I said before that my muse wakes me up in the early hours with brilliant ideas. Knowing that an attack can strike at any moment, I have a notepad next to my bed. This is what happened about a week before Christmas. She gave me an idea of a blue substance – something like snow – covering everything, and I mean everything. I hastily sat bolt upright, scribbled down a few notes and promptly went back to sleep.

Morning comes around and I read through my notes and knock up a cursory introductory chapter. This is a short snippet from that:

‘Why doesn’t it snow in June? Is it because it’s so warm?’

‘That’s right son now stay in the house, please.’ He didn’t want to explain that a couple of years ago it had snowed in Scotland in June and northern England had experienced snow in May five years ago but giving him such a response would normally be met with a whole host of other questions that he couldn’t and didn’t want to answer. He stepped out from the comfort of the house and finally set foot onto the strange blue substance, closing the patio door behind him.

Not only did it coat the ground like snow, it felt like it underfoot too. It made that distinct dull crunching noise that only fresh snow made. He walked into the garden, following roughly where the path should be. The fence was a little over five feet high and standing on tip toes, you could see across a path, down a slope and onto the railway line. Precariously, he crept along the pathway as people do in snow and peered over the fence. The blue stuff did indeed cover the path, the grass slope and the railway line – he could only make out the rough shape of the track beneath.

I have a lot of ideas to play around with on this but don’t expect progress any time soon as I feel pretty focussed on my gladiators at the moment.