The alternative world which Jacques inhabits by the River Tweed has immediate rewards in all of the tiny details which make his life so rich. With no need for extreme thrills, every journey, however short or long, holds something interesting, something tangible, something which might become a treasured memory.

In Pilgrim, Jacques becomes absorbed in the lives of a family of ospreys living near the River Tweed. He sees the bravery and determination of the mother, the loyal persistence of the father and the wonderful learning-processes of two young birds as they gain strength and confidence before their first huge migration.

The ospreys act as a touchstone which lies at the very heart of the trilogy, giving us a view of family life which might seem idealised compared with what is 'normal' today.

'So much of our current vision of material wealth is an illusion, akin to the illusion of buying a place in heaven which was a keystone of the Feudal System in Medieval times. For all of our notions of the freedoms of an educated, democratic society, I don't suppose we are much happier than illiterate peasants were in the Middle Ages.

'Just as we might laugh at Medieval ideas of Hell and Purgatory, so people in future centuries might look back on many of our current fears.'

'For many years now, the fears of parents and teachers have been paralysing children and teenagers, stunting their natural emotional, intellectual and creative growth, making them introspective at the time of life when they most need to look outwards with a realistic, achievable spirit of adventure, self-rewarding effort and independent discovery.

'The implications for the physical and mental health of individuals, couples, families, local communities, nations and our whole global human society are enormous, yet it is so easy to identify the underlying causes of the problems.

'Is it any wonder that we look to a well-known group or organisation, something which makes us feel secure because we are following a trend rather than struggling with those fears which prevent us from thinking clearly and making our own choices? But of course, huge amounts of money and power come from controlling the way young people's minds and bodies develop...the relative freedom of the hippie years just wasn't sufficiently profitable!'

'Fear of the Unknown is a natural animal mechanism for maintaining social cohesion and order. It has evolved over millions of years and if they could speak to us, we would probably find that ants and bees, or any social animals, experience collective hormonal surges which are there to help them avoid danger. So it is the queen bee who will decide to fly to a new tree, to set up a new colony...not the thousands of workers, whose overriding instinct is to return to their home.

'Collective fears bond us together and keep us in the established pecking-order, thus avoiding chaotic fights for supremacy. Shakespeare wrote about this in Henry V, where the king unites his subjects by identifying a common enemy. George Orwell showed it in 1984, too. It is there loud and clear in any disaster-movie you care to mention...both hilarious and disturbing in King Kong, with good old Money winning the day, rescuing us from a brief moment of chaos and the charisma of natural animal power.

'In V for Vendetta, we see Evie overcoming her own fears and successfully overthrowing the system which has imprisoned her society.'

The artistic and anthropological foundations of Tunesmith, tinsmith and Pilgrim are sometimes explicit, but most of the time it is left to the reader's imagination to discover familiar aspects of human behaviour.

'When I was writing Tunesmith, I was watching a film most nights and also rereading a few classic works which had influenced much of my thinking for forty years or more. For example, Moby Dick and Anna Karenina are mentioned in the text.

'Tolstoy covered the life of Russian peasants so well and Melville had vented his political feelings so amply that there was absolutely no need for me to devote pages to social, economic and political issues...it was enough for them to be major undercurrents for a different kind of story, full of fresh observations and a more modern understanding of human nature, set in a context of all life on our planet.'

'Since my own environmental education was extremely well-founded on first-hand experience in the early sixties, I felt no need to read modern writers. I wanted these books to have their own somewhat dinosaurian, tongue-in-cheek Cyclops perspective, which is so much more productive than slavishly following current trends.'

The view from a cave can be intriguing because of its limitations, and the reader is invited to laugh at the narrator's naïvety. In Pilgrim there are multiple caves and through Maggie Stiggle we learn things about Hetty which her lover Jacques could not possibly know.

'The Tunesmith Trilogy has been constructed in the manner of certain Old Master oil-paintings. Underlying structures and themes are sketched out in my mind, but the surface of the novels is all about detail, colour, shapes...interesting combinations and contrasts which bring a multitude of characters and stories to life, evolving naturally as each book grows.

'For example, one of my favourite characters, Maggie Stiggle, simply hit me in the face one day when I was in the middle of writing about someone else. This system has given me great freedom and a real-life energy which drives every page.'

In the Tunesmith Trilogy, Jacques is shaken by a series of traumatic incidents which are absolutely real, but some of his fears arise from a sense of guilt which may or may not be so well-grounded. Initially this web of fears paralyses him, but thanks to the astonishing bravery of Hetty, he gradually learns to overcome them one at a time, so that his confidence and strength grow.

In Pilgrim, Hetty's example raises questions of parental rôles. As a sub-plot to Jacques' and Hetty's story, the nuclear family of ospreys highlights the question of how much the human species has really progressed.

