Avebury

Caragh's nan was taken ill suddenly this week, and so we found ourselves travelling south from Scotland to Swindon on a hastily arranged trip -- Caragh in a fret, me concerned but also lugging my laptop along in order to keep up with my schedule for Book Three. Thankfully, Edith O'Neill had improved by the time we reached her hospital bed, and everyone is hopeful that she will continue to recover.

It is six and a half hours drive from our home in Scotland to Swindon. I was worried that my aging Citroen would take this opportunity to remind me that I was no longer a member of any breakdown recovery service. The power steering has started to wheeze. An odd knocking sound grates my nerves every time the car goes over a pothole. I stopped at a garage and topped up with oil, hoping that that small gesture would placate the dark green machine enough to get us there safely. And I thought I'd test my new theory of conserving fuel by using 5th gear at every opportunity and by not applying my brakes on the motorway unless I really was going to hit something.

Seemed to work.

Caragh's brother Kieran and his wife Paula had booked a cottage in Avebury, just a few miles from the hospital in Swindon, and had given a room over to us. Infinitely more organised, they set off well before we did, their little baby girl Beth snoozing in her child seat, while I was hunting for my phone charger and then mucking about with oil in the local garage. But a dodgy tyre valve delayed them by hours, and so we arrived at the cottage first.

Teacher's Cottage is a handsome brick house in the heart of the ancient and picturesque Wiltshire village of Avebury. On the opposite side of the lane from the front door a gothic portico leads into a tidy graveyard around the pretty village church. A Neolithic ditch and bank engirdles the village and also the henge: a stone circle that is larger, older, and far more impressive than its famous cousin at Stonehenge.

Huge monoliths or paddle-shaped stones, some weighing sixty tonnes, stand upright in the fields and seem to defy explanation as much as gravity. There is something creepy about those stones, a feeling I blame on the TV series "Children of the Stones" that terrified me so much as a lad. I can barely remember the show and yet it must have left a mark, or a scar, deep in my subconscious. At night I could almost sense the stones waiting out there in the darkness. Part of me half-expected them to have moved the next morning.

Even the crows roosting in the village trees are creepy, and they seem to know it.

My partner Caragh, who is an archaeologist, was intrigued by the site and by all those other ancient monuments in the area: the multi-chambered West Kennet Long Barrow; the inexplicably huge manmade mound that is Silbury Hill. She was so passionate about the history of these circles, barrows and mounds -- and all the theories exploring their origins and intended purposes -- that Kieran and I took to suggesting some alternative theories of our own. Clearly the henge was designed as a tourist attraction from the outset. The cavemen who built it would undoubtedly have charged an admission fee of one groat (all ancient peoples used groats as currency) They probably put on bands, sold tourist tat from stalls (pebbles, cup-and-ball games, paper windmills, model-henge's and so on), and they might have hired Morris dancers or forced dinosaurs to fight to the death in a pit. West Kennet Long Barrow, a few miles away, would have made a perfect cool environment for storing beer long before someone had the idea of using it to inter bones. And aren't the slopes of Silbury Hill just set at the perfect pitch for sledging?

None of our theories met with Caragh's approval. She didn't even deign to offer them the serious academic contemplation we felt that they deserved.

Avebury impressed me, but my heart sank a little when I first glimpsed the other tourists. Swinging the car into the village, we passed a couple of Crusties who were admiring the henge from the roadside. They wore rough hemp trousers and shirts decorated with esoteric Eastern symbols and OM talismans, crystals and beads and Celtic knots and their hair hung in mats and clumps like really bad thatch. And like the other members of that soap-shunning tribe they boasted abundant nasal piercings and were accompanied by an ill-fed ragged brown dog on a piece of string. Of course henges are a magnet for them.

Don't get me wrong, I've nothing against hippy soap dodgers. But I dislike all the pseudo - mystical - healing - crystal - lay - line - magick - with - a - "k" - crop - circle - tree - hugging - naga - baba - earth - mother - gaia - worshipping - ayurverdic - Om - chakra - wank that goes with it.

We had dinner at the Red Lion, a fine ye olde English thatched pub with an 86 foot deep well in the dining room. The well had been covered with glass and now made an unusual feature-table on which to set your pint. Friendly place, the food was ok. Apparently the pub had appeared on the TV show "Most Haunted". Well it's, like, really old and has a thatched roof.

The local Henge Shop was surprisingly good: full of prints of old maps and fine crafts and informative books and fossils and huge chunks of crystal, adamantine or basalt with tags which did not claim to bring a lover back, and cast replicas of gargoyles from old Cathedrals, and other, more useful things like hats.

But the National Trust shop and its oh-we-are-just-soooo-vegetarian restaurant were an altogether different pair of creatures. On our second day in Avebury we had lunch at the restaurant. My vegetable hotpot consisted of a pot of vegetables served on a plate of vegetables. Kieran's chickpea curry looked suspiciously like someone had spooned out some chickpeas onto a bed of rice. No chakra-damaging meat in sight.

And the shop...

Here were all the books on Mother Goddess worship and ley lines and the mysteries of healing springs and UFOs and the power of crystals and earth talismans and ancient Indian philosophy explained by a seventh level mystic guru from Surrey called Kevin. Now all this would be fair enough in Edinburgh's Cockburn Street, but this was a National Trust shop. Kieran was examining a tray of magnetic stones (magnets encased in resin so that they looked a bit like stones -- 5 for a pound) but he accidentally pinged a fistful of them across the floor. They clattered everywhere, skittering off under the racks of mugs and postcards, and we grinned guiltily then picked them up while the elderly women behind the counter lifted their noses and admonished us with brute silence.

