Authors Electric

This month, we took advantage of the National Trust's free autumn tickets to visit Agatha Christie's holiday home, Greenway on the River Dart. You can stroll down through the gardens to the boathouse where her famous detective Hercule Poirot solved one of his murder mysteries in "Dead Man's Folly", which was filmed in the grounds. You can even sit in the author's favourite chair with a panoramic view of the river and watch seals basking at low tide on the rocks opposite. There is a lot more river traffic these days, but it is still a magical place. So what else would you expect to find in her garden than writing prompts to inspire today's authors? I found this nature-inspired prompt on the path to the fountain where Agatha's much-loved pets rest in their peaceful little graves. It's one of my favourite spots in the garden and immediately brings water to mind, closely linked in my memory to the grotto further down the garden where a goddess called K...

It’s the holiday season! Long summer days, schools are out or almost out, and if you're like me you’re probably thinking about a beach somewhere ... I’m lucky in that I live about ten minutes' walk from one of the best sandcastle beaches in the country (according to an experiment carried out by the BBC a few years ago). Above is Preston beach - the one with all the beach huts in the English Riviera resort of Torbay. The red colour of the sand comes from the local sandstone cliffs. You can get here by train on the intercity to Plymouth, which runs along the coast from Exeter via. the recently repaired sea wall at Dawlish. Hop on to the branch line at Newton Abbot, and you'll end up at Paignton, where you can either walk past all the bucket-and-spade shops and casinos to the beach, or board the steam train to continue at a more leisurely fashion down the line to Kingswear and from there via the passenger ferry to the Naval port of Dartmouth. Travel by steam...