about coat with long sleeves

there are some similarities between me and my protagonist

If you know me, or if you’ve puzzled over the cover of the book and the images on these pages, it won’t have taken you long to realise that there are some similarities between me and my protagonist. The beard’s a bit of a giveaway and you can see that my age is about right, too. It would be foolish of me to deny or ignore it.

When I started writing ‘Coat with Long Sleeves’, I sort of fell into it like Alice down the hole. I’d never penned anything before that wasn’t a technical dissertation. I found writing creatively from memory came rather more fluently than writing from imagination. Then, when I got used to it, the imaginative parts became more absorbing and rewarding. But I decided that I would leave it all in, anyway; that’s the beauty of self-publishing. Some of the early scenes are based loosely on real events, but most aren’t. You’ll have to decide, if you’re interested. But the fascinating thing is that some of the seemingly least plausible storylines are actually the real ones. Smoke blackened thatch, for example. And Ralph Ralph; he exists. And just to really confuse you, the incident in the underground gent’s lavatory in Nottingham was true, too, though my protagonist dismisses it as a lie. So, as he might say, ‘now you really don’t know what to believe, do you?’

The early company stuff is also broadly true and I kept this in out of interest because the original dot-com boom of the nineties is largely unknown or forgotten by today’s millennials and the time when you could buy two company vans for the price of the cheapest IBM PC clone (without the hard disk!) is long gone and now seems scarcely believable. That’s what it was like, and the whole thing really was batshit crazy for a while if you were swept along in it. Similarly, some of the childhood anecdotes may be of interest only to those who were there – I’m thinking Civil War cards and shilling school dinners – but I hope others will be intrigued by this lost, innocent world, so they stayed in as well.

the inspiration behind the story was the Smoke Blackened Thatch

But back to the inspiration behind the story. It was the Smoke Blackened Thatch. I found it in the roof of my farmhouse in just the way my protagonist did, by poking a hole in the ceiling. What if I could find something up there that I knew FOR SURE was hidden five hundred years ago? It might be anything. This void is a covert, undisturbed sanctuary and there really are smoke blackened insects and the rye straw really was harvested by a medieval peasant and set there half a millennium ago.

It exercised my imagination. It didn’t take long to make the connection with the natural world and how it’s changed over this time. And how the way people live has changed, but also how the way people THINK has changed. And then to link it to their supernatural beliefs and the green men in the roof bosses of the church and to the Nymptons – George, Bishop’s, King’s and the mysterious Queen’s that no one can quite place – all sacred groves, all ancient and echoes of pre-Christian worship, and all still here just a few miles down the road.

In this quiet part of North Devon the people, the farming families, they’re still here and have a story to tell.

But the unique thing is that although the landscape with its wind turbines and modern tin sheds has inevitably changed and the roads are busier, one thing remains the same in this quiet part of North Devon. The people. The farming families who still live in these ancient buildings and farm the same fields as their distant ancestors. They’re still here as well and all have a story to tell.