Easter Sunday, we were walking…

…sang Patti Smith, once upon a time. Only partially true in our case, though we talked about walks and other journeys during the arts weekend we facilitated at Othona (The Map is not the Territory). It was great to be able to lay out all the maps from my journey so far… Our house is [...]

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Precise History of a Pebble: Journeys of Discovery at Othona

We spent a long weekend at Othona in West Dorset, participating in a ‘reading retreat’ with the title Journeys of Discovery, led by Mandy Addenbrooke. I’ll let Othona tell its own story, provide a few establishing slots from the first morning to show the kind of place it is, and say it is as familiar [...]

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Shadow Trolls of the M5

Going to Othona, on a six-hour motorway drive, I took some more random pictures. Every fifteen minutes (the same frequency with which Simon Templar (‘The Saint’) would light a cigarette in the earlier novels of Leslie Charteris) I snapped a picture from the passenger window. Result? Lots of wood-fringed banks, seen in a rushed-past blur. [...]

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The Map is Not the Territory: live and unplugged

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned, in a roundabout way, a course that Jennie and I are delivering next year. The Solitary Walker suggested I should plug the course and ‘not be so shy and retiring’, so (allowing my finely-honed marketing reflexes to prevail over my introverted diffidence) here goes… It’s called ‘The Map [...]

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