My Map Pins (11): The Nile Ferry at Laropi, Northern Uganda (Posted February 2021)

My novel ‘The Coincidence Authority’ features, in its closing chapters, a tough, overland trip by the eponymous protagonist, Thomas Post. He travels by bus, taxi, bicycle, and foot, all the way from Kampala to the north west corner of Uganda –a province known as West Nile. This corner of Uganda has been snipped off the country map by the Nile River, and is only accessible by a bridge to the far west of the country at Pakwach, or by a smelly, unreliable (but more accessible) ferry eighty miles away at Laropi (unless you sneak over the border from Sudan or Congo). This was a journey I first made around 1970 with my brother-in-law Doop when I was fifteen or sixteen or thereabouts. Doop was an engineer installing elevators into Ugandan hospitals. I went with him as his spanner boy to places like Gulu, and Moyo – remote communities, close to the borders with Congo and Sudan. The region has been a war zone for much of the past half century, although now, thankfully, it is at peace. Thomas Post, in the novel, crosses the river at Laropi, and I felt it was important to go back and see the region again; so in May 2011 in an effort to do the research, my son Jon and I followed in Thomas’s footsteps. We drove north from Kampala, and boarded the ferry to West Nile. The river is only about half a mile wide here. This is one of its narrowest points. It was a languid, surreal crossing, watched by hippos. Glorious. 

Please check out my website to learn more about my books:  https://www.johnironmonger.com

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3Words: pivot.stepbrother.atrocious

 

My Map Pins (10): The Berm, Guelta Zemmur, Western Sahara (Posted February 2021)

My mate Graham Ibbotson and I may be the only Europeans alive ever to visit Guelta Zemmur. True.  There is absolutely no reason to go here unless one of you, perhaps, is a slightly crazy novelist who wants to research it for a story. And yet the desert drive to Guelta Zemmur remains one of the most extraordinary journeys I’ve ever made. We went to find ‘The Berm,’ one of the greatest landscaping achievements of humanity. Or, if you prefer, one of the most disgraceful (and frankly unnecessary) engineering feats on our planet. It is a two thousand seven hundred km wall, built almost entirely out of sand. On either side of it lies the world’s longest continuous minefield. It is the most effective military border on Earth. Buried within it are more than seven million land-mines. An estimated 1,500 people have died from mine explosions along it. It still kills around 25 people a year. Imagine that. Imagine a minefield two hundred metres wide stretching all the way from London to Istanbul. That’s the Berm. It is a difficult construction to get close to (although Graham and I had both driven over this minefield before – but not at Guelta Zemmur – and that will need to wait for another story). 

 

We flew into Laayoune, hired a big 4x4, and drove into the desert. There isn’t a lot of traffic on the long roads of the Western Sahara. Here and there the wind blows sand across the road, and every hour or so a military checkpoint waves you through and on you go. Other than these brief respites, it is a singularly monotonous trail. It’s hot, and when you stop to stretch, the heat is like a foundry furnace. We drove into the bright light of the desert, taking turns at the wheel. The landscape stretched away forever like a Martian plain, rock strewn and featureless, but flecked, surprisingly, here and there by spots of green. Tiny purple flowers bloomed along the roadside. And every now and again a stubborn tree held miraculously out against the hostility of the environment. Guelta Zemmur itself is a tiny oasis with a population of fewer than a hundred people and that’s where the road ends. It is a day’s drive. A soldier, assuming we were military, waved us through and we found ourselves at the Berm. We looked at it. Took no photographs. And drove back. Lunacy. Total lunacy. But one of the best trips ever.   

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What3Words: outfitters.divorcing.draping

My Map Pins (9): Parkgate, Cheshire (Posted February 2021)

 

This is Parkgate. Sue and I moved here in 2017 to a rambling, old house on the Parade, and I guess this means we now call this town our home. It is a hauntingly beautiful place. People visit Parkgate for the scenic walks, for birdwatching, for ice creams, and for fish and chips. Once upon a time it was a seaside and a busy port, and it still retains echoes of those days. It is a popular promenade – even though the ships and the sea and the beaches have all gone.  Back in 1928 someone had the bright idea of planting spartina grass to control the dunes; the grass invaded the estuary and turned it from ocean into marshland. Now it is an RSPB sanctuary for wading birds and raptors.  As I write, I look out over forty square miles of wilderness towards the North Wales coast. I can see egrets and pink footed geese. Often there is a hen harrier or a short eared owl. You can hear the haunting calls of curlews. Once or twice a year we get a spring tide that brings water all the way up the sea wall as a reminder of Parkgate’s glory days, but these tides also bring silt and vegetation and so, in small increments, the level of the marshes rise. The dog in the picture is Poppy, now 13.  

