Tuesday 27 April 2010


Well, I'm sorry for all those people who couldn't go on holiday, or have been stuck abroad and couldn't get home because of the ash cloud. My sister was going to visit me from Norway, and she couldn't come.

But I can't say that I haven't enjoyed the peace and quiet without the planes roaring overhead. And I've never before seen the sky in London so blue.

Just compare these two pictures that I took in my garden. The sky when the planes weren't flying was a gorgeous, perfect blue. As soon as the planes came back, the vapour trails came with them, and misted the sky over again. Wouldn't it be great if we could find a way to fly without messing up the environment?





Friday 2 April 2010

I've just been to a meeting at the Society of Authors, to hear Mary Hoffman and Rhiannon Lassiter talk about blogging. Wow! Such professionals! But I think I'll just plod on doing my occasional post when I feel like it.

And I feel like it today, because I've received in the post the first copies of The Witching Hour in paperback. I think it looks great. I hope you do too.



The story transported me back to the seventeenth century when I was writing it, to remote, misty corners of Scotland. Just to give you a taster, this is how it begins:

"I was the first one to see the whale lying dead on the sand at Scalpsie Bay. It must have been washed up in the night. I could imagine it, flopping out of the sea, thrashing its tail and opening and shutting the cavern of its mouth. It was huge and shapeless, a horrible dead thing, and it looked as if it would feel slimy if you dared to touch it. I crept up to it cautiously. There were monsters in the deep, I knew, and a great one, the Leviathan, which the Lord had made to be the terror of fishermen. Was this one of them? Would it come to life, and devour me?

It was a cold day in December, the sun barely risen, and I'd pulled my shawl tightly round my head and shoulders, but it wasn't only the chill of the wet sand beneath my bare feet that made me shiver. There was a strangeness in the air. The early mist was clearing. Across the water I could already make out the Isle of Arran, rearing up out of the sea, the tops of its mountains hidden as usual in a crown of clouds. I'd seen Arran a dozen times a day, every day of my life, each time I'd stepped out of the door of my grandmother's cottage. I knew it so well that I hardly ever noticed it.

But today, as I looked up at the mountains from the dead whale in front of me, the island seemed to shift, and for a dreadful moment I thought it was moving towards me, creeping across the water, coming for me, wanting to swallow me up, along with the beach, and Granny's cottage, and Scalpsie Bay, and the whole of the Isle of Bute..."