The UK lock-down (which sounds more like a wrestling event than a disease prevention measure) means a lot of people are spending time at home instead of at the office.

This free time is a great opportunity to learn to write, or you could learn to paint, or you could learn to play a musical instrument – which means once lock-down is over there will be a lot of bad novels, bad art and bad music around!

Here at Twinbikerun we’re ahead of the curve. We’ve being making bad novels, bad art and bad music for years. As a bonus we also produce weekly blogs for people to enjoy/endure.

But there’s an important lesson we learnt doing these things. Our first book was “The Fat Minister’s Question time”

The Fat Minister was a character we created for twitter (https://twitter.com/thefatminister) so we could write jokes abut the Scottish Independence referendum. Any resemblance to any former First Minister is purely coincidental…

We collected the Fat Minster’s best jokes into a book. I re0read it before writing this and I can honestly say, like the SNP white paper it was based on, it hasn’t aged well.

We had no aim for the book. It was just a fun project to do so that we could work out how to write a book, publish it and sell it.

We’d have been happy if it sold just one copy.

It actually sold quite well. Beyond our expectation – two copies! One for me and one for Andrew. It helped that it was priced at 99p. Reviews were mixed. Some people loved it

and other didn’t love it as much.

But because we had written the book we received a couple of interesting requests.

1. We were asked to contribute to a BBC radio show about the independence referendum. Each week for six weeks we would go into the studio and give our comedic take on the weeks news. I still have the cheque from the BBC for my work. Considering how much I’ve paid them in licence fee payments, it was nice to get a bit back.
2. We were asked to support Eddie Izzard in concert! Yes – the real Eddie Izzard! We would go on before him and tell jokes to 2,000 people.

I’ll write about that next time….

The lesson I took from the book was don’t wait for anyone else to publish your book, or sell your painting or play your album. Just do everything yourself. You never know where it might lead.