A Tour of Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute

I have been visiting the Isle of Bute all my life on family holidays, and as you’ll know if you follow this blog, I am still a regular visitor there to visit family. My latest trip coincided with the Glasgow Fair holiday, when traditionally hordes of Weegies go ‘Doon the Watter’ for a break – …

London – For Business, But Mostly Pleasure

The paperback of Her Heart for a Compass, the first book I co-authored with Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, was released in May this year. To celebrate, Mills&Boon hosted a live Historical Book Club event at the News Building, so for the second time in the space of a few weeks I paid a visit …

The Great British Sewing Bee – A Hive of Inspiration

My mum is a beautiful seamstress who once had her own made to measure dress shop. When I was wee, she used to make matching outfits for me and my doll (Tiny Tears at first, later Cindy – never Barbie). I got a toy machine when I was about five that did a simple chain …

Brighton Rocks!

My first experiences of Brighton were literary, and though read around about the same time in my late teens, their depiction of the fashionable seaside resort on the South Coast were poles apart. Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock was set in the sleazy underworld of the town in the 1950s, a stark contrast to the Regency …

Cat-Sitting, Chilling and Taking Stock

For the last two years, before and after lockdown, I have been working full out with very little breaks between books. In February this year, Sarah Ferguson and I handed over our second book together (A Most Intriguing Lady, more on this soon), and I then jumped straight in to writing a Christmas novella which …

What I’ve Been Reading

Fiction I haven’t had a lot of time for reading in the past few months, so I’ve mostly been turning to comfort reads in my fiction, and continuing with three quite different detective series that I’ve been very much enjoying. A Winter Memory, Lulu Taylor. I met the very charming Lulu Taylor at the Yeovil …

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