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I got the first copy of the new Emergency Questions book in the post today. It’s always very exciting to see a new book and this was no exception. It looks lovely - the cover is a brighter green than I expected and is much better for it. I wrote a newsletter about it and tweeted a bit and the book leaped from 104,000 in the chart to the low 2000s. If you are buying the book early then it is apparently helpful to its chances to buy it from Amazon or Waterstones in order to build its rep and get them to push it more. But it’s also available from gofasterstripe, where the money will go to a nice tax paying man who will use it to make more comedy shows. Head or heart - it's your choice.
But it would be lovely (for me obviously) if you would buy it from somewhere - it’s a good Christmas gift and people don’t even need to know who I am to enjoy it. If it’s a success then that will help us move RHLSTP and possibly an Emergency Questions TV show onwards.
For people who like to rid big fields of stones whilst walking their dog, today was like Christmas Day. When the farmer ploughed the field a week or so ago he or she left a large 5 metre swathe of unploughed land around the edge. It’s this 5 metres that I have been slowly picking stones out of. I wouldn’t say I had quite finished the job, but I had certainly removed quite a few of the larger chunks.
But now that 5 metre section has also been ploughed. The path I was diligently trying to make run proof is gone and is now loose soil, making running impossible until it has been stamped down again.
BUT -and this is the vital part of the equation- the ploughing has trudged up thousands of new stones from underground for me to attempt to eradicate from the soil. There were so many to choose from in the twilight walk tonight that I didn’t know what to do with myself.
Now admittedly this mission started as a bit of a joke - setting myself an impossible task to prove the futility of existence - but I am actually beginning to become genuinely and possibly dangerously obsessed. That’s not like me, right?
But it may prove to be a positive thing as well. Before I was just walking the dog, which was OK exercise, but now I am bending, lightly throwing and kicking. It’s a whole body exercise regime and according to my Apple Watch I am burning twice as many calories as before (obviously it has a stone-clearing exercise setting). So I am not only very slowly building a huge higgledy-piggledy wall that no one will ever know was mine (until maybe someone discovers a secret diary about it and decides to call it Herring’s Wall) and helping the farmer (or possibly massively inconveniencing them - please don’t tell me, I don’t want to know which it is), I am going to turn into a Geoff Capes style strong man.
I know from the cairn that I am not the only person show does this and I know there must be loads of readers out there who are doing something similar to this, and I’ve come up with some observational comedy that I think a lot of you are going to like.
So you know what it’s like when you’re surreptitiously trying to clear all the stones from a very stony field over the course of several decades? We’ve all been there. Isn’t it funny when you think you’re spotted a really big stone, but when you pick It up it crumbles to bits and turns out to be almost entirely made of soil?!
That’s the first joke.
BUT how about when you’re surreptitiously trying to clear all the stones from a very stony field over the course of several decades and you see what you think is a big clod of earth and then you step on it and it turns out actually to be mainly rock? That’s funny too isn’t it? Funnier even, because you’d just been tricked the other way.
And is there any greater temptation than a big rock a few metres away? You think maybe you'll leave it til later as a treat for the future you, but you know you won't be able to resist. You know you'll miss these big ones when you're been going for a decade or two and are reduced to going out with one of those big garden colanders so you can get rid of the tiniest shards of stone. But no good stone-clearer can leave a stone like that for another day. Or another stone-clearer.
Tonight I took the short cut across the field. I always stop to pick up five or six big stones to add to the cairn when I come this way (there is of course nowhere else to kick or throw your stones to. You could bury them, but you're only making work for your future self). Wolfie (who it's easy to forget is part of the walk) came across another dog and started running around with it. I called her back but she wouldn't come and I was forced to put down my six big rocks and go after her. Partly so my hands weren't full, but mainly because I didn't want the other dog walker to see what I was doing. He couldn't know that I was the mystery stone-clearer. But also I worried that he'd wonder what I was doing with two handfuls of stones. It would be hard to explain.
He might think I was mad.
I lost those stones, but there was a good section of other ones near the end of the path which I got and put on the cairn once the man was out of sight, so he never found out my secret.
I am not mad. All stone-clearers have been there. That guy knows what I am talking about.
That’s it for jokes/observations so far, but I think there might be a show in this.
The crazy thing is that I think there genuinely might be.
