Adrian Chiles: what I have learned from five years of oversharing

It is a privilege to be able to express random thoughts, and not one I take lightly. When my dad died, writing about the experience helped me to cope

Somebody decided there should be a book of my Guardian columns. Yes, really. I cringed a bit at the prospect. I mean, one a week is too much for some people. So how is a whole book of them going to work? At least it wouldn’t take much effort on my part, I thought. How wrong I was. For a start, I had to go back and read hundreds of them. They really are a bit much all at once. Spoons, ageing, footpaths, drinking, spectacles, death, ADHD, death again. And so on. My colleague Caroline Frost, having been persuaded to interview me about the book for a literary festival, read 60 columns at one sitting and seemed a bit shaken by the experience. It’s more for dipping into, I told her. An excellent toilet book, perhaps.

Speaking of toilets, the column I wrote about having a urinal in my flat was a gamechanger, in the sense that no longer am I stopped in the street and asked either about my drinking or West Brom. Now it’s invariably about what I wee into at home. Only this week I was stopped at the BBC by a chap I didn’t know who asked me if I minded answering a “sensitive question”. Oh God, what now? Cringing with embarrassment, he said, “Is it really true you have a urinal?” I laughed and told him that I did and that I was relieved his question was about nothing serious. But his expression suggested that he considered my having a urinal really was a rather sensitive matter.

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