Kindle Edition Amazon Trading Vincent Crow Category:  Humor Publisher: Matador ISBN-10:  1780883269 Type: Fiction Pages: 232 Copyright: Jan 1,2013 ISBN-13: 9781780883267 Ever wanted a better life? Vincent Crow is determined to get one by trading his, in humorous novel Trading Vincent Crow by D. C. J. Wardle. Midlands-born Vince Crow had heard somewhere that you could trade a piece of useless junk on the internet and within a year of swapping it for better and better things you could get cool stuff. Crow decided that he himself was going to start off as that piece of tat, jump from one job to the next; indeed he would trade one lifestyle for a new one, until he was finally a success. Every three months he would have to trade-up for an entirely new life - new job, new girl, new wheels, new pad, new threads - until he reached the top.  The plan of comparing himself to a used item traded over the internet was of course marginally flawed, as there is a human factor to all of this which he'd over-looked. Besides, success isn't just about work. It's about the car, the clothes, the house, and getting the girl, so changing all of that with every new trade upwards is a lot more difficult than swapping an old stereo in the classifieds. Crow quickly learns what the price of success really is. An education he would never have got if he had gone to college. Excerpt Vince scraped the gunk from the bottom of the final saucepan with his water-wrinkled hand. He plunged it into the lukewarm, murky water of the sink and scrubbed half-heartedly at the bottom with a scourer. He was convinced that his boss wouldn't mistreat the pans, or use quite so many, if she was the poor bugger who had to wash them up afterwards. Natalie Sedgwick, who was both the cook of questionable bar-meals, and spouse of the pub's owner, was currently in the bar enjoying the New Year's Eve party. Vince imagined her, G&T in hand, flirting with the regulars. She would be laughing in an over-the-top way at their crude jokes whilst Dennis, her husband, polished glasses at the end of the bar, watching in silent annoyance and jealousy. She had about as much apathy towards Vince's desire for an easier run, as Vince had towards his current occupation. Delving into the depths of the industrial-sized sink, Vince located and removed the plug, watched the water slowly gurgle down, and then began to scrape more gunk and soggy bits of vegetable from around the plug hole. Natalie Sedgwick had a thing about her sink looking cleaner than the pots that were scrubbed in it. Vince swept and mopped the floor of the kitchen. The muffled sounds of 70's Christmas classics accompanied the shouted conversations of people with better jobs than him, who didn't have to work on public holidays. Once he'd finished, he propped the broom up in the corner, he grabbed his coat and left via the back door which led into the car park. Having dumped the evening's black bag of soggy leftovers in the bins at the top of the car park, he began his walk home. Passing the front of the pub, he peered through the window at the drunken mob of revellers. He knew a lot of them. Through the frosted pane he could see Jenny Davis, a girl that he'd had a crush on throughout school. She was at the end of the bar getting-off with Dan Bridges, whom coincidentally he had also been at school with and despised with a passion. Jenny was now a receptionist at a car rental place. Dan worked on a till in a supermarket. Vince pondered at how amazingly pathetic a bunch of drunken people appear when you yourself are sober, and yet somewhere within him was a need to be as drunk and pathetic as them. After all, being wasted and getting off with Jenny Davis was the pinnacle of aspiration in small town life. It didn't get any better. The days in-between such fleeting moments of excitement were a monotonous drudgery, and it would never change. Jenny was not going to progress past receptionist. She neither had the drive, the skills or the opportunity. Indeed, her looks had probably helped her land the job and a younger, better looking girl would eventually come along and replace her. Meanwhile, Dan was always going to be a thug. He was a violent piece of work at school and was still a moron now. His strong jaw-line, rugged appearance and just enough money to buy attractive girls drinks would carry him along until he eventually got one of them pregnant and would have to get married. He'd then realise he actually had a naff job, a life which had acquired responsibilities, and then take out the frustrations of his wasted existence on his kids. Their offspring would in turn on go to become thugs and terrorise more sensitive kids at school. This was a circle of life that was rarely covered on in-depth documentaries. As Vince crossed the road opposite the pub, he turned on hearing the front door of the pub swing open and two pissedup, middle-aged women staggered out. The stagger was emphasised by their clothes that were a few sizes too small and rather impractical for the cold urban winter. Their make-up was applied liberally to evoke a message of availability. The first one immediately fell into a bush next to the porch. The second then screeched with laughter at an unnecessarily high volume. Having realised this noisy display had failed to attract any welcome attention from passing hunks, she knelt on the ground and began to throw-up loudly into a pot plant: damp soil and vomit no doubt making an unwelcome addition to the peroxide. Should these delightful ladies remember any of their display, a romanticised version of the incident would surely be their big story for many Friday nights to come. Vince looked through the open door at the groups of drunken party-goers. A week before he would have walked right in there and joined the crowd. He would have happily spent all the money he'd just earned whilst washing-up their dirty dishes trying to become part of the Jenny and Dan social group. He would eventually leave with less money and a similar social status to when he started, but the water-wrinkled hands from a night of washing up would remain. Instead he walked straight past the pub and started down the road towards home with a wry grin spreading across his face. Vince Crow had been party to a revelation the day before, that was going to change his life forever. He was no longer one of the small town crowd that delighted in tales of vomiting into plant pots. Vince Crow was about to start living life differently. The inspiration Vince had been waiting at a bus-stop on the corner of the street. To pass the time he faced the only clean-ish bit of glass on the window of the closed shop behind the bus shelter. His simple aim was to see if he could thaw the frost in a variety of patterns with his warm breath. The rest of the glass window had clearly been the venue for a spitting contest that had provided entertainment for the preceding group of bus-waiters. As the first signs of successful thawing began, two middleaged women arrived to wait for the bus as well. They had seemingly reached a point in their life-journey where discretion and social embarrassment had been diminished, from years of yelling at small off-spring. A self-conscious approach to interaction in public places was no longer a valued