• I’m so pleased that I’ve finished the fourth Axel Storm story before I go off to MIlan on Sunday. These things can play on the mind. I’ll be able to go away and not fret that I should really be writing.

    I seem to have been away from home for most of this month. I tell myself that I’ll try and do some work while I’m away – but it never works out that way. A full day talking to children in school is very tiring and I never really get anything done while I’m away.

    Having finished my story and emailed it to my editor, there’s nothing else to do but faff! Checking stuff before I go off on Sunday. Online checking in, google mapping, working out itineraries, charging batteries and getting ready for when I get back because I have two days in school in Gloucester at the end of next week. Busy, busy, busy, then a whole two and a half weeks at home for lots and lots of writing!


  • The temperature is rising, there’s a gentle rain and the cats are going crazy because the pond is heaving with frogs. They are croaking away, singing sweet songs of love to each other and there’s a whole load of spawning going on!


  • After a couple of days away, a long drive back and then a morning of re-booking flights with a clogged up brain, it was great to get out for a walk this afternoon. There is a vast quarry up the road from me, where they are digging out stone for building and paving and the like.

    All around the quarry are scowles – left over slag from previous workings – which get taken over by nature, making the distinctive landscape of the Forest of Dean.

    In the photographs, you should be able to see how the Quarry are now bulldozing their slag up against the old scowles. In places it looks like a glacier of rock pouring into the spaces in between. I noticed a cardboard box on a tree stump below one of these piles of terminal moraine. I thought it may have a warning not to come too close writing on it, but no, it was an airgun target! Pop bottles, strewn around, evidence of kids doing a bit of target practice.

    It won’t take long for the raw, bare scree to get colonised by lichen and moss, then covered in leaves, which will rot and provide compost for the trees and plants that will eventually turn this industrial eyesore into a walker’s tourist heaven, another scowle, another piece of classic forest landscape.