my writing

Category: Uncategorized

  • A walk across Paris, along the Meridian 2

    I am standing on the Paris Meridian. (A meridian is an imaginary line connecting the north and south poles of a sphere.) The Paris Meridian was decided upon 6.6km (20,317 pieds de roi, in those days) south of here, on Midsummer Day, 1667, when members of the Academy of Sciences gathered to outline on the…

  • A Walk across Paris, along the Meridian: 1

    St-Ouen. Outside le Périph. A large silver ball has landed on a small traffic island. The sun blazes at its centre. Mirrors reflect; a curved mirror bends. And eventually deflects. Passing cars appear, swell, are gone, into St-Ouen. “St-Ouen Bienvenue.” Under Napoleon III, I see a marshal of France on horseback, sabre raised. Between the…

  • Vincent, Anselm and I

    In 1963 school student Anselm Kiefer received a grant to travel ‘In the footsteps of Van Gogh’, through the Netherlands, Belgium, Auvers and Paris, to Arles. With remarkable self-confidence the eighteen-year-old left his village near the Rhine for the first time, hitchhiked across countries occupied by Germany less than twenty years before, sleeping in barns…

  • Return to La Balme …

    Day 20, 19 June, 2015 : Albi to Coupiac, 56 miles. Return to the hills. Our village revealed. The carved stone buried. The wild boy reconsidered. Our house. The one-armed man. The Virgin’s veil. The threshing-machine. Camping by the lake. Pot au feu with the young couple. I wake early. Today I will be at…

  • Diggers & Dreamers

    Rural Languedoc. The South of France. Summer 1976. “There is another world, but it is in this one” – and the characters in this novel, in their different ways, mean to find it. Kris and Jane are an idealistic young couple who have bought La Balme, a run-down smallholding near Albi, city of the Cathars.…

  • The Divided Wood

    “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” A ruined splendour, a white wasteland … what has happened in the great wood?When his overbearing magnate father dies, Geoffrey believes that he has inherited everything and can at last come into his own. But the old man’s will contains a…

  • Vincent and I: A lifelong passion.

    A 1) It begins here. I take a photograph of the small gravestone: ‘Vincent van Gogh, 1852’. It is by the door of the Dutch Reform church in Groot-Zundert, a few hundred yards from the house where he was born. When the film is developed, this frame alone is blank, consumed in an explosion of…

  • Keith Walton’s Website

    All my writing that I want to be public

  • First Post …

    After my last website went down – lost in a broadband changeover – I recovered my archive and have made it available via the dropdown menus, above. My next project is ‘A Serpentine Walk along the Paris Meridian‘, which I will post here.