Category: Books & Personal Essays
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Sir Philip Magnus-Allcroft of Stokesay Court: A Memory That Stayed
The Sir Philip Magnus-Allcroft I grew up with already felt as though he belonged to a different world. Even in the 1980s he carried himself with a kind…
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Between Jobs, Between Lives: Workplace Injury, Career Change and Reinvention
20 July 2025 remains fixed in my memory not simply as the day I injured my back, but as a moment that revealed something about the time in…
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The Last Years of Radnor Citizens Advice, 2001–2007
This essay reconstructs the bureau’s working life from personal memory and surviving evidence. For the earlier institutional account, see Radnor Citizens Advice Bureau and the Passing of a…
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Leaving the Third Sector: The End of an Operational Chapter
For more than two decades, the third sector was not a professional landscape I observed from the outside. It was the terrain I walked every day. My working…
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Voices from the Uplands: Why I Wrote It and Why It Matters
Voices from the Uplands: The Davies Family and the Soul of Rural Wales began with my own ancestors, the Davies family of Caeadda in the parish of Llanwrin.…
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Off the Rails: Why I Wrote the Story of Alfred Jenkins
Off the Rails: The Story of Crewe Steam Train Driver Alfred Jenkins began not as a publishing project, but as an act of recovery. Alfred Jenkins, who lived…
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Richard Emmett: From Salford Poverty to the British Army and Crewe
When Richard Emmett died in Crewe in 1906, there was little in the circumstances of his death to suggest the geographical breadth of the life he had lived.…
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Doldowlod Hall Estate: My Teenage Years, 1995–1997
Between 1995 and 1997, when I was passing through the uncertain territory between childhood and adulthood, the Doldowlod estate became part of the landscape of my life. My…