Fiona Walker's Blog, page 2

I Land in the Stream

To celebrate National Book Lover’s Day this Weds 9th Aug, I’m appearing on Instagram Live at 7pm with marvellous fellow novelist Victoria Scott, hosted by book blogger extraordinaire Emma’s Biblio Treasures. We’ll be talking about our latest books, writing process and favourite reads. It would be fabulous to have you there. To join in, you go to Emma’s Instagram feed HERE, although you might be able to go from mine too (link HERE). Fingers crossed I’ll find my way there as well.

While I’m a whizz at laptop video calls, I’m still an Instagram tyro, and it came as a bit of a shock that streaming live can only be done from our phones. We all looked like postage stamps in the practise run last week. And, as anybody who’s ever received a WhatsApp or Messenger text from me will know, it can be a hit and miss communication even with my reading glasses on. Mine is a love/hate relationship with smartphone tech, especially now there are AI apps on Google Play which might soon replace novelists like me. For such a clever machine, mine has no idea what I want most of the time.

Take last weekend when we drove Sam’s mother back to her new retirement village in the Derbyshire Dales, using my phone’s sat nav because none of us yet know the best way there from Warwickshire. I’d downloaded a soothing playlist which turned out to be a dirge, classical-music buff Grandma looking pained in the passenger seat, the rest of the family grumbling in the back. We tried to change it, but each time we cried ‘Hey Google, play more cheerful classical music!’ it boomed out Christmas carols. After three rounds of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, I cried ‘Hey Google, play Bach!’ It’s reassuring female voice purred ‘OK’, then launched into Away In A Manger. In the end, we listened to the downloaded dirge as we drove on through glorious Eliot country, all rolling fields and red brick mills, the family exclaiming that we hadn’t come this way before and wasn’t it lovely?

It wasn’t until the sat nav was boasting ETA 10 Mins that we realised we were nowhere near Matlock in Derbyshire. It turned out that Google Maps had added in a new stop-point mid-journey: Playbark Ltd near Stoke on Trent.

Play Bach.

Maybe my phone understands me better than I give it credit for. It certainly knows how to make me laugh.

I’ll be talking to its little screen again on Wednesday. With luck, I’ll be on Instagram at the same time.

Unboxing video and (sound)proofing…

It’s just three weeks to go until Country Secrets comes out and I’ve been in deepest Leicestershire, recording the audiobook narration. I threw my heart into my World Tour of Dodgy Accents (which never quite made it to Scotland despite my best efforts), and yet again loved having the opportunity to share my writing with readers in my own voice. Here was my office view all last week:

I’m now more convinced than ever that all authors should read our books out loud before the final print run because it’s by far the best way to proofread them. Whilst recording, I spotted some erroneous words and commas that must have completely escaped me when I scoured its typeset pages earlier this year. No matter how eagle-eyed the professional proofreader and author are in combination, a few mistakes inevitably slip by, although this one felt particularly ironic:

A list of corrections has now winged its way to my publishing team, albeit too late for the hardback which has already been printed. And that looks so gorgeous, I hope you’ll forgive the odd dropped ‘h’. Cue pack shot:

The opening chapter is now here on my website if you’d like a taster. You can find it by following this LINK.

Narrating Country Secrets brought me right back into the heart of Comptons again, the perfect spot in which to linger just before publication.  First love is a big theme in the novel, along with families and forgiveness, and it’s left me feeling wonderfully nostalgic, grateful for the chance to escape into the Bardswolds villages. I hope readers old and new feel equally at home there.

I gather “unboxing” videos ahead of publication are now de rigeur, which strikes me as odd (opening the book is more exciting than its delivery packaging, surely?) but in the spirit of media savvy modernity, I’ve made one to share with you:

Be warned, a flurry of excited posts and tweets will follow in the coming weeks, along with the obligatory snapshots of the hardback posing with my photogenic pets and/or Photoshopped into celebrity pics. But as those of you who have read my previous books will know – and I love you for it – it’s what’s inside the covers that really matters to me, and the journey its characters take you on. If you listen to the audiobook, you’ll have me as your talkative travelling companion throughout.

Not long to wait now!

Chip off the Old Blog: the Joy of Books

Years ago, I bought my parents a framed print by the Punch cartoonist H E Bateman entitled ‘An Attempt to Evade the Best Seller’ which summed up our family’s reading addiction. I still have it.

