July 6th dawned much like any other in our house. By 5.00am my workaholic partner Mark was bound for the red-eye to Glasgow, leaving me and our terrier Brodie to doze for another hour or so. My waking thought was ‘Whoopee! Today’s publication day for Seeking Eden!’ But it’s hard to get excited on your own. […]
When I was 28, I wrote my first novel. It was garbage, littered with clichés, adverbs and flowery similes. I printed one copy, then put it away – in the round filing cabinet that lives under my desk. Roll forward twenty four years and I had another stab at it. This one was better, but […]
I was recently emailed by a lady asking if I still had my terrier cross, Brodie. She’d read my rather bleak post in February, shortly after I’d rescued him from the amazing Foal Farm in Kent, and after tuning in to my website at regular intervals and finding no further posts on the subject, […]
I’m very blessed that my partner is a talented graphic artist and web designer slash builder. I’m even luckier that however busy Mark is, when I need a website or page, he loyally puts me at the top of his massive To Do list. For this, and for so many other daily acts of kindness, […]
Sometimes, when a book (or a film) is accompanied by much hyperbole, the event itself can be a letdown; not so in the case of Mark Mayes’s exquisite debut novel, The Gift Maker. The book’s blurb is an accurate teaser of what you’re getting so I won’t regurgitate it here. Instead, I can say that […]
Dancers in the Wind is a classic thriller in the mould of Lynda La Plante’s Prime Suspect. It could be that I was reminded of the series because it is set in London’s King’s Cross in the early nineties – an era when this part of London was a world away from the chichi urban […]
The last few weeks have been a bag of mixed blessings; the rough with the smooth, the yin with the yang (insert your own cliché here). Still raw from the passing of our beloved old dog Rodney, after new year the Boyf and I returned to the shelter Rodney came from, hoping to adopt another […]
Simon Wan’s Love and a Dozen Roast Potatoes is an autobiography with a fresh take. Dates, names and places are unimportant; instead the author takes an acerbic yomp (or more of a techno-twitch) through the decades, luxuriating in the 90s and their deeply shallow proclivities. It’s the story of a quest for true love in […]
It’s a fun game (go on, admit it) and one I am no stranger to. Oddly enough, Seeking Eden is already a fully cast three-part drama on ITV, complete with amusing Sainsbury’s idents at ten minute intervals – at least it is in my head. After the credits have rolled (my name all over them […]
The thing I’ve been dreading all year happened yesterday; our adored Jack Russell Rodney died. He was very old (16 and a half) and his life was, for the most part, happy and carefree. We helped him to die with serenity by asking our caring vet to euthanize him because he’d become very ill and […]