The Rivendale Review | Writing to know what I think.

A Review of Push Hands

March 16, 2026 by Michael Graeme

So, this time we’ve been working through my novel Push Hands, first published in 2008, sweeping up the typos, fiddling with commas and dashes, and basically enjoying the company of these characters again. We’ve made no major changes, other than a couple of the shorter chapters merged together, and some longer ones split. The latest version is out now. If you’ve not read Push Hands, indeed, if you’ve not read me at all, this is a good place to start. And it’s free.

The story is a literary romance of sorts, which is its main problem, I mean, were it ever to do the rounds of the publishers, which it never has, nor ever will. “Literary Romance” sits between two genres, two readerships without quite belonging to either – romance readers may expect a more conventional boy/girl thing and a cleaner happily-ever-after kind of ending, while literary fiction readers might shy away from the romance label altogether. But I think the story is warmer, funnier and lighter than most literary fiction, also more emotionally restrained, interior and honest, than most genre romance. It’s the kind of story I would like to read myself, therefore the best kind for a writer to write.

It began, indirectly, with a hike in the Yorkshire Dales, in a howling gale, midwinter, and one side of my face frozen. I had some ear problems after that, and it’s when I think the tinnitus started – a kind of scratchy whistling noise that never goes away. People get tinnitus to varying degrees. Mine is mild, but whatever the level, you tend to focus down on it and, if you let it, you can end up depressed. It can even ruin your life.

Western medicine shrugs at it, and fair enough – nothing they can do. Charlatans will try to sell you all manner of snake oil for it. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) will have a go at it – herbs, acupuncture, ear-candling. I did the whole TCM thing, and it did help a bit, indirectly at least. But more than that it rendered the tinnitus both interesting and manageable. I noticed it came on more when I was tired or sickening for something. It still does. Most of the time though I don’t notice it.

The TCM led to taking up Tai Chi and Qigong, and to joining a little martial art’s school. What I learned there became the backbone of this story. Acupuncture and massage at the hands of Doc Lin (not her real name), remains one of the most profoundly stilling experiences of my life, and provides further material for some of the scenes in Push Hands.

Of the art of Push Hands itself, a unique form of martial art, my own experience of it is very basic, certainly not to the level Doc Lin teaches Phil and Penny in this story. But I’ve watched and admired the masters – a blend of skill, grace and power – and I’ve felt the balance of another person in the point of contact between our wrists, and read their minds in it, lowered their ego to the floor, and by turns had my own hands trapped in painful locks, as a result of my own lack of skill.

Even early in the new millennium, when this story was written, such things were, and to a degree still are, treated as “alternative” by some – even a bit weird. To engage deeply with them is to arouse consternation, even derision among strongly rational people. And to my surprise, even my little Buddha garden ornament proved disturbing to certain conservative religious types.

But the main lesson for me of those times is that we are each of us the universe coming to an awareness of itself through us, through our individuality. Therefore, it’s no use seeing ourselves through the eyes of anyone else, or living, or assuming an identity we imagine would better suit the expectations of others. We are the narrator, the first person protagonist of our own story, not a third person character in someone else’s.

So, we take up our unique perspective and live through it, even though it might be considered odd, indeed perhaps especially if it might be considered odd. Nor do we allow our own lives to become narrowed by what we think others might consider more conventional or appropriate. Otherwise, we are living in the Panopticon.

So, to the blurb: Phil and Penny were made for each other. The only problem is they’re both married to other people. When they meet at a Tai Chi class, they recognise at once the depth of one another’s loneliness. Fearful of the consequences, they go to elaborate lengths to avoid each other — but their paths keep crossing with a regularity that begins to feel less like coincidence, and more like fate.

Middle-aged, long-married, and surrounded by people with agendas of their own, Phil and Penny find their unlikely friendship forcing them to ask serious questions about their marriages, their families, and who they actually are beneath the roles they’ve been playing for years. The answers, when they come, are funnier, sadder and stranger than either of them expected.

Posted in reading, the writing life | Tagged book-review, book-reviews, books, fiction, free, michael graeme, push hands, review, romance, writing | 2 Comments »

The writing life – a review of In Durleston Wood

March 14, 2026 by Michael Graeme

Reading back through one’s early novels is a little like reading an old diary. You remember who you were when you wrote it. The question is: do you still recognise that person?

In Durleston Wood first appeared around 2012 as a self-published ebook on Smashwords, though I think it may have surfaced as a paperback on Lulu.com a little earlier. It is essentially a piece of active imagination, in the Jungian sense: an almost dreamlike narrative masquerading as literary fiction.

