Often daft, sometimes pertinent, occasionally moving, Curious Columns by Adrian Chiles is a tome that’ll make you smile and wince in equal measure.

We were lucky enough to read an advance of Adrian’s book Curious Columns ahead of the writer’s appearance later this month at Stratford Literary Festival, and even luckier to then chat to the man himself. The book is essentially a collection of Adrian’s Guardian columns and being a regular reader of the column, it’s funny to see them written down in one place – it accentuates their wild randomness.

The randomness is a major part of the column’s charm – a dislike of bending down one week, the death of his father the next. It’s amusingly observational, like a newspaper column version of a Peter Kay stand-up routine, but Adrian says it’s not an easy process: “I’ve to submit a thousand words every Wednesday and for the last four years I’ve given them a heart attack. Sometimes I try to get ahead and start on a Monday, but I lose the thread by Wednesday, so it’s always a bit last minute. The important thing is when you think of something, you’ve got to jot it down.”

EMBARRASSINGLY PERSONAL

Compiling the book has meant going through all his columns and cutting them down by roughly 50 words in order to fit the book’s format. Adrian says: “It’s a look back at your body of work if you like. Going through the columns, I realise some of them work, some of them don’t but they all benefited from being trimmed. I also realised how much I write about dad dying – it’s amazing how often I mention it. I mention both mum and dad a lot actually.” He also realises a lot of his musings are ‘embarrassingly personal, some of it absurd’. One column recalled a bout of repetitive strain injury caused by continuously stirring polenta for 45 minutes.

Adrian credits the column with meeting his wife. It was just after the ‘dislike of bending down’ ramblings were published that he was invited to meet the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner. She liked what he was doing, and the pair are now married. Adrian says Katharine is particularly understanding of the chaos of his ADHD brain.

He talks about the diagnosis which came five years ago. He’d been tested previously, and the results came back with a wishy-washy, ‘you might have it, but you might not’ conclusion that came with a £1,500 price tag. He says: “It felt like private medicine gone mad!” When he was finally, properly diagnosed lots of things in Adrian’s life began to make sense.

UNDERSTANDING PARTNER

He’s keen to point out that the notion that a diagnosis plus medication means all’s well is false. He explains: “That’s not the case. You’ve to put in the hard work altering the way you approach life. It’s hard, boring and repetitive. You have to figure out how to deal with it, how to finish one job before starting another. I have an understanding partner but also one who’s able to draw a line and won’t accept coming home to a bomb site.”

He adds: “I might have ADHD but I still have agency. My biggest conclusion is that the diagnosis has been important but not existential. I would still have been functioning and earning a living.” Adrian goes on to say: “The problem is most people don’t get a diagnosis. Kids are failing in school or ending up in prison. Prisons are full of people with ADHD.” Adrian talks more about his ADHD in numerous of his columns with his usual dry, humorous twist.

Despite the extensive writing I think of Adrian as a broadcaster, but he says he always thought he’d be a writer. “When I meet people who say, ‘I saw you on the telly or heard you on the radio’ – that’s nice, but when people say they read the column it’s another level – that people bothered to read it really means something.”

FULL CIRCLE

Adrian’s first writing gig was work experience at the Stratford-upon-Avon Observer where he says he learnt a lot. “It’s much harder being a local journalist than at the BBC. You’ve got to work hard to find the stories rather than them coming to you.” Despite living in London, Adrian will always feel connected to the Midlands. He says: “When I arrive at New Street, I get excited by the familiarity of it. I’ve strong roots in the Midlands. My mum’s in Hagley and I wonder sometimes what’ll happen when she’s not here anymore. What then?”

Adrian’s love for West Brom is well documented. He says: “I love the West Brom Smethwick area. It has a sense of itself.” Of the wider region he says: “The restoration of the canals is a massive thing. The improvement around the Jewellery Quarter is quite something plus we’ve got the countryside on the doorstep. The Clent Hills is just beautiful.” And he adds: “In an era where it seems you have to show off – like Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow saying they’re the best cities on earth – we don’t do that. I like it.”