Even when I’m writing flat-out, I never stop reading. The TV might go unwatched, the radio unheard and this blog guiltily overlooked, but I will still have at least one book on the go. No matter if I’m crawling into bed at dawn after a plot-twisting night shift, I crave that daily chapter to take me somewhere else for a while. These are often novels I’ve read before because I take precious little in when I’m writing round-the-clock, but my reading reflex is so instinctive I wouldn’t be without them. My Jane Austens have now fallen apart so badly, I’ve downloaded them to my Kindle; Northanger Abbey still makes me laugh aloud, Persuasion makes me cry.

From my first Peter and Jane, through a thousand pony stories, torchlit nights beneath the duvet with Jilly and Jackie, lost weekends with the Brontës to the decades of blissful page-turning which had followed, reading remains my favourite fix. Books soothe me like nothing else.

I buy far too many books – more than I could ever hope to read – and from every available outlet. My favourite spot will always be the traditional bookshop, its shelves striped floor to ceiling with unbroken spines. But I also struggle to leave a supermarket without snaffling a new paperback. No charity shop can be passed without me diving inside in search of vintage romps and cosy crime, ditto National Trust visitor attractions with their second-hand bookshops. I borrow new hardbacks from the library, and I’m hopelessly addicted to 99p eBook deals. My idea of heaven is to be granted a year in which to do nothing but read all the books I own which I’ve not yet found time for.

If I find a writer I love, I want to binge everything they’ve written: Tessa Hadley, Rachel Joyce, vintage Janet Evanovich. Debut authors are terrific – and I appreciate why publishers love them for all that potential – but I want the backlist, and fast. The thrill I felt when I discovered the late M C Beaton’s Agatha Raisin Series ten years ago was overwhelming, almost thirty books at the time and now that the series is being continued after her death, there are more. I’m nearing the end and rationing them out.

Waiting for a favourite author to produce something can be agonising, but when they do I find the wait oh-so-worth-it for the binge-reading pay-off. Above all, I adore big books (The Goldfinch, A Suitable Boy, The Luminaries, Middlemarch, plentiful Dickens and Jilly again). I’ve just come up for air after 1000 pages of the latest Robert Galbraith, borrowed from the local library which prolonged the wait but spread the love. For a week, I was the character in that H M Bateman cartoon. I’m now escaping to Italy with a fabulous new author, figuratively speaking, then racing home to gather up Maggie Farrell, Janet Hallett and Curtis Sittenfeld, possibly squeezing some Agatha Raison sleuthing in between.

One day I will be organised enough to add a page to this website full of book recommendations and reviews. I love getting book suggestions and will never cease being fascinated by what people read and why. My love of reading is the reason I write. There will be much more news on what exactly I’m writing between all this reading next time I blog, I promise. For now, I hope this helps explain why it has been so quiet here of late. Wishing you all lots of very happy reading this spring.

Meanwhile, Country Secrets will be published in August, and it now has its own dedicated page on this website. For more details, please click on the book cover below.

Festive Short Story Collection

New book alert! As a Christmas treat, I have a short story collection out, exclusively on Kindle at just 99p. A Christmas Wish…and Other Stories features eleven fictional stocking-fillers packed full of good cheer.

The title story, set in a romantically haunted bookshop, was the inspiration for publishing this collection. I wrote it a year ago, and it was one of those magical little snow globe worlds that lived with me for months afterwards. It still makes me smile and cry to read it, which is why I’m excited to share it with you now. Having waited until the fairy lights and baubles are coming out of storage again to do so has given me plenty of time to rootle around the Walker gift drawer and pull out some other secret treats. There are short stories for all seasons inside this collection, so don’t worry if you haven’t got time to read them all at once. Like the miniature bath bomb set that’s still filling your tub with fizz six months after you unwrapped it on Christmas day, you can dip into this whenever you like.

Please click on the book image or follow this LINK to purchase. I hope it provides a much-needed fireside escape this festive season.

May you enjoy a thoroughly merry Christmas. With all love and good wishes,

Fiona

xxx

Crackling fires, woolly jumpers – and book news!

Autumn is always the most magical of seasons, even with the heating still stubbornly off, a hot water bottle under each arm and greyhounds leaning in for body warmth as I type this. And here’s some news to warm your cockles if you’re waiting for the third Comptons novel: it will be out next summer. It’s called Country Secrets, and I look forward to sharing lots more details along with its gorgeous cover closer to publication.

