Adventures

The Premises Studios in Hackney features prominently in the book as our hero blags a job there and spends many an hour sitting on reception, thinking deep thoughts, alongside doing duller work things like setting up practice rooms, taking phone bookings and cleaning toilets. Eugh. (Post script edit: I am told he never once cleaned…

It’s Beltane so we (that’s the royal ‘we’ because it was 100% my idea 🤦🏼‍♀️) felt obliged to go somewhere vaguely hippyish and do some ‘paganing’. We headed to Uffington (word to the wise, there is no toilet at the car park so if you’ve got a badly behaved bladder you’ll need to nip into…

A sunny Sunday afternoon along the local canal with ma dawg. Sometimes I like to get out by myself to let my mind mull over the hugeness of the project so I can panic about the sheer amount of work and agony it’s going to take before we hold the finished novel in our hands…

Our adventures have stepped up a gear. Not only did I get us slightly lost (well, technically we weren’t lost because I knew where we were, it’s just that we weren’t supposed to be there) but I also got us slightly sunburned (well, again, technically I didn’t actually get us burned, that was the fault…

Another working adventure, this time at Westonbirt Arboretum. Westonbirt in spring is like a giant explosion of green froth, everywhere you look. The new leaves are frothy, the blubells are frothy, all the shades of green are frothy. I got overstimulated and had to go and have a coffee. Flat, not frothy. (That rhymes, go…

Then we moved on to Camden – scene of many gig locations and one or two strops, fall outs and fights. Normal young man things, really. Camden restored our vitality thanks to the second hand smoke of the huge aromatic ‘medicinal’ doobies every second person was smoking. Gotta admit I did a bit of deep…

We did more train tootling, this time to the big city, Londinium, to visit some of the places used in the book. There was a serious dearth of flowers but enough greenery to make up for that. One location frequently mentioned in the book is The Premises Studios. The book’s protagonist gets a job there,…

Westonbirt, season of trees, leaves, willow animals, mists and mellow fruitfulness. Or that might be a Keats poem, I get the two things muddled sometimes.

Tetbury is a tiny town which has more cobbles than people. It potentially also has more polo ponies than people (which I personally believe to be a good thing). Tetbury station claims to have had a section of platform exclusively for polo ponies to which I can only respond “well played, horses, well played.”

When we started this project we agreed to meet regularly to check how things were progressing and to keep a steady forward momentum, to keep chipping away at the writing, plot, characters and all that jazz. We tootled off to Oxford, on the train, which was rather jolly, and once there we abstained from every…