Authors Electric

Rusty, newly arrived Rusty arrived two weeks ago and trotted straight into my heart. Not that I flatter myself that my feelings are of any more than pragmatic interest to him. He seems a self-possessed little pony, not nervy, not needy, sizing up his new situation and making the best of it. A sensible chap.       My own riding days are over but we have two stables and some sheds which enable my daughter Georgeanna to base her two retired racehorses here. Rusty’s job is as a minder for Backbord, a hurdles winner at Cheltenham in his day (not with us, I hasten to add). Georgeanna was his work rider, led him up at the races and bought him for a nominal sum when his career came to an end. He’s now 23, elderly for a thoroughbred, and has recently suffered the loss of an eye.       Backbord is so devoted to his stable companion Bo (22)  that it’s become impossible to separate them. Theirs is an intense relationship with a competitive edge. They can...

  It was late in the evening and we were still sitting round the kitchen table in Yorkshire, finishing our red wine, knowing we should have gone to bed but relishing the time with our youngest son Archie and his wife Steph. We’d come up from Essex to this small West Riding town watch Archie’s pupils perform Mary Poppins . Steph had met us earlier with our granddaughter Ada, now sweetly asleep upstairs. It had been a lovely day away. Then my phone rang. It was Bertie, our son who lives as our ‘next door neighbour’ at home. This means a small separate building in the same space - 'the shed'. He and his dogs had unexpectedly left home that day, to visit a friend in distress. An unplanned absence.. He’d just returned, seen upstairs lights left on, discovered the back door open and our bedroom in chaos. Understandably he was shocked and upset. No, not normal mess ‘Call the police,’ we said. ‘You have to call the police.’ He did so and was told he mustn’t touch anything, mustn...

The scent of dew on barley (photo credit Jack Thorogood) Regularly at this time of year I snuff the air for that warm, baked biscuit smell and listen out for the rumble of heavy machinery hurrying past or working late into the evening until the dew falls. Harvest hymns run on a loop inside my head as the fields open yet more widely to the sky. Harvest feels purposeful, potentially triumphant, but breath-holdingly tense. This is a triumph that won’t be earned until the last load has been brought in.  There’s no other moment quite like it.   It's a vestigial response from forgotten generations of farming ancestors and the period when I was living in a farming family and would likely be found packing a basket at tea time and hurrying to the field with a flask and sandwiches and the children clamouring to be lifted up for a ride. Two things prompt this month’s blog (three, if you count Francis’s barely concealed expression of dismay when I threatened to re-share someth...

The stepmother in Pebble is not a bad person. Her name is Lottie Livesey.  She’s sensitive and caring (if occasionally a little too determined to do what she believes to be right) and there is never any doubt that she loves her stepsons (Luke and Liam) just as much as she loves her daughters (Anna and Vicky). She’s also far too principled and clear-thinking to allow her deteriorating relationship with their father to lessen her concern for his boys. So, how to get her off the stage and allow them the freedom to get into jeopardy? The solution seemed delightfully simple…put her on it.  Lottie is a folk-singer whose career is beginning to take wings. In The Lion of Sole Bay I dispatched her to a recording studio in Italy to make her breakthrough album. I thought she’d earned a holiday after her grim time as an invisible, illegal, worker in the early volumes, living  in a shipping container somewhere half-finished in the Ipswich docklands. Three of the four chil...