February 2025

Writing a story. Here was a challenge I hadn't yet taken up. In the past I had written short stories, even going so far as to write a book of almost 900 pages at one time. I'd had the bright idea of starting at the beginning and moving straight on to the end, forgetting the middle of the story. That book, I still have it in my boxes. One day, perhaps, I'll have to dust it off and finish it.

I threw myself into Gabriel's story, a man I imagined outside time, already in death whilst being liminally alive. Obviously, he could not stay alone. His companion naturally added herself to my list of ingredients. But as the story wrote itself — I work on the principle that, often, the author merely passes on a story, that there exists a bottomless magic well called inspiration from which one draws without realising it — Penelope began to take up all the space.

One of my best friends had just passed away. Of course she was going to take up all the space. Men are not generally gifted at handling grief and loss. There are exceptions, of course, but we don't know what to do with our emotions, other than hide them and wait for them to pass.

I didn't accept it. I couldn't manage it. Even today, three years on, I still find it hard to digest this truth, which feels less real to me than the coffin I nonetheless touched.

Penelope thus helped me bring to life, on paper, an even stronger, even more brilliant, even more dynamic version of her than my departed friend. The more I wrote, the more I wanted to write. To write about this version of her.

Looking back, I think it was at that moment that La dernière aventure de Penelope — no accent, she's English — was truly born.