The Battle For Dole Acre: An Introduction

The day I finished In Southern Waters, my heart, long shot through with fault lines, finally cracked and broke. I lost my sanity for about three years. I thought it would never come back. In those three years, I wrote 25 000 words of a highly cloacal novel called ‘Tidying Up’. It suited my mood.

Then, one day, I turned forty, and I cheered up no end, just like that. ‘Tidying Up’ turned my stomach, and I dropped it like a stone. I was frightened of the me that could write that stuff. I was happy again, and I didn’t want to go to that place, those places anymore.

I started to think about the small northern city of Pancester, which you can find on the map if you close your eyes and look hard enough.

It’s a place where nothing changes, very like Frinton-on-Sea, or Budleigh Salterton, except bigger, and Catholic. It is, I suppose, a fictional place where nothing happens, like Blandings Castle or Tilling. Because nothing ever changes there, it has kept its medieval practises and traditions, much like the City of London, or Hungerford. Like Lewes it has bonfire celebrations, like Jedburgh, Kirkwall and Haxey in Lincolnshire it still plays street football, like Winchester it hands out a Dole: like Leominster, Towcester and Bicester it’s a bugger to pronounce for hard pressed American tourists. The food is bad, but no one cares, the politicians are corrupt and no one cares, and no one cares at all for the visitors who keep the place afloat. It’s every town, I thought - Pan-cester.

I wanted to write about Pancester. And because I was so well and happy again, I really just wanted to write something very light-filled; something joyous. A jeu de fete, a fol-de-rol.

But Pancester is English; bawdy and blue-veined like stilton. And I thought maybe I had left out the characters pungent side. So I let the thing ripen, get a bit moist and stinky. It turned into a pantomime - a masque.

I found something of that bawdiness in ‘Tidying Up’, like a pallette sent from the other side of being well. I mixed it drop by drop into the bright colours of Pancester, and I liked it. My stomach no longer turned. I wasn’t frightened any more. It was like being put back together.

So this book, in every sense, is the book of my heart.