Back in the day, I'd order albums by bands I'd never heard of from record catalogues purely on the strength of the label - Epitaph, Fat Wreck etc. These days it works the same way for books with 2 small presses. Thanks to @littletollerbooks.bsky.social and Eland Publishing for filling the shelves!

What's depressing about the David Walliams thing is that *I* - a provincial no one with minimal contact with the gossip circuits of London publishing - knew. And I don't mean in the "someone once told me" way but in the "sure, EVERYONE knows that" way. 1/2

And that is a wrap. Final MS of #ThePathlessLand: Finding a Way Across Ireland delivered - due out from @headofzeus.bsky.social autumn 2026...

I have an article in the @theguardian.com today about winter solstice in West Penwith – includes a stunning picture by Carolyn Kennett of Chûn Quoit with the midwinter sun setting into Carn Kenidjack! www.theguardian.com/travel/2025/dec/18/west-cornwall-perfect-place-celebrate-winter-solstice

Final cover - #WritingOnTheMove, out in February from Berghahn. If you're a #travelwriting studies person and you've any sway with a university library, ask them to order it! It's got loads of good stuff inside, I promise!

Anecdote from an old travel diary, Sumba, eastern Indonesia, early 2000s: a salutary lesson...

In the pit, Reading Festival Carlsberg Export Stage 1998 - the extended pause at 0.27; sweat and spilt beer and trampled grass and a frisson of fear... (kids today... etc. etc. etc...) open.spotify.com/track/41keZb...

Post a movie set where you're from...

What a lovely evening chatting with Tim Hannigan about his brilliant book The Granite Kingdom at The Lost Gardens of Heligan

Sixteen years ago: a fiery autumn on the Karakoram Highway, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan.

Absolutely. And for every lecturer - and I know you're out there - who thinks "I wonder *if* it could marks these essays... I'll try, just out of curiosity... Jeez! Look at the time I saved!" That time *is what you are being paid for*. The best way to protect your job is to *do* your f*****g job!

Quoit, in the last of the daylight, November.

A perfect pairing of consistently excellent publisher (@littletollerbooks.bsky.social) with reliably brilliant and humane writer (@horatioclare.bsky.social), We Came by Sea is highly recommended. Best thing you could read on the so-called "migrant crisis" of the last few years...

Academic books don't often have covers worth revealing, but this one is pretty good. Samia Ounoughi & I have been working on this for about 100 years, but we've just sent the final proofs, so here's the cover & contents. Writing on the Move, due out from Berghahn early 2026. #travelwriting studies

The BBC's "Anatomy of a Cancellation" podcast provokes a terrible weariness for someone who watched the whole business unfold in real-time back in 2021. Yes, they've attempted to give space to some on the receiving end of the worst of the aggressive pushback against criticism of K*te Cl*anchy. 1/

Heading west. Nice bit of rain overnight...

Homesky

The Granite Kingdom at the edge of winter.

Great evening at Heligan last night chatting about Cornwall, history and more with @matthewmshaw.bsky.social and a lovely audience. Also got to see the spectacular Lowarnes fox sculpture by Sue and Pete Hill, a gargantuan presence leaping through the woods, worth the trip to Heligan just to see it!

Has any writer radically changed their style in mid career? I don't mean changed *genre*; I mean changed their poetics, the aesthetic of their prose, dramatically, between one book and the next?

Stone circling on a dank October afternoon.

This Wednesday evening I'll be at the Lost Gardens of Heligan chatting about Cornwall-related things, if anyone's in the vicinity... www.heligan.com/events/event...

Next week peers will vote for or against swift bricks to be incorporated into all new builds. To help please email [email protected] & [email protected] who are crucial to the decision. Ask them to SAVE OUR SWIFTS ‼️put SWIFT BRICKS in the subject line 🙏 Such a small thing.

Ambition for next year's Liffey Descent: work on my facial expressions. (Me in the blue boat, Straffan Weir.)

All set for the #liffeydescent. Not much water in the river this year - the weirs are going to be a bit scrapey I reckon...

Very much looking forward to this. On 29 October I'll be at The Lost Gardens of Heligan to talk to Matthew Shaw about The Granite Kingdom as part of their autumn "Homecoming Presents" series. Doors open at 5.30pm, tickets available online. www.heligan.com/events/event...

