‘You ought to do something about these emails,’ a friend emailed me when I was last in the Philippines. He’d received several emails from me, all about my visits there. And these were his first words, the first sentence of his reply.
‘Oh Lord,’ I thought. ‘Typical of him. Miserable so-and-so. I send him interesting emails about my trip and all he can come back with is that I ought to do something with them.’
Stop sending me this junk! he seemed to be saying. Burn the things! Give us a rest from your ceaseless drivel.
I didn’t expect any more from him. He’s no judge of anybody’s writing. You can see his lips moving when he reads.
Anyway, I steeled myself to read the rest of his ungenerous thoughts. Trust a friend to stab you in the back.
‘I think you ought to collect all of these pieces and make them into a book,’ he continued.
What?
I had to read the sentence again. Was he actually suggesting there was some merit in what I’d been writing to him and other friends? Was this encouragement he was offering.
Well, he was an old friend, a trusted friend, a man whose opinion I valued greatly. And after all, if he thought, as he put it, that I ‘ought to do something about these emails’ and that I ‘ought to collect all of these pieces and make them into a book,’ that was really advice I ought to follow. I mean to say this chap knows a good book when he sees one. I couldn’t ignore what he said.
And that is what happened. I decided to publish my emails in ebook form in the quickest possible way because at my age you don’t hang around waiting for publishers to accept or reject your work.
I tarted up the text, got rid of some of the rougher edges, and then hunted for a professional local artist. At Cabanatuan I met Leonardo Malgapo who provided a cover and a dozen illustrations.
