I am getting excited - I am very close to launching my ebook of half-a-dozen short stories linked to the coronavirus lockdown. They are not grim - in fact they are more upbeat than anything else. What I did was to dream up a number of circumstances that could not possibly happen outside this unique period of lockdown.

And all the profits of the ebook will be going to Hospice UK.

I had just finished a 104,000 word novel (The Lemon Tree Forest) when Covid-19 began its march across Europe.

Then, inevitably given the circumstances, my public relations work dried up, so I was left with zero income. I was even asked to take a break on the freelance fee I earn each week for my Saturday newspaper column. And so, feeling pretty useless and generally unwanted, the thought occurred to me that if I was to be living on nothing but a recent redundancy pay-out, then perhaps I could do something as a way of making my own humble contribution during these troubled times. I could have a go at doing my bit.

Then I saw a TV news package about what a hard time the British hospice movement was having. The front-line NHS wards and staff were making all the head-lines, but the sombre, quiet world of the hospices were taking a very bad hit during the pandemic for all sorts of reasons. Because my dear old father, Peter Hesp, passed away at St Margaret’s Hospice in Taunton some years ago, I have always felt a debt of gratitude to the staff there. Now the family connection with St Margaret’s continues (for reasons I won’t go into) - and I felt this was a health charity certainly worth supporting in times when it was all too easy for such places to fall out of the limelight.

So I decided to write a series of short-stories, all based in these extraordinary and unique times. If I could write half a dozen tales rapidly enough, then perhaps I could pull them together in a collection that could help raise funds for the hospice movement during the lockdown period.

However, what I very much did not want to do was make the stories dark or sad in such tragic times. As I write this foreword, the UK has recorded more than 20,000 Covid-19-related deaths - and there have probably been a great many more than that. And, of course, it has been the death-rate which has dominated the head-lines, as well as the general ghastliness of the illness. I felt that the last thing anyone looking for a bit of light reading needs at this time is a reminder of all that.
Why make up some tragic tale concerning Covid-19 when the whole world can simply flick on the radio or TV and have one delivered instantaneously by 24-hour rolling news?

What I did think was that it could be worth having a go at recording the unique atmosphere of these remarkable and, hopefully, never-to-be-repeated times. Had I still been working as editor-at-large of the Western Morning News I’d have done this by phoning around my many contacts in the South West on a regular basis so that I could write news-features about the mood of the rural population and the state-of-play in out-of-the-way places. Indeed, the paper did hire me to do this on just one occasion when I produced a double page spread just before the lockdown began in earnest.

As it was, I was stuck in lockdown in the depths of my valley, so I began to imagine what things could be like in other parts of the countryside.

Christmas Day. That was my thought as I drove down Minehead main-street a couple of weeks ago on my way to take my elderly mother to an unavoidable hospital appointment. In normal times the only occasion you’d ever see that busy main-street totally empty during daylight working hours would be on Christmas Day. Now it is empty all day, everyday, as the social-distancing continues. It will be like that in towns and cities around the globe - and surely, outside a war-zone, no-one has ever seen anything like it before?

So we live in truly remarkable times. Historic even.

However, it is going to be a difficult thing to relate or talk about in years to come when, hopefully, all this is over.

“What did you do in the Great Lockdown of 2020, Grandad?” my as yet unborn grandchildren might ask, in the same way that I quizzed my elders about what they did in the Second World War.
“Well… We stayed home, watched the news and did quite a lot of gardening.”

Not exactly heroic or swashbuckling. It’s not even something you could turn into comedy and make a Dad’s Army style series about. It seemed to me, growing up in the aftermath of WW2, that the grassroots existence in these islands between 1939 and 1945 was all about people pulling together. Now the only way we can pull together is to stay apart. Today’s Home Front means something very different indeed. It means staying at home.

Nevertheless, the lockdown has thrown up some very curious stories on the news - and perhaps in the imagination. Certainly it has in mine. So, trying to avoid thinking about hospital wards or mortuaries, I began to imagine what might be happening to various people around the rural South West.

None of the characters in these stories actually exists in real life, but my long experience as a newspaper journalist - meeting thousands of people a year - tells me they could have done. Nor have any of the events in the stories actually occurred, as far as I know - but there too, they could easily have happened…

But only as a result of the lockdown. And that is what is different about these stories - such things could only ever evolve, develop, unravel and take place during the very strange times we are living through.

Anyway, the ebook should be out this week and you can be sure that I’ll be letting yo know when it becomes available. By the way, the Dartmoor images I’ve reproduced here were all in the running as illustrations for the book cover….