In Tunesmith we get the impression that Jacques is a bit of a recluse, but this is all a perspective of time. We also learn that he was a celebrity in his teens...a household name, popular with the ladies and travelling wherever he wished. It seems that Jacques has turned his back on city life for a reason, also to do with time and the changes in our society.

'When I lived with my Argentinian girlfriend in a lovely quiet university street in central London in the eighties, we were actually right in the thick of things, physically and mentally.  Within a short walk we were in Euston and King's Cross, or the British Museum and the West End. It was an extremely competitive, crowded environment, yet in most ways we thrived because those diverse, interlocking, interdependent communities had evolved reasonably naturally over the centuries.

'Even though near the end of 1981 there were serious problems such as the October bombing in Oxford Street and the fact that my country was at war with that of the woman I loved...and that Maria's previous boyfriend was lying in a military hospital with three British machine-gun bullets in his belly...our daily lives were still functioning on a human scale, with face-to-face contact for most things.

'If we wanted to buy a book, or some good-quality food at an affordable price, there were good, independent shops just along the road. Things really were that simple, and in many ways the same could be said of almost any sizeable town-centre in Britain...and through much of Europe.

'The two of us shared a room in an international hall of residence of which I was the chairman. Our friends had come from many countries..Fiji, Bhutan, Saudi Arabia, Australia, India, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Yemen, Ghana, Zambia, China, Japan, Canada, South Africa, Singapore, Jordan, Brazil, Argentina, Scotland, The Irish Republic, Wales and even England...the list goes on!

'Yes, of course there were a few minor conflicts and some generally-unacceptable behaviour and yes, certain cliques did develop, but I think that in that community we all learned to live and grow together, to listen to each other, without any one person laying down the rules for everyone else.

'One of the only real imperatives was the fire-drill. When the alarm went before eight one morning, it was hilarious to see who emerged from which part of the building. Everyone knew that I lived in the ladies' section, because Maria's room was more comfortable for two, but there were some other surprises.

'The only serious incident of which I was aware involved an attack on two big, strong African men by a group of British youths who ran out of an underground train, just around the corner at Euston Square, one evening when there were very few people around. That made us more cautious, but we certainly didn't live in fear!'

'It is easy to look upon the horrors and failings of the twentieth century with rightful disgust, but to balance those there was also remarkable progress in so many ways, especially in the freedom of an ordinary person from a humble background to develop his or her ability to think and act independently.

'There was so much variety...in Britain you could enter a very different world merely by going from one council-house to its next-door neighbour.

'Even as late as the early years of this century, we lived in a remarkably natural, human, diverse way because we had never even considered any alternative.'

'The change towards a uniform global mindset was accelerated under the convenient cover of the pandemic, so that we now seem to have lost sight of our natural capability of thinking for ourselves, and we take so many commercially and politically-driven changes as commands.

'Even in the pre-Punk early seventies, people talked about robots and artificial intelligence...we had Doctor Who and the Cyber-Men, after all...but we certainly didn't let global computer-networks make our decisions and run our lives for us! Our new Information-gods hold both the carrot to entice us and the stick with which to beat us back into line, right from the most trivial things which penetrate our lives just as invisibly and effectively as any virus.'

For nearly forty years, Percy Stewart has lived without television, and the only time he ever bought a newspaper for news was in France in 1976. After two years of having to teach via Skype, he cancelled his internet contract.

This freedom from direct exposure to mass-media gives him an unusual perspective and a sensitivity to subtle changes in our society.

'The novels aren't a sociological study, but at Cambridge I had a very good foundation in anthropology. I find it extremely worrying to see the way a whole community can be pulled in one direction or another, because I understand the processes which underly this in any human society.

'For many years I have worked alone for several days or even weeks at a time, with no radio or news of any kind, so when I see one or two friends I am acutely aware of changes in their ideas from one meeting to the next.

'For example, I might hear someone use a particular phrase which they have never used in our conversations before, and then exactly the same words come from another friend's mouth, usually within two or three days. The following week it may have dropped from their vocabulary.

'The changes aren't always bad and in fact recently I have noticed little of the general gloom which filled most conversations a short time ago.

'To my great surprise, I'm even finding that once again, in this unsettled summer of 2024, among my acquaintances there is an increased diversity of opinion. The really worrying sign is when everyone says the same thing.'

Although changes in modern society are the essential backdrop to all three novels, Percy Stewart sees no point in filling pages with the humdrum of modern life.

'A while ago ago I picked up some new books in one of our local libraries. Those award-winning writers seemed to love wallowing in their own introspection...writing about the dreary toil of writing in one case! I have no desire to add one more book to that particular pile, so I write about things which are all around us if we open our eyes to the natural world, and to that miraculous creature, the Complete Stranger.

'We only need a few kind and thought-provoking words to escape the negative ideas and behaviour-patterns which get us absolutely nowhere. As often as not, these kind words will come from someone we barely know, who for one brief moment gives us a different perspective.'