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What3Words: chill.august.unable

Why this has been The Year of the Whale: (Der Wal und das Ende der Welt and The Whale at the End of the World) (23rd February 2021)

 An odd thing has happened. ‘Not Forgetting the Whale’ has sold amazingly well in Germany. I should love to take all the credit, but in truth I owe much of the success to a remarkable German publisher, and most of the rest to the pandemic. The publisher is S.Fischer Verlag, a small but very dedicated imprint in Frankfurt. They are lovely. They are smart. They renamed the novel, ‘Der Wal und das Ende der Welt’ – or ‘The Whale and the End of the World,’ and they gave it a startlingly clever cover – an arresting orange ground with a fin whale swimming into view from the back cover. They promoted the book really well. Big displays in bookshops. Lots of press. This was in 2019. And well, we all know what happened next. Covid came along. The paperback was due to launch in August 2020, but someone at Fischer had a hunch that the central story of ‘Whale’ (a global flu pandemic) might be topical enough to justify an earlier launch. They brought it forward to March 25^th. Smart move. It went straight into the Spiegel paperback chart at No 6 – just behind Camus’ ‘Plague.’ By 20^th May it had crept up to No 3, and by 20^th August it was at Number 2. Christmas came and it was Number 1. Today, as I write this, it is still up there at Number 5. It has been in the top 10 for 49 weeks. On social media, in Germany, it has been

a phenomenon. More than 560 people have posted photographs of their copy on Instagram. I have lost count of the Twitter messages. The image above is just a snapshot of some of the hundreds of Facebook posts.

I could pretend to be wholly nonplussed. Perhaps I should. But the truth is, of course, I’m over the moon! It’s amazing! (I don't think you'd ever find a novelist who wouldn’t like to see ‘The International Bestseller’ on the cover of their book.) So a huge thank you to S Fischer Verlag, and to Susanne Halblieb, Elisa Diallo, Siv Bublitz, Petra Wittrock, and Janina Bradac, and of course to Maria Poets for her fantastic translation, and to Kirsty and Stan and Fede and  Ellie Freedman and the brilliant team at Orion Books, and to Krystyna who sold the German rights. And now, guess what, it has been relaunched here in England as, ‘The Whale at the End of the World,’ (which is curiously unsettling because now I don't know what to call it.) But it is doing ok. And it is doing well in the Netherlands too as ‘De Dag Dat De Walvis Kwam’ (The Day the Whale Came.) And it will launch soon in Italy. Altogether it has been translated into twelve languages! It is to be made into a German TV series. And it has been turned into a stage show (with music by Sting). Gosh. I'm truly stunned..

My Map Pins (8): Ilorin, Kwara State, Nigeria (Posted February 2021)

 

Ilorin is a bright, hot, dusty, smelly, busy, noisy, chaotic, colourful place. It is Nigeria’s seventh city. It has a population similar to Greater Manchester and it sits in a kind of geographical hinterland between the Sahara to the north and the rainforest (what is left of it) to the south. Not many big trees. Lots of sand. Lots of low, makeshift buildings. Lots of traffic. Not much in the way of a city-wide sewage system (at least not while we were there). Or refuse-collection. But you can’t have everything. We moved to Ilorin in 1979. I was to take up a post as a Lecturer in Zoology at the University, which I did, with enormous enthusiasm, for a term or so. It was fun. We would explore the city and its vibrant markets. We would chill out in the pool at the Kwara Hotel. I even took to the field once to play cricket for Kwara State (It was 102° F / 39°C. I scored two. I blame the heat.). But there were all sorts of problems. I won’t bore you with them all. The biggest challenge was accommodation. There wasn’t any. The University had recruited teaching staff from all around the world, but they hadn’t actually started building the campus. So we taught in a series of unsuitable buildings that had been commandeered from a local college, while lecturers and their families were billeted in unsavoury flats around the town. It all developed into a bit of a Gordian knot and eventually, pretty disappointed, we flew back to Britain. And that was that. I don’t suppose I shall ever go back. But Ilorin isn’t the kind of place you forget easily. So that’s my map pin. The photos are snapshots from our album. And the link should take you to the campus, close to where we stayed.

