Amanda Larkman's Blog: Middle-Aged Warrior, page 2

My New Book

Well, it’s taken me a year and a half of pain, suffering, and tearing my hair out but at last (at last!) I have finished my new book ‘Finding Frieda’  and she is all dressed up in her lovely cover and ready to leap from the Amazon shelves into lots of people’s baskets (I hope).

This is my fifth book and boy, was it a tough one. You’d think it would get easier but this one was harder than ever. The main reason is because I thought it would be a good idea to get a developmental edit for my birthday present AFTER I’d already written well over 50,000 words.

D’oh!

Of course, there was a tiny part of me that thought maybe, just maybe, the editor would read it and say, ‘Wow! This is incredible! It’s the best book I think I’ve ever read. I know thousands of agents and publishers who would chop their own arms off to get a piece of this.’ Before heading into a furious bidding war between four of the big publishing houses leading to me netting me a million pounds. I would then go and buy Dog that diamond collar.

Dog in Diamond Necklace

Well, of course that didn’t happen. OF COURSE IT DIDN’T!

To be fair, the editor did say she liked my writing and said I was a ‘born storyteller’ (cue tremendous preening) but that was followed by ten pages detailing exactly what was wrong with the whole thing.

Oh, it was disheartening. But after a lot of sulking, I realised she was right, and I had to put my pride aside and do some more work.

She recommended some excellent books, particularly on maintaining dramatic tension. Now a common complaint from readers is that I spend a long time getting going. (As I get older this is increasingly true of me every morning). These books forced me to think about things like ‘inciting incident’ and ‘goals’ and ‘conflict’.

I normally sit and write by the seat of my pants, so this was an interesting – though blooming hard work – way to approach my new book.

So I had to chuck it out. All nearly 60,000 words of it and start again. It took me a long time to get through all of the stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. To that, I would add an extended period of sulking.

When I finally stopped lying face down in bed, I emerged bright-eyed and bushy-tailed determined to see this as ‘an exciting opportunity’ and ‘a challenge to test myself to the limits’.

So I consigned the words, my darlings, to the recycle bin and started afresh. It wasn’t long before I was immersed in the world of Pagan’s Reach, but this time with a very strict plot plan that I wasn’t allowed to deviate from.

It was godawful. But all that work paid off as I knew exactly what was going to happen so all I had to do was write from one bit to the next.

‘Finding Frieda’ is the third in The Woman and the Witch trilogy, but I’ve tried really hard to make it work as a stand-alone. Interestingly, all my books so far have been well over 100,000 words but this one is about 85,000. I think it’s because I’ve cut out all the waffle about making cake and cups of tea!

There’s something very lovely about slipping into a world you’ve created and you know so well. It’s surprising how certain I am about it – so much more so than my real life. I know how the magic works, how my characters are going to react to things, and exactly what every room, garden and object looks like. I suppose it’s a form of control in an increasingly chaotic world.

Saying that though, despite endless plotting and planning, my characters still have the power to surprise me. At one point in the story, my character Angie, and her theoretical physicist friend Penny, have to get to a distant town. Turns out they end up travelling there in the lemon yellow zephyr I used to get a lift to school in about forty years ago. I’d completely forgotten about it until they discovered it in Frieda’s old garage.

The Lemon Zephyr

I LOVE that about writing – it always has the power to surprise you. Also, so much of it is unconscious – my brother recognised loads of things from our shared childhood when he read my books. Things I hadn’t consciously realised had inspired events or characters. He also noted that I keep banging on about ‘plenty of hot water’ and ‘hot buttered toast’. Quite right – they are two of my favourite things!

Finding Frieda

So what is the book about? Well, the focus is on a mystery – the disappearance of Frieda Beaudry. What happens next is (I hope) a thrilling adventure. I read loads of physics books and got husband and physics teacher friends to teach me about the Theory of Everything for Penny’s character but ended up not using a lot of it – but I did really enjoy exploring the friendship between a scientist and a witch.

Here’s the link with a sample if you fancy checking it out! If you do, I hope you enjoy it and do let me know what you thought.

Bouquets and Barbed Wire: Writing and Bad Reviews

Ever since I was little, I’ve been obsessed with writing stories. I’d be embarrassed to show you the number of half-finished, terrible novels I have languishing in drawers and on my hard drives. When I finished university I was determined to go straight into writing or become a journalist.

Then my granddad, who was a teacher, reminded me that I was rubbish with money and said teaching offered a great pension. ‘You can write in the holidays!’ he said.

So off I went to get my teaching qualification, taking on a masters in literature as well to keep me out of the real world for as long as possible.

Whenever I could, I would write. Poems, novels, short stories and one truly awful screenplay. I never did anything with it as I just thought it was all dreadful. I had absolutely no confidence in my writing.

Time passed, much more quickly than I was expecting, and after marriage and two children I suddenly realised my fiftieth birthday was looming over the horizon. If I don’t write a proper novel now, I thought, when will I? It’s now or never!

So I sat down to write. I wrote and wrote and wrote until I finished a dark comedy caper about an unpleasant teacher being found murdered in a classroom that looked very like mine – they said write what you know!

It wasn’t very good and I think five people bought it. Then lockdown happened and I embarked on my next book – The Woman and the Witch.

It was hard work. At one stage I had to dump 60,000 words because I hadn’t planned it and it went completely wrong so had to start again. Eventually, after nearly three years I got it finished.

