Hello and welcome to my website.  I am a writer and a marmalade-maker which as a combo works surprisingly well: while the marmalade is cooking I can write, and while I chop oranges and grapefruits I 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 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.... 

 

A few of my favourite writers are  Wodehouse, Dickens and Trollope, Hilary Mantel, William Boyd, Laurie Graham, Barbara Pym, Rose Tremain, Mick Herron and Belinda Bauer.  One of my most treasured things is a letter PG Wodehouse wrote to me in 1972, where he writes about how the cat insists on lying on his typewriter when he’s trying to work and how he has a stray foxhound called Bill.