Jacques is obviously on a quest. With crash-helmet and protective clothing, a motorcyclist becomes like a knight in armour heading into the unknown on horseback.  

Initially he goes to France in search of the mother he never knew, but what he eventually finds in the Pyrenees is a complete surprise, changing him forever.

On his return to Berwickshire, in the quiet by the Tweed, images from his own past come flooding back, filling the huge memory-blanks of Tunesmith, tinsmith and Pilgrim.

All three novels take an unusual look at family life as it is seen by an orphan who originally believed that he had no living relatives, yet the author himself had a rich and happy childhood.

'I come from large families on both sides, with around twenty cousins.  Before I reached Jacques' age, I had already lost several wonderful relatives, including some of those who gave me the happiest memories right up to my late twenties.  One of these cared for me as a baby and probably read stories to me when I was a toddler: I can still picture the blue nightshirt which she made me when I could only have been two or three at the most.  Some of these memories emerge from dreams which are so clear that they become parts of Jacques' story.

'Coming from the flat sea-level Fenland of Cambridgeshire to a Pennine valley in Derbyshire at a year old probably explains my lifelong love of hills, clear-flowing rivers and trees, and my ability to be self-contained on walks in the fresh air.  I've lived in central London and three other cities, but the hills, mountains and coast are my natural home.'

'Living in near-isolation on a quiet farm near the Tweed, especially since the pandemic, it took only a small leap of imagination to write everything from Jacques' perspective.  Day after day it feels as if I am living life through his eyes, in his skin, because most days there is no-one and nothing to disturb the concentration.

'I haven't had a television since 1990 and in 2023 I cancelled my Internet contract, which poses certain practical challenges but gives me a sense of freedom and a clarity of thought which had become impossible when checking for emails far too many times a day.'

'I really cannot see the point in researching a novel on the Internet, for the essence of a novel is LIFE itself.  Reading a really good novel is as close as we can come to experiencing life as lived by a complete stranger, so to my mind that experience needs to be real, and not something plotted out with a marketing plan, on a creative writing course!

'The research for Feeding the vultures has therefore been almost entirely first-hand experience, combined with stories which people tell me on Jacques' journeys.  People who gave me their initial reaction to the first two books all said that they seem very real, so clearly I was on the right track from the beginning.

'To make things emotionally and factually true, I walked for three weeks without the aid of a map, mobile phone or even a compass, experiencing things just as Jacques portrays them in his stories.

'Astonishingly, by living life through his eyes, for over three months I felt almost as if I were back in my forties all over again.  In the novels Jacques goes to explore places which has father had known in the seventies, so I have been able to experience almost the same joys of discovery as I had done at nineteen when I first went to live in the Pyrenees.'

'In the mountains last spring, for the first time in many years I began to truly LIVE each day as it came, having to rely totally on my own human judgement, with no plans or weather-forecast.  I have lived at six thousand feet in the winter, and once walked up to an eight thousand foot pass in the dark with temperatures around minus twenty:  only possible because I had Alpine mountaineering boots and ample layers, so I know that it would be stupid to attempt anything like that in normal walking gear, and the only safe place to be at nightfall is inside the tent.

'Walking unfamiliar paths through the mountains without any technological aid once again became completely natural and deeply liberating, and at sixty-seven I far exceeded what I had considered my capabilities at nineteen....thanks to a bit of experience, determination and wisdom.

'I met three brave young women walking from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean alone and that company was very pleasant for a few hours, but mobile phones inevitably came out and somehow the magic was lost.  The best times were in complete solitude, alone with the vultures and the chamois, with bare rock and ice all around, and clear skies once the last planes of the evening had gone into the Spanish airports.  Near the end I had to continue descending from the most spectacular views I have ever seen, without stopping to watch the sunset, simply because within half an hour temperatures would have become dangerous amongst the peaks and I had to get down to the snow-line with enough light to pitch the tent on safe ground.'

