Then came the “vwa-yazh.”

It was a Tuesday, the kind of day where the rain doesn’t so much fall as hover in a persistent, drizzling indecision. We were huddled in Room 14 for French – a subject most of my classmates treated with the suspicious hostility one might reserve for a contagious skin condition. Our teacher, Mr. Jenkins, was a man whose own dreams of the Continent had clearly been curdled by years of explaining the subjunctive to boys who dreamt only of chips and gravy.

He tapped the chalkboard with a piece of chalk that screeched like a dying seagull. “Repeat after me,” he sighed. “Voyage.”

The class groaned a collective, flat-bottomed “Voy-age,” sounding like a fleet of damp Wellington boots hitting a puddle. But I sat frozen. I looked down at my textbook – a battered, tea-stained volume titled En Avant! – and saw the word printed there. Voyage.

In my head, it didn’t sound like the English “voyage” – that clunky, two-syllable word that suggested a slow boat to Australia. It was something else. It was a sound that started with a vibration of the teeth against the lip and ended with a soft, exhaled sigh – a phoneme that carried the scent of roasted coffee and the clatter of a train crossing a border at midnight.

I realised then, with a jolt of pure, electric clarity, that this wasn’t just a lesson in grammar – it was a coded map.

Every new sound we were taught was a potential exit. If I could master the nasals of the Loire, if I could navigate the trilled ‘r’ of a Parisian café, I wouldn’t just be speaking another language – I would be becoming another person. I began to see the vowels as stepping stones across the English Channel. Each “u” pronounced with the lips pursed – as if blowing a tiny, sophisticated bubble – was a mile further away from the damp hills of Glamorgan.

I was the only boy in the room who looked at a list of irregular verbs and saw a flight itinerary.

Of course, this burgeoning urbanity was constantly undermined by the reality of my surroundings. My blazer was two sizes too large – a polyester shroud that crackled with static electricity every time I moved – and my Welsh lilt was still thick enough to constitute a pea-souper. I felt like a spy who had been given the blueprints to the embassy but was currently stuck in the cloakroom, while men with posher accents handed him their elegant coats.

I began to practise in secret. While my peers were perfecting their scowl in the local arcade and carefully combing their hair into centre partings, fishing their combs out of their back pocket – each one a Rhondda Fonz – I was in my bedroom. It was a space dominated by a poster of the Welsh rugby team and a growing pile of stolen Le Monde newspapers – trying to shed my skin. I would stand before the mirror, forcing my mouth into shapes that felt alien, almost treasonous. I was trying to sandpaper the “bach” out of my throat and replace it with something smoother – something that suggested I had spent my summers in Menton rather than Mumbles.

The Welshness never truly leaves you, of course – it just becomes the dark, rich soil in which the more exotic plants are grown. It gives you that necessary “outsider’s eye.” Because I knew what it was to be from a place that the world had largely forgotten, I became obsessed with the places the world couldn’t stop talking about.

I wasn’t just a schoolboy in a grey-skied town anymore. I was a citizen in waiting – a borderless soul currently trapped in a world of school milk and damp socks – longing for the moment I could finally embark on the vwa-yazh and never look back.

*******

Now pause if you will, and treat your ears to this sublime sound, which sets the scene for what is to come. It was of course the theme tune for the definitive TV version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, starring the late great Alec Guinness. But it can also serve for Grey Scale and put you in the right frame of mind for our next chapter, set amongst the cloisters and quadrangles of Oxford.

***

This journey may begin in a Welsh valley but does not end there. From the high-stakes “plummy” corridors of Oxford to the neon-soaked hutongs of Beijing, Julian’s path is a restless map of linguistic espionage and cultural proteanism. You will follow him as he translates Stasi ledgers in a divided Berlin, deciphers ancient silk patterns in the humid bazaars of Istanbul, and navigates the brutalist shadows of Prague and Bratislava. Whether he is untangling a garment worker’s secrets in the sweltering monsoon of Dhaka or tracking snipers through the exquisite agony of the Bulgarian mountains, Julian proves that a well-placed phoneme is more dangerous than a blade. This is a twenty-six chapter “vwa-yazh” that spans the globe – from the automated efficiency of Singapore to the desert ciphers of Tripoli –eventually returning to a secluded café in Sofia, where the final, silent language of the heart is the only code left to break.

Just subscribe below for now, free of charge. And if the next chapter reels you in, well we might just end up sharing a paying compartment for a while, as the lights of foreign cities flash by.

In future, for half the price of a decent espresso martini (neither shaken nor stirred, my dear fellows) – or a mediocre G&T in a London airport – you can join me twice a month as I navigate the world’s backstreets, boardrooms and occasional bedrooms. (I promise Julian will get more success in that latter department that I ever managed – fiction is a wonderful thing).

Next chapter due out on Sat 18 April.

Just subscribe below for now, free of charge. And if the next chapter reels you in, well we might just end up sharing a paying compartment for a while, as the lights of foreign cities flash by. Armchair travel, dépaysement and intrigue guaranteed.

Subscribe now

All aboard! No luggage required; just an appetite for the journey, a comfortable fireside chair, and a glass of something that twinkles in the light of the flames.

I’ve come up with plot lines for 26 separate stories featuring a character a bit like me, who nevertheless gets to do the stuff I’m far too well-behaved to do.

Like murder people.

The series title: Grey Scale

Don’t miss it. Breadcrumbs to follow soon in the usual place. Ask for Andrei.