after the euphoria of publishing spaghetti head, it is time to get on with my second book, WHICH IS ABOUT MY LIFE AS A PROFESSIONAL GARDENER IN FRANCE.

Spaghetti Head

In 2006 I wanted to be out of the relationship I was in, but my head and heart were spinning and fighting one another everytime I tried to decide what action to take. One day I sat on my bedroom floor and tried to put my confused thoughts and emotions into a drawing. The image I drew showed a ball of tangled lines. I named each line with an emotion or thought - such as ‘mistrust’, ‘unknown’, ‘jealousy’ etc. Underneath that image I drew nice, orderly straight lines and wrote only positive words to reflect the emotions I wanted to attract to my life: ‘love’, ‘peace’, ‘trust’.

I stared at the page in front of me for a while and added one big arrow heading from the jumbled mess of lines to the nice orderly pile. I started to note down what I needed to do to move from the top mind-state to the bottom - and I thought, ‘hang on a minute - this could make a good story’. And thus the seed for Spaghetti Head was sewn.

I call it self-help fiction. Someone else said it’s certainly not your average self-help romantic comedy political speculative fiction!
What everyone who reads it agrees on though, is that it’s original, thought-provoking and has caused them to look at cornflakes in a totally different light.  

book no. 2

I don’t have a title for it yet, which feels a bit weird because ‘Spaghetti Head’ arrived before anything else.

However, on November 23rd 2005 I packed some bits, including Fred my 1978 Falcon racing bike, into my Peugeot 106 and drove from Somerset to France. I had booked accommodation for five months.

Fourteen years and many ‘pourquoi pas’ later, I’m still here and have my own gardening business. Why gardening? Why France? Plus gardens, plants and working as a gardener are what I talk about in Book No. 2. I’ll keep you updated on progress!