Our narrator, Richard Hunter, discovers that his childhood haunt, Durleston Wood, now hides a secret: a mysterious woman, Lillian, who has been kept there as the property of a villain – or so she says. As Richard learns more, he realises her intention is to transfer her “ownership” to him. While he tells himself this is the last thing he wants, he cannot help wondering if it is in fact the one thing he needs.

There are other layers to the story. The main one is Richard’s struggle to establish himself as a teacher at his old primary school, under the watchful eye of the chilly headmistress, Davinia Barkwell, with whom he is secretly and hopelessly infatuated. At one level, then, the story reads as a love triangle. At another, it becomes a psychological drama: the villain representing Richard’s shadow self, while the enslaved woman represents the state of his so-called Anima – his relationship with womankind in general. Davinia becomes the aspiration he projects, but until he can see her as she really is, there can be no genuine relationship. He must release Lillian into his life properly and thereby grow sufficiently, psychologically, if his life is not to remain moribund, dogged by depression and neurosis.

What surprises me most of all, returning to the story now, is how many typos can survive fourteen years – and goodness knows how many reviews. This latest edition is my attempt at putting that right, though probably not my last.

But to the essential question: do I still recognise myself?

Well, I don’t feel any different to the self I imagine I was in 2012, but then we rarely do. We age gradually, with a continuity that seduces us into believing in our own psychological steadiness. Yet it is an illusion. I was either much clearer in my thinking when I wrote Durleston Wood, much closer to the emotional core of my own deep past, or the words that emerged came more from my reading and my preoccupations – appearing in fictional form as the way I thought things should be, rather than as they really are. Or perhaps the novel outlines a process of personal transformation that did not require the literal enactment of the story, only its imaginative working through over the years it took to write.

Yet when I compare Durleston Wood with my latest novel, The Archivist of Endings, certain familiar themes emerge, along with a similar approach to the metaphysical. The characters espouse no overt beliefs, either mainstream or speculative. Rather, they speak and live as if they did. Their approach is closer to myth, or to the folk religion of their grandparents. At the same time, they recognise that the power of such an approach lies not in belief itself, but in living as if it were true. The distinction is subtle, but it explains a great deal.

My own metaphysical explorations have since taken me into the realm of an essentially Idealist philosophy of mind, both personal and universal. It feels right, feels comfortable – but such thinking was not yet available to me in 2012. I had yet to discover it. Even so, it remains compatible with the earlier work, resolving now as something like an Ariadne thread leading from the labyrinth of a more material way of thinking, with all its rational dead ends. Not dead ends in terms of technology or culture – rationalism has taken us a long way – but dead ends in terms of meaning and relationship.

There are no major changes to this new edition: just the typos swept up, some dialogue streamlined, and a couple of chapters merged into one for the sake of clarity. Oh, and a new cover.

The novel remains free, and you can download it here.

Posted in novel, the writing life | Tagged book-review, books, fiction, free, in durleston wood, michael graeme, novel, reading, writing | Leave a Comment »

Out and about – Some Trees and a Tractor

March 13, 2026 by Michael Graeme

We’re a little further up the Ribble Valley today at Hurst Green. It’s a cloudy bright sort of day with a fresh wind, the meadows glowering darkly one moment and glowing a lush green the next. The hedgerows closer to home are already in leaf, but here, not an hour’s drive away, it’s still early in the season, trees bare and gaunt in silhouette from afar, and you have to get up close to see they’re budding. It’s the Tolkien Trail today, a loop of the rivers Hodder and Ribble amid some fine, rolling Lancashire scenery. It’s about a year since I last came this way, in tow with a whimsical Galadriel, as I recall. But she’s keeping a low profile today.

Speaking of Galadriel, I’m reminded how elves can at times be as warlike as humans, but their legends don’t depict them being anywhere near as stupid. As we walk we’re mindful the world is shaking to its foundations. The Strait of Hormuz is now closed, a predictable response to the bombing of Iran. As of this morning, UK fuel prices haven’t moved much, but they will, when strategic reserves run out. Then there’ll be panic-buying. All of that will come, but I’m conscious our inconvenience is insignificant, compared with the suffering of others who have munitions raining down upon their towns and cities. Of course, we’ve had Middle-Eastern conflicts before, but there seems a particularly unhinged madness about this one, and I have a bad feeling about it.

There’s a roaring in the trees as we come down to Over Hacking wood and approach the Hodder. Pines soar here, closely packed, and they clatter ominously above like bamboo chimes as we pass, the wind stirring them. Some are freshly fallen, bearing the bright scars of newly splintered wood, the soft earth cratered at their base.

It’s a route I’ve pretty much photographed to death. Still, find myself pausing at the same view-points, looking for something new in the details. Mostly the light isn’t promising, the sun slipping behind cloud at the wrong moments, then on we go. The triptych of trees here, seen from the track leading down from Hodder Place, I’ve not noticed before, so loiter awhile, waiting for light.

