With the cost of the ceremony, policing, and arrests of peaceful protesters in London on Saturday estimated at £250,000,000 at the taxpayer’s expense, and with the taxpayer numbering 27,000,000, we have a bill per person of £9-10.
At the Cockatrice Books online store, £9-£10 will buy you Roger Granelli’s collected short stories, Any Kind of Broken Man, (‘incredibly hard to put down’ – The Big Issue), or Nigel Jarrett’s latest collection, Five Go to Switzerland, stories which ‘take seemingly ordinary or innocent situations and gently tease out their emotional complexity’ (Lesley McDowell, The Independent), or A. L. Reynolds’ ‘gentle yet searing, introspective yet intensely physical… gem’ (Rachel Rees, Buzz Magazine) of a novel, Seaside Towns, a story of memory, fear, and the dawning of love among the sugary diversions of 1960s Llandudno.
Or as an antidote to cheap patriotism, stolen bling, and invented traditions, Morgan Llwyd’s Welsh-language classic, A Book of Three Birds Rob Mimpriss’s (‘lucid, skilful, and above all, of enormous timely significance’ – Jim Perrin) new translation, and Ellis Wynne’s The Sleeping Bard translated by the scholar and poet T. Gwynn Jones are both discounted to below £9 as a response to the coronation. These two enduring masterpieces of Welsh prose reflect on Welsh and British identities during times of far-reaching economic and constitutional change.