Christopher’s brainwave regarding Jane Austen’s Library Passage: Emma Thompson

Actually, this is not so much an update on my friend Christopher Sandrawich’s efforts protect Jane Austen’s Library Passage in Worthing as it is just an opportunity to offer a glimpse at his charming personality. You can click here for information about the Library Passage and Chris’ efforts to save it from closure. What I want to do now is share an email I received from him:

Hi Jennifer — I have been busy over a very very wet double bank holiday weekend (the Jubilee) thinking of last-minute ways to get people on-board for helping prevent the closure of the library passage. I have of course absolutely no idea whether the decision is “cut and dried’ either way. However, my working assumption is that the decision is negative and needs shoulders to the wheel to move it back across to a positive outcome.

I had a reply to my letter to the Sec of State for Transport. They had a minion — as predicted — in Defra (environment, food and rural affairs) write to me. The intention seems to confuse me and make me despair. It had quite the reverse effect. I have written a fresh letter to the Sec of State for Transport, and also one to the Mayor of Worthing as well as the two local MP’s. One for the west and one for the east of Worthing.

I also had another brainwave. I was doing the washing-up (yes, I am that domesticated) and humming Joni Mitchell’s For Free when my stream of consciousness ran along to Emma Thompson’s character in Love Actually saying to Alan Rickman’s character just how much Joni Mitchell’s lyrics have informed and developed her AND then drifting into next thinking of Emma and Alan playing parts in Sense & Sensibility and how Emma Thompson got an Oscar for the screenplay because she read English at Cambridge and is a big Austen fan. So after drying my hands i wrote to Emma Thompson’s London Agents and asked her if she’d be interested (given that she has the time) to lend her name to preventing the Library Passages closure. Slim chance of that happening but if it does then wow, hold the front page!

The charm of this, of course, is my imagining Chris doing the washing up, humming the song and all the Austen connections firing in his brain. What a charming man! And I think his idea of getting the news out to Emma Thompson is a good one, as long as it’s done in a refined manner. We don’t need an American-style save a threatened TV series appeal where people send her tons of stuff or pester her with emails. But if you know someone who knows someone who knows Ms. Thompson, put a word in their shell like and hope it has some effect.

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