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Have I come a long way since my almighty meltdown over a pile of logs in October 2021? By now, of course, I recognise that it wasn’t really about the logs: that unexpected delivery was just the final straw. The anxiety and blues that characterised that period should probably be attributed to my writing fiction offline, which had come to occupy all of my free time. An old novel revisited, and an old unfinished manuscript. Both of them had stirred emotions from deep inside, leaving my heart in a state of perpetual agitation.

Shortly after that meltdown, I set both of those novels aside, finding myself suddenly moved to pen a completely new one. A story of a search and reunion, about love and forgiveness. This one seemed urgent, pouring out of my soul, hammered into my laptop at speed. A rough outline found its way onto the page on the last Sunday in November. The following weekend, while visiting my parents in Bath, I took that rare opportunity of time away alone to write uninterrupted.

So it was that after a very cold afternoon walk along the canal in the grey drizzle with my parents, I spent the evening of that first Saturday in December and the early hours of Sunday morning setting out an initial draft in their spare room beneath Great Pulteney Street. By the time I met with my parents after church for our rendezvous at Côte for brunch with my sister, I had a complete first draft saved on my laptop. I have never written a novel as quickly as this one.

Where did that story come from and why? Well of course it came from the novel I had been editing all year long. A novel with origins in my first attempt, penned over a quarter of a century ago. The new one, imagining a reunion of many of the characters from that earlier work, nearly thirty years on. An exploration of how lives might have changed in the intervening years. An imagining of what might have become of them all during so many years apart. For the whole of the winter, in between work and family responsibilities, I worked on that new novel exclusively.

That was until the end of February, when I came to a very intense chapter about forgiveness. There I came to a halt, for the interactions of those fictional characters stirred something inside me, calling me to discover such bravery myself. That’s when reality took over, revealing itself to be far stranger than fiction. So strange, in fact, that I haven’t touched any of my novels since. The only way I can describe all that became apparent is as divine comedy: a sort of cosmic prank, which threw me completely.

Instead of editing fiction, for the remainder of the year I embarked on a voyage of self-discovery, healing and understanding. I don’t know why I carried so much anxiety for so long. I know that I made everything far more significant than it really was, but that’s the nature of the heart. I don’t know if I will ever return to those novels, having discovered reality to be far more unbelievable than anything my imagination could possibly conceive.

On the other hand, that novel turned out to be quite prescient: about how hearts can be drawn together, but not for love. About how people can be drawn together desiring one thing, when really they’re being called towards something else altogether. In my novel, for the pursuit of truth. Hearts attach, but not for the reasons we imagine. I’ve definitely come a long way since that almighty meltdown over a pile of words, revisited after a long hiatus. We might even call it progress.