Last weekend I was being blown over with my sons at the top of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh – many thanks to the kind stranger who caught me and helped me to my feet before I crashed sideways into a boulder! Today it’s Amazon’s French Poetry list that has me blown away – ‘Safe Ground’ is at number 4, between Billy Connolly and ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’.

How on earth is a wee book of poetry written in English on that list at all? My book ‘Safe Ground’ tells the story (in poetry) of my travels and escapes from Northern Ireland via Cambridge and London to the north coast of Kent. Where does France come in?

In February 2021 my home was full of builders making emergency repairs to the roof. In icy blasts, they clambered like mountain goats among the scaffolding. It felt at the time as if we might never get to socialise in public again, so escapism took hold. I wrote about a little trip I’d made alone to Paris the previous February and relived the pleasures of sitting in a Parisian restaurant. Those scribbles became ‘Laughing and Grief’ (as the Mock Turtle used to say), and were published later that year by American Writers Review in their 2021 Turmoil and Recovery anthology.

With thanks to lovely Henri who helped me climb through the graves in Montmartre cemetery to find Beckett and Seberg, ‘Laughing and Grief’ is about how laughs and sadness jostle together in our lives and how recovery can find us at the strangest times. You can buy here from Amazon or here from publisher Mica Press.