Me reading this out loud:
I might have known I was asking for it by deciding to write a novel called Everything Will Swallow You: that, in doing so, I would be giving it an invite to lock me between its teeth, roll me around on its inflamed tongue, gulp me down, then regurgitate me and gob me out onto the muddy ground, before repeating the process all over again. I am by no means registering a complaint: when you’re as far into your writing career as I am, when you have spent as many years training yourself to dive deep off high cliffs into a fictional universe, a project like this is probably the wildest ride available to you without the help of Class A drugs. Not that I’d know from personal experience: at the point of my life when I would have have been most likely to try some of those, I was in the unusual position, by the standards of my music journalist breed, of being perfectly content with a few pints of beer and a boogie to some the funkiest offerings from Motown and Stax circa 1970.
Was that even writing I was doing back then? I suppose I must have thought it was somewhere beyond passable at the time but next to this current project it lives in the memory as having all the depth and narrative complexity of the kind of shopping list a person might pessimistically take with them to a small unsatisfactory supermarket. What I am doing right now is without doubt harder, more mentally and emotionally taxing work than that was, but where the process finds common ground with that period of my existence is less in the work than the fun that often took place after the work. I love dancing. Always have. With the benefit of hindsight, segments of my life when I don’t regularly dance always end up feeling aberrational. Writing books, at first, didn’t feel like dancing but now it increasingly does. There’s the same sense of tapping into a mystical rhythm, of letting some nameless part of me take over, following the beat of something in the air that I can’t see, the same enthusiasm for attempting new moves, the same awareness of the potential for falling over as I do, the same strange, earned trust that I won’t and that, if I do, I’ll soon be back upright again and in the groove.
Another feeling this book regularly gives me is that I am a battery, constantly in use, apart from the four or five hours at night when I recharge. But as soon as that recharging is done the battery is working again. I don’t have any choice about that, even if it’s 3am. My mind wants more book, is terrified about what might happen if it isn’t pointed like a short range ballistic missile launcher towards book at all times. Wherever I go, book, book, book, BOOK, book. Frank, our large demanding garden crow, bangs on the kitchen window because we’ve not left out enough scraps for him. Could I have a demanding crow called Frank in the book? I could. A friend says “coffee isn’t an interest” to me. Could I have a chapter in the book called ‘Coffee Isn’t An Interest’? Yes. Quite possibly. That might work.
I can cope, just about, with no more than four or five hours sleep. Apparently you need less sleep when you’re old, which I am, ish. Although not as old as a couple of readers recently informed me that Google thinks I am.
I’m not sure how the extra almost three decades got added. Perhaps someone saw one of the intentionally preposterous fake hippie era album cover shots I occasionally post online and got the wrong end of the stick. I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t happened before, and I’ve done dozens of them over the years. I should probably stop.
Curiously I never did shoot a fake album cover at the Cerne Abbas Giant, the United Kingdom’s only remaining - as far as we know - fully engorged hill figure, which seems like a major oversight, since it’s an atmospheric location with lots of muscular psychedelic energy. I’ve also never climbed over the fence that protects the Giant from the public and danced on him: surely an additional oversight. I know someone who knows someone who once did and she reported back overwhelmingly positively about the experience: top 11/10 TripAdvisor Lord-Summerisle-off-his-face-on-fermented-Pagan-orchard-apples-with-Ingrid-Pitt folk freak-out. She also slept on the giant’s eleven metre hard-on, alone, afterwards, and described it as “the most erotic night of my life”. I have walked to and around the Giant several times, though, and never without incident.
Here, for example, is a rare look at the original photo which inspired my celebrated watercolour ‘Study Of Two Lambs In Front Of A Gargantuan Chalk Penis’, purchased at Southeby’s last summer by an anonymous buyer for close to £2.5 million.
When I circled the valley of the Giant at almost this exact time in 2016, on a seven mile route beginning and ending at the Rhododendron-dominated village of Minterne Magna, I saw, in the earthworks above the Giant’s bald head known as the Trendle and described by Michael Pitt-Rivers half a century earlier in his Shell Guide To Dorset as “probably the sacred precinct of a fertility cult”, a mysterious creature stalking along, badger-shaped, fox-coloured. Retracing my steps last weekend, however, I found only the freshly decapitated head of a male pheasant. I’m not going to show you a photo of that, so here is a beautiful medieval door on a no-through road in Cerne Abbas village about a quarter of a mile south west of the giant’s testicles.
Utopia - original Greek meaning, “no place” - is the village that’s always just over the next hill on the internet. I’m increasingly aware that some people - especially those on Substack notes who live a long way away from me - see the pretty photos I post of the UK countryside and imagine I live in some kind of rural fairyland. What I would say to those people in response is: trust what you see but also don’t trust what your mind wants to piece together from what see. I walk many hundreds of miles every year, choose my walks extremely carefully and take photos of nice things I encounter. What I then choose to post is a reflection of my wider love for editing and my lack of love for decapitated pheasants and black placcy bags full of dog shit, and it’s important to keep that in mind. Having said that, Cerne Abbas is insanely pretty, with a staggering amount of immaculately preserved architecture, some it dating back to the medieval period.
