Broke'n'english

by Mr Jerry Smith

Broke'n'English began life as a journal I kept of my visits to Sri Lanka between 1998, when I came for the first time, to 2008, when our house 'Jungle Tide' was completed. When we opened Jungle Tide as a guest house early in 2010 a copy of the journals was left in a ring binder for guests to read if they were interested. It stirred up a fair bit of interest and I lost count of the e-mails asking "When is the book coming out?" so eventually succumbed to demand and decided to try to turn the journals into a book. By this time (2016) I was living in Sri Lanka. Bringing the material up to date - an awful lot happened between 2008 and 2016 - was the easy part. Much harder was getting away from the journal style into a memoir which had some kind of a narrative flow. Perhaps harder still was wielding the knife and excising great chunks which were of great interest to me but unlikely to be of much interest to general readers. Self-indulgent jokes and stretches of political and social commentary which didn't really fit were the main offenders. Fortunately I'm married to the world's greatest critical friend. This is my first book. I'm not yet sure whether it will be my last. We'll see.