to my website. If you have arrived here as a writer or specifically, a reader, or just by accident, I hope I can interest you to stay. The chances  are that we share an interest in any of the above (even accidents; life is full of them) and books.

Unlike so many author websites, I won’t tell you I am a best-selling author; if I were, I still wouldn’t tell you. If I were, I wouldn’t have to. What I will tell you is anything that interests me and hope that it will interest you too.

In this world of instant communication, as you read this on your computer or another instrument of technological genius, do you wonder where it all began, this world of reading and writing and language? No? Why should you. You don’t wonder how cornflakes began or what happens to effluent when you flush it down the toilet do you? Or do you? Perhaps, just perhaps, you have the sort of mind that pauses to wonder at the beauty of marigolds as you measure them. If so, that’s why you write, or why you read books – and why you’re still here.

I like to think it all began with those Cro Magnon cave-drawings twenty thousand years ago; the eye connects with the brain, the brain connects with the hand and the hand is driven by the need to express what the eye has seen and the brain has thought. Does that sound familiar, writers?

The Cro Magnon drawings are the earliest known demostration of the miracle of human mechanics and as I type this I am conscious of the link I am making back to those cave-dwellers; my computer is my flint.

Did language start there too? After all, making lines to represent shapes is not a long way from making shapes to represent sound is it? It’s the sort of conundrum I’ll be throwing into the conversation if you continue to visit my little corner of this universal drawing-room. I hope you do. I’ll tell you stories too.