Sparrows, Hope, and Rules
Potentially the last newsletter before the baby arrives… This is a season of storm. The birds know it, they are frantic, feeding as quickly as they can before vanishing from sight as the sky drops into the valley and all…
Tag writing
Death In Harmony Is OUT NOW!
It’s very good, if I do say so myself. Hello After last week’s baby-related announcement episode, this newsletter will be centred around my writing. First, though, a very big thank you to those of you who got in touch about…
The Golden Mountain
Of hammocks and new growth. As with the spring and the mountain greening, the fall of autumn begins in patches. It is first noticed one morning, with two or three trees shunning their former verdancy, in exchange for a cloak of…
The Sense of a Storm
Echoes and Foreboding It comes not through taste or sight, sound, or touch, or scent, but through something other, another one of our senses the majority somehow forget we possess. It is a pressing down inside, something foreboding, ancient, deep…
Seasons and Memory
Whispers and Seaglass No place has but four seasons, and Alentejo is no different. Summer, yes, of course it is, but it is no longer the days of the wildflower-rich, high-sun summer, nor the screaming swift summer, nor the misty…
Time and Magic
Magic and Time Time, at some points and places, stretches. Days seem longer, the mind translates the passage of the sun in ways which are not, perhaps, normal. When I was eight, my family moved to Stromness, Orkney. The month…
A Tale of Salt and Wave
Of Edgelands and Imagination We live around 12 kilometres, or 7.5 miles, from the ocean. Here, as I have mentioned, the ground begins to fold and hills rise around us, stretching above crinkled, complicated valleys, all the way down to…
Stories of Life
Also featuring stories of drafts and edits Outside the window, the world warms, stories of life everywhere. Swirls of storks climb invisible spirals. Beneath, strata of swallows manoeuvre, twist, brake and snatch, manoeuvre, twist, brake and snatch. Lower still, plummeting…
A Return to Sea and Sun
(I have books for you to read!) In the last ten days, I have been joined by old friends: the salt-tang of the ocean carried on powerful, iodine-strong winds, the sun a force, capable of burning quickly, the roar of…
Fermentation, Hither and Thither
There are some mornings when the world is suddenly sharper, the senses heightened and all clear in the mind, every leaf sharply focussed, every scent evocative. I find these perfect days often correspond to the weather; when an autumn morning…