About

Once upon a time, years ago, I worked with a musical crowd - my husband was a classical cellist and conductor - and I used to read the biographies of musicians, especially singers, with horror. They were very boring. Lists of operas and lists of concert halls. Lists of leading roles.

 

In the hope of confounding that spirit, here follow one or two things you would not necessarily find out in a book jacket and which might just be a bit illuminating. On the flippant side, I swear like a French mercenary and have a pathological dislike of the colour mauve. On the serious side, I have been writing, doodling and dreaming with a pen in my hand since I was little. Reading first was A House at Pooh Corner and The Adventures of Sam Pig and the Cherry Ames nursing capers; before a long gap to Dick Francis and Agatha Christie; and another to Hammond Innes and Alastair Maclean; and at last to the French and Spanish and proper English classics, when I was at Somerville College.

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Poetry and poetic writing are somewhat lacking in the English literary landscape these days. And yet to feel and feel the rhythm of language so that it sings to you is one of the great experiences of reading. If you try Cry the Beloved Country or the tales of Lilian Beckwith or the later novels of John Buchan or anything by Yeats and you remain unmoved, then perhaps my writing is not for you (not that I am for one moment putting myself at their level, she adds hastily). But if you like a little magic, stylistic or narrative, if you like to read stories that are fractionally out of reach, if you like to lose yourself in the imaginative world that is made possible by means of the written word, then maybe we can talk.

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PS. If you do actually want to know the boring  bits, my cv is here.

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