This isn’t a post about a book that I’ve mislaid, or lent to someone and never got back. This is about a book that I should have written, but didn’t.

A few months ago I was sorting through some files in my study. Whilst I have a couple of small filing cabinets, they don’t really contain many files. They contain a geiger counter, some stationary, my father’s old stamp collection, a load of network cables…basically, anything BUT files. But, in the back of one drawer, was a little bundle of envelope files, one of which was labelled ‘Night Book’.

My mind went back nearly 40 years to 1986. To be precise, I remember standing in the garden of my then home here in Sheffield, looking up at Hayley’s Comet, shortly before I fell over a hedgehog snuffling it’s way around the lawn. The hedgehog survived the encounter; my dignity didn’t…. But that was the night when the idea about this book first came to me. I wandered back in to the kitchen, sat down at my desk (in those days I didn’t have a study – I had a desk in the corner of the kitchen with a computer on it – and wrote down some ideas – they appeared on the first page in that envelope file.

I have always been fascinated by the night. As a child I wasn’t scared of the dark. I loved being out in the garden around dusk, and once I got interested in star-gazing my mother could end up having to call me in like a pet cat… And I’m still convinced that the best amateur radio conditions occur in the darkness of a winter evening. Something just clicked that night – and I thought to myself ‘How about writing something about…night time?

I’d been writing for publication (and in those long gone days you could actually get paid for writing stuff…) for 3 or 4 years at this point and already had a couple of books and a lot of articles under my belt. So I knew what would be involved from the point of view of the effort. Although my writing to then had been mainly technical stuff – and this would be somewhat different. However…I took a sheet of paper and after a few minutes thought wrote down ‘A natural history of the night’ as a working title. I’m afraid I was clearly a bit pompous in those days…no comments, please…

After a couple of hours, come coffee and some head scratching I had a rough idea of what I wanted to create. A book that covered everything about the night time – why it happens, a bit of astronomy, a bit of chemistry, meteorology, history, legend and superstition, social history…I had a couple of pages of ideas and even a rough chapter list. I put the pages in a file, and popped the file away.

I’d like to say that a few weeks later I started on this magnum opus and slogged away at it for years to complete it. Perhaps there’s an alternate universe where that did happen! Last night I was watching the ‘Dr Johnson’ episode of the TV sitcom ‘Blackadder the Third’, where Dr Johnson explains how his life panned out whilst writing his dictionary:

The one that has taken eighteen hours of every day for the last ten years. My mother died; I hardly noticed. My father cut off his head and fried it in garlic in the hope of attracting my attention; I scarcely looked up from my work. My wife brought armies of lovers to the house, who worked in droves so that she might bring up a huge family of bastards.

Even now it makes me chuckle having had short periods of my life where writing occupied most of my waking hours! But not on this book. ‘A natural history of the night’ remained unwritten. The file was…filed. My life unfolded; other books were written, every now and again I’d remember that evening and say to myself ‘You need to get on with that….’

The next thing I knew, in the words of Pink Floyd ‘Ten Years had got behind me’. My life took a bit of a tumble in the mid-1990s and I stopped writing anything until 2000, when I started writing film scripts and some articles. Every now and again I’d see that file and think – ‘Come on…get on with it…’ and never did.

And then in 2005 the two books pictured at the top of this post were published and just came to my attention by accident. Out of a perverse sense of curiosity, I bought them, and…well….they’re not what I would have written but they are damn good. Annoyingly good. And that was that. I kept seeing the file show up in my drawers every now and again, got a twinge of ‘Bugger…why didn’t I…’ but that was it. I didn’t see any point.

And then a wee while ago I encountered the file again, and thought…hmmm….20 years since they were published….nearly 40 years since the night in the garden…maybe? Maybe I should get that file out and take a look? Maybe as an older man I can do the subject more justice than I could have ever done in my twenties?

Unfortunately….after I started writing this post I turned my filing cabinets upside down to get the file and take a picture of the page for inclusion in the post. I cannot find the ‘effing file. I have a horrible feeling that after I found it again a few months ago I did a file purge, and that file was possibly one of the files that went.

Bugger.