Excerpt from my latest novel...

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I'm just starting a redraft of 'Dead Man' - a novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo in 2013. It's about a man who, in the prime of life, is killed in a car accident. His spirit, however, lives on to enable him to 'see' both the effect of his death on those he left behind and the lives he might have lived had he made different choices at important times. In this way, ironically, it's about celebrating the life you have and not getting hung up on the 'what might have beens'.

This passage is basically a conclusion that he comes to:


'So, what's life for?

It's simple, really.

It's to do everything there is to do, and everything that you are capable of doing, whilst you have it. It's for picking your nose, or knitting a sock, or scratching your arse, or watching the stars. It's for paddling in the sea, where it all began, or swimming as far as your arms and lungs and heart will take you. It's for loving another, or liking them, or even just understanding them. It's for stopping to sniff the flowers – or maybe just to look at them in complete amazement. It's for sniffing a fart. It's for stroking a cat, or finding a treasure in a charity shop, or drinking a glass of cold, clear water. It's for having a sleepless night and getting up in the morning feeling like s**t, but feeling nonetheless. It's for popping the tab on a can when you've been dry for a week. It's for the taste of that first cup of morning coffee, or the first lungful of smoke from a cigarette. It's for getting high – and getting low. It's for having a shag or a w*k or a wet dream. It's for watching the best arse you've ever seen in your life walk down the street and turn the corner – and maybe, just maybe, setting off after it. It's for the taste of caviar or sardines or chocolate or custard or chilli or chips. It's for being able to scratch your back, or your crotch, or the sole of your foot, when it itches. It's for having that itch in the first place. It's for reading Chekhov or Tolstoy or Bukowski or Carver or Shakespeare or Dickens or Sterne or Swift or Harry Potter or Dan Brown or Winnie-the-Pooh or Fifty Shades. It even for reading the name of the checkout girl on the bottom of your till receipt. It's for reading her name, and reading as much into it as you might read into the greatest novel ever written, or the greatest poem ever wrought. Because she has a life, too, and it's important to her, even if it isn't to anyone else – except, perhaps, you now. If you take the trouble to notice. It's for taking the trouble to notice. It's for taking the trouble to notice everything. Everything ever made or created or written or painted or composed or put in place. Everything that comes before you. It's for seeing those things, and appreciating those things – even if they mean nothing else at all. An old shoe. A dead bird. A flower growing through a crack in the concrete. A stopped clock. A derelict house. An old tyre. A rusting car. A piece of stone. A petal. A flame. A shaft of sunlight slanting through an uncurtained window. It's for seeing the sun rise and set, and the moon go through it's phases, or even just knowing those things are happening in the world you're in. To see the moon shining over water at night - see the clouds pass across it, hear the wind in the trees, see the band of colour that traverses the sky when it rains in the sunlight. It's for touching a flower, or a woman's hand, or a man's shoulder, or a bird's wing, or a child's heart. It's for hearing the birds sing, or a dog barking, or the silence of snow. It's for seeing children smiling, or hearing them laugh. It's for seeing a face, or touching it. It's for seeing a tree. It's for hearing a word of praise and encouragement, or even a word of anger or remorse. It's for being able to tell a lie and believe it, or telling the truth and believing that, too. It's for crying, sometimes. It's for missing people, then seeing them again. Or just missing them, and remembering. It's for being able to sing in the bath, or the shower, or the car, or the pub, or the street. For hearing a song and – even though you know not the first thing about music – being able to appreciate the way it's put together and what the different parts of it do, and what it means to you, and why. It's for being able to lie in bed late one morning and know all these things, and know they're there for you if you need them, and know that all you have to do is get up and feel yourself fitting into the day and taking part in it and being there and doing it and knowing it's all alright, really, even the bits of it that aren't, because it's yours and yours to keep, and no one else's, and you have it and you can do all these things with it, and know that that's what it's all about. Because it is. That's what it's all about. Having it, and seeing it, and touching it, and smelling it, and tasting it, and hearing it, and doing it. And living it.

It's about living it.'