This one was much more popular and I started to get people contacting me on Facebook or Instagram saying how much they enjoyed my characters. Honestly, it was better than heroin (not, I hasten to add I know what heroin feels like but you know what I mean) to hear people talking with such affection about the characters I’d created.

Writing is a funny old thing. For me, it’s a bit of a compulsion. It’s how I switch off from the stresses of the day and I love disappearing into a world I’ve created over which I have absolute control.  A world where fat, middle-aged women like me have super powers, or thrillers where the bad guy always gets his come-uppance.

The trouble is you go from thinking your writing is the best thing ever written since Shakespeare to wanting to throw everything out the window because every word is utter rubbish. I’ve gone from one to the other within two hours.

Writing is such a personal thing it’s hard not to take it personally when readers review your books with the heading ‘Rubbish. Did Not Finish’.

I wonder if people realise the impact it has when they write how much they hated the book you spent a year writing – and only charging a couple of quid for! I’m guilty of it myself, I’ve written negative reviews. But since becoming a writer myself I’m much kinder than I used to be!

I have been lucky enough to have some really lovely reviews and I bless every single one of them for taking the time to recommend my books. But I’m afraid I only remember the bad ones – isn’t that true for all of us?

I have received the odd compliment in my life, but I tend not to remember them. I do, however, clearly remember Melanie Horsham calling me ‘a moonpig’ in 1987.

Goodreads is well known for its membership of keen readers who aren’t going to hold back if they think a book is rubbish. One woman registered her account in 2020, only read three books. They are all mine. She has given each of them ONE STAR. Why keep reading them? One wonders.

Here are some of my favourite negative reviews that thankfully made me laugh rather than screaming into the void and vowing never to write a word again. (I’ve got plenty of those too)

Some reviews focus on a very specific aspect of the book they didn’t like.

I loved the spellbinding story and the finding of magical gifts, but the OTT gushing middle aged woman in love felt fake & nauseating. If that element was more relevant & less sickly, I’d have 5 starred. Put me off reading more.

This one made me a bit defensive – what’s wrong with a fifty-year-old falling in love?

Here’s another

Disappointed. The first 50% I quite enjoyed and found it original…but the rest was boring  Not very good literature I’m afraid.

This next one I like to imagine was written by a very pompous man.

‘Surprisingly enjoyable story.’

Why is he surprised by my story being enjoyable?

He goes on.

‘Where it stuck to the local and the quotidian it was fine’

I have three degrees and teach English to A level but I am ashamed to say I didn’t know what ‘the quotidian’ meant and had to look it up – it means ‘the everyday.’ But wait – there’s more!

‘but the episode in Twenties’ Germany was comical in its awfulness’

Comical in its awfulness! Oh dear!

Finally:

‘the scenes of violence just a bit too creaky. The main characters were strong and sympathetic and well done.’

Phew!

And last but not least is a one star given to my thriller.

‘The story of a charming husband who isolates a woman and makes her doubt herself, isn’t new or original. Give this read a miss, unless you suffer from insomnia’.

OUCH!

I was moaning about this to my brother, and he told me to go and look up the one-star reviews for ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The results made me feel much more cheerful

Of one the greatest most experimental albums written by the Beatles, people had said.

‘A totally bubblegum and cotton candy melange of garish fantasy and narcissism’

and

‘Mesmerizingly awful. A bad idea, badly executed’

It inspired me to have a look at how some classic novels had been rated …

James Joyce’s Ulysses ‘This book not only ruined a week at the beach, but also damaged my self-esteem.’

1984 by George Orwell ‘Load of rubbish. My rabbit could have written a better book.’

And my absolute favourite.

Tess of the d’Urbervilles – ‘I hated the book then and hate it now. My only revenge for being forced to read Tess as a kid, is to write a negative review as an adult. So there. That’s done.’

Even the greatest, most celebrated of writers get terrible reviews. And really, I should write because I love it, not so that I get nice people saying they enjoy my books – although that is always lovely! I also need to grow a tough skin because not everybody is going to love what you create. And bad reviews shouldn’t make you want to give up completely – still struggling with that one…

So if you read a book and you really enjoyed it, write a nice review. You have no idea how much it means, even to the most successful of authors. And if you hated the book, maybe just not mention it. And don’t do what one of my readers did and tag me in a post in which he describes, in detail, every single thing he hated from beginning to end – I really didn’t need to know!

But the main thing is to keep buying books – whether you like ebooks, paperbacks, hardbacks or listening to audiobooks – keep reading. There are so many fabulous books out there, something for everyone. And if you want to know my favourite book – it’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, by Louis de Bernieres

Writing and Bad Reviews

Ever since I was little, I’ve been obsessed with writing stories. I’d be embarrassed to show you the number of half-finished, terrible novels I have languishing in drawers and on my hard drives. When I finished university I was determined to go straight into writing or become a journalist.

Then my granddad, who was a teacher, reminded me that I was rubbish with money and said teaching offered a great pension. ‘You can write in the holidays!’ he said.

So off I went to get my teaching qualification, taking on a masters in literature as well to keep me out of the real world for as long as possible.

Whenever I could, I would write. Poems, novels, short stories and one truly awful screenplay. I never did anything with it as I just thought it was all dreadful. I had absolutely no confidence in my writing.

