I am a book.
But not only am I a book.
I am THIS BOOK.
William E. Drummond might claim that I am just one of his novels.
But I am far more than that.
I am for real.
You can pick me up.
You can turn my pages.
You can smell my paper.
You can drop me on the floor.
You can throw me at the wall.
I have been to places.
I have crossed oceans.
I have journeyed continents.
I have careered down motorways.
I have fallen from window ledges.
I have been left behind but then found my way back.
I have history.
A history that no other book has ever had nor will ever have again.
With out me things would not have happened that happened.
With me you could book studios, you could book vans, you could book gigs, you could book hotels, you could book ferries to Europe, you could book appointments with the bank manager, you could book flights to the USA, you could book meetings with record companies in London or New York.
That is why my name is THIS BOOK.
But...
You can’t switch me off.
Nor turn me down.
You can’t delete me.
Nor remind me later.
I don’t need wi/fi.
I don’t need the modern world.
I am always.
I never lie.
I am not fake.
I make mistakes.
You learn from my mistakes.
And I took years to write.
I am Bill Drummond’s first book.
Long before all those other books.
And
I have purpose.
And...
I was over time...
With consideration...
With determination...
With no need for likes
Or shares.
Or views.
I was written in hand between 1978 and 1984.
But...
This is the thing...
I am part and parcel of the Penkiln Burn Universe, even before it knew it was a Universe. Stan Lee could not make me up. The Riddler could not...
But anyway...
There is a culture war tearing the Penkiln Burn Universe apart. There are those in the Penkiln Burn Universe, that want to dis all that that is physical, that can be touched and dropped and hung and smelt like me. They want everything to be merely the nothingness of the digital.
It is my job to put a stop to this, or at least attempt to stand up to this. If only for the sake of all those little physical books that have come after me, that now feel they do not belong. That have just been left in boxes in a dark industrial unit on a light industrial estate in the shadows of Sizewell B.
Thus...
I would like to proclaim in the here and now, that I have made an arrangement with Alimentation those Fourteen Nights between the first New Moon of September and the Full Moon, each year, Alimentation will trade in my physical brothers and sisters.
Or maybe, when the Wild Damsons are ready to be plucked, from the trees that line The Great Lane out of Bierton, in The Vale of Aylesbury.
And we will all be loved and treasured as physical books should be, whatever the words that lie between our pages.