A Dragon (In Human Form)

The book - our guide to the hunt, our gift from the heart - after endless days of searching and gathering, is finally, wonderfully finished!  Everything you will need, to follow the hunt, to find the heart… is hidden within. All that remains now is for you to work out how to read it. For some time I’ve had the pages, the illustrations, a contents page, a dedication passage… (as you do too). However, I knew I was missing one final page. I could sense that there was a hole in the text, but I couldn't tell you what it was and I had no idea how to start filling it!  Then, yesterday, I found myself doodling on a map of the City of London… I marked each location where I’d found a page or an illustration, remembering every step I’d taken across the city’s streets. My mind wandered as I drew, and when I looked down I realised that in my daydream stupor I’d drawn something…  My pencil had traced a line from the location of one page to another, and then from an illustration to a st...

As we draw closer to the day of The Golden Key, and prepare ourselves for the doors of the city to open, and for all of Dragontime to spill in, I am reminded of how many of us there are - dragons I mean! We’re in many forms, across the city, and across time. A full blooming community. It is so wonderful to be reminded of bonds beyond family, and the joy of building your own team to face life’s challenges and the hunt's challenges too.  Any hunt, or journey, is best done together. For our Hunt, while you can absolutely undertake it alone, you’ll find things easier and more joyful with the support of others. Different perspectives, knowledge, histories and heights will all be useful. If you're aged anywhere between 5 and 555 - if any of you are that old, or is that just me? - all are invited and encouraged to play together. You may play with balanced roles, with everybody puzzling and travelling together. Or you may decide to split up, to take on different responsibilities. You’l...

The custodian of the heart of the city is a role of responsibility and care.  The heart is tough and eternal but it’s also delicate and vulnerable. And before you ask, yes you can be tough and vulnerable all at once, have you met a dragon?! It can be hard to know what makes a good custodian, how to take care of something well - what to pay attention to, what to ignore, what to push for, and what you can leave to thrive… In our book, full of the rhymes and mythologies of the city, you’ll meet many custodians, of the heart or otherwise. Each custodian has a different approach to the task of guarding and caring for something, whether that be a bird or a bridge, a stone or a heart. It’s worth paying attention to them, those custodians of the past I think, paying close attention to what they say, and the words that jump out.  One of our custodians even watched over a set of keys, or so we think… and now at the end of every hunt, once the heart has been born and the custodian found,...

One of the gifts of being taken out of yourself, pushed into the life of another - tea drinking, legs walking (so many steps!!), TV watching, toast eating - is that you realise the things you so love about who you are, and the life you get to live. Hand on my (undisclosed number of) hearts I will admit that TV is great and that nothing beats toast and butter. Seriously, butter is so good!  But one of the things I miss most is my dragon mind. See dragon minds are these beautiful complex, knotty things, a bit like a little maze. Dragons love problems and puzzles, challenges and games. They don’t see things as they are, but all the things that they could be or have been or might become. They find the hidden in plain sight, and the deliberately obscured, they follow the threads across past and present and off into the future.  The hunt is a bit of a dragon gift I think - an invitation to see the world a little as we do. To find hidden messages and numbers, to pull together words i...

As I reveal the pages of the book to you, I am so grateful for this time together. For this moment to gather ourselves, to understand the book, and recognise the task at hand - its weight and its importance. The birth of a new Heart of the City of London no less! In many ways, each and every moment of my rather long life has been leading me right up to this very moment.  As much as I value right now, my mind often drifts to the 15th of October. The day of The Hunt itself. You’ll move through the city, hunting and searching and we can meet each other! I’ll be there physically and digitally there too, on your phone. I’ll be sending messages to guide you through the city, to ask questions, give challenges and clues and to help reveal all the heart and the book have to tell you.  I hope you’re able to join us, to hunt together. There will, of course, be a winner - a person who makes it to the end, and who best finds the place of the Heart and the shape of the Heart. That person wi...