But as I wait, I find it hard to avoid the sense that it’s becoming more difficult to find beauty in the passing detail, in the small, like this, when there’s so much going on in the world now that is irredeemably, and profoundly ugly. We woke up this morning to images of burning tankers in the Red Sea, and here we are waiting for the light to shine on some trees. At what point does that become ridiculous? When is it less of a resistance to the Zeitgeist and more a refuge from things we cannot alter? Perhaps it’s both. Or perhaps such things become even more important, the uglier the world becomes.

It’s striking how commentators still assume there is a reason for it all, yet even the most informed appear to be struggling with this one. For myself, observing such things from afar, it seems that, once upon a time, terrible acts were undertaken for identifiable reasons, however cynical. Now it more often feels as if explanations have been dispensed with, and confusion itself has become the atmosphere, indeed the entire oeuvre of power. Thus have our leaders moved beyond explanation. They have nothing useful, nothing intelligible to say to us, inhabiting as they do their own world, as do we ours. What this means for our futures is unclear, but disturbing all the same – our certainties shrinking to a bubble no greater than might fit in the palm of your hand, or through the all too selective viewfinder of a camera.

Lunch is by the Hodder, a stretch of pebbled bank where one can get down to the waterside. We’ve had plentiful rains recently, including torrents overnight, so the river is high and deep voiced. There’s plenty of company here, with other walkers and dogs, and the usual detritus – bottles and beer cans and the almost obligatory bags of dog-dog muck. The Tolkien Trail is always well walked, even midweek. I would not think to attempt it at the weekends. The Hodder is reflecting sunlight here, an alluring sparkle to it as it slides by, and the trees on the opposite bank roar in the wind, a touch of March Madness about them.

I filled the car this morning, burned about a gallon on the way over here, another gallon by the time I get home. It used to be I’d be panicking about conserving fuel, needing it for the commute. There was no such thing as home working during previous fuel-shocks, and I recall a particularly inflexible attitude on behalf of employers, too. Unlike in past crises though we now have far more electric vehicles on the road. You can pick used ones up very cheaply, though their battery life is probably much reduced now, with uncertainty over longevity and the cost of replacement. Still, they’d be fine for knocking about locally. Were I in a bind, and still having to commute, I’d be considering an older model as a backup now, though as it is, I can probably ride out at least some of what is coming our way.

We don’t linger over lunch but press on, making our way by Cromwell’s Bridge, up the hill, cross the meadow to Winkley Hall and the Piggery. Here we pick up the broader sweep of the Ribble, the newly diverted path no longer taking us by the spectacular oak, but here it is, captured in other times. Instead, we have this old tractor by the wayside – always something Stoic about them, I think. It doesn’t look to be in working condition, but I’ve seen worse, and still running. How many seasons, I wonder, ploughing the earth? It speaks of continuity, of certainty, of return.

We have a clear path now back to Hurst Green, most of it in company with the run of the river. Up ahead there’s another walker, what looks like a tall young woman, long auburn hair and a Barbour jacket, nipped at the waist. She has a graceful, upright posture. I catch her up as we climb from the valley, to the Shireburn Arms, and exchange greetings in passing. She’s actually getting on in years, a lovely, mature face that smiles easily. We meet again in the coffee shop in Hurst Green, and we exchange a joke, then I’m carrying my coffee-to-go back to the little blue car. It’s looking a bit grey actually, ready for a wash and spruce up.

The woman was interesting – in other times a potential meet-cute of course – but for the writer, it feels more like an introduction to a character who simply has to be written about, after she’s spent some time developing in the imagination. With the world on fire these are such small things, but beautiful in themselves, and we mustn’t forget that.

Sometimes it’s the only thing we have to go on.

Posted in countryside, current affairs, journal, lancashire, out and about, outdoors, photography, walking | Tagged adventure, current affairs, hiking, hodder, hurst green, lancashire, nature, ribble, travel, UK, walking, writing | 5 Comments »

Between the Tides

March 10, 2026 by Michael Graeme

I find myself caught
Between the tides,
Surrounded by a shallow sea,
With you.
Your heartbeat unfamiliar
But not unkind.
And me,
As always, slow to dance
To rhythms I cannot comfortably circle
With my hips.

But we are not trapped here.
This loneliness is finite,
Familiar in its melancholy,
Transient as birds.
And though the distant shore
Of all we know seems lost,
It is not blackness,
Or treachery that waylays,
More a friendly fate,
I think,
One that in kindness cannot give us up
As flotsam tossed to rot once more,
In mud.

Take then my hand my love,
Until you feel the dance in me
And I in you,
And let us make the rhythm
Of ourselves once more
Our own.

