‘I have read individual poems to a number of people who say they have enjoyed them – I am sure you will too! Some are romantic, some funny; there are also poems of the present and the past. ‘I hope the illustrations that accompany some of the poems help to deepen what the poem is trying to convey to the reader: the combination of words and pictures will give you a sense of enjoyment and of involvement in the poems themselves. In lots of cases, you will be able to immerse yourself in the adventure of the poem, recalling things that in the past you have seen or heard of. All of this will add to your enjoyment of the book. ‘To give you a little more insight as to how the whole saga of the poems began, let me take you back to 1945 when I was stationed on the Burmese border. Having little to do after the day’s events gave all of us lots of time to think about: home, our friends and the family. So it was only natural that to occupy some of those hours my thoughts looked elsewhere. I always remembered that poem by William Wordsworth I learnt as a boy, “I wandered lonely as a cloud” – you remember it? Most of us do, anyway. As it passed through my thoughts, I thought to myself, “Why don’t you write some poetry?” ‘I thought about it a lot, mulling it over in my mind, but decided that this was not perhaps the time. In the end, the thought came back to me from time to time, over the years: “Should I?” ‘Well, as you can see, it finally did happen, after all those years. So never say never.’ Raymond Hunt

The ‘emoji’ in question, in case you were wondering, is Jenny Taylor’s involuntary wink, which has landed her in all sorts of scrapes over the years. Together with her farmer parents Jim and Gladys and her siblings Doris, Tom and Fred, Jenny has many adventures in the sleepy Worcestershire town where they all live.

The story begins in the year 1989 before computers had taken hold of society and not many people had mobile phones.Forty-four year old Roger Vickers had been for the last four years working as a local fireman. He was trying to get his life back on track after going through a divorce and leaving the Army. He still has nightmares about the operations he was assigned when he was in the Special Forces Regiment, yes; he was a member of the elite British SAS. Roger was divorced from his wife Mary. As he had no contact with his own father since the age of two years old was devoted to his own son Wayne who he kept in contact with on a regular basis, meeting up every week to go to the gym and to catch up on what each had been doing over the last week. Wayne a twenty-two year old studying at university to be an architect. One night Wayne calls his father explaining that he would have to change their meeting time as he had another meeting to go to, but would not say with whom. Roger then finds his son badly beaten and his son doesn't want the police involved. This is when Roger finds out that his son Wayne, whom he worships, is tied up with a London Gang leader / Drug Dealer.Roger enlists the help of his ex wife and an Army friend to help him try to sort out his son's problems but gets dragged deeper into a world of lies, deception and murder with this thug from London which has dire consequences for all concerned.