No-brainer

I started writing The Barn Door Stayed Closed the day after the October Budget 2024.

Agricultural Property Relief, capped. Perhaps not big news to the urban occupants of the country. But for rural communities, well, that's a different matter.

I was fuming. Angry enough that Alex, a boy on a farm, arrived almost immediately.

And what I saw was tragedy.

A few weeks in, the reports started. Real farmers facing the impossible choices my fictional family was facing.

That stopped me.

It wasn't a question about whether I was allowed to write this. It was simpler and harder than that. There were real families living through the exact thing I was putting on the page. I didn't want to add to what they were already carrying.

I thought about all the other novels — set on estates, in gangs, in cities, where a child grows up around violence and exploitation as a matter of course. Nobody questions those. It's just a setting. So familiar it barely registers as a choice.

Rural Britain doesn't get written about that way. A family's whole world collapsing in real time, while it's still collapsing for other families, somewhere else, right now.

I sat with that for longer than I'd like to admit.

There wasn't a moment where the worry resolved itself. It just became part of the writing. A weight I carried alongside Alex, chapter by chapter, rather than something I solved and set down.

I finished the book anyway. Not despite the worry. With it.

The book was finished. The worry didn't go anywhere.

It just sat there, after, the way these things do once the writing stops and the publishing starts.

I had to decide what I actually wanted from this book. Not what I was supposed to want. Not what makes sense on a spreadsheet. What I actually wanted.

The honest answer: readers. More than royalties. By some distance.

So, I made it simple. All profits from The Barn Door Stayed Closed, for as long as it sells  go to RABI, the charity supporting UK farming families through exactly the pressures at the heart of this story. https://rabi.org.uk/

It doesn't answer the worry I carried while writing it. Nothing fully does. But it sits right next to it, in a way that feels honest. The book exists because of something real and difficult, happening to real people. Whatever it earns goes back toward people living some version of that, still.

For me, it was clear: all profits going to support this charity was a no-brainer.

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