I’ve taken slightly longer than anticipated to finish it, for which I can only apologise if you’ve been waiting impatiently since Country Lovers. I can’t remember a novel I got more stuck in, by which I don’t mean writer’s block so much as cosying down and not wanting to let go. Such a turbulent eighteen months of post-pandemic political flux, financial crises and global conflict no doubt added to my subconscious longing to stay in the Compton villages. Hacking around the ridgeway above the Bardswolds with the Saddle Bags is my imaginary safe space, and the prospect of this fictional gambol through village life coming to an end slowed me horribly midway through this book, the build-up to the inevitable breathless galloping finish all-absorbing.

Whilst bashing out my first novel French Relations at warp speed in the pre-digital Dark Ages, I bought a monthly magazine for aspiring writers like me, full of useful articles by pros about our mutual craft. One that still sticks in my mind claimed authors are either ‘gushers’ or ‘bleeders’. The former write as fast as they think, frequently verbosely; the latter think it all through before squeezing each word out. Back then, I was an out-and-out gusher.

More than twenty novels later, whilst I still gush most of the time, I realise I’ve become an occasional bleeder. This is partly practical because my typing (self-taught, two-fingered, keyboard-breaking) is increasingly rogue these days, like Eric Morecombe playing the piano, and I’m forced to strike the keys adagio not allegro. But I do stop to think more deeply about the techniques of writing too, and I can catch myself spending minutes on end moving paragraphs around wondering if they’d work better here or there. It’s all very time-consuming and probably far too self-doubting, although I like to fool myself that it’s grown-up and literary.

My greatest weakness, however, has always been my love of word and wordplay. This has never changed, but with online dictionaries a keystroke away, the temptation to pernickety perfectionism can be overwhelming. A carefully chosen phrase or motif can make or break a piece of writing and lend it meaning. For example, when I first wrote ‘warm the cockles’ at the top of this page, it hummed radioactively with antiquated over-use, but because I’m fond of a bit of vintage verbiage – from collywobbles to gumption – a cliche’s sometimes hunky-dory if its meaning checks out. Which is how I’ve just discovered that the things we feel warming up when we get good news are our heart’s cockle-shaped ventricles and not – as I always imagined – a hot snack blended with whelks and winkles raked from the Thames at low tide, once sold in London’s East End. Which makes mine all the more aglow to have another big-hearted novel on its way to you, even if it’s a bit bleeding late.

Rest assured that my (cardiac) cockles have pumped their warmest and toastiest love into Country Secrets this past year and that my not wanting to leave the Comptons is a testament to how much I adore and believe in the setting and its characters. If I could have moved there permanently, I would. I look forward to inviting you all to come back there next summer.

Before that, I’m escaping again. One wonderful bonus to being an author, whether gushing or bleeding, is that we can always invent new favourite places to take you to, and my imagination is already exploring the next one. Right now, it’s buzzing at the prospect of balmy sunshine, soothing seawater, cawing gulls and hidden sandy coves. Cue those hot cockles.

More on that, and on Country Secrets, here soon.

Dog of a (mid)Lifetime

I’ve shared my life with dogs, and the one who stayed loyally by my side during my thirties and forties was something special. Perhaps it was just timing: she saw me through the turbulent years of divorce, second chance love, motherhood, multiple house moves, career troubles and the darkest days of bereavement. Yet I believe there’s more to it than that. While each dog I’ve owned has had my heart, just one had my soul.

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She was a force of nature from day one: a blue-eyed, needy, bundle of joy gifted to me by my then-husband as another baby substitute, a ‘little sister’ for our Jack Russell, Jelly. Her registered name was Calzac Carletta of the Cotswolds which we considered far too grand for this wrinkly, big-pawed goon of a tot, so we called her Pudding, an added sweet treat sugaring our little Cotswolds family.

For the ensuing fifteen years, she was to become my rock, the most consistent companion in my life.

