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Books Taking Over The House
I’ve just inserted a tall narrow bookcase by the fire, the only place I could find to put another bookcase. When the sweep next comes, I expect he’ll tell me it’s a fire hazard, but it’s a risk I have...
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Real Olympics
The Olympic Games of 1948 were the last games I got really interested in. Fanny Blankers- Koen, the heroic Dutch woman runner captured my imagination, and with a few girl friends we organised our own...
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More about Books
Between six and a half and nearly nine, I lived with my grandmother. My mother had disappeared, not to be found until fifty years later, and my father was at the war from when I was a year old until...
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Books That Taught Us The Secrets of Life
As I listened to the Whiffenpoof Yale Choir singing ” As I was young and foolish”, at their concert last night, I thought I know all about that… I was twelve in 1950 when we were given a lecture...
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Rambling through Youtube
I had the haunting Irish tune of ‘Down By The Salley Gardens’ on my mind and turned to lovely Youtube. I did the rounds, Kathleen Ferrier- sublime, Orla Fallon – beautiful, Marianne Faithful –...
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Acorns Oaks and Art
Spring, and the oak tree we planted in the gully beyond the sitting room window has suddenly shimmered into leaf. I treasure these first days when the young fretted edge of the bright leaves are still...
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The Pursuit of Love and Other Interests!
When I was twenty and longing to fall in love, I came across a book that seemed made for me. It was called The Pursuit of Love. But far from being chick-lit (a term which hadn’t been invented...
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Books and real people
So many bloggers write about their experiences writing fiction that I’ve begun to look long and hard at what I read. Mostly diaries, letters, biography, autobiography and history. Why? I’ve been...
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Art and soul – do they matter?
On Sunday I discovered that I am a member of a tiny minority. I belong to a group of around three million people world- wide who watch the live performances of opera filmed from the New York...
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The upsides and the downsides of being a woman
Something made me re-read a book for girls which my Victorian grandmother had pressed on me when I was seven. It was about a girl who’d lost her mother, and whose military father was absent. It...
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The noble art of reading in bed
When I was young and naive, and a novice journalist, I wrote an article in a woman’s magazine which began:’ I got most of my education under the bed-clothes’, and went on to discuss children’s...
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Storms of Delight
I awoke to the roaring of a savage sea hurling itself onto the rocks below. The window is always open so that I can hear the sea. Looking out, it was a grey wolf sea, with a steel-grey haze...
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The nuts and bolts of writing
The man who tried to teach me to write was a very patrician academic, who wrote book reviews for The Times and was also an army officer. He was my charismatic headmaster at boarding school in Malaya,...
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A is for Dictionary
There was a framed photograph of me as a toddler on the wall, which just showed my head, with a mop of dark hair, dark eyes, and my neck fading away into nothing. When I was between two and three years...
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We are all witnesses
Who would have thought that when a group of murderous men attempted to kill a fourteen year old girl that they would have made her a global heroine and given her cause world-wide coverage? Malala...
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Summer song
Walking around the cemetery on New Year’s Eve the sky was still and clear, no silver, almost transparent moon yet, rising above the sea looking like a silver sliver of dried honesty in the pale night...
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Blogging – antidote to writers’ heartbreak
“Writers don’t go to hell”, said Anthony Howard, an English writer, “they have such hell on earth with their publishers, that when they die, they go straight to heaven.” As a mere journalist at the...
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A hiatus
Dear friends and fellow bloggers, the writing gods have withdrawn their inspiration from me, and have made it clear that this is a moment for Hestia, the goddess of peace and replenishment, solitude...
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Living takes up all my time
As I drove home this morning I wondered how often I had driven along that same country road with all its winds and curves and hills and one way bridges… ruminating about this, I went back randomly to...
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Behind every great….
‘Behind every great man stands a great woman’, one of my dearest friends declared, a propos Winston Churchill and the love of his life, his wife Clementine, and of Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor. We...
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