So writes Adrienne Divine, in the poem she promises our protagonist Phil Sampson, this at the end of the story of the tides. Written in late 2012, first self-published in 2013, with records suggesting a minor revision in 2017. Not sure why I picked this one up for revision again, download rates telling me it’s not much looked at any more – just 3 downloads last month. But I wanted to remind myself perhaps of the writer who wrote it, and what he was thinking about in those days, so we’ve had another go at it.

We’ve swept up the usual typos, but also streamlined some of the more verbose passages which perhaps belonged in a novel of their own. And there are changes in language, words, phrases we used back in 2012, that have shifted gear, used lightly then but which carry much greater and unintended weight now. So, we’ve changed those. And the intimate bits, yes I wouldn’t write like that now, so we’ve had a go at cleaning those up. And the ending… the ending should have flowed straight out of chapter 29. I don’t know why I held on for another chapter – perhaps not wanting to part from these characters, with whom I admit I fell in love. So, we took a chunk of that out, which made no difference to anything I could see, and we end with the same closing scene, Adrienne and Phil on their bicycles pedalling back to the mainland after their unintended sojourn between the tides.

A kind of mystical realism, I suppose – the story comes out of the imagination, both of the writer and the protagonists. A literary romance, too, and an exploration of the notion of obscurity. Interesting the references to post-crash economics, and a kind of premonition of the lost decade to come. It’s an attempt also to establish a foothold in the idea there’s no such thing as an obscure life. Do I succeed in that? I don’t know, it’s for the reader to judge. But do we have a story worth the telling? Yes, I think we got away with it.

So, a better version this time round, I hope, and a couple of days enjoyably spent listening to the voice of a younger self. And yes, those fourteen intervening years have changed me. I feel it in the prose. But he’s still there in this version. I’ve not been so severe as to erase him. The new revision is out now. If you’ve not read this one from me, and you’re looking for something different, why not give it a go?

It’s free.

Posted in journal, Mysticism, novel, philosophical, the writing life | Tagged fiction, michael graeme, novel, fantasy, books, free, book-review, writing, berween the tides, revisison | 3 Comments »

The Season of Yellowing

March 8, 2026 by Michael Graeme

A cold sun sort of day.
Hazel catkins lengthen
from threads of twisted bough,
like exotic caterpillars,
while daffodils
add their nodding yellowness
and the celandines brighten
the dapple-shaded woodland floor.

But seasoned as they are,
venturing hardy into
the season’s first light
they carry long memories
of the levelling winds to come,
and of ditches brimmed
once more with rain.

And here are we, held indoors,
dazed by too much winter’s sleep,
hesitating at this threshold,
not yet trusting sufficiently
its warmth and welcome.

We seek the reassurances
of richer blossomed hues
of warm scented earth
and the hawthorn’s
first fledgling green.

Posted in countryside, outdoors, poetical sketches | Tagged catkins, caution, celandine, daffodils, hesitation, march, memory, poem, spring | 3 Comments »

Some thoughts sitting on a bench by a river

March 5, 2026 by Michael Graeme

Early March, now, and the season of yellowing. Hazel and willow catkins hang from branches like exotic caterpillars, drying themselves. Clutches of daffodils nod in the breeze, and the starry heads of celandines brighten the first light-dappled greening of the woodland floor. It’s a cold sun, but our movement these last few miles grants us the impression of warmth. We find a bench by the murmuring river and sit down to rest.

We’re just a little upstream from Ribchester here, making way towards Dinkley, having in mind a short circuit of the Ribble Valley, and it’s proving to be far enough on wobbly legs. We’ve been out several days in a row now, and we’ve either tired ourselves out, or it’s the shingles jab we had that’s having unexpected side effects.

“You might feel like you’re coming down with something,” the nurse said.

Which would explain it. So, we’ll take our time. We’ll be fine.

It’s not an attractive bit, this stretch of the Ribble, and the lack of foliage reveals much we’d prefer remained hidden. The trees and bushes along the bank are hung with all the trash washed down, some of it from farms – plastic sacking and canisters of ominous and garish colouring. But it’s mostly the petty consumerist trash – the beer-cans, the bottles, the discarded wrappers, all of it heading out to sea, a long slow, infinite outpouring of human detritus. This is our gift to nature, product of a confused sense of who we are, of an imagined separateness, indeed an outright denial of the finiteness of the earth, and its capacity to forgive our childish ways.

We’re covering some old ground today, not just on foot but in our heads as well. From time to time long forgotten writings surface in the blog stats, and serve to remind us of forgotten byways. It’s surprising how we forget these things. I suppose we absorb the ideas, stripped of the detail, and simply move on, but I was once intensely preoccupied with the idea of identity, and it seems that’s what we’re thinking about again today.

