Warming Up

500 done. Let’s go for 1000.

Into town today for the first face to face meeting with my publishers in two years. We’ve released two books in that time and I’ve finished work on a third. We’ve done zoom meetings of course, but here we were in person, tentatively working out if hugs were allowed again. 

The meeting went well. They seem excited about the book. They’ve been enthusiastic before, of course (I think that’s probably part of the job), but this felt a bit different. I am unusually pleased with this book too (though I did think “The Problem With Men” felt like a good piece of work, albeit one of just 25,000 words) so maybe this one will be some kind of breakthrough. But I won’t hold my breath. I feel very fortunate to be in the position where I am getting books published and increasingly feel like this might be the medium for my writing work. If I can write a book a year for the rest of my life I will not only be very happy, but I will have written two more books.

After the meeting I decided to have a walk through London. I was heading for Covent Garden (which I learned - or relearned- from Super-Infinite was once actually a garden, which blows my mind even though the clues were there all along), but misjudged directions a bit and found myself on Fleet Street when my brain told me I was heading for the Strand. My London knowledge is fading away. I went in the wrong direction on the Northern Line when I arrived too.

I wasn’t sure how Fleet Street linked up with the Strand (directly it tuned out) but I was in no rush and took in the sights and enjoyed reliving the old days when I had time to wander round London and occasionally walk home to Shepherd’s Bush. I had no plan and a couple of hours to myself and this was a rare luxury. This part of London is so full of unexpected history, as well as KFCs and Tesco Expresses, but what I was really enjoying was the time to myself. No work, no parenting, just a nice 30 minute walk up to a place that used to be a garden, but now has an Apple store. Maybe in the olden days I would have been able to pick an apple. But the computer shop is better.  Plus there’s a Moleskin shop. In the olden days I might have been able to catch a mole in and skin it and then use its skin as a sort of parchment, possibly using its blood as ink. But I just bought some notebooks instead. 

What a wonderful couple of hours of freedom I had, walking round London, listening to Emma Kennedy’s excellent new book “Letters from Brenda”. I knew Brenda a little of course and she was an incredible character, though I didn't know the half of it. I thought this might be a sad book about losing a parent and it partly is, but it's also a celebration of an imperfect life and is full of laughs. The letters are (to some extenet literally) insane and full of hilarious stories, but there are some home truths to face up to and you end up feeling great sympathy and love for Emma's dad Tony, even if you don't already know him. The book ends up mentioning me a bit too, so I got to relive some of the times from a quarter of a century ago and more when I was really free. I don’t really believe in destiny but if I did it would feel as if someone out there really wanted Emma and me to be friends. We think we first met at the interview stage at Oxford when Emma applied to do History at St Catherine’s college at the same time as me. I definitely remember chatting with a young woman beforehand and Emma does too. Both coming from normal schools and having no one to train us for the entrance exam we were both hoping for a conditional offer on our A level results, which we both ended up getting. They must have liked us as the offer was 2 As and a B, which was pretty generous. Emma would actually have been in the year above me as I was taking a year off (as it was called then), but she got glandular fever which impacted on her exams (she fell asleep in one of them) and didn’t get the grades. She gave up on going to University at all, until a chance meeting with her old English teacher led to her training up and reapplying to St Edmund Hall, where she got a place and her tutorial partner ended up being Stewart Lee. And now that she’d inadvertently had a year off, she was in the same year as me too.

Life is not predestined (I don’t think) but who we become friends with and where we end up are always done to a series of chance events that seem impossible or magical when viewed in hindsight. Though certainly listening to Emma’s book, a lot of her chance encounters really do feel like they have a magical hand nudging her in the right direction. We were all very lucky to chance across each other at that time. We will doubtless discuss more when Emma is a guest on RHLSTP book club in a few weeks.