Essays and shorter writing
I’ve spent many years publishing things on the internet. Below is a small collection of some of my favourite pieces of writing that I’ve created over that time, presented in no particular order, free for anyone to enjoy or share.
This Is Your Forging: A letter to my seventeen-year-old self
Hello, you. Hello, me.
You are 6,360 days old. If I were to stand before you now, you would tell me that you know all there is to know about yourself. You are wrong.
King's Men: A short story
The wind whipped across the mountainside, howling like a demon. There were no trees to impede it, only straggling gorse bushes clinging low to the ground, and against it Mick’s heavy woollen coat may as well have been thin cotton.
Tholtans of Mann: A memoir
There’s a particular place in the Isle of Man; an endless avenue of fuchsia trees, which in most seasons is like any other country lane, but in summer becomes a tunnel of purple and pink flowers. The scent of them saturates the air.
Betty's Reading Room
At first glance, there is not much to the tiny ferry port of Tingwall in Orkney. It would be tempting to write the whole place off as nothing more than a farm, a part-time ticket office and a pier. The thing is, this is not entirely true.