The Spoons That Are My Ears!

I wasn't planning to do much with these little tales. They were just a divertissement to pass the dull evenings. But somehow they became the opening chapters of a novel called The Pilgrim's Regress. I added more chapters: the thing became intricate and extremely metafictional. I knew I had a monster of unsaleable humour on my hands. But then, midway through 2008, I ran out of steam and abandoned the project. That's not an uncommon habit with me.

But I always console myself with the knowledge that I'm able to return to any half-finished work at any time and take up again exactly where I left off. I always planned to return to The Pilgrim's Regress after only a brief pause, but as that "brief pause" grew longer and longer, I began to fear that all the little complexities of the numerous subplots, the intricacies of the connections between events, ideas and conceits would be lost to my memory. I knew I had piles of notes in boxes, but my notes are often just mnemonics that quickly become baffling if not acted on rapidly.

So it was with some trepidation that I launched myself back into the novel in the summer of 2011. And to my relief, it all came back; or rather, much of it came back, and what didn't was easily replaced with new (and perhaps better) things. It was good that I never abandoned poor Don Cosquillas permanently. And yet it has taken a further ten years for this novel to finally be published.

And here it is at last... The adventures of a knight as he roams with his trusty sidekick Sancho Panda over Spain and across Africa and all the way to India and the back of beyond on a bicycle. Cover art by the magnificent Selwyn Rodda.

Available on Amazon as a paperback or ebook.