'The whole of writing Feeding the vultures has been an extraordinary experience, particularly going back to work in a place which I knew like the back of my hand nearly half a century ago.

'Last year I began six weeks of voluntary work exactly forty-eight years and one day after I first went to live there two days after leaving home at nineteen.  I was doing exactly the same job, starting on exactly the same spot at the corner of a hillside car-park.  The emotions were uncontrollable, as you might imagine, because so little had changed and yet in the meantime I have become almost an old man!  At nineteen I had a new pair of Levi's jeans, a new pair of hiking boots, a Norwegian sailor's sweater and a pilgrim's staff which I had cut with my sheath knife from an ash sapling.  At sixty-seven I was astonished to find that inside I am still very much that same person, still some kind of a pilgrim on a long journey into the unknown, with faith in the basic goodness of human nature.

'All these years on, I was the only person there who had known the man who set it up in 1954.  Many details have changed, yet the place is essentially the same as it was in the sixties and seventies.  I'm due to go there again soon, to continue the work and the research, filling in gaps and listening to more local people.'

'Last year's Pyrenean experience seemed to open doors of all kinds.  Since returning to Scotland I have taken many months to allow buried memories to rise to the surface, each in its own good time, fictionalising the essence of these so that real people from years gone by become characters who are full of life on the page.  In Lourdes some of the old hotels have barely changed since I used to have clients staying there in '76 and '77, but many of them have been closed for ten years or more.  There are some fantastic period film locations, for when I turn the novels into screenplays.'

'In recent months, various dark secrets have emerged from my own memories and dreams, but for the 'British' parts of Feeding the vultures I also call upon experiences of working with thousands of children and adults, going all the way back to 1972.

'Sometimes a chapter comes from things which someone has told me the day before, probably in or near Berwick, Lourdes or Saint Jean-de-Luz, which are the three main locations for Feeding the vultures.  Connections readily emerge:  cruelty or tragedy in one family can have its parallels in others, and something which someone tells me in a tiny village in the Spanish mountains has its counterpart here in the Cheviots.  The similarities are just as fascinating as the differences.

'What comes out on the page seems to write itself, transformed by words and images into something entirely new and fresh.  It feels as if the characters in these books wish to tell their own stories, in their own ways.  Feeding the vultures is actually a collection of many stories told or retold by this forty-something dreamer Jacques and a few of his friends, all of them linked in the intricate web of Life on this precious planet of ours.'

'The most curious thing about the three-week walk home through the mountains from the Atlantic shore to Lourdes was that it didn't feel like 'an adventure' in the modern sense, because it was all about dogged survival in difficult conditions: not remotely like tourism or sightseeing.  Towards the end survival depended upon one thing: finding water.  I knew that so long as I could still walk, I would slowly make it to my original French 'home' on the hillside which overlooks Lourdes.  I have walked the last stretch of the path hundreds of times, so the whole journey was really one long thankful homecoming rather than any kind of thrill-seeking adventure....a completely different mindset!

Percy Stewart writes much as a good actor acts, by putting most of himself aside so that he can become someone else.  Apart from the deep emotional surges triggered by visiting familiar places, he felt remarkably objective, as if viewing the whole situation from somewhere 'other'.

'This detachment puzzled me for a long time, but now I realise that I was completely focused on the job of internalising the experiences which would have been Jacques' on his long, arduous pilgrimage following the loss of the three people who constituted the nucleus of his world.  I had been thinking about this more or less the whole time for two years, not really thinking about my own life at all.

'Reading 'Jacques' thoughts' in 'his' two notebooks, in the comfort of my own home on a Scottish Borders farm last summer, I can see that I really was living his journey, feeling his feelings:  the writing does not seem anything like a diary which I would have written.

'It is as if it had not been me on that long, long walk, but someone closer to the person I might have become in other circumstances, had I continued to live in the Pyrenees instead of returning to Britain in the eighties.  It was perhaps the most disciplined piece of large-scale work I have ever done, and certainly the most rewarding.'