The lyrics to Bob Dylan’s iconic song of 1964, The Times They Are A-Changin’ seem more apt than ever. With the impending divisive US presidential election, Covid 19 and the huge challenges in its wake, the UK setting itself adrift from the EU – the biggest trading bloc in the world – and the climate crisis, you couldn’t have imagined a more toxic bunch of hurdles before us. Dylan’s words in the third verse, Come senators, congressmen…, apply to all politicians wherever they are. Let’s hope they heed the call.  

Come gather ’round, people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
And you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin’
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’

Bob Dylan

Meanwhile, back home, where weak sun shines on fading leaves, soon to explode in a riot of autumn colours before fluttering down to the ground, plants well past their best slowly hunker down for winter, tall grasses flutter in the light breeze and probably stay that way until the first frost freezes their wispy tufts hard and makes them look like frozen spears, it’s autumn. 

My latest book, Otto and Frankie, is available in all formats. It’s different from anything else I’ve written and took almost three years in the making. 

It’s about a dying man’s fight against injustice, his wife’s unusual affair, and the love from his long-lost daughter. 

I’m told it’s a compelling read.

amazon.co.uk. amazon.com.

Days Without End is the title of the epic and intimate novel by Sebastian Barry that manages to create spaces for love and safety in the noise and chaos of history, and one of my best reads.  It could also be an apt description of the extraordinary troubling times the world is going through. The daily dose of depressing news seems relentless.

But I’m an optimist, inspired by how mankind and individuals have overcome terrible events and personal traumas to build a better future. ‘Hope springs eternal,’ first used by an English essayist in 1732 describing mankind’s continuum of hope, sounds a better slogan to me.

I get that there has to be a plan and belief to overcome adversity but think how Nelson Mandela would have coped with thirty years imprisonment if he hadn’t had hope,  how hope and belief drove Alexander Fleming to discover antibiotics, and how the British people during the Second-World-War hoped the war would end the way it did.

Without hope history would have been very different.

Let me share some reasons for hope. 

Firstly, the virus. 

Many people in the know are saying vaccines will be available for Covid-19 next year, even a chance that they’ll be one ready for selected immunisation by the end of the year: China and Russia say they are vaccinating key workers already. The earlier vaccines may have limitations, but they’ll start to stop the virus’s spread, and further development will improve them, as has happened in almost every medical advance in history. Several treatments are now in use by doctors and medical staff to lessen the severe effects of the virus, bringing the death rate down. 

The doomsters say vaccines may not work, it’ll take several years to vaccinate the world’s population, they’ll be many non-vaxers, and more. Oh yeah; but look at the positive. At the outset of the pandemic, commentators said it’ll take years to have a 100% effective vaccine, and it may, but at the least, in just over nine months, we have several vaccines in trails that are showing promising results. That’s positive, and meanwhile new treatments for Covid patients  will be discovered while the existing ones improve. Man’s ingenuity knows no bounds. We can send a rocket millions of light years away in space to land on a spec on a distant planet.   

The virus is devastating, a million people have died worldwide, but we may be at the beginning of the beginning, and a tiny spec of light flickers at the end of the tunnel.

Climate Crisis

This week Marks and Spencer announced the end to selling milk and milk products produced from cows fed on soya grown in destroyed rain forests. In future they will only sell milk products from cows fed on an environmentally friendly feed. This is a huge step to push back on the climate crisis, and, I’m sure, many more food retailers will follow, if they already haven’t.

In Turkey, where coral reefs are dying because of global warming and man’s sea pollution, scientist have discovered ways to transplant live coral alongside almost extinct coral, which in time regenerates the reef, saving it, and bringing it back to full health.  

Also this week from China: “We aim to have CO₂ emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060,” Chinese President Xi Jinping told the United Nations General Assembly via a video link on 22 September.

All of this is encouraging, to be applauded, fuelling my optimism that man is inherently progressive, and despite setbacks and some politicians trying to manipulate events for their owns agendas, a great many people – scientists, doctors, medical practitioners, commentators, campaigners, social workers, and even sane politicians, and many others – are working to make this a better world.

Stay safe.

My latest book, Otto and Frankie, is available in all formats. It’s different from anything else I’ve written and took almost three years in the making. 

It’s about a dying man’s fight against injustice, his wife’s unusual affair, and the love from his long-lost daughter. 

I’m told it’s a compelling read.

amazon.co.uk. amazon.com.

‘World’s loneliest elephant’ allowed to leave zoo for better life. (The Guardian)

A small zoo in Pakistan, not known for its care of the captive wild animals, agrees to release an elephant back into the wild.  Sounds good, but it’s not quite an open-the-cage-and-let-the animal-run-free job. Kaavan, a cause célèbre for animal rights activists and dubbed the world’s loneliest elephant, lost his partner in 2012 and has slid downhill mentally and physically since then. The zoo, much criticised for its poor conditions – two lions died their recently – bowed to international pressure and agreed to release Kaavan and send him to a large animal sanctuary in Cambodia where he’ll be in the company of many other elephants. Elephants are highly social animals and need the company of their fellow creatures. Let’s hope Kaavan’s new life will banish his blues and bring him back to full health. But he still has a long way to go before his revival is complete. More –  

A sense of autumn.

Bare feet on a cold stone floor. Faded lavender with still a few blooms and the last few bees gathering dregs of pollen. Drenched grass in the early morning from autumn dew. A few white butterflies flitting around in the midday warm sun. Leaves floating down from the overhanging trees. It’s coming. Soon it’ll be upon us with all its dramatic colours and suddenly bare trees and ploughed fields. With such an odd world around us, I wonder what it will bring? Change – certainly. A better future – hopefully. Some sense – surely? Read more on smelly autumn. 

