04. April 2020
I’m reading Whirligig and boy am I enjoying it. That will sound very conceited given it’s my own novel. It’s not like I can be surprised by the twists and turns, the rising tension, the character progression. ‘Whoa! I didn’t see that coming.’ The story is my own invention as are most of the people. Even the ones I’ve borrowed from history are my own take. So why is it such a pleasure?
06. May 2019
I ‘sailed’ with my family on a sixty-five-foot canal boat over Easter, starting out from Rugby. We’d done a couple of weekends in the past, but this was the first time I was brave enough to try a tunnel, the two km long Braunston Tunnel on the Grand Union. We motored into the maw and out of the reach of the spring sunshine at, I would conservatively say, about two knots. That’s still too fast a speed to enter the underworld, maybe two knots too fast, and it was so much darker than I’d...
11. January 2019
Aunty Pip started work at Bletchley Park in 1943. By then it was already a big operation. She would have been eighteen or nineteen. I’d long wanted to take my family there. Pip was the connection, the blood tie to the past, but even without that deeper link, there’s something very special about Bletchley.