Twenty-six years ago, I left Exeter, where I’d lived for nearly ten years, to move back to Essex and get married. It was an exciting time, but my emotions were mixed. I was leaving a place I loved, a job I enjoyed and friends who were so embedded in my heart that packing up and saying goodbye was almost too painful to bear. On the other hand, I was looking forward to spending the rest of my life with the man I loved, with no need to spend all our disposable income on phone calls and train journeys from one side of the country to the other.
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Hair Toss, Check My Nails, Baby How You Feelin'?
It’s been a rough week. I won’t lie to you. Thank goodness for writing, which always helps. Last week’s blog, Christine Keeler’s Eyelashes, hasn’t done what all my other pieces do. I think about them, write them, publish them and let them amble out into the world by themselves. Christine won’t leave. Like a shy child hiding behind its mother’s skirts, she’s still very much on my mind.
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Christine Keeler's eyelashes
I’ve been watching the BBC’s Sunday night drama, “The Trial of Christine Keeler”. As the story unfolded, I was gripped. I was born in 1966, only three years after the Profumo Affair, but Christine had been on the periphery for me for years. What did I know about her? She was young, incredibly beautiful, usually described as a call girl or a model and seemingly irresistible to powerful men. It turns out I knew next to nothing.
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Mrs Hinch versus Mrs Leigh
Following on from my dream about King Zog last week, I was hard put to think of something to write about this week. As often happens, however, a seemingly random event fired up my creative writing spark.
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King Zog and the mystery of dreams
On Sunday night, I dreamt (amongst other things) that King Zog’s grandson was running a brewery a quarter of a mile from my house. Now this is the kind of thing you’d think I’d know, but it came as a complete surprise to me. Perhaps the fact that I was helping our church trumpeter to run a stall at the local school fair while chatting to Steve the mechanic and wondering why someone had graffitied “paint your barge boards” on our neighbour’s house had something to do with it.
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Recollected In Tranquility: Poems And Stuff
You may remember that in my first blog, I mentioned that I write poetry. Back in the day, at primary school, I knocked out loads of the stuff. If there were competitions for budding young writers, I didn’t know about them. Life might have turned out very differently if I had.
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The Ghosts of Christmas Yet To Come
I’ve just finished binge-watching the BBC’s new adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Did you see it? Victorian novels, and Dickens in particular, are my thing, so you could be excused for thinking that I’d swoon dead away at the liberties taken with the original text. Where were the cosy scenes of middle-class Victorian life? Whence the beaming Cratchit daughters and their twice-turned dresses? The Ghost of Christmas Past effing and jeffing? Mrs Cratchit as a Sweary Mary? Do me a flavour!
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Expectation Management
‘Tis the season to be – well, a bit overwhelmed and grumpy, actually, since you ask. Christmas cards, presents, food, decorations, remembering a thousand and one things for school, the same annoying Christmas songs being played on the radio over and over again – a few days before Christmas, my mind is whirling, I’m tired, and I just want to lie down on a comfy sofa somewhere in front of a fire reading the Christmas Radio Times and nibbling on chocolate tree decorations. Is that really so much to ask?
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A heavenly Christmas memory
It wasn’t that long ago that my December was a frantic round of costume making, line learning and general dashing from pillar to post. These days, with only one child in primary school and my Nativity days far behind me, that month of tinsel-bedecked craziness is just a memory.
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Life is copy
I’m sitting in A&E with my 94-year old father. It’s Sunday morning and we should be at church. Dad arrived via ambulance through the green fields on the approach to Ipswich on a bright, clear, sunny day, the endless Suffolk sky washed clean by rain storms overnight.
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Writing What You Know
They say that everyone has a novel in them. As a factual freelance writer, I wasn’t sure that I did, but a couple of years ago, I had a strange experience. Navigating the wiggly road from Worlingworth to Framlingham, a sentence dropped into my head. “I am a very lucky little girl.”
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Hitting the high notes
I can’t sing. You know when people say that and you’re expected to disagree with them. “Yes, you can. You have a beautiful voice. You shouldn’t be so modest.” No. Honestly. I really can’t. The only time I sing (and I use that word advisedly) is in the car by myself with the windows tightly closed and on the way to gymnastics in Ipswich on a Monday night with my 11-year old daughter. She doesn’t mind, or doesn’t notice that I can’t carry a tune.
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How I Became A Writer
Let me take you back in time to Theydon Bois County Primary School, nestled in Epping Forest, West Essex. It’s 1972. I’m six years old, sitting in Mrs Camus’s class. I’ve just made a fantastic discovery. Using our standard issue chunky crayons, I’m able to create a pleasing shade of pink on my drawing by using first red, then white.
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