Time passed, much more quickly than I was expecting, and after marriage and two children I suddenly realised my fiftieth birthday was looming over the horizon. If I don’t write a proper novel now, I thought, when will I? It’s now or never!

So I sat down to write. I wrote and wrote and wrote until I finished a dark comedy caper about an unpleasant teacher being found murdered in a classroom that looked very like mine – they said write what you know!

It wasn’t very good and I think five people bought it. Then lockdown happened and I embarked on my next book – The Woman and the Witch.

It was hard work. At one stage I had to dump 60,000 words because I hadn’t planned it and it went completely wrong so had to start again. Eventually, after nearly three years I got it finished.

This one was much more popular and I started to get people contacting me on Facebook or Instagram saying how much they enjoyed my characters. Honestly, it was better than heroin (not, I hasten to add I know what heroin feels like but you know what I mean) to hear people talking with such affection about the characters I’d created.

Writing is a funny old thing. For me, it’s a bit of a compulsion. It’s how I switch off from the stresses of the day and I love disappearing into a world I’ve created over which I have absolute control.  A world where fat, middle-aged women like me have super powers, or thrillers where the bad guy always gets his come-uppance.

The trouble is you go from thinking your writing is the best thing ever written since Shakespeare to wanting to throw everything out the window because every word is utter rubbish. I’ve gone from one to the other within two hours.

Writing is such a personal thing it’s hard not to take it personally when readers review your books with the heading ‘Rubbish. Did Not Finish’.

I wonder if people realise the impact it has when they write how much they hated the book you spent a year writing – and only charging a couple of quid for! I’m guilty of it myself, I’ve written negative reviews. But since becoming a writer myself I’m much kinder than I used to be!

I have been lucky enough to have some really lovely reviews and I bless every single one of them for taking the time to recommend my books. But I’m afraid I only remember the bad ones – isn’t that true for all of us?

I have received the odd compliment in my life, but I tend not to remember them. I do, however, clearly remember Melanie Horsham calling me ‘a moonpig’ in 1987.

Goodreads is well known for its membership of keen readers who aren’t going to hold back if they think a book is rubbish. One woman registered her account in 2020, only read three books. They are all mine. She has given each of them ONE STAR. Why keep reading them? One wonders.

Here are some of my favourite negative reviews that thankfully made me laugh rather than screaming into the void and vowing never to write a word again. (I’ve got plenty of those too)

Some reviews focus on a very specific aspect of the book they didn’t like.

I loved the spellbinding story and the finding of magical gifts, but the OTT gushing middle aged woman in love felt fake & nauseating. If that element was more relevant & less sickly, I’d have 5 starred. Put me off reading more.

This one made me a bit defensive – what’s wrong with a fifty-year-old falling in love?

Here’s another

Disappointed. The first 50% I quite enjoyed and found it original…but the rest was boring  Not very good literature I’m afraid.

This next one I like to imagine was written by a very pompous man.

‘Surprisingly enjoyable story.’

Why is he surprised by my story being enjoyable?

He goes on.

‘Where it stuck to the local and the quotidian it was fine’

I have three degrees and teach English to A level but I am ashamed to say I didn’t know what ‘the quotidian’ meant and had to look it up – it means ‘the everyday.’ But wait – there’s more!

‘but the episode in Twenties’ Germany was comical in its awfulness’

Comical in its awfulness! Oh dear!

Finally:

‘the scenes of violence just a bit too creaky. The main characters were strong and sympathetic and well done.’

Phew!

And last but not least is a one star given to my thriller.

‘The story of a charming husband who isolates a woman and makes her doubt herself, isn’t new or original. Give this read a miss, unless you suffer from insomnia’.

OUCH!

I was moaning about this to my brother, and he told me to go and look up the one-star reviews for ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The results made me feel much more cheerful

Of one the greatest most experimental albums written by the Beatles, people had said.

‘A totally bubblegum and cotton candy melange of garish fantasy and narcissism’

and

‘Mesmerizingly awful. A bad idea, badly executed’

It inspired me to have a look at how some classic novels had been rated …

James Joyce’s Ulysses ‘This book not only ruined a week at the beach, but also damaged my self-esteem.’

1984 by George Orwell ‘Load of rubbish. My rabbit could have written a better book.’

And my absolute favourite.

Tess of the d’Urbervilles – ‘I hated the book then and hate it now. My only revenge for being forced to read Tess as a kid, is to write a negative review as an adult. So there. That’s done.’

Even the greatest, most celebrated of writers get terrible reviews. And really, I should write because I love it, not so that I get nice people saying they enjoy my books – although that is always lovely! I also need to grow a tough skin because not everybody is going to love what you create. And bad reviews shouldn’t make you want to give up completely – still struggling with that one…

So if you read a book and you really enjoyed it, write a nice review. You have no idea how much it means, even to the most successful of authors. And if you hated the book, maybe just not mention it. And don’t do what one of my readers did and tag me in a post in which he describes, in detail, every single thing he hated from beginning to end – I really didn’t need to know!

But the main thing is to keep buying books – whether you like ebooks, paperbacks, hardbacks or listening to audiobooks – keep reading. There are so many fabulous books out there, something for everyone. And if you want to know my favourite book – it’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, by Louis de Bernieres

Lightning and Me

Hooray hooray, it’s half term today. Let the joy be unconfined. The bad news is I am so exhausted every muscle aches, the good news is that over the last few weeks, I have been involved in a charity event that has raised almost three thousand pounds for Tommy’s, a charity that is really close to my heart since we lost James to stillbirth 18 years ago.

