When we arrived on the Friday night, instead of moody blues, we were met with a 20-year-old singing Oasis, The Beatles, and some original songs. My parents’ friends weren’t fussed, but I was sold. This was all new to me. Through my grandparents, I’d grown up on a diet of Daniel O’Donnell and similar Irish country artists. This was something different, something living, something I could relate to.

At the end of the night, I spoke to Rory. We had nothing in common. When I told him I lived in Creggan, Derry, he spoke about it like it was a different world. “I’d love to drive down a road in Creggan,” he said, as if it were a million miles away.

And it worked both ways. To him, Creggan was exotic. To me, Donegal was. Summers there meant Cornettos and Cidona, long days on beaches or up mountains and cliffs like Errigal and Slieve League.

He gave me a CD, his debut album 20th Century, and in the days, weeks, and months that followed, I played it constantly. The language in the songs was different. I’d graduated from kettles boiling and fires in the kitchen to lyrics with words like “balls”, “wonderbra”, and “condoms”.

Two years later, I was back in Donegal on another family holiday. We were driving through Falcarragh, another small Gaeltacht town, when a song came on the radio. Three chords. Pop punk. Full of energy. The song was “Wired to the Moon” by a new Donegal band, The Revs. I needed to know more, and DJ Ruth Scott had them in studio after the break.

The penny didn’t drop for me, but it did for my parents. “That’s the fella we met in Carrick!” my mum shouted halfway through the interview. And so it was. The chorus of “Wired to the Moon” stayed with me for the rest of the holiday.

The engine took off for The Revs from there. They went from playing pubs around Donegal, places not unlike the Slieve League, to main stages at Witnness and Slane Castle in 2002. The following year they were at Reading and Leeds, touring abroad and popping up on MTV2.

I got back in touch with Rory soon after hearing that first single. Before long, I got to know John McIntyre, the guitar player, and Mickey D O’Donnell, the drummer. Truth be told, I was probably a little too invested. I annoyed the management, and the band were likely too polite to say I annoyed them too. But to me, they were escapism from a troubled, overactive young mind at the time.

The Revs didn’t just change what I listened to, they opened doors to another world. From there I started digging outwards, I discovered Radiohead, the deeper cuts from R.E.M and U2, and even found my way to becoming a huge fan of Bill Hicks.

There are great memories from those years. In the early 2000s, my granda would take me to Letterkenny to pick up their latest releases. Albums released in Ireland were hard to come by in the North and were treated as “imports”, slowing everything down. It feels ridiculous now, when we carry almost every song ever recorded in our pockets.

During one bout of bad behaviour, my mum gave my Revs CDs away. She blamed the music. Ironic, considering the line in their song Louis Walsh: “and my momma she said, you’ll go crazy in the head with rock n roll.”

I travelled the length and breadth of Ireland to see them live. Once, in December 2004, I left Derry at 5am for a 14 hour journey to Killarney for a gig at the INEC only to leave at 5am the next morning for the long return journey.

After The Revs announced a “break of indefinite length” in 2006, they played a short, almost secret tour. It ended in Carrick-on-Shannon, County Leitrim, their last official show. I made the journey. It felt like they didn’t want to leave the stage.

Eventually, The Revs sort of became stories I told. Not everyone believed them. One friend, in particular, was convinced I was talking shite when I said I knew them.

So one afternoon, I asked Rory to drive up to Creggan with me.

We pulled into the estate, past the same rows of houses I’d grown up around, roads that had once felt a world away from Donegal. My friend was outside, a copy of Hot Press in his hand, ironically with The Revs on the cover, still not quite convinced until Rory stepped out of the car.

Rory finally got to drive down a road in Creggan.

Pre-orders for the Stories. Songs. Seasons. collection are available now. Shipping from 1 December to the UK and Ireland. If you’re outside the UK or Ireland please drop me a note and we’ll figure something out. There are 50 numbered, signed, and limited editions available. The collection includes more than 24 reflective essays on memory, music, and place. Early bird tickets for the Leeds launch event are also available. All you have to do is click the button below.

I didn’t realise this was the beginning of something that would follow me for months. Seamus started to pop up in random places. I’d be reading a book, seemingly unrelated to Heaney, where his name would appear. Or I’d have the radio on and the presenter would talk about him. These little coincidences began to grow.

