In 2006 I experienced something like a mid-life crisis. Not a real mid-life crisis of course. I was far too young for that. Still, I decided to go travelling to give myself some space to decide my next move in life.

This was a life-changing experience which I blogged about at the time, to the great amusement of my friends and family. Cue the call that I “should write a book about it”.

So I did!

Only somehow it turned into a novel (partly so that I could blame my characters for the stuff they say rather than have to take direct responsibility myself).

Thirteen years later I had re-written and re-edited the book a hundred times and sent it out to a huge stack of publishers and agents, and received a huge stack of rejection letters in return.

Publishing my novel was on every New Year’s Resolutions list I’d made for a dozen years, so as ‘lucky number thirteen’ came around I decided that enough was enough and I sent it out to two last publishers. The first one followed the herd and said no… but the very last one said yes!

So then a whole new journey began: The journey toward publication…

When I was writing my book I thought that if I could just finish it then I’d have made it (because so few people actually finish writing a novel). Then, when I finished it I realised that the next hill to climb was getting it published and that if I could just do that then I’d have made it (because really, so few finished novels get published). But now that I’m published I realise that it’s a really crowded marketplace, and getting your voice heard in amongst all the others is yet another steep hill to climb.

Publishing during a pandemic has obviously added a number of novel challenges too…!

I’ve talked a bit more about this and other issues in some of the interviews I’ve done since publication, which you can find on my News & Events page.

Peregrine Nation, May 2020

I have been watching you, the way you

torpedo the sky, flick flacking

in the currents, diving and banking, hovering

on the updrafts, a bullet in stop

motion. Then, almost weightless

a stalled spitfire, you

drop and barrel and roll, folding

your wings in slots, the horizon

spilling like wine. Down and down,

a dropped bomb,

sinew and feather and claw shivering,

tensing, anticipating. You

level out in an instant, parachute

wings unfurled, prey caught

in your sights as surely as in a trap,

another few minutes and

it will all be over.

I have studied your moves, flexing

my fingers, arching my back, learning

by rote each minute adjustment, fighting

cramps and contortions, my weakened limbs

twitching at the unaccustomed effort.

In my dreams, day and night, I follow you

over the cliff.

My last ecstasy of hope.

Anatomy of a poem - Inside Peregrine Nation

I often walk along the cliff paths near my home when I get the chance. During lockdown, this has been my daily mandated exercise. I remember one particularly windy day, the kind of day that has you leaning into the wind to make any headway, only to stumble forwards when the gale changes direction. Seagulls and pigeons were soaring and divebombing on the blustery currents, appearing over the top of the cliff, hovering then disappearing again.

One young seagull was arching his wings to make a sort of half-parachute so that he or she could, by twisting their body with the most minute precision, keep themselves almost motionless despite the violent gusts. I found myself thinking what an incredible skill this was, and how they made it look so effortless, and how I would so love to be able to fly like that.

Recently, when unable to sleep at night, I have tried to practice lucid dreaming by running and jumping off an imaginary clifftop and flying out over the sea. It is incredibly relaxing (once you overcome the initial instinct to panic at take-off).

I had never thought of seagulls as graceful before. At least not in the same way as birds of prey – my favourite avians. I have spent a lot of time watching the kestrels that live on our clifftops because I love the way that they can hover so precisely, like hummingbirds, over their prey before diving from a great height. But my very favourite raptor is the peregrine falcon, a rarer visitor here, but one which I have studied at close quarters on animal psychology trips at university. The peregrine is a majestic bird with a sultry blue hood and a hunting dive that reaches speeds of up to 320 miles per hour, making it the fastest bird in the world.

In recent years, peregrines have come in from remote clifftops to become city dwellers. During lockdown we have seen more and more cases of wildlife coming closer to our homes and reclaiming our streets and some peregrines have even been spotted nesting in the ancient ruins of Corfe Castle in Dorset.

I was also struck by how the imagery which came to my mind when thinking about these graceful birds in flight seemed to have parallels with aeroplanes in a dogfight. The recent VE Day celebrations, complete with Spitfire flyovers, naturally came to mind.

Thus the elements of my poem were starting to come together, but I wasn’t sure yet what the point of the poem was. It was then that I came across the invitation to send in a poem for an anthology to raise money for the NHS Charities Together. The poems were to reflect people’s everyday experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic, whether as frontline NHS staff, or patients, or their families, or as a published poet. I had been in hospital at the beginning of the pandemic so I had seen at first hand the horror of the NHS at full stretch (although thankfully, despite all my family showing symptoms, none of us were not considered ill enough to be tested).

So in this poem I imagined myself in a city hospital bed, fighting coronavirus, and seeing out of the window a peregrine falcon, and finding hope in its freedom and in its flight.

When it came to a title, it almost dropped into my lap. The word ‘peregrination’ means ‘travel from one place to another, a course of travel; journey’ – and the very thing that right now, in lockdown, we are unable to do. The irony of that, coupled with the increased sightings of wildlife such as peregrines, seemed to be the perfect fit for this poem, while ‘May 2020’ not only sealed the poem into this historic moment but also recalled VE Day 75.

Addendum: On reading this explanation my Mother commented: “But we are travelling right now – from the ‘normal’ to the ‘new normal’”, and she, as Mothers are wont to be, is right!