The trouble with thinking of a title for a book that doesn’t exist yet is… well, it doesn’t exist yet. And when I had the idea for this book, I had no idea what it would be about, just that it would be about forty different things.

What I did know was that the longest essay would be long and the shortest would be short, and that there would be a load of others in between. So when my son Oliver suggested The Long and the Short of It as a title, I paused only to give him a fatherly hug and a deafening ‘HURRAH FOR CHILDREN’ before appending the title to the as yet unformed project.

But now the book is written, and The Long and the Short of It, while an excellent title for a work-in-progress, doesn’t really fit the bill any more.

So the fab people at Unbound got together in a smoky room (or whatever the modern publishing equivalent is), threw some ideas around, pinged them in my direction, and after a short game of Title Tennis, we’ve decided to rename it after one of the essays in the book. So The Long and the Short of It is dead; long live Music to Eat Cake By – Essays on Birds, Words and Everything In Between.

I hope we’ll all be very happy together.