Introduction

Bandoxa: A Life Lived, Remembered, and Reimagined

From the mist-cloaked valleys of South Wales to sun-drenched terraces in Spain, from Grampa’s football boots to flamenco guitars and surreal barstools, this extraordinary memoir travels across time, memory, and geography with wit, warmth, and a welcome disregard for convention.

In Bandoxa, the author weaves together a vibrant mosaic of reflections, equal parts cultural history, personal journey, and comedic dispatch. One moment, you’re standing beneath the ruined arches of the Walnut Tree Viaduct; the next, you’re dancing with shadows in an imaginary bar in Bandoxa. Along the way, you’ll encounter revolutionary Welsh princes, poisoned oceans, a grifting cat, angry school projects, the ghost of Segovia, and a fair amount of very questionable weather.

Told with an eye for the absurd, an ear for the poetic, and a heart attuned to wonder, this book is for anyone who has ever wandered, wondered, or wanted to start a folk band with their grandparents. Brimming with anarchic humour, historical curiosity, and deeply human moments, it is both a scrapbook of a singular life and a mirror for our own strange, beautiful journeys.

This is not just a memoir. It’s a multi-course feast of memory, a trip through love, politics, place, and identity, served with grace, irreverence, and the occasional carpeted epiphany.

Read it. Then read it again. Different every time.

Don’t Be Disappointed

Where to begin?

The ink trembles before the words arrive, as if the page itself fears what might be conjured.

There is too much to say and too little permitted to be said. Thoughts flicker like will-o’-the-wisps across the moorland of my mind, quick, mischievous, half-forgotten. I want to share a tale, but the tale is alive and secretive. It does not reveal itself easily.

I ask the wind, as it presses against the crooked windows of my home in Bandoxa: where do I begin?

Bandoxa. Ah, yes. You must hear it aloud to feel the enchantment. Ban-dó-sha. Say it softly, like a name whispered by the dying light on a solstice eve. The word is not just sound; it is a spell, old and rooted, like the hawthorn tree behind my cottage, the one the crows won’t land on.

This is where I am. The hearth is glowing, the kettle hums, and the big light casts warm halos across books and dusty curios. I sit before the screen, staring through it, not at it, fingers poised like a seer over a crystal. There is static in the air. Not electrical, something older, charged with stories yet to be told. Stories that twitch beneath the surface of things, like trout beneath black water.

The cats slumber with the chickens outside, curled in feathered heaps like the creatures of a saint’s dream. The sheep, those druidic monks of the field, mumble their riddles to the stones. Even the goats have ceased their mad games, as if the air holds some sacred hush.

This story begins here. But beware. It may seem a tale of memory, but it often slips into a dream. It is not what it appears to be. There is no clear line between myth and fact in Bandoxa, only fog, and in the fog, whispers.

No, it is not a fairytale. And yet, the forest folk know it well. It is sorrowful, strange, sometimes foolish, and always full of longing. It is what remains after the harp stops playing and the storyteller has gone silent, his eyes lost in some distant sea.

It is the lament of a man who could have chosen any path, a scholar of hidden knowledge, a keeper of coins, a master of cities and concrete. But he turned his back on all that. Instead, he followed the call of a voice not heard, but felt. He followed it to the edge of the map, where ink fades into serpents and stars. He followed it here, to Bandoxa.

It is said that once, long ago, a man rode beneath a sky that never ended. The scent of rain and leather wrapped around him like a cloak. He was a cowboy, they said, though that word is thin and wrong for what he was. He was a rider between worlds, chasing echoes and lost truths across vast, open silences. His strength broke where cunning might have prevailed. The land swallowed him, and the years too. Now he lingers, a ghost in a broad-brimmed hat, whispering to no one:

“Oh God… how I worked my youth away.”

There is fear in this tale. Not fear of monsters, but of the real disappearances. Of time slipping away like mist. Of becoming invisible. Of being left behind, cold, old, disconnected. Forgotten not just by others, but by the web of life itself.

Yet fear cannot keep us from magic. The magic that lives in love is remembered. The kind that trembles in your skin when you recall a warm breath against your neck, a laugh in the dark, the last look before parting.

Don’t be sad, not for me. Love was here. It still is. Let’s not pretend to be strong when we can be true instead. Let us move forward, not out of forgetting, but because time does not wait for even the most beautiful ache.

Now, listen, do you hear that?

“All change, please! All change! Mind the step while alighting the carriage.”

