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Marvellous stuff! It’s such a joy to pick up a book like this, a book so fluid that it feels like it was written in a single sitting. I read it in less that 24 hours. For a book to be simultaneously a great work of literature and a page turner is almost unheard of. Classic novels are, by definition, heavyweight. Their subjects are meaty, and take time to digest. Not ‘The Moon & Sixpence‘ though. It’s subject matter is definitely meaty, but Maugham’s treatment of it makes digesting it as simple as drinking a glass of milk. And this despite the reader knowing well in advance exactly what’s going to happen.

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Blakes Road, the book I am writing, is the story of a walk I took last year from England’s south coast to London. Specifically from Felpham, near Bognor Regis in West Sussex, to Bunhill Fields, a cemetery in Islington. The distance was something around 70 miles, and it took four days walk, meaning the book is divided into four chapters.

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I am halfway through the task of illustrating ‘Blakes Road‘, the book I am currently writing. I’m illustrating the book as it is, in part, a paean to William Blake, and Blake illuminated almost every page of his own books, so I feel I should do the same.

Here are a few of them:

1. A field with a wooden signpost in the foreground;
2. The “Shelley’s Fountain” sculpture in Horsham, with a branch of McDonald’s behind it;
3. The Croydon Flyover;

Vurt. It’s a story based around feathers that create dream fantasies, and it has a character in it called Icarus. Icarus Wing.

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I wouldn’t bother.

Believability. That’s what I look for in characters & plots. People are multifaceted, they do contrary things. Within 30 pages of Anna Karenina, I was dreading another 870 pages of the angelic, eponymous character I discovered in the opening pages.

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The cover of this book features a photograph of a series of worn posts stretching out across a sandy beach. In the distance the sea and sky, a series of thin, bleached strips running horizontally. A grey landscape worn down by time, and by the sea.

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Next Tuesday I have been asked to give a short talk about my book Swindon Orbital at the Postmodern Gallery in Swindon. As we are in the midst of an election, here’s how I have decided to pitch it:

Although Swindon has grown a hundredfold in the past 200 years immigration remains a hot topic, particularly at election time.

Drawing on research conducted for his book Swindon Orbital, author Richard Willis will use Swindon’s history of migrations to argue that immigration is a force for good. If you are interested in politics, history and/or literature you should enjoy the discussion.

The talk is free. Here’s the flyer for the event. If you are in Swindon on Tuesday 4th May please do come along.

Playing football last Friday I broke the little finger of my left hand. The bone has also twisted, meaning that I might need surgery to straighten it. This means my left hand is more or less useless. Just living simply becomes a chore. Anything involving water is particularly tough, the hardest two tasks are washing up and shampooing my hair. But more or less every activity involves both hands, I have sadly discovered.

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Whilst writing my first book Swindon Orbital earlier this year, I learnt something important about the act of writing. It was a crucial lesson, but not one I can share with you right now, because it went on to form the key idea around which my second book Blakes Road is being built, and to share it would be to spoil that.

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