It even still has its original village stocks.
Here’s the passage that, because I am in a permanent trance right now, where the events in my novel have begun to feel more real than reality itself, I wrote in my head, immediately after seeing the stocks, then transcribed as soon as I could:
(Sorry, you’re not allowed to read the rest. You’ll have to wait until next March.)
A few minutes later, outside the remains of the Benedictine Abbey, looking at the view you see below, I was pulled out of my trance by an elderly man who wanted to know if I could help him switch the TV in his self-catering cottage to DVD mode so he and his partner could watch Lawrence Of Arabia. He said he was called John Eagle and had been a Roman costume and lifestyle advisor on many historical TV shows, and on Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. His partner, who was feeding a cherry tomato tart to a small dog on her lap, said she was called Angela and had once written a book about stress which had sent some ripples through the stress industry. “Ah, that’s an industry I know well,” I almost said, wrestling with cables and thinking about my looming book deadline, and about the part of the book where something similar to this would happen, not to me, but to Eric from the above screenshotted paragraph, who in a lot of ways isn’t like me, and is much older than me - though not quite as old as the current version of Search Engine Me - but whose motives and personality and history I presently carry around in my head everywhere I go. “Our hero,” said Angela, when I’d sorted the telly. “Now we get to hang out with Omar Sharif.”
“Stuff like this is always happening to you: I think you must have one of those faces that invites it,” said my partner Ellie after I’d arrived home and related my encounter with John and Angela to her. “Pardon?” I said. Because I’m in a trance, at the moment Ellie frequently has to go through the tiresome routine of repeating many of her sentences to me. It’s one of the main reasons I’m looking forward to the trance being over. Some of the other reasons I’m looking forward to that are:
Much as I try to, I find it almost impossible to read other people’s novels when I’m in the most intense workaholic late stages of my own.
It will be good to remember what it feels like to not have a brain that’s permanently either deep fried in butter or on the precipice of gushing out of my ears.
Experiencing the satisfaction of having finished another novel - my second in a year - without dying.
Sleep. The peaceful kind, rather than the kind you wake up from at 3.15am, saying to yourself “BY GOLLY THAT’S IT! ERIC CAN DIVE DOWN AND FIND DAPHNE’S WEDDING RING IN THE SEA. AND BEFORE THAT WE CAN MEET GRANNY KETTLEBRIDGE AND SHE CAN IMAGINE THE CERNE ABBAS ON A SEX ADVENTURE.”
Looking after my health a little more successfully and returning a few more phone calls and messages and striding out boldly into the summer, and living as a full human, and being able to talk to my fellow humans about many subjects other than the crazy universe in my head, which, though compelling, is, I realise, at this stage, significantly more of interest to me than to anyone else.
Ellie might be correct. Maybe I do have one of those faces. But also: walking is always going to greatly aid the trance, whoever you are and whatever kind of face you have. When I was first commissioned to write semi-regularly about walking for a newspaper, 15 years ago, I remember being thrilled at the prospect but also secretly thinking, “But… it’s just… walking. What is there that’s interesting or colourful to say about that?” I can’t think of many bigger failures of imagination on my part. It’s like asking, of dancing: “But it’s just leaping around and moving your limbs in time to some music. What can possibly be enjoyable about that?” Someone - although nobody can remember exactly who - once said “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. It’s a good quote, and probably true: I always felt creatively limited by reviewing music for a living, which was partly why I swiftly chose to move on from it. But I think there is a way to dance about architecture, and about landscape, too.
I didn’t know I was going to Cerne Abbas when I set out from my house on Sunday. Why did I end up there? Maybe it was just too long since I’d seen a massive cock. But I think the truth is that it was yet another part of the trance, whatever I’m plugged into presently that prompts me to make decisions outside my normal conscious self, this rhythm that, while not sustainable full time, and perhaps “mad” by a few tedious and fearful standards and set by 21st Century Society, also probably makes more sense than anything ever has to me. I somehow knew the trip was what the book needed: that green narrative shoots would explode, at this fecund time of year, in this valley so synonymous with fertility. I needed to go and dance with the giant, in my own way. And while I will be glad when I come out of this draining hallucinatory zone, while I will wonder if I have the stamina to ever put myself “under” again, I know I will also soon miss it, feel nostalgic for days like these as soon as they have gone. Days when I used history and stories and hills to indulge in the age-old human pursuit of getting deliriously lost. Inevitably, I will go out into the countryside, and begin, gradually, to put myself into the whatever the next trance turns out to be,
And then I’ll write another book.
My most recent books are Villager and Notebook. If you fancy taking out a full annual subscription to this page I’ll send you signed hardbacks of both, for free, wherever you are on planet earth. Please also note that Blackwells do free delivery to most places, worldwide.
1983 is out in August.
Everything Will Swallow You is out in March 2025.
I think I would like reading more about your walks. Yes, please write something about Frank the crow.
Sorry, you’re not allowed to read the rest. You’ll have to wait until next March
- alas the fickle finger of fate depounces my appleat and i say 😁 good chap - how much is that book?