Hello Readers,  I have got back onto the Facebook. Mainly to promote my books to be honest. HOWEVER, I hope to post the odd interesting thing to make it a bit more interesting. I do have a long history of love-hate with the platform (with all the platforms to be honest.) I don't mind the ads (well, of course I don't or I'd be a hyprocrite) but its all the random stuff, isn't it, that is so annoying. Stuff you don't want to see, and can't be bothered with. And all the fake stuff. Like the other day I saw a post which said there is a Golden Girls reboot with Tina Fey, Lisa Kudrow and others. Really, I thought. Why would you? The entertainment industry has done strange things... but really? So, as I do these days, I figured it was fake, and did not even bother to read more. Sure enough when I mentioned it to someone, they checked and it was FAKE. Even if it wasn't fake, you can not do better than Rose, Bea, Sophia and Blanche. YOU CAN NOT.  But I am not fake, s...

Last night we watched the final in the series Ludwig . Oh my gosh. It is one of the best TV shows I have seen in ages, and we have to wait for series two, whenever that happens. I am sure it will. On the plus side, we can watch them all over again with the On Demand on line website of the TV.  We had also been watching Matlock with Kathy Bates, which has taken a hiatus on New Zealand screens but of the two, both brilliant, I love the comedy drama of Ludwig, and absolutely love David Mitchell, who I'd only seen on the TV Show Would I lie to you? Now I'm getting shown Mitchell and Webb skits all the time by the fam.Hilairious. Sunday nights won't be the same without dear  Ludwig .

This is a blog I wrote for a now defunct pop culture site I used to contribute to, some years ago.   A friend was reading some fiction I’d written the other day and after telling me what she did like about it, commented, “But you’re no Jane Austen.”   The only Jane Austen I have read is “ Emma .” and it was read under duress at university. I consider myself a person of not massively low intelligence, but it took three reads to get my head around it. Interestingly, that paper was not only my first and only complete Jane Austen experience, but my first and only experience of analysing English literature. I did get an A but not without suffering a degree of depression as a result. Yes, I gained an appreciation for some things (Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnets, oh my gosh!) but analysing Emily Dickinson was enough to sap the will to live right out of me. Fortuitously, at the end of that semester, I saw the movie Stargate on TV,  and promptly un-enrolled myself fr...

 Apparently some time in January is Clean Off Your Desk Day. I don't know who invents these things. But a bit of a search came up with some writing room set ups that look to me legitimate.  First up is is Roald Dahl's, (from The Guardian.) I like the old chair with the tray to hold his equipment though I read somewhere he did have a bad back. https://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/40-inspiring-workspaces-of-the-famously-creative Martin Amis. This is good, too. A bit of mess. Stuff  on the floor. Pretty much the way I write.  And this is Danielle Steel's, from her Facebook page. She said it is her Paris office and writing space, includes a vintage typewriter for writing, and a computer she uses for emails etc. She has personal memorabilia around her as she writes.  https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10157345663904713&id=21250804712&set=a.10150666308874713 My writing style is a combination of the first two. I like sitting with my laptop, and I have a des...

When I'm writing (or really, when I'm awake) I drink a fair bit of tea and coffee. When I say coffee, I am talking instant. Out of a jar.  As for tea, I drink English Breakfast, and with both beverages, I like it with milk.  Plus apparently my bones need the calcium and I love milk. A milkshake, and I'm in heaven. But there is always talk about caffeine and the diuretic effect of it, and I found some things lately that suggest coffee and tea aren't all that diuretic at all.  Then I found an article on a Tea website which says if you let English Breakfast steep for shorter times, the caffeine is way, way less. I was quite pleased about that because I don't tend to like strong tea. So if you steep your tea for a minute, which is okay by me, there is only 14 g of caffeine it it. Three minutes which is about the maximum steepage for my taste, and the cup only has about 22mg of caffeine. A whole five minutes though and you've got 42mg of caffeine in that cup (and a r...

  Happy New Year! As per usual, we are having a nice and quiet one. I had saved the bone from the lamb roast at Christmas and boiled it up to make a bone broth a few days ago, so we had that and it was super delicious with silverbeet from the garden. I know. Silverbeet, delicious? It is one of the vilest vegetables known to man but was pretty darned good in this broth. Had that for tea with a really nice bread one of the kids made. Then used up the left over sponge to make another trifle. Really nice. I've begun planning out my diaries, and I've been getting incredibly distracted watching YouTube videos on journalling and creating junk journals, so I found an old library book, re-covered it and I will use that, along with the proper diary I got for Christmas. I do love this time of year. Love it! So 2024 is coming to an end... It wasn't a great year for the writing output, but it has ended productively, and 2025 I am looking forward to as being a good writing year.  Out of ...

Christmas was lovely.  I did a lamb for the roast dinner which was different and really nice. I'd wanted to do a roast beef in lieu of our family's traditional pork (we are not fans of turkey at all)  but couldn't really find any suitable beef roast, so settled for the lamb. Very, very good.  I made Yorkshire puddings using an Alison Holst recipe and although they did shrink, they tasted fine. The only green veg was peas, but I also roasted kumara, spud and pumpkin. Still got leftovers, yum! For dessert we had pavlova and trifle. One of the boys made the pav and as we cut into it, gasps of happiness at the fantastic marshmallow inside and the crispy outer. I even managed to scrounge some raspberries off the bush to plonk on the top. The trifle was yum. I bought the sponge this year from the supermarket  (I never seem to able to make a decent sponge myself). There were dollops of jam on the cut up sponge, drizzled with orange juice and the juice from the can of peache...