Expressions of identity are all the rage of course, but we do far better if we can work out how to shed them. So, who am I? Right now I am just a guy sitting on a bench in the early spring sunshine, listening to the river. That’s all. Anything I add to that description is mere decoration. We used to equate the question of identity with what we did: plumber, poet, engineer. But the world is changing, and jobs are shrinking to a mere flotsam that seems unworthy of pinning something so precious as our identity upon it. We have AI stripping work away from us, or we may be entering retirement and looking for a new identity, or we may be clinging to an identity, courtesy of a former career and to which we no longer have any real connection. I write poetry, fiction, and I keep a blog now. Does that make me a writer and poet? I can call myself that if I want, but it never seems to sit right. No, I am just this guy sitting on a bench by the river.

We take a breath, let it out slow, extend our awareness into the body, open up a gap between the rush of thought, and the softer spaciousness of the inner self. It can be a tight squeeze, but if we can manage it we find in that gap there’s no past or future, no identity, no reputation to be protected. There’s just the river, this low, bright sunlight, and the movement of the breath. It’s not empty – quite the opposite. We sense a fullness and, sliding a hand into that gap, we peel the sides apart and, shedding all thoughts of who we think we are, we step inside.

There we find the presence behind the human, a presence in the world, rather than something pre-defined by culture, or by a label attached to us by ourselves or others. And through that presence we find we are not our thoughts or our feelings. We are more simply the awareness of those things, or every thing. Spiritual teachers will go further and tell us our awareness, the sense of self looking out at the world through our eyes, is the same awareness looking out through everyone else’s. But that’s not an easy thing to get across, or to accept, conditioned as we are, and increasingly so, into a sense of our own profound isolation.

Our times have seen a dramatic shedding of the old ways of belonging, making it all but impossible to find or even to take seriously the idea of meaning. Workplaces, faith-groups, pubs… all are in decline. Meanwhile, consumer culture promises fulfilment but, like all these bottles and cans down there on the riverbank, it delivers only an emptiness to be discarded, rather than something genuine to be adopted and worn for life. And then the rise of our identitarian culture offers so many off-the-peg identities, all of which might feel meaningful in the moment, though often built on nothing more than grievance, or victimhood. And of course, we have the ever present peddlers of “life-style”, false identities, like bubble gum, briefly consumed, soon to lose its flavour and discarded.

We are hungry for belonging, yet look for it in all the wrong places. There is no community, no identity in a mobile phone – absurd to think there might be – yet increasingly, we feel that’s our best shot. Imagine any crowded room of people at their ease, be they strangers, or even friends and family, most faces lit by the glow of screens, and the promise of diversion, of transportation from the here and now, to somewhere else – to a place of promise, a place of meaning. We scroll for connection, finding only fragmented shards, a thousand ways to perform an identity, to enter into community – likes, shares, comments – but no way to simply be. It is a mirrored labyrinth of algorithmic bait-and-switch, yet we keep scrolling, hoping the next post, the next notification, will tell us who we are.

We have forgotten. Who we are lies entirely in this gap of stillness, in this shedding of all decoration, of all identity. And the paradox? It’s just a breath away, the realisation we are at the same time nobody, going nowhere, yet also, and at all times, we are the world and all that’s in it. Of course the trick is to stay in that space, while we get up from this bench, and continue on our way along the river. But that’s not easy in a fractured world, where such teachings might be considered unhelpful anyway, a world where division and isolation serve a greater, if less wholesome purpose.

Thanks for listening

Posted in blogging, countryside, existential, journal, lancashire, Metaphysical, walking | Tagged identity, meditation, mindfulness, philosophy, spirituality, spring, walking, writing | 4 Comments »

The last Friday of February 2026

March 1, 2026 by Michael Graeme

The little blue car is full of winter sleep and grime, as am I – sleep at least. There’s been heavy rain overnight, the morning sky is oppressive, and the roads are splashy. But once under way, and the car warms, we begin to feel more optimistic. Then there’s this age old “last Friday of February” thinking, that Glasson has yet to turn us away. Indeed, though the meadows have often been under flood, the sun usually shines against the odds. And so it proves again today, the inland gloom and intermittent drizzle peeling away miraculously as we come up to the harbour. And then a hazy sun breaks through.

Oh, but there was such an accumulation of doubt, diversion and discouragement this year, I wondered if it was not better to let day go. After all, I’ve been coming to Glasson now on this particular day for 12 years, and I don’t know why. It’s more than shaking off the winter, more than striking out again after a long confinement, trapped by weather and short days.