It all came to a head a few months later. We were in Ireland for a few weeks in August and decided to visit the Seamus Heaney HomePlace in Bellaghy, Co. Derry. We’d just spent a week in Inishowen and were on our way to Wicklow, with a few nights in Dublin and a detour to Heaney country along the way.I’d been to HomePlace a few years earlier to see Glen Hansard, but I’d always wanted to go back for a proper look at the exhibition. It didn’t disappoint on that rainy Friday, the only complaint being that we had to get to Dublin and couldn’t stay longer.

That night we were attending Eire is Alba at the National Concert Hall, Zoë Conway, John McIntyre, Julie Fowlis, and Eamon Doorley’s performance with the RTE Concert Orchestra. One of the first songs on the set that night was a song called Ómós Sheamuis, a piece Zoë and John composed in memory of Heaney, the literal translation being ‘in honour of Seamus.’ Me and Amy looked at each other with a quiet laugh as they introduced the song. During the interval, we went to the bar, a Guinness for me, a white wine for Amy, and as we took a seat at one of the tables, we looked to our right to see a portrait of none other than Seamus Heaney on the wall next to us.

After a couple of lively days in Dublin, we headed over to Wicklow where we stayed in a cottage once owned by Joan (Shevawn) Lynam, an author and journalist who was once Alfred Hitchcock’s assistant. One evening at the cottage I suggested we watch the Seamus Heaney documentary ‘The music of what happens’. It’s become a Christmas tradition for us to re-watch the documentary, so it was unusual for us to watch it in the middle of summer, but given our visit to HomePlace I thought it would be a nice way to pass the evening. The documentary features archive footage of Seamus alongside interviews with his wife Marie and their children.

The next morning we decide we’ll head for Wicklow Town for some breakfast. We were coming to the last few days of our trip so we wanted to treat ourselves. But as mornings on holiday often end up, we got off to a slow start and started to worry we’d miss the breakfast menu in most places if we ventured as far as Wicklow Town. A quick Google search revealed that we’d get a good breakfast in a restaurant just next to Mount Usher Gardens, a few minutes drive from where we were staying. As we’re walking to the entrance of the restaurant I stop in my tracks and under my breath I utter a ‘what the f**k?’ to Amy. I could hardly believe my eyes. Marie Heaney and her family were stood at the front door of the restaurant. These coincidences are getting a little out of hand now, I thought. I didn’t want to bother Marie and co. by saying hello and left them to their nice morning out in peace. And there was no way I was going to attempt to tell the story of these little coincidences as they were having their coffee and cake. During the week in Wicklow, I was toying with the idea of writing a story about the Dagda, a god from Irish myth connected to agriculture, magic, and wisdom.

At the end of the trip, on the Stena Line from Dublin to Holyhead taking us back to England, I pulled out Seamus Heaney’s ‘Preoccupations’ a selection of his prose written from 1968 to 1978. Amy had given this to me for my birthday, and I hadn’t got around to reading it. Six pages in, Seamus starts talking about how his imagination was lit up as a child when reading about the Dagda. Another little coincidence.

In the weeks following that summer trip home to Ireland, I felt I wanted to share the story of all these little coincidences with Marie. I wrote her a light hearted letter, telling her about the performance at the National Concert Hall, the portrait, the restaurant in Wicklow, the Dagda. She wrote back and kindly sent me a copy of her book ‘Over Nine Waves’ in which the Dagda is a big presence… and the little coincidences continue.

I start to think about how people are so embedded in the anatomy of a place that it seems like they’ll go on forever. Moya was one of those people. Affectionately referred to as the First Lady of Celtic Music, Moya with her band Clannad merged the old and the new, concocting a unique sound, bringing traditional music into the modern day. Moya’s music sounded like North West Donegal, the soundscapes she created lit up the imagination and placed you in the landscapes of Gweedore and Gola Island.

