When I was young and green I truly believed that having a No. 1 single and a spot on Top of the Pops was enough to retire on. This was before I learnt that the disposable income for a pop performer is, after various deductions by the record companies, managers, and assorted hangers-on, usually about the same as a checkout operator’s.

A slightly more highbrow version of this fantasy is the belief that having your novel shortlisted for a major literary prize will deliver, if not a payout of Lotto dimensions, at least enough to buy a new car. But even these modest dreams turned to ash after reading a report in The Daily Telegraph about the startling (in a bad sense) British sales figures for all but one of the books shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize:

“While [Ian] McEwan’s novella, On Chesil Beach, has been a runaway commercial success, selling more than 100,000 copies, one of his rivals for the prize, Animal’s People, loosely based on the Bhopal chemical plant explosion, by the Indian author Indra Sinha, had sold just 231 copies in this country by mid-August, 10 days after its sales were supposedly given a major boost by being longlisted.

Nicola Barker’s Darkmans had sold only 499 copies. Anne Enright’s The Gathering had fared a little better with sales of 834 sales, Mister Pip had sales of 880 and of McEwan’s rivals, only Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist broke the four-figure barrier, with 1,519 readers buying it.”

It must be doubly galling for the paupers trailing in McEwan’s wake that On Chesil Beach still manages to outsell their works by at least a hundred-fold despite being, at 176 (generously spaced) pages, not so much a full-fledged novel as a novella (or extended short story, according to one friend who has read it.)