Southwick is famous for absolutely nothing.

It’s about four miles away from Brighton, but culturally I suspect it’s further away; there’s industry here, and actual fishermen as opposed to people who are ironically dressed as fishermen.

Southwick’s most well-known resident is the punk poet Attila the Stockbroker. Exactly.

The headwind was so strong I almost didn’t make it to the Carats Café, a ‘basic seaside café’ which has been suggested as a location by Kathi Harman, who is waiting there to take pictures of me. It’ll be atmospheric and windswept.

As my speed was reduced to almost zero, and blew things away, and caused stomach churning waves in the grey green grey again sea, I agreed.

Obviously I was pleased that the waves and road debris will provide a moody and dramatic backdrop to the shoot. It’s like the backdrop to a Duran Duran video, and it’s cost me nothing.

But also downhearted. Have we really broken the weather, you can’t help thinking. Are the Gods of Evidence-Based Peer-Reviewed Science angry with us and our ways? I wondered how much I've contributed to climate change myself, how many gusts out there belong to my flights.

Cycling furiously but ineffectually into the wind is something we’ll have to get used to, as the weather patterns become more unpredictable, and only the political elite will be able to afford cars, just like the olden days and parts of rural Africa.

Southwick is an excellent location, but I hate being photographed. One year our school photographer refused to take my picture, because I wouldn’t smile properly and was scruffy. There has been little subsequent improvement.

In my ideal world authors would remain anonymous. Not quite so severe as cigarette packaging, I’d allow covers with pictures, slogans, and carefully edited glowing reviews. Just not of pictures of the authors, nor biographical information.

In the olden days, which coincided with some of my most prolific and formative reading years, there was basically no Internet. I knew little or nothing about the people who I read, and cared nothing about how they looked. This was definitely part of the escape.

I'm glad. If I'd known anything about or seen a picture of Evelyn Waugh I'm sure it would have put me off reading Decline and Fall. I expected her to look completely different.

Leave the cult of celebrity for other media, like TV, and music, and let books be about the ideas, I say. Possibly this is because I’m not famous. If I were famous I'd have my own line of pasta sauce and monitise the shit out of my likeness.

One of the strands of the book I’m being photographed to promote is that we take too many pictures. Like many areas of life, travel has been colonised by those who seek to emulate celebrities; we live in an era of image-led capitalism; and this has the potential to stop us from enjoying ourselves, because we are always so aware of how we look all the time. So young people rave less hard, just in case someone captures the moment.

In turn, there has been a subtle creeping commodification of the way we experience the world. We actively seek to emulate the visual language of advertising, with ourselves as the product (‘pout’) and the places we visit (‘pout in front of the thing’). And of course, as has been noticed by just about everyone, food (‘pout, pudding, and look delicious’).

It’s hardly an original thesis, and fortunately a very short one. And it possibly started out with some unknown Paleolithic cave selfie.

Fortunately Kathi was professional and got the job done quick. She was full of ideas and knew what she wanted; she'd read the Diaries too, and somebody who approvingly quotes my own book at me has to be a person of excellent taste.

She's used to photographing endurance athletes, and specialises in sports photography, she wasn't too disappointed by the fact that I am far from an elite athlete, and go quite slow on a bike. She didn’t expect Lycra from me, and I didn’t disappoint.

I still felt like a bit of a twat, to be honest, but the whole experience was genuine fun.

The wind puts a lot of cyclists off, but there was a gang of people on mountain bikes who I quite liked the look of. It seemed that like me they’d bunked off in some way just for the pleasure of being in strong breezes for a bit. Two men, two women, all in their thirties I’d guess. They did little wheelies as they pedalled gleefully into the perilous wind, which had kept most people away, leaving - I like to think -  the curious and unafraid.

I felt they were interested as to why I was being photographed, and disappointed that I wasn't someone more famous. It reminded me of the time I was mistook for Banksy, then accused of impersonating Banksy.

The light industry hummed and the waves crashed in the background, and large trucks looked a bit too close for it to be safe to lie in the ground holding a camera.

But it was fun, because when you work with professionals, it always works out. The little things, like 'you're hair looks a bit sweaty, can you sort it out?'

I think the results are excellent.

There's an honesty too, in the storytelling. You can see the bags in my eyes, which tell the story of my beautiful yet chaotic toddler and his crazy antics at 5.30 am. My teeth are that colour because I've lived a life, and that life has not been one of red wine or coffee avoidance.

I think I’ve forgotten the call to action. Have a look at Kathi's photography on her website, and hire her:  https://www.klickchickphotography.com/

The Kindle version of the book is available on Amazon, a company which does beautiful things for the environment apparently.

I know it's dull reviewing things and not getting paid for it, but I would be incredibly grateful if you could review it there, or be the first person to do so on Goodreads.

Be honest and mention the typos that will make it worth a fortune one day