WILDLIFE WRITER, PHOTOGRAPHER AND ARTIST
Last night I had a lovely meal at the Grant Arms Hotel in Grantown-on-Spey before seeing a talk by Iolo Williams. Despite current news and hysteria, the lecture room was full to the rafters and extra chairs had to be squeezed into gaps. Iolo’s new book is called “The UK’s Top 40 Nature Sites” and […]
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For the past few months, I’ve had a growing sense of being in the wrong place. I’ve lived in Hertfordshire all my life, but since coming back from university in Cumbria, I haven’t felt like I’ve belonged in the south. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I’ve been lucky enough to spend a lot of holidays […]
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It seems as if spring has come early, and I’m certainly not complaining. For the past few days I’ve been stuck indoors trying (and mostly failing) to write through an infuriating case of The Block. Multiple times I’ve caught myself gazing outside at the gorgeous sunshine, listening to the spring sounds of birds and bees […]
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The light was still faint as I drove through fields of green. Cars tore past in a work-fuelled rush, while I cruised leisurely in the opposite direction. My focus was on the forest today – my only objective to walk through trees and listen to wild sounds. A flash of copper caught my eye and […]
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December was quite a dry month for me in terms of inspiration, so I apologise for the distinct lack of posts over the past few weeks. It is high time for some fresh writing, but before beginning anything new in 2019, I wanted to reflect on the progress I made in 2018. Last year began […]
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If you love wildlife, then I need your help! I’ve entered the Wildlife Blogger of the Year 2018 competition, organised by Terra Incognita. The theme is “a favourite wildlife moment of 2018”, and I chose my encounter with a wild grey seal in the Farne Islands, which some of you may remember reading about. I […]
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The Egan’s Greenway is an unexpected jungle in the middle of smoke-belching industry and deckchair tourism. The mundane sounds of traffic are deafened by the furious chatter of cicadas – enormous insects that seem prehistoric. Their strange call is like the sound of angry water sprinklers, growing louder and faster until it reaches an alarming […]
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Recently I’ve become a writer who doesn’t write much. I have ideas, many a day, of what to write, but somehow I never get round to making them a reality. I’m blaming this latest case of writer’s block on my new occupation, so I’ve decided to write about that. I have been accepted as a […]
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In 2017, 40-year-old author Gail Honeyman entered a story about a lonely and damaged young girl into a writing competition. Now winner of the Costa First Novel Award and scheduled to become Reese Witherspoon’s next film project, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine has become a triumph for modern literature. Our heroine, Eleanor, is evidently not […]
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As we turned into the car park at Honister Pass, the clouds were grumbling. Geoff Cox appeared and shook my hand in greeting, with the same kindliness he might offer to his closest friend. Having roamed the fells since childhood, the bracing chill and spattering rain are all too familiar to him. A gust of […]
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