Work has been its usual enjoyable, maddening, tiring and all encompassing self so my novel has been sadly languishing in the background sending me reproachful glances. But now I have a whole week to get back into it – I am determined to get the third in my trilogy published in the spring this year.

To get my creative juices flowing, here’s a quick catch up. Dog is flourishing and looking very dashing after a recent groom. Husband and son spent the morning eating tomahawk steak and have now gone off to the gym to see which of them is going to deadlift 120 kg first. I have no idea where all this machoness has come from but husband looks great so I’m all for it. Daughter has disappeared off to spend the night with her friends so I am in the house, peaceful except for the sound of Dog yawning. Bliss.

Lightning is a strange topic, but I thought I’d share with you the strange events of last year when I learned rather more than I would have liked about what happens when lightning strikes.

I’ve always rather hated storms. I know some people find them exhilarating and fling back the windows to breath in the ionised air crying how alive they feel and isn’t nature wonderful? But I found them terrifying.

I grew up in the Middle East where in the twelve years I was there it rained twice, both times were biblical in their proportions and were accompanied by storms so terrible they ripped the roof off the school library. I learned from an early age not to trust them.

My husband is a scientist and I’ve found him very useful when I’ve had irrational terrors about things like storms and being hit by lightning. Once, in the heady days of pre-children, we decided to take an impromptu trip to Sicily. I couldn’t wait but hadn’t realised that a big part of our journey involved flying across a large stretch of mountains. This wasn’t great in terms of turbulence, and apparently, the area was also renowned for giant lightning storms.

Sure enough, after a bumpy ride had already set my stress levels soaring, I saw out of the window the ominous crackle of lightning zig-zagging through the clouds ahead. I completely fell apart, convinced we were going to get zapped by lightning and fall out of the sky to our doom. I hadn’t smoked for ten years but found myself desperate to dig out a Malboro light.

My husband, seeing my distress, spent the next twenty minutes explaining that the plane acted as a Faraday’s cage and there was nothing to worry about. He used a soft, droning, sciencey voice that contained within it the ring of absolute authority. I believed every word, my anxiety receded and we landed safely.

I subsequently discovered he was lying his head off and lightning could have easily struck an engine and sent the plane plummeting downwards. Thank goodness he didn’t tell me that until years later.

I didn’t know this, but if you go for a holiday on Lake Como you have amazing, gorgeous, stunning views, but the price you pay is storms constantly bounce around the mountains Every Single Day. My weather app was filled with images of lightning.

During the day it was fine, but towards the end of the afternoon you’d hear the ominous murmuring and booming of thunder and I would hare out of the swimming pool as if someone was chasing me with a knife. My entire family thought I was mad – I couldn’t understand why nobody else at the holiday complex wasn’t worried they were about to get fried alive in the pool by a lightning strike.

Then, recently, a very dear friend told me a horrifying story about how when she was living in a rented house in Broadstairs there was a terrible storm. She heard a strange noise and a ball of lightning exploded through the window. As she looked on in astonishment it ran along the walls towards the door, which she opened, and the ball of lightning disappeared through it.

She swears up and down this is the absolute truth, and it has haunted me ever since.

Last year we had an unpleasant few weeks when the Kent countryside seemed to be suffering more than its fair share of thunderstorms. I spent most of the night counting how many miles away the dreaded lightning was until I fell into an uneasy sleep haunted by dreams of balls of lightning running through the house setting everything on fire.

The next morning the birds were singing, the sky was blue, and the garden had that lovely freshly washed feel you get after a big storm. But all I could hear were the outraged, indignant tones of my children yelling – ‘why isn’t the wifi working?’

I went downstairs and the router was flashing pink. Also, the lights in the kitchen weren’t working. Odd. I thought, and went to check the fuse box. Maybe something had tripped?

No.

Turns out the house had been struck by lightning!

Did you know that if there’s a storm you have to unplug your router? If you don’t you risk the bit that connects you to cyber space being blown up! The BT man who came round said he’d once had to sort out a connector thing that had been struck by lightning and brought down an entire village. Not one of them had access to wifi. If only they’d unplugged their routers. If only I had – because living with teenagers who’ve had to go off grid for four days was not pleasant, I can tell you.

My neighbour’s house had also been hit by lightning, but she’d been sensible and unplugged everything, so there was no damage. She was filming the storm when the house was struck and when she sent me the video I was torn between horror at the explosion of light and sound, and laughter at the stream of expletives issuing forth from my usually mild-mannered friend.

Sound up – don’t worry, I’ve cut out the swearing!

Unfortunately, Daughter is one of those people who feel alive and exhilarated by the power of storms, and when we had another storm in the afternoon two days later she and her friend decided to go out in it and thought it was hilarious when they filmed a tree breaking in half and crashing to the ground two feet in front of them. I only discovered this a week later when she posted it – accompanied by many laughing emojis – on her social media. Good grief!

The fallen, lightning struck, tree that nearly killed my foolish Daughter

So I’m going to be keeping a close eye on my weather app and staying indoors in future. But learn a lesson from me. If you hear the rumble of thunder – go and unplug your router!

GIVEAWAY!

