March Madness from an April Fool
The “Odysseys. Anniversaries and Musings” edition.
I desperately wanted to use the above image as a cover for one of my three recently self-published “Rambling Musings” (highlighted below) but when the image was cropped in line with paperback and hardback size specifications, there was so little space for the title/sub-title for the book and this vexed me. Greatly. So here it is anyway as I think it’s rather beautiful.
I set myself a mini-task at the beginning of March and a month that has to end, either by monthly calendar tradition or personal heartache closer to home, with an anniversary I’d rather forget and a birthday I never will. I tasked myself to formalise and publish my latest cricket book “Tea and Biscuits in India” (highlighted below) as well as working on an idea of rambling musings that quickly became far too big for just one book so instead became volume one of two which has now quickly escalated to three, the last of which the most contentious and open to the tales I tell myself. All follow the same 3 Act structure as I first invite you to a “Saturday Night at the Movies” and 100+ pages of spoiler free ramblings and musings before we ride the reverie river with my dear old parents and an unreliable narrator and then headlong into a deep dive into the madhouse of The Matrix. I’ve enjoyed gluing these collections together and I’ve stressed as well as enjoyed settling on the cover images and locking the manuscripts into place. In short, I’m rather proud of them.
"Rambling musings and other balderdash" Volumes 1-3 - Available via Amazon
"Tea and Biscuits in India" - Available via Amazon
VAR, 3 little birds and an unrequited love for Wataru Endō
If you’ve continued wandering down here you’ll see I’ve also been busy in another writing capacity and to my enormous honour, another of my articles was deemed worthy enough for inclusion in the March/April edition of the independent Liverpool FC fanzine “Red All Over The Land”. This is my seventh or eighth inclusion in the past year or so and I’ve kind of taken over their column entitled “Yesterday’s Paper”. A yesterday’s man in charge of yesterday’s news? A match made in heaven as I’m sure you might be tempted to agree.
It’s been a hell of a month for this particular fool on the hill as I’ve wished universal birthdays to both of my parents and I didn’t have to make my traditional telephone call at the end of the month to my Mum so we could tell the tales we told ourselves about her husband and my Dad, and boy do I miss having to make that tear filled telephone call. I’ve spent the month of March in memories fresh and new, some old, some borrowed from an unreliable narrator, and some depressingly blue. A couple of articles I penned 2/3 years ago on my parents made me cry, the silly narcissistic arse that I am. I’ve proudly shown off my creations to my autistic son and he’s tried to enthusiastically please me with nods and smiles as I’ve shown off the covers or read aloud a small passage of absurdist writing from the lock down of 2021. He looks at me like I’m a piece of moldy cheese for even publishing these books or sobbing my way through a passage from “My Dad in a Field of Dreams”. Silly arse.
Happy Birthday Pops
Say hello to Mum for me and tell her I’ve written another book on cricket, her (and your) granddaughter is running a half-marathon in aid of the charity fighting the disease that cruelly took her Mother and your favourite daughter. Must be fun spending time with her again. Please tell her we miss her spirit dreadfully. Please tell Mum the lad still looks at me like I’m an alien from another dimension (or a piece of moldy cheese) and I talk about her every day and wish she’d call me sometime. I miss hearing her voice.
I’m sure this communique will find you propping up your own bar, rolling a cigarette and making Mum laugh. Fancy a game of snooker later?
I’ll set up the balls and chalk the cues.
Love,
Tosh x
Thanks for reading.