Antony J Stowers

Teaching in France, vaccinations, Locomotion Number One, Covid-by-the-Sea, four UK trips in six months, French theatre and film projects, model railway displays, book printing, promotion and sales, exercise and old age, Delta and Omicron, Darlington, Manchester and Nottingham, a change of career and re-connecting with the past - follow the modern adventures of Jethro Anson Nowsty, 58, throughout 2021 and into 2022, an English ex-pat living and working in France. Like the mythical 'key to the door' of maturity in reaching the age of 21, we of Planet Earth should have been passing from one old state to the next new state with flying colours but we would, as usual, go into it expecting far too much and emerge from it having achieved far too little. It was a year of change for our world and a year of change for our reluctant hero.

Every year for one week in July or August, the Nowsty family peers suspiciously from the windows of their terraced house in Darlington as if the weather is about to play yet another intentionally cruel deception. They pray for sun but prepare for rain, slaves to a typically unpredictable British summer that sometimes seems intentionally malicious rather than casually reassuring. Yes, it's time for summer holidays But never mind - let's leave all that doom and gloom behind for a little while and escape back to the good old days before everything began to go to pieces, back to the English working-class world of half a century ago when life was just as complicated but expectations more simple.

'Imagination links with memory' is a quote attributed to the Impressionist painter Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and one which he passed on as advice to many apprentice artists including Paul Gauguin. I chose the title to reflect this quote as it sums up what this book of short stories is - my own memories mixed up like colours on a Degas palette with liberal sprinkling of my adult imagination. 'Mixed-up kid' was my first foray onto short stories based on childhood memories in and around Darlington, County Durham, England 1968-1981 and this is my second.

It's peculiar to know that solid objects and people can no longer be seen or touched apart from through photographs, films or memories. They have become ghosts. For some, the anchors that root us are important and for others unimportant. Cutting those chains can free us to move on to new waters but cutting too many can see us drifting in a way we can't always control. Finding the balance between drifting and steering is the tricky part and is what I hope I, Jethro Anson Nowsty, a man of little importance, have achieved within these covers.

Continuing the adventures of Jethro Anson Nowsty, a not-so-innocent Englishman abroad in France, entering a dark period for humanity as the first global pandemic for a century bursts upon his world. Like most, he tries to take it in his stride and carry on as normal but what is 'normal' in a world where human contact is dramatically reduced and human mobility is vastly restricted? He does his best at work as a teacher and at play as a writer, dramatist, reader, book-lover and gardener, singing the post-Brexit blues, dealing with lockdowns, masks, COVID tests and vaccinations, he struggles on, like everyone, blindly fumbling forward to a hopeful future with pathos, humour and irony . . .

Fragments is a collection of thirteen short stories that somehow miraculously survived the long journey I took them on, some from as far back as 1989, two from 1997 and the others from 1999, until very recently, that's to say I wrote them under adverse circumstances and managed to cling onto them by putting them all into booklets. The first six, from the spring/summer 1989 while I was living in a squat in Hackney in east London, are: 'Slight dreams of a Northern bastard', 'Crawling king snake', 'Preparations', 'Baptism by fire', 'Foray' and 'Maxine'. I sold a few copies at Compendium bookshop in Camden High Street in London in 1989. 'I walk the line' and 'Roman Road' were written in 1997 after I'd left London for good and was living in Darlington. The remaining five - 'Confessions of a rock n roll star', 'In the year 5749', 'Thatcher killed my Grandad', 'The Gospel according to David' and 'Unknown writer on the dole' - all come from 1999.

Being the uneventful and rather plain story of the childhood and youth of one Jethro Anson Nowsty, an ordinary boy from an ordinary working class family in an ordinary town in Darlington, north east England, from his first tentative steps into the adult world of work in the summer of 1979, aged 15, then backwards in time, via his youth, education and family, recalling the many lively characters that informed his personality, to his earliest memories in 1967 and all told through short stories over twenty-nine chapters.

