This week….

I’m home for a couple of weeks, and working on something secret, but soon to be revealed, The Unwinding, two book covers and beginning work to promote The House Without Windows and The Secret of the Tattered Shoes.

For some reason I have settled to write The Unwinding on my dad’s old typewriter. It seems to be working, but does mean that when I set off on my travels to Cornwall and Wigtown I need to carry it with me.

Yesterday the beginning shaped itself. It’s been sitting in the back of my mind for a while, awaiting the time and the space to emerge. It starts with the Keeper of Lost Dreams whose name is known only to a few. You can read about it on the Unbound website. I’m hoping today to have the publication date, but am told that those who pledge not only get their names (or, if the book is a gift you can nominate the name of the person you are giving it to) in the back of the book, in a listed index of supporters, but they get a ‘deluxe, all bells and whistles’ edition that is richer in production than the ‘ordinary’ edition that hits the shops a bit later.

It’s hard to say what the book is. Small, yes. There are similarities with The Quiet Music of Gently Falling Snow in that I wanted to make a book that was a collection of paintings made over a period of time, and thread together with narrative. But The Unwinding is more of a dreamscape. They aren’t poems as such, but the design of the text will be such that it slows the reader. And the book is to slow the mind, before sleep. My hope is that it creeps into people’s dreams and helps them find rest. Seems to me the world is becoming increasingly angry.

I used not to be able to read and write at the same time, and in many many ways I wish I had not picked up this book until The Unwinding was finished. But I did. And I can’t put it aside now. Having avoided it for years, it really is something rather beautiful.

Of new books, I have two, and will be setting off mid September towards this, above, in Dulverton. Hoping to go to the Two Rivers papermill and ink them an otter where the paper is made. Also hoping for a field of deer at Loyton, sent by Barbara Newhall Follett and Eepersip. The afternoon still have a very few tickets left. And after the day in the bookshop I head to Bath for an event at Bath Festival on 29th Sept, then into hiding with my typewriter and I emerge at Wigtown, where The Bookshop Band and I are doing a House Without Windows event. ( I will see if I can persuade Beth Porter to sing a charm of goldfinches into the room!) I will then be heading towards Carlile.

But for now I am painting and writing and swimming and walking, and sitting and thinking and trying not to fall into the trap of anger.

When on the news I hear a radio announcer say, ‘and now to the biggest story of the year, Brexit’, and I think, didn’t you just say the Great Barrier Reef was going, going, almost gone, that the Amazon was burning, that the Arctic was burning, that glaciers were melting at an alarming rate, I try not to let the anger rise, at the political game playing of our puppet ‘leaders’ and the tactics of bullying in politics that has echoes of pre-war Germany. I don’t want to hate them, or anyone. I don’t want my emotions to be manipulated by fat white men in suits. I want to give them the relevance they deserve, for they are nothing, an irrelevance, unless they chose to step up to the real problem at hand and address it.

I have new paintings for Dulverton. There is an inky cloud of butterflies, seven swallows, some gold leaf. I’m hoping to spell a fox into the shop also, though not with an audience of 5 000. A bit more intimate than that.

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