Diary

22nd February 2009

Horace has arrived, and Charlotte is being very nice to him, after an initial battle. He is much MUCH smaller than her, but he refused to be intimidated, and seems to have passed some kind of test. They look very funny together. He is a great digger, so their paddock is now a sea of mud.

I spoke too soon about snow. We had very dramatic coverings over the first two weeks of this month, compounded by the sheep decided to start lambing earlier than usual. So far there are five nice lambs. I hardly dare turn my back in case somebody gets into difficulties. For the first time ever, I called the vet to a sick ewe, a couple of weeks ago. He saved her and her lamb, luckily.

2nd March 2009

Baring-Gould is taking priority at present. I met a member of his family yesterday, who showed me some marvellous old photographs. The question of how many pictures to put in a biography is important, I know. But one can get carried away, and I intend to keep it mainly to the most relevant. Having said that, I am hoping to track down a very early carte de visite, which Sabine had taken in Brighton.

Esther and Gareth are home from their honeymoon. It took in Russia, Mongolia, China, Hong Kong, USA and Canada. To the surprise of everyone, Hong Kong was their favourite place, closely followed by China itself.

12th April 2009

Easter Day, and the sun is shining. I am dyeing wool, trying to clear a space for the new fleeces from the shearing next month. At least, I hope I can find somebody to do it - never easy. Eight lambs are playing in the field, one of them only a few days old.

The copy edit for FEAR IN THE COTSWOLDS hes been done, already and the book is due in November. There is a plan for a big launch party in Gloucester - all welcome!

The two workshops in Torbay last weekend were fun. Again, sunny skies and very creative and talented participants in both groups.

19th April 2009

Just back from the Lincoln CWA Conference. What a tremendous city it is! So many historic buildings and much of it quite unmodernised. I appear to have landed the job of overseeing 2010 in Cardiff. Currently looking for a venue - not so easy.

I have begun A GRAVE IN THE COTSWOLDS in earnest now, and am very excited to be bringing Drew Slocombe back. He is just as nice as he ever was.

8th May 2009

Making good progress on A Grave in the Cotswolds, told from the viewpoint of Drew, the undertaker.

Ten lambs have now arrived, two of them at the end of April, much later than usual. The next big thing is the shearing. After the cold snowy winter, the fleece is fabulous.

Holiday plans are shaping up - the Isle of Man, the local canal and Syria, so far.

The CWA 2010 Conference next April is to be held in Abergavenny, with me as Chief Organiser. We are really going to take over the town. Daughter Gemma has been very helpful, as have her workmates, Anja and Shona. Thanks, girls!

18th May 2009

A quarter of the way through A GRAVE IN THE COTSWOLDS, which feels like quite a substantial start. The plot so far is working out quite well.

Horrible weather, rather like last year and the year before. We are all starting to lose hope for a good summer for a change. Already some village events are being postponed or cancelled due to wind and rain.

The Hay Festival starts this weekend. I have booked a few tickets, and am very much looking forward to hearing Vince Cable speak, among others.

 3rd June 2009

The Hay Festival was hugely inspiring, not least because the weather was so wonderful for a change. I went to political events, mostly - Green and LibDem - plus a marvellous address by A.C.Grayling on civil liberties. A high spot, I gather (which I missed) was when Martha Holman, a Zimbabwean, stood up and closely questioned Desmond Tutu about the appalling happenings in her country. Martha and her husband work tirelessly for Zimbabwe, but are powerless to tackle more than a tiny part of the horrors there. They are modern saints, and made a big splash at the Festival.

Meanwhile I am writing and gardening strenuously. Progress on A GRAVE IN THE COTSWOLDS is good, although looking back, I have been working on it for several months. It is halfway through, now.

20th June 2009

The book is almost done, which feels like prodigious progress, in the last two or three weeks. Then I can get back to Baring-Gould, who has been neglected yet again. Praxis Books is supposed to be producing his story Margery of Quether which is a Dorian Gray kind of tale, wonderfully gothic. The autumn meeting of the Appreciation Society will focus mainly on Margery and the church on top of Brentor on Dartmoor, where she lived in the belfrey...

This website is soon to be refreshed and refurbished, with pictures. Obviously Charlotte and Horace must be the first to feature, despite their disappointing failure to become piggy parents.

5th July 2009

The Isle of Man turned out to be a dream destination for a short holiday. We had perfect weather, and there was so much to see and do, we could have stayed for weeks. The B&B we used was Albany House in Peel, which is not cheap, but has many of the luxuries you expect in a much bigger place. The attention to detail was extraordinary.

A GRAVE IN THE COTSWOLDS is just about finished now, in first draft. It has been great fun returning to Drew and finding out what has been happening to him in the past three years. Needless to say, he finds Thea fascinating, and she seems to rather like him, as well.

