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.