MEET JULIAN VAUGHAN

A little weekend entertainment to accompany a glass of your favourite tipple.

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Ever since I started travelling in my 20s, I've had people saying to me "You should write your story". But it never quite took hold. Writing what actually happened is great for Facebook posts – I do it all the time – but a magnum opus seemed too arduous. Besides, I tend to write when things are fresh, in the moment.

As an avid reader of literary fiction, I also realised I had little imagination for the lives, loves and longings of other people.

And then one day a close friend suggested I combine the two: drawing on my own life and my years in places round the globe, but in a fictional manner that allowed me to do things that I myself was far too well-behaved to do.

Like murder people.

And that is how Julian Vaughan was born. Here he is in the first picture below, aged 61. But his journey began way back in school, where we see him, still staring straight at you in that unflinching way that came to characterise him over the years.

Because the chapters are long (I've just written the first one), I'm going to serialise them on Substack. It begins like this:

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Chapter 1: The Phoneme Passport

The sky over my hometown was not merely grey; it was a heavy, slate-coloured woollen blanket that seemed determined to suffocate any thought of the horizon. In that valley, gravity felt stronger than elsewhere – as if the coal dust of a century had settled into the very marrow of our bones, pinning us to the damp pavement. My school, a Victorian brick fortress designed to produce reliable clerks and stoic rugby players, offered little in the way of transcendence. At twelve, I was a boy of sharp angles and even sharper anxieties – possessing that quintessential Welsh inferiority complex that whispers you are simultaneously too much and never quite enough.

Then came the "vwa-yazh."

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To find out what happens next, click below.