Margery of Quether will be reissued within the next 4-6 weeks, along with several other Baring-Gould stories of the supernatural. I am also reading an Eden Phillpotts novel, which uses the same settings as B-G does in his Dartmoor novels, and offers a fascinating comparison.

8th August

Just home from a short week on the local canal, with my sister, her daughter and both our grandsons. The weather was mostly fine, and the scenery utterly glorious from start to finish. The small boys, aged 9 and 5, got along pretty well, and endured the long slow parts fairly stoically. Luke and I are keen to do it again as soon as we can. The others are not so sure...

Margery of Quether is now printed and ready to go. I'm very pleased with it, especially the front cover, boasting a picture I took, which is the ghost walk at Baring-Gould's family home.

The Cotswold books are turning up in more and more places this year. I just heard of someone finding one in a hotel library on the Canary Islands.

30th August 2009

The new website is still proving rather difficult to cope with, and the promised pictures on every page will have to wait a while longer. There seem to be glitches at every stage of the process.

But the good news is that A GRAVE IN THE COTSWOLDS has moved a step closer to fruition, with the hardback provisionally scheduled for next summer. Nothing yet begun on number 9 in the series, but I think I've selected the setting for it.

Despite pretty grim weather, the garden is looking its best ever. The bamboo has finally decided to grow, and the many trees and shrubs that I planted eight or nine years ago are all flourishing. The 'folly' that I'm making out of lovely twisty dead ivy branches is quite dramatic (there might even be a photo of it one of these days...)

The Launch of the next hardback - FEAR IN THE COTSWOLDS - is attracting a lot of interest. 26th November, in Waterstone's Gloucester. If anyone would like an invitation, just email me. The more the merrier.

And the Baring-Gould biography is entering its final stages. I'm sending out the proposal package this week - at last! After five years, I love him more than ever, and will really miss the project when it's finally completed.

20th September 2009

Currently revising A GRAVE IN THE COTSWOLDS, which is set in Broad Campden. I think the setting for the 9th in the series will be Cranham, with some action in Painswick. Drew will be in that one, as well.. I've been trying to clear out a large quantity of extraneous paper and other rubbish from my study, with a major journey to the tip scheduled for this week. What does one do with old computers, which still have a lot of old stories, letters, emails, etc on the hard drive??

18th October 2009
Just home from a fabulous three-week trip to Syria.  I was with my old schoolfriend Liz, and we visited Damascus, Aleppo, Palmyra and Hama, as well as several side trips to ancient sites. High spots were the astonishing Roman amphitheatre at Bosra, the Simeon Stylites church near Aleppo and the  addictive souks in Damascus and Aleppo, full of colour and smells and cheerful shoppers. Vendors in Syria do not hassle tourists the way they do in India, Egypt and Morocco, to name but a few.
   On my birthday, we stayed at the famous Baron Hotel in Aleppo, which was magically romantic. We stayed in Room 203, where Agatha Christie wrote the early part of 'Murder on the Orient Express'.

28th October 2009

Just noticed the rude reviews of 'Blood in the Cotswolds' on Amazon, referring to my depiction of an obese person. I can understand that the thoughts Phil Hollis entertains are insensitive - but they're what a great many people do think. It's a dilemma, isn't it - how realistic do we dare to be, when it comes to political correctness and 'inclusivity'? It seems to me that a writer does have a duty to reflect authentic views, and even tread on a few toes now and then. Taboos have to be challenged now and then. Luckily for me, the Amazon ranking for 'Blood...' is pretty high. Read it for yourselves and see what you think! Meanwhile 'Fear in the Cotswolds' will be out any day now, in hardback, and I am delivering the revised version of 'A Grave in the Cotswolds' to the publisher tomorrow. One is set in Hampnett, and the other in Broad Campden. Next in line will see Thea in a big beautiful Cotswolds manor in Cranham.

 

