One thousand copies of "Warming Up: Bye Bye Balham" were delivered to my house on a palette this afternoon. It's very exciting to see the finished product.
Go Faster Stripe have done an amazing job putting this together. It's their first book and it's really cool to have put this together ourselves. I hope you'll all buy a copy. It's totally like a proper book. And no doubt, like the first Harry Potter book, this limited first edition will one day be worth tens of thousands of pounds. Though Andrew Collings seemed to think it was unlikely that JK Rowling ever stored her own books in her own house.
It may be a day or so before you're able to order it, but it would really help both Chris from Go Faster and me if you did, as currently we are trapped behind massive piles of unsold books and can't move around our homes.
After carrying books off my palette - and I am excited that I now own a palette, I went to the newsagent to get papers for the podcast.
The front covers of the tabloids all had photos of
Karen Matthews with headlines proclaiming her the most evil woman alive. Though I would say she's just stupid and wrong, but each to their own.
As I got back home I caught my blurred reflection in the glass on my front door and the image seemed familiar. I am a bit tired and hungover and I realised that with my long bedraggled hair, I am the dead spit for Karen Matthews. I am worried that crazy people in the street might mistake me for the worst mother of all time (and I am including Medea in that) and pelt me with rocks. On the other hand I might be able to make a good living as a lookalike, being booked for kids' parties as a kind of pantomime villain. Still it was a bit of a shock to realise the similarity, even if I then spotted that Collings is the spit of Michael Donovan. And if we can persuade Jeanette Krankie to dress as a school girl, rather than a boy, I think we might have found our tribute act Shannon. I know that lookalike tribute bands make a lot of money. I don't know how much call there is for lookalike tribute news items. But if you want to book us all then do get in touch. We could be on to a winner.
Still it gave us something to talk about when Collings (or was it Michael Donovan?) turned up. I gave him a copy of my book and using some kind of typo magnet in his journalistic brain he immediately managed to find a missing apostrophe in a footnote within seconds. I am pretty sure there isn't another mistake like that in the whole book - but Collings was straight in there. Still not as bad as just editing out one of your mentor's names entirely is it?
You can hear what else we got up to in my attic
here. It's childish and caffeine free and some of it is just rubbish. Just the same as usual. But I managed to make Andrew look like he might actually be sick at one point, which is all a man can aim for.