I’m not sure if this link will work, but 100 copies of The Woman and the Witch, the first in a trilogy, will be in a give away today!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Woman and the Witch


by Amanda Larkman

Giveaway ends August 12, 2022.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Bonjour, les Vacances!

Well, it finally happened. The last holiday we went on was to a very beautiful but very wet Lake District. ‘Never mind!’ I said to my raincoated family. ‘Next year we’ll go somewhere gorgeously sunny!’. That was in 2019, and we all know what happened next.

After the Covid years, this summer we finally made it to the holiday we booked at the end of 2019. The one that had to be rescheduled twice. It was worth the wait. As I write, the cicadas are creaking away and the sun is blazing fit to crack the stones around the swimming pool that beautifully matches the aquamarine necklace Husband bought me to mark our 19th wedding anniversary.

The teenagers are huddled in a shuttered room watching Hangover III. As we have travelled by train to Nice, through Antibes and onto our final destination, just outside Avignon, they have managed to watch all three of this series. Ah well, nice to see them doing something together.

With all the horrors facing anyone travelling by plane this summer, I was feeling very smug that I’d thought ahead and booked all our travel by train. Oh, the glamour! I have a real thing for trains and was looking forward to watching the countryside slip past our window moving from Kent to Calais through the rolling hills of Burgundy onto the sun-drenched glamour of the Côte d’Azur.

My smugness proved rather premature as we faced just as long queues at St Pancras. The only smugness that day was from Rob who kept saying ‘good job we got the early train’ until I wanted to smack him. The teenagers and I had not enjoyed leaving the house at 5.50 am to catch the 6.21 train, but Rob was right – good job we did as it took two hours to queue to reach the train (twice, as the first time we got sent back as we were in the queue for Lille, not Paris).

Once on the train the journey was smooth, tarnished only by the look on Rob’s face at the price of four ham and cheese sandwiches and four drinks at La Gastronomie restaurant coach. Careering across Paris from one station to another was entertaining; nobody spoke – we gripped the window handles, trying to stop ourselves flying from the cab as the grizzled taxi driver made sure we got to the Gare De Lyon in time to catch our TGV.

But there it was! At last! After eight hours of travel, we were greeted by the glittering sea of Nice. Airbnb was fine – but beds weren’t made grrr – and we sailed off to meet my old uni friend who lives there. (After I had sworn to teenagers not to spend ‘years talking to her and getting drunk while we hang around like lemons, mum.’)

Much rosé was drunk, sunny seas swam, and over €120 spent on two sun loungers and a niçoise salad with a bowl of frites. We would have got four loungers, but the cost was so astronomical Rob promptly took his towel over to the pebbles further down the beach. The waiter guy tried to say that as there were four of us we had to buy four loungers but I told him I had no idea who Rob and Son were and that they were nothing to do with me and Daughter. He finally acceded and we had to lob bits of salad and the odd chip over to the other half of the family whenever he turned his back.

Son and Daughter are at odds over the beach. Both love to swim in the sea but Daughter hates sand. I toyed with the idea of carrying her down and throwing her into the water but she’s taller than me and can fight me off. For one, breathtakingly joyful moment, the two of them swum to some distant rocks and we could see them chatting with each other. I took a million pictures of their little pin-like figures. It didn’t matter you couldn’t see their faces in the photographs, just the fact that my two children were hanging out together was enough to make my heart burst with maternal delight.

Views of Nice (and Rob’s arm)

It all went wrong twenty minutes later when Daughter saw Son using her now-no-longer-sand-free-towel, but for a moment they were in harmony. I have the proof.

Oh, and we saw Iggy Pop! This was at the Nice Jazz Festival. He was brilliant, but half an hour late, and I was slightly alarmed by his eagerness to strip down to his pants, revealing a 73 year old beef jerky strip of body (but at least we were saved the infamous see through trousers). As Iggy got into his groove (around midnight) my watch kept flashing the message ‘Noise level over 110 db! Any exposure at this level can cause permanent damage to hearing!’ so I kept my ears blocked for the rest of the concert.

Iggy Pop, before he took his trousers off.

Then on to Antibes! GOD it’s the most beautiful place. Also, all research as Angie has to go to Antibes to look for Mrs B who has done a runner in my next book. I spent a lot of time studying the landscape from my (€20 rip off tourist beach shop) towel lying on the beach enjoying the sun as it attempted to burn through the five layers of factor 50 I had smothered on. I was desperate to stay in the old part of Antibes and every Airbnb cost a fortune but I managed to nab a gorgeous place that was the size of a dining table but we seemed to manage.

Rob was having a wonderful time. We’d gone to see Hockney at the Matisse Museum and the Picasso at Antibes. He ate one of the best swordfish dishes of his life …

Rob’s swordfish

and discovered the joys of the cassis gelato in a hot square at the Nice market. It took me a while to get him to take off his shirt, despite the 37 degree heat.

There was a reason for this. Before we left the UK Rob decided to neaten up his chest hair. Something he does every now and then. Unfortunately, he hadn’t checked the setting of his clippers and instead of achieving a light trim, he managed to swipe a narrow bald stripe from stomach to collar bone. The roars of fury brought the family running but we all had to run straight out as our hysterical laughter did nothing but make Rob even more angry.