I could try arguing there’s something poetic about it, an alliteration of “Friday” and “February”, but then why not the “the First Friday of February”, which is even more alliterative? Sure, this hanging on is making less sense as the years pass, even without events conspiring against us. Perhaps it comes down most of all to a defence of eccentricity, for holding firmly to an idea without needing to know the reasons why. And it’s about not having to explain it to yourself, or anyone else.

Our determination today is rewarded by sight of the magnificent schooner “Helene” tied up, and now resident, at Glasson basin. Built in Sweden in 1916, she’s owned by the Mersey Trust, who have plans to refit her. A stately tall ship with beautiful lines, she commands tremendous presence.

The forecast for today wasn’t promising. Even less promising, the little blue car desperately needs a new battery, and is cranking very sluggishly. A tired battery puts out 12.4 volts. This one is down to 12.3, so I’ve taken a bit of a risk bringing her out, but I’ve promised her a new battery tomorrow if she sees us home all right.

I suppose another thing that brings me out this way is the stability of the landscape. Not much changes over time, so you have the feel of recreating the same day, and I like to compare my impressions over time. There are changes in Glasson of course, but they’re mixed and subtle. The Victoria Inn is still an abandoned shell, the Lockkeeper’s Rest is still serving tea and biker’s lunches, and the familiar boats come and go. And then there’s the walk, the same route down to Cockerham marsh, and back along the Lancashire Coastal Way. Tide in, tide out, wading birds of all variety, the constancy of nature.

There were shouty signs around the Thursland Hill fishery about keeping to the path, which is now fenced in. This is an increasingly popular trend among landowners, which soon renders the paths impassable due to concentrated footfall turning the ground to a deep slime. The meadows were indeed heavy going, but they’ve been worse, and the coastal path around by the abbey’s chapter house is seeing some devastating erosion. Finally, Jansen Pool in flood, even at low tide, required the usual ingenuity to cross. Then it’s back to Glasson for a bacon sandwich and a mug of tea at the Lockkeepers and, today, in the shadow of that beautiful old ship.

Back in the day when I used to mentor youth, I had the pleasure of working with a young woman who crewed tall ships for fun. I’m reminded of her as I gaze up in the rigging of this craft and feel myself going giddy at the thought of scrambling up there. Oh no, she assured me, that was the best bit. Although necessary, I suppose, in the sailing of tall ships, it seemed still a terrible risk. That she enjoyed it though needed no explanation, and I certainly didn’t ask for one.

Anyway, we seem to have gobbled up the walk at pace, amid a race of thoughts, some of which are catching up with us now as we enjoy our mug of tea. I realise for myself there’s something of a void opening up, a kind of creative exhaustion following the self publication of another novel. I’m not sure what’s been going on with the process recently. In the old days, I would live inside a novel for a year or more, but the last two have come with such an intensity – eighty thousand words, in a couple of months.

The poetry journals, too, are filling up faster than they used to do. I thought I was done, actually, but it seems we’re not. But like this day, the last Friday of February, and a mug of tea at the Lockkeepers, there’s something Quixotic about it. The work is the work, and I know some of you do read it, and I do appreciate that, but one cannot help butting up the rationalist question: whom does it serve?

The answer of course is not a rational one, so we may be up against one of those philosophical category errors, though the question: whom does it serve, reminds me of that question from the grail myth: Whom does the grail serve? It is the right question, says the myth, and the right answer is it serves the King. But who is the King?

Some versions say the King is you, but maybe a better answer is that the King is the ideal within yourself you serve. And what is the ideal? Is it merely fidelity to a craft that has chosen us? Is it that we feel our audience is not so much mortal but more related to soul and the deepening into a shape we have always been becoming? And then, I suppose, like the eccentricity of keeping to this last Friday of February, the answer’s not exactly clear, and needs no explanation anyway other than that the daemon keeps us at it. And that’s answer enough for me.

So, we peel off the boots, somewhat gingerly, them being coated in a great deal of mud, and we grab the last few shots of the lovely schooner, Helene, then settle in the little blue car and turn the key…

She’s painfully slow on the turnover, but the engine starts, and we make it home okay. And as promised, I go out and buy a new battery. We can both use the energy.

About 7 miles round. Dead flat, some seasonal heavy going through waterlogged meadows.

Posted in journal, walking, countryside, lancashire, out and about | Tagged meditation, walking, time, lancashire, Glasson, cockerham, writing | Leave a Comment »

The Archivist of Endings – Out Now!

February 25, 2026 by Michael Graeme

My thanks as aways to those who have read my longer stories. This is just an update on the status of my most recent work in progress, which I’m happy to say is now finished, and available in e-book format here. Although essentially a sequel to my previous story, Beyond Saturn’s Gate, it’s not necessary to have read that one first. If I’ve done this right, you should be able to pick up the various characters and their back-stories seamlessly.

