But I was inspired by the long-dead New York eccentric Joe Gould. Between the 1910s and the 1940s, he listened to more than 20,000 everyday conversations and began compiling them into the longest book ever written, An Oral History of the Contemporary World. At least, that’s what Gould claimed. For 60 years, debate has raged about whether or not his book did exist — but regardless, I’ve always thought the idea was sound. Gould believed that meaning could be found in “lyrical episodes of everyday life”. He was motivated by a line from the poet WB Yeats: “The history of a nation is not in parliaments and battlefields, but in what the people say to each other on fair days and high days.”