Evening Standard‘s Magda Ibrahim was at The Fayre of St James charity Christmas concert on Tuesday and told the newspapers’ podcast the reading Benedict did at the event was actually of an extract from a book he’s writing!!! She said:

He didn’t kinda give us too much of a clue about what the book is called or when it’s gonna be out but he and when went into the pulpit, he just said to us ‘yeah this is gonna be the first reading of this excerpt from this book and you’re all the first people to actually hear it’, which was quite exciting, and he said the only other people who’d heard it had been his editors so, I mean, it was quite an interesting reading, really. He described it as being quite unique and it was, yeah, definitely. I mean, I suppose I describe it as sort of stream of consciousness, really, but the bit that he read, it kind of tied in quite nicely with the event because it was sort of talking about the fact that you’re born and you become this individual but then, gradually, things happen and you realize you’re actually part of a wider community.

Here are the clips we’ve got of his readings thanks to @cateblanchyes and @kovalchuk_mary, who shared them on Twitter and Instagram, respectively:

For the Cumberbatch peeps… his hair is so dark 😂 pic.twitter.com/1g8KWa1cUJ

— Katie Blanket (@cateblanchyes) November 26, 2019

Transcript:

[…] Instantly recognizable. You stand anew. Remade. You’ve rebuilt yourself, but you are different.
[…] You become a heroic, unique embodiment of both the things you cherish and the things that cause you pain. As you grow into this living idea, you become instantly recognizable among the millions of faces in the world. You become that which you think you are. You stand before the world and you say ‘I am here and this is who I am’. But there’s an influence at work […] and positions in the locus of the divine. Together, we are equal.

How Benedict of Benedict, to write a book exploring such themes. Hopefully, it won’t be long until we get more information about the book!

Update on 1st December

This post has just been updated to include another video and its transcription and to correct an error. Even though I (Gi) had included the aforementioned video in our post about the event, I still somehow failed to include it on this post. I also completely misunderstood the very last word of the very last video. My apologies!