Time flies – in memory of Jack Alun Time flies. So thank goodness books remain. Possibly gathering a bit of dust, but not becoming dust. That’s what people do, I suppose. I’m reading for the nth time Jack Alun’s blog, Neither Here Nor There, written in the middle of a lockdown in the COVID time. He’s stuck in Wales dreaming of France describing writing a new collection of poems that would eventually become ‘Invisible Spaces’. He describes feelings of being cut off geographically and culturally and ‘marooned in a neither here nor there sort of Neverland.’ I am sure he spoke for many who experienced the isolation in all sorts of ways but here I am, years later, stuck in Wales, looking back wondering what happened to all that time and, in particular, how we can ever bridge the gaps that time and space increase. Le temps passe vite. I had to look it up, by the way. French is such a slippery thing, sometimes so elegant and then sometimes, it just lets you down a bit. I remember Jack making me roar with laughter at his tales of going to Paris on a French language course and rapidly deteriorating…
I wrote this book about ten years ago, partly as a response to the sudden death of my mother-in-law, who’d just turned sixty. Time, then, to get something down. But what? I’d studied Keats closely at university, including the letters and Robert Gittings’ biography and had even written a poem about Keats’ arrival in Naples: to have gone through all that, only to be quarantined for another month. So, after a bit more research, I had my plot and also the ending, which I knew would steer clear of Rome, because Anthony Burgess had written a novel about Keats dying there already. Over a period of two years, in cafes and classrooms [empty ones], I gradually put together a series of scenes describing the journey to Italy. I chose third-person focalised narrative because that offered me both descriptive luxuries and the ability to explore voice/point of view. The hardest part was settling on dialogue that didn’t sound like botched Beau Brummell, so I tried to keep it as simple as possible, in contrast to some lusciousness over river-bank and ocean-wave. In particular, I found I enjoyed writing about the Thames [five years’ hard labour in Grays, Essex helped] and about…