Tonight:
5°c
How apt that London waiter Ross Raisin has been nominated for the £60,000 Dylan Thomas Prize, for authors under the age of 30. The bohemian poet Dylan Thomas was unaccountably rude to a whole host of waiters and barmen during his lifetime; while drunk, he had the nasty habit of pretending to be a dog and biting people, and he once famously emptied the contents of his stomach onto the floor of the Colony Room Club in Soho. So this really is payback time.
Raisin, whose debut novel God's Own Country has been nominated for the biennial prize, continues to serve at Smiths of Smithfield for two days a week and says he prefers waiting to writing: "It's much more fun working there than sitting on your own writing." So long as you are not serving oafs like Thomas.
As Ernest Hemingway observed, it is much easier to write about what you know than what you don't know. And drudgery can be a nursemaid as well as a spur to creativity. TS Eliot worked at Lloyds Bank in London to help make ends meet, and Philip Larkin was a librarian in Hull for most of his life. Their boring, humdrum jobs provided them with the necessary stability and security to write.
Thus Raisin joins a distinguished roll call of people who have done the most unlikely jobs before turning to a writing career. Paul Torday worked in engineering and industry for 30 years until he published his first novel, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, at the age of 60. Magnus Mills was a London bus driver for 12 years and wrote his 1998 Bookershortlisted debut The Restraint of Beasts between shifts on the 159 route from Brixton to Streatham. Catherine O'Flynn toiled at a record store at a shopping centre in the West Midlands which provided her with the inspiration for last year's Costa prize-winning fictional debut, What Was Lost.
The impecunious West Country widow Mary Wesley knitted for a living before having her first novel published to acclaim, aged 70. Even Alastair Campbell has taken up novel writing after a lifetime of spinning yarns in Downing Street. Fay Weldon, Peter Carey and Salman Rushdie all beavered away as advertising copywriters before becoming novelists. Somerset Maugham was a medical student at King's College, London, for five years. Far from being a creative dead end, he saw this as the ideal chance to observe "life in the raw" and experience a range of emotions.
Working the tables no doubt brought Raisin into contact with a whole range of emotions. But if you want to feature in his next novel, do not go gentle into his good restaurant without leaving a very fat tip.
