Will Ashon - assault on not only consumerist culture, but on identity, false idols and a blistering critique on even the quirks that define modern Britain

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Will Ashon, Clear Water. Faber & Faber, 2006.

vernaland.blogspot.com/

 

Set in and around Clearwater, a vast, subterranean shopping centre lying on the edge of the Thames estuary in Kent, Will Ashon's spectacular debut novel constructs a story of intrigue, action and high entertainment around six principal figures. King James of Vernaland is an ex-secret service hardnut with a God complex, Binary Robert, his young companion with a genius for computer-hacking and data-harvesting; Peter Jones is a disaffected lifestyle journalist desperate to rescue his career with a scoop on the invisible workings of the Clearwater complex, and Mandy, the young shop assistant he befriends in his attempts to penetrate the vast edifice of consumerism. And then there's Jimmy Patel, a retired professional spin-bowler turned melancholic-alcoholic, about to be fingered himself for professional indiscretions. It's just not cricket. CLEAR WATER binds these five together along with the unforgettable Verna Landor - a wartime 'entertainer' of dubious stripe and King James' muse - and builds an extraordinary narrative of espionage, desire and dysfunction to a thrilling denouement. An intricately structured, deadpan exposition of contemporary life, CLEAR WATER announces the arrival of a prodigious new talent. 

“If being a Messiah was easy everyone would do it.” So says King James, one of the characters from Will Ashon‘s six-handed trick of a novel, Clear Water (seven, if you count Clearwater itself). Though it’s set around a gargantuan underground shopping centre at the Thames Estuary, and the “tomb of late-twentieth-century consumer culture” connects the disparate narrative strands, it’s as much about shoppers’ paradise as Michael Bracewell’s Perfect Tense was about the office: that is, not at all. In Ashon’s hands, Clear Water becomes an assault on not only consumerist culture, but on identity, false idols and a blistering critique on even the quirks that define modern Britain: “England. This England. This is England.”
The aforementioned King James is one of those great English, slightly dangerous eccentrics that readers of JG Ballard are well versed in: a “true connoisseur of disinformation,” King James treats us to a heady mix of “biography and parable all the way,” which, when a diligent reader ploughs the lies that King James freely admits to, discovers that the man is not only a violent ex-bogey man, but a certifiable nutter who has re-invented himself as a saviour, a rescuer of a “society in decline, a society losing touch with its traditions and values .. anchored only by their database selves.” And, along with his Man Friday, Binary Rob, “final defenders and pioneers,” plans to do just that, ensconced in an old sea fort turned into an off-shore data haven, not a virtual home to the filth and scams the ‘net has to offer, rather all the major data sources for the whole nation backed-up. “From the Sea will come a Man who is more than a Man and that Man will reveal himself a God on this Earth and his Kingdom shall be called Vernaland. Or something like that.”
The other main protagonist is the less likeable cultural cartographer Peter Jones, a wrung-out lifestyle journalist for the Abtruser, who “doesn’t write about the horror of life — of death and dismemberment and rape and torture and massacre — because he is a genius, or as close as you get these days.” Remember, “this was not the Age of War, but the Age of Expensive Shoes With Fantastic Hand-Crafted Applique,” and as “muscular prose about coffee or sofas” go, Jones is your man. It is through Jones that we experience the Clearwater Experience, lit by the “revolutionary Sunlite Ambient Glare,” where under “the giant, corneacopic eyes” of evil conglomerates Barnum Corporation — “knowledge is the power to serve you better” — shoppers flex their purchase power. Jones has hit on the idea of writing a coffee table book on the centre, and uses Clearwater employee Mandy Hart to mine information from, a project abandoned when he learns that his rival, Daniel Mercurine, has got there first with Glaucous Gleam, a “Longtitude of shopping” and “like Orwell crossed with Barthes and Bill Bryson,” an apt description of Ashon’s own book, though to that I would add Martin Amis, Ballard, and perhaps Douglas Coupland.
Shop-girl Mandy epitomises the emptiness of shopping culture: nothing unique, nothing interesting, “nothing to render it transcendent.” Of the characters, she and her brother are the lest satisfactorily drawn and a little, well, blank. Rob is as 2-D a computer geek as they come, “binary tattooed down his right forearm — 100001 – six digits carelessly gouged out with a compass and filled with Bic ink, even his attempt to do a Manson looking childish and ill formed,” a chap addicted to hacking who would “undoubtedly be in prison by now, or working for Microsoft” (“hard to be sure which is worse”), and Ashon tells his story as translated ASCII, replete with SMS-like shorthand and an aversion to capital letters: “what looks like just 1s and 0s to u is beutiful [sic] 2 me. is sense.”
A more interesting, lesser character — though connected as much to the Clearwater centre as much as the others, through his brother who owns the tat shop in which Mandy is employed — is disgraced cricket bowler Jaimin ‘Jimmy’ Patel. Ashon turns in a fine piece of Bukowskian lowlife squalor and drunken desperateness with Jimmy, riches spent, employed as a sportswear salesman through a Barnums subsidiary, his former glory gone: “Then, with pills sticking to cradled fingers, back to couch. Nothing has changed in his absence and nothing will ever change. He knows this. But still nothing will dull. He craves dull. Foot gently taps an unemptied bottle, his tenderest motion. Hand moves floorward and grasps it gently where body slides into neck. The pills go down with the first drink of the day. Used to be the best. Now just the first.”
Which leaves Verna Landor, former wartime singer-turned-junkie and muse to King James, a woman who “belongs to an era where people accepted the truly magical without question .. an original .. can have only been put on this earth only to take part in myth, to play a role in creating Great Religion,” and whose song ‘No Man Is An Island’ King James has taken quite literally: he turns her into Veranland’s “hot and wet Virgin Mary.”
Though not as clever as JG Ballard, nor as weighty as Martin Amis, Clear Water is far from shabby. Ashon has written a terrifying, not-so-distant picture of the future, in which we are all complacent. Many of the elements of Clear Water are already in place — the mammoth shopping centres with boutiques geared toward niche tastes; the lack of privacy; consumption, not production ruling the roost; Sealand, the strange archipelago off the Kent coast (what’s he doing on there?) — and he builds the momentum right up to the bristling final, apocalyptic pages, where ultimately everyone is fucked.- Susan Tomaselli