attribute. For Vince, escape from their loud, bland conversation would be unachievable without abandoning the need to get the next bus. The shared walk to the bus stop and the subsequent wait had eventually exhausted the ladies of all repetitive cooing over the pushchair-baby combination belonging to the first woman, and the evolving baby bump of the second - such was the infrequency of buses. In Vince's opinion, the chubby baby in the pushchair may well have been the inspiration, or even the winner, of the spitting contest that had preceded him at the window, judging by the gelatinous goo on its chin. In the uncomfortable space that resulted from the first woman failing to loudly announce all that was passing through her mind, as nothing was passing, she moved on to the contents of a trashy magazine that was tucked into the back of the pushchair. Vince turned his attention to the back of the bus shelter, and started to peel at the corner of a poster of some bloke wearing a complicated-looking watch. Having reviewed the gossip columns, and the blurred line between the reality and the TV lives of soap stars, the women moved on to an article about the internet. Despite neither having used a computer, they were intrigued that you could use it to swap or sell old stuff you didn't want and then order new stuff that you did. Old junk could be transformed into new money without having to leave your own home and place an ad in the classifieds. Vince had no interest in the internet, or the vocalisation of limited mental activity, which would be better if it remained unexpressed. It sounded a bit like the Saturday morning Multi-coloured Swap-Shop to him. From memory this was for kids that were allowed to use the phone, swapping their Scalextric for drum kits. At the time he had dismissed this gem of trading knowledge in favour of returning to the window and seeing if he had enough warm breath to un-freeze the word 'arse' on the glass before his bus arrived. The moment passed. In contrast to verbally enthusiastic women at bus stops, Vince did have a job where he had far too much time to think about things, and these thoughts were destined to bounce around inside his head instead of being expressed to the world at large. After all, his main companion through his working existence was a Brillo Pad. The memories of baby dribble and the internet conversation returned to him the next day, whilst scraping some black goo off the back of one of the pub's fridges with a dessert spoon. Trading up things of no value, and turning them into valuable assets was very much something for which he had the initial outlay required. The question was, what would he have to trade-up on the internet, and what did he expect to get back in return? Indeed, could he be bothered with the effort of following up on this at all? It seemed like you needed get very lucky, otherwise everyone would have already dropped their normal working lives in favour of this approach to financing their existence. Alternatively, you could spend a lot of time down at the post office wasting your four pound-fifty an hour washing-up pittance on buying a lot of stamps, and swapping tat with other people who were also wasting stamps. This conundrum reminded him of the stories of gold rushes when the only people making money were the ones selling the shovels and sieves. In this modern day analogy, the answer was then to either open a post office, or start a stamp collection. Then, just as Vince decided that the dessert spoon was bending out of shape too much to be able to bend it back again, and that he'd be better off with a bread knife, he had a moment of lateral thinking that was about to re-shape his life. Why tradeup 'stuff' to get more and better stuff. It was still just going to be stuff, but more of it. Despite having slightly more stuff, he was still going to be stuck in the same dead-end job. An occupation which seemed to revolve around removing material that may have once been edible, but had since decomposed into something slightly alien, and had cemented itself to various inaccessible parts of a kitchen. With sufficient devotion to the internet and the postal service, his room in the house where he lived with his nan could eventually contain a big-size TV, or similar. However, he would still be basically the same person, with the same mediocre looks and personality. He would still be a person who would continue to go to the same bars each week with not much money, and fail to attract the likes of Jenny Davis. No, trading stuff was not the answer. And then it struck him. What he was going to have to do, was trade himself. Right now Vince was a washer-upper in a slightly run-down kitchen, in a slightly run-down suburban pub. This washerupper had to be traded up for something better, and that something better would then be traded upwards again and again until he was the man he needed to be. The more Vince thought about it, the more it made sense. It wasn't going to be just about trading jobs. Plenty of people did that. It was called 'a career', and not something that happened to college drop-outs who washed-up in knackered pub kitchens. No, this was a lifestyle thing. At each stage he would have to trade-up the lot. The job, the girl, the wheels, the pad, the threads - everything. With every step upwards the whole of his life had to change upwards, and for the better. Fortunately, at least in terms of this ambitious process, he currently had no wheels, no girlfriend, and his clothes were old and hole-ridden. In fact he barely had what he considered to be 'a job'. This meant that getting to the next step would be fairly straight forward. After all, what he did have was a plan, and that was something Danny Bridges was never going to have.

Books Monthly
'Wardle uses all his love of Wodehouse to bring us an at times hilarious account of a young man hell-bent on making something of himself in a hostile world. There are elements of real humour in this excellent novel, and I have to say I enjoyed it immensely.' -- Books Monthly

Hard to put down by Francois G
Trading Vincent crow is, once started, hard to put down. Following the adventures of a young chap along the (sometimes rough) trades of life, the reader is taken along and becomes part of a great adventure. D.C.J Wardle's writing is a delight, precise and creative. The situations in which our hero gets entangled are depicted with both humor and a sharp attention to details. This intelligent novel will make you laugh very loud but also invite you to reflect on the things in life that can make it a real adventure

A delightful satire by cemery
`Trading Vincent Crow' is a sharply written, character-driven satire, laced with acute observations and delightfully recognizable situations. It stars the incredibly likeable Vincent Crow, who embarks on a journey of personal improvement in a unique way - trading up aspects of his life for improved models.

Imbued with a strong sense of place and cultural references, Wardle's writing is inviting, warm and he has a talent for making you care about his characters, while at the same time finding yourself grinning with delight at the situations he creates. I'm looking forward to more from this author, and hope Vince is back for another round of adventures.