Welcome to my website.  I am a writer but I also sew and cook,  which works surprisingly well: while the marmalade is cooking I can write, and while I chop oranges and grapefruits or sew I can think.  I have written for The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, Country Illustrated, the Scottish Field, Saga magazine, The Spectator and The Oldie.  I did an MA in Creative Writing at West Dean in 2011 and began to write fiction too, both contemporary and historical. 

 

I have four grown-up children and I live in West Sussex with a Parson Jack Russell Terrier called Beano. 

 

I write about pretty much anything that comes up – the countryside, children, cooking, health, chickens, dating, the Tudors.... 

 

Some of my favourite writers are Wodehouse, Dickens and Trollope, Hilary Mantel, William Boyd, Laurie Graham, Barbara Pym, Mick Herron and Rose Tremain.   I treasure a letter PG Wodehouse wrote to me in 1972, in which he tells me that the cat insists on lying on his desk when he’s trying to work and how he has a stray foxhound called Bill.