Insights | Alison Morton Author

The place where I work

I hope you didn’t expect a tidy and sleek office?

My office is a place full of paper, books, notes, pens, files, cup of coffee, lights, noticeboard, etc. Our super-tough birchwood work stations came over to France with us, plus the IKEA office cupboards which used to adorn […]

New year, new blog title!

What?

When I first started this blog on World Book Day not quite three years ago (4 March 2010) I had just signed my indentures as a mad newbie writer, so the title Write a Novel? I must be mad! was an appropriate one. While I will never give up learning – no human being, […]

Drivers of the metal fish

Not steampunk, but creative imagination expanding our ideas of exploration…

Lagos, in the Algarve, was the harbour from which Prince Henry the Navigator’s maritime explorers set off in the early 1400s to discover the unknown world. Portuguese sailors were at the vanguard of this European Age of Discoveries during the 15th and 16th centuries, finding […]

Latin, eh?

What connects a Wallsend metro station, an ATM in the Vatican City, Asterix and Wikipedia?

Latin, of course!

Originating in Italy, it was spoken in Ancient Rome and spread through the Mediterranean into much of the then known world. Although now considered a dead language, many students, scholars, and members of the Christian clergy speak […]

The journey home

Lagos, Portugal, six a.m. Luggage bundled into the car, fumbling in the dark with the satnav. Farewell waves from my magic circle, then eighty kilometers to Faro Airport. The ex-pat South African banters as the receives my hire car back into his fold. I escape from the wrong passport queue – I’m in Schengen, unlike […]