Life changes. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which the change begins. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier moment. Nothing is fixed but patterns are woven and rewoven as we move along the different pathways of life.

In a half forgotten past and a future just glimpsed I change lanes. The last year has been a sabbatical, to travel and renovate the house and to escape a corporate environment from which, I now understand, I took no pleasure in. Bored with my job, tired of the predictability of each day - I had wanted out; wanted freedom from the drudgery of daily life. So I jumped and I my life has shifted and changed lanes and I have emerged from this last year knowing that I now have the opportunity to write.

Here in Mansfield, there is so much to claim the eye. The eagles aloft hovering for a breathless instant. The dappled quilt of fields, their grasses and grains swept by the same tides of air. Velvet woodland creeping up the flank of hill on whose pinnacle snow will soon alight. Sun and cloud-shadow drifts across the valley below me. Laptop on my knees I consider the blank page before me awaiting the first words of the fiction to be created from the private storybook in my head. Where will they lead me. So many words to write. Bare bones of a story. Sounds, nuances light to be fleshed out. And the story once exhumed will take on a life of its own. A kaleidoscope of words, blind runners rushing backwards and forwards, tapped across a page to become a beginning ...