The late Dulcie Domum, direct to your door

MOST column-writing journalists, when their feature is axed, as columns inevitably are, favour retiring hurt to the pub, doing a little light voodoo on the sacking editor and then forgetting all about it. Not so Sue Limb, whose fictional Dulcie Domum musings in The Guardian's Weekend magazine were terminated in April after a 12- year run.

Limb has gone instead into what might be called direct sales. Through a display ad in The Guardian, she is offering Dulcie fans the chance to continue their weekly 740-word fix either by post, at 15 for six months' supply, or 10 for the same by email.

And worryingly, perhaps, for those who make their living editing and printing newspapers, weeks after starting the venture, Limb is close to making enough money to equal or even surpass the stipend she received from her former paper.

"When The Guardian dispensed with Dulcie, my first thought was that I must get a website up and running in time for the last column. I was just planning to have a site like a postcard in the corner shop, as a lot of writers do now, and simply post the columns there," says Limb, who lives in a cottage on an organic farm in Gloucestershire.

"Of course, being a person of my age with a liberal education, I'm not very commercial and I didn't realise at first that I could sell them. The Guardian sacking happened at a time when all my other projects had gone cold as well.

I'd also had a disappointing rejection from the BBC, who had taken radio and TV things for years. So I was completely broke, with no income apart from child benefit."

To add to this - just the kind of gloomy scene The Guardian loves to report - Limb's partner, Steve Redman, found his livestock under threat from foot-and-mouth, which had reached within a mile of the farm.

A Californian web-hosting company came up with the revolutionary Columns Direct idea. A nephew who works in IT designed an elegant website for her, and 560 customers have already signed on for the column, many of them expatriates as dispersed as Malaysia and Manhattan. Her website has had 300,000 hits since April.

"Why do we have to have this middle man to mediate?" a newly buoyant Limb asks. "I was paid 400 per week for the column and I reckon if I could get seven new subscribers per day, I could soon exceed what I was paid before. I am convinced I can overtake my Guardian whack. I want to prove it can be done.

"It is a completely different experience, writing for 500 people. They all seem to know Dulcie Domum terribly well and depend on it for their little soap-opera fix. So they send me suggestions, and even have a discussion group on Yahoo! where they ferociously discuss Dulcie's life. It's been a tremendous morale boost."

"I think," says Limb, who has done research at Cambridge into Elizabethan lyric poetry, "that there is a historical precedent for what I'm doing. In the 18th century, ballad sellers actually went out with a basket of ballads and moved from town to town saying, 'Do you want a ballad?'

"As for The Guardian, I don't feel bitter at all. I had a fantastic run with them; they've asked me to continue doing stuff for them, and it was fair enough after 12 years. I was completely at ease with their decision; it was the readers who were incensed."

Copyright 2001
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