Amongst other things...travel, boundaries, borders and the people I meet, including the witty, the wise and the simply deluded. 

 

      As you might expect, I'm hoping that in the course of writing  my next  book, 'Where have all the counties gone?', I'll talk to people who'll be able to offer wit and wisdom but, given my experience so far, I suspect that those with their own share of extreme opinions will also make their own disitinctive contribution to the research process... 

 

'Where have all the Counties gone', has yet to be fully researched, let alone completed, but my first book, 'On an Offa Bus' is of course available!

 

 

        Some 18 months ago, I walked down a lonely hilltop lane, looked east towards Cheshire and thought about the border with England. Did it matter these days? Are there any real differences between the people who live on either side of it? Do people look across the border and like what they see? Why didn't I try and find out? After all, it wasn't as if I'd be going to a remote country where locals still sent messages using cleft sticks and thought that one day Bruce Forsythe would crack the American market.

        I decided to use service buses to zig zag back and forth over Offa's Dyke and talk to fellow passengers and others I met along the way. Somewhat surprisingly, I came across happy hippies who lived in cottages filled with brown rice and love, a man in Kington who seemed to hold me personally responsible for the way his taxes are spent in Wales and began to realise you don't have to go as far as Bleached Bones, Arizona to meet eccentrics...

 

The result? 

 

'On an Offa Bus'  (ISBN 978-1-84494-061-5), which  is now available from Bridge Books,Wrexham. (tel. 01978 358661)   www.bridgebooks.co.uk , as well as good book shops everywhere and distributors such as www.bookdepository.co.uk  www.gwales.com    www.waterstones.co.uk    www.blackwells.co.uk    www.amazon.co.uk   www.whsmiths.co.uk

 

 

 

            

 

                                                                        

 

                                                                          Gareth Wheatley