MY FIRST ATTEMPT at this book was lost when my laptop was stolen. Don’t ask me why I didn’t back it up. Did anyone ask Lawrence of Arabia that after he lost Seven Pillars of Wisdom when changing trains at Reading station in 1920? Of course not. He re-wrote it and it almost doubled in length. For that reason I suggested the title Eight Pillars of Wisdom, but the publishers weren’t having it. I also suggested Read … The Book, but that got the ‘thumbs down’ from the Caesar Sisters as being too common a phrase for Amazon and Google. As Sandie Shaw once said, ‘message understood’.
In many ways this isn’t a conventional autobiography, if indeed it is one at all. The stories are there, the various pathways I’ve followed, in my carpe vitam moments, for better or worse, but after much thought and consulting my diaries I’ve made a conscious decision not to make it linear. If it were, you’d be a sitting in a cricket pavilion or standing on a tennis court every other page and listening to the radio or watching TV on the ones in between. I have no desire to get ‘buzzed’ by Nicholas Parsons for repetition. Neither have I overly focused on my girlfriends. They’re mentioned here and there, of course, but I’m never convinced that people are particularly interested in the intimate details of somebody else’s love-life. Relations between human beings have been going since the serpent suggested to Adam that he gave up gardening, so there’s nothing new. (Unless of course you’re very, very weird, in which case I don’t want to know.) I’m still on good terms with all my girlfriends and wouldn’t want their children or partners to read anything that might appear salacious. More often than not they’ve been to many of the cricket matches, shows, gatherings etc., but I don’t feel there’s a need to drag them through every opening night, flight, cruise or event in the book. They feature, of course, but appear as and when. I have many great friends, but not all of them are mentioned here if they don’t appear in the selected tales. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love them any less or that they’re not an important part of my life. It probably means their dance with me ‘upon this bank and shoal of time’ was brutally slashed by an unscrupulous editor. A cast of thousands, in a biography just as in a novel, is often confusing.
Also I decided not to write a book that my mother or grandmother would be embarrassed to read. As Ernest Betjeman said to his young son when he declared that he wanted to be a poet, ‘Let what you write be funny, John, and be original.’ I too have heeded the words of Betjeman senior, echoing down the years and now a century old. I may have failed but I have tried. I have, in the words of Horace, ‘seized the day’, although the literal translation of his phrase carpe diem is ‘pluck the day’, which adds another layer of meaning to one who plucks a guitar on a daily basis. I vacillated between carpe diem and carpe vitam as a title for the book. I hope it’s not too haphazard or labyrinthine.