Just A Small Prick

Now I don't know about you but for me, November is just about the worst month of the year. Why's that I hear you ask. Let me explain.

First off, the clocks have just gone back meaning that it's dark by lunchtime. Second, it's cold and wet - two things I detest. Third, unlike February (which comes in at second in my list of most loathed months) in November, we know we're staring down the barrel of another long, wearisome winter of hibernating under the duvet and eating comfort food.

Yes, November really has nothing going for it; except that this year it did.

Because this November I was invited to go to Las Vegas for the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix. To say it was incredible would be like saying Mt Everest is merely a hill. It. Was. Amazing.

And that wasn't because I'd never been to Las Vegas before - after all, this was my fourth visit this year alone. It was an experience like no other. And here's the thing.

We talk a lot - an awful lot in fact - about customer experience in retail, I know I do. And as I've discovered, it's not necessarily about the experience itself (after all, if you're still reading this, you're experiencing reading it), no, it's the memory of the experience which really matters.

Let's examine that for a moment. I would have seen far more of the racing, and been able to watch all the pre-race build-up, if I'd stayed at home and watched it on television. But instead of that I jumped on a plane for a ten hour flight to be there.

On the day I returned I went straight into a podcast recording with Mr Boxpark himself, Roger Wade and we discussed this. As he once said, "online is like watching fireworks on TV". And there's the point. Nothing beats being there in person, having all your senses stimulated, sharing the experience with friends. And that's why I agree with Roger that nothing beats physical retail.

Now, if you, like me, having been paying even the remotest attention to the goings-on in Westminster, it can't have failed to pass you by that our former Health Secretary is having to explain his behaviour during some of the darkest days any of us have experienced.

And that brings me to the headline of this month's newsletter, which I don't mind admitting I agonised over for, well, at least a second.

Because, as some of you may have realised, I've temporarily transported myself back to those dark days in order to do something which I have genuinely agonised over for quite some time.

During lockdown, from March 2020 to May 2021 each and every day I wrote a personal diary reflecting the strange times we were living through. That's 422 or around 250,000 words to be precise.

For some time I've considered publishing a book of the Diaries and on reading some of them again for the first time since writing, I decided to take the plunge.

First off I was amazed as I thought I'd lost the body of work as I hadn't renewed the website domain but, it's all still there, so I'm frantically transferring it all over to create a manuscript. That's the process but more than that, for those who I've taken counsel from, everyone has said the same thing. It's a fascinating record of life during those times and reading them through the lens of December 2023 gives them an eerily surreal feel.

So, I began this month's newsletter writing in the style more akin to the Diaries and I hope that that's what sets them apart - an alternative view of lockdown. Look out for the Covid Chronicles published in the New Year.