The Making of Presence: An Introduction

As winter approached, I decided to turn my shaky hand to a Christmas story. Oh, joy! Does Ralph Burton know it's Christmas-time at all? The answer is yes, absolutely ho-ho-ho. I love Christmas. Much like Tim Burton (no relation) I'm especially drawn to holidays. I don't like X-mas time half as much as Halloween but it's still great. As I wrote this book, I had all this chocolate and these satsumas and pringles on my desk to try and conjure up the feel of Christmas Day. I also left shaving close as possible to 12pm (I shave every day) to try and make myself feel like it really was Christmas.

But this is a dark and grim book, no matter how closely its plot resembles The Nutcracker. This is my book about Climate Change. I came up with this book in 2019, before the life-changing events of 2020 and 2021, so Covid doesn't really haunt the story (it's set in 1980). Instead, there's the morbid feeling of death, and destruction, approaching. Not just because of Climate Change but also because of freezing to death, starving to death, and also the general apocalyptic aura around the late-seventies.