Our protagonist, the poet, Richard Hunter, is now over-wintering quietly at Hill Top, his off grid retreat in the Yorkshire Dales. As usual, he’s concerning himself with living as a poet, living as if dreams matter, and that the imaginal world is objectively real. But when a forgotten Romano-British river goddess begins appearing in the dreams of people he knows, and then a fallen American tech billionaire, Larry Elliot, arrives to restore the old village rectory, Richard finds himself caught between worlds.

As his dearest friend, the curate, Amanda Beckinsdale, faces exile from the parish, and his mysterious housekeeper, Miriam Doyle, brings an ever deepening presence into his life, Richard must navigate the strange hinterland between metaphysics and materialism, between dream reading, and real world action. The goddess appears to demand recognition, while Elliot demands a forgetting, for fear of his past catching up with him, and Richard must learn what it means to explore the labyrinth of both a profane and a mythic mystery, without claiming to know the way out of either.

This is a literary fiction about taking dreams seriously, and about the role of the arts in preserving the patterns and the beauty of our human culture as we move into a late-world dynamic of a creeping authoritarianism and barbarism. As a poet Richard realises his role is not that of the hero, but more subtle, as artist, and archivist, to lay the thread that prevents our heroes from becoming monsters themselves.

That’s the gist of it anyway. I apologise in advance for all the typos that must still remain, but I’ll sweep those up no doubt when I next review it.

Thanks for listening

Posted in journal, the writing life | Tagged book-review, book-reviews, books, ebook, fiction, free, michael graeme, novel, self publishing, the archivist of endings, writing | 6 Comments »

The Archivist of our own endings

February 20, 2026 by Michael Graeme

Muddle headed, woolly headed, hacking cough and a splitting head. It’s been two weeks, really, since I felt well, and most unlike me to be laid low for so long. I wonder if, in retirement, we are not exposed so much to the bugs that circulate freely among our fellows, and we lose some of our natural immunity. Then a random vector brings us into contact with a common cold, and we are floored by it.

In this case, the random vector is a delightful little person, around a year old. This being my granddaughter, and a grand mystery too – I mean that I could possibly be old enough to have a grandchild, and find myself some days responsible for entertaining a little one again. But entertaining I am, and find myself regressing to the delightful babble, and nonsense of what I suppose must be my own innocent infancy.

But anyway. I think we’re coming round a bit now, having coughed up what I hope will prove the last of it, though I’m still as deaf as a post and three sheets in the wind, as my mother used to say. But looking that one up, I wonder if she meant it that way. I always had the picture of bedsheets flapping in the wind, when she said it, and wondered how that equated to being somehow “elsewhere” or dazed or ill, when it seems to have derived from nautical slang meaning blind, staggering drunk. But sayings are flexible, and I wonder if, in a more poetic way, she was likening consciousness to a vessel that, when loosened from its guiding tensions, begins to wander.

Yes, I suppose that was it, a somewhat wandering consciousness, which sums me up even at the best of times.

But in these weeks of confinement the weather has mostly been appalling, so not much of the outdoors has been missed – at least not the best of it. Indeed, the landscape of Lancashire’s February is by now brim-top full of water, to the point of overspilling. But on the plus side, we have been spending time instead in the perfect place, this being the little Yorkshire village of Sommerton, which exists only in imagination of course, as the setting for my story Beyond Saturn’s Gate and, now, the sequel, “The Archivist of Endings”. I wrote the closing words of the latter this morning. Another run through for typos, and I imagine that one, which is looking like the second novel of a trilogy, actually, will be out on D2D, with all my other books, in a few weeks.

Speaking of Saturn’s Gate, I’ve begun serialising that one on Substack. It’s going up a chapter at a time and, if interest is sufficient (judging by the number of views) then I post another chapter, but won’t push it beyond boredom. It’s allowed me at least another run through the story, to which I’ve made some minor edits, captured some typos and aligned it better with the story that now follows. Interest is modest, but encouraging, all the same.

Which brings us to the perennial question why we’re actually bothering writing in such a slow burn “literary” genre, and I suppose the answer is it’s the only thing that helps me settle into the shape I’ve always been becoming. By way of explanation, I’m reading a book called“the Force of Character” by James Hillman, which talks about how we settle into ourselves in our senior years, that character begins to show through as a pattern of becoming. The face is one indicator, indeed about the only outward sign of the state of our development, that the soul itself is revealed through all those creases and contortions, also the whitening hair, the receding hair, and the warts and all. We shouldn’t mess with it, says Hillman, no matter how much we think that reflection in the mirror looks like someone else. Wear the shirt in all its crumpled glory, he says, and whatever you do, don’t take an iron to it.

