As soon as my writing group told me the topic, I knew I had to write the story about the time a rose got me into trouble. It happened a long time ago now, but I still can’t quite see a rose, especially a pink one, without thinking about when I was young, foolish, and a long way from home …

I knew, I just knew, things would not go smoothly when I got the builder in to work on the extension to my kitchen and put in the new downstairs cloakroom. I didn’t quite realise how mad the situation could get. Nor how quickly. I could have written a long essay, but I thought a poem might express my feelings better over this first day ‘on the job.’

Since Easter, I have been spending time doing some self-reflection, not least because I spent two wonderful weeks on the island of Iona. Here is a poem I wrote during that time of reflection. (With apologies to Rudyard Kipling for using his title – but we are writing in different times, so my poem is very different.)

The theme for this month’s short story is ‘getting the message.’ It is to be hoped that Gran does indeed get the message, and starts to allow her grandson to follow his heart. Inter-generational living isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be, especially when one member of the household appears to be living in a previous century.

We all remember childhood holidays, usually with a dash of nostalgia, but, while I do remember holidays (one in particular) when the weather did not cooperate, this family’s troubles are nothing like mine: whenever we went on holiday as children, we all came home again.

The title of this blog is a quote from Kenneth Steven’s poem ‘Finding’ in his poetry collection ‘Iona: New and Selected Poems.’ I do not write much in the way of poetry, and writing poetry based on someone else’s line is an even rarer occurrence. But this poetic line transported me back to ‘a childhood I did not have.’

When our narrator arrives at the derelict place his partner has found as their next ‘project,’ he is stunned to find he recognises it as his grandparents’ home. A place he knew when he was a child; but now the house is empty and in need of a lot of work. It also hides a chilling secret …

Back in 2024, I wrote a short piece for Resolute Books for their online series of blogs on ‘How Not To …’ – my word was ‘Procrastinate.’ While I was searching for information about a talk I was due to give, I came across the draft – so I have added to it a little, and posted it here as well.

It’s very early in the process, but here’s the first draft of a chapter from ‘Podevin and Elgiva’s Return.’ Morwen first appeared in chapter one of ‘Warrior Princess, Errant Page’ as Emma’s chief lady-in-waiting. Until, that is, Emma killed her brother, the Welsh outlaw Cadwalladr. Seventeen years later, Morwen still wants her revenge for this death and so, when it transpires there’s a new arrival in the English court, she is interested, very interested …

In 1980, young Tommy finds a shoe box beneath his parents’ bed – and gets into a lot of trouble over it. But he is not told why his mummy is so upset and his daddy so angry. He, and his sister Liz, don’t discover the truth until 2025, after their parents have died. It is a memory box: read on to discover what it is all about …

Yes, I was nervous, but I think, after all the preparation, my first ever book launch, on 6^th December 2025, went well. Every Saturday, my church, Lichfield Methodist, holds a coffee and cake morning between 10a.m. and 12noon – this time, I was coming along with my second novel and hoping to interest the coffee drinkers (and anyone else who happened by) with buying a copy. Actually, we sold almost as many copies of ‘Warrior Princess, Errant Page,’ (the first book I wrote in the series), but I’m not arguing!

‘Your tree destroyed the front of our property. And you know it!’

‘Nonsense! It barely touched it. If your front fence had been half-way decent, that tree wouldn’t have got anywhere near.’ A pause. ‘And it wasn’t our tree anyway.’

An old argument, rehearsed in an old people’s home. This story is all about a tree, and what happened when it fell down. It fell down a long time ago, and was actually a reason for uniting two families, rather than dividing them. Actually, the story all started a century ago …

I was once asked to make up a story from one of the following ditties by Hilaire Belloc:

Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light

Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!

And the second one:

It is the business of the wealthy man

To give employment to the artisan.

Of course, me being me, I decided to use both in a story about an old man, ‘Uncle Stanley,’ who is something of a miser with a ‘colourful’ past, and leaves his relatives with one or two surprises …

As a writer, I do occasionally get concerned when words appear to change their meaning, or if the same word seems to mean different things to different people. One word which looks as though it has fallen into both these categories is the word ‘friend.’ It seems to be used to mean ‘social media contact,’ or, for some people, it is equivalent to ‘this person whom I’ve just met.’ For me, the word means something closer than what is implied by either of those two explanations. Something closer, deeper, and longer-lasting.

This story follows on from ‘Lost and Found.’ Deb and her father have a second meeting in a coffee shop, where memories and assumptions collide, and they both have illusions shattered about what the other has been doing since the father left home and moved all the way to South Africa.

These thoughts were prompted by a discussion amongst a group of writer friends about a (admittedly fictional) someone’s ashes being not very heavy and, ultimately, ‘overlooked and discarded.’ I did some research, and re-visited some memories … Was the author of this story right, wrong, or somewhere in-between?

A retired man, divorced and home from working abroad, is facing up to life without his family. He returns to a favourite place – a beach in the Northeast of England – with his memories, to try to come to terms with what he has lost. However, what he finds on the beach is completely unexpected.

The trouble with being a writer is, even though I spend so much time thinking, or reading (and calling it research), whenever I plan to take time off away from the laptop, and do other things, in this case, a 1,000-piece jigsaw, my writing brain won’t switch off, and keeps giving me ideas!

This story is about an older man looking back at a pivotal point in his childhood, where he and the rest of his family learned some home truths, courtesy of a farmer’s wife, and, of course, a llama.

Glasses, Spectacles, whatever they’re called, they’ve been a part of my life ever since I was ten years old. Life suddenly stopped being blurry and, even when I was sat at the back of the class, I was able to read the maths questions on the board. Why it took until I was ten for anyone to realise I was short-sighted, is a story for another day: but, since then, I have always needed “specs.”