View from my bed, in Dorset at 8am on 1st January 2025. A few fanciful thoughts: The bare trees symbolise the falling of the dead leaves and the ephemera of 2024. The Viburnham winter flowering shrub with its pink flowers [...]
I am excited to be attending the Book Blest Festival in Stroud in early September and I am one of the authors speaking on the second day Saturday 7th September. Here is the Poster for more information. Do come along.
Today I have finished my first children’s book, entitled The Blue Mirror. It has taken three months to write and it now has 12 chapters and over 17,000 words. It is aimed at 7 to12 year olds. I knew the [...]
Free Friday is the one day each week when there is no employee, contractor or part-timer working at our home either in the office or on the land. My ‘other half’ and I savour not having to get up early [...]
Three years after their wedding Ella’s husband Andrei ran away to sea. He was a Romanian bricklayer who had always had a dream to sail the oceans. It came as no surprise - he had always been so impetuous and [...]
The times in which we live can seriously impact the type of books we choose to read. When an economy is booming, unemployment low and the national feeling is upbeat, we often indulge ourselves with reading books about war, natural [...]
I lost my balance recently. Few of us care to admit having problems with mobility until it becomes obvious. I started falling over a lot. Luckily I’m expert at falling without hurting myself (I used to do ‘pratfalls’ as my [...]
Over 50 years ago, I was living in SE Asia. When on leave from my teaching job in Thailand, I used to travel around the neighbouring countries. In 1970, I bought an inexpensive airline ticket with five destinations, one of [...]
Big cities or small villages - I’ve lived in both - and I know which I prefer. In my twenties and thirties I lived in Dublin, Bangkok, London and Bath, but I’ve remained for longer in villages - both in [...]
Readers are vital to writers, who are in the business of communication. So writers should be wise enough, when writing their books, to keep the potential readers in mind, and to tell good stories that arouse their curiosity to keep [...]