Why I write:

My heart was opened one day in 1982. I had been expelled from the local further education college despite my mother’s pleading to the vice-principal. I lay poleaxed in her home.

Disgraced, unemployed, penniless, without direction. Any youthful promise I had lay in shreds in my mother’s sitting room where I sat not unlike a sphinx, gazing into the garden. For hours at a time.

Eight years before my father had died and now my mother's hope, the vehicle of her only son’s future, was wreckage, with him still inside.

On one of those days looking out of that room, my heart opened. At seventeen I was already fighting with a comprehensive loss of meaning. My father’s unlucky abandonment of his wife and children had knocked everyone sideways. And now I had been rejected from the only piece of structure that remained. Like a mollusc my angry teenage self fell open for the gasses of all the world to enter.

This opening of the heart let out the humours and in their place appeared nothing save hot air and arrogance, a bravado and will so robust as to be near substance. That energy source would last for twenty more years.

Decades later, my couch is on the banks of the Saigon River in Ho Chi Minh City. I have had some short pieces of writing published in little known literary magazines and webzines. No novel has yet seen the light of day. Elsewhere I have some redeeming, and modest achievements, that shall not appear here.

Yet an internal debate continues on. 

What is the legitimacy of a project in writing? 

And what is this unwritten covenant that artists agonise over? Some of us, know that while we are uncertain of being artists, we know that we are nothing else.

And so.

From 2010 I wrote ten short stories, ten poems, two blogs, edited my first novel Made in England and wrote a second novel Cape Wrath, kept up two weblogs, took 7000 photographs, edited the material of two academic friends.

During the period 2010 to 2023 I have become a navigator on a sea of trauma symptoms and a 'raft of the medusa' survivor of depression and anxiety so pronounced as to resemble CPTSD. I only became aware of this little by little, like rounding a very long curve into a straight.

This was an incredibly frightening yet productive period. I swam for kilometres off the coast of India on a daily basis. I holed up in an attic for a month in south-western China. I stayed in a two Tibetan monasteries, wore a mohawk, spent a long early summer in the capital of Laos. And that was just a six month period in 2013. By 2014 I had moved to Vietnam, via Bali, Singapore, Korea, Japan and France. I lived in Saigon for six years.

In a five year period from 2014 I have written and edited a long Vietnam novel, "This Bitter Red Earth".

In 2019 and 20 I wrote and edited a novel, The Book of Drifting, set in Japan.

In 2021 I wrote a feature - length screenplay, Day of the Long Shadow, set in the Covid era.

Crucially both Camus and Murukami noted that ‘toxins’ and ‘dark forces’ are released during the creation of a piece of art. I understand their thoughts. If depression is being stuck down a dark tunnel for months or years at a time, writing fiction, is lowering yourself down the well and out again every day although manifestly some, including myself, don’t do it well enough to pull up and out, spending whole days down there like some palaeontologist of the Cartesian depths obsessed with collecting more data, glimpsing more fireflies.

At this moment there are no options remaining. Only being true to oneself and Beckett's words, ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’ The dynamic tension within the main existential and structural joint of my adult life is like the atoms in red hot metal – moving frenetically about but, to the eye, nothing of the sort can be seen.

The pain of observing the waters of our dream life passing under the bridge and away must be a disturbing experience for every living thing but the insect. Now I have grown older and lived through many things. I understand though don’t always respect my limits. I’ve learned less about people, since their destiny interests me more than their reactions and destinies too tend to repeat each other. I’ve learned that selfishness, although it cannot be denied, must try to be clear-sighted. To enjoy only oneself is impossible, though I understand I have great gifts in this direction. If pure solitude exists I.

I’m sure we might certainly have the right to dream occasionally, of paradise. And yet two angels have always kept me from that paradise: one has a friend’s face the other, an enemy’s. Yes I know all this and nearly understand the price of love?

My aim in these following years is to give the reader pause, to convene an audience with himself.

To find one’s great artistic drive is to identify some store of trapped energy. During these recent years it has been wilfully sublimated and I have, in the resulting space, found some measure of patience. I explore life slowly without the youthful pressure to perform, thus saving on precious stores of energy. The need to write and create worlds emerged from the circumstances of my childhood. My Baijan father was an engineer at Hawker Siddeley. My mother, a dinner lady. When my father died she took on cleaning jobs – locomoting her old, cast iron bicycle across town in all weathers. She was also purblind then. Once upon a time, as a single woman, she worked at Unilevers as a poultry specialist but one you leave Unilever they never rehire you. So her career was over.

And so, there it was, we became poor. Our house was one street away from the countryside. As a consequence I spent large swathes of time playing war games in the countryside surrounding a disused railway line. Several large industrial companies backed onto this old branch line, it being a victim of Lord Beeching nine years earlier. I could watch the decline of industrial Britain at first-hand noting when each factory closed and the increasing level of rust on the piles of outdoor stock. With the exception of these eyesores lying like dinosaur bones behind walls of primordial weeds, it was a pretty area reclaimed by nature. It’s wildness bejewelled by flowers purple-headed thistles, egg and bacon flowers, daisies, violets, pink and white clover, rosehips, dandelions.

