I’m still alive, still walking, still playing music, still taking photographs.

What I don’t seem to be doing much of is writing.

It almost feels like the writing part of my brain has been broken. It’s a strange feeling; I want to write, I still feel the compulsion (and I know it’s not helping my overall sanity not writing), but it’s the sitting down and actually doing it that’s lacking. If there was a Nobel prize for thinking about writing I’d probably be a shoe-in.

Anyway, I’m here, writing this, and that’s a good thing.

I have a near-complete manuscript that I must finish.

I’ve just returned from an amazing weekend staying with my editor Jack, who verbally slapped me around a bit and gave me a well-deserved kick in the trousers.

So I’m back at the laptop, head full of monkeys and a lot of stories to complete, plenty of new ones to tell, including the epic return to Tasmania last Winter where I headed off-track in the absolutely spectacular Walls of Jerusalem in search of a mysterious mountain hut.

Gotta go. The keyboard is calling.