As an editor as well, what were the kind of challenges involved in working with a manuscript like this?

Most of the challenges are about handwriting.

So, you know, I'm relatively good with 18th and 19th century scripts that people weren't writing quite the same, but there's all sorts of things that can impact handwriting.

how readable it is, whether people are tired, whether they're trying to fit a lot of words onto the page, whether they got a gravy smear on something.

And so there are definitely parts, even in the copy that I have now, which I have to put in square brackets with a question mark because there's a word that I don't know.

Often that can appear around names.

So a lot of the time that went into putting this together, it feels like, oh, it's just a book, quite a short diary.

Would you mind just telling us how that experience shaped your perspective as a writer and researcher?