I'm in Kendal, in the heart of the Lake District. Gods Country. The window of my hotel is looking out over the hills of Cumbria. I spent two  hours writing the notes for The Literature Brochure. This is the first draft. sent to Amelia in Marketing who made the request for it. It's a first draft.

"The word immigrant emerged from the word migrate. Migrate was first prescribed as the  description of what birds do. The South Bank Centre was built by immigrants cheek by jowl with people born here.

Words are not unlike immigrants.  They travel long distance to arrive in literature and spoken language. They hold great meaning. The ideas carried by or within words develop culture. They become part of us and we  them. They offer new interpretations of the world.

Should we quarantine all immigrant words, search their pockets for possible explosive material?  Maybe some words are, though not immigrants, housing an immigrant within.  Shall we raid our sentences, interrogate our paragraphs, imprison large groups of words of latin extraction and question all words with an Indian Root just in case they are trying to subvert us.

What is an immigrant to one set of people is an intrepid explorer, a discoverer, to another. However you define yourself  the act of reading  is a celebration of immigration."