About Me

Tollesbury, Essex, United Kingdom
I was born in the Summer of 1969 in Dagenham, just on the border of East London. School was largely unproductive but enjoyable, setting me up for something of a wayward but interesting life! On leaving school I had various jobs including putting up stalls at Romford Market, working in a record shop, putting up ceilings, gardening and road sweeping. After resigning from an insurance company to play in a band, I found myself unemployed for two years. Then finally I got back on my feet and I've been a psychiatric nurse since 1997. I wrote A Cleansing of Souls when I was 22 years old and followed it up with Tollesbury Time Forever almost twenty years later. I started writing The Bird That Nobody Sees in September 2011 and it was released in July 2012. In terms of writing, my heroes are Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck. I would also include Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan and Tom Waits as literary influences. So that's me I guess - scruffy, happy and in love with literary fiction, music and life...

Friday 4 November 2011

A 'blurb' I had to write for a recent submission....

"Tollesbury Time. Nothing is real. And there's nothing to get hung about. Tollesbury Time Forever," sing the children…

That's all very well if you're not Simon Gregory, a Beatles-obsessed alcoholic with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and a love of cricket. For Simon, nothing is real except the knowledge that he misses the son he abandoned twenty-four years ago. Although the rope around his neck is real, and Tollesbury Time, that is real too. As you are about to discover.

On the night of his fiftieth birthday, Simon drinks himself into a lonely stupor in The King's Head in the little English village of Tollesbury. Nothing new in that. He staggers to his beloved salt marshes and attempts to drown himself. Nothing new in that either. But this time, when he comes to, things have changed. He is still in Tollesbury. He is still alive. But there are cattle instead of cars. And there are two horses where his house should have been.

Simon has two choices. He can either give up or he can try and work out what has happened to him in order that he can be with his son once more. What Simon doesn’t know is that he is a hero. I used to be his mental health nurse. Little did Simon realise that he was to be not just the hero of his own life, but of mine too.


"Tollesbury Time. Nothing is real. And there's nothing to get hung about. Tollesbury Time Forever," sing the children…

as the rope tightens around Simon Gregory's neck...
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