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What3Words: uncle.rating.dolls

My Map Pins (7): Liverpool (Posted February 2021)

Sue and I were married in September 1975, two months after we graduated from Nottingham, and we moved to a city neither of us knew – Liverpool. I was enrolled at the university, studying for a PhD in zoology. Sue was working in the lab at Unigate Dairies in Fazakerley. We found a one roomed flat in Princes Road, Toxteth. I won’t lie. It was grim. After a year we moved to Waterloo, a much more genteel neighbourhood.

It probably took us about a year to ‘get’ Liverpool. It’s a city that grows on you slowly. In the 1970s it was suffering from decades of neglect. The docklands were derelict and abandoned. So was much of the city. We were there during the notorious 'Toxteth Riots.' But we did ‘get’ Liverpool eventually. There’s a rather charming stoicism about the city. Being ‘scouse’ is less about where you come from and more about your frame of mind. In the 70s it was a city of rip-off goods, and dodgy politics, and football, and wisecracks. I’m not sure much has changed. In the 1980s I worked for a while at the Port of Liverpool Building on the Pier Head. The Albert Docks were being transformed. There was a sense that Liverpool had turned a corner. Things were looking up. Today our daughter, Zoe, is an Events Manager for Liverpool Council. It’s an amazing job. It means we are drawn back to the city every time there is a big event –and there are a lot in Liverpool - music festivals, fireworks, lightshows, tall ships – and here, in the photograph, for one of three amazing visits by the giants!   

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What3words: joined.sleep.select #LIVERPOOL

My Map Pins (6): Kilimanjaro (Posted February 2021)

 

I was twelve the first time I climbed Kilimanjaro. The black and white photograph is me with my certificate to prove I made it to the top. (Coincidentally this picture was taken in Nairobi Bus Terminal which is My Map Pin (1).) The traditional garland of everlasting flowers is made by the mountain guides, and given to climbers once you make the summit. I don't know if they still do this. 

It was a five day expedition. Three and a half days climbing, and a day and a half descending. The photograph below really hasn’t aged very well. These were the ten of us, all schoolboys, all much the same age, photographed at Marangu at the end of the trek. Now I come to look at this photograph I can’t even figure out which one was me. Maybe there were eleven of us and I took the picture. Who can tell? It was a school trip, of a sort. The expedition leader was our teacher, Mr Cowie. I have forgotten the names of almost all the boys in the photograph – so if, by a miracle, you read this blog and remember being there, please, please write and tell me. 

Kilimanjaro is one of the best things you can do. It is challenging (very), exhilarating, exhausting, exotic, and one heck of an achievement. If you ever get a chance to climb it, don’t even think about passing.

The What3words (below) take you to Kibo hut, the highest overnight resting stop. It is the location for the second photograph. You set off from here at 2am for the summit. It is brutally cold. Breathing is hard work. But you get to the top for the sunrise and I promise you, you won’t ever forget it.  

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What3Words: bacteria.name.twirling  #Kilimanjaro

My Map Pins (5): Nottingham (Posted February 2021)

 

I picked Nottingham University because I liked the name. I liked the association with Robin Hood. It sounded like a place in the forest. I had never been there of course. Or anywhere close. I don’t remember doing any research on the university itself. Or the course. Or the town. Or anything really. That’s how tenuous life choices can be when you’re a teenager. Anyway, it was fine. It was more than fine. It was brilliant. I studied zoology. I met my wife, Sue there. I made great friends. I still have enormous affection for the place.

In my final year I shared a house at No 25 Cromwell Street with Sue, Val Rose, and Jon Gathercole. This, in the photo, is how it now appears on Google Street View.

