Dear Algernon,
Hello again from your university friend! After the improbable success of How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden in North America — where it has been praised as both a manual for living and a cautionary tale for the credulous — my publishers have decided the time has come for a British English edition.
This, as you will appreciate, is no mere exercise in swapping “colour” for “color.” It is a cultural translation of seismic proportions: petrol for gas, allotments for yards, and a careful excision of the chapter in which I advise readers to store crude oil in Tupperware. My hope is that the book will resonate with your nation’s proud history of quietly persevering in the face of hopeless weather, and perhaps inspire a few of you to metaphorically, if not literally, drill.
Which brings me to my request: would anyone at Pimlico Wilde — with your impeccable editorial instincts and your apparent immunity to flattery — be willing to compose the preface to this new edition? Ideally, I’m looking for something that straddles the line between an academic benediction and a pub anecdote, with perhaps a dash of Edwardian gravitas. I want readers to feel they are about to embark on an adventure that is both edifying and faintly scandalous.
Naturally, you will be credited handsomely in print and in my future memoir, tentatively titled The Crude Truth. I can think of no finer home for my British debut than under the auspices of those who know the value of both a well-placed comma and a well-timed wink.
I await your reply with the breathless eagerness of a person who has just heard the promising gurgle of oil — or possibly just mains water — beneath their lawn.
Yours, in optimism and refined hydrocarbons,
Shannon Drifte