In 2006, when I arrived in France, it was a different geo-political world - Blair was British Prime Minister (while Gordon waited in the wings like an ambitious understudy eager for the principal to break a leg) and across the Channel towering Chirac was President with 'Shorty' Sarko in his shadow. Not that it made much difference to me - I was too busy trying to make a living to give much of a damn about the global picture, like most people. After hanging on by my fingertips for the summer, it was with relief that I landed myself a part-time, nine month teaching job assisting in three primary schools in the autumn. I've never looked back. Part self-help, part-memoir, this is an accurate record of my time teaching Britain's biggest export - its language - to our French neighbours 2006-2016. It's also a tribute to the legendary Raymond Murphy, author of world-renowned versatile, practical and informative teaching books, some of which have kept me in constant work for over 10 years.

Volume 4 of 5 features 'The Dishwasher' 2005, 'Confessions of a rock 'n' roll star' 2007, 'Gauguin's Ghost Story' 2009, 'Tommy Greaves' 2014 and 'Unspoken'2019.

Volume 2 of 5, for young people and family audiences, features 'Harry's Dream' 1997, 'My Brother Jake' 1997, 'Scars' 1998, 'Eddie' 1999, 'Cyrano' 1999 and 'The Key' also 1999.

'All this is mine' (formerly 'A Teesside Voice') is set in London in 1994 and is a strident commentary on the perils of unbridled Thatcherism. Money is designed to buy things but to Rob Barlow, a young but inexperienced, northern-born drug-dealer who has wads of it lying around his upmarket but unfurnished Camden Town apartment, it's only use is to generate more of the same. Despite his decadent, materialistic world where everything has a price, Rob lives on basic instincts - his only friends are customers who pay hm to take risks they daren't. Inevitably, when a mysterious caller starts to threaten Rob, all he can do is wait helplessly as the noose tightens . . .

Volume 1 of 5 features 'The Waiting Room' 1983, '1979' 1984, 'The Bond' 1984, 'The Conformist' 1985, 'The Crossroads' 1984/85 and 'London Cousins' 1989.

Set in Regency England 1810-1825, 'No. 1' draws on the real and the imagined from the North East of England present at the birth of the railways, starting on 18th September 1810 and finishing there on 28th September 1825, the day after the first ever railway trip between two towns, a first that changed history. History didn't record it inadvertently carrying a boy fleeing from a miscarriage of justice and an ex-Waterloo veteran intent on silencing him, but history can now be straightened out. In this ambitious recreation by Darlington-born writer Antony J (Tony) Stowers, fact and fiction are blended through real-life personalities, known historical events and ordinary people whose lives were impacted by this revolutionary technology. It also features a re-imagined but detailed account of the opening itself on 27th September 1825. This is a special limited 500 edition print run featuring the cover by Terence Cuneo and available exclusively to buyers/residents of the United Kingdom.

They will tell you this book has to be categorized under 'memoir' and they may be right but for me it's a working journal that straddles the end of the 20th century and shows how to create something from nothing how to turn a dream into a reality and how to make simple live theatre that challenges and inspires.

A fantastic time-travelling adventure story that takes the reader back to the opening of the Stockton to Darlington railway on 27th September 1825 as seen through the eyes of Lewis Noble, 10.

The ghost of French painter Paul Gauguin finds temporary sanctuary in the imagination of obscure British writer Antony J Stowers.

This is a book for those who smoke and want to stop and for those who've stopped but need reassurance. I'm the latter. I started and stopped four times and this final time was the last. I'm never going to take the crown from Allan Carr for writing a practical book about quitting smoking so I've written my own, consisting of cold facts, personal memories, home-spun philosophies and hard life experience. I'll make a deal with you: as long as you're reading this book, you won't smoke. I don't mean just as long as you're physically holding the book in your hands and lifting the words from the page with your eyes, even if you read a little, a few pages, then put it down and go off and do something else and then come back to it again. No. As long as there's a relationship between you and the contents of this book, you won't smoke. Is that a deal? Just remember: there's no dignity in slavery. If you want dignity - you've got to be emancipated.