The social media feed fills rapidly with more verified sources, confirming Moya’s death and I’m rattled by it. Amy’s asleep next to me, I think about waking her up but instead I sit up in bed thinking about how, to me, Moya was always mysterious and magical, yet open and approachable. U2 put it in better words with their tribute: “She walked through this world like an angel, and now she’s back with her own kind.”I wrote about Moya in June 2025: It’s the 8th of March 2006 and I’ve just managed to sneak my way into Clannad’s soundcheck in the Millennium Forum in Derry. At the time, I had this idea called ‘A Lyrical Gallery’, an exhibition of handwritten lyrics by Irish songwriters. By gaining access to the soundcheck, I was going to ask living legend Moya Brennan if she could scribble down the lyrics to the hit song ‘In a Lifetime’ which Clannad had recorded with Bono in 1985. Unfortunately, I was too late, the band had already made their way back to the hotel.

As I turn to walk out, a voice comes from the stage, “Can I help you?” I thought I had been busted, but the voice belonged to Paddy McPoland, Clannad’s tour manager, and his offer of help was a genuine one. When I explained what I was doing he said he’d do his best to get me a lyric sheet from Moya. I scribbled my address down and unfairly I didn’t have much faith in ever hearing anything about it again.

Two weeks later, a letter arrives at my parent’s house, the return address on the back caused some excitement. Inside was a signed handwritten lyric sheet of ‘In a Lifetime’ along with a lovely letter from Moya wishing me luck with the project.Reading that back I’m thinking about how Moya didn’t have to do this. It was a random request and she could have just as easily not bothered. The kindness she possessed is typical of the people of North West Donegal, there’s always time to do something for others. I was lucky enough to later experience this kindness on a number of other occasions. I was invited a few times to play at Club Beo, the monthly night of music Moya set up in Leo’s Tavern. The night was always a healthy mix of established artists and those just starting out, Moya giving young artists a platform. In fact, it was the very platform she started on, the pub owned and run by her father Leo when Moya was beginning her music career.

“You’ve got a lovely voice,” she said to me as I stepped off stage in Leo’s back in 2017. “You’re not so bad yourself,” was my response, too nervous to be sincere, too Irish to just accept the compliment.

I’m told it’s Moya’s wish that the Club Beo nights go on without her. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of great nights in Leo’s in the future, but there will be a certain magic missing. Crolly, Gweedore, and days on Magherclogher beach will also be a bit less magical now that Moya’s gone. As Father Brian Ó Fearraigh who celebrated Moya’s funeral mass said: “through her voice and her gift in playing the harp, Moya carried the rugged beauty, and that quiet strength, ancient timeless mysteries and the rich soul of Donegal to audiences right across the world.” We’ll never see her kind again.

Moya Brennan, photo by Stuart Bailie. Instagram: @stu_bailie

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Then I made the decision to try Leeds. The plan was to give it a month to see what it was like and if it wasn’t for me then I’d head back to Ireland. My generous friend Jamie let me have his spare room for the trial month. There weren’t enough gigs in Leeds to pay the bills, so it was time to find that ‘proper’ job.

Another Jamie came to the rescue.

I knew there was a Jamie’s Italian in Leeds and I was drawn to it like a magnet. I’d first crossed paths with Jamie Oliver back in 2014 when I pestered him about helping organise Food Revolution events in Northern Ireland. He had nothing to do with me getting the job, but I liked his ethos, food, people, community, and I had a feeling ‘my people’ would be there.I did an interview at Jamie’s Italian and in the same week I did a trial shift at a rock bar. The rock bar shift started with an initiation drink: four different types of rum, in one glass, down in one. I felt my stomach summersault the second the liquid passed my lips, but I wanted to impress. Even though it felt like the floor had disappeared and I wanted to throw up, I pretended I was fine and the seasoned staff members were duly impressed. As the night went on, there were team shots of Jameson every 15 minutes or so. The shift went from 8pm to 3am, and by the time I was loading the final tray of dirty glasses into the washer I could barely stand up. But the night wasn’t over, there was post shift drinks in Bad Apples. It was mid-morning by the time I got home. On the following Monday, I got the call from Jamie’s offering me the job. I took it with both hands, if I had to go work in the rock bar, I would’ve been dead in three months.

And so began two of the best years. I was right that I’d find ‘my people’. Both front of house and back of house teams became like family. I’d just moved to a new city, a new country, and suddenly I went from knowing one guy in the whole of Leeds, to having 40 or 50 new people in my life.