I’ve been finding it hard to sleep.  I spend nights tossing and turning, and awake entwined in my sheets. It is as though we have been battling one another. Perhaps this is a human thing too? The book tells several tales of myths discovered in the depths of night, by wandering figures with insomnia. Maybe the sleep that evaded them was leading them somewhere else?  Then, when I do sleep, my dreams are overwhelmingly, impossibly vivid and present. I wonder though whether my sleep shows me things that I can’t otherwise see. Part of me imagines that in slumber I am able to find all of the many me’s, that as I sleep, just for a short time I am able to become my dragon self.  In my dreams I see things. I find myself dreaming of the book’s pages. They are as I know them, as I’ve found them, but then they are something more too…  Words are highlighted, illustrated, captured, as though there is something growing around them. Or maybe it is that the words together are growing...

Our book, ‘London’s Assorted Enigmas and Mythologies in Rhyme’ is slowly finding its way to me…  The process is odd, I’m led by intuition, but also by logic, finding myself in places as I stumble upon them and also as I seek them out. I found my feet leading me to a small bookshop in an alley I’d never noticed before, and there, tucked into a bookcase was one of the stories. Then another framed and hanging on a wall in an impossibly old library. A third, incomprehensibly, rolled into a very tight cylinder and stuck into a gap in an old stone wall. They are letters, and notes and tales… stories well known and stories never told.  I often take time to look up the three word addresses of each location, using a wonderful human contraption called What 3 Words . It gives you a little three word address for any location in the world, each different, each unique. They are almost like short poems for each spot on which you might stand.  I know each page belongs and each is right, ...

I keep thinking this whole ‘being locked in the bodily form of a human’ thing is going to get easier… but every morning I wake up and remember and it’s always a surprise. The problem isn’t being a human, humans are fine, and it’s definitely not this specific form I’ve landed in, she is beautiful.  But I miss being able to move myself - to shapeshift and change, move from dragon to raven to flower to fish. Each one of these shapes has its own unique joy, and I’m a different version of myself within them. As a dragon, I think I’m quite funny, but as a raven that humour becomes sarcasm (bird humour is a weird and wonderful thing) and then as a fish I’m super super intense (fish don’t take anything seriously).  It’s not that I don’t want to be a human, but that I miss being everything. How do you all do it, just stay in one form? Never dive deep into the murky Thames, or fly over the Tower of London’s battlements? This city can be such a playground, from the peak of the atmosphere...

  The first pages gathered here .

The hunt has always been led by a book.  it’s not a book you need to find [that’s the heart - listen closely]  or indeed a book you might win [that’s the golden key - more on that] The clues and directions for the hunt are hidden within a text. Myths and rhymes, doodles and illustrations combine and unravel to reveal the door to the hunt, the route that must be taken, and the heart that lies at the centre of everything.  Every hunt there has ever been has been led by a text. The pages aren’t fixed, and each time the hunt is called, the book changes. As the hunt caller, the heart’s helper it’s my job to seek out the pages, and bring them together.  Pages presented themselves to me as soon as the hunt was called… tucked into volumes at the back of a dingy bookshops, rhymes folded up in your great aunt’s old recipe book, a letter lost in the post for nearly 300 years and now suddenly, incomprehensibly, delivered through your door. Some are text, others images, some in E...

The hunt is a journey in two directions.  Every person who joins us in the hunt will be hunting, following clues and messages, hidden codes and puzzles, to find the shape the new heart will take and its place.  But the heart is hunting too… It's looking for its new custodian. It’s a search the heart can’t take lightly.  The heart of the City is forever changing. Each heart of the City is totally different from the hearts that came before. Over the centuries during which this city has stood, the heart has taken endless different forms: a cup of tea, a whistled tune, an explosion of flowers, the London Stone. My personal favourite was a candle, in a narrow avenue, which burned endlessly: a constant white light. I think of it as the first London street lamp.  The heart has to change because the city does. The city is constantly shifting and upending and reimagining itself. The city is never one thing, and it's always on the brink of transforming again. And each new hear...