David Slade

Why publish a book? Everyone wants to have a go, because, as the saying goes, we've all got a book in us! But my reason maybe different to most peoples.

I'm a 60year old skateboarder who's been back in the sport for about 8 years after taking 37 years off! In those 37 years I got married, had two children, Raced Motocross for nearly 10 years and also rode the infamous Weston Beach Race a few times when it was really tough!! But I really liked Acting and tried unsuccessfully to get into the thick of the action, apart from a Channel 4 ident I once did. But then stupidly I bought an outdoor leisure shop, just before a major infection in the British cattle industry broke and nobody could go for a walk for nearly a year. For months nobody came near the shop, so, bored, I decided to write a play for something to do this was in 2002 and the play I called, The Third Tunnel. A Class Act in Newbury staged the show in the theatre on the old abandoned Airbase at Greenham Common in 2004. It was a huge success and I wrote many plays afterwards, by the way the shop went bust!!!

But The Third Tunnel was always dear to my heart and so we staged it again in 2012 but this time in a much bigger theatre Arlington Arts near Newbury once again it was a huge success and even two cast members met and married off the back of it (who do you think it was??) But I couldn't let it go and so in 2016 I broke my ankle badly, dropping into the pool at Hemel Hempstead's XC which meant I couldn’t work for about three months and so I started making The Third Tunnel into a novel, I wasn’t even much of a reader and if you knew what my old English Teacher thought of me! So, this was going to be a challenge. You have to take the reader on your journey so they can see it through your eyes and that’s difficult even when you’ve had a long-varied life. I was never going to publish what I did, never in a million years was I going to make myself look a fool. But then in April 2020 Covid struck my dear old mum down and you just want to make them proud one last time so I sent it off and here it is. The Third Tunnel the novel