If there’s a common theme in my writing, it’s that dirt pushed under the carpet may be out of sight, but it doesn’t disappear. Furthermore, what you most want to avoid is what you tend to find yourself confronted with, sooner or later. I like to explore the kinds of lives which are beset by ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty: the lives full of ‘what-if’ situations, not to mention ‘if-only’ and ‘but-for’ ones. I believe there are very few out-and-out villains, and equally few shining heroes – of either sex.

My interests colour what I write, viz. music in Work For Four Hands. The night sky and the sea, or both, tend to make appearances, the former very much so in the book I’m working on now, Capella in Auriga. (In a nutshell: four people’s happiness depends on two of them keeping the bright star near the zenith in winter in their sights.)

That said, rather than ‘writing what I know’, I like to write what I’m interested in finding out about. (Many thanks to the friends and acquaintances I’ve pestered for information on their areas of expertise!)

If a character is feeling that there’s trouble ahead or a change of heart is due, I like to pack a notebook and go and stand where the plot has taken him or her, as on this South Wales beach with the Bristol Channel rolling in. It’s not a beach for swimming or sun bathing, it’s for lovers of strong winds and shades of grey – in sea and sky, as well as rocks and shingle.

Stories.

I haven’t written many stories as yet. In a number of ways I find them harder to write than novels. The Rothko Room appeared in Mslexia magazine in summer 2003, and Vesti la Giubba and Walking Pace have come out in the Oxford Writers Group’s recently published anthology, The Sixpenny Debt and Other Oxford Stories.

Poetry.

Writing poems is, for me, like waiting for buses. You can go for ages without seeing one and then several come along at once. So I would never lay claim to being ‘a poet’: I’m merely someone who puts down a few lines when I’m lucky enough to find an idea popping up, and a piece can take weeks, months or even years to mould into anything like a final form. Here’s one which emerged after a visit to Normandy some years ago. I include it here because it seems to have struck a chord with a number of readers, especially older readers:

Utah Beach

People will forget who won, who lost. It will take time: Waterloo and Hastings are still fresh. And Marathon – for some, that happened yesterday. But someone yet unborn will hear cicadas chattering in the marram grass, and not think of guns. Someone will watch a man like that one strolling, and not remember other men who had no time to stroll. Someone will see the man’s son’s kite painting bright green curlicues on the breeze and not think of parachutes. Someone, perhaps, in whose blood old enemies are united.

For now, we who remember stand, eyes closed, and watch these seaside colours fade to grainy newsreel grey. In the museum, a young German stares at a faded tunic. And here and there, old men who speak one language clasp the hands of ghosts.