I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else.

If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement. Towns and cities, too, which always retain the ghost of their earlier incarnations beneath today's concrete and glass.

I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.