There are days when being a writer feels a bit like being a small child in a sweet shop. You walk in with every intention of choosing one thing — one neat idea, one tidy storyline — and then something glitters in the corner of your eye and suddenly you’re off, pockets full, attention scattered, heart racing with possibility.

That happened to me recently while watching the news.

England, at the moment, seems to be in a constant state of industrial unrest. Strikes here, walkouts there, headlines that make the rest of the world raise an eyebrow. It’s easy to roll our eyes, to sigh at the inconvenience, to mutter that the country is becoming a bit of a joke. But beneath the irritation — beneath the bins piling up, the delays, the disruption — there is something we too often forget.

There is humanity.

There are people behind those headlines. People who are tired, worried, stretched thin. People who want the same things we all want: a fair life, a safe home, a sense of dignity. And as I watched the coverage of the Birmingham refuse workers’ strike, something stirred in me — something old, something familiar.

Because we’ve been here before.

Almost a century ago, in 1926, the miners of County Durham stood on their own picket lines. Their fight was different in detail but identical in spirit: wages slashed, hours lengthened, families pushed to the brink. Entire villages held their breath together. Women ran communal kitchens. Children queued for bread. Men who had survived the trenches now faced a different kind of battle — one fought not with rifles but with resolve.

And as I watched today’s workers standing in the rain beside their trucks, I saw the same quiet courage. The same frustration. The same determination not to be pushed past breaking point. The same truth that history keeps whispering people don’t strike for fun. They strike because something essential has been threatened.

That echo — that human thread stretching from 1926 to now — is what inspired the new book I’m writing.

Not the politics. Not the headlines. But the people.

• The mother trying to stretch a week’s food across a month.
• The man who feels invisible until the day he stops working.
• The community that closes ranks when one of their own is hurting.
  The quiet, stubborn belief that life should be fairer than this.

These are the stories that pull me off my planned path and into a new one. These are the sparks that derail me in the sweetest way. These are the moments when the news stops being noise and becomes a doorway — a reminder that the past is never as distant as we think, and that the struggles of ordinary people are timeless.

So yes, England may look chaotic on the world stage right now. But beneath the surface, there is something deeply human happening. Something worth noticing. Something worth writing about.

And that is how a headline became a heartbeat, and a heartbeat became a book.