Which I suppose is me, and the way I write. To those of you who do read me, I’m grateful for your company. I’ll never be dramatised on Netflix, but am happy to bob along on this burgeoning ocean of words, all the same, three sheets to the wind, or otherwise.

Perhaps that’s what these small confinements are for, or at least what they allow, if we’re able to see them that way, as less an inconvenience, a time of frustration at the loss of sleep and time, and more a metaphysical unmooring. They are a drifting at sea. Days pass, the weather moves through us, the body weakens and recovers, the season turns, but beneath it all the deeper current continues, unconcerned by audience or final destination. We write because we’re still here, still able to take notice, to set a few words in order against the gathering tide of everything else. This is not to hold anything fast, to call out, to name names, to set the world aright, but simply to bear witness, while our vessel drifts on in our own way.

And in this way I suppose, we become the archivist of our own endings.

Posted in My Notes | Tagged faith, life, love, mental-health, writing | 7 Comments »

Harris Tweed

February 16, 2026 by Michael Graeme

It’s not just that I’m getting older – the pace of change really is accelerating, even the recent past seeming further away than ever. Case in point, I look at what I’m wearing and most of it – trousers, shirt, jacket – came either from the charity shops, or online thrift. It’s not that I can’t afford to buy new, more a question of where to go. We used to have the high street: Debenhams, C&A, British Home Stores, Woolworths, but they’re all gone now.

If you want to pick a shirt off a rack, hold it up to the light, feel the cloth, nowadays, it’s a charity shop. There are still premium retail stores around, but they tend to be in faraway places, or in the centres of big cities, where there’s still a bit of money. The regions, the market towns, are hollowed out, and those big stores, once just a short journey away, aren’t coming back. A few famous names are hanging on, but they’re looking vulnerable, like that one person still wearing a suit and tie in the office, on a dress down Friday.

The last several books I bought came used, off eBay. One turned up this morning, along with a Harris Tweed jacket, both of them in much better condition than I was expecting. A Harris Tweed jacket will cost you around £300 new these days. The cloth is hand-woven in the Hebrides, and they’re made to last a lifetime. Once ubiquitous, the staple of countrymen and pipe-smoking writerly types, they’re definitely niche and luxury now.

This one cost me £20. It carries traces of someone else’s life in the shape of it, though it clearly hasn’t been worn much. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s just that jackets, though immensely practical, are not very fashionable now. As for the book, that was a fiver, including postage – £20 new off Amazon. I’ve not used Amazon for years.

I’ll return to the jacket in a moment, but let’s go back to the charity shops. With the demise of our high streets, those household names have been replaced by the charity sector, along with coffee shops, barber shops and nail bars. So nowadays a typical trip into town involves coffee and cake, followed by a tour of the charity shops. I cut my own hair and nails. But even here things are changing.

Any decent clothes or books I’ve finished with I’ll donate, so I took myself off recently with a bag of goods, only to find a reluctance among the charity shops, who are normally glad for most things in good condition. Some had nowhere to store the gear, but others were in the process of closing down, they said, on account of soaring rents.

If even the charity shops are struggling, one wonders what shape the high streets will take on next, and why anyone would even bother visiting them. While my most memorable experiences have been in the outdoors, in woodland, or on moor and mountain, I’d be wrong to say one’s memory is not also coloured by the ordinary, by Saturday afternoons mooching among those old perfume scented department stores – many of them still there, though empty shells, now, haunting the high-streets, and in deplorable condition.

The old BHS store in Southport, empty and falling down for years, is now in the process of conversion into residential flats, which I suppose is one indication of how things might be going: our town centres converted into urban living spaces, with the necessities close to hand – convenience stores, cafés, bars, transport hubs. And those of us who live on the rural fringes will have no reason to visit these enclaves at all, since even the charity shops will have been forced out of town.

Which brings me back to the jacket: something made to endure the transient and ever accelerating details of history, rescued from a world that no longer seems to know what endurance is for. A world where we’d sooner make things that wear out in five minutes than last a lifetime. The label reads “Gurtex” – a name that has left no trace on the Internet, and which I’m guessing pre-dates it. Its contemporary styling though suggests late nineties, or turn of the century, and that last gasp of British volume clothing manufacture, before the death knell of offshoring.

So the label has gone, the maker is forgotten, but the jacket remains, stubborn reminder of a different mode of being. And maybe that’s the only way our history survives at all these days: not through names, but through those things that last, and which we can only pick up from the thrift sector. I was worried it might look a little old-fashioned – well, I suppose it does – but my good lady says she doesn’t mind being seen out with me when I’m wearing it, which is good enough for me, though given the weight of it, and the fact that spring is almost (we hope) upon us, I may be putting it away now, until the autumn.

Thanks for listening.