BACKGROUND TO THE BOOKS

This was my very first book and will probably always be my favourite for that very reason. It had very humble beginnings (the humility has continued) with some conversations I had with my daughter while walking our wonderfully attentive dog, Soba. It was about 2006, and we used to tell stories to each other as we walked, just making them up and telling a sentence each. The stories, of course, went in all crazy directions and we only had one rule which was that we were never to talk about clowns so inevitably the story became about clowns which while we were walking in the dark was a little bit scary for my younger daughter It was only seven or eight years old at the time. I remember this is one of the happiest times in my life.

 

At some stage, we started talking about writing some of these crazy stories down and I can recall saying that I would at least write a chapter. Just one. Around this time I was invited to Cardiff for a meeting and I had a couple of days afterwards where I got a bus up the coast to a little town called Oystermouth. I wanted to see a surfing break called Crab Island and secretly harboured hopes that I would be able to borrow a board myself, and hopefully a very thick wetsuit.

 

Well, I never got in the water but I ended up sitting on a loan bench on the top of these beautiful cliffs overlooking crab Island. Just off the little sandy beach were magnificent groupings of colourful sheds which I guessed were rented by holiday-makers in the summer. It was a spectacularly beautiful place.   I had also visited a range of Roman ruins that were scattered around the area and had been reading about Hadrian's Wall and a range of other remnants of the Roman Empire. What I noticed was that the Welsh were very proud that they had never been completely conquered by the Romans.

 

I guess it was some wonderings about what the place must have looked like when the Romans were conquering the other land that got me thinking about the connection between the time periods. Coincidentally, at school, I had been teaching a course called Theory of Knowledge which among other things, considered the nature of memory and how it came to define a person. Sitting on that bench, high above Crab Island, watching the surfers in the cold November waves, I wondered what would happen if a child in present-day Wales started having memories of those times. The idea of Welsh independence from the Romans also made it seem like in a world dominated by the might of Rome, Wales would make an excellent hiding place for something that needed to disappear. The first chapter was written in my black notebook on that hillside. A second would follow and be shared with two girls and a dog on our evening walk.

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If people are to be used as spare parts, we don't need elaborate deception.

Just some drugs, a healthy market and a high wall.

My second foray into fiction, just coming out of a lengthy PhD I had wanted to start another story but of course, needed an idea. I have just read The Unbearable Lightness of Being and in the introduction Kundera talked about different ways to begin writing a novel, different starting points. Although you could start with a specific piece of action or start with a particular character he mentioned that an interesting place to start was with a situation, he said that he had started that novel with the idea of a lady looking down at a street through the slightly parted curtains of a window. The story grew from there. It was a revelation - Starting a story without a story. I thought that a situation, a scene, was as good a place as any.

 

Both my daughters are vegetarian and my elder daughter had given me a book What Animals Think and Feel and under the influence of Kundera's woman staring through the window at the street below, I was wondering what I would be thinking in the cow's place. An image came to mind of a man standing in a yard staring through a chainlink fence at some cattle moving towards the slaughterhouse knowing that this was his own fate, as well. It grew from there.