I picked up a book on crop circles and studied the chapter titles. Chapter four's heading posed the question "Genuine or Hoax?" In a rational world I would have turned to that page to find one word, and not the one beginning with "g", and then skimmed onwards through a pad of blank pages and at last arrived at one final paragraph in which the author made a heartfelt and humble apology for wasting the reader's time. But what I found instead was an argument in which the author stated that the patterns found in some crop circles were of such intricate mathematical or geometrical design that they could not possibly have been made by man.

That makes sense.

Us mere humans, who have sent astronauts to the moon and designed computers that can perform billions of calculations in the blink of an eye and have invented jet aircraft and the internal combustion engine and cracked the human genome and put satellites in orbit which can transmit information at the speed of light between some dude in London and his mum in New Zealand and have mapped galaxies and photographed nebulae and split the atom and developed theories about the nature of time and space and matter and cured so many diseases and have genetically modified the plants and animals around us and massively altered the very face of the planet we live on to suit our own needs yes, us ignorant apes could not possibly come up with a complicated way of flattening corn.

So it must be aliens.

Of course it is much more likely that a bunch of supremely intelligent alien beings travel in their space ships light years across the universe to reach our small blue world and then once here do not say "hi, we're from Alpha Centauri, nice to meet you guys and do you mind if we film this?", but instead come down in the dead of night and use their weird force fields to make concentric circles in a field near Swindon.

I once met a guy on an overnight bus whose claim to fame was that a photo of his arse had appeared in a book on UFOs -- a big mainstream book, like, by a guy who knew what he was talking about, knew about the black choppers in Area 51 and everything, and it's all a big conspiracy. This erstwhile passenger had sat on a hill somewhere and afterwards developed a strange rash.

Aliens.

The hill was a renowned hotspot for extra-terrestrial encounters, you see.

In the National Trust bookshop I didn't spy that particular volume, but there was a book written by two flying saucer experts. They were depicted on the cover, both wearing giant headphones of the sort typical in the seventies and they held aloft small silver ray gun type things like miniature satellite dishes. They looked so earnest and serious that I couldn't bring myself to open the book. I had to set it down gently and take a long deep breath.

While we waited on news from the hospital we nipped down the road to Marlborough, another handsome and historic town built from red brick. For lunch we ambled into the former church, now a reasonably priced cafe and gift shop, where we squirted sachets of ketchup onto our Cumberland sausage, egg and chips under the gazes of glass saints in the windows and beneath huge wooden boards packed with grand curlicues of script reminding us not to steal or kill or covet anybody's ass.

Baby Beth sat in her high chair and watched us all with her huge blue eyes, gurgling cutely. I chatted with Paula about religion and decided that maybe it wasn't such a bad thing after all. Those chips were really good.

In the local bookshop I spied the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which consisted of two huge volumes that each weighed as much as a spare wheel for my car, and so didn't appear to be very compact at first glance. Only when I heaved one of the giant books down from the shelf and opened it did I see that each broad page had been crammed with text so small that one required the supplied magnifying glass to read it. By compact, they meant that 16400 pages had been squeezed into a mere 4100. And it is truly a wonderful book, full of words nobody saw fit to include in my other Oxford Dictionary -- words like deathwards (towards death), slob-land (muddy ground), sulke (hard to sell, as in Never was a thrifty trader more willing to put of a sulke commodity than she was to truck for her maydenhead) and tankodrome (a park for military vehicles). Of course after I read "tankodrome" I had to buy it.

We set off back north on Friday, up the dreaded M6 which funnels millions of cars through a chokepoint between the busy cities of Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool. The rain lashed down. Lorries hissed by. My windscreen wipers creaked and smeared it all into a grey blur. Seventy miles an hour became sixty, then twenty, and then a long crawl through road works where whole teams of blinking vans and generators and men in yellow jackets had converged on one spot to remove a pebble from the fast lane. Speed cameras and average speed cameras and warning signs for speed cameras, all waiting for some future day when a sudden drop in traffic congestion might make it actually possible to exceed 15 mph. And on almost every overpass there waited a solitary vehicle, occasionally a mobile speed trap, but more often just a normal lorry or car that had stopped there for some unknown reason. Why are they there? Do they go there to have a picnic and watch traffic? Is it a swingers' thing? It's completely inexplicable.

Aliens, probably.

The Book Formerly Known as Penny Devil

The advance reading copies of "Iron Angel" are now out and doing the rounds. That a large part of the book is set in Hell is apt, since it felt like I was actually there while writing it. The creation of Book Two has been a much more difficult process than writing the first one.

Publishers sometimes talk about a strange malady called "secondbookitis". After taking several years to write your debut, you're suddenly thrust into a position where you now have to produce a second book to a deadline, and now you are keenly aware you have an audience.

I don't know if this peculiar affliction had a grip on me. Perhaps it did. It seems that for every word I left in the final draft of "Iron Angel", I deleted another two. Swathes of text, characters and even book-length threads, all binned. Writers advise you to murder your darlings. "Iron Angel" produced mass graves full of darlings.

Kirkus have provided the first quote: “Flavorsome, original and leavened with a fierce sense of humor.” Nice enough, but curiously bready.

Writing "Lye Street" was far less stressful (perhaps something to do with only having 26,000 words to write, as opposed to 150,000 or so). It was a limited edition with only 2000 copies printed, and these have now sold out -- thanks to the stunning artwork by Bob Eggleton and Dave McKean, I'll wager.

So now it's on to Book Three. No title yet, but as the deadline looms I know I'll be thinking of calling it "God, I Really Need a Holiday" or "Can this be a Really Short One, Please?" or "Everyone Dies After 80,000 Words."