There were ups and downs in those two years. Paul T, one of the best waiters on the team, took his own life. Some relationships broke down. And in the end we were all made redundant overnight. But for me, the two years I had at Jamie’s Italian were life changing. I learned so much in the short time I was there. I was enthusiastic, annoyingly so. Within six months of starting on the bar, I had booked meetings to discuss ideas with the CEO in London, and had meetings set up with Jamie to discuss the same. Infuriatingly eager, but I had an opportunity and I wanted to make the most of it. I had an interest in food and I enjoyed cooking, but coming from working-class Northern Ireland I didn’t have much language for it. Now I was learning about some of the best food suppliers in the UK and Italy and tasting wine that didn’t taste like vinegar. It was here that I learned about the importance of responsibly sourced and sustainably caught seafood, that the word burrata meant ‘buttered’ and that freshly made pasta is a thing of beauty. I tasted rabbit for the first time, spent a week training in the kitchen, prepping squid and octopus every morning, and learned that there are over 300 types of pasta, with more than 1,300 different names.

There was a media frenzy the day the doors shut on Park Row, a similar scene unfolded all over the country when 22 other restaurants displayed a small A4 sheet of paper announcing that the Jamie Oliver Group had gone into administration. The entire team got together and spent the day and night in various bars around Leeds. It was the end of an era, two years had felt like a decade. Some of the team members, including general manager Holly, had been there since day one. We all promised to stay in touch, but of course, life gets in the way and now I hardly ever see anyone from that team.

Fast forward to 2026, and Jamie’s Italian is back on the high street. Jamie’s Italian 2.0. In a recent interview, Jamie talked about second chances, and the importance of being allowed to make mistakes. I know all about this, there being more than one occasion when Holly would have been well within her rights to sack me on the spot. Some of the original crew might feel a bit resentful of this relaunch, and that’s completely understandable. People had families and bills to pay. One of the reasons Jamie’s went down was because the hospitality sector was (and still is) taking a beating, so finding a new job wasn’t exactly easy for many of these people.

But from my point of view, if Jamie’s Italian 2.0 can act as a home away from home for some other lost souls, give them an understanding of what’s really important in life, and bring Gennaro Contaldo’s bolognese back to the high street, then I’m all for it.

This week Jamie Oliver joined the Substack community. He’s done videos on making your own vinegar, and spent 11 minutes talking about artichokes. A little different to what you’d see on TV and worth a watch.https://substack.com/@jamieoliver

You can check out the BBC piece from Saturday 11 April by clicking button below. I’m on from 1:12:50 to 1:27:00.https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002tmbk

This week, I announced that a Stories. Songs. Seasons. collection will be out in December, and there’ll be a live event to celebrate at Heart Headingley, Leeds, UK. You can pre-order the collection, with or without tickets by clicking the button below.

https://storiessongsseasons.substack.com/p/stories-songs-seasons-live-event

In the evening, we’d go back to my grandparent’s house a little further down Clooney Road where I’d stay most weekends. Their house was about ten miles from where I lived in Creggan, where the tensions of the civil war were a daily trouble. Staying there gave me the opportunity to experience a more ‘normal’ childhood for the most part. The fear of something bad happening wasn’t far though. The Greysteel massacre a reminder that the deadliest elements of the Troubles could find their way to your doorstep regardless of your postcode.

For dinner, my granny Margaret would usually have some southern fried chicken cooking, which we’d have with baked potatoes, the smell strong in my nostrils more than 30 years later. After dinner, I’d settle to enjoy the peak of Saturday night TV in the UK and Ireland. There’d be Catchphrase, Gladiators, Baywatch, You’ve Been Framed, Noel’s House Party, Blind Date. A plate of custard creams would be served with a cup of tea as the theme tune of Casualty began, this my granny’s favourite viewing, Mr Blobby and Pamela Anderson not really being her thing.

