I used to work for a Trust, many years ago, and, after about eleven years of day-to-day and climbing up the ladder to end up with my own office, staff team, area, and million pound projects to run, decided one day that I didn’t want to be doing that any more. I wanted to be doing something else.
After some deliberation and a month in the Greek islands, including two weeks in Symi while off work sick – which always makes me think of people throwing up, ‘can’t come in I’m sick –eughch’, why are people not off work ‘ill’, or ‘unwell’? I don’t think I have actually been sick since having one too many pints of Shepherd Neame (Britain’s oldest brewery apparently) back in 1990 or something – we returned to England and I resigned.
Well, that was it; instantly felt better and so excited that there I was cutting off all ties with an income, what with a large house and mortgage, credit cards and such like. For about two weeks after making the monumental decision I hardly slept, I’d sit up all night and write and, during that time I came up with a thing called ‘You Wish!’
Now then, if you like your novels to be sophisticated and sensitive, well put together and deep, if you like great sentence construction and intelligent thought, perfect grammar and a calm, adult storyline, then you don’t want to buy this book. It poured out of its own volition over two weeks of sleeplessness and just kind of fell onto the page. Once it was out I decided to leave it for a while and come back to it later to rewrite it. That’s what I did, only I didn’t. I left it more or less as it was because it kinds of works as it is, and it is what it is and actually, it still makes me laugh if I reread it now. (I’ve even left some of the typos in for you, how generous is that.)
What’s it about? It’s about five friends who get their wish come true for one day and then find they have to suffer three days of the consequences; it’s about the gay scene in Brighton, dead parents (and others) coming back to life, it’s about having X-ray eyes and being the biggest, butchest, most macho gym-fit stud the ladies could wish for, it’s about magic gone wrong, nudity, and mayhem. Someone once said, ‘Think Tom Sharpe on loony juice with a camp gay twist and you’re getting close.’
Yes, it’s rude, crude and very often nude, has some typos, and it’s not for snobs, but you don’t have to be gay, mad, young, all of the above to like it. A local Brighton magazine reviewed it as ‘Perfect poolside reading’ so that kind of suggests it’s light and pointless, which is 100% accurate. But, if you know someone who likes Nick Revel and his ‘The night of the toxic ostrich’, or even Tom Sharpe (may I say, while bowing low), then the chances are they are going to like this piece of madness and slightly camp mayhem. But it is really only for adults. Or only for adults who haven’t quite grown up yet.
You can get a copy of You Wish! here.
“Mr Collins took me into a world packed with original characters in very unusual situations, with hilarious consequences. I have read many humorous books in the style of Tom Sharpe, not all of them good. In my view, this book adds much to the genre and I recommend it to anyone with a lively imagination and a good sense of humour.” Amazon review.
