Michael Palin: 'Squeezing 10 years into a book is like being a sculptor'

Whittling away 80% of a decade’s events is cruel but holidays, meals and train journeys all had to be jettisoned in the creation of the Python veteran’s latest memoir, Travelling to Work

My experience with the publication of my two previous volumes of diaries – The Python Years and Halfway to Hollywood, had prepared me for the task of squeezing 10 manically busy years into a single volume. The process is, I imagine, a bit like the challenge a sculptor faces. To chip away at an amorphous block until a shape is gradually revealed. I saw great chunks of the decade fall to the floor as some 80% of the block was whittled away. Ion Trewin, the much-missed doyen of diary editing, was once again my wise adviser on choice of material. Family holidays were jettisoned in their entirety; there’s something about hot days, beaches and mosquito bites which just doesn’t travel.

Business meetings, unless they involved something like a snake coming in through the window, were early casualties, as were joyful, but repetitive, train journeys. Equally joyful descriptions of meals and drinks had to be pared back in case they gave the impression that I lived in a restaurant and occasionally went home to change my shirt. Little curiosities, long forgotten, are among the greatest pleasures of an edit. The window cleaner who has vertigo and can only clean the ground floor, the Manchester hotel manager who attributed his wife’s non-appearance at a meal with me to “an attack of the vomits”.

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