I very rarely make plans for my writing; I admire thriller writers who paper the wall with Post-it notes and science fantasy authors who make spreadsheets and histories for the worlds they’re creating. Even when I’m writing something that should be planned, like a radio play, I just crack a cup of tea over the vessel of my ideas (it’s too early in the morning for champagne) and set sail on an uncharted voyage. This has meant that the producers and directors have had to work very hard with me to help me to produce something that has plot and character rather than images and gags and so with this new book I decided I’d learned my lesson and I would make a plan. Maybe I wouldn’t go as far as spreadsheets, but I would certainly have a compass. A metaphorical compass, of course, but it would be a start.
The idea of the book was that I would write about the coast of Britain; sometimes I would delve into my memories of places I’d visited, and sometimes I would visit new places and write about what I encountered. I would try and knit connections between the two and, like all writers unless they’re liars, I would imagine the author photograph of a windswept me gazing out at the eternal water, perhaps with an ironic ice cream in my hand.
My plan for the book was based around my quest to do a gig in every village hall in the country with my musician mate Luke Carver Goss. If the coast was within striking distance, by which I mean of a railway because I can’t drive, of the village hall we’d played the night before, I would go there the next day and absorb it on the (metaphorical again) blotting paper I wrote on. This may not seem like much of a plan if you’re a thriller writer on the fourteenth book of a series featuring a hard-bitten detective with a complex home life and a passion for vintage china but let me tell you that for me it’s a plan.
And then the pandemic’s tide started to come in. In early March 2020 my wife and I had a couple of days in Scarborough, the jewel of the East Coast; the plan was that this would make the first chapter of the book. Except that things felt a little chilly, and that wasn’t just the wind blowing across the sand. We went into shops to try to buy hand sanitiser but there was none. People looked nervous; there seemed to be a sense of hurry about them as though they wanted to rush somewhere but, crucially, they weren’t quite sure where. In our Premier Inn there was no buffet breakfast and we were served by a waiter who said ‘This is how it will be for a little while’ and I felt a deep sadness, partly because of his turn of phrase and partly because I couldn’t get seven sausages, a croissant and a tub of Greek yoghurt. After all, like everybody else in the Western world, I’d become used to treating life as a buffet that endlessly invited me to graze. My wife and I felt a desire to sit far away from strangers and closer to each other. Walking towards the castle, we wondered aloud to each other whether we should have come. The strong wind made me weep. I think it was the strong wind.
And then, about a week after we came back home and I shook the sand out of my notebook, the country locked down and all my gigs fell off a cliff and my diary relaxed in its emptiness and lack of scribblings. The village halls of Britain were safe from my laboured gags. My children and grandchildren could no longer visit the house and we had to make do with drive-by wavings and Zoom quizzes that nobody really wanted to win. I still wanted to write this book, so I had to have a new plan, and the new plan was to use the time to climb deeper into my memories of the coast, of the places I’d been and the person I was when I went there. Two slices of the coast would loom large: Cleethorpes, where my wife’s family have had a caravan for decades, and where my 92-year-old mother-in-law would happily spend all summer, until 2020 put a lock on all that and forced her into a foreshortened season where she daren’t go on a bus; and Northumberland, where my children have had wonderful times and where my wife and I have discovered solace and calm over the years.
Brief unlockings like the one in the summer of that year allowed us out and it meant the sea air in the sentences was fresh rather than air-conditioned by memory, but mostly I paddled in the half-remembered and, I admit, half-invented past. And so the coast became a place of legend and myth; its unchanging narrative of tides and whirling gulls shape-shifted into my own story, a story of someone who, in their mid-sixties, was being nudged into a state of endless reverie by the lockdowns and the pandemic. I found that because I wore my mask a lot, I couldn’t wear my glasses as much as I usually did; the mask and my breathing steamed them up. I went to the optician’s and she said that my eyes were improving; I asked how that could be possible, given my advancing age. ‘It sometimes happens,’ she said in the half-darkness. I didn’t question further but I reckoned it was because the turbulent times had turned my gaze inward, towards an internal and personal coastline.
So, if you’re expecting a guidebook, look away now. If you want a map, I suggest that you make your own because I think you’ll know your roads much better than I do. Welcome to my coast; come with me and wander its paths. You might not find your way back home; I’m not sure if I ever will.