"Rigor of beauty is the quest." – WCW
When I first started writing, I thought I was going to write a novel. I began (as we often do) on January 1st, having selected a couple of useful books for Neil to wrap for me for Christmas. I hoped to finish a first draft by the end of the year, and it seemed sensible…
May was a great month for writing, and research, and walking and filling journal pages with all sorts of things about the Thames. I wrote seven short stories and a couple of poems and I was loving it. In June, everything fell apart. The terror attacks, the negativity and uncertainty surrounding the General Election, a…
I’ve pretty much finished gathering information, and although I still have some reading to do (I just ordered this fab looking book), and I already started writing long ago, this weeks feels like I’m moving into the ‘second half’ of the project, the half where I use all the stuff I found and learned to create my…
It’s the morning after the General Election here, and it’s difficult to concentrate on anything, but it’s also Friday, and I have finished stage six of my journey – I have walked all the way (with much extra wandering) from Teddington Weir to the Thames Barrier. Teddington is the furthest point upstream that the tide reaches, and…
Yesterday was a glorious day for walking by the river, and almost the whole section was completely new to me – I’ve been to Greenwich before, but otherwise I had never really been anywhere east of Tower Bridge. I had a bit of a wander in Borough Market for old times’ sake and to collect some…
It’s been such glorious summer weather in London yesterday and today that it’s hard to sit down indoors and get on with writing work. Yesterday I walked from Battersea to London Bridge, and today I went back to Battersea to meet up with a friend who used to live on a barge there. I knew…
Stage three took me through my home patch – past my house (a mile away) and along the paths that I run, walk or cycle every week. I did wonder whether I would discover anything new, but I found that it did make a difference to be out there with a different purpose. There was woodland…
Old Deer Park, Kew Gardens, Syon Park, Mortlake Cemetery, Dukes Meadows… Most of my walk yesterday took me alongside parks and woodland, and it would have been easy to imagine myself deep in the country. I worked a bit on trees, and can now confidently identify Horse Chestnut and London Plane, still can’t tell the difference…
Yesterday I completed stage one of my Thames walk, from Teddington Lock to Richmond Bridge. In the photo above you can just see the end of the weir, upstream below the footbridge. This marks the limit of the tidal Thames, which is why I chose it as my starting place. Except of course, that it…
There’s a very specific set of emotions I associate with starting a new project: anticipation, excitement, curiosity, quite a bit of fear as well. These are all circling inside me and bouncing off each other like bubbles. The external manifestation of that Big New Thing feeling is the pile of books I’ve collected together on…