I had a neat little pile now: stories of success and failure, frustration or oblivion. In a lovely Buddhist sense. I had been at this quest for a longer time than I cared to consider. Maps show a snapshot of time, a historical moment. Places change and new maps are calibrated. Flick through a selection to watch progress in motion, like the earliest style cartoon films.

So I was back to the self-questioning: would the map have become obsolete during the time that I sought it? I was getting older, closer to mundane mortality: was I doomed never to find this nowhere map before my own inevitable demise? Perhaps I had acquired nothing more than a handful of ephemera stored loose-leaf in a cardboard document wallet - handwritten testimonies smuggled out, bartered for, bought for extortionate amounts; accounts and recounts recorded second hand, third hand, carefully typed up and added to the evidential pile. On occasion, I had even appended some comments - Is she still trapped in that library? / What became of the fifteen monks? / Given the religious turmoil currently tearing our world apart, just whose vision or version of Eden did the writer return to?

But the blessed map continued to elude my grasp. Annoyed, I emptied everything out of the folder and threw all my documentation up at the ceiling. A fit of pique worthy of my younger student self but unbecoming to my current age and standing.

I had expected the papers to fall haphazardly but, to my surprise, the descent was not at all random; rather, the pages came down with a seeming purpose, the disparate items landing atop or next to each other, coalescing into… really? Surely not!... yes, they would sort of fit together like so and… this is interesting… No, scratch that, this is mind-blowing! To all intents and purposes, right in front of me now is:

        the map.
        No time to lose. I think I'll start…
        here.


 (Clockhouse London Writers appeared in this order: Allen Ashley, Jack Turner, Sandra Unerman, David Turnbull, Robin Lupton, Mark Lewis, Rima Devereaux, Gary Budgen, and Allen Ashley)