LITMIR.BIZ

      IF YOU GO to a fancy restaurant these days you normally get given something that is called an ‘amuse-bouche’ – that’s French for ‘amuse mouth’ – which is basically an appetiser that they serve before the food you have actually ordered turns up. The whole point of it is to whet your appetite. More often than not it looks like stuff they’ve just brushed up from behind the cooker and stuck on a broken Jacob’s cream cracker. I tend to eat it just cos it’s there but I very rarely enjoy it and it isn’t a part of the meal I remember when looking back. To me, an amuse-bouche is like an introduction to a book, in that you could easily do without it.

      I thought I’d finished writing this book. I had handed in the six chapters to the publishers and was all pleased with myself that after almost nine months of sitting in front of my computer, it was finally complete. Except it wasn’t. Jenny at the publishers said she wanted some more. Jenny is never happy. If God had handed her his Ten Commandments for approval she would have suggested he write another three. ‘Why do I need to do an introduction?’ I asked. She explained that an introduction should inform the reader of why I travelled around the world looking at the topics I’ve written about. I said that I had written over 120,000 words and all this information was already in each chapter, but she insisted that an introduction was still required. So I am sat here feeling like a marathon runner who’s been asked to do a lap of honour. I know the saying is that you should never judge a book by its cover but I’m asking you not to judge this one by the introduction. I don’t know what to say that I haven’t already covered, and would prefer it if you just went straight to the start of chapter one now. But for the benefit of keeping Jenny happy I’ll keep going with this introduction even though I don’t believe in them.

      I think if a book has been well written you shouldn’t need any explanation at the start. I only got round to watching Star Wars for the first time last year and thought it was odd that it had all that scrolling text about ‘in a galaxy far far away’ at the start of the film explaining the background to the story. I thought I’d downloaded the bloody Kindle version of it due to the amount of text there was to read. I wonder if Jenny was involved in Star Wars and demanded it had that intro added on afterwards.

      I’ve just remembered an introduction to a programme I watched years ago that was so daft it made me laugh even though it wasn’t supposed to. It was a travel documentary presented by Neil Morrissey (the fella off the TV show Men Behaving Badly) called Neil Morrissey’s Excellent Adventure in Jordan. Now, just like Jenny at the publishers, TV execs also like the start of a programme to cover what the show is all about and why Neil Morrissey has been picked to present it. This is always a tricky sell for any programme as it’s most likely that he just did the show cos it was a paying job and didn’t have much else on at the time. But being honest doesn’t always work for TV. If I was in charge I’d have just called the show Amman Behaving Badly (Amman is Jordan’s capital city). This would immediately make Neil the perfect presenter for the show, no more questions asked. But they didn’t think of this, so to justify his involvement the opening line to the series was ‘I’m Neil Morrissey and I’ve always been fascinated by the desert’. It makes me laugh just writing it. He said it with such seriousness, which made it even funnier. Now, I’ve never met Neil, I’m sure he’s a lovely fella, but I don’t believe for one second that he has ‘always been fascinated by the desert’. I would bet £100 that he was forced to say that line by some TV exec so any viewers wondering why Neil had been chosen to host the show now knew it was because he’s fascinated by deserts.

      And now, like Neil I’m being forced to explain and justify why I filmed The Moaning of Life 2 series. Well, first of all I needed to earn some money to pay off the mortgage. The second reason was that if I was going to be away from home yet again I wanted to look at topics in life that interest me. The first Moaning of Life series looked at issues that most people face through their lives like marriage and having kids, but looking back on it, the problem with those subjects was that I went into them with my mind already made up, as I already knew that marriage and having kids wasn’t for me. So in some ways it was all a bit pointless. With this last series I wanted to look at themes that did play a big part in my life even though I didn’t realise how big. The original list of topics I was going to look into were:

      About two weeks before going away to film

Скачать книгу