To describe the feeling of comfort, homeliness, and contentment those Saturdays provided is difficult. The feeling doesn’t come in a fancy or flamboyant restaurant, it doesn’t arrive when on holiday, and it definitely doesn’t come sitting at a bar, a pint of Guinness long since replacing the Coke and Bacon Fries. While these things are all perfectly good ways to spend a Saturday, the feeling I’m talking about comes in times when you feel like you truly belong and in places where you can think of no better place to be. Netflix, and other streaming services that give us on demand access to extraordinarily large libraries of film and TV, have ruined Saturday night television. I think our smaller screens have also played their role in the detriment of the cosy Saturday. That sense of belonging and contentment can easily be overshadowed by the comparison of your Saturday to that of others. Someone’s perfectly curated Saturday morning, avocado on sourdough at the local hipster stomping ground, presented to you while you tuck into a stodgy sausage sandwich made with the remains of a stale white pan loaf, washed down with a cup of instant coffee, can quickly put you in the trap of comparing your life to others and you soon start to feel a little bit inadequate.

Now, I’m not saying that feeling of settledness and steadiness doesn’t exist any more. It comes in flickers, usually on days when I leave my phone aside. It arrives often on Saturdays when we have pizza for lunch, and spend the rest of the afternoon at the cinema, or when we’re sitting in the garden, the smell of a just lit barbecue drifting towards us. No doomscrolling, no comparisons, no distractions.

Broadbridge football club might be gone now, and it’s a real shame there seems to be no record left of those matches in Eglinton or those early evenings that followed them in The Foyle View. But there is comfort in knowing that in small routines, the ordinary afternoons, and with the smell of food, there’ll be Saturdays like there used to be. And if all else fails, I’ll always have custard creams.

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Pre-orders of limited editions, numbered, and signed copies of the Stories. Songs. Seasons. essay collection are now being taken. You can also purchase early bird tickets to the launch event in Heart Headingley, Leeds, UK on Dec 5th. Or, you can bundle them all together. All details and links can be found by clicking the button below.

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You can listen to the conversation here or read the transcript below.

[Tom Shiels] You’re the co-founder of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, so if it's cool with you maybe we'll start there. You were born in Britain but you now live in Berlin. How did that come about?

[Paul Scraton] So yeah I grew up in the north of England just outside of Liverpool and I moved to Berlin 20 years ago, actually, 21 now. And the short answer is I was traveling, I got stuck, I fell in love and I'm still here, basically that's kind of how it worked. But there are worse places to get stuck as a writer or not as a writer, it’s been a good story.

[TS] So if we go right back further than 21 years then, what are your earliest memories of literature and books when you were growing up?

[PS] So, when I think about my first memory of books, I think I remember reading in the backseat of my mum and dad's car, usually as we were doing a longer journey, maybe to Wales for the summer holiday or something. And both my parents are very kind of, what shall we say, ‘right on’ would be a good way of putting it. So the fact that some of those books were by Enid Blyton, they probably wouldn't like me to tell the world that, but that’s actually the fact. But yeah, Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton and then the Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome’s books all about the outdoors and adventure. Those three writers were the ones who made me fall in love with reading.

[TS] And do you remember the first thing you wrote?

[PS] The thing is, as a child or even as a young person, I didn’t think of wanting to write. I remember trying to write song lyrics. I wanted to be in a band. I think that was the thing that I was most interested in from about the age of 13 or 14. So I'm guessing that the first things I properly wrote creatively were really terrible song lyrics about falling in love without any experience of falling in love. That would probably the first thing I committed to paper.

[TS] Yeah, I think I'm in the same boat with you there. I was the same. It's kind of the place where a lot of people start off is lyrics, in their teenage years. Do you have a process?

[PS] I tend to work on paper first in terms of, I like the bit of writing which is not the actual writing, so I really enjoy the planning stage and that's usually on paper making notes, trying to work out in my head how something is going to appear. And then I quite enjoy the editing process once I've got a first draft down and then I can start to tinker with it. The bit in the middle is the bit that I put off until I don't really have a chance to put it off any further. I'm not a writer that likes to sit with a page and see where it takes me. I do tend to be quite careful with my planning and I tend to be quite clear on what I want to write. And it doesn't mean that the writing process doesn't then change the story or change what I do write once I get going . But before I sit down, I kind of like to know what all the steps along the road are going to look like. So I think the first part of the process is a lot of scribbling notes, moving things around, walking, running, cycling, thinking about it anywhere but at the desk. And then once I've kind of got it clear in my head how it's going to look, then I sit down and write. And I guess that's true even like for articles or essays and shorter pieces, I tend to use a slightly more condensed version of the same process. When I do write, I write on the computer now. Once I was able to type fast enough then I shifted pretty much to writing on the computer.

