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Another celebration of the always-surprising subtleties of texture, tone and colour in the everyday scrub of another patch of local wild plants and grasses. As I was taking these images, I could smell the sea at my back and hear the keening of the gulls above me, and somehow the waves found themselves into my…
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Chapter 9 of Chimera Book 1 – entitled Captain Toothache & The Silver Locket – takes place in a locked room, with Kyp Finnegan, the book’s 8 eight year old hero, and Atticus Weft, a snake comprised from all the odd socks that go missing from your washing machines, baring their souls. It doesn’t have…
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It’s a lesser known fact about me that I’m sometimes known to write a song or two when the mood strikes. That mood used to strike much more often, I think because I didn’t second guess myself as much as I do now. I’m no musician after all, so what gives me the temerity to…
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More salted, windswept skeins and matted hummocks on the sea-facing rise of Tankerton Slopes.
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Chapter 9 of Chimera Book 1 is a very important one to me. I took the decision at the outset of the very first draft of Chimera that the reader’s first experience of the novel should mirror Kyp Finnegan’s – a head-long rush down the rabbit hole, breathless, panicked, sensorially intense – a boy on…
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A short walk along Whitstable’s blustery sea front and you arrive at Tankerton Slopes, a long steep rise of scrubby grass, hog’s fennel and brambles. In the depths of winter, kids sledge down the slopes, speeding down towards the colourful beach huts and the shingle beach. Now, the long unkempt grasses are dry and bleached,…
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It’s 4pm on Sunday afternoon, which means, here in Red’s Kingdom, it’s time once again to gather around the wireless (or more probably your smart phone!) and continue Kyp Finnegan’s adventures in the curious, fantastical realm of Chimera – a world of peril, danger and excitement!
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John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween is one of my favorite things. Here’s why.
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I was drinking Red Bull and eating handfuls of almonds to sustain me through my long night alone in the sprawling impressive house in which this image was taken. At this point, I’d made it as far as the top of the house, finding myself in a richly wall-papered room blossomed with damp, the ceiling…
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Our garden is full of threads at the moment; the elaborate, death-defying webs of the orb spiders, with their juicy brown bodies. When Graeme Daly over at Gentle Giant offered up the city of Ersilia from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities as our starter-for-ten for the Kick-About#13, these spider-webs were utmost in mind’s eye as I…
Red's Kingdom 