Recently, when I was in Paris, I visited the Bon Marché store, which is a regular haunt of mine. I usually head directly to the top floor where they have a very excellent librarie/bookshop. I love to browse there and to see what is being published in French and also who has been translated into…

Quite by chance, while internet browsing, I came across an article in Variety magazine – almost a film industry bible – announcing a new film studio complex converted from warehouses to be opened on the outskirts of Marseille. This is exciting news. France’s Mediterranean coastline from Marseille all the way to Monaco and onwards to…

When I was a child, one of the treats of the week was our family outing to the cinema. The programme back in the mid-fifties, early sixties usually included two films. A ‘B’ movie followed by the main attraction. Today, before the main attraction, spectators are shown endless expensively-shot commercials followed by a series of…

Last Saturday, the 21st January 2017, I met up with a couple of friends alongside the Apollo Fountain  in the impressive Place Massena in Nice. We, along with about seventy others, were gathering to march. We were marching – each of us perhaps for slightly different reasons – against Donald Trump and Mike Pence’s position…

This month my blog is very short. Apologies for that. I am a little unwell. On top of that, due to the loss of my mother earlier this year, my husband and I are having a very low-key Christmas. Today, 26th December, is Boxing Day. It is also St Stephen’s Day, which is celebrated in…

A day or so ago I watched, for the first time in many years, Louis Malle’s wonderful film,  Lacombe, Lucien. I don’t think I have seen it since it was first released in 1974, when I was a young actress living in London. I would have been audience at the Hampstead Everyman or that wonderful…

I am deep in work at present, lost in the brambly mire of editorial notes on my still untitled novel due for publication in 2017. As well, I am also preparing or rather allowing to gestate the novel I am about to begin writing. I am not a Plotter. I start with grainy images of…

I have just returned from a memorable trip to Ireland – my semi-adopted homeland because I was actually born in London. My recently-departed mother and all her family were born and bred in County Laios, set in the Midlands of Ireland. The farm her parents spent their hardworking lives running is still in the family…

Many of my colleagues are writing glorious posts inspired by recent holidays. How envious I feel as I stay locked to my desk, moving inexorably towards my upcoming deadline. However, I did make a short trip to Krakow two weeks ago, for five days, taking all my work with me. I wrote all day in…

What is in a street? It was my husband, Michel’s, birthday last week. We were in Paris. I decided that aside from taking him for a delicious dinner it was time for us to stay up late and go to a jazz club. We haven’t done that in a while. Instead of choosing one of…

William Shakespeare and I were companions way back, from the time when I was about seven. We spent whole long days and nights together, when I had been ‘naughty’, when I was being punished for some misdemeanour or other. Our house in Kent had a spare room in it, a third bedroom, I remember. It…