The High Dive

Hello. Welcome to my blog.

Is that what one says? I’m new here.

It feels a bit like Purgatory: neither up nor down. The high dive, halfway along the arc. The wax has melted and the feathers are gone,  but the sea is just the upside-down sky and it isn’t getting any closer. Yet.

When people ask me what I do and I tell them I’m an author, the first thing they say is do you blog? Well, I didn’t. Now I do. It’s been rushing up towards me. Themes to choose, colours to be fiddled with. A one-liner or a Wasteland quote for the header? No, too late…

Here’s who I am. I write books: five novels to date, four dark Medieval romps written as Pip Vaughan-Hughes, one – Appetite – as Philip Kazan. I write about art, food, places, tastes, smells, music. Exiles; cities; people in love, or trying to be. I like the kind of place that Auden describes in Musee des Beaux Arts:

…a corner, some untidy spot                                                                                     Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse    Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

That’s Icarus up there in Breughel’s painting, incidentally: the legs vanishing into that bottle green water. Personally, I find that life gives us both: we’re the dogs living their doggy lives and the vainglorious boy plummeting into the deep, all at the same time.

That being said, I’ll try to keep things interesting. Dog and Icarus, Icarus and dog. Posts may meander around such things as rembetika and the Greek Diaspora, Italian food, the merits of various chainsaws, Tibetan Buddhism, drink, parenthood, Dartmoor weather, graveyards and gardens. Purgatory should be fun. It had better be. We’re stuck in this place for a while.

Wish me luck. I’m new here.