I wrote my own name 2,000 times on Tuesday afternoon. An odd experience, to be sure. I got through two and a half brand new Sharpies. This was at a book distribution centre in an enormous warehouse near Didcot in Oxfordshire. I can’t bear writers who use columns to plug their books but mine’s called The Good Drinker and it’ll be available in all good bookshops, blah, blah, very soon.
So here I was facing a massive stack of them, all of which needed signing. “That’s half of them,” said a genial bloke called Steve, who was looking after us. We got stuck in. On my left, a nice woman from my publisher opened the book at the appropriate page and slid it in front of me to sign and pass it on to a younger woman from the publisher to my right, who passed it to another chap to put in a box. We were soon getting through them at a pace that earned us the praise of Steve, who also commended me on the legibility of my signature, which was nice.
The young woman to my right, doing the passing to the packer, was a highly qualified university graduate. I asked her if this was what she had had in mind when she went into publishing. She told me it wasn’t. The colleague to my left showed her experience by presenting the books to me at a pleasing angle, convenient for signing.
It all became, for me anyway, a deeply meditative process. Anyone with ADHD will tell you what relief there is to be found in the paradise of complete absorption. I’d only experienced anything comparable to this in motorcycling, language learning and stacking logs. Problems only arose when I started worrying my signature was losing definition. Overthinking the matter, I got what cricketers call the yips, when the bowler suddenly can’t release the ball. The ability to write my own name temporarily deserted me. But I soon got back in the zone for the zen-like calm to return. When I was done, I motorbiked the hour and a half home. What a beautiful day.
• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
