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Well, my dear chums, I can now reveal The Excuse: I have been absent from you these last weeks – and how you must have suffered! – while I have been completing all the onerous duties surrounding the unveiling of my alcoholic Irish cat.

And now it is here: Alcoholic Irish cat equals Magnum O’Puss (copyright Barry Cryer 1952). And my Magnum O’Puss is this:

Now if you’d just pop along to the Store page and place your orders (for you’ll want more than one, what with Christmas coming up)…. There. Easy wasn’t it? Secure online buying. Your copy is being placed in an envelope by my small army of half-starved underpaid disabled child workers supplied by that vileness Iain Duncan Smith even as we speak.

These are ghost stories I’ve been writing on and off for years. Most are based on Cornish places, or local myths and yarns.

I’m fed up with publishers’ rejection slips so I’ve set up my own publishing house – The Lynher Press, also available on this website – and I’ve bloody well published it myself because they’re really good stories. I’ve always loved the history, mystery and suspense of a good old MR James-style ghost story and while I will never achieve such heights, these are, if I may say so, entertaining and thought-provoking.

There will be more from The Lynher Press in coming months, especially if we can persuade Brother Fiddle to get off his commodious backside and put finger to keyboard.

In the meantime, The Promised Land is launched at the Church House Inn, with thanks to my dear friends there, on Halloween with a dramatised reading (9.30pm) by the talented actors Jonathan Lewsey and Elaine Humphries, to whom I’m enormously grateful for their support.

The front cover picture will be familiar to readers of this website –  it is of course the picture chronicled in earlier blogs, taken  by my beloved Captain Kay. There’s coverage of the story behind it here: http://www.westernmorningnews.co.uk/Stuart-s-spooky-stories-reveal-family-grave/story-23735137-detail/story.html

It isn’t just the book that has kept me from you.

In a startling development, I had a phone call out of the blue from the man who gave me my first job in newspapers when I was but a spotty lad of 17. Back then, I joined the old Mirror Group training scheme based at the Sunday Independent newspaper in Plymouth, the last of a long line of trainees. My predecessors included one Alistair Campbell.

Well, more than 30 years on I was asked in this call to go and help produce the Sunday Independent again, so there I am, three days a week, adding (I hope) to what has always been a weekly miracle in that it offers the most amazingly comprehensive coverage of local sports from Bristol to Penzance that anybody could ever imagine.

I am astonished that I can still fly a newspaper, that I can still operate design software, and that I can still relish and enjoy the challenge. So there you will find me, pounding the keyboards once more. Isn’t it strange the turns life takes?

But I very much hope that now the book launch is out of the way and you are all elbowing each other out of the electronic way as you rush to buy The Promised Land, I shall return to haunt you, once a week, regular as clockwork. It just might have to be on a Sunday, that’s all.

In the meantime, thanks for bearing with my long absence and vive la revolution.