If you’re here via social media, the bottom half of this will sound familiar, but this bit is for everyone.

Thank you for visiting! I hope you’ll have a wander round, find something worth reading, maybe even worth commenting on – that would be brilliant.

It isn’t an empty shell I’m presenting you with.

I wanted to make sure there was some content for everyone. With 80+ posts and over twenty-six thousand words, there should be something, whether you’re student, parent or carer, teacher, or ‘just’ a reader.

If something is missing, I need to know!

This isn’t ‘job done‘, by the way.

26,000 words? I’m just getting started.

Not sure where to begin?

I’d head here. If we think about this place not as a website, but a ‘home‘, then this is where you find what the main rooms are, and who lives there …

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A last, but important, point before the social media text.

When you click the Home Page, I invite you to ‘join the conversation‘.

I mean it, and I hope you’ll take me up on it.

Reading is far from a solitary activity. And Literature is a subject of ideas.

Yes, tuition is my business …

… but you don’t need to be a customer, or a potential one, to hang out here, or to comment. You don’t need to agree with me, or what someone else posts, either.

Where would the fun be in that?

If you can be kind, and remember the human you’re addressing when you post, you’re welcome. We argue with ideas and theories here, not with people.

Let’s crack on, shall we … ?

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Months ago, I started building a website.

Along the way, I realised I wasn’t building a website at all.

I was building the sort of place I’d wanted to find when I was sixteen.

Somewhere for people who think reading matters.

Somewhere for students who ask awkward questions about texts.

Somewhere that believes literature isn’t about memorising what other people think, but learning to notice, and having your own ideas.

There are articles to read.

Ideas to explore

Rabbit holes to go down.

Essays to argue with.

And, of course, tuition.

The shop shelves aren’t full yet.

They’ll fill up over time.

But the doors open today, because after about fifty years of books, and eleven years in classrooms, this finally feels like home. Not the end of a project. The beginning of new conversations.

So …

Welcome in.

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Reference

‘Where Is My Mind?’, Pixies, Surfer Rosa (1988)