I recently found myself bewailing the fact that my last book release, Fab Fools, was over four years ago, and even that was released under lockdown. Currently I’m being massively mishandled in my quest to find a paperback home for one of my existing books. And although I started researching a new comedy history book years ago, interviewing elderly comic actors while they are around to remember, not one word of that book has yet been written. As if I have had the time, between mortgage payment work and fatherhood…!

Oh, but then, I am forgetting my first novel. Yes, a lockdown novel, embarked on as a game of chicken with myself in July 2020, reworked and worried over for the ensuing years, and self-published (another complete first for me) on Amazon (“boo! hiss!”) this Spring. I often wondered if I had a novel in me. And although this one was ultimately fan fiction… I sometimes worry I might have more than one.

But there’s the stinky rub – for myriad reasons, I have published this light comic novel under a pseudonym, derived from a place name, that of a village once lived in by my favourite author, and subject of the novel’s homage. So although current orders for the publication remain at Zero, it defeats the whole point if I just mention the name of the book here on my own blog.

Which is a shame, as I’m oddly proud of it, and would recommend it to any fellow lover of the author in question. Or indeed any lover of laughing, particularly at the horrendous rise of the far right in our society.

I’m a fool to myself, obviously.