“It’s called what? Your readers won’t get past the first letter of the title!” Nearly three years after ignoring this wise marketing advice, I decided to dip into my novel “Þe Wyldrenesse of Wyrale” again. Here’s a little taster- if it tickles your tastebuds and you’d like to read more, there’s a link at the bottom of the page…

Ah, lovely language. In Arthur’s court they prayed in Latin, fought in French, and fucked in Anglo-Saxon. A rich mixture which, with the addition of some Greek technical terms and loan-words from far-flung imperial trade routes eventually evolved into the English in which you are reading me now, unless like Bottom I have been translated. For that, I mean the act of reading me, I thank you, and thank you too for persisting so far; it is an effort to read all this, I know, and it is painful to write, believe me, my syntax is killing me. The so-called Gawain poet, he of the shaky geography, wrote in a dialect of Middle English, which explains the spelling of the title I have as it were ripped untimely from a line in his book, id est Þe Wyldrenesse of Wyrale. The unfamiliar character is a thorn. Not the thorn in the flesh that the sainted Paul complained about in his second spasm to the Corinthian fornicators, whatever that was, we’re not told what it was, one of the pricks he kicked against, ha, no, our thorn is a survival into Middle English orthography of an obsolete Anglo-Saxon letter, a fricative, dental, voiced, the t. h. in this. That. Therefore, the. Now that’s out of the way, the thorn’s pulled out, ha, ha, I resume. But I have digressed. I am given to digression, you can see that, any fool can see that. Like the river Dee on its way to the sea, I meander. Look out for oxbow lakes, braiding, for, in a word, two words really, fluvial features. Time, like an ever-rolling stream, will bear me away, if time really is like an ever-rolling stream, which I doubt. But it is not yet time for the discussion of time, there will be a time, we’ll come to it in time, whatever that means. Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to produce literature. Like the Lady of Shalott, we look into the mirror of our senses and, half sick of shadows, labour to elaborate the tapestry of our perceptions, knowing that reality is always elsewhere, knightly accoutrements jingling past us down below our tower window, there by the river running to Camelot, yes, it’s Sir Lancelot, singing tirra lirra. Don’t look, Lady! Too late.

Like to read more? It’s available as paperback or e-book: click on the link: