Back in 2015, I sculled the length of the Thames from Lechlade to Tower Bridge.

At the time, I was living in Sheffield.

The trip was one I took with three friends who I’d previously rowed and competed with for Agecroft Rowing Club while I was living in Manchester.

It took about a year to organise and four days to do.

It was one of the few times I got to see my friends while I lived in Sheffield.

I then wrote up the experience immediately afterwards between August 2015 and November 2015.

I largely did so at work for domestic reasons.

I haven’t seen or read the manuscript since.

This is partly because a lot has happened in the intervening time, but also because I left Sheffield in the clothes I was wearing.

So, I wasn’t expecting to ever come across the story of our trip again.

Around the time the trip happened, I was advised by safeguarders to start letting members of my family know what was happening if I hadn’t already, and also to start sending them records of who, how, where and when. Dates, times, places. Emails, photographs, diaries.

At some point while doing this, I sent a family member my first draft account of that trip - and she’s just returned it to me: complete, unopened and intact.

I haven’t read through it.

I don’t know if I should.

Not for fear of revisiting some of the things that were happening then.

Because if you’re a musician, you aren’t supposed to also be a writer, and if you’re a writer, you aren’t supposed to be a musician, and if you’re a musician, you aren’t supposed to be a rower, and if you’re a rower, you aren’t supposed to be and academic and if you’re an academic …

You know - that you can be an aesthete or a philistine but not both. Or an arty or a hearty but not both …

I released my first album in 2020, which is doing well and which has been a great experience.

Surely I shouldn’t be thinking about opening up something I did in 2015? Surely I should be maximising my first album and working on the next one?

Well, I don’t know about that.

Firstly, I’m so ill it’s unlikely I’ll ever play an instrument again.

Secondly, I think we’re all more than one thing.

And looking at it in the round, I can’t really maximise my first album more than I already have. It’s out, people are listening to it. That’s as far as I can take it given I can’t go out and therefore I can’t gig it. As for new music, I’ve already identified the emotional landscape I want to explore and started collecting ideas for it.

Artistically and commercially, whatever you come out of the gate with first nowadays is the thing you’ll have to repeat for the rest of your life.

Conventional wisdom is that in a world of seven billion people, we don’t have the capacity to see one another as more than one thing. Sculptors don’t become painters; crime writers don’t start writing romantic fiction; musicians can’t be actors. Although there’s compelling evidence showing why this last one is true, it basically means that if you come out with Jack Reacher as your first public statement, Jack Reacher is what you’ll write forever more.

Some people lean into this. Bernard Cornwell has written the same book a hundred times and made a ton of money out of it.

Good for him.

But surely the point of being an artist is to explore what’s possible?

Surely the point is not to repeat the last idea, but to follow the next idea to its logical conclusion?

In one sense, the determination to limit ourselves is a natural consequence of living in an age that promotes either / or binary choices, rather than ‘… and.’

In another sense, it’s odd.

We’re told that we are supposed to excel - as people, as parents, as friends, as colleagues, as partners, at work, at home, in life, in business, financially, at our hobbies, at being mindful, at being green, at being politically engaged, at … everything.

We are told we have to be all things to all men, including ourselves.

But we’re also told that we can also only be one thing, usually related to how we make money.

We can only be a doctor, a lawyer, a plumber, a teacher, a brickie, an engineer, a musician, a writer …

It’s contradictory, but untenable cultural narratives reinforce these ideas: scientists can’t be artists; artists can’t be scientists, and so on - even when history and evidence tell us that this isn’t the case.

With these in mind, how can I reconcile being ‘sensitive’ enough to create music with being ‘hearty’ enough to pull on an oar with being ‘skilled’ enough to write about it all?

Well, I don’t think I should even try.

The idea of the sensitive, empathetic artist, the beefy, brainless jock and the brainy academic are cultural stereotypes.

They aren’t real.

Doing all of them and doing them well feel like perfectly natural interrelated parts of my character.

I don’t believe that we are one thing.

I think we’re all multi-faceted.

So, I sent what I wrote to a literary agent.

And forgot about it.

This is not a comment on memory.

Mine has been legally proven to be impeccably accurate.

It’s just that from January this year my Long Covid symptoms returned again, leaving me bed-bound. It wasn’t a lot of fun. If you’re an independent person, the last thing you want is to be forced to defecate in a jug for your elderly parents to take away because you can’t walk anymore, and no parent should ever see their child crying in pain.

During this period, when I was also found out that I was now classed as permanently disabled as a result of contracting Covid and developing Long Covid, this agent tried to get in contact with me. There’s a story in that - they were trying to reach me and wondering if I’d gone to another agency because I wasn’t responding, but I wasn’t playing hard to get. I wasn’t responding because I was in bed too ill to move.

Anyway, they liked what I had written, asked if I had anything else, which I did. They took a look at that, and then suggested we work together.

We had a meeting on Skype, and now have a literary agent.

I know how it looks, which is why I know how lucky I am: writers, artists and musicians fall over themselves to be taken on by someone, and I end up with someone first crack out of the box while bedbound and crapping in a jug.

The Same River Twice is a great story about love and friendship and all of the good things in life, and there’s a long way to go on this for it to end up on bookshelves, but it’s good news.

©℗ A. I. Jackson

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Origin(al) Stories was first launched to show some of the thoughts, decisions and processes that went into the writing, recording and release of the Northumbria album.

Following the launch of The Landing Stage, which brings together some of the things I do, I’ve continued adding to Origin(al) Stories.

Origin(al) Stories has none of the features beloved of self-help and influencers: how-to guides, lists, essential hacks.

Drawn from my personal diaries and journals, the posts might often seem unconnected, elliptical and fragmentary. Showing, as they do, my explorations of ideas and approaches and processes as I do things, they are best viewed as glimpses of my workings.

They show my mistakes, the false trails I’ve followed, and the blind alleys I’ve gone down - all of which are intrinsic parts of finding a path through to doing something.

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