Projects

I’m working on two book projects.

Within Walking Distance is a book about journeying on foot. Within walking distance you discover things about yourself that you didn’t know. As you step out onto the trail, you step out of the customary coordinates of your life to spaces where there’s room to wander. You see a world where history and geography are woven together and the voices of the past still mutter. Where do you fit into this mesh of time and place? Through the filter of three elements (stone, moor and water), I hope to explore the physical and metaphysical journeys that take place walking long distances. Each day a new story unfolds underfoot. The focus is less the big vistas than the small worlds at one’s feet or in the near distance that tell the stories, true and mythical, of past lives and of the self.

A Diary of Mum and Me tells the story of a different kind of journey. As I observed the physical and cognitive decline of my mother over the three years until her death in summer 2017, I kept a diary. Though I wrote it spasmodically, entries made in moments of emotional intensity followed by long, fallow periods, still they fill a notebook with strange stories, episodes of deep sorrow and despair interspersed with moments of immense joy, even comedy. The diary records not only the journey my mother made but also my own. My journey continues as I adjust to a world no longer as it should be, as if a line is missing in a familiar song.