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3Words: dare.waters.rugs 

My Map Pins (4): Ramsgate, Kent (Posted February 2021)

 

Ramsgate is a seaside resort town on the far eastern toe of Kent. I went to school there. To be precise, I went to St Lawrence College, a boarding school exclusively (then) for boys. I was there from the age of 13 up until the week before my 18th birthday. My family were in Kenya, and flights were expensive, so I would go home just twice a year – once at Christmas and once for the summer holiday. Some years I was among the small handful of boys who stayed even during half terms and Easter while everyone else had gone home. It was a pretty austere place at the start. Dormitories were unrelentingly cold. Discipline was fierce. Junior boys were still ‘fags’ expected to wait upon senior boys, to fetch, and carry, and mop, and polish. Prefects could (and did) still thrash fags with a cane. It was all very Tom Brown’s Schooldays. But our generation of pupils were witnesses to change. We were the very last fags, and the last to be flogged. We were part of a great movement in the 1960s of enlightenment and modernisation. Thank God! And I don’t hesitate to say I enjoyed school. I did. I made good friends. I loved sport. I performed Shakespeare. And Ramsgate, on the whole, was a pretty fun place.  It was good. All good.

I went back a couple of years ago. I was invited to talk to sixth formers about being a novelist. How strange it is going back to your old school. So much had changed. There were no dormitories. There were girls. New buildings had appeared and old ones had vanished. And yet so little had changed. I guess that’s how it works. In my novel ‘The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder,’ the character, Adam, ends up at a school in Ramsgate. I’m sure it must be somewhere similar.

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What3Words: trail.drum.sticky #Ramsgate    

My Map Pins (3): Mevagissey, Cornwall (Posted February 2021)

 

This is a photograph of Mevagissey from the 1970s when I lived here with my family. It is a traditional Cornish fishing village on the south coast. My mother grew up here. The middle picture is of my mum and old Mr Cloke the fisherman. When my father retired from his job in Nairobi, he bought a grocery shop here. They called it ‘The Harbour Stores.’ (The third picture is my dad in Mevagissey at about that time.) I was seventeen. I thought I would hate living in a remote village at the end of the world. I was wrong. I loved it.  Years later, Mevagissey would inspire my novel ‘The Whale at the End of the World,’ (also called ‘Not Forgetting the Whale’). Mr Cloke was the inspiration for Old Man Garrow in the novel. Mevagissey is a little bigger than St Piran (the fictional town in the story), but it was the sense of community I was trying to capture. That’s a plug, in case you haven’t read the book. The What3Words (below) takes you to my dad’s shop. Today it is a bakery and an art shop.  

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What3Words: panics.backers.leaky

My Map Pins (2) Tsavo East National Park, Kenya (Posted February 2021)

 

I was sixteen when I first went to Tsavo East.  I went as a hanger-on/assistant to a zoologist from the University of Nairobi, and what we were supposed to be doing there was helping to measure the elephant population. How is that for a holiday job? From my memory, I can tell you there were an estimated 30,000 elephants in Tsavo at the time, but someone had apparently decided that a more accurate count was needed.  The plan was for light aircraft to ‘bomb’ groups of elephant with white-wash and then for spotters in Landrovers (us) to criss-cross the park trying to spot and count those elephants with white spots. We stayed at the Tsavo Research Station and we spent every day in the park counting elephants. Tsavo East is larger than Yorkshire. We covered a lot of miles and counted a lot of elephants. One night we were invited to dinner with the park director – an ancient colonial character who shared stories of exploring Kenya on foot as a young man, and who told us of his encounters with the Ghost and the Darkness, the man-eating lions of Tsavo. Dinner concluded with a huge stilton cheese hollowed out and filled with port. Could you get more colonial than that?  This was when I decided I wanted to be a zoologist.

I've been back to Tsavo with Sue. These pictures are from our visit in 2008.   

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What3Words: bookmaking.noted.fumbles

My Map Pins (1) Nairobi, Kenya (Posted February 2021)

 

I haven't been to Nairobi since I was seventeen. That was in 1971. So the photograph here (not my picture by the way) is from around that time, This is Nairobi bus station as I remember it. When I went into town (which I did a lot), this is where I would often go to catch the bus home.