I’d had a Weimaraner before, so I knew the breed suffers from separation anxiety, but nothing prepared me for Pudding’s level of clinginess. She crashed her way out of ever-tougher dog crates, clambered through open windows and became the ultimate boot room escapologist to be with me. In the end, it was easier to take her everywhere. She seldom strayed far. In all other respects, Pudding was almost untrainable. I thought I knew my stuff, but for a long time, she had me beat. We were asked to leave our village hall puppy classes for disruptive behaviour. On the lead, she dragged me everywhere. She barked non-stop at other dogs, flattened strangers with enthusiastic greetings, and stole any food she could lay her paws on – a roast chicken resting on the Aga at Easter, a whole salmon in foil, entire picnics and ice creams from children like a seagull. Trips to the vets were commonplace. Some were food-theft related, others sheer bad luck: she caught Parvovirus despite being inoculated and nearly died; she developed severe uveitis after a womb infection and came close to losing her sight; she swallowed the Jack Russell’s favourite toy and had to have several feet of stomach removed. Her insurance premiums were soon bigger than the car’s. And if she wasn’t the victim, she was the cause: an overexcited game of fetch in our garden led to her landing on top of Jelly, his leg breaking so badly it needed a metal frame; my tooth was knocked out when she felled me against a drystone wall. She was, in short, the most destructive, disruptive, injury-prone dog I’d ever had. And we worshipped one another.

We walked miles together to try to run down her batteries and for me to think things over: work, troubled friends, family rows, my disintegrating marriage. When that ended all-too painfully, there was no question about who would get custody of Pudding. She was by then four and at her most rebelliously wilful. My mother called her ‘demon dog’, but I drew strength from her single-minded devotion. Having always slept downstairs – one bit of training we’d nailed – she moved to the landing, then outside my door, and finally onto the foot of my bed. We watched a lot of bad late-night television together. She never judged me; she just loved me.

When I eventually found love again, she adored him from the start, even when she was demoted to the top of the stairs once more. The devotion was mutual. She came with us on every romantic weekend. If I went out, she didn’t howl by the door as she once had but followed him around instead.

We went on to have two children, and she was like Nanny from Peter Pan to them, a doting maternal companion. She let them crawl all over her, hang from her tail and ears, and peer in her mouth. Her stumpy tail just thumped the ground adoringly throughout. She would pad around the house rounding us all up; she liked togetherness. We appreciated that bossy corralling, the opportunities to relax together all too few. Our first years as a family were full of life-changing upheaval: we’d moved to Somerset to set up my partner’s new equestrian business just as my darling father was diagnosed with aggressive cancer that took his life in little more than eighteen months; Alzheimer’s also claimed my partner’s stepmother that year. With two parents widowed and struggling to cope, we moved again to be closer to them, taking eight horses, two toddlers and Pudding. Then my mother was diagnosed with a long-term degenerative illness, and we moved yet again to set her up in an annexe with us. Pudding would sit with her for hours, friends at last. ‘Who’s the best dog in the world?’ Mum would whisper to her when she thought no one could hear.

Having finally mellowed in midlife, Pudding had become the dog everyone who met her wanted to take home for her loyalty, her beauty and – wonders – her obedience, a canine epiphany that had surprised us all. From around seven (fifty in dog-to-human years) she’d stopped pulling on the lead, terrorising other dogs and even let our free-range chickens ride on her back. She sat, lay, stayed and came on command, making us suspect she’d always known how to, but now she’d chosen to comply. She still stole food – even in her dotage one house-sitter’s badly concealed fudge stash led to yet another emergency vet’s trip – and she hated being left, but she possessed a wise, charismatic kindness only older dogs have. She genuinely loved people, especially children. Our eldest daughter’s autism can make home life traumatic – her high anxiety, many meltdowns and sense of profound, rudderless isolation impact us all. Pudding was her go-to, the calm weight of her most-trusted family member leaning against her side reassuringly provided a comfort we couldn’t, however hard we tried. The simplicity of it, that connection between child and dog, just worked.

By her teens, Pudding had multiple huge lumps, cataracts, arthritic hips and the fiercest will to live I’ve known in an elderly dog. My darling grey ghost who had almost died so many times wasn’t ready to leave us. The vet trips became so regular she grew to dread them, to the point where she had to be treated in the car boot. We were told multiple times that this was probably the end, only for her to rally and be back out gambling in the garden a day later, ears flapping.

But it came eventually, as we knew it would. She settled beside me one evening, head on my lap, and I knew in an instant that she’d taken a hit from something she couldn’t beat this time – kidney failure it transpired, as so often claims old dogs – and that we needed to help her out of the pain quickly. The vet was wonderful, agreeing to visit us at home, aware of how frightening Pudding found the surgery.

