First publication by David Beckett Launched

“Your job moves to another country in the middle of your working life. What do you do?” This was the starting point of an incredible journey, which is captured in David Beckett’s first book, “After the Ceiling Fell On Us”

The book describes the Round-The World trip that began in October 2009, taking in 14 countries on 4 continents on a tour that lasted 154 days. Here, David tells the story of how the book came into being.

“I started writing a blog when I heard that my job was moving to England, back in November 2008. Then when I took a short holiday to Texas in Spring 2009, there was new writing inspiration. I wrote about my experiences there and found an instant connection between travel and the need to write. The feedback I got from those entries was the most enthusiastic I’d received so far, and the blog took on a new dimension.

When I left Canon, I shared my dreams with friends and colleagues at a farewell presentation. Those dreams were – write a book, go to Australia, set up my own company. Then I met Nicki Davies that summer and we started to talk about traveling. Thanks to her, the dream of going to Australia became something much bigger.

Nicki and I formed our World-Trip plan in August and when we set off in October, I’d decided already that I would write about our experiences in my blog. There was never a problem finding something to write about because we saw so many different places and cultures in such a short period of time.

It was sometimes difficult to post onto the blog, because getting an internet connection was not always simple. In USA, of course Internet was readily available. Surprisingly, in Peru it was much easier than most countries, as Internet café’s were everywhere. But in some places we had to pay crazy prices for an hour of connection - like in Tahiti where the connection was too slow to upload pictures, yet cost 9 Euros per hour! Australia and New Zealand were also expensive. I think we spent around 3-400 Euros in total just on Internet.

Sometimes I wrote in dark Internet café’s whose keyboards had letters written on scraps of paper and selotaped to the keys - the letters were worn away by so much use! And sometimes the connection would be unreliable. More than once, my whole piece just disappeared and I had to re-write it.

I managed to post something every 2-3 days, and found that if I didn’t post something the for a few days, I would start getting ‘blog anxiety’! It became almost an obsession and I wrote on planes and sitting on rough hostel beds, sometimes in the middle of the night and often at 6am in the morning. I just had to keep writing.

Around three-quarters of the way through the trip, for some reason I decided to estimate how many words I had written. Then I calculated how many words were in a standard book. I realized that – almost by accident – I had the basis for achieving my dream of writing a book. That’s when I decided that I would start a publishing company and turn the blog entries into a book.

It may seem a simple process to just download the entries, re-format them a bit and print it. But when I read the manuscript for the first time after I returned to Amsterdam, I realized that it was not yet a book. There were many spelling and grammatical errors and it read like a series of individual pieces. I set about re-writing the whole thing and designing it so that the pictures fit the words and there was a feeling of a whole publication, instead of those separate bits and pieces just being thrown together."

Where does the title come from? Ah, you’ll have to read the book to find out… But it is based on a real experience we had in a hostel in Cuzco, Peru.

“After the Ceiling Fell On Us” is available to buy here.