Will Ashon's first novel tries to do for the shopping centre Bluewater what JG Ballard's Super-Cannes did for Cannes: a shiny, hyper-modern dream of Eden is here stripped to its bloody heart. The sort-of-central figure, Peter, who longs to be a famous lifestyle commentator but is in fact a rapidly failing hack, is dragged from his safe world of Nick Hornbyesque self-deprecation into an almost literal Hell where he finds that his own heart is not so much dark as simply blank.
But Peter's story is just one of six strands. Ashon also gives us King James, a megalomaniac killer whose history tracks that of postwar Britain; his eternal beloved, wartime whore/chanteuse Verna; Jimmy Patel, a once-famous British-Indian spin bowler, now a guilt-ridden drunk; Mandy, the virtually faceless shopgirl for whom Peter falls; and her brother Binary Rob, a hacker and uber-geek who is the agent of King James's digital plot to take over the country. All paths converge on an abandoned floating fortress in the Thames estuary, on the day that Britain's computers are shut down, and all but one of the characters die there. It is clear, then, that Ashon has a big, apocalyptic vision.
In fact, his great talent is for naturalism. Peter and Jimmy are superbly realised characters. The tracking of Peter's arc from glib, self-serving cultural ironies to the terrifying realisation of his own vacant soul is splendidly convincing, while we enter as completely into the coke-and-booze-and-guilt-wrecked Jimmy's fantasy of redemption through spin-bowling. Ashon rips us down with them through the circles of their falls: this is seriously good character-writing.
The other strands of the book are far less satisfying. The endless first-person perorations of the psychotic King James (think Hannibal Lecter voiced by a bad copy of Will Self's Dorian Gray) rapidly wear thin. Little chunks of exposition are given verbosely counterfeit meaningfulness - the literary equivalent of pretentious film-direction. And to hang a whole novel on the supposedly terrifying threat of digital shutdown is already as dated as Y2K.
There is a basic mismatch between these two sides of Ashon's writing. He excels at a realism that can include moments of sheer, quiet, sad poetry. The lurid visions seem to come from somewhere quite different. This means that the novel inevitably breaks down when the strands at last collide. When Ballard's figures finally reach their destinations, you get the queasy feeling that they (and we) have been lured into hells customised with the tatters of their (and hence our) very own secret dreams. Here, you feel that the author has fallen in love with his locations and his plot, and is simply pulling the wires to get puppets where he wants them.
In the end, this is two excellent (and very traditional) novellas linked by a lot of spurious, would-be zeitgeisty sound and fury. If you are ready to shell out for a whole novel, flip through most of it and ignore the ending, buy this book. Otherwise watch this space, because Ashon can really write and you'll doubtless hear his name again. - James Hawes 
 

