Hello Reader, This week on the water Given that it’s the start of the year, it seems appropriate to talk about the start of a new writing project – and because I am increasingly of the opinion that writing and life are parallel activities, it might well be that what I have to say about beginnings, applies also to life. Let’s see if that’s the case. As you contemplate the story to come, you begin, perhaps, by assembling your characters, in all their tawdry glory. As they step onto the stage of...
9 days ago • 6 min read
Hello Reader, This week on the water The lake has frozen, and thawed. While frozen, our resident gang of cormorants naturally deserted us. But now that the water – and the silvery treasure within it – is once more accessible, they’re back, hunting in a pack, three or four of them roving the surface, barely head and neck above water, then diving in synchronised fashion in pursuit of their lunch. I spend minutes on end watching for them to reappear. It’s difficult to predict where they will pop...
16 days ago • 5 min read
Hello Reader, This week on the water Here’s another trip on the River Great Ouse, a source of a great deal of the inspiration that, I hope, animates your Mondays. It’s an autumnal journey that yielded a number of unexpected treasures. Next week I’ll be back with a completely fresh out-of-the-box bouquet for you to savour. This is the last of the four retrospective blogs plucked from the seasons of 2024. See you then! The eye of a magpie It’s late autumn, here in Bedfordshire, and the...
23 days ago • 6 min read
Hello Reader, I’m not sure that anything I’ve ever resolved to do at the start of the year has come to fruition. Something about the demands made by new year’s resolutions, the way they wag their fingers in my face, makes me rebellious. So, happy new year from all of us at All About Writing. I hope we all have a healthy, happy and creative year. But my advice is: don’t make resolutions. They just make us all feel bad. Let’s rather fix our writing intentions for the year. Intentions are...
27 days ago • 8 min read
Hello Reader, The summer in the United Kingdom was brief and unmemorable – but Trish and I have found that, whatever the season, there are vivid and memorable details to be spotted and investigated in the river and on the river bank, all within just minutes from us via kayak. In this summer piece, we go adventuring with a very specific goal in mind. This is one of four pieces from 2024 that we’re repeating while I put my feet up. Going with the flow on the River Great Ouse Join me as Trish...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
Hello Reader, In the spring, said Tennyson, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. Living on a houseboat in the middle of a lake, you can’t help be struck by the amount of love going on at this time of the year. Very productive love. We are inundated by goslings and ducklings and cygnets and whatever the young of coots are called; cootlings? Here's a story I wrote in April about two fools in love, and their progeny, a clutch of golden goslings. The Gosling Symphony This is a...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
Hello Reader, I’ve always taken a particular delight in watching people. My guess is that everyone takes similar pleasure from the pastime. The logical consequence is that everyone is, in one way or another, watching everyone else. It is one of the attributes of being human, I suppose. And it explains a lot. But the casual watcher’s eye is as nothing to the writer’s eye, who’s attracted by the sorts of details that can be stored away for later use. Every season is people-watching season, of...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
I have just completed my longest ever open-water swim: 2.5km in deep ocean. I swim a lot, every day if I can manage. But this was the first time I’ve swum with the group I consider to be the ‘big girls’, the fast, long-distance sea swimmers. I nearly didn’t go, despite setting two alarms. I procrastinated in bed. It was overcast and drizzly and that 6.30am start felt just too hard, too early. I had to force myself, not looking ahead, taking one step of preparation after another. When I...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Hello Reader, This week on the water I’m looking out of the window in my study onto the grey-green surface of Priory Lake. The sky above is a uniform light grey. The trees along the shore are bare, although each is garlanded by a ruff of glossy green English Ivy. It’s at about this time, in the run-up to Christmas, when many of us are forced by circumstance to lay aside our writing, that we take stock, measuring ourselves against our goals. We ask whether we finished that novel we’d swore...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read