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Ghost
A brief record of a confusing and eerie thing that happened to me on a moor, from a couple of years ago
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Memories Of My Time Living In Edwardian Britain
(Reposted, free for everyone to read, because I prefer it that way.)
Things About The Countryside That Make Me Angry, And Some Photographs I Have Taken Of Them
Subscribe now Autumn is possibly the time of year that makes me most furious when I’m in the countryside. It’s coming again soon, worse luck, and as always it will be disgusting and messy. Look at the state of this path I found a few autumns ago in
Diary Notes, November, 2022: The Pleasure Garden
Subscribe now It is surprisingly easy to hypnotise yourself into a pre-World War II fantasy around here, especially at this tourism-unfriendly time of year. Most of the lanes behind our village don’t technically go anywhere, fading out to wild clematis and mud at lonely farms and dark cottages with
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Why I Am Here And Not There
Today I feel more tired of social media than ever before and more thankful for Substack than ever before. Yesterday I deleted my Twitter account, having been briefly drawn back there for the usual reason: the desire to give books I’ve put every ounce of myself into the best
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A Quarter Of A Hundred
On part-climbed mountains, two Welsh graves and the complex path to the 25th building I've resided in...
Nottinghamtopia
Thoughts On Finishing A Novel
A Pleasant Illness: Thoughts From The Desk Of A Vinyl Nerd
* I have been in a huge, even-more-time-consuming-than-I’d-thought-it-would-be phase of finetuning my record collection recently. I’d call it a spring clean, if it hadn’t gone on since long before spring and I felt totally confident that it is going to be 100% finished before summer. Part of my
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Native Tongue (A Short Story)
This is a short story I wrote a few months ago exclusively for paying subscribers which I’ve now decided to post for everyone to read for free. If you would like to upgrade to a paid subscription to this site it helps me post more regularly. There’ll also
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Dear Amazon Drone Complaints Department
“Dear Amazon Drone Complaints Department. I was informed that my package would arrive between 9.31 and 10.12 and that my drone would be Silas. Package did not arrive until 10.43, which was doubly frustrating since the package contained an avocado, and 9.31-10.12 was the one
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The Home Stretch
A subscriber to this page who read my most recent book, Villager, told me, "Good luck topping that." I've been doing my best over the last few months. I can just about see the end now, a few hilltops - or, perhaps more aptly considering the
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Seven Great Things About Badgers
Subscribe now I came up with this list during my research for my frequently quite badgery ninth book, 21st-Century Yokel, which was published in 2017. It would not be an overstatement to say that my life was very badger-themed at the time. I fed peanuts and cat biscuits to the