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This is my first blog since the revamp and renaming of my website. It’s also the first thing I’ve written since the publication of No Precedent. Nobody has read that yet, apart from my developmental editor Steve Carver, so I wait in trepidation for the sound of the raspberries.

It’s a sequel, or more accurately a midquel, to Where’s Sailor Jack? (WSJ), finishing at the same point in early 2020 but covering only the previous five years. It’s written by Bob and Wendy in succession.

Those who have read WSJ will know that it has a traumatic episode towards the end. I did wonder if I could change that in a parallel universe, with Wendy finishing the book at an archaeological dig in Gloucestershire, the sun rising in the west like a red rubber ball. But as Bob made clear in WSJ, he doesn’t want to believe in alternative worlds, as everything that could have ever gone wrong with his life would have done somewhere, and that really would be too hard for him to take. So this novel ends in the same place as the first, with us having left the EU, along with a Tory Government headed by Boris Johnson, and, unbeknownst to us all, with a nasty virus transferring to humans in the east.

God bless us, every one!