Life is like a Banana

Foreword

In February, 2023, I received an email from a lady named Grace Pilkington. She had found my details online and was approaching me, she said, with an 'unusual request'. An elderly author called Tony Wilson was looking for an editor to curate some diaries he had been writing since the 1980s. They were, she said, 'rather amazing - philosophical musings and beautiful watercolour illustrations'. Grace had worked with Tony on a previous book, but as she lived in Hastings and he was in Wiltshire, she felt he needed to find someone local to curate the diaries. 'Are you available and would you be interested?' she asked. 'There are rather a lot of them.'
Intrigued by this description, I agreed to meet with Tony in his home in the lovely old village of Turleigh near Bradford-on-Avon. I found a gentle, funny and extremely intelligent, but very frail man who seemed to be surrounded by a lot of warmth and care. As well as the constancy of those he lives with - his grandson, Oliver, and Jack Russell, Rufus* - he is visited regularly by friends, cleaners, gardeners, and his devoted carer, Vanessa.
After an introductory chat, Tony sent me up to his office. I pulled out a small number of the carefully indexed diaries and immediately saw what Grace meant. The sketches and watercolours were striking in their simplicity and brevity, as was Tony's ability to reflect a mood or moment with just a few well-struck lines. I was also taken by his bold and often experimental use of colour and tone. In addition to the sketches and watercolours there were many writings - most were occupied with Tony's life with his wife Pat and their large family and group of friends, but others concerned his observations on life, reflections on historical events and - his favourite subject - what makes society function. It is this latter preoccupation that provided the subject matter for his previous two books - The Universe on a Bicycle (Elliot and Thompson 2007) and The Wheels of Society (Quartet 2021), which received glowing reviews in the Daily Mail and the Times Literary Supplement respectively.
Anthony Wilson did not initially seem destined to become an artist or philosopher....