The Mount Pleasant footbridge featured in my first novel, Plagued, and I often cross it on my walks. Despite recent makeshift repairs, it has become alarmingly rickety of late, so it was no great surprise to learn it was due to be replaced. Precisely what this entailed wasn’t clear, but I’d heard work would begin in February and involved closing the road. So, on 1 February, I went for one last look before it was too late.
Continue reading The cycle of change
If Mary could see him now, stirring his underwear in a bubbling dixie of petrol-tainted water, she’d laugh her head off. It was a far cry from any kind of laundry she knew, with no soap or mangle and a metal tin precariously perched over four stubby candles in the dark instead of the copper boiler she used at home. That he was attempting the task at all would have amused her, but it wasn’t something he could add to the letter he was trying to write. For a start, he wouldn’t want to mention the bayonet he was using to stir the pot, or the lice he was trying to kill. She didn’t need to be worrying about that kind of thing. The trouble was it was difficult to find anything to write about that wouldn’t make her worry. One way or another, even the most innocuous things tended to end up running to horror, and every letter he wrote could so easily be his last.
Continue reading Just a tease
As Commando and I headed across the Common to parkrun, on 11 December 2021, we thought the pandemic was all but over. Well, I did anyway. Of course, we were still all wearing masks in shops and things, and washing our hands every five minutes. Ok, so that might just have been me too, but you get the picture. There was an annoying little variant called Omicron, in the news, but it sounded fairly innocuous, nothing but a bad cold really. The first case had hit our shores at the end of November, but no one was especially worried about it. Well, I wasn’t. It sounded to me as if the virus was doing what viruses generally do, getting weaker. In fact I thought it might be good news.
Continue reading Christmas comes to the Common
In March 2020, when it became clear that COVID 19 was going to change our lives, I remember wishing that I had a magic wand and could fast forward until it was all over. By November 2021, life really did feel as if it was getting back to normal. I’d had a much needed haircut, although I’d opted to keep it longer just in case things went pear shaped again. Parkrun was back. Races were back. Mark and Nicole had finally managed to get married. We’d even been away for the weekend to Witney and visited a museum. The real feeling that it might be all over, though, came with two long put off appointments.
Continue reading They think it’s all over . . .
It has been a long time coming, but finally, the big project I have been working on for the last few years has come to fruition. All the research, head scratching, procrastination, imagining and working late into the night have finally paid off. My first novel, Plagued, has now been published and I can call myself an author rather than just a writer.
Continue reading Plagued