I've been doing that thing on Google Maps where you create a map of your life; you drop a pin into all the places you've been, and before long you have a world map dotted with your memories. No use to anyone of course, except as a rather fun exercise; but I had this idea to turn a few of my pins into blog posts. After all, I have been a rubbish blogger, and it is time I posted some more. So here we are, and I'm starting with Nairobi. This is where I was born - at the Princess Elizabeth Hospital (now the Kenyatta National Hospital). My dad was a civil servant, and we moved around a lot, but the house I remember most was the one Dad built - the home I grew up in. The address used to be Westfield Close, Lavington which is a terribly British address. Today it is Naushad Merali Drive. (See the What3Words link below). I used to know every inch of this neighbourhood. I explored it on my bike, and on foot with my best friend Bruce Bulley. In those days it was on the very edge of town, and you could set off on the Kikuyu paths into wild Kenya - watching out for snakes - and we regularly did. In my novel, 'The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder', this is where the early chapters are set. Adam Last, the voice of the book, lives conveniently in the very house where I did, and he explores the same paths.

I still miss Nairobi. To me it still feels like home. I still hope, one day, to go back

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3words: dusters.pitch.cowboy

 

Why I shall always be a Remainer ... (30 December 2020)

That’s it. We’ve left the EU. We’ve swapped membership of a great international club for a sort of handwritten visitor’s-pass. We’ve done it to appease a motley and dubious crowd of braying nationalists. I don’t know, by the way, if this will make us richer, or if it will make us poorer. Neither do you. Neither does anyone. Both sides wheel-out their tame economic think-tanks to make contradictory forecasts. Yet even when Brexit has become old news, let’s say in ten years’ time, when all the dust has settled and economists have done their sums, do you know what? We still won’t know. We’ll still be arguing. Because who knows what the alternative future might have been? Remainers will say it would have been rosier. Leavers will say it would have been bleaker. Jacob Rees-Mogg will be telling us it will take fifty more years before we know. Well, good luck with that.

Here’s where I stand on the whole sorry argument. I’m a Remainer. I shall still be a Remainer even if Britain’s economy booms spectacularly after Brexit as Boris Johnson promises us it will, or equally, if it fails, as many economists and the Financial Times choose to believe. My argument, you see, has nothing to do with the economy, or trade deals, or customs unions, or tariffs. I’m not worried about the colour of our passports, or the plight of farmers in Northern Ireland, or lorries parking up on the M2 at Dover. Or fish. I am concerned however, about our belligerent desire to build barriers between peoples, as if somehow we are different, as if we breathe different air or have different numbers of legs. We are all related, the Brits, and the Belgians, and the Bulgars, and the Bolivians and every other label we can choose to hang around the necks of people, but we have lost sight of this. Let me demonstrate this. Consider your cousins. If your first cousin is someone who shares one (or usually two) of your grandparents, and your second cousin shares one of your great grandparents, it turns out that almost no one on the planet is more distant from you than a 27^th cousin. Most people are a whole lot closer. We are all related. We have been fooled by ephemeral things like skin colour or language to imagine that humans belong in races or nationalities, but genetically we’re all pretty much the same. There is more genetic difference between a chimpanzee in Senegal and another in Uganda than there is between an Inuit and a Maori, or a Yorkshireman and a Chinaman. It really doesn’t help us to define ourselves by the patch of land where we happen to have been born (or the island we happen to think of as home). We are one human family, and if the world belongs to anyone, it belongs to all of us equally. Understanding this, and treating the world as our common responsibility, is the best (and possibly only) hope for our species. We only have one planet. It is the cradle and home of our species. Whether you were born in Ruislip or Rio, whether you’re a Briton or a Breton, a Ghanian or a Guyanian, we all have a right to live and breathe the same air, to grow up, to raise families, and to pursue happiness or whatever it is we want to pursue (within reason of course). And it seems to me that the biggest barrier we have to this great ideal is our almost religious devotion to the idea of the nation state with its precious little borders and its pretentions of autonomy. I like to think that one day, probably long after you and I are dust, the squabble of little nations and fragile egos and tiny minded bigotries that infect our planet and keep us all at arm’s length will dissolve and we will come together as a people to manage, and curate this planet, and its tribes, and its wildlife, in a way we simply don’t do today. And in that regard I saw the European Union as one small, tentative, local, step in the right direction.