Will Ashon's debut novel Clear Water concerns a shopping centre lying close to the Thames estuary in Kent. The centre descends 400 metres below sea level and has a sinister black space-shuttle decorated with a woman in a white ballgown on its trunk. The shuttle is designed to defend Clearwater (and potentially the whole of London) from attack but, instead, it makes the shopping centre a place of almost occult attraction to six strange but beguiling characters, ranging from an alcoholic ex-spin bowler to a murderous psychopath who has named himself King James.

The most immediately attractive of Ashon's cast is Peter Jones, "the premier lifestyle journalist of his generation", who has generated from writing style pieces about badly dressed friends to pieces about books, films, music, garden furniture and food and finally "the semiotics of whatever everyday object caught his attention". Now he's trapped as "the Kafka of the Designer Pepperpot", imprisoned in a constantly simmering marriage, unable to cope with his swearing son, Gus, and fearing that he cannot summon up emotion about anything beyond the trivial. Jones is particularly interested in "blankness", which may be a comment on the "blank generation" fiction of Ellis and McInerney, but seems more a way of separating Jones from the more emotionally intemperate characters that surround him.
King James's first-person autobiography aims for similar neutrality, but his terrible anger seethes behind every line. The descriptions of his atrocities are rich in black humour, and owe something to Michael Moorcock. King James has taken up with Binary Rob, a young hacker whose love he craves, in a decommissioned military building, where he plans serious destruction. He's obsessed with Verna Landor, a Vera Lynn-type wartime singer and the only woman this homosexual man has ever loved. Retired spin-bowler Jimmy Patel also craves blankness (mainly through painkillers and booze) but it's a state of grace he can rarely achieve due to his terrible depression. His brother owns a shop in Clearwater and believes he's sent Jones to spy on him. The last character in the intricately connected chain is Mandy, a shop assistant Jones is attempting to befriend in order to glean insider information about the shopping centre for a misguided attempt at a book. The link between these characters is partly Clearwater, but also a mysterious British company called Barnums started after the war by Verna as a secretarial service before developing into something far more sinister.
As Ashon moves his characters towards their fates, it becomes clear that this is a very dark novel indeed. Most of the jokes are bleak (Jones's editor on the broadsheet he works for is a war correspondent who had his legs blown off playing a drinking game involving landmines in Bosnia and spends all his time getting ex-military types to write articles about sofas) and even small moments of humanity (Mandy confiding in Jones about her father abusing her) turn out to be tricks (the girl is lying). But this isn't straightforward nihilism: there is a genuine sadness beneath the sour humour, and some of the best passages of the book concern what makes life worth living. It's a very confident debut author who offers his characters no hope of redemption, and it's his intellectual fury that makes the novel so memorable.
Ashon's day job is running a British hip-hop record label, Big Dada, and, although he has chosen a shopping centre rather than the music industry as the subject for his world-weary satire, this is (in the very best sense) an insider's account of dealing with finance, written by someone with a precise understanding of the commercial world. Occasionally he stretches this for comic effect (Clearwater houses a shop that sells miniature marshmallows in the shape of Kant and A J Ayer, and PRs have access to lifestyle journalists' personal account information), but for the most part his observations of materialism are chillingly accurate. Ashon shares some sensibilities with Douglas Coupland, but this is a defiantly English novel, with an exquisite awareness of such English institutions as cricket, the army and public school. It's a beguiling and arrestingly original mix, and suggests that unlike poor doomed Peter Jones, Ashon has a long literary career ahead of him. - Matt Thorne

 

Will Ashon, The Heritage, Faber, 2008.