Amidst all this my day of freedom began. At around 9am when I would head for a friend’s house. In no time we would be in the countryside with his friends and be involved in some vast and long war game. These games were quite excellent because they were carried out in a theatre of operations that extended for one mile along the ex-rail tracks toward a village two miles away. In addition there were three vast meadows and the off-limit section of river bank at the rear of my father’s factory. The signs said, “Private Property. Keep Out.” The rest of the river bank was available but between it and the railway was open country and it made you a target unless you outflanked the opposition and lay in wait. 

On the other side of the railway line was a large pasture for sheep dented by a rolling declivity and at its northern border a busy B road. Across that road lay a large hedgerow and a secret way through endless knitted together sloe bushes and the desolation of the Blackstones Corporation dump. Now overgrown. The practice of dumping had ended years earlier. Pitted with craters and lumps of concrete with the rusty wire reinforcements protruding. This was the final sector of the war operations theatre. In the summer it was not unknown for me to return home at 9.00 or 9.30 pm, on the cusp of darkness.

My father died in 1974. The summers of the following two years broke heat records and swelled the heart of a poor mixed-race kid without a father into dreamland. These summers were magical in their length and, to this day, have constituted a benchmark in terms of comfort and freedom. 

My university years were of nearly the same calibre. It was during these years of the mid-1970s that I developed my taste for solitude and the melancholy that naturally attends it. My traits were forged in this crucible of death, freedom and solitude. When in the outdoors, crouching in some undergrowth I always stayed too long, allowing my thoughts to unravel and wonder – what if I stayed here, away from the reality of life? The mainstream of existence. In these bushes. Some predilection for loneliness was being established.

At twelve years of age I discovered the early morning. Another time without people. 6 am. By now I had a paper round. At 6 am no one, save the milkman in his float, stirred in Stamford. Even in the streets I had the whole world to myself. What a grand time. Alas here in Vietnam people rise at 4 am, the monks at 3, so I find myself in a culture of early risers. But in those days, with the sun dawning and the people abed, the world was mine.

And so to that artistic drive and tracing its source. Let’s try the shock and misery of my father’s death by bowel cancer; the freedom of his absence and the rebellion when the world came to curtail it; the ensuing poverty and deep-seated anger at the injustice of the world and its machinic, restraining nature. There is some unknown blood running down from my Caribbean ancestors, Arawak Indians or somesuch and its twisting, restless nature at last made me unsuitable for England.

The shock of employment, delivering newspapers, by means of a daily paper round, was visited on me by my English grandfather. Even through this first job the world was already closing in.

Of course it’s a job to know what it is all for. There is no answer to that. There is only observation and learning every day, trying to put it to good use.

For some years I was a teacher and researcher into poverty and education. Both the mind and the body eventually rejected this mode of existence. Performing within an industrial model according to scientific management principles in not what is required, not to afford the freedom to pour out words. Even with some sort of acquired freedom I have to travel 6000 miles and the problem came, as it did in England, of learning to throw off the governing implants of two schools, two colleges, four universities, not to mention numerous employers, the insidious regimen of alarms, bells, clocking on and off, timesheets, not to mention the bourgeois compulsion to work both Saturday and Sunday in order to inch ahead in some sort of illusory life.

With writing, taking photographs, one has unlimited time to work or play. My habit is Buddhist meditation early, and eat early. Then to work from 7 till noon. After lunch exercise and reading is next. Much like Mailer in the morning and Schopenhauer for the rest of the day. Zola penned five sides of foolscap each morning. Mailer took Fri, Sat and Sunday off. Murakami also works early and sleeps early. Best not to copy Balzac.

Let’s go back to the time when I was first, in my memory anyway, confronted with the instructions. ‘Keep Out’ and ‘Private Property.’ Restraint, pettiness, inequality, did not chime with me. Inability to share, remain open, allow always mystified me. Engand was littered with these signs, an unending series of curt demands everywhere you go. In addition, you were always being judged on your clothes, your background, your education, your speech. There were many ‘shoulds’ but underneath the increasingly service industry oriented American positivity message, there were precious few ‘coulds’ and even fewer ‘we’s’. I feel that ownership doesn’t matter, that Proudhon was correct, that right to roam in Norway is reflective of a greater good but in England, the country that invented Industry and the accompanying exploitation of its people (known by some as the great unwashed). Even with the south of France, England does not compare favourably …

Meursault is a man who refuses to lie. To lie is not only to say what isn’t true but also to say man than is true, and, as far as the human heart is concerned, to express more than one feels. He refuses to do this and all of society feels threatened. See this is what we do everyday. The truth of Meursault is negative. It’s what we are and what we feel but without some element of it no rendezvous can be made with ourselves and no attempt to discover the world can be made.