This is just a quick note to thank you and the hundreds of others who pre-ordered Words from the Hedge. A number of supporters have contacted me via my X feed (@troopersnooks) asking for an update on the book's progress. I am delighted to say that the publish date is now confirmed for the 1st May 2025. This is my first book and I admit I was a complete greenhorn, wholly ignorant of the publishing process and just how exacting the system of editing is. Patrick Galbraith told me before editing began, that I would have to gird myself to ‘kill one of your spaniels’. Much to the delight of my two cockers, Mabel and Blyth, neither actually had to die, but the metaphor is apt. There are passages that have now been changed, reduced or completely consigned to the dustbin. Initially I viewed these changes with horror. Words from the Hedge was my baby, a book that had taken me nearly three years to complete. Equally, I suppose, all writers are bumptiously convinced in their own unassailable genius, believing every sentence they write to be gold dust – to lose so much as one simile is tantamount to vandalism! Having read the now edited version of my manuscript I fully realise that the forensic, yet gentle tweaks and amendments made by Flo Garnett and Patrick Galbraith at Unbound, have truly made Words from the Hedge the book I hoped it would be and I trust that you, the reader, will appreciate it all the more. 

 

It is now September and we are busy hedgelaying. Gouldy and I have nearly completed our second farm hedge of the season, the first was on a rather grand estate in North Norfolk, the latest is sited in a wildlife rich arable farm in the Cambridgeshire Fens. It is a remarkable place to work in, we receive a daily visit from a Marsh Harrier, linnets buzz like bees about us and we see the ungainly shapes of a pair of cranes feeding out on the stubbles near a nondescript village called Guyhirn. As you will read in the chapter called 'Bucolic' in Words from the Hedge, I have a curious love affair with the Fens, I describe it as a 'rum old place' yet once you look past the seeming monotonous flatness, you glean that there is a beauty in the bleakness and the hedges thrive so well in the 'growbag soil'. 

Finally you are the first to get a glimpse of the front cover, so beautifully designed by Mark Ecob and linocut by the artist Becca Thorne. 

Thank you once again for your support and in a few short months, May will be here, the hedging season will once more have drawn to a close, and Words from the Hedge will land on your doormat. 

All the best,

 

Richard