Where My Writing Likes to Wander is a small map of the mind’s favourite detours, the places, periods and odd corners of history I keep circling back to. Saints, ruins, lost kings, moral puzzles, the Isle of Wight, the Romans, and the occasional philosophical grumble. It’s less a plan than a pattern, the routes my thoughts take when left to their own devices, wandering off the path in search of something quietly interesting.
Where My Writing Likes to Wander
I tend to write about the places where my mind settles most naturally, the landscapes and cities that shape my sense of the present.
The Isle of Wight is the one that anchors me. It’s a place I return to again and again, not only in person but on the page. Its chalk cliffs, quiet churches and odd corners of history offer a kind of steadying influence. There’s something about the island’s scale that encourages close observation. You can walk its coastline in sections and feel as though you are reading a long, slow story written in stone and tide lines.
Alongside that, I keep a strand of writing I call “The shape of now“. It’s the sort of blog I began with and it still matters to me because it allows for a different tone. It’s where I think aloud about the present moment, the small shifts in mood or culture that don’t always fit neatly into a category.
Some pieces in “The Shaoe of Now” are reflective, others observational, and some are simply attempts to catch hold of something I saw watching TV before it slips away into the fog of bad memory. That’s the part of my writing that feels closest to my original journal, although I try to keep that part shaped enough to be readable.
Then there are the places I spend time emotionally rather than physically. Monaco and ancient Rome sit at opposite ends of a spectrum although both exert a pull. Monaco fascinates me for its contradictions, the glamour set against the tight geography of the rock. It’s fair to say I love the place and visit when I can although I could never afford to live there.
Ancient Rome is something else entirely. It’s a city that refuses to stay still. Layers of history sit openly in the streets and I find myself returning to it in my writing whenever I need a sense of scale or continuity. I’ve been to the modern City of Rome many times and will be there shortly.
These places, both ancient and modern, form a matrix of sorts. The island, the present moment and the cities and empires that occupy my imagination and together they give me more than enough to write about.