During last year’s first lockdown, I avoided catching COVID-19 by staying at home, as instructed by Al ‘You can call me Boris’ Johnson. I should definitely have read much more given the leaning towers of books on the landing but I couldn’t have written much more. Sadly, much of what I wrote, mainly a collection of essays about my life in Brislington, disappeared when my computer died. I thought it might be lost forever, but thanks to the efforts of a dear friend, and his friend who is a computer genius, my work has been saved. It is the best news I have had in over a year.
I have struggled, like many of you, with the uniform drudgery of each passing day which closely resembles the previous one and the one before that. Even when hope arrives in the form of a vaccine we find there remains precious little we can do, other than to not die, which I admit is rather important. So, I started and nearly finished a follow-up to my best-selling (and only) book Corfu, not a scorcher which reviewed the ‘mixed’ reviews it probably deserved! It was lost and now it’s found.
I don’t ask for much, but if any of you have the odd £10,000 to spare, can you please let me have it by first post tomorrow? Then, I can dedicate the rest of my life to writing lots of books which no one will read but will at least make me feel I’m doing something vaguely useful.
Obviously, if anyone has more than £10,000 to piss up the wall, then I’ll take that, too. In fact, I might even sent Bristol Rovers’ owner, the sainted Wael al Qadi, a begging letter because I’m only trying to grift barely a sixth, maybe even an eighth, of what he is pouring down the drain every single week in BS7.
Desperate people try desperate things, right? I’m not really that desperate but hey, what you don’t ask for you don’t get. It’s time to turn a new page!