OK. So perhaps I’m a fantasist. But bear with me a little longer. The EU wasn’t (and isn’t) a perfect organisation. We agree on that. But it can (and does) legislate on environmental issues across a whole continent. That’s important. The EU has some of the world’s highest environmental standards, and laws passed in Brussels help protect natural habitats, keep air and water clean, ensure proper waste disposal, and help businesses move toward sustainable economies. Tin-pot nations that don’t belong to a global bloc like the EU don’t bother making these kinds of rules. Why should they? Only a big club like the EU can do this.

And the EU is growing. Or it was growing until Britain decided to take its ball away. It was nine countries. Now it’s 28. One day it might absorb countries in the Middle East, in Central Asia, and North Africa and who knows, it could, one day become a global union. I hope it does. I hope Brexit doesn’t put the brakes on this. And I hope, when it does finally reach a critical mass, it won’t be too late to save our planet from greedy, feuding, nation states.

Nation states are the problem. They’re not the solution. Not even Britain. Nation states like to think they can do whatever they want. They can make their own rules. And they do. But a world of competing nation states is a world that rapes the planet of its resources, that stifles the freedom of its people to travel, that overlooks famines and disasters in other countries. Nations go to war with other nations. Nations can’t manage the oceans. They can’t manage the climate. They can’t halt deforestation. They can’t stop mass extinctions. 

Yet the idea of the nation state is so deeply embedded in our collective view of the world that it is a difficult shibboleth to topple. All around the world children learn about the glorious histories of their own nations. Every other country is a potential enemy. That’s the lesson we all grow up believing. Brexit was driven by a whole basket of grievances, but more than this, it was driven by a nationalistic belief in British exceptionalism, the idea that we are somehow better than the Poles and Hungarians, that the sun that shines on Britain is our sun, that the fish in the sea are ours, that Queen still rules an empire, and the map is still pink. But none of this is true.

 The EU isn’t a global talking-shop like the UN. It’s a pragmatic single market with free trade and free movement and regulations and regulatory oversight and a court. It is an organisation that survives by respecting its members, celebrating their differences, and trying to find consensus. Imagine a world run like that. Is it such a bad idea? Really?

This is why I want to stay part of the club. I don’t expect Britain to rejoin for a generation at least – but I will support any campaign to rejoin. I’m a remainer. I will always be a remainer. And I’m proud of that.

 

Covid-19 / Corona Virus and Not Forgetting the Whale (12th Feb 2020)

[This was posted to my blog on 12th February 2020 when we were only just beginning to hear about Coronavirus - just in case you wonder why some of it sounds a little weird now...]

First an apology. I’m a rubbish blogger. This is my first post since my sixtieth birthday blog, and that was, ahem, five and a bit years ago. My blog history has skipped right past my third novel, ‘Not Forgetting the Whale,’ as if it never happened, and I probably ought to be thinking about blogging ahead of my next book, ‘The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild.’ But events of recent weeks (I’m thinking now about the Covid-19 Corona Virus) have reminded me of Not Forgetting the Whale, so maybe it is time, at last, for a blog.

Not Forgetting the Whale (if you haven’t read it) is a whimsical and slightly allegorical tale about the collapse of civilisation following a worldwide flu pandemic. If that sounds a little heavy, it might help to add that the story is told almost entirely from the perspective of a tiny Cornish fishing community. The fictional village of St Piran was a familiar environment for me to write about. I was seventeen when my family left Nairobi and reinvented themselves as shopkeepers in Mevagissey, a village on the Cornish coast. My mother had grown up there, and she longed to go back. My parents bought a general store in the square, right by the harbour, and I worked there, during school and university holidays, stacking shelves, slicing bacon, and delivering groceries to houses around the village. One of my regular deliveries was to the writer Colin Wilson who lived a short way out of town in a rambling old farmhouse. It was a real writer’s home – filled with books. ‘I should love to be a writer,’ I told him once, after I had carried a box of groceries into his kitchen. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you want to be a writer, then you will be. You won’t have any choice.’

I thought, at first, I would hate Mevagissey. My friends were far away, and this little town (especially in winter) was desperately quiet and remote. But, like Joe, the protagonist of Whale, I discovered instead a most extraordinary community. Within weeks I had learned the names and faces of dozens of villagers, I had made new friends, and I had started to understand the support network that every villager seemed to be part of. It was unexpected. It was a joy.