‘I can’t leave it like this!’ he yelled after us. With an exasperated sigh, he clipped the whole lot off. I think it looked quite nice, but he was worried people would think he was one of those bodybuilders keen to show off all the muscles.  Luckily the heat in France was so fierce he gave in, and took off his shirt on the beach, exposing his shining, hairless pecs to the world.

Views so good it even stirred the teenagers to look up from their phonesViews from Antibes and the long awaited Avignon Villa

After a hectic week sightseeing and walking over 6 miles a day EVERY DAY as we didn’t have a car in Nice and Antibes, we jumped on the train looking forward to a week in a villa just outside Avignon overlooking the Luberon mountains. The villa we booked in 2019 and had been paying for in chunks over the past three years.

As the train pulled out sending us towards Avignon, everyone buried their faces into their mobiles and I double-checked the hire car I had booked. The train got in at 10.53 and I had another look at the rental voucher to check we could collect the car between 10 and 11.

My stomach suddenly filled with ice. The warm, golden pastry of the croissant I was chewing turned to dust in my mouth.

Not between 10 and 11.

10.

The original email from the third party company said between 10-11. The official rental voucher said collect at 10.

We had to collect the car by 10 it said, otherwise we’d lose it.

I reassured myself. It’s fine! I thought. We’ll be there only a little past that …

Just in case, I got hold of trip.com, the company we’d booked the car through. Using the chat feature I asked if they could let the car hire place know we were going to be late.

The customer service woman seemed very alarmed. Ten minutes later – at 09.50 she messaged me back to say she couldn’t get through. ‘OK,’ I typed. ‘I’m sure it will be fine.’

‘You don’t understand,’ she wrote back. ‘If you’re not there by 10am they will cancel the booking and you will lose the £770 you paid.’

‘What?’ I replied, looking over nervously at Rob who was gazing happily out the window.

‘You need to cancel it NOW, Madame,’ she typed furiously. ‘Otherwise you will lose EVERYTHING!’

Sweat stung my brow, my stomach lurched again.

I stared at the time on my phone. 09.56. As it clicked over to 09.57 the phone sprung to life in my hand.

‘Madame!’ a frantic woman’s voice greeted me without preamble. ‘You have to cancel NOW! You will lose all your money!’

Rob looked over and lifted an enquiring brow.

‘WehavetocancelthehirecarasIthoughtwehaduntil11butwehavetogetitat10andthetraindoesn’tgetinuntil10.53wewillloseallourmoney!’

‘What?’ he said.

‘ButifwecancelwemaynotbeabletogetanothercarandwillbestrandedinAvignon!’ I shriek whispered, conscious of the amused glances from nearby train passengers. It was 09.58

‘Wait. What?’ Rob said.

‘Madame!’ I heard from the speaker, ‘you have two minutes!’

‘OK!’ I yelled down the phone. ‘CANCEL IT!’

‘What,’ said Rob with a voice that could crack glass, ‘the HELL is going on?’

I shook my head, scrolling frantically through my phone. ‘I need to book another hire car!’

Thank goodness for the customer service woman. Well done to trip.com, a company I shall use forever more. She managed to cancel the car at 09.59 and we got sent a full refund. Even better, I managed to hire another car to be collected at 11.30 (probably the one I just cancelled) for £399. Bargain!

Almost worth the ten minutes of panic/what-felt-like-a-heart attack on the train.

The rest of the journey went without incident until we collected the hire car and set off for the villa. Being a bit early, we decided to stop for provisions. A mistake, we realised very soon, as we were already stuffed to the gunnels with luggage. The boot was chock a block, Rob’s rucksack was squashed between the teenagers each of whom had their suitcase on their lap.

The Super U had everything we needed. We filled the trolley with bread, ham, tomatoes, cherries, chicken, strawberry tarts and cereal – all the food groups. At one point I found Rob staring into a trolley holding up a long, unrecognisable vegetable. ‘What is this and why did you get it?’

‘Rob!’ I hissed across the aisle. ‘That’s not our trolley!’

It was only the next day when my chèvre chaud salad was without chèvre, and the teenagers’ cheeseburgers were without cheese slices, did we realise that Rob had put all the cheese he’d chosen in the strangers’ trolley.

My grandmother always swore bad things happened in threes. I’m hoping what with the chest hair incident, the missing cheese and the fact I just managed to throw Son’s phone into the pool when I shook out a towel, means we have had our fill of unfortunate events.

Happy holidays!

This was burger was declared by daughter to be ‘the best burger she had ever tasted.’ When I asked the waiter whether it was a speciality bread he just shrugged and said ‘food colouring.’ When I pressed him for the magic ingredient in the sauce he responded with another shrug ‘Shrehderrrrreeee’ which I thought was some exotic French ingredient until I realised he was saying ‘cheddar’.The food! The food!

Interview with the BBC

Another interview! This time with Pat Marsh over at BBC Radio Kent. I hope to chat with them again soon as they’ve asked me to do some blog posts.

Have a listen! https://youtu.be/qTduIntLX5k

My radio interview!

Well who would have believed it! Here I am talking to DJ Matt James about becoming an author and my book series - The Woman and the Witch Trilogy.

I had an absolutely lovely time - do have a listen!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NJWXFOw...

‘But you said we could make Rainbow Cake!’ The Horrors of Baking

Reposting an old memory when Daughter and I made cake. Oh, happy days!

