charles barrow's writing

I go out walking daily, regardless of the weather. I walk by the sea, mostly, but do have a shorter more local walk, through the park, if the weather is especially inclement. I walk for exercise, for the fresh air, to clear my head, to give myself thinking time, creative energy, and to just 'be' in nature and monitor the seasonal changes that can easily be missed during a fast walk to the station, or a struggle back from the supermarket with an overladen bag. And while I walk I sing to myself, under my breath, sometimes more loudly if I've checked behind and know that no one else will hear me. Sometimes one song will lodge in my head for weeks and become the oft repeated soundtrack to my walks. Often that can be just a snatch of verse and the chorus of a song, stuck on repeat, which, after a while becomes annoying, as any song stuck on repeat would annoy, and I have to make a conscious effort to shift it. Mostly this can be achieved by simply replacing it with another song,...

Please follow the link to Smashwords.com to download your free copy of The Stolen Days of John Mann. This book is the first part of the John Mann trilogy, All the Days of John Mann. You can choose to download the book in an epub, mobi for Kindle, or pdf format. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do then please consider leaving a review, because that would really help me out. Thank you.  https://www.smashwords.com/books

More than a week of January has passed already. It's usually such a long (seeming) month that it's a blessing that a quarter of it has passed before I really noticed. The weather has been continually wet since the new year began, and I've been feeling rather under par since Christmas, so what outdoor exercise I've managed to get between showers has been welcome but short lived. I have, however, very much enjoyed catching many signs of an emerging spring - emerald spears of the early daffodil, crocus and snowdrop. Songbirds singing to ward off trespassers in their territory, and nest building. Buds on the hydrangea. All of these things help to lift my spirits. My mental health has not been good recently, so I've actively been thinking about what does bring me joy, and what brings the dark clouds into my life. I'm making lists. It's difficult to find any consistency when it comes to self care, it has to be worked at. And life has a tendency to poke a stick in ...

So. Snow. We woke up this morning and the world outside was blanketed in it. When I say 'we' I mean us on the the south coast of England. If you don't live in the UK you may not fully appreciate the enormity of us Brits waking to find that snow has fallen in the night. In essence it means the country grinds to a halt. It's like a public holiday, but without any warning, or the themed special offers stacked high in the supermarket. It only takes a smattering of the stuff and our trains stop running (although they're on strike anyway at the moment), and our postal workers can't get through to deliver the letters (although they're on strike at the moment too), the roads become impassable (the gritter lorries can't get out of the depot because of the icy conditions), and everyone generally thinks "Fuck it, let's just take the day off work and head to a local hill with a tea tray toboggan." Just don't end up in A&E folks because I actual...

November's theme, on BookTube and the like, is Non-Fiction. Non-Fiction November. It's got a nice ring to it. However, I always have a non-fiction book on the go (currently Wintering by Katherine May) so I decided to stay alliterative but go off piste and, indeed, go 'no nonsense' by reading two of the biggest books on my shelves. I'll admit that I do suffer a bit from Big Book Fear (it's a real thing) so these books represent a real challenge for me. The two big beasts in question are; Ducks, Newburyport (2019) by Lucy Ellmann, and The Count of Monte Cristo (1846) by Alexandre Dumas. These are real chunky tomes. Ducks is 987 pages long, Cristo is 872. And they couldn't be more different in style. Ducks is set in C21st America, its style is  ultra modern  stream-of-consciousness,  and its USP is that it's written in one, very long, sentence (in reality it's about 8 sentences) but the author frequently uses the phrase 'The fact that..' where o...

 #Victober continued So I read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, as my attempt to get involved in this year's Victober. And you'll know if you read my last entry that this wasn't the recommended book, for the group read. In fact, I've not followed any of the rules, as laid down, so far, but I'm not too bothered tbh. I really enjoyed Jane Eyre, it's stayed with me for the past few weeks. Funny isn't it? You finally get around to reading these classics and you realise why they've lasted the course and have the reputation that they do. And why millions love them. Well, that's probably true for Jane Eyre, but not for all the classics, though I'm sure you'd find an advocate for any that you cared to name, if you searched hard enough. Anyway, back to Victober. I still had two weeks left of the month and felt I should continue in the vein that I started; by not recognising any of the rules - read a book by a British author, written during the reign of...

As mentioned in early September, October is all about Victorian literature. In a theme tagged #VicTober on Youtube, where I first learned of it, readers are encouraged to read books written during the Victorian period - 1819-1901 if you wanna get pedantic. Furthermore it has to be by an English writer. BookTubers are reading Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge as a group read, but I decided to skip over that as I read a Hardy recently (Under The Greenwood Tree), and had my heart set on reading Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte instead. I thought I must have read this book before, at school maybe, but no. I didn't recognise large swathes of the story. I definitely knew that I'd seen a film or TV adaptation because I remembered a crucial, very cinematic, plot point that comes right near the end. Anyways, I enjoyed it. It was slow going at times, as classic novels can be. Some of the language is overly flowery - why use one word when you can use ten. Some of the religious and...