Always Look on the Bright Side of Total and Humiliating Failure
Exactly a year ago today, I closed the door of my flat in East Dulwich for the last time, pushed my keys back through the letterbox and began my life as the littlest e-hobo. Since then, according to my Dopplr account, I’ve flown enough miles to single-handedly warrant the building of a third runway at Heathrow. It’s lucky that I don’t offset my carbon because if I did, the world would be overrun by trees. And no one wants that.
It’s fitting perhaps that–52 weeks to the day after saying goodbye to London for the first time–I’m about to do it again. I’ve reached the end of a two week stay in town to take care of some admin and, most importantly, to finalise a deal to write a second me-me-memoir, this time about my bizarre adventures as a technomad. A sort of Drunk And Disorderly In Paris and Las Vegas, if you will. The fact that the deal is with the same publisher–even the same editor–as my previous book is a frankly damning indictment of the level of sane judgement to be found in modern publishing. Ask anyone who has worked with me in the past and they’ll tell you the last thing they want to do is make the same mistake again. I’m just going to put it down to an administrative error, keep my head down and hope no one at Orion House realises what the hell they’ve done.