When fifteen-year-old Tilly is wrongly sent to a Young Offenders Institute - a far cry from her safe, suburban upbringing - she's desperately bored and unhappy until she meets Sadie. Now released and living in Sadie's bedsit, the pair soon throw themselves into a contented life of petty criminality. But when sinister landlady and social worker Lynda comes to take DNA swabs - purportedly for a scientific investigation into the genetic roots of criminal behavior - their teenage idyll is shattered. For a joke, Tilly swaps the two girls' samples, setting into motion a gripping story of mistaken identity and corporate malice. With its depiction of shoplifting techniques, shadowy revolutionaries, alcopops, sperm banks, genetics, adolescense and a lot of smoking, "The Heritage" is both funny and sad, grittily real yet exuberantly imagined, utterly strange and yet strangely moving.

When fifteen-year-old Tilly is wrongly sent to a Young Offenders Institute – a far cry from her safe, suburban upbringing – she’s desperately bored and unhappy until she meets Sadie. Now released and living in Sadie’s bedsit, the pair soon throw themselves into a contented life of petty criminality. But when sinister landlady and social worker Lynda comes to take DNA swabs – purportedly for a scientific investigation into the genetic roots of criminal behavior – their teenage idyll is shattered. For a joke, Tilly swaps the two girls’ samples, setting into motion a gripping story of mistaken identity and corporate malice. With its depiction of shoplifting techniques, shadowy revolutionaries, alcopops, sperm banks, genetics, adolescense and a lot of smoking, “The Heritage” is both funny and sad, grittily real yet exuberantly imagined, utterly strange and yet strangely moving.

When fifteen-year-old Tilly is wrongly sent to a Young Offenders Institute – a far cry from her safe, suburban upbringing – she’s desperately bored and unhappy until she meets Sadie. Now released and living in Sadie’s bedsit, the pair soon throw themselves into a contented life of petty criminality. But when sinister landlady and social worker Lynda comes to take DNA swabs – purportedly for a scientific investigation into the genetic roots of criminal behavior – their teenage idyll is shattered. For a joke, Tilly swaps the two girls’ samples, setting into motion a gripping story of mistaken identity and corporate malice. With its depiction of shoplifting techniques, shadowy revolutionaries, alcopops, sperm banks, genetics, adolescense and a lot of smoking, “The Heritage” is both funny and sad, grittily real yet exuberantly imagined, utterly strange and yet strangely moving. - See more at: http://www.graspingforthewind.com/2009/02/11/free-fiction-the-heritage-by-will-ashon/#sthash.NkHRCiJY.dpuf

In his first novel, Clear Water, Will Ashon attempted an ambitious collage on the state of the nation, using the voices of half a dozen characters in a giant shopping centre. His second seems to open on similar territory, with a clash between riot police and protest marchers recalled for us by Tilly Parkins, who watched it on TV as a teenager, in hospital, in handcuffs. Clearly Ashon will be having another go at issues of power and control; at personal conflict in a public arena. Writing in the future, under a regime that suppresses such memoirs, Tilly promises to tell us how the clarinet-playing daughter of a dull suburban family became "radicalised", beginning with her incarceration for something she didn't do.
Tilly undergoes "Rehabunishment" in Yarleigh Falls Young Offenders Unit, where she is required to toil in a call centre and, using a fake Indian accent, bamboozle the unwary into unwise loans. One day Tilly, now known as Titch, meets the formidably pierced Sadie. Titch teaches Sadie to email. Sadie teaches Titch to endure. In no time at all, it seems, their servitude is over and the pair are sharing a flat in Coalville Newtown, where the only employer is the "Coalville Living Mine Experience", an artificial pit staffed by 100 tour guides in blackface. Ashon insists that his writing isn't satire, so it's hard to know what to make of these facetious twiddles he keeps inserting.
Aided and simultaneously persecuted by Lynda, their social worker, probation officer, landlady, and fence, the girls pursue a life of drinking, smoking and shoplifting. When the government launch "Project Root Cause", a scheme to isolate a "criminal gene" by sampling DNA from convicted felons and their families, the infinitely opportunistic Lynda secures that contract too. She swabs Titch and Sadie. Titch, in a moment of motiveless mischief, swaps the swabs. Then everything goes pear-shaped.
Thus far, it might be an adventure novel for the tougher-minded young teen: two mismatched mates hurtling through a grubby inferno on a quest for self-actualisation. Eventually, an eruption of gore and explicit druggy nastiness will convince us that what confronts Titch and Sadie is more grown-up than that: an increasingly sinister, increasingly confusing snarl of bad faith, bad blood and false identity. In its plot The Heritage resembles a conventional paranoid SF novel: twin representatives of the stupefied proletariat worming their way towards the Awful Truth through the entrails of the Evil State, only without the Evil State. Behind the easy smiles and weasel spin of Ashon's sketchy dystopia there's nothing for Titch and Sadie to discover, merely an institutionalised indifference to privacy and individual rights that's been evident from Chapter 1.