I’ve been beside beloved dogs when they have been put to sleep before, that agonising kindness born of having canine companions whose lives are so much shorter than ours, but this was different. This was Pudding, my family, my force majeure. She was irreplaceable, her familiar gaze fixed on me as she took leave of the life she’d lived so riotously and generously.

The family were all distraught, our mutual comfort so important, but the enduring grief I felt afterwards rocked me. The well-meaning platitudes soon came thick and fast: ‘She had a good life’; ‘She was a great dog’; ‘Will you get another one?’ How could I? There was no other Pudding. I looked for her everywhere. I hid behind doors and wept in silent, shameful desolation. It was a feeling entirely unlike any for a pet I’d lost before. I lay awake at night just missing her.

Although my daughters, then ten and eleven, had never known life without Pudding in it, they took her death in their stride, The Encyclopaedia of Dog Breeds quickly brought out for inspection to choose her replacement, designer dogs much discussed. I couldn’t bear to join in. I felt I’d lost something of myself with her, but I was too ashamed to admit it; I didn’t want to make it about me. Perhaps that secret part of me was grieving for my own stage of life: Pudding had arrived in it when I was thirty-two, at the top of my career and full of dreams; I was now forty-eight and more world-weary. She’d been my constant through so many life-changing years, and now she – and they – were gone. For a while, I felt genuinely lost. I missed the woman I’d been when we met.

My mother’s death a year later put things in perspective, a loss on a different scale and a sharp reminder that a human lifetime outspans and outshines a dog one. There’s no comparison between the two, except that one is enhanced by the other immeasurably. Carpe diem is a wagging tail.

And thank heaven for books and for writing, in which Pudding remains immortal. She featured in most novels I wrote during her lifetime. A fictional shapeshifter, she’s not only been the inspiration for far too many canine characters to mention but she’s also been people, horses and even a car with a mind of its own. When stubborn, devoted, destructive eccentricity was required, I closed my eyes and pictured her. I still do.

Losing Pudding was a part of the inspiration behind Woman of a Certain Rage, my novel written as Georgie Hall which is out in paperback this month. In it, heroine Eliza is struggling to come to terms with the death of her own ‘lifetime’ dog, Arty at the same time as she grapples with middle-aged invisibility. And Pudding is always by my side in the Comptons novels, bounding through every landscape when I walk there in my imagination – or more precisely when I ride there. In the third book in the series, heroine Pax closes her eyes and gallops in her mind if life gets tough. Her creator has always done this, but nowadays I’m never alone, chased alongside by Pudding as she did so often when alive. We’ve been especially busy exploring the Bardswold villages and vales together lately, and I hope we’ll continue to do so for a long time yet.

When distracted working, I still sometimes catch myself reaching down expecting to feel the creased velvet top of Pudding’s head. Even four years after losing her, I miss her daily, although I’ve long since relented to family pressure and dog love and we now have two rescue greyhounds, sweet-natured divas we adore, although they possess none of Pudding’s fierce sister soul.

I will be forever grateful for the years I shared with the ‘best dog in the world’ and that she became the most gloriously generous personality in midlife. I’m taking inspiration from that. By my calculation, I’ve just passed seven in canine years, and I hope my dog days are just as rewarding. I wish the same for all fellow dog lovers who are also only just coming of age.

More news on the third Comptons book soon.

Woman of a Certain Rage written as Georgie Hall is out in paperback on 12th May.

Stratford Literary Festival

I’m thrilled to share the news that I’ll be appearing alongside the Guardian’s TV critic and all-round womanly wit Lucy Mangan at Stratford Literary Festival on Friday 12th November, where we’ll be talking motherhood, midlife and all its multi-tasking with the wonderful Jane Garvey.

Lucy’s first novel Are We Having Fun Yet? is a riot of family chaos featuring a heroine reluctantly approaching forty (I’m reading it and can vouch for its belly laugh brilliance). Meanwhile, I’ll be waving the banner for the fifty-something female renaissance in Woman of a Certain Rage, written as Georgie Hall.

The event is taking place at the Bear Pit Theatre, Stratford upon Avon, 4pm-5pm

Tickets priced £14 are available from this LINK

Or call the box office on 0333 666 3366

And do check out the festival’s many other superb Winter Weekend events. I’d love to see you there!

