Every story has its surface, the motion, the danger… the unfolding events.

But beneath The Song of the Blackbird, something quieter and more personal was forming.

A deeper layer… a kind of inner gravity.

I pondered the right word for it and settled on ‘The Return’.

The return isn’t a revelation, it’s not a sound, it’s a feeling.

A pull back toward something older, truer, more human, connection, instinct, belonging, and the truths we sense long before we understand them.

The Return isn’t something the characters discover. It’s something they come to recognise.

And, for me, that recognition began long before I wrote the book.

Where The Return truly began

It began in childhood.

Growing up in Chorlton, I was the kind of child who paid attention… really paid attention. I was fascinated by the small, quiet details other people rarely stopped to notice.

I’d watch a ladybird move across a leaf and genuinely wonder why it chose one direction over another. Why it would suddenly stop and about face.

I’d sit in the garden and observe the behaviour of birds, bees, squirrels, as if they were teachers offering lessons in patience and intention.

Nature was the first thing that made sense to me. Not because I preferred it to people, but because it was honest – driven by rules that creatures adhered to and worked with.

If you watched closely enough, you could understand its rhythms.

When I visited the centre of Manchester, the city felt enormous, not intimidating, just significant… huge and perhaps, daunting in some respects.

I could sense history – stories held in the stone, as if the buildings were carrying something quietly important beneath their surfaces. I’d stand and look at the town hall and imagine my ancestors, and also famous people, gazing at the same structure, wondering what they had been thinking at the time.

It made me question things, why places feel the way they do, why some moments feel heavier than others, why certain truths seem to live beneath the noise.

I wasn’t withdrawn.

I was curious.

Deeply, deeply curious.

The world felt layered to me even then.

And that early instinct, that there is more beneath the surface, became the first spark of ‘The Return’.

Manchester shaped that awareness… I am proud of that.

The philosophy behind it

Modern life encourages us to rush past the deeper parts of ourselves.

To sharpen logic and mute intuition, to appear certain even when we’re not.

To carry our burdens alone.

But something in us, something ancient, knows another truth: we are connected, we are influenced by what came before us and we are shaped by the stories we inherit.

The Return is the pull back toward that truth. It’s what happens when instinct, memory, and connection rise above the noise for a moment and remind us who we are.

The emotional resonance

The Return is emotional resonance without mysticism:

• the feeling that something touches a deeper part of you
• the instinct to trust a moment you can’t explain
• the quiet recognition that some truths feel older than your lifetime
• the pull toward someone who understands you without the perfect words

It’s the thread beneath conversations, the knowing behind intuition, the sense that a moment is bigger on the inside than the outside.

Even as an adult, this pulls me back to Manchester, that sense of potential in the pause before something changes.

In the previous post I mentioned a dynamic sculpture that sat outside what used to be the City of Manchester Stadium, originally built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games and now the Etihad stadium, home to Manchester City – the B of the Bang – this piece of art symbolised that ‘pause’ perfectly:

• the frozen instant before movement begins,
• the held breath before impact,
• the knowing before the sound.

That suspended moment, that inner certainty is the Return.

The forgotten signals

Our world is loud, and in all that noise the quieter human signals are easy to miss – the instinct that something is misaligned, the longing for connection, the pull towards meaning, the faint sense that we are part of a much larger story, and the whisper that we are meant to live more closely with each other and with nature.

The Return is the quiet rising of these signals – soft, subtle, yet endlessly persistent.

The inheritance beneath the Return, elders, nature, truth

But the Return isn’t only emotional, it’s ancestral.

Long before modern systems, we learned from each other, around firelight, through stories, through observation of the natural world. We learned from elders who held truths shaped by experience, not narrative.

We learned from watching birds, animals and seasons.

Nature was the first source of knowledge.

Then the modern world grew louder, and those ways of knowing were pushed aside… not lost, just buried.

But true history, the history carried through voices, traditions, instincts, and land, never disappeared.

It lived quietly, waiting for people to listen again.

The Return is that listening – that shift back toward the older ways of understanding:

Connection, belonging, humility, curiosity, and attention.

It’s the realisation that wisdom doesn’t begin in institutions, it begins in stories, in nature, and in the long line of people who lived before us.

Pip and Anna, the human shape of the Return

Pip and Anna begin not with answers, but with a feeling, a disquiet, a pull, a recognition that something deep inside them is trying to guide them.

The Return is their compass.

Not forward but inward, the Return guides them back toward themselves, back toward each other, back toward truth. Their connection is not decorative; it is the emotional heartbeat of the story. When people reconnect, they become harder to shape; when they feel understood, they become stronger; and when they return to each other, they return to themselves. The Return is what the world tries to quieten – and what the human spirit refuses to lose.

So what inspired The Return?

Life did.

Chorlton did.

Manchester did.

Blackbirds did.

Nature did.

Curiosity did.

Every person I’ve worked with did.

Every story whispered between the lines did.

The Return is the hidden architecture beneath The Song of the Blackbird.

Not something to decode, but something to feel.

It is the movement back toward connection, towards intuition, towards truth, towards each other, and towards the inheritance we were meant to receive. The Return isn’t a discovery but a homecoming – the quiet breath before a shift, the knowing before the sound, the thread that leads us back to who we truly are.