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Instead, almost superfluously, there is the tendency for characters to disappear into thin air. It is, Ashon would have us believe, a political gesture: the ultimate refusal to comply. But it's impossible to square with either his naturalistic narrative or the absurdist tics that occasionally disrupt it. That's a significant problem for us, and it's going to be a problem for him, if he wants us to keep reading his books.
We may well want to; he definitely has talent. He makes words work for him; writes an evocative, supple prose. He does a nice chunky, clipped version of teen street argot, and can do stifled teen sadness and scalding teen anger. Perhaps he should write that teenage novel after all. Addressing a definable reader might help focus his divergent impulses. - Colin Greenland



Tilly is languishing at Yarleigh Falls Young Offenders Unit when she meets Sadie. A nice, well brought up middle class girl, Tilly is like a fish out of water - she's the victim of a practical joke by her brother which went horribly, horribly wrong. Tilly released an internet virus he had written, and that's how she ended up at Yarleigh Falls. Her friendship with Sadie - predicated on her non-existent hacking skills - is the only connection she makes there, so when she's released, Tilly doesn't go home. She goes to Sadie's bedsit.
The two girls lapse into a life of drinking and smoking, paid for by the proceeds of shoplifting, once they've fenced the ill-gotten goods to their landlady Lynda. Lynda is an outsourcing success story. As government departments are successively privatised, Lynda picks up just about everything on offer. She is not only Tilly's landlady; she's her probation officer and her social worker too. When Lynda suddenly adds a new string to her outsourcing bow and adds DNA retrieval agent to her repertoire, the girls think nothing of it - but Tilly can't resist making mischief by swapping the swabs.
And it seems that Tilly's DNA is of interest to all sorts of people - shady government operatives, malicious corporate agents, even Lynda, who can sniff out a profit opportunity at several hundred paces. But of course, it isn't Tilly's DNA at all. Thanks to the prank, it's Sadie's DNA that is revealing all sorts of secrets...
Oh goodness me. What a book. It's certainly one of the best teen books I've read so far this year. Part conspiracy chase, part study of troubled adolescence, part blackest-of-black satire, it's a very sophisticated read. At first, I thought I was in a kind of near-future power game novel similar to Ken MacLeod's splendiferous The Execution Channel. But I wasn't. There aren't really any shady men in grey suits in this novel - or rather, there are, but they are more David Brent than evil genius. What I got was a dissection of modern corporate capitalism quite as vicious as anything Jim Ballard has ever put out.
Do you ever watch Question Time and come away with the feeling that there's more ability in a PTA committee that only managed to raise a paltry 39p on Children In Need day than there is in the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet combined? They're a bunch of hopeless incompetents, aren't they? Well, here they are in all their outsourced glory, summarised by Lynda, the Fagin figure in the novel. Here's what you get, Ashon is saying, if you let these fools put it all out for tender. Instead of a political conspiracy thriller, this book is a black comedy of privatisation. There are some wonderful scenes - including an interlude at a sperm collection facility that I won't ruin for you here. I had to put down the book, I was laughing so hard.
But it's not hilarity all the way. It's a sad story really. Middle class but unloved Tilly cleaves to bottom of the heap Sadie as if she is some kind of saviour. Sadie clings back but is crushed by the various genetic revelations. There's a heartrending tenderness to their relationship with its strong homoerotic undertones that brought a tear to my eye. And saddest of all is that the world is going to hell in a handcart not because there is a shady Bond-style villain out there masterminding it all, nor because the elite are all lizards in disguise, but because people are petty, greedy, small-minded and incompetent.
If I were a teenager reading this book, I'd be inspired though. Who wants to make the mistakes their parents made? And if I were a teenager reading this book, I'd not be wasting my time writing a review about it; I'd be reading it again. And again. And again.- www.thebookbag.co.uk/reviews/index.php?title=The_Heritage_by_Will_Ashon

