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Stumbling through the Internet, as one does, I found ‘John Grimshaw’s Garden Diary’. I was surprised to discover John’s comment, with his photos of Long Purples (Orchis mascula). I recently mentioned long purples in a story, ‘Ten Years, Six Miles, and One Canoe‘. The story describes my ten years of school holidays in a kayak … Read more
This excerpt comes from one of the 40 short stories in my books, “Wessex Tales”, Vols. 1+2 (with 20 stories per book). This clip is from: “Ten years, six miles, and one canoe” (Volume 2). The story condenses incidents from my extensive time on the river during a ten-year period, from 1955 to 1965, my … Read more
We have not come far since Gilgamesh. 4,700 years ago, Gilgamesh may have been a mortal king in the Sumerian world. Or, he may have been “a demigod of superhuman strength who built the city walls of Uruk”. Never mind which. The Epic of Gilgamesh is considered the earliest great work of literature. Gilgamesh … Read more
This clip comes from one of my new “Wessex Tales” stories (Volume 2), the tale of “Schelin’s Daughter”, set in the year 1081. King William (the Conqueror) had recently awarded a Norman knight, Schelin, a village on the River Stour, in Dorset. The village promptly acquired the name Schelin’s Okeford. (The name of my … Read more
We start in a perverse sort of way, considering we are dealing with a supernova. First, we drop into a world of fiction based on fact, beginning with an excerpt from ‘Wessex Tales’ ~ ‘Musing on Damory Oak’: “In the thirteenth year of King Canute (1029), the year in which the acorn thrust its root down in moist earth … Read more
These are the opening paragraphs in my Wessex Tales story, ‘Whose Pig?’ At the end of an especially hard winter, two starving peasants emerge from their huts at dawn to find a large, pregnant sow. Who owns her? The men almost come to blows. ‘Whose Pig?’ is set on Okeford Hill above Shillingstone in the Late Stone … Read more