Horatio, Blue’s grandfather, is an enigmatic poet and philosopher, is he based on someone in your own life?
There are elements of both my own grandfathers in Horatio. My father’s father, like my father, was a clergyman, as Horatio had been before he questioned his faith, but my grandfather sadly died before I was born. However, I learnt a lot about him from my late father and I’m sure we would have got on. He wrote poetry, like Horatio does, but usually in the form of hymns. He had a grasp of Classics, like Horatio, from studying Theology. He had a joie de vivre, a great sense of humour, a varied career in that he joined the Navy as a young man and then decided he was a pacifist and trained instead to be a clergyman. My mother’s father had been an army man and, like Horatio, was madly in love with his wife. Also like Horatio, he had a great sense of humour, and he played the mouth organ. There is also something of myself about Horatio – his love of philosophy, poetry, Mallorca, his sense of humour, his admiration of Aristotle and Greek philosophy. I studied the Pre-Socratics as part of my postgraduate degree, and of course Greek philosophy as part of my undergraduate degree. Like Horatio too, I am fascinated by Aesthetics – my postgraduate thesis was on Kant and Hume and the Standard of Taste. Having said all that, Horatio is a unique character, not really like anyone I’ve known. As I created him, he became real to me and I longed to meet him – I miss him!