Articles published in November, 2021
It’s quite hard to explain to others why I persist in wasting my time doing things that other people could do much more efficiently. Take this book I’m publishing as an example. I’ve spent hours wavering between different types of envelope to send the book out in. Should it be bubble wrap? But then the corners might get damaged. Or cardboard? More expensive, but safer, perhaps. There must be a reason Amazon uses them. I bought small samples of each and decided to spend the money on cardboard. I get the envelopes a hundred at a time from some guy called Kurt in Germany. The Amazon man brought the first lot to my door cursing because the village Mayor has torn the road up, and he has to back out down a very narrow crooked street, and it’s raining.
I need a system that will work on the day the books arrive at my door, because they will come, if all goes well, just nine days before Christmas. They’ve all got to go out immediately so that people like you, dear reader, have time to send them on as gifts. And I’ve got to sign them all and write stuff in them. I’ve already got a list of three hundred and I hope it will be closer to four hundred, because that’s the break-even point.
Obviously the answer is to have all the envelopes ready, addressed and stamped in advance. So I’ve been typing out hundreds of addresses on my Mac, and with most of them a note about dedicating the book “To my dear old Auntie Gussie “ or “Keep the rubber side down, Chuck.” And then I transfer the addresses to shipping label templates, and then I run the Avery labels off the printer and stick them on the envelopes, with a Post-it note about Aunt Gussie or Chuck.
All this took a couple of days – there are three hundred envelopes to date – and on the third day I notice that the labels are beginning to unstick themselves. A nightmarish vision of labels flying free in the post office and attaching themselves to other people’s packages of Viagra causes me to spend another day taping the labels down on the envelopes – how inefficient is that? Then someone says, “What about return labels?” Oh. Yes. Another few hours with Avery and the printer, and 300 envelopes. By now the names are getting really familiar; remarkable how many of them are good old Anglo-Saxon names. Where’s the diversity?
Anyway, the idea is that on D-Day I sit at a table, pen in hand while one acolyte to my right holds the book open for my precious inscriptions and the other to my left slips it into an envelope and seals it.
I have yet to find out what happens at the post office when I arrive with three or four hundred small packages. I hope to have them stamped before I get there but I can’t yet figure out how to print the right stamps at home. And what will my credit card say about a sudden 7,000 euro item?
People say: “Why doesn’t he just stick to writing, which he’s quite good at, instead of messing about with things he doesn’t understand?” I don’t have a very good answer. It could be a kind of laziness. I find it a bit boring to do what’s expected of me, but I do enjoy trying things for the first time and understanding them. That’s why I built my own house, and why I started an organic vegetable farm forty years ago, and why I rode a motorcycle round the world before everyone was doing it. I could have hired experts but where’s the fun in that. And anyway, what would I have to write about?
So remember, when the book comes to your door, I’m not just the bloke who wrote it, I’m also the one who stuck on the labels and the stamps. It’s all very personal.
You’ve been wonderful. Almost 200 of you have come through already with orders for Don’t Boil The Canary. And that’s only half the number who said they’d buy it, so I can dare to hope that by the time the books arrive at my doorstep there will have been enough sold to make it all worthwhile.
This week has been like a taste of the Fifties. That’s the last time I did old-fashioned office work, with lists and labels and stacks of envelopes and endless checking, and tea-rings on the tabletop, and heated discussion with the French post office about how to get hundreds of small packages stamped and delivered in one day.
I’ve been promised delivery on December 15. It’s later than I hoped, but still in plenty of time to get it to you and even enable you to send it on before the holiday if you want to. I’ve signed a lot of books in my time but this will be a marathon, especially as so many of you want more than just a signature. I’ve figured out an elaborate system with post-it notes, and with my happy helpers, Ann and Hilary, on either side of me it should go like clockwork. Well it should, shouldn’t it?
If you are among those who promised to buy the book I hope you’ll place an order soon. I want to be sure I’ve got enough supplies to deal with it all, and they might become uncertain as we get closer to Christmas. And need I remind you that Jupiter’s Travels in Camera also makes a very desirable present if you’re looking for something that offers much more than just pictures. What’s more, I’ll put copy of the CD in it for free. It’s much under-rated and offers a huge amount of stuff about the second journey.
Some of you have accompanied your orders with extraordinarily moving accounts of the influence Jupiter’s Travels has had on their lives. I can’t begin to tell you how comforting that is to me and how proud it makes me. This is a time when so many destructive forces seem to be gaining in strength, and it’s hard not to feel helpless in face of them. You allow me to feel that I’ve done my bit, and that we’re all on the same side. For that I am deeply grateful. We have to win, or my grandsons will never know the joys of our wonderful world.
Now that my book has finally gone to the printer I find it hard to believe that it’s taken me almost four years to write. I started on it in 2017, soon after my last visit to New York which was also the last time I saw Harry Evans. He gave me lunch on the East Side at what I suppose was a favourite restaurant since everyone there knew him. Later in the year, with some trepidation, I asked him to read the first 20,000 words which were about my early childhood and the war. He wrote back:
“Ted, I read it all at one go. It is enchanting. Beautifully observed. It will resonate with many who lived it and charm the rest.”
