specialists in local books and authors inc. Hardy & Fowles

The Amazing Mr Smith
25 Years Of An Eccentric Musician
1980 - 2005

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This book contains 183 funny anecdotes, pictures etc concerning my 'life on the road' over the last 25 years - although what follows is the quite serious foreword to the book. (T.A.Mr. S.)

If one discounts jokes and apocryphal stories completely (and I like to), everyone has funny stories about things that have actually happened to them. Unfortunately as time goes by these stories often become embellished and exaggerated. This 'evolution' can be conscious or unconscious (or a combination of both). Now I know that never consciously alter any of mine but what about unconsciously? If one tries to recall some event in one's distant past and this attempt with this particular event is for the first time, then this memory is bound to be hazy and incomplete, with gaps having to be filled in. This gap- filling is quite likely to be incorrect and, although possibly recognised as such at the time, it is nonetheless this partly made-up version that will most probably be recalled next time. Now unless this is very soon after the first recall the initial suspicion of falsehood won't accompany it and so this new version is consolidated. Furthermore, if these stories are passed on there's obviously even greater scope for mutation. Assuming one is making a genuine attempt to be honest, the shorter the gap between event and 1st recall the more likely it is to be accurate. This is all very obvious but it's why I've included the scanned originals (actual size, incidentally) which, if you can be bothered to try to read my writing, provide a check on the typed 'translations' (in which I've changed only the odd word to make them more readable, but see also the note below on commentary). I hope that this increased credence partly offsets the fact that a lot of them aren't actually that funny. I, myself would always prefer to hear a funny-ish story that believe to be true than a hilarious one that suspect is not. Certainly the whole point of writing this stuff down in the first place was that these things, however trivial, actually happened.
I've categorised the chosen extracts into 12 sections. In each section the extracts are arranged as chronologically as continuity and layout constraints would permit. Earlier stuff tended to be longer because I used to find nearly everything funny when I was in a rather excitable state at earlier gigs. Things were written down at the time, or as soon as possible afterwards, so as not to forget them. Of these written down things, for the reasons mentioned above, I've only very occasionally included anything that would be called hearsay. Many of the stories are much longer than the bits reproduced here. One day I might 'release' the unabridged versions along with some of the ones that I've omitted altogether.
Perhaps the funniest part of the whole business is that bothered to write any of it down in the first place given that it was intended solely for my own future amusement. I'm glad I did though.

Note on commentary This is in italics and, if included in the 'translation', is enclosed in square brackets. Some of it comes from unscanned bits of the original entry and some from memory. The credibility of the latter type is subject to the weakness droned on about above and, in either case, you'll lust have to take my word for it! I hope you'll forgive the somewhat autobiographical nature of some of it.
A word about the original 'books'. I've estimated that myA6-page notebooks (9 of them) contain in toto some 300,000 words. At least 90% of these are funny things that happened to me and at least half of this 90% is gig-related. But don't worry there are only about 25,000 of them here. Although some of the entries are in excruciating detail the books are not, nor were they ever intended to be, a comprehensive day by day 'Journal'. Whole days or even weeks have nothing written about them presumably because nothing notably funny happened.

authors own web-site www.the-amazing-mr-smith.co.uk