Not okay, computer.

I have some very bad news to impart. My beloved iMac has passed away at the grand old age of nine. He has been unwell for some time and was unable to operate beyond glacial speed. Nonetheless, I shall miss him, as well as quite a lot of my writing which he will take with him to that great computer graveyard at the tip.

Luckily, the death of my computer came at a time when I was just about to start yet more therapy so I was able to deal with it more objectively. And before the bugger died, I managed to print out the 60-odd thousand words I have written for the non-awaited follow-up to my worst-selling book ‘Corfu not a scorcher’. Looking on the positive side, at least the words have not disappeared altogether but it does mean that when my new computer arrives, I shall have to rewrite the entire bloody thing!

My next book, which will not be available at any bookshops, let alone good ones, is about me. It will be available from Amazon, which means Jeff Bezos will make far more money out of it than I will. Given that I am barely a household name in my own household, I can certainly see the limitations, here. It’s not an autobiography or even a memoir since there is no consistent narrative running through my life. Instead, I’ve written loads of essays about growing up in Brislington, featuring people and places that hardly anyone will have heard of. And for those who are still living, don’t worry: I’ve changed their names in order to avoid potential litigation from, say, someone who may have shared with me a pack of 5 Park Drive in St Annes Woods back in the 1970s.

I figured that, at least among old people who know Briz (the short name for Brislington, NOT Bristol), there might be some vague interest in my stories. People might be excited to read how the IRA almost killed me on Park Street or the time we waited for the caretaker at the Severn Beach Blue Lagoon open air swimming pool to remove the dead flies from the surface before we had a dip. These, would you believe, are the highlights, along with scrounging a bag of scrumps from Templars Fish and Chip shop on Hollywood Road and sitting with my grandfather watching the great Mick McManus to cheat his way to wrestling victory on ITV’s World of Sport.

I had hoped to capture the lucrative Christmas market for this project, but there is no prospect of me rewriting an entire book and then having it proof-read by a proper writer before November. Hopefully, it will be self-published on Amazon before next summer when we are confined at home during the seventeenth wave of the coronavirus.

If people are still panic-buying toilet paper, at least you’d have something else with which to wipe your arse.