After a few weeks of depressing weather, weight gain and a general sense of crapness, the sun is shining and I am feeling much happier. I have also managed to knock off seven pounds so I’m getting back in control. Hooray. The events of the last weekend has slightly knocked me off track, but back on the salads tomorrow.

It has been the weekend from hell. I am footsore, sticky, exhausted, and skint. Why? Because my daughter decided her contribution to the School Fête would be a ‘Welcome to Cakeland’ cake stall. She asked me in a weak moment when I wasn’t listening, and somehow the ball had started rolling and quickly became unstoppable.

It all began on the Friday when Daughter decided a trip to Lakeland was needed to purchase cake tins, ready made icing and various bits and pieces. My purse was considerably lighter when we left and that was before we bought a pack of thirty eggs (I didn’t even know they came in boxes that big) and about nine billion packs of butter. In fact we got through so many packs of butter Son was on permanent ‘butter runs’ to go into town to buy more. He did well on it; he charged a £1 commission fee for every trip.

Son wasn’t allowed in the kitchen as it was awash with eggs and with his allergy we didn’t want to risk a trip to A&E, so he happily did nothing but play Fortnite and buy butter.

Saturday was under control. We decided to make brownies as they would last the longest. A lovely ex-pupil has given me this.

It was driven home to me how rubbish I am in the kitchen when I read her dedication inside. She was in year 11 when she gave it to me and she is now in her third year at university. Last weekend was the first time I had ever opened it. Isn’t that awful?

Especially when I realised the recipes are AMAZING! (Actually I should lock it away as it’s a carb frenzy and I really shouldn’t go there). Daughter and I decided on this one, and I am putting it here in full because they was a dream to make and tasted absolutely incredible.

Here are the ones we made…

 

They weren’t all sold so I bought some back, chucked them in the fridge, and have been nibbling on them, ooh about every hour or so, since then. They are chewy, rich and absolutely gorgeous. So far so good!

A Victoria Sponge was next. Boom! Lovely and looking good.

We had to stop then as I was working Saturday night. Sunday dawned brighter and earlier than I would have liked due to Daughter’s intense and uncontrollable excitement which drove her to wake me up at 6am.

I tried to say in bed for as long as possible and we started work in earnest at 10am. It wasn’t long before the kitchen was in complete chaos. Gone was the calm, methodical and peaceful progression of the day before. Daughter and I were aware time was ticking and she had VERY ambitious plans as to what she wanted to have done by the end of the day.

We seemed to be baking a hundred different things at the same time in a very small kitchen. It was a glorious day outside and I kept looking longingly out of the window at the stretch of blue sky – not a cloud marred it. Bitter envy crawled through me as careless strangers in summer dress walked past laughing lightly in sunglasses, unencumbered by responsibilities or five tons of flour, butter and sugar. To make matter worse, unlike the rest of the whole world, I had work on Bank Holiday Monday and the poor kids had school.

Within about an hour the kitchen was a war zone.

 

Every single surface was covered in crap. Boxes of ingredients, cake tins EVERYWHERE – I don’t know why we suddenly had eleven billion of the damn things. Flour, butter, 37 eggs, milk, spoons, plates, muffin tins, tubs of ready made icing and a hundred different types of sugar. Both Rob and I on different occasions had been persuaded separately by Daughter that ‘we haven’t got ANY Butter/self-raising/plain/flour/sugar/icing sugar/caster sugar, Mummy/Daddy you HAVE to buy some more or it will be a COMPLETE DISASTER!’

We had enough ingredients to bake cakes for about a thousand people for the next five years.

Mysteriously, the floor was carpeted with a mixture of flour, icing sugar, and caster sugar. I always wear bare feet indoors and I hate the feeling of stuff under my feet. All my flip flops/slipper type shoes had disappeared, so I had to make do with two clean tea towels under each foot which I shuffled about on for the rest of the day – it seemed pointless sweeping and mopping when mountains of sugar were falling to the floor every half hour so I thought I’d leave it until we were finished.

Two o’clock: time to collect Dog from her (belated) birthday spa day grooming session. She’d been there for a couple of hours and we couldn’t wait to see how she looked. Here she is before, note the stain still left from the ‘tea bag incident’ I wrote about a few weeks ago…

 

And look at her afterwards! She’d had a blow dry and was gorgeously fluffy and extremely pleased with herself. I love the ‘Fresh as a Daisy’ bandanna.

Back to the baking. This time Daughter wanted to make a giant chocolate fudge cake.

This did not go well. I don’t know why. We followed the instructions to the letter but it was a disaster from start to finish. It didn’t look too bad when we got it out of the oven and we made the buttercream icing without any problems. But then when I tried to paste the icing onto the cake it ripped great chunks of the sponge away leaving big, gaping holes.

As I was trying to glue bits of chocolate sponge back into the black hole with buttercream icing which seemed to be melting into a puddle, Daughter was working round the back with chocolate fingers, trying to shore up the sludge coloured circle of sponge which seemed to be spreading and morphing into some kind of alien species. I persuaded Daughter to sprinkle some silver balls over the top to try and rescue things, but the word ‘polish’ and ‘turd’ sprung to my mind.

 

I was bemoaning the chaos of the different sized chocolate fingers, wondering if I should take them off and send Son to buy two more packets to make a more even ‘fence’ when I heard Daughter trying to read the silver balls packet. ’20/10/10′, what does that mean?