Yes, this train stops for no one. The conductor wears a crown of thorns and bells, and her eyes shine like twin moons. You can choose to get off here or ride further into the mist. Either way, the story continues.

This is Bandoxa. The threshold of what is and what might have been. The beginning of all endings. The end of all beginnings.

Let’s begin again.

Wandering into Bandoxa

I arrived in Bandoxa on a night that seemed stitched together from shadow and rain.

Not just wet, anciently wet, the kind of damp that seeps into bone and memory. The road twisted like a serpent unsure of its destination, and I, fool that I was, followed. I had no umbrella, no plan, no charm about my neck. Just an old rucksack, a pocketful of misgivings, and a quiet pull in my chest, like something calling me home before I knew I had one.

What had I done?

But Bandoxa, true to her old ways, did not scold. She held her silence until morning, then cracked it open with birdsong and that peculiar, haunting light that only comes after deep Galician rain. My fears drifted off with the mist, and in their place rose a strange, settled joy. The kind that doesn’t announce itself with trumpets, but kneels beside you like a childhood friend you forgot you’d missed.

With curious fortune, perhaps the old gods tipping a cup in my favour, I found myself rooted in this unreasonably green, profoundly quiet corner of Galicia. The hills rise and fall like breath, soft and solemn, alive with stories. Everything here seems to contradict itself, yet it somehow makes perfect sense. A place where melancholy and celebration live in the same cup, and you drink from both without asking which is which.

Do you understand me?

Of course you do. You little shapeshifters.

Here, the seasons do not arrive; they perform. Each one enters like a bard with a tale to tell: summer with its fevered dreaming; winter with its hard truths and smoky hearths. And above it all, those skies. Skies that change moods more often than poets. They stretch and swirl like omens, or memories, or both.

Three words: I’m here. Lovely. Delighted.

The soundtrack of my cabin is as enchanted as the land itself. Yes, Genesis, Tull, but also my piano, guitars, flute, and violins. Each is an invocation. Each a voice in the ritual. Sometimes they play themselves when the wind’s right and the fire’s low. I swear I’ve heard the violin sigh while I slept.

I am a watcher of Galician skies. A seer in the mist. A chronicler of mossy truths. I live, proudly and precisely, above the River Mendo. Not a mighty river, nor a whispering stream, but something in between. Like Thomas’s rivers, it carries old lullabies and new regrets. A rushy-bedded beauty, more soul than water.

This is Oza-Cesuras, land of fusion, land of story. The trees speak here, if you know how to listen, bark to bark, leaf to leaf. And the land? The land doesn’t just hold you. It gives you a quiet cwtch and, on certain blessed mornings, kisses both cheeks before you’ve had your coffee.

We don’t have the flash of the Mediterranean. No gentle lapping of warm seas. But we have the Atlantic, roaring, brooding, sending waves like marching giants to knock on our cliffs. We have rain that baptises you whether you asked for it or not. We have greens that glow under cloud and fire under frost.

The food is a spellbook: octopus, broth, clams, fat potatoes full of earth-wisdom, and greens that taste like they grew with secrets in their roots. The herbs in my kitchen whisper recipes when the moon is full. And the wine, oh, the wine! It knows how to listen.

This is no land for cowards or cynics.

The village, if you can still call it that, is a curious relic. Once full of laughter, now half-asleep. The bar is silent. The school is a ghost. Services come rarely, and when they do, they behave as if they’re sneaking in unnoticed. But the land speaks louder than bureaucracy. The river runs whether you vote or not.

My cabin is small, humble, a kind of shoebox shrine. But it has a well, a soul, and a window facing the truth. It’s too small for a family. But big enough for a minor miracle. I’d make room. I do not mean the scabby cat, noble beast though she is. I mean her. But that’s a different story, and one that probably won’t happen.

Much of my day is spent writing at a machine that glows, blinking like a curious animal. When I need to remember my shape, I play music, stretch my limbs, and feed my thoughts to the trees. I practice languages like a man rebuilding a tower, brick by brick, with each one remembered. French, Spanish, German, Italian. Each one a mirror. Each one a world.

I only wish I had known their value when I was younger. But time is a tricky river, and we swim in it backwards.

One evening, many moons ago, I wandered into Bandoxa. The hills opened, the rain eased, and the silence let me stay. And so, I stayed. Older now, and if not wiser, at least more weathered.

This is my place.
This is my myth.
This is my life.