My new book, Otto and Frankie, is now available in paperback and e-book. It’s different from anything else I’ve written and took almost three years in the making. 

It’s about a dying man’s fight against injustice, his wife’s unusual affair, and the love from his long-lost daughter. I’m told it’s a compelling read.

E-book at promotional price: amazon.co.uk. amazon.com.Paperback: amazon. 

I’ve been away for a few days with my wife and daughter and had the good fortune to stay at Capel Courtyard in Kent. It calls itself a B & B, but this is no ordinary B & B, surpassing all my expectations. It was booked for me, and although when told about it I nodded in agreement and said how wonderful it looked, I didn’t really register how magnificent it would be. Dating back to the mid 1800 hundreds, it has been renovated lovingly by the present owners over twenty years. Early in the building work they had to have the courtyard (as shown in the photo) lifted to reconstruct the drains. It’s truly superb and must be one of the best B & Bs in the country. An excerpt from Capel Courtyard’s website follows:  

‘High ceilings, gothic arches, and lots of windows, create a gloriously light and open feel, offering a multitude of differing views of the courtyard and surrounding gardens. Capel Courtyard is principally a peaceful home from home, rather than a hotel. In keeping with this ethos, we do not have TV’s in our bedrooms or reception spaces. WiFi is however available everywhere, and for the less technologically focused there are books and games.

The Courtyard dates from 1860 and originally comprised the subsidiary buildings – stables, cart sheds, coachman’s house and chauffeur’s cottage – to a grand mansion built by the Austen family (relatives of the famous novelist Jane Austen) and designed in Italian gothic style by Thomas Wyatt.’ Capel Courtyard website.

Using this as our base, we spent the time walking in the Kent countryside, visiting delightful gardens, old oust houses, an English vineyard producing excellent wine, and three good restaurants, whose impressive and rigorous Covid 19 precautions made us feel safe. 

It’s surprising how a few days away in a beautiful setting, good company and food, and with interesting places to visit, revitalises and relaxes you, but it did that and more for the three of us. It beats foreign travel and Covid and quarantine worries!

My new book, Otto and Frankie, is now available in paperback and e-book. It’s different from anything else I’ve written and took almost three years in the making. 

It’s about a dying man’s fight against injustice, his wife’s unusual affair, and the love from his long-lost daughter. I’m told it’s a compelling read.

E-book at promotional price: amazon.co.uk. amazon.com.

Paperback: amazon. 

I think this week’s going to be fun and easy. A few days with my wife and daughter staying in a quaint cottage, wandering around the English countryside, visiting some show gardens, enjoying good food, and two or three books to read. 

But next week should be different. My new book, Otto and Frankie, is officially launched on Friday, 4^th September. I’m not expecting my world to turn upside down, it’ll probably be quite normal, but I started thinking about this book in early 2017, finally typing the first words in August of that year, finishing it in autumn 2019, and messing around trying to get it published ever since. So, I’ll have all the promo stuff to do, and then enjoy for a day or two a feeling of achievement and elation. 

Why did it take me so long, you may ask? Well – it’s different to anything I’ve written before. My previous eleven books have been crime thrillers, where normal people find themselves entwined in very abnormal situations and resort to dark deeds. I felt I’d had enough of that. The world’s pretty dark at the moment, and I wanted to try something new.

Otto and Frankie – a dying man’s fight against injustice, his wife’s bizarre affair, and the love from his long-lost daughter – digs into people’s emotions, the life-changing challenges they face and how they cope, grief, raw emotions, love, and above all the triangular relationship between a dying man, determined to the last, with his loving but disloyal wife and his long-lost daughter who he’s reunited with for his last few weeks after twenty years apart. 

I don’t know how Otto and Frankie will be received, but I enjoyed writing it, and hope others will enjoy reading it.  

To pre-order e-book: amazon.uk, amazon.com. Buy the paperback now.

The parents I did not know – a short story about a man searching for the father he’d never met – is also written in the same genre and can be read in full elsewhere on this site.

I’ve always been in awe of vultures. Ever since I was young and taken by my parents to see a film, ‘Where No Vultures Fly,’ about ivory poaching in Kenya – sadly still happening – I’ve found all bird predators impressive and noble-looking creatures, but to me the vulture ranks the most magnificent. And so when I read this clip, I wished for more.  

‘A wild, free-flying nine-foot-winged bird of the Alps and Pyrenees; a bone-eating, tortoise-dropping inhabitant of wolf-haunted montane crags; here over the Derbyshire moors, with their grouse and their sadly piping pipits – the very idea seems somehow momentous.

Even as we watched the creature – a second-year, probably female, bearded vulture (Gypaetus barbatus) – sail along the wind-blasted gritstone edge at Shining Clough Moss, it was hard to credit something so expressive of European wilderness. Yet there it floated with barely a flap – massive, glamorous, completely calm – and wheeling away from aggressive buzzards that mithered after it. These lesser predators, which are themselves no mean aerial masters, looked by the side of the giant no bigger than jackdaws. Each one in its entirety was less than one wing’s length of the vulture.

Yet there have been precedents and predictions of just such a visitation to Derbyshire. On 4 June 1927, two griffon vultures were seen in the skies over Ashbourne. Sadly, the record has since been rejected, but there are some who still believe in those birds of nearly a century ago.’ More at The Guardian.