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ABOUT ME
 I celebrate the ordinary, the remarkable in the everyday. I am a traveller of the wayside, by foot, by cycle (10,000 miles in Europe, around Britain). Into journals I write portraits from life on the city and rural waysides: the comic, the tragic, the forgotten, the natives, the wee beasties, the discarded lives, the rubbish. I tease out the rich frontier between the familiar and the unknown.
I search for the picture by rearranging the fragments. I think the meaning is carried by the pieces, the broken lines. The road we are going down personally and collectively is one that we have not been down before and no-one knows where it goes to. There is a great opportunity to devise new values about time and money and work and what is sacred, and what kind of future will work for us.
I am fascinated by the process of change, how we shed our personal and collective skins. That’s why I have always felt at home on the wayside, the last wild line in our culture where nothing is sown but the natives appear. I am fascinated by borders, how we can meet without losing our identity, how we can dialogue with each other and with Nature. About learning really.
The holine series completes a quartet of intimate travel books giving voice to the amazing commonplace. I combine the highly personal with objective portraits of people and places. They are like jigsaws. They are made up from many parts which I rearrange by meaning. I create unusual juxtapositions, giving fresh insights into the ordinary world. You can read them from beginning to end, or dip into them. Serious, humorous, poignant is how I would describe them. Others find in them an antidote to stress.
My background is varied, working in English and Scottish journalism before training as an organic gardener at the Findhorn Foundation in the mid-seventies. I have worked in therapeutic gardening with children and adults. During the 90s I worked extensively as a storyteller in schools, medieval fairs, museums and woodlands, and later at the Bath, Swindon, and Larmer Tree Festivals. The Druidic Gorsedd of Caer Baddon has made me an honorary bard.
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