Image source: onebigphoto.com
Browsing the weekend Financial Times’s book section I saw that English actor, novelist and stage, film and radio writer Emily Woof was asked “Where is your favourite place in the world?” She replied:
“My father, who died in 1996, was the director of the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere in the Lake District, and my favourite place is above Grasmere were Dunnabeck stream is at its highest.”
William Wordsworth lived in Grasmere for 14 years and declared “The Vale of Grasmere – the loveliest spot that man hath ever found!”
I’m coming up a decade in Grasmere as part of my re-connection with England’s north west and am rebuilding Beckwood, on a timeless site on the way up to Alcock Turn, high above Grasmere directly opposite The Lion &The Lamb.
Emily Woof’s new novel The Lightning Tree has just been published by Faber & Faber. This is a story of two young people who fall in love – and then life gets in the way. Set in Newcastle in the mid-80s, the novel weaves across generations, asking us to question the nature of love in all its forms.
p.s. Another good book just out Peter May’s Runaway. Glasgow 1965. Five teenagers run away to London and form a band. Glasgow 2015. Five decades of fear. Back they go to London to confront their past.
