25 March
First place!
I am delighted to report I am £15 in book tokens better off than I was before the results of the Ayr Writers Club short story competition were announced. Yes, I managed to win the competition with my story The Queue, which went through the GSFWC school of hard knocks before I submitted it. It’s shorter than I usually write, and I found it hard to keep to the 2000 - 2500-word guideline, but I seem to have succeeded because the adjudicator said I’d managed to introduce not only the plot but also the characters very succinctly.
Allow me to gloat.
I shall put The Queue up on this site when I have the time, so you will (eventually) find it by navigating to my stories section and looking in the Science Fiction column.
10 March
Home from Rome
Dylan arranged for us to go to Rome for a few days. He sorted the flights, the accommodation, the itinerary. I sorted the cost.
There were ups and downs. My foot swelled up alarmingly on the first day, so that by the evening I was lame. Fortunately it wasn’t so bad on the second day, when we wandered around and saw, among other things, the Spanish Steps.
Our apartment was literally a four-minute walk from the Coliseum and Dylan got tickets for us to go there on our third and last full day. It rained. It rained and rained and rained. Never mind, said Ivy, we’ll be all right once we get inside.
Even wet and miserable, it’s an impressive place. Huge. W gor back, dried, and went out for a meal because it had stopped raining. Except that, half way there, it started again. When people ask me what I think of Rome I now have a ready answer. It rains a lot.
10 Feb
This and That
I was wrong about Sabalenka… so sue me. But Alcaraz stood up for me and only Norrie and our men’s doubles pair did well. Come back, Andy, all is forgiven. England not doing so well in the T20 competition, losing to the Windies today. Mind you, that’s not really cricket, is it? Off to Rome next week on a trip organised by son #3. Let’s hope a) it’s not too wet, b) it’s not too crowded and c) it doesn’t take too long to do the biometric thing once we get there. Me, worried? I’ll let you know at the end of next week.
27 Jan
Mixed fortunes
So there are no Brits left in the second week of the Australian Open, which is sad but not entirely unexpected. It looks to me as if Alcaraz and Sabalenka look pretty unstoppable, even allowing for Sinner. Still, there’s better new on the cricket front with England managing to beat Sri Lanka in Sri Lanka, thanks to a 100-ball century from Root and another century from Brook that seemed to take not much more than one over. Why couldn’t he (and the others) have done that in Australia? Maybe next time, in England? We can but hope.
10 Jan
Number six
News just in from New Zealand. It would seem that my daughter, who has been living in Auckland for… um… quite a few years now, is expecting her second child. And my sixth grandchild. Caitlin, who is four going on five, really wants a younger sister. Given that the four grandchildren over here in the UK are all boys, I guess that would even things up a bit. Well, we shall find out in July.
7 Jan
As They Grow Older
Still catching up on posts missed because of the no-site period: I am delighted to report that As They Grow Older (which you can read more - a lot more - about in the Writing section of this site) was formally published during November 2015. Appropriately enough, the actual book launch took place on Halloween, in Waterstones Ayr. Quite a few people turned up (thank-you, everyone), including my optician, an entire gang from Homesure, the property management company who look after the renting out of our annex, some members of the Ayr Writing Club, and last but not least some old friends who I’ve known for 60 years who were visiting at the time, not entirely coincidentally.
Some copies were signed and sold, and I think everyone enjoyed themselves. I certainly did. I’d better start writing something else that’ll appeal to Sparsile books.
6 Jan
Another year, another website
Welcome to 2026. Let’s hope the entire world still exists by 2027, and hasn’t been blown up, melted or drowned.
You may have noticed there’s been a big gap since my last post (May 2025). That’s because there has been no website during that period to post to. Michael and I decided that the previous host of the website was becoming too expensive. Plus it kept inveigling me to pay for all sorts of bells and whistles, none of which I wanted. So we switched to Squarespace.
In my naivety I thought we could just download everything from the previous version of the site, upload it into Squarespace and hey presto! the new site would be formed. But no. Every page… every word… every photo or image had to be carefully turned into Squarespace-ese. I did almost all of it myself, and I have to admit it was quite fun sorting out all the various issues that arose. I even copied and pasted some CSS into the relevant Squarespace spot. (I don’t really know how CSS works, but still.)
The result is what you see. Quite a lot has happened over the last few months, not least the publication of another of my books, so I expect I shall be making a few more posts over the coming days and weeks. Oh, and I read a lot of books and watched a lot of films during the no-website period, so I shall have to update my review pages too.