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  • DIARY PIECES: A LIFE IN 365 DAYS
  • PARIS MERIDIAN
    • Paris Meridian 1
    • Paris Meridian 2
    • Paris Meridian 3
    • Paris Meridian 4
  • VINCENT & I
    • My Life with Van Gogh: The Beginning
    • My Life with Van Gogh: Nuenen.
    • My Life with Van Gogh: Paris
    • My Life with Van Gogh: Auvers
    • My Life with Van Gogh : Anselm Kiefer
  • MY WRITING
    • When Van Gogh met Rimbaud
    • Strange Pieces
      • Newton’s Cradle
      • The Third Moon
      • Strange Creatures
      • A Bonfire of the Vanities
      • The Pitch Lake
  • LETTERS FROM LANCASTER
    • Letter 1: Arrival
    • Letter 2: Projects
    • Letter 3: Vignettes
    • Letter 4: ‘Tenderfoot’ and Temperance.
    • Letter 5: Cycling along the Canal.
    • Letter 6: The Source of the Lune.
    • Letter 7: Thomas Harrison’s Bridge.
    • Letter 8: Sunday Afternoon.
    • Letter 9: Thomas Harrison’s Towers.
    • Letter 10: The Hogback Stone and ‘Ship’ at Heysham: a Fable.
    • Letter 11: ‘Horizon Line Chamber’ at Sunderland Point.
    • Letter 12: The Last Tripe Shop in Lancaster.
    • Letter 13: Swans on the River.
    • Letter 14: The Lune from Source to Gorge.
    • Letter 15: Sambo’s Grave at Sunderland Point.
    • Letter 16: The Heysham Labyrinth.
    • Letter 17: Walking Across Lancaster Sands.
    • Letter 18: Lancaster Co-op.
    • Letter 19: Lancaster’s Cinemas.
    • Letter 20: Walking the Lune: Lonsdale.
    • Letter 21: Gray’s Seat, Crook o’Lune, a View.
    • Letter 22: Out of Lockdown.
    • Letter 23: The Lune through Lancaster (1): The Lune Aqueduct.
    • Letter 24: The Lune through Lancaster (2): Skerton Weir.
    • Letter 25: The Lune through Lancaster (3): The West Indies Trade.
    • Letter 26: The Lune through Lancaster (4): Williamson’s
    • Letter 27: The Street that Disappeared – St Nicholas Street.
  • MUSIC
    • Connie Converse
      • Connie Converse: A Singer/Songwriter before her Time
      • Connie Converse’s 100th Birthday
      • Connie Converse’s disappearance on 10 August, 1974
    • Bob Dylan, Herman Melville, and ‘The Confidence Man’.
    • Leonard Cohen at The Opera House, Manchester.   Tues, 17 June 2008.
    • Buddy Holly: Apartment Tapes.
    • Buddy Holly: Please Don’t Tell.
    • Gram Parsons
    • Neutral Milk Hotel
  • MY BOOKS
    • ‘The Shaftesbury Chronicles’
    • ‘First Cut’
    • ‘Diggers and Dreamers’
    • ‘Dionysos’ Island’
    • ‘In Search of France’s Green Meridian’
      • Introduction
      • Dunkirk to Pithiviers
      • Pithiviers to Belcastel
      • Belcastel to The Pyrenees
      • References
    • ‘The Divided Wood’

This is where I archive my writing, and blog as I go.

Use the dropdown menus above to navigate Pages, scroll down for Posts.

  • Australia

    Claude Levi-Strauss and approaching the Red Centre I “Exploration is not so much a covering of surface distance as a study in depth: a fleeting episode, a fragment of landscape, or a remark overheard may provide the only means of understanding and interpreting areas which would otherwise remain barren of meaning.” Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, p56…

    May 23, 2026
  • Leaving Shaftesbury for Greece, 1999 : Pages from ‘Odysseos’ Island’,

    p1. There is a moment. After my preparations, the note-taking, the buying and borrowing, the itinerary-writing, the spreading out and piling up of things to take – so that the flat was no longer a place to live but a resource at the service of going away, my first trip to Greece alone since 1971…

    Apr 25, 2026
  • Leaving Naxos, 1970. Pages from ‘Dionysos’ Island’.

    p379I plunged inside the vibrating drum of music, the thudding rhythmic bass shaking the floor, screaming guitar notes bending the walls, the drum kit smashing the air into glittering fragments. Sensory overload in which my bones, emptied by leaping, now filled with pulsing, coloured mercury, my body, hollowed out by activity and strung with resonant…

    Apr 11, 2026
  • Entering Greece for the first time, 1970 : pages from ‘Dionysos’ Island’.

    p 38On the overnight train down the length of Italy we take down the luggage and Simon and I use the netting racks as hammocks, leaving more sleeping space for the others. I look down at Jacks sleeping, sprawled and open-mouthed, then I’m rocked to sleep. I wake to a red dawn, the air already…

    Mar 27, 2026
  • Introduction. &, Meeting Penny : Pages from ‘Dionysos’ Island’.

    INTRODUCTION The details of Richard’s disappearance filtered through to me slowly. Or perhaps I filtered them slowly. I had lost touch, ceased to keep in touch with him several years before, having run out of patience with his lack of focus, his failure to get on. When getting on, one needs the company of those…

    Mar 14, 2026
  • Bob Dylan and Herman Melville: “Blind Willie McTell” and ‘The Confidence-Man’.

    Note: I originally wrote this piece, on the links between a Bob Dylan song and a Herman Melville novel, a dozen years ago, before his Nobel Prize for Literature, when he was still a ‘song and dance man’. It was written in a compressed form for a specialist Bob Dylan magazine. Here I’ll open it…

    Feb 28, 2026
  • Buddy Holly’s Apartment Tapes

    Buddy Holly died in a plane crash on 3 Feb, 1959. January 1959, late at night in a Greenwich village apartment, his pregnant wife asleep, Buddy Holly is recording. He’s been recording obsessively since he was 14, and for the last couple of years camped in the studio in Clovis, New Mexico, learning how to…

    Feb 14, 2026
  • Inside the Tower : pages from ‘Diggers and Dreamers’.

    Aug 21I’ve worked steadily. I finished the panels and glazing in the tower roof and it stands empty. No purpose has revealed itself. Why did I build it?I go in and stand and look around and wonder what it’s for. An orgone accumulator? A meditation chamber? A folly? At present, simply an empty space. ‘What…

    Jan 31, 2026
  • Building the Tower : pages from ‘Diggers and Dreamers’.

    July 1In my silence and withdrawal, the other vision has been developing, becoming more real …A tower. A tower made with my own hands, whose walls connect the inside and outside: filtering, refining, intensifying what is outside inward; amplifying and radiating what is inside out. A tower whose anticlockwise winding steps I climb to the…

    Jan 17, 2026
  • La Balme in 1976 : pages from ‘Diggers and Dreamers’.

    p.54. I go to the door and stand in the sunlight and look out over the garden, the valley, the hills, clear and bright on this midsummer morning and now more alive in my eyes than it has ever been, because of the songs that are already weaving their way through me. What happened yesterday…

    Jan 4, 2026
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my writing

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