An event last week marking the belated launch of Tigger and the Tantric Princess and the associated album was the first time that I had sung the songs in public, and only the second time I had performed formally in nigh-on 60 years. It was not easy.

As with all such firsts, I learned what never to do again, like forgetting to glue in my teeth.

The upper set kept falling down, which made my voice wobble at points as I tried desperately to stop the dentures disappearing down my throat. At one point I debated whether to damn appearances and take my teeth out.

It reminded me of the time when I took job teaching English in Rio de Janeiro after arriving broke while wandering round South America. My clothes were in pieces from months of rough travel and my flies kept coming undone in front of a class of sweet women, young and old, who were supposed to repeat everything I said. 

After some minutes of surreptitious but futile fiddling, I pointed to my jeans and said: “My flies keep coming undone.”

“My flies keep coming undone,” they parroted dutifully, and then collapsed with laughter.

The next day they presented me with a new pair of jeans and a tee-shirt.

No-one, I have to say, offered me a new set of teeth after the launch. In fact no-one seemed to notice my tooth crisis at all, but it is apparent to me in the video clips that my friend Mariam Severin took on her iPhone. I veer embarrassingly off-key towards the end of some toothy lines.

Sadly, Amazon is doing an excellent job of hiding my book. I spent five minutes trying to find it on the Amazon site using a smart phone and succeeded only by resorting to the link on this site. Here it is again.

The search was hardly easier on a big PC screen. Various  combinations of the title, my name and the word ‘book’ in Amazon’s main search box drew either a blank or a robot fantasy of what a small girl might like: a princess book, party costumes, choose-her-swimwear dolls or Winnie the Pooh. 

I finally got to the right page by first choosing the book section ­- but I suspect only because Amazon remembered that I’d put in a big order from my PC.

The mistake is to assume that Amazon’s search box fronts a proper search engine. It’s a smart-arsed selling machine that thinks someone who requests “Tigger and the Tantric Princess book by Clive Akass” is looking to buy princess dresses for a roomful of little girls at a birthday party. That’s artificial intelligence for you. Amazon’s own meta-data could have told it that my book is is a book, and not one for children.

To save you searching further, the book can be found here.

Anyway, thanks to all who came to the launch, and particularly to Barbara Hickmott, who read the excerpts.