Jackie Collins, a Pocket Diary and a Box of Treasures

I read recently that Jackie Collins kept an immaculate archive, every press clipping about herself neatly cut out and filed, all editions of her books in every language shelved in order. No mean feat for a woman about whom so many reams of material was written and whose literary output was so prolific. She was one of my heroes when I first set out to write women’s fiction, her plots dazzlingly saucy and her work ethic phenomenal.

This week, I wanted to take a photo of my first Fiona Walker novel alongside this month’s debut by my alter ego Georgie Hall, the hardbacks of which are gorgeous. But when I searched for a hardback of French Relations, I drew a blank. I used to have one on the shelf in my study, but I must have given it away. There’s a box of my early editions and proof copies in the back of garage, but to get to that (and I tried) involves clambering over a quad bike, broken desk, cat boxes, unwanted satellite dish, assorted coal scuttles and fire irons, several saddles and a mountain of other book boxes, mostly my mother’s, a huge library she brought with her when cancer led her to downsize from the family home to live with us, and which was still only part of the way through sorting when she died. Faced with a wall of political biography and Iris Murdoch, I gave up. Then, feeling like J R Hartley, I ordered a second-hand French Relations hardback on eBay.

That’s just a very small part of the reason I will never, ever be as successful as Jackie Collins.

What I did find in the garage, crushed on its side between Christmas decorations and an elderly record player, was an unfamiliar box marked ‘Fiona’. Inside, beautifully tied up with ribbons, were several small, carefully curated collections. One held theatre programmes from the 80s and 90s full of hand-written notes beside each cast list saying things like ‘dreadful!’ ‘strange stutter’ and ‘unconvincing limp’. These date back to my drama degree for which wrote countless reviews. Another ribbon-tied collection from the same era contained letters I wrote as a student, all heavily illustrated with drawings and exaggerated truths. A third contained a pile of hardback notebooks full of ideas for novels, screenplays and the Edinburgh Fringe sketch show I never staged. Amongst my favourite treasures from the box is a photo album dating back to the mid-eighties judging from the shoulder pads on display, and labelled ‘Novel Mood Board’, in which I’d pasted pictures cut out from a selection of publications: Freemans catalogues, Just 17, Horse and Hound, several Sunday supplements and the Radio Times. There’s a lot of horsepower, floppy-haired testosterone and perms in there. I’d forgotten it existed.

That box, which arrived with Mum seven years ago, has lain undiscovered until now. In it are the seeds from which my writing career grew. Not the tattered, note-covered first manuscript of French Relations which I’ve still got crammed in one of my own boxes in the back of the garage along with that hardback author copy, but the very inspiration, the stuff I might have otherwise discarded, all of which she’d kept and catalogued, my own precious Jackie Collins, born to the same generation of women. She always kept my press cuttings too. And she displayed my hardbacks in date order.

Right in the bottom of the box was an old ’90s pocket diary of mine, scrawled with the days on which I was working part-time in a saddlery, rehearsals for an am dram play I was set designing, the parties and weddings that studded every weekend in my twenties. I didn’t get the significance at first, until I saw an entry for 16th July 1993: SOLD MY BOOK.

My mother kept it all. I’ll be forever grateful for finding it this month, this year. I’m now exactly the same age she was in 1993. I hope she would have been as proud of Georgie Hall and Woman of a Certain Rage as she was of Fiona Walker and French Relations. We both owe her – and Jackie Collins – a huge debt of gratitude.

Virtually Worldly

Mid lock-down, feeling guilty that we hadn’t taken the children anywhere more exciting than the local footpaths for over a year, we came up with the bright idea of a Virtual Reality headset. This way, we told them eagerly, we could each scale Machu Picchu, ski down the Matterhorn, lie on a tropical beach, parachute out of a plane – all from the comfort of the sofa in 360° 4K clarity.

We found a second-hand one on eBay, which I set up with my phone, ignoring the titters that ‘Mummy looks like she’s got a clog strapped to her face, f’nah!’

Having witnessed me walking into the kitchen wall and falling over the dogs, our oldest daughter then flatly refused to put it on, and still hasn’t. She says she’s seen Johnny English 3, the VR experiment doesn’t go well, and that’s enough. Our youngest tried it once, went straight for the Scariest Roller Coaster Ride and screamed ‘get me out of here!’ until the clog was lifted.

