Book of the Year

'I still have a few hours free when I get to the Departure gate and realise it would be a good time to write a diary for yesterday. Then a ridiculous idea comes to me: how about not just writing up last night but also every gig of the coming year...?' When I wrote those words at the beginning of 2013 I had little idea of what I was letting myself in for, otherwise I might have been more cautious. But once I'd started it was too late to stop. By the time the year ended I had played almost 130 gigs and flown so many thousands of miles that my carbon footprint must have been the size of a small continent. As well as travelling around most of Great Britain, I visited - let's go alphabetical on this - Argentina, Austria, the Basque Country, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland and Uruguay - often still frantically writing the experiences of the tour I'd just come back from while already on the way to the next. Usually most of it gets forgotten as the road sweeps it all into a blur, but thanks to one ridiculous idea I can honestly say: this is the book of the year. Enjoy the ride. - TV Smith