'As a young child I began to discover the wonderful adventures which open up the moment you start to listen to someone outside of your own family-bubble. With one or two inspiring teachers, a few books and a handful of songs when I was only four years old, my world suddenly extended a long way beyond our own four walls.

'From an early age, fiction was extremely important in my own life...an escape from things which I didn't understand until recently.'

In the seventies Percy Stewart was learning about families and power through Shakespeare and Greek drama.

'Our primary school library had already given me a good foundation for this in myths of Jason and the Argonauts, the Cretan Minotaur and the serpent-haired Gorgon. I was carried away by the bravery of Odysseus and Achilles, the sword-drawing power of Arthur as a boy and then the hopeless love of Lancelot and Guinevere...all of this purely from books with a few simple pictures to stimulate a child's imagination.

'The saddest moment in my formative writing-career was reading of the downfall of Camelot, at sometime around the age of ten. Some might rightly say that I have never got over it.'

At seventeen, working in a brand-new riverside theatre two nights a week inspired plans to write an opera based on the Underworld journey of Virgil's Aeneid.

'I loved the magic of the theatre, with actors, colour, light and shade, the illusion of stage-space and powerful music coming from all around. Three of my friends were great fans of Wagner's operas and one of them had already been to see the Ring cycle in Bayreuth.

'In Latin lessons we were studying Aeneas' descent into the Underworld.

'Journeys tend to give me fresh ideas, different ways of seeing familiar places. On the three-mile cycle-ride home from school one evening I could hear very powerful choral music in my head, influenced by the Mozart which I had sung in our cathedral, and the Wagner which I first heard on my friend's fabulous stereo.'

'Alone at my desk, when I should have been memorising a list of Latin verbs, the brain-music and Virgil's poetry gave me some grandiose visual ideas for a stage production which would really make my mark on the theatrical world...nothing as ordinary as a B+, a painted backdrop and a moth-eaten pair of red velvet curtains.

'Since my father was an artist, right from birth it was perfectly natural for me to see imagined worlds. I had already been to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge as a toddler too young to remember anything other than the vast scale, intricate detail and other-worldly magic of the Old Master paintings.  The National Gallery and the V&A in London followed soon afterwards. At eleven I saw a large exhibition of Van Gogh's drawings at the Hayward, which made a deep impression.

'By ten or eleven I was familiar with the work of Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Brueghel and Salvador Dali, so my teenage imagination could conjure the kind of dreamlike realism which only became credible in the cinema with CGI around twenty years later.

'In the seventies many of us had those dreams, that wish to escape the dull grey unemployment and power-cuts world in which we lived, the horrors of Vietnam and Northern Ireland which we were seeing on the television, Beirut under bombardment, people trying to escape to West Berlin and the fears of nuclear war.

'By comparison, Ancient Greek gods and Roman ghosts were light relief. For a brief moment I lived in that imaginary Underworld where Aeneas sees a glorious vision of future Rome.'

'Finally reality hit, when it dawned on me that our headmaster would never give permission for us to build a flowing river and a vast black cave in the school hall, because at half-past nine each morning it had to double-up for basketball and badminton.'

'Clearly I needed to live a lot and learn a lot!'

In recent years the threads of real-life and the rich imaginative foundation which the boys were given at school in the sixties and seventies have all been converging. Faint memories from the end of the fifties also find a useful purpose in the narrative.

'Clearly my teenage operatic ideas were over-ambitious by a long way, largely because I came from a poor working-class background in a small East Anglian town a million miles away from the La Scala and L.A..

'The vision of Aeaneas' Underworld set to music was absolutely fine, and now I draw on that ability to visualise, in writing these novels. The only major difference is that my own life since the seventies has been so blessed with real people, places and emotions that I no longer need to use ancient myths and legends, other than as little threads to weave into the overall fabric of a book.'

'From the start of Tunesmith, tinsmith the decision was simple and completely matter-of-fact: to create a new mythical character, a composer known to no-one except the son who discovers his life's work after his death...the humble tunesmith of the title, the very antithesis of Mozart and Wagner.

'By rejecting modern celebrity-dominated notions of 'genius', in a sense the tunesmith is an Everyman character who stands for all of those artists and other wonderful people who add something beautiful to the world, yet who die completely unrecognised, or even reviled and cast out because they do not swim with the other fish in the main stream.

'If a reader recognises in this image a thankful nod to Paul Torday, with his marvellous book about salmon fishing in a desert, then hopefully they will realise that Tunesmith has modern roots as well as ancient ones!'

'In March this year I had my first serious brush with hypothermia, which would have given a curious twist to the story of Tunesmith, tinsmith. Coming close to death around seven thousand feet up in the mountains in June took the story beyond the summit-attempt envisaged many years before I wrote the first page of the trilogy.

'With Feeding the vultures this lifelong learning-process is reaching its final phase. The same beautiful summit awaits and now that I have some friends who could help make it accessible and safe, no fear-inducing risk-assessment is required.'