Early Influences
“And the dealer wants you thinking
That it’s either black or white
Thank God it’s not that simple
In my secret life.
”
Some authors work stand out so clearly from my childhood reading: Susan Cooper, John Wyndham, Ursula Le Guin and Brian Jacques, to name but a few. Their stories excited and thrilled my youthful imagination. I suppose looking back it was these accumulative influences which had, by the age of thirteen, fixed my mind on one day becoming a writer. Around that age, I became increasingly fascinated by both Greek Mythology and the Paranormal (Thanks, X-Files!).
During those teenage years, I read every strange subject I could get my hands on, from Werewolves and Vampires, the Witch Trials and the Occult, Astrology and Demonology, to Tarot Cards and Astral Clairvoyance. Before I had left school, Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning had got me dreaming of the open road, while Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner had my heart successfully hooked on poetry. William Blake’s writing and artwork, together with one of his disciple’s—Samuel Palmer—paintings, kept me sketching and also introduced me to the peacefulness of long nocturnal walks.
My Late Teens
“If they were right, I’d agree,
But it’s them they know not me
Now there’s a way and I know
That I have to go away.
”
For my eighteenth birthday, a surprise present from my mother reacquainted me with The Little Prince, a book she had apparently read to me when I was a young child. I remember climbing to the highest branch of a tree, and reading it in one sitting: to this day, it still remains one of my favourite books. I became a huge fan of Louis MacNeice’s poetry and found the beauty of Kahlil Gibran’s writing—especially in Jesus, the Son of Man and Broken Wings—deeply humbling.
With great personal interest, I started researching and reading all that I could on historical visionaries, seers and mystics, including Nostradamus, Joan of Arc, Baba Vanga and Emanuel Swedenborg. Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions was perhaps one of the first biographies which drew me towards reading about other people’s extraordinary lives. When I set out on the first of many backpacking adventures, I remember taking one book with me: Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, a weighty volume which I would wrap up in a jumper at night and use for a pillow. Since then, I have read all of G.I.Gurdjieff’s incredible works, and still feel a great fondness for his own autobiography Meetings With Remarkable Men.
My Late Twenties
“If you walk away I walk away
First tell me which road you will take
I don’t want to risk our paths crossing someday
So you walk that way I’ll walk this way.
”
My twenties became a repetitive cycle of working, saving as much as possible and then travelling until the money ran out. The poetry gradually shifted into a real desire to write a full-length novel, although at first, this proved extremely challenging. I got easily distracted by philosophical questions and found myself going back to theology in search of answers. This led to an interest in Sufism and Taoism, and subsequently to even more daydreaming. I continued, with some jealousy, reading biographies of individuals who had led quite remarkable lives: Ferdinand Ossendowski’s Beasts, Men & Gods, and Tiziano Terzani’s A Fortune-teller Told Me, both stand out in my memory.
I buried myself in books on Carl Jung and his work, and read with great admiration the bravery of Arundhati Roy’s essays and writings. The Three Dangerous Magi, detailing the lives of Osho, Gurdjieff and Aleister Crowley was both riveting and enlightening. In the last ten years though, if I had to pick one book which has genuinely affected my way of thinking, I believe it would be The Lucifer Effect by Phillip Zimbardo.
As fate would have it, my twenties ended on a hopeful high, but the dawning of my thirties revealed this was all just a wicked sham. My life careened off into a trainwreck omnishambles—just as it looked certain that I would at last settle down. Little did I realise back then—as I scratched around, broken-hearted in the lowest, darkest emotional place I have ever been—that a new, life-changing adventure was soon to come.