Everything is Sinister by David Llewellyn and The Heritage by Will Ashon by Martin Lewis

Big Dada: Will Ashon interviewed

 
I arrange to meet Will Ashon in a South London pub on the first day of the smoking ban. Those around us are alternating between drinks inside and quick cigarettes outside. I’m struck by how incompatible the two have become.
It is a fitting precursor for my interview with Ashon. While his debut novel, Clear Water, is an unsettling and bleakly apocalyptic tale, Ashon himself bears no relation to his pessimistic narrative voice. He is lively, chatty and enthusiastic, even when he is talking about frustrating or disappointing incidents. Mostly, though, he expresses a real passion for writing, one that has kept him going since beginning the book in 2001.
Ashon began writing soon after he left college, before forming Big Dada Records, the London-based record label. “I wrote a novel when I was twenty-five that nobody wanted to publish. I was a music journalist for three or four years before I started the record label, so I always knew, and I always thought, “I’ll soon get down to my new novel, I must get the time to do it.”’ Ashon eventually found the time on his daily commute, penning most of the book on a Palm Pilot while travelling on the underground. “I’ve got young kids, I was working full time — it was the only spare time I had really.” The idea of being creatively productive on the much-loathed tube suggests a remarkable determination, but Ashon insists, “It’s a good place to work. I wrote most of the second book on the tube, just because there are no distractions. You can’t even get up and make a cup of tea; you’re literally just shoved there and you want to get off as quick as you can, so you work really quickly.” The book traces the connections between a set of characters, but there is nonetheless a strong sense of isolation dividing them. Did the writing conditions have any influence on the narrative? “I guess it [the tube] exemplifies that idea of lots of people together, not talking to each other, not interacting at all. I think yeah, it did have some effect.”

It is this lack of community which Ashon identifies as one of the key themes of Clear Water. ”None of the characters have any friends – they’re all completely separate. Jimmy has his friend who’s really horrible to him, but besides that there are no friendships in the book at all. I’m quite fond of the characters, some more than others, but no they’re not very likeable. I think King James is quite funny; I like Verna, she’s probably the nicest character in the book, just about, I guess.”
The characters in Clear Water are loathsome, it’s true – but they are also deliciously painted, from the ex-army soldier with a God complex to the amoral, dallying lifestyle writer. James Hawes, writing in the Guardian, praised the book for its “seriously good character writing.” Ashon is proud to have fought his corner, dismissing the importance of likeable heroes. “It’s not about liking them anyway.I spent months with my agent telling me “We need to give people something to hold on to; for the book to work, there has to be a sympathetic character you can identify with.” And I just thought that was bollocks.”
Clear Water, set largely in an oversized shopping centre on the outskirts of Kent, captured the imagination of readers everywhere. I mention Clear Water, and the innovation of using a shopping centre as the main backdrop, but Ashon is quick to discount this view. “If you call a book Clear Water, and you have a shopping centre called Clear Water, that’s what people tend to focus on as somehow the centre of the book, and it is and it isn’t.” He goes on to discuss critical responses to the book, and his frustration at certain critical responses towards the book.
“One of the odd things I found was that people treated it as if it was a satire, and actually a lot of people said, “Oh, it’s not a very good satire.” But Clear Water wasn’t meant to be a satire on consumerism; everything that I talked about to do with Clear Water happens on websites. You buy something, that website will run through its database of everyone who’s ever bought that and tell you what else they bought; it will tell you “If you like that, then you’ll like this.” That’s how Amazon works – we consider that to be a service, in a way. Putting that in a shopping centre makes the feeling of how that works to be a bit more concrete. It’s not meant to be satire, it’s meant to be how things actually do work. Maybe turned up a little, the odd exaggeration and silliness here; but my aim wasn’t to satirise culture.”
Before he leaves, Ashon tells me about “The Last Ape House”, an online project combining fascinating and artistic photographs with a typically fragmented, compelling narrative thread. It’s an engrossing work, and the perfect showcase for Ashon’s talents. It also shows a gentler, lighter side to Ashon’s writing, which will perhaps welcome readers looking for something warmer than Clear Water. But that, of course, is just the way Will Ashon likes it. “You’re not going to take any great comfort in the book,” he grins. “It’s not Ovaltine.” - Charlotte Stretch