Pieces about where I come from — family, inheritance, the codes I was raised inside — examined with love and without absolution. I'm not interested in blame, and I'm not interested in letting anyone off either; both are ways of not looking. The narrator here is one of them, not standing outside looking in. Hagiography and hatchet-job are both evasions. This is the attempt at something truer than either.
A 1976 diary entry; a stuffed marrow forgotten in the oven, a Triumph with failing brakes, and a frantic dash south to the Reading Festival, where my brother, Francis, made it to the stage with one minute to spare, becomes the starting point for a reflection on risk and spontaneity in live performance, and what's lost when shows grow too polished to leave the audience any part to play.
A 1972 photograph in the garden of Shandy Hall of a local odd-jobs-man, an actor playing Laurence Sterne, and my mother, opens a reflection on arriving in a tight-knit North Yorkshire village from 'away', the community that has since vanished, and a childhood sense of dislocation that never quite lifted. A meditation on belonging, outsiderness, and how a landscape might hold the key to coming to terms with oneself.