A strange thing happened today. I opened my front door to find an A3 reinforced envelope leaning against it. Opening it I discovered some rough sketches and a colour sample for a version of The Elves and the ShoemakerI never illustrated, that I can’t even remember roughing out. It’s only – and this is bizarre – through recognising the handwriting of the notes on the roughs that I have even been able to work out who the publisher is. This book was never made, and I cannot even remember why.
It’s hard to say how this has left me feeling. The date on the sample is 2001, so not so long ago, and yet it feels like I’m looking at work produced by someone else. I had a whole other career that has been and gone and which means nothing now. Perhaps I was upset that this book never got made. Maybe there were meetings about it I even went to and a disappointed author, and who knows what beside. Did my agent intervene? Was the publisher bought out?
Standing on my doorstep, feeling wistful, I was tempted to just reseal the envelope and add it to the pile of prehistoric work I’ll probably never look at again. But I’m leaving a little glimpse of it here first. There’s a lesson in all this somewhere. If only I can work out what it is…
This resonates. Not for ‘book’ related reasons – but because I’ve had this same experience of realising my former working life was unknown to me; that the person I had been then was not someone I recognised; that what I was so absorbed in then was now so distant and removed from me that I struggled to recall what I had done.
The only lesson I have ever learned from it is a stronger sense of perspective. There’s nothing so important that it doesn’t look different tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…