I find myself, as usual, thinking about other people’s lives, what they might hold, and what they might have experienced. What started as a few thoughts on a recent holiday on the Greek island of Paxos, is becoming something more. It’s becoming a story.

I always write quite short, short stories. And they often seem to have an intensity based on brief meetings, sudden encounters, or realisations that take place over minutes or hours. I suppose as a poet I think in a kind of mental shorthand.

So what is happening in this tale? A woman is running away, and finds herself in the hotel bedroom she stayed in ten years before. In that intervening ten years much has happened. She has had a child. She is pregnant with another. And something has occurred in her recent past to make her want to cut loose and flee her life. The journey and the hotel room are made up of journeys and hotel rooms I have known. The woman I have not met; she is totally imaginary but she has grown and become real in the two or three days I have been writing about her.

She is waiting to be rescued, and i don’t know as yet if that will happen. Such is the oddness of creating a person, a place, and an experience. Sometimes as a writer I go on a voyage of discovery with my characters , not quite knowing where we will end up.