It is 1.15am and I have just finished the indexing for this cursed edited collection that has been haunting me for a hundred years ahead of tomorrow's deadline. I hope someday someone actually does go looking in there for "geopoetics" on page 151, I really do...

Sad to hear of the death of Manchán Magan, a one-off who was somehow able to bring his authentic enthusiasms to a wide public. A shame there'll be no more of it, but I was glad this morning to be able to send a student starting a project on history, place and poetry in the direction of his books...

My mid-c20th European history is a bit shaky, but the socially liberal folks hanging around in cabaret clubs were the baddies in this narrative - right?

Thirty years on and still getting heavy rotation in this house... (I still marvel at the complex cultural transfer process that brought this sound from California via Australian surf videos all the way to the far west of Cornwall in the mid 90s.)

So, I've been using a CMAT song ("Have Fun") in a 1st-yr "intro to lit-crit" class on the Death of the Author for the past 2 yrs, and none of them have ever heard of her. But clearly this year they will have, & I'm going to look like a sad old dude trying too hard to be down with the kids, aren't I?

Back to work...

Obligatory box of books photo. Not sure what I'm going to do with all these, but there's some really good stuff in here - if you're into that sort of thing...

I despair over countryside access in Ireland. This report on the 7km Bray cliff walk could easily apply to much of the entire SW Coast Path around Cornwall, Devon and Dorset, and no one is closing that. 1/2 amp.rte.ie/amp/1531228/

A fitting read while I’m parked up in a downpour at the end of the land #vanlife #booksky #Cornwall @timhannigan.bsky.social

Solving the Cornish housing crisis with planning noncompliant dwellings in parents' gardens since the 1980s. (Upcycling too - slate & timber came off shed roof in a winter storm, bricks from a collapsed chimney, window from a refit of my dad's fishing boat, and underlay an old shower curtain.)

Homeplace in heartbreak season, the bridging days between August and September that can twist little love knots in your soul.

Final UK/Australia cover of TRUE NATURE, and the blurbs on the back. Out October 16.

reviewed @patrickgalbraith.bsky.social's excellent Uncommon Ground for the latest Resurgence & Ecologist. I had too much to say about this book to squeeze into 600 words, so ended up a bit incoherent. But suffice to say: highly recommended.

The Big Four of blokeish, Granta-affiliated, late-c20th literary travel writing. My principal readerly affections have drifted around between them over the years. Theroux was the gateway drug but never really a favourite. 1/3

Homeplace, August blues.

This - Buried at the Crossroads, by @cornishbirdblog.com - is highly recommended. If you've read her blog you'll know she has an uncanny knack for mining the highest grade of narrative ore from the Cornish archive. This little book does the same thing brilliantly in longer form.

Publication alert for SE Asia history folks. I have an essay in this giving another kicking to TS Raffles, arch Orientalist, all-round scumbag and absolutely *not* the "good colonialist" he's been made out to be. Loads of other interesting essays in there too. www.penguin.sg/book/singapo...

Travel writers never go to the toilet... I left this out of the first draft, but C insisted I include it - so it's going in the book! Pushing the formal limits of the genre here...

This is on in a bit, if there's nothing interesting on the telly... www.youtube.com/live/I7KpUlr...

Still open, PhD scholarship for research on Balinese culture: www.sydney.edu.au/arts/news-an...

Here's a lovely little video from Luke Sherlock of the excellent Sherlock and Pages bookshop, part of their discussion of #TheGraniteKingdom for this month's book club. I'll be joining Luke tomorrow, 8pm UK time, for a live YouTube chat, if anyone wants to come along... youtu.be/PIAsYramjSQ?...

For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper

Apropos of ongoing #TheSaltPath discourse, a while back I did an academic version of the Observer/Chloe Hadjimatheou treatment on myself with a (mercifully) unpublished travel book written years ago. Travel writers always struggle to keep their stories straight! www.researchgate.net/publication/...

The Irish countryside appears completely devoid of footpaths. There's no legal mechanism for public countryside access here as you'd find elsewhere in Europe, certainly no right-of-way network. But there WERE paths. Just in this one tiny 2.5km2 patch of Galway countryside there are 5km of lost paths