August 2026
Is it really three years since I submitted the Portfolio element for my MA Travel & Nature Writing degree?
In the years since graduating my walking has taken me to all parts of Britain. My writing focus has switched between the local and the further afield. Until July 2025, this included putting together a monthly nature pieces for Radley News. I ‘retired’ after clocking up a grand total of 60 contributions and around 40,000 words. Local nature writing activities also included running sessions at a local primary school, building on a collaborative writing project with a school in Musanda (western Kenya) that led to publication of Cosmic Cats. I particularly enjoyed working with children in Years 4-6, helping them to create imaginative short-form pieces from ‘found’ objects.
Currrently, I’m pressing on with a bigger memoir project that I hope to bring to fruition this autumn. Developing material that I’ve written over the past five years (and writing some entirely new pieces), I switched my focus to the Universal Turing Machine project that has two key restrictions: 64 squares of wrting, each of which is limited to 1000 words. The 64 units restriction fits my age beautifully, which was just part of the attraction of the project. Here’s the link to the UTM website: https://www.universalturingmachine.org/
One of the themes of the memoir pieces is the unavoidable reality (for me) that life has generally been a bit of a puzzle. For all that I’ve led what looks from the outside like a conventional and successful life, on the inside it hasn’t been so straightforward. A dominant feature of the past few years - and this has been informed by thinking that has become writing - is what you might call my ‘internal wiring’. I’m aiming not to bore for Britain about this in my account of my life, but keen readers will see all the signs that, very late-in-the-day led to revelatory diagnoses.
I continue to enjoy leading walks and giving talks for ocal groups, as well as sharing some of my poetry, as opportunities allow. In 2026, this has tended to relate to Woodland, a collection of words and pictures inspired by Radley Large Wood, andancient woodland just to the south of Oxford. I worked on this project with fellow creators Diana Bell and Sylvia Vetta, aiming to raise awareness about a cherished habitat. I’ve shared poetry at the Oxford Poetry Circle, the Oxford Indie Book Fair, and the Wytham Woodland Festiva. In September, lI’ll be joining my Woodland collaborators at an Abingdon Library event.
What remains clear to me is the realisation that I find most fulfilment from fusing together personal reminiscence with focus on the places where I’ve travelled (which in reality means walked), and the wildlife I’ve seen there. Achieving that fusion, always with a nod to the literary influences that have found their way into different stages of my life, is where the focus of my thinking and creativity is directed. This all started on the MA course and grew through contributions to such as Tanya Shadrick’s The Cure for Sleep project. From those beginnings and with increasing purpose my body of words continues to grow.