About

This is the general blog of Peter Hankins, where I talk about my creative endeavours and review other people’s.

I’m a retired UK civil servant living in Surrey, married with two grown-up daughters. I was born in Peterborough, like all my family; but we moved to Bedford when I was five and that was where I spent my schooldays. After studying philosophy at University College London and a brief period working in Oxford I have essentially lived down here ever since, so I suppose I have become one of those deracinated London/Home Counties people.

In my fifties I was diagnosed with Crohn’s colitis, an incurable immune system problem whose main effects are diarrhoea and fatigue. It got pretty bad. I worked through several drug regimes to control those symptoms, including infusions of monoclonal antibodies, but in the end had to have my colon and everything below surgically removed. Having your bottom sewn permanently shut is pretty strange, but it has restored my ability to live a normal life, though I have to wear a stoma bag.

For ten years or more I had a long-running blog Conscious Entities about consciousness which finally ground to a halt (I’d solved all the problems, I suppose…) I self-published a book The Shadow of Consciousness which sums up my view of all that.

These days most of my energy is going into short stories and the like, but I do sometimes try my hand at something else arty, or perhaps a cake.