Their father and I, however, were immediately entranced. Taking it in turns to strap on the clog, we’ve visited Jurassic Park, fought Star Wars droids with light sabres, sat amid the Philharmonic Orchestra, perched on a stage amp to get the best festival view of The Kaiser Chiefs and flown all over the globe sight-seeing – the Pyramids, Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, Tokyo, Paris, Angkor Wat, Niagara Falls. For two rural workaholics denied social lives for many months – and devoid of grown-up travelling since parenthood – it’s been a revelation to enjoy front row seats for theatre and dance and to tour the finest art galleries in the world, even if we do have to do it one at a time.

Whilst perhaps not the shared family experience we’d first anticipated, the girls can see the benefits of all this parental comedy value. Gathering round the wood-burner in the sitting room of an evening, we no longer bellyache if they want to use the TV for an online Splatoon battle instead of us all watching David Attenborough together. Instead, one of us is now Clog Face, getting up close and personal with a colour-changing cuttlefish, lazing under the shade of a baobab with a lion or fighting a river croc – arms flailing, pictures and ornaments under threat, cats terrified – while the other supports eagerly. I just hope this excited, demented, sightless vision of one parent with the other as carer isn’t prescient in any way.

If we do need to allay fears on that front, we can even add VR into the ongoing middle-aged fitness campaign to help us live to a happy and healthy dotage. There’s a whole world of 360° gyms, boxercise classes and dance clubs to explore in bad weather, although now that Spring is bursting out sunnily in real life, we’d far rather be checking out the local woodland haze of emerging bluebells and wild garlic on dog walks. Plus neither of us want to spotted through the window by the postman doing the Jane Fonda workout in a VR headset.

And while it’s true we’ve been casting aside the clog more as the world around us opens up a crack at a time, I’m not abandoning it entirely because it’s such fun, and it’s turned out to be an invaluable research tool for a writer. How else could I fly over the Cotswolds, gallop along a Panamanian beach and nip up the Eiffel Tower to check out the view, all before lunch? It’s never going to be as good as the real world – or as good as reading a brilliant book – but given I live so much in my imagination professionally, having an extension to that is bliss. The children have no idea what they’re missing out on…

Meet my other half

I have book news, and I hope you’ll forgive me if it’s not quite what you were expecting:

Today, I’m thrilled – and slightly terrified – to be able to share the news that my first novel as alter-ego Georgie Hall will be coming out in the UK this summer entitled Woman of a Certain Rage, and here is the official ‘cover reveal’:

At fifty, Eliza sometimes feels as though she’s vanishing a hormone at a time. Then a rebellious moment lands her in deep water, and she starts to realise midlife might be a glass half full after all.

The initial idea for Woman of a Certain Rage came to me in the same way my first foray into fiction, French Relations, began in the early 90s when I couldn’t find any twenty-something heroines to relate to, so I made one up. Now twice that age, I’ve set out to show a stage of womanhood seldom depicted in fiction, let alone with humour and empathy: the menopause years. We’re bolder and wiser, ready to turn up the heat, and we have secrets to share.

I’m enormously proud of this book, although I don’t want to mislead readers into expecting a big-cast Walker romp, which is why Georgie Hall’s name is on the cover. While we share the same sense of humour and love of creating unforgettable characters – as well as sharing the same publisher – writing as Georgie allows me to focus on just one central voice which offers readers something different: Eliza’s unswervingly honest, sharp and occasionally opinionated take on life as a ‘midult’.

Rest assured I’m still busy writing as Fiona Walker, with the third Compton novel on its way and my passion for plotlines crammed with villagers, horses, dogs and love affairs as ebullient as ever. Nothing will stop me country romping for years to come, and I hope my two writing sides will complement one another.

To save confusion, Georgie Hall has her own website www.georgie-hall.com and social media streams @georgiehalluk, and I’ll post lots more about Woman of a Certain Rage there over coming weeks and months, along with an extract and news of further books. I really hope you find the time to visit, follow and share. This is unchartered territory for me, and having the support of readers who already enjoy my Fiona Walker novels would mean the world.

To visit Georgie’s website and connect via social media, please click image above. And to pre-order Woman of a Certain Rage from Amazon, just click the kettle…