[TS] You mentioned the idea of getting out there and walking and things like that and not being at the desk all the time. Do you have a favourite place to to work from?

[PS] Yeah, I was thinking about this the other day because I tend to write anywhere but at the desk that I'm speaking to you from right now. And that's because I like to move around in the apartment, so I sometimes write at the big table that's right behind me in the living room or I go into the kitchen. And I think it's because my kind of day job is as an editor, copywriter, kind of communications type work and so by now the desk feels a lot like work. So I like to try and get myself away from that when I'm actually doing the creative writing. And for a long time it was because, God, this is going to age me a bit, but until we had a decent Wi-Fi router our internet came through a cable and so that was one way to get away from the internet. Unfortunately, it follows you around now so that's not quite so easy.

[TS] Yeah, I mean, we're almost too connected now, I think. To everything. Too many distractions a lot of the time. You mentioned the idea of writing lyrics and that's where it all started. At what point did you realise that you were going to forge a career from writing?

[PS] Career is always an interesting word. I think from about the age of 17, 18 on I knew that I would like to make my living with words. I think at that point I wanted to be a journalist. I think that was kind of what my goal was. In the end, the idea that it would be something that you could make money out of I and I could do it as a job I think only really took hold once I was in Berlin and that was because I realised that in Berlin I could at that point in time, at least, you could live relatively cheaply so I could do minimum amount of paid work and have time to do the other stuff. But it's very interesting, there’s a lot of talk about what constitutes, you know, a writing career and to live purely off the writing, I don't think there's many obviously can do that. I certainly can’t. But then I kind of think of myself as a session musician who goes and writes for money so that then you have the time to do the creative work on the side, even though in your head it’s the most important priority. So I think building a writing career has basically been asking how can I create space for myself to write? In the beginning in Berlin it was working in a hostel cafe or then working for as an editor, a communications manager, I think doing jobs that were kind of writing adjacent, if that makes sense. You’re still learning and you’re still honing your skills. I think all writing is helpful. You know, when you look back at the history of the many writers who worked in advertising, for example, or in different fields where you’re not writing your fiction, you're not writing your creative work, but you're still using words. You're still using language. And I think that was kind of my of goal. Is there a way that I can use my skills such as they are with with words to make money and then make enough money to make that space to write the the books that I'm interested in writing.

[TS] And during these times, what do you find to be the greatest struggles, whether creatively or, you know, practically, what have you come up against?

[PS] I think the biggest issue is you have to kind of decide and everyone will have a different answer to this, what are you writing for? Is it because you have a desperate urge to get something out? Is there a story you want to tell? Do you want to reach the widest possible audience? People write for different reasons. And I think for me, that was the period before I started my blog, which eventually led to the journal and then also out of that writing for some other websites and then eventually into the first book. There was a period where I was working on a novel. I finished a novel. I had an agent, but the agent wasn't able to sell it, and I was a little bit wondering, okay, I put three years into this and no one's ever going to read it. And I think at that moment when I was like, can I can I actually do that to myself again? And I think what I discovered at that point was what I needed to do was take the pressure off, make sure I had enough income working three, three and a half days a week to live off and then actually just start writing the things that I really wanted to write and not worry about writing that would sell. And I think that was the moment that kind of broke that kind of block. It was a very emotional thing. I was really thinking, okay, if I you put everything into something and you think it's as good as you can do and then nobody really is interested. You’re thinking, well, am I any good at this? Is there any point? And of course, over time you learn that for every person who doesn't like it, you just need to find the one person that does and will stand behind it, you know, and I think a lot of the writing that I want to do, finding an audience for that writing by writing for websites like Caught By The River or my own blog and doing it almost quite DIY in that sense actually started to give me the confidence then and probably since then. I think because I separated out the idea that this has to pay the rent, once I broke that kind of idea and I just thought, okay, I want to write. I want people to read it and I want to be published and I want to get the work out there. Once I took the pressure off I felt much more free with the writing and I haven't really had a kind of a creative struggle since then, I would say. Sorry, that was very long.

