I was at a funeral recently, and I lost my voice. That is, I was sure I was singing, but I couldn’t hear myself. Why? The male basses and tenors around me drowned me out. It’s happened before – strong voices overpowering quieter ones. The singing was great, of course, just hard to distinguish anything…

So, my daughter wrote a great story about her Brownie camp. The leader asked if she would read it out at the prize-giving ceremony tonight and she said no. I asked her why not. “I just don’t want to” was her reply. As I thought about the sheer terror of sharing my own work with…

A few weeks ago, a friend (thankyou Aileen!) reminded me of the phrase ‘a thin place’. In other words, a place that is close to heaven. I’m sure you’ve all been somewhere like that, where you feel that you only need to stretch out your hand to touch something outside of your finite life. It…

So many bad, painful, shocking things have happened recently – to the world, to people I know.  What’s a body to do – retreat into the dark and never come out?  Cry until there are no tears left?  Never dare, never change, never try anything new? Never hope?

So here’s some of them  – the people I’ve created and spent nearly two years with.  They’ve shaped my story, and determined how it will end.  See more of them and their world in my novel, Chez Moi (working title) due to come out June 2018.

Hearing of how Cambridge Analytica used a personality type questionnaire via Facebook to access personal records got me thinking.  Why do so many of us do these quizzes and what makes them so appealing?  The answer lies in that universal question – who am I?

Following the well-known advice of William Faulkner, I have selected a few passages of my latest work and taken them out as being superfluous, self-indulgent and downright unnecessary.  I’ve copied and pasted one in here, as I couldn’t bear to kill it completely…   Francesca lifted one mustard, navy and red patterned curtain and looked…

Last week when the snow had stopped falling for a time, I saw an angel.  Well, the shape of one like you see on Christmas trees or cards.  It was hard to make out at first, but the more I looked, the clearer it became.  It was a gentle reminder to search, scavenge and scrabble…

Salma kept her head down, let the scarf fall across her face and focused on placing her feet one in front of the other on the littered pavement.  Although it was fairly crowded, she never walked into anyone.  They always side-stepped around her, going onto the road where necessary to avoid acknowledging she even existed. …

Over the past week or so, I’ve seen people I know plunged into unexpected grief. And I’m wondering, how much does it take before I learn to cherish the people that I have in my own life? Often we scrabble to retrieve memories after someone dies, and regret we didn’t make more when they were…