September was again divided by two trips - one to Suffolk and the other to Bristol/Wales! There were also some amazing London events to boldly go to, from exhibitions to a screening and concert. Plenty of writing updates too, including a sneak peek into one of my poems for issue 3 of the GLUE the zine.

Things I did

The month started with another brilliant Screen Players Club, an early screening of Everybody Digs Bill Evans with director Grant Gee, screenwriter Mark O’Halloran and actor Valene Kane in conversation with Charlotte Bogard Macleod. I must confess I hadn’t heard of Bill Evans before going, so the dramatisation was just as educational as it was beautiful. I especially enjoyed the use of black and white vs colour for the way the film jumps between time periods (in poignant ways). And it was all filmed over twenty days with Ireland doubling for America. More here.

It’s always great to catch up with Charlotte and be able to talk to a film’s creative team right after witnessing it. Valene Kane, who played Jyn’s mother Lyra Erso in Rogue One, was especially kind in talking Star Wars with me as well whilst she signed my visual dictionary. She hadn’t seen her pages before!

Keeping with Star-universes, we made a family trek to the Science Museum for their scattered exhibit of props and costumes from across Star Trek’s history. Some special props from the movies were Zephram Cochrane’s uniform tucked amongst the flight section, the photon collector from Star Trek IV, and of course B-4’s head.

My favourite though may have been the array of PADDs, communicators and uniforms from across eras and species. Handheld props from Deep Space Nine and the wonderful detail of newer productions uniforms were lovely to see up close. I’d never appreciated the Starfleet emblems in the fabric. Plus there was a captain’s chair (red alert non-fucntional) and tribbles!

For our Suffolk trip, we stayed at a lovely place in Framlingham, with front windows overlooking the Market Hill triangular square, and backwards looking towards the church, so close to the castle. An evening walk yielded views of the town’s sites, including the Victorian vertical slot letterbox and many Detectorists filming locations.

The first major visit though was Sutton Hoo. All the new Time Team specials had prepared us to visit, though there was still so much to discover walking the landscape over the hoos and following potential ancient routes for the boats to make their way to the ship burials.

Looking over the cemetery and earthworks from the tower was incredible, as was seeing the Bromswell Bucket and artefacts from the horseman’s burial and all the treasures from the famous digs in Tranmer House. So many layers of history to walk through, from the earliest riverside community to patches still left from last year’s dig!

Later that day we visited Orford Castle, a fascinating bit of architecture from Henry II, with a great museum inside and an interesting legend I will be exploring further. It’s a yin yang mirror to Framlingham, which it was built to oppose, in having lost its outer walls but maintained its all-purpose keep.

The village of Orford was lovely to walk around, from the church with its outer ruins and 1400s font with lions, wildmen, angels and the four gospel writers in cherubim/animal form, to the peaceful quay with a view across to the Ness and down the shore past a few wrecks.

Framlingham church has a very similar font, and an array of tombs colourful and/or masterfully sculpted, of dukes, earls and Henry VIII’s son Henry Fitzroy.

The castle has a wonderful local history museum within its walls, as well as the usual EH display about the various inhabitants of the buildings within. The real highlight was walking at chimney level the whole way around the impresive battlements.

Then circling from ‘moat level’ was equally as impressive, before a walk around the Mere.

The second stop that day was Southwold. The pier has an arcade of hilarious home-made machines reminiscent of Harry Hill props, as well as a fantastic mural tribute to George Orwell with quotes and a well-placed security camera. We of course stopped by one of his family homes there.

The local museum has intriguing finds like the biggest Viking rudder ever found, preserved at over four metres, a to-scale votive lead hand, an Anglo-Saxon decorated leg bone, a Bronze Age carving of a deer and a human vertebrae with a flint arrowhead lodged in!

Colchester was our stop on the way back, for a circuit around the Roman walls. The first stop was St. Botolph’s Priory ruins, which obviously reused so much of the Roman material, pretty pretty and unique!

Carrying on further south away from the walls we discovered the various bumps, fragment of spina and road layouts which taken together reveal Britain’s only known Roman circus. From there we discovered perhaps one of the first churches in Britain, or perhaps a mithraeum…

It was like being back in Rome for a second when walking in and out of the Balkerne Gate under the original pedestrian arch, with the Victorian Jumbo water tower towering over the staute of Mercury on the theatre roof. I loved the juxtaposition of left half of the four entranceways beneath the balcony of The Hole in the Wall pub.

Colchester Castle looked Roman again with its reuse. Incredible to think of the remnants that lie beneath, the temple that sat at the heart of Britain’s first Roman capital. At one point Boudica reduced it to rubble, then time gnawed away until a different conquerer set up shop. William had no idea the poetry of building (suppossedly the largest keep in Europe) on the foundations of conquerors nine hundred years prior.

Speaking of ruins and empires, my next trip was to the British Museum. Their little display of 250 years of American Independence had a couple of wonderful artefacts in the traditions of Native Americans. But the highlight there was discovering the only other ceremonial copy of the declaration, which was only discovered in 2015 in Chichester. I took the time to find the “all men are created equal” statement…

Lots more new aquistions were on display, including a gold and garnet hoard to rival Sutton Hoo, a cute lead bull Roman vehicle mount and of course the Tudor Heart. I explored the whole room 2 and saw more disparate treasures like a modern coiled sister basket from Australia, an ice-resembling Finnish vase, an incredible baton so similar to the others I’d seen from La Madeleine in French museums in May and some jaw-dropping Roman sculptures to rival those in Rome, which I’ll link here, here and here.