[TS] It was a great answer. What advice would you give to new writers?

[PS] It’s a good question because I mentioned this before we started recording that I was teaching a creative writing course last week and one of the things that I said to everybody in the group when we had the one to one sessions was, to go back to my last point, you really have to know what it is you’re writing for. And I think in the end, if you go out tonight into Berlin and go down to one or two of the pubs in the centre of town, there will be musicians playing and they will be playing their songs and they will be playing for 10, 15 people and they're doing it because they love music. They love the performance. And it's kind of funny, we don't tend to think of writing in that way, that writing can also be something that we do as a hobby in the best possible sense of the word, not demeaning it. We can write and we can share our writing and we can join writing groups and we can have our blogs and we can put our work out there. And that has also got a value to it in the same way playing music, playing the guitar with your mates in the back of a pub also has a value. Not everybody will be playing the stadiums, not everybody will be selling hundreds of thousands of books. If it's not financial, then you can't really be disappointed by it. If that makes sense. You will always then have a reason to write that goes beyond the idea that you want to make a hundred thousand pounds or whatever it might be. And at the same time, there'll be people that say, I mean, I've got friends who have told me before that if they didn’t think they could sell their writing, whether it's journalism or books or whatever, then they probably wouldn't do it. And that's also fine. But you need to know what it is that you want and what you're doing it for. Because I think if you don't know, then no one else can answer that question for you.

[TS] Yeah, I'm a great believer in the idea that you can't be a writer without being a reader first. So with that mind, what have been reading recently?

[PS] I believe he's an Irish writer, but he also lives in Germany, he’s called Adrian Duncan and the book was called A Sabbatical in Leipzig, and it's all about an engineer at the end of his life reflecting on his career and memories and relationships and it's very lyrical, but for those people listening who know the writing of someone like Sebald, it has this very Sebaldian kind of style. And I've just read the new translation of an East German writer called Brigitte Reimamm, the book's called Siblings and it's translated by Lucy Jones and it's just been released as a Penguin classics. And that's really interesting because it provides a very fascinating window into life for young people in a East Germany that was trying to build a socialist system out of the ruins of the Second World War, the mix of idealism and cynicism, what it meant to be a young woman at that time of dramatic transformational change. And I think it's just really interesting that, you know, 50 years from her death, the writer's death, her diaries were published over the last few years, this novel has just been published. another novel's about to be hopefully published the next few years. So it just begs an interesting question about why now are we reading these things. I’ve been enjoying reading that. And then I'm also reading a book and I was convinced I'd read it before, but I'm about halfway through and I don't think I can have done because I don’t remember any of it. And that is Danube by Magris, the Italian writer, which is an absolutely wonderful piece of place writing, I guess, back to the Elsewhere idea. That’s a kind of a mix of cultural history, literary history, travelogue, basically the kind of book I'm continually trying to write myself. And so you have to be in a very good frame of mind to read something that is along the lines of something you'd like to write and know that you will never be able to write it to that standard. I obviously must be doing psychologically quite well at the moment to have dived in for that one.

[TS] They sound brilliant. I think one or two of those might actually be making their way on to my own reading list. So congratulations are in order as well, you have joined Bluemoose Books recently. Next year, you’ll be publishing A Dream of White Horses. What can people expect from that?

[PS] Well, first of all, I would just like to use the chance to say, thank you to Influx press who published my previous books. They're going on hiatus, which is the main reason why I would be looking to move to a different publisher. But Bluemoose have always been a publisher that I've greatly admired, especially the books by Benjamin Myers when he was publishing with them and the Rónán Hession books as well. And when I wrote this book, I actually had Bluemoose in mind because it seemed like the kind of story they might be interested in. It's a story about friendship, I think more than anything else. It's a story of two friends. And along the way it’s a story of identity and belonging. The question ‘where is home?’ is asked quite strongly throughout. Where is home and what defines what home is? Is it the soil we stand on or is it the people we share it with? But most of all, I think it's a book about friendship. I wouldn’t like to say more than that because we’re still working on the edit.

[TS] I look forward to reading it, Paul. Brilliant. Thanks for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

[PS] Absolutely no problem.