Since he was a truly great newspaper editor and then the boss of Random House his opinion was clearly valuable, and I determined to go on with it, but knowing how lazy I’ve become in my old age I thought publishing it in chapters on my website might keep me going. It worked I guess, but awfully slowly. Harry died three years later, and I still hadn’t finished it. I’m still grieving. I know he would have loved the title.
Anyway, it’s done now, and I’ve promised quite a lot of people that I would do an audio version. There are already recorded versions of Jupiter’s Travels and Dreaming of Jupiter, and they’ve done well. The reader, Rupert Degas, is brilliant and they are both very classy interpretations, but I think this story of my life doesn’t need to be that sophisticated. In fact, I fancy doing it at the kitchen table, and if there are occasional noises, well, so be it. I’ve noticed how rowdy my village street can be sometimes. There aren’t any juvenile scooter sods roaring up and down the street now, partly because the police took an interest after one of them knocked me flat on my back. But it’s the mayor who inadvertently spoiled their game. He has torn up the small square at the end of my road and exposed the village’s entrails.
The plan is to renovate and beautify the Placette as it’s called, but for now it’s a mess of deep holes with a quite bewildering substrate of pipes of all ages and dimensions to be pondered over by bewildered workers, although they seem now to have figured it out. For traffic – and drunken pedestrians – it’s a no-go area. We’ve been promised to have it back before Christmas, with water in the fountain as a bonus, but for now there are drills and compressors and things that go bang, and some of that noise might well be recorded for posterity if I go on with my plan.
You may recall that my partner’s house, where I was mainly living, burned down on New Year’s Eve with the guinea fowl in the oven (it wasn’t the oven, and we did rescue and consume the dinner while the house burned). They are still rebuilding it, otherwise that would have been a quieter place to record in. We were promised to have that back by Christmas too, but we all know about mice and men and supply chains. It seems there’s a shortage of windows, among other things.
So along with my book you might get a slice of recorded history, written by pneumatic drill, of the restoration of beautiful old Aspiran. It’s all to come, and more…
The book is ready and about to go to the printer. I am pleased with it, and I’m sure you will be too. Most of you have already promised to buy a copy, and I very much hope I can count on all of you to pre-order it as soon as possible. Here it is – a paperback but with flaps, front and back. And I hope the title amuses you: It’s in the book, of course.
The book will be in my hands well before Christmas. It has 448 pages, which makes it even bigger than Jupiter’s Travels, and the cover price is $25. I will sign every copy you order and, if possible, dedicate it to whomever you choose.
You could say I’m a multi-national but I don’t have a tax haven (pathetic, really) and I am not Amazon either, so the postage to get my book across the water safely is rather high and costs as much as the book itself. Because so many of you have committed yourselves, I will reduce the shipping cost to $20 until Christmas. It’s a bit of a gamble but in my experience I think I can count on you. If most of you come through I have a chance of breaking even.
Most of you I have never met, but a strange thing happens as I laboriously type out the lists of your names and email addresses. Many of them I’ve seen before, and I feel a curious familiarity with you. Although all my books up to now have been published by big companies I have always offered to sign and sell them directly. Many of you have written to me afterwards to thank me for writing them so I recognise a lot of the names. These interactions have been important to me, and I have devoted a lot of time to them, much more than would normally make commercial sense. I think I have a good feel for who you are, and I think you know I’m not in it for the money.
So that’s the deal. Pre-order the book now, or as soon as you can, for expected delivery before Christmas. There will, I hope, be several hundred books to send out quickly, and that involves a lot of work signing the books and addressing envelopes and I want to be ready for when the books arrive.
PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE BOOK HERE
Here’s the blurb about the book:
“Ted Simon was 42 years old when he began the motorcycle journey that the world knows as Jupiter’s Travels. In a book that was unusually revealing he laid his life and his emotions open to everyone. Yet readers across the globe who have been touched by his openness know virtually nothing about those earlier 42 years.”
“Estranged from his father since childhood, and without brothers or sisters, Ted’s point of reference in the world was inevitably his mother. Yet it was only after she died that he realised how many questions he had failed to ask her. At the same time he became aware that his own son and grandsons were also too involved in their day-to-day lives to think of asking him much about his own life. He resolved to write an account for them, so that they might later know the answers to some of the questions they were too busy to ask. This account inevitably grew into the book to be published this month, under the title, DON’T BOIL THE CANARY.
“Born in 1931, his childhood was dominated by the second world war, and his reminiscences from wartime London will resonate with those who lived through those dark times and enchant those who came later.”
“As the post-war world expanded Ted takes the reader through all the turns and twists of an ever-changing career with an unabashed account of the rich and varied life he led before the journey that defined him.”