Then, after the Constable and another visit to the Netherlandish Drawings exhibitions, I headed across London to St Matthias Church, Stoke Newington. A very special evening progressed from there. First, some time hanging out with fellow Liang Lawrence fans in the queue, then watching her team track down the merch for the show (including handmade clay swans). While we were waiting, someone from the label came out with a walkman-esque cd player and some earphones. I got to be 3rd/4th in the world outside of Liang’s team to hear her next EP in full! I can’t wait to listen again!

Being front row pews meant I had a great view when the lights dimmed, apart from on the suspended Jesus in the back. Both supports were fantastic, the harmonies of Essence Martins particularly fitting in the church, and then came Liang and Coby, and the band slowly grew. Hearing the songs with backing vocals and the violin live with such great acoustics was somewhat divine and I had another lovely chat with Liang afterwards about my next trip…

With a brief two-day birthday interlude, I was off to Bristol. I think I’ll write more about this trip when its all revealed, but it was a really nice stay with a new friend. The full day I had there, we headed to St Fagans, Wales’s National Museum of History, complete with about fifty imported historic buildings! There’s a castle with lovely gardens including a woollen mill, and a whole authentic town with a working bakery and pub. I had a fantastic day almost back in time, and immersed in the incredible crafts and language spoken by those around me!

Plus the museums on site had some beautiful artefacts from a fluted flint macehead to many unique carved slabs of stone from across the eras and Iron Age fittings, shields, bowls, a helmet and a firedog. Then there were wooden treasures, like love spoons and butter prints, and one of the oldest wood carvings in Europe, an oak post from 6,270 years ago with a zigzag pattern.

The gallery in the main centre had a whole donkey mill like I saw in Ostia, hoards, a stone with an early Brythonic name, the only fossil Neanderthal teeth to be found in the UK, amazing swords and poignant items from Capel Celyn.

We spent 10 till 5 at St Fagans, and then went for celebratory pizza in Cardiff! I had a brief tour, mainly in awe of the museum and court buildings, and then we ate in view of the castle walls, which showed the scale of Roman fort walls - and reminded me of the walled park in Ravenna. Much easier to appreciate their size and presence than looking at foundations!

The next morning I had a different walk around Bristol, seeing some more of the river and islands, and visiting the Strangers’ Burial Ground featured in GLUE - issue #2. Then I walked down memory lane into the museum, seeing again the Egyptian artefacts and displays that mean a lot to my storytelling before finding the new Curiosity area and all the Aardman figures scattered around the display.

I don’t know whether I was happier to see a copper face of Apollo or Shaun the Sheep and Wallace amidst porcelain.

I’m writing this while up in the Midlands, visiting Stafford and celebrating my Nan’s 99th birthday!

Things I wrote

This newsletter…

Speaking of, the newsletter as a whole turned three years old this month, as I turned twenty-four! A lot has happened in those three years. Thanks so much for following along, for being a part of that journey.

Throughout that whole life of the newsletter, I’ve had the same novel going on the back burner, specifically the ‘gem journey’ story you may remember, that’s been in a growing flux since mid 2023. You’ll be happy to hear I’ve set aside time this month to finally work through all my photos and notes, returning to my 2024 trip to Arles and Marseilles.

An edit of another short story added a little extra context and cut down the many similes. I’ve sent that and another previous story to different open calls, and these last few days have continued work on another project…

GlUE the zine shared a sneak peek of my poem on instagram. Here’s an edited version of the text:

I am contributing a poem about friendship to the third issue, illustrated beautifully by Betty Freeman, comprised of stanzas focusing on different ways of describing friendship, which came to me over the course of the year.

The theme of Strings gave me the perfect opportunity to tie these all together and write a final stanza reflecting on the growing friend group of imagery! Some lines from that stanza came to me when I was staying at Magdalen College in Oxford, walking Addison’s Walk. So I’ve shared some photos from that trip through the link above.

The deer and magpie friends during the eclipse. Some snaps of my GLUE sticker out and about in Magdalen. And since one of the stanzas compares friendship to a stone circle, a collection of the monuments called the Rollright Stones, so rooted in their hilltop landscape!

PROJECT DOUBLE WEAVE is the name I’ve given my second contribution to GLUE, an incredible collaboration with fabricator and illustrator Ange Morris. For now, I’ll hold back on telling you more so the full thing makes its impact. I’ve refined a special type of poem over four versions for this project, which has manifested in the real world. It’s all been such a treat for me to continually bounce ideas back and forth with Ange and create something so unique.

2026 Projects Written

Comic: 1

Comic Outline: 1

Essays: 2

Novelette: 1

Pitch decks: 3

Poems: 8

Rewrites: 10

Short Films: 4

Short Stories: 7

Steam Page: 1

Things I gained

While Echoes of the Empire wraps up, I’m so excited to launch into Soule and Sliney’s final piece of his trilogy expanding on Kylo Ren’s story.

Now it wouldn’t be my birthday without an embarassment of book-riches. I’m very grateful for these stacks, a nice mixture of surprises, books I’d forgotten about and ones most definitely on my list for inspiration. First is the above marvellous sandwich of fiction, with some definite Roman tastes, and some other recommended fillings.

On the non-fiction side, there’s another great array. Whether biographical, historical, anthropoligcal or poetic they excite me in different ways. After the exciting reveal of Misfits Together, a musical from three of my favourite creatives, I’m more excited than ever to read Miller’s autobiography, especially after reading All My Sons whilst writing my twenty one pilots novelette. I’m finally digging into the books which inspired George Lucas too, like the Campbell and Casteneda. Delphi will inform whichever fiction I eventually set there…

Thank you so much for your continued support. And if you’re a new reader, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to hear about everything I’m doing, writing and gaining. Looking at photo albums with my nan was so transportative, and I feel this newsletter is a version of that for my future self.