In the week or so between three boxes of Pennine Platform landing here and one copy reaching you, WF1 9RW becomes a dispatch depot. The task, which has been mental and sedentary, now becomes manual and physical as personalised comp slips, compostable mailbags, postage stamps, address labels and customs forms are combined in multiple ways. Some of them correct.
Compostable bags have (short) lives of their own. They weigh less than alternatives, which helps with postage, and the diaphanous look is fetching, but they have to be stored in the dark and used within a year or they disintegrate; they are so slithery they cannot be piled or manually counted; and once ‘stuffed’ have to be pressed for several hours for the seal, stamp and labels to actually stick. Two defunct Times Atlases of the World (oh world of yesteryear), Beethoven’s Complete Sonatas and the entire contents of the piano stool have their uses. For the rubber stamp to dry, however, the magazines must be unstacked and spread out individually. Floor space becomes a sea of magazines. Small batches are then lugged to the friendlier post offices (a five-mile round trip) who may be coaxed to issue proofs of posting with minimum eye-rolling.
Next I filter the ‘due’ subscriptions from Excel and email personal reminders, which generates more post. I deliver in person to bookshops. I invoice these, council libraries, university libraries and intermediaries, each with their own protocols. Legal deposit copies go to London and Edinburgh. Orders come in all year but especially during submission windows. Every one is logged under fourteen columns. I schedule online payments for mailbags, printing, photography, WordPress, domain name fees, tech support and the PO Box. I file sheaves of paperwork and each year have the lot audited.
With the website now in the capable hands of Ged Groves I can relax a little between these seven to eight intensive weeks, but I still have some input, preparing a new masthead for each cover, requesting and editing audio tracks, sourcing images and posting on social media. For most issues I convene a radio show; this April there’s the Poetry Society Free Verse Book Fair in London, a newsletter and this May, Huddersfield Literature Festival. Then I remember I once wrote and submitted poems myself. Few of which were ever acknowledged, and to which no editor except my stalwart predecessor Nicholas Bielby ever gave feedback.
Pennine Platform 