So, because of a number of significant factors, not least leaving my job, having a significant health scare, moving house to the other end of the country and living and travelling in South America for 5 months, I have not really been able to commit to the ongoing upkeep of this blog. I am annoyed with myself, but equally I have had some fairly overwhelming thoughts and emotions stretching back to January 2025 which has meant that I simply haven’t had the headspace to commit thoughts to the page. I have been cooking over live fire like nobody’s business, and this has included lighting charcoal and grilling steak in Brazil, Chile and Peru. It has been amazing; the food has been delicious and creating a meal in the Elqui Valley in Chile, whilst the sun is setting and the Milky Way is moving into view overhead has been one of my life’s greatest pleasures. For the fourth year on the trot I did the turkey in the Big Green Egg and on the fire cage rotisserie and this time was the best I’d ever done it !
But I haven’t been writing it down.
As I started to write this, I was in a hotel room in Lima, Peru and we had just a couple of days there before we flew home to England. Home is an interesting concept for us at the moment as we sold up in Bromsgrove and moved to Amble on the Northumberland coast a couple of days before we set off to Rio de Janeiro in the middle of July last year and therefore I am finishing this article tucked under a duvet because we are too mean to put the heating any higher!. We have slept in our new house for about 40 nights since then and the other 130 nights were all on the other side of the Atlantic. We have always travelled but this extended journey has been transformative. We made the hard decision to leave our teaching jobs just after the turn of 2025 and, honestly, it was one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do. I’d had the email written and ready in my drafts for a couple of weeks before I dared press send. I felt sick for the rest of the day, however in the coming weeks I slowly but surely felt a release, like the ebbing tide sliding its weight from my shoulders and clearing my clouded and muddled brain.
I wrote a diary as we travelled and kept it up every day which I’m really proud of. I have rediscovered the joy of writing and the consequence of this is that I am keen to do more of it. And the joy of this thought is that I might have the time to. Maybe weekly, maybe fortnightly, we’ll see. Since starting Live Fire Journal, the world has changed, and I have changed too. 2025 was a story in two parts – the first half gave me a very bleak outlook and good reasons to feel anxious about the future. The second half has been joyful in seeing new places, meeting new people and eating new things.
Therefore, 2026 might really well be a case of “new year, new me” and the consequence of that is I have made the decision to change the platform I use to publish my writing from this blog to a new publication on Substack – you can find me here @5amhiggins. It might be be called the Northumberland Fire Kitchen (or something similar) and will still be all about me lighting the coals and cooking something, but I also hope to share some of the experiences we’ve had during our worldwide travels and what we’ve been eating while we were doing them. If you follow the link, it would be really helpful for you to click the subscribe button for both for my profile (you will be joining Mark His the famous chef as my only subscriber so far!), and the Northumberland Fire Kitchen publication itself. If you could share and recommend the publication to your friends and family, I would be enormously grateful. You’ll get a weekly, maybe fortnightly email straight to your inbox with a recipe, or a review, or a restaurant recommendation and it will be free like this is. Building a significant following will hopefully help me to create more content with the view that hopefully it will be so good you will begin to pay for a subscription.
Once you’ve found the publication, all you will see for now is a “coming soon” placeholder, but big things are coming, I promise! This site and the Live Fire Journal will cease to exist at the end of January 2026, so if you liked it, click the link above and come with me on my new writing adventure! To those of you who were regular readers, thank you and I hope you got something out of it. I know I did.
Live Fire Journal 