London is full of echoes and shadows of the past. Sometimes this past was barbarically cruel towards those who were different. These poems are poems of remembering and healing.

I've drafted the novel 5 times now, and edited it twice. I think I need some fresh eyes on it now!

In the novel “Green Twining” the life of the Coffin Family of Green Twining Farm moves – seemingly as it always has done – slowly, silently, haunted by the ghosts of the past. But Joe Coffin, apart from being the farmer’s son, is a keen amateur musician and has recently finished building a spinet. And Tim, an old romantic friend of Joe’s, aware that the spinet might be ready, has come up with an idea for a folk trio he could put together for the next Althwaite Folk Festival combining his own...

In the novel ‘Green Twining’ the Coffin family live at ‘Green Twining Farm’. In the early nineteenth century Green Twining Farm was much bigger than it was in the 1980s. It had twice as much land. So – wanting to show off his affluence – the farmer enlarged the farmhouse to almost twice its previous size. But then later, in less affluent times, when land had to be sold off again, a much smaller farm had to support farm buildings and a farmhouse which were now far too big for the farm. As a...

In ‘Green Twining’ the farmhouse of Green Twining Farm either literally is, or maybe just feels haunted. It is certainly haunted by memories of a painful family history which make it hard to move or even breathe without coming into rhythm with an uncomfortably restrictive past. And every time the walls of the farmhouse move a little more, settling a little further towards the little stream which flows past the farm, the building creaks and groans. Visitors are few and infrequent. The whole...