Part one:
Part two:
Part three:
Part four:
My first ever novel, VILLAGER, is now up for funding. If you’d like to reserve a copy, you can do so here.
My most recent book is Ring The Hill – which is also out in the US and Canada in January.
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Perfect Sunday evening listening, thankyou. I now feel much less strange for spending so much time hanging around river banks, looking at stones and watching fish and peering into the roots of fallen trees, which are ubiquitous in Wales too. It’s really true about the craze for stealing undies in the 60s. Vividly recall being a little kid, sitting in the outside toilet of our house in Topsham, listening to my mum and the next door neighbour talking about it. She (the neighbour) had lost all her ‘smalls’ off the line and they were speculating about which local man might have done it. I concluded that grown ups were weird.
Love the video of you with the Herwick sheep, (i think) they are lovely!!!i saw a lot of them when rambling in the lakes. The young ones are brown with white faces then they trun to white with black faces. Loved the eyebrow action on ‘best sheep ever’
A great start to the day listening to you on a rather overcast Monday morning. cheers. Suppose I’d better get up now …..
I remember going to my first college weekend at my boyfriend’s fraternity and hearing about a panty raid. It was 1962 and I was shocked!!
Thank you! I would so love to see video of some of these walks, the river, the trees, the spaces you inhabit. It would be quite wonderful!
Nice big chunks of rambly ramblings with some great digressions – don’t ever edit them out! I have checked out Douglas Kennedy (who I did not know of before). Hope Roscoe gets to love her new outdoor territory. Cats’ relationships with other cats they don’t live with is a mystery. Many cats visit our garden and my cats tolerate some and actively hate others for no reason I can work out.
The idea you talked about of becoming extremely familiar with an area near to where you live reminded me of Nan Shepherd and her writing about the Cairngorms in ‘The Living Mountain’. And Hope Bourne in her Exmoor books.
‘To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience.’ Patrick Kavanagh.
Thanks for cheering up a rather confined Day 8 of self – isolation.
Loving the ramblecasts, and the audible recordings of your books. It’s a great way to tap in. My mum’s house (in Postbridge) always had the sound of running water by it. It’s such a soothing (and sometimes overwhelming) sound. Have you ever seen the Da Vinci drawings where he tried to capture moving water on paper? It’s fascinating…
Thanks Rebecca. PS I did reply to your email about the book but kept getting a message saying “failed to deliver”.
Interesting what you say about writing and walking, and writing releasing thoughts. I’ve always been a big walker until I fractured my pelvis five months ago, and I miss it terrible. It’s possibly why I am enjoying your writing so much, as there is a similar meandering quality to your text, and I mean that as a compliment. I’ve realised that walking is where I go to meditate and where I finding the path through and to the things that are important to me. It’s a sacred zone where the timelessness of my being and the landscape merge. So it’s not surprising it’s where you also see ghosts. When I lived in Japan they had a wonderful way of introducing one to a place through ghostly folk tales. One such experience I had on a lake, where we were told before beginning our canoeing that nature is a place for listening not talking, and that there was a village submerged beneath us. I peered into the dark depths and could hear the village bells tolling, signalling the movement of time. It was one of the most poetic and powerful moments of my life. I feel like this often happens in nature as it’s always changing, and past, present and future merge in a tapestry. Also, I concer regarding sheep. Anyone who knows them, knows they are all different and extremely intelligent and communicative.
Really like these audio diaries and thoughts. Keep it up!