Manager's Pick

I like Wal-Mart. I know this is swimming against the tide somewhat. I know I’m not meant to like Wal-Mart, but I do. There are things I don’t like about Wal-Mart, but by and large, shopping there is a pleasant experience. You have to remember not to wander round with a vacant expression on your face, because the staff are so helpful that one of them is bound to stop you and ask “Can I help you find something?”, and then you find yourself saying “Um, no thanks. I’m just wandering around with a vacant expression on my face”. This aspect of shopping used to be much easier in Britain, when you could wander round aimlessly for ages without anyone interrupting you.

One of the things I like about Wal-Mart is that, as it is so big and sells so very many things, you always see something to catch your interest. The other day, for example, I saw a book entitled Potty Train Your Child in Just One Day. This got me thinking. Clearly it should have been in the Fiction section of the book aisle, but it wasn’t. It was right by the till. And it wasn’t just one book; it was a whole stack. They must have been selling like hot cakes. Wal-Mart Manager’s top pick.

Now if I wrote a book about potty training, it would be titled Potty Training: Steel Yourself with a very visible sub-title, your life will be dominated by your child’s bodily functions for weeks if not months, you will be very aggravated, and it will involve a lot of cleaning up. I doubt that would make it into a stack by the till though. It would be an honest approach, but not a very marketable one. In fact I could write a whole honest approach series of child-care books:
Getting Your Baby to Sleep Through The Night: a hundred things to try, but no guarantees
Toddlers and Vegetables: you will never win
Immunizations: you’ll never know if you made the right decision
Making Homework Fun: resorting to creative bribery.

I’m not going to find a publisher, am I? No. The canny publisher has worked out that you only need to persuade someone to buy a copy of the book to make your money. Honesty and integrity aren’t up for discussion here. The very depressing thing is that if you look up “potty training one day” on Amazon.com, you find that there are in fact four books with titles almost identical to the one I saw. There is also one called Potty Train in Three Days, but that is a little way down the list. I mean, who would buy that one? Best of all is Toilet Training in Less Than A Day – wow, that’s a tempting one. Not just the potty, but the toilet, and in less than a day – you might even complete the process without actually needing to use the toilet at all. No wonder that’s at the top of the list.

I am beginning to realize, though, that I could be ideally placed to write some books about relocating. We did have a couple before we came, and although I found them useful as reference books for particular topics, I couldn’t read them cover to cover, as Husband did. I found it too daunting. Having read a few paragraphs on “driving in the US”, I was so nervous of having to remember which rules applied in which state, which speed limits applied on which roads, and making sure I locked my doors at night, that I wondered if I would ever be able to drive at all. I decided I would read no more and just cope when I arrived. It was a case of better the devil you don’t know... These were serious books, written after extensive research, packed full of useful facts, thoughtful opinions, and tried and tested ideas.

That’s not the book I’m going to write. I’m going for the book with the snappy title that will stack by the till. Mine is going to be titled something like Relax while you Relocate: Get to Grips with a New Culture in Five Days. I’d better just check on Amazon, though. Someone may already have done a Get to Grips with a New Culture in Half an Afternoon. That would scupper me. I think five days would be my lowest offer.