‘It’s the best before date,’ I said distractedly. ‘Wait, what?’ I briefly toyed with leaving the well out of date silver balls, then thought I could kill someone, so we laboriously picked them all off and replaced them with silver balls which weren’t EIGHT YEARS past their use by date.

The chocolate fudge cup cakes went well to begin with…

Trouble came knocking again when we tried to ice them. Daughter had only one, petal type attachment for the piper which created an odd, rippled wave of icing. I tried, Rob tried, but neither of us could ice the damn cup cakes without being unable to break the icing from the nozzle. If we lifted the nozzle from the cake the bloody icing we’d already put on the cake came up with it leaving a long trail of butter cream icing from the piper.

Eventually I just rippled around the icing for a bit then smushed the nozzle into the cake using my (clean) finger to break off from the icing bag.

OK they didn’t look that pretty, but it triggered the screaming abdabs in Daughter who hated how they looked and declared the whole thing hopeless and I had to email her teacher to say that Cakeland was off and she wasn’t going to go into school.

I managed to tempt her out of her room by saying we could do the cake pops. They were fun, but… The recipe was enough for 40 cake pops but we only had 20 cake pop sticks supplied. I told Daughter to only make half the recipe. She flatly refused so cue a sweat shop in the sitting room where Rob and Son cut a whole pile of kebab sticks into cake pop sticks.

They came out OK but I couldn’t work out how to store them. Finally I hit on the genius idea of wrapping three slice of bread in tin foil and wedged them into a (clean) planter. As we made them I stuck the cake pops in and they lolled about in their stand like a group of drunken footballers.

While Daughter were icing these, I whipped up a big batch of Delia’s Shortbread biscuits, which were egg free and ideal for Son. I had to spend a good hour wiping down everything, so paranoid was I about any cross contamination.

Here is dear old Delia’s recipe. I don’t cook much, but when I do, I tend to go with Delia as her recipes never let me down.

By this time it was 9 pm. Way past Daughter’s bed time. I told her it was time to clear up and go to bed.

‘But we haven’t made the rainbow cake!’ she said.

‘I know, sweetie, but it’s very late and Mummy has been on her feet since this morning and she wants to watch the next episode of ‘Fear of the Walking Dead’ with Daddy. Come on, off to bed.’

‘But you PROMISED we could make a rainbow cake,’ she replied, her face a picture of outraged disappointment.

Oh dear. Cue complete meltdown. She was worn out and emotional. After half an hour of wrangling she gave up and ran to her room, slammed the door and – heartbreakingly – cried herself to sleep.

I tried to watch TV with Rob but couldn’t concentrate. Going through my mind was this debate…

‘OK, so there are five layers to this cake. Each one will take at least 25 minutes. I can’t do it. It’s too late. I’ve got work in the morning… She’ll be fine. We’ve got loads of all different cakes for her stall. I haven’t stopped for twelve hours…’

Flash forward an hour and there I am in the kitchen reading the instructions for the goddamn rainbow cake. It’s now 11 pm and Rob has gone to bed calling out, ‘you’re mad,’ over his shoulder as he went. This packet was from Lakeland (£6.99 and the icing was also from Lakeland).

I don’t know what I was thinking. I was shattered. I think it was a combination of the thought of Daughter’s sobs and the usual guilt of the working mother.

So off I went. Five different layers of sponge in different colours. Each one taking about ten minutes to mix and 25 minutes to cook. I had to wash the whisk, mixing bowl, and cake tin between each layer. It took AGES!

Looking at the time on this photo, I can see that by just before 3am I had made, iced, and put together the stack of five layers. Look closely at this picture.

Now I used the SAME cake tin for all five layers. Can anyone explain to me why the top layer is bigger than all the others? It is a complete mystery to me.

To be honest, I was not impressed. All those different mixes and they all looked the same to me. NOTHING like the box. I didn’t care, though, I just iced the damn thing all over and left a letter for Daughter by her bed telling her I had made the rainbow cake and she had to add the unicorn horn and eyes when she woke up.

Quick tip: I used this ready made icing from Lakeland and it was the only one I have ever used that doesn’t taste like artificial bleurgh. Highly recommended: Renshaw Frosting.

Monday morning, the alarm goes off and I am dead to the world. Rob tells me later that Daughter was delirious with delight that I had made the rainbow cake and had promised him, ‘tell Mummy whenever I am naughty or don’t do as I’m told – just say rainbow cake and I will be good again.’ (Bless her, but this lasted for about five hours before she was back to her old tricks). Here is the cake after I had iced it completely and Daughter had added a unicorn horn and some eyes.

I am pleased to say the fête was a huge success. Strangely, the chocolate fudge cake was not hugely popular. I sold two pieces, and both of them I had to hand over by nudging the oozing lava of the chocolate fudge onto the plate in their hands. Luckily, although it didn’t look much, it tasted delicious and we snarfed the left overs and brought them home

Finally, and I am quite chuffed with this, the rainbow cake looked a hell of a lot better when sliced open and sold like, well, rainbow cake.  Check out this beauty! And it tasted AMAZING.

Yay me and Yay Daughter. But for goodness sake, don’t EVER let me say yes to anything like this again.

 

FRIEDA Woman and the Witch #2

I've put together a little video to get an insight into what 'Frieda' is all about. Find out what old Mrs B got up to when she was a young (well, younger) woman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdrty...


Frieda