I wanted to write about this for a long time. What I needed was a story. On a train from London to Liverpool I found myself reading a magazine article by the science writer Debora Mackenzie. The title of the article was, ‘Could a Pandemic bring down Western Civilisation?’ The idea was simple, yet terrifying. Complexity theory suggests that once a society develops beyond a certain level, it becomes dangerously fragile. It reaches a point where even a minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down. A pandemic flu – for example. I had my story. I became fascinated by arcane things like … supply chains.

The whole way our civilisation works – even the systems involved in putting food onto our tables - has become labyrinthine in its complexity, involving high-tech farm machinery, refrigerated warehouses, networks of specialist distributors, and complicated packaging. It relies on the availability of fuel, spare parts for all the machines, the health and reliability of drivers and packers and dozens of other trades, the electronic exchange of currency, good road, rail, and other transport networks, and who knows how easy it would be for any one of these systems to fail. The fact that it all works amazingly well means we don’t tend to think of it as a risky process. And yet it is. A small disruption could grind the whole machine to a halt. 

This is the central thesis behind Not Forgetting the Whale. A pandemic flu, originating in the Far East, is brought unwittingly to Britain by passengers on a long distance flight, and after that, public fear takes over. Oil imports stop. Key workers stay home. Power stations grind to a halt. Shops are raided and shelves are emptied of produce. I had a quotation in my mind, ‘Civilisation is only three square meals away from anarchy.’ This quotation (from the TV Series Red Dwarf) drove the story.   

And now, here we are facing Covid-19. It’s a flu-like virus from China that threatens to explode into a pandemic.  Could it lead to the same situation that faces St Piran in The Whale?

And I suppose the answer has to be … yes.

But there is a glimmer of hope. In Not Forgetting the Whale the forecast for humanity is grim. But humankind (in general) and St Piran (in particular) defy the pundits and bounce back. They do this by, well, … pulling together and sharing things, and generally being nice to one another. They overturn all the assumptions of apocalyptic fiction that see us hunkering down with shotguns and fighting over the last scrap of bread. The flu virus, far from destroying us, ends up bringing us closer together. Maybe that should give us hope.   

Although the villagers of St Piran do have the help of a whale, of course. Let’s not forget that.  

Glastonbarby ... and the significance of sixty (4th July 2014)

Perhaps I shouldn't admit to this. Maybe I should post a youthful photo and pretend to be thirty five. Oh dear. This is harder than I thought it would be. 
Deep breath.
Here goes ...
... in four days time I shall be sixty. 
Ouch!
It might be easier if the birthday cards were kinder. Instead the convention seems to be a comical card with a sting inside. 'At your age it's a good idea to test your hearing,' reads one. 'So I bought you this musical card.' (Hint: It isn't a musical card.) 'You're at a wise age,' headlines another. And inside, 'wise my hair falling out? Wise my memory going?'
Oh well.
We had a fabulous party, (Glastonbarby) with sixty (natch) wonderful guests. We set up our mini-marquee and my brilliant son-in-law Ian fixed up a live link to the Glastonbury Festival on a colossal screen and we all ate hog roast, and drank Pimms and countless bottles of wine to the sounds of Metallica and Brian Ferry and we all partied ridiculously late into the night. Mike (Plymouth to Banjul) Taylor set off the biggest firework display I've seen for ages. Sue made an amazing cake. And our kids showed an embarrassing surprise video montage (Sixty Years in the Making) with photographs of me from childhood to bloated old age (including a picture of me in a frock as Mariana of the Moated Grange in a school production of Measure for Measure - not the sort of family photo I'd normally choose to share.) There were surprise guests. There were balloons. There was bunting with my face and age. There was an awful lot of hugging. Actually it was just about the best barbecue night I could imagine. Twenty one people stayed the night and the next morning we barbecued bacon and sausages and black pudding and Sue made a huge trough of scrambled eggs and the sun shone. Thank you to everyone who came, who helped with food and tents and loads of other stuff. It was awesome. You were awesome.
And here's the thing. I don't feel sixty. Really I don't. I've figured out that it isn't a milestone at all. It isn't this big deal. It's just a day, and hey, tomorrow will be another one. Two of our best friends bought me a T-shirt that reads 'Old Guy,' on the front. 'It fits perfectly,' I've told them. 'But I've put it in the drawer. I'm keeping it for when I get old.' 

