Day 2: Imagine you do it all wrong

Transcript

Hello, good morning. It’s Tuesday the 3rd of November and you should have got my email at 11.27ish. I tried on the first day to send it to you at 11am but I made a little mistake and so it got delayed and every subsequent email, for reasons I couldn’t explain, has to be exactly 24 hours later. So expect my emails at 11.27.

Last night I went to King’s Cross in North London to drop off a parcel, a paperback proof copy of my own micro-memoir, which is called A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown. There’s a picture of the parcel here.

In case the book means nothing to you, it’s something I put together in 30 days in March this year. It’s about my 2018 breakdown and a time in psychiatric hospital with severe depression and subsequent recovery.

I took the package to the offices of The Guardian, where my wife worked for many years, so the trip was very familiar.

Northern line to hectic, bustling King’s Cross St Pancras. Glitzy shops and restaurants on the boulevard. Vast, looming new offices of Google, like some kind of Death Star. Barges on the canal, and finally, as you can see in the photo, Kings Place.

It’s not as welcoming as it was now though. Not having any family members in the building, I wasn’t allowed into reception to hand it over in person, but shown outside to the post room. Oh well.

The reason I took it is because The Guardian is running a feature about my book on the 2nd of January. They’re running a feature about a very short book. Just let that sink in. And they’ll use drawings that appear in the book.

And I didn’t want to send the pictures digitally, so I just – because I like it, I think it just looks better on paper. So I wanted to hand it over.

Why am I telling you this? Well, the same point applies to you too, I guess. If you put together a book, it could be picked up and shared somewhere else. And more than that, a printed thing is just different. It’s special. It endures.

And more still, I thought it might be amusing for you to know that The Guardian magazine feature, the one I wrote for The Guardian, contains more words than the book itself. So I had to come up with additional text.

And I have to say that as a magazine writer, a full-time magazine writer on newspapers, for a long time it used to drive me potty when people said that a picture speaks a thousand words. But I guess I’m discovering that there’s a lot of truth to that.

On the tube home last night, I replied to your messages, for which, thank you very much. All of the messages were different, obviously, and I won’t try to summarise, because you’ve got the reply that I sent to you, I guess, I hope.

But in at least a couple of instances, I picked up a slight whiff of perfectionist anxiety. And I thought I’d say in today’s message, if you’re feeling like that, try this.

Imagine that you do, in fact, produce your book after 30 days, but you do it all wrong. What would that actually mean? What is all wrong? Take a second to think it over with specifics. It’s possible that you’ll actually find some rather delightful opportunities in there.

Anyway, thanks for listening.