It occurred to me recently that I hadn’t focused on the Jack of All Trades book I published 11 months ago for a good while. It has an indulgent title and subtitle – You Don’t Know Jack! Why the Jack of All Trades Triumphs in the Modern World. You can buy the book from all good booksellers – actually you can’t, you can only buy it from one enormous bookseller, which seems to consume everything in its path, here.

What got me thinking about the book again was that I decided in a rare break in the Irish February weather that I would dust off the bike and give it a spin within 5km of the abode, in keeping with the seemingly eternal restrictions that chisel away at our wellbeing on a daily basis.

I hadn’t been on my bike for years. It’s not a racing bike with narrow tyres. It’s not a push bike with a couple of gears. It’s a hybrid bike, with fat, knobbly tyres that kind of let you go off road and bash it about a bit and kind of are fine for cycling distances on roads.

Of course, it’s the classic JOAT’s – or Jack of All Trades – bike. It does a number of things well but doesn’t focus 100% in one area, like going fast, or carrying things, or being comfortable and relaxing.

So that’s what got me thinking about how I approach pretty much anything, and about the book as well. When we JOATs get stuck into a bunch of things there’s sometimes not room enough for all the ‘trades’ we ply, so it was nice to be reminded by the great outdoors and the ingenious engineering feat that is a geared bike to reconnect with one of my trades again.