A New Cover Revealed (15th May 2014)

I don’t imagine Dickens lost an awful lot of sleep worrying about the cover designs for his novels. ‘Bleak House,’ he might have thought, ‘let’s go for a plain cover, in brown leather, with the title embossed in gold.’ ‘Ah Charles,’ the publisher might have said, ‘we’re toying with a plain red cover with a silver embossed title.’ Controversial. 

But these days - covers matter. They matter a lot. It can be irksome for a writer who has spent two years working on a novel to discover that the cover is the main topic of interest for the local book group. But publishers too, get very exercised by cover designs. Of course they do. A good cover can sell a lot of books. A poor cover can consign a book to the remainders store. Enter one of the most important people in the business - the cover designer. The cover designer has to be an artist, an alchemist, and a magician. He or she has to capture the essence of a novel in a single image, has to make it striking, compelling, and simultaneously unique. It has to be a cover you wouldn’t be embarrassed to be hiding behind on the tube, but a cover that will catch your eye on a book shelf. It has to scatter hints on genre and location and mood. It has to be serious. It has to be light. Who, I wonder, would be a cover designer?

 I love the hardback cover for ‘The Coincidence Authority.’ The plain image of the seagull and the sharp blue of the background seem to capture the whimsical essence of the story in a clear, eye-catching way. I also love the dreamy, faraway qualities of the US cover So I was a little surprised when Orion’s brilliant paperback editor Gail Paten told me that she was commissioning a redesign. Did it need one? ‘Yes,’ she told me. And she was pretty emphatic. Paperbacks are different creatures to hardbacks. The rules change. We talked about some of the ideas. Should it reflect the African themes of the story? Or something else?

Today W&N have revealed the new cover, and Gail has blogged about the hard work that went into the design. It is humbling to discover just how many people and how many ideas and how much talent went into the new cover.  But for me it is perfect. It captures, with the wheel of fortune, the essential mystery of chance that lies at the heart of the book, with echoes of the fairground where the young Azalea is abandoned, and hints of a buried romance; and it does all this in a brilliantly colourful way. The tag line if perfect (She believes in fate. He believes in fact. What are the chances of a happy ending?) It is so good, I wish I’d written it myself. So thank you Gail, and Steve and Edward and everyone else who contributed. I absolutely love the cover.

What do you think? Please let me know …

Father of the Bride (20th Feb 2014)

I hadn’t expected to be quite so emotional. I know I’d written a teary speech, and I’d joked to one and all that I’d be welling up, but deep inside I thought I’d sail through with my usual jolly demeanour. And then, five minutes before collecting my beautiful daughter, Zoe, from her room, one of the bridesmaids brought me a gift. It was from Zoe. A watch. On the back was engraved, ‘Dad – Forever your little girl.’

And that was it. I was in bits.

I went to collect Zoe and when she emerged, like a butterfly from a chrysalis, she was so beautiful I was crying like a baby.

Giving a daughter away should be the hardest thing in the world, but it’s the easiest. I’ve never seen Zoe looking so lovely, or so happy. My hand was shaking when I walked her up the aisle. I’m so happy for her, and I’m happy for my wonderful new son-in-law Ian (whom we all love).

It was a spectacular wedding. We took over the Wordsworth Hotel in Grasmere right in the heart of the English Lakes. In practice we seemed to take over the whole village. This was February. No one else was there. Every time I crossed the square I bumped into wedding guests. It should have rained – but it didn’t. The sun shone. The Prosecco flowed.  We had a brilliant cartoonist (Christopher Murphy), a stunning band (Superfreak), an amazing cake (Val Cooper), heart-stopping floral displays (Gill Maxim) and a whole load of wonderful guests. I only left the dance floor once in three hours. So thank you to my lovely wife Sue (who also looked gorgeous), to all our friends and relations, and to everyone who helped make the day go so well – the bridesmaids were fabulous – the best man was hilarious – the fireworks were awesome – the photographer was a genius - the flowers were spectacular; but thank you most of all to my stunningly beautiful daughter. I will never forget the day I gave you away. Forever your Dad.