Signing off…

It totals 175,890 words, and it took four years to write, off and on (and a considerable part of those four years was ‘off’), but The Man Who Built The Swordfish: the Life of Sir Richard Fairey, 1887-1956 is finally written.  The next stage is compiling the bibliography and selecting the photographs, after which I must wrestle with the technological challenge that is preparing camera-ready copy.  As regular readers of this blog will have long since ascertained, researching and writing Fairey’s biography has been a challenging and not always happy experience (unhappy largely because of factors unrelated to the task in hand).  Working with his daughter and grand-daughter, Jane Tennant and Esther Bellamy, was always a pleasurable and rewarding experience – getting to know Jane, Esther, and their extended family has been a privilege and a real pleasure for Mary and myself.  Unless there is a dramatic change of plan the book will be published by I.B. Tauris early in 2018.  I anticipate the launch party, hosted by the Fairey family, will be a grand affair (the RAF Club would be an ideal venue), but all that is in the future.  For the present it’s time to thank the modest readership of this blog, and to sign off.  It’s not the first time in this blog that I’ve quoted the Grateful Dead – what a long strange trip it’s been…