Piers uncancelled

Way, way back in The Olden Times, well the autumn of 2019, a publisher contacted me to ask if I wanted to write a travel book about the coast. I’d written a little introductory essay for a different book about the coast and they wondered if I’d like to have a go at writing a full volume of similar musings. I have to say that I hesitated; the more books I write, the more I tell myself that I’m not that great at writing long stretches of prose. After all these years I know what I’m good at and I know what I’m not so good at, and the shorter pieces like the one you’re reading now are the ones I think I can do best.

After a while, because I’ve always been freelance and I’ve always said yes to everything, I thought I might give it a go. I suggested to the publisher that I would write fifty 1,000word pieces about different parts of the coast, and they thought that was a good idea. My plan was that when I did a gig on a Friday night I would stay over and go to the nearest slice of coast and write about it. My wife and I would take little breaks by the sea and as I ate fish and chips in the evening sun I would be able to convince myself that I was hard at work. The book was commissioned and I bought myself a new notebook and prepared to fill it.

In early March 2020 my wife and I had a couple of days in Scarborough and I scribbled words in my notebook. Things were changing; the air felt ominous. We were using a lot of hand sanitiser. People looked wary, and weary. The notes I took were fragmented and fractious. Then, as we all know, the world’s doors slammed shut and the lockdown happened and all my gigs disappeared and I couldn’t go to the coast even if I wanted to, which, to be frank, I didn’t.

The book still needed to be written, though; the deadline was extended a bit on the assumption that things would start to get better as 2021 loomed. It turned out, as we all know, that loomed was the right word.

So I started writing down my memories of time spent at the coast and sent them to the publisher and luckily they thought they were OK. Once things began to loosen up, we were able to take my mother-in-law to her caravan and have a few masked and sanitised days by the water in the North-East, but the book began to construct itself around my memories. Even when I did visit the coast it felt that, inevitably, the pandemic hung over those piers and amusement arcades and wheeling seagulls so I kept returning to the always-productive memory mine.

And now, as I write this, I’ve just finished essay 43 of 50. The end seems to be in sight. Somehow I’ll find 7,000 more words hiding down the settee of my mind. There’s nothing like a looming deadline and a global pandemic to push you back into yourself, I find!