22nd November 2009
As is so often the case, the weather dominates everything just now. Furious gales and lashing rain have turned much of my acreage into a swamp. The pigs are having to dodge deep ponds, where their wallows have filled to overflowing. The drains are full of leaves, and the road is often more like a river.
   I just finished reading 'Nine Tailors' by Dorothy L. Sayers, in which there's a major flood at the end. And yesterday I went to see '2012', so Armageddon is not far from my thoughts.
   Last week I was invited to the final half hour of a book group's discussion of 'A Cotswold Killing'. They hadn't chosen a crime novel before, and were rather bemused by it - somebody asked me whether I ever considered writing something 'serious'. Sigh. How much more serious does it get than one person deliberately killing another? But I know what he meant - I have never denied that crime is a 'genre' with conventions and a orderly (if not always happy) ending. Even so, I do feel quite serious about it. 
Saturday 5th December 2009
The Launch of FEAR IN THE COTSWOLDS on the 26th November was a lovely party. We sold almost 20 copies of the hardback, which can't be bad. I caught up with some old friends and introduced the books to a few new ones.
   I hate to go on about it, but the weather has been truly ghastly. The mud is prodigious. I have no clean clothes left.
   I've made a good start on DECEPTION IN THE COTSWOLDS now. It's set in Cranham, which is yet another lovely little village, hidden away from sight.
   The paperback of SLAUGHTER IN THE COTSWOLDS will be out in February. It is one I am especially fond of, so I anxiously await feedback from readers.
17th December 2009
Christmas is fast approaching, and there's a lot of shopping and visiting still to be done. But the new book is getting priority billing, and is close to 15,000 words already.
    I've had some great 'fan email' lately - always a boost. I can't bring myself to bother with Twitter or Facebook, but I do love good old-fashioned email.
   A solstice party has been planned here for next week, just as snow is forecast. Could be fun... mud or snow, either way.
24th December 2009
Well, the party half happened, in snow. Not really much fun, to be honest.  Since then, each day has been progressively more difficult, with ice packed hard on our small hilly road, and any idea of venturing out abandoned. Christmas is probably cancelled up here, although a neighbour has enough food for an army, so maybe we'll descend on her.
   It is perfect writing weather, though, and the new book is making very good progress indeed.
   The animals are a worry, with hay running out, but there are kind neighbours on all sides, so we'll survive.

 

3rd January 2010

Happy New Year to all my readers! The arctic weather continues, and the strategies for obtaining feed for the sheep become more Byzantine. The road outside my house is like a glacier, so driving is not recommended.

Nice things are happening, as well. All the neighbours are helping each other, and listening to each other's stories of skids and slips and narrow misses. The comparison seems to be with 1962/3, when the freeze lasted for six weeks or more.

But the writing still proceeds well, and DECEPTION IN THE COTSWOLDS is now a third of the way along, with Thea finding herself confronting the realities of assisted suicide and the legal implications.

10th January 2010

At some point last autumn, I woke up one day no longer persuaded by people like Al Gore and Franny Armstrong who threaten utter disaster because 'we'll all fry' thanks to global warming. Suddenly it felt like another in a long line of collective hysterias that society does so well. I spoke to many friends about it, and all but one had recently arrived at much the same conclusion. In fact, it feels as if the whole thing is a nonsense, with several environmentalists producing books that demonstrate how bad the 'science' is. Most of it is computer modelling, which is notoriously useless at making predictions.

'The Deniers' by Lawrence Solomon is one of these books which take a good hard look at 'the science' of climate change. Amazon is out of stock, which must be significant.

Since my change of heart, there has been the Essex email scandal - and a month of the most severe snow and ice in Britain since 1963.

Meanwhile, I am struggling to keep my animals alive, carrying heavy buckets of water to them, slipping and sliding down the most icy road I've ever driven on - and back again. Friends and family are overflowing with dramatic stories. Children haven't been to school for weeks, nobody's going to work, or to the shops, and long snowed-in days can be very boring. It's all much worse than the white-out I describe in FEAR IN THE COTSWOLDS, which I wrote at the end of 2008, when there was no snow in sight.

10th February 2010

 I'm very pleased with the progress I've made on DECEPTION IN THE COTSWOLDS, through this long cold winter. There has been rather a Groundhog Day feel to life since the New Year, with so little happening, and much more routine than I would like. But at least it has been quite productive. I've made one or two more of my popular knitted throws as well.

There has been a big increase in the number of emails I've received from readers, which is really gratifying. It adds a very important dimension to the whole process of writing, and is very much appreciated. I have always had a rather hazy idea of my readership - I never have an image of 'a typical reader' as I write - but now I know some of you as real individuals, and that's lovely.

Still following the climate change debate avidly, and very pleased to find a lot more common sense emerging. To summarise my position today (and it will doubtless change again soon): I think we burn too much fossil fuel, and waste far too much of everything - food, especially - and there are probably too many of us. But I think it makes far better sense to adapt to change rather than devote huge amounts of money and effort to averting a future we can't know for sure will happen. We need to be very much humbler about what we can and cannot predict.

The coming month or two has numerous bookings to sign copies of the novels, all over the Cotswold region. I just hope it doesn't snow again!25th February 2010

 Just got to the final page of DECEPTION IN THE COTSWOLDS. It does need some tidying up, but essentially it's done. Always a great feeling.

It also seems safe (almost) to say that the worst of the winter weather is over. I planted 4 apple trees today, while mulling over the final twist of the novel.

Still a lot of really lovely emails coming from readers. It is so encouraging. Thank you, everybody.

And I'm still having trouble putting pictures on here. As fast as I solve one problem another one appears.