I’ve had a big, bad idea.

Unfortunately, bad ideas take root quickly in my brain. For example, I once wrote a silly letter to a Welsh football club – and so began a 20+ year obsession with the mighty Cefn Druids (we loved Welsh football before Ryan Reynolds made it cool).

The new scheme – which may take significantly longer than 20 years – is this: I’m going to walk the entire coast of Great Britain (the island that contains Scotland, England and Wales).

It’s wildly ambitious, but I plan to take it slow. I won’t attempt the whole thing in one gruelling three-month expedition. I’ll do it in many small adventures, starting each walk from wherever I finished the last.

I might do a few week-long marches, but the grand plan is to amble along, exploring the coastline with friends, relatives and people I meet on the way. If you live close to a patch of the British coast, let me know and I’ll be glad to walk a stretch with you. I’ll be there in 1-27 years, depending on your location.

So, assuming I live long enough, this plan makes sense. Right? Well, maybe. But I’ve already suffered some setbacks. I like to start projects before second thoughts intervene, so I resolved to walk the first steps on Good Friday, April 3. The night before, I was chatting to some friends about my plan and we started Googling the details. Problems emerged.

Problem 1: The King Charles III Coast Path (whose recent completion sparked my interest in this venture) is not 2,000 miles long, as I had thought. It’s 2,689 miles.

Problem 2: The path does not encircle Great Britain. It’s just the coast of England. Walking around the entire island is more like 5,000 miles… or 7,000 miles… or 19,000 miles. In a very British turn of events, no one seems to know. Maybe I’ll solve the mystery.

Problem 3: The coast of Scotland is not fully walkable/open to the public.

So, on the literal eve of the walk, I went backwards by 3,000-17,000 miles compared to what I had anticipated. And my vastly extended route may be illegal and/or impossible to walk. But hey, Frodo didn’t just wander into Mordor and chuck the ring into Mount Doom.

With reckless optimism, I set out on my latest ill-conceived adventure. I began at the appropriately named Start Bay Inn – accompanied by two of my brothers – and we walked a short-ish distance to Hallsands. 2.49 miles down, untold thousands to go. If I reach the end, maybe I’ll write the book.

And speaking of unfinished quests, the final edit of my novel (see last month’s newsletter) has reached page 184 of 207.

Comfort Fiction

Life is enriched by unfinishable tasks. The things I really love can’t be won or completed. Parenting, writing, gardening, dodging angry gamekeepers on lonely stretches of Scottish coastline – these are endless pursuits.

So, to quote Gimli in the aforementioned tale of friends who embark on a long – and probably doomed – journey: “Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.”

Dicing with Death

Spring 2026 is the season of new things for Dice Company, with the release of two wildly different series. First we had Charlie’s chaotic take on Mothership, in which our characters found themselves serving the sinister Darkstar corporation in deep space. And now we’ve moved on to Dave’s gently chilling debut as GM/Keeper in Call of Cthulhu: It’s Grim Up North.

Meanwhile, we’re about to record more episodes of our main Small Embers D&D story – with Tom suggesting we’ve reached the beginning of the end. Will the Order of the Heron defeat the Empire – or be consumed by the Hushed One? The exciting thing about playing this as a game – rather than writing the novel – is that we have no idea. Like epic walks around an island of unknown size, the ending is shrouded in darkness.