Of course, everyone says there’s no need.  Why bother?  people say.  Surely everyone in Crete speaks English.  And yes, most people have either an impressive, very fluent command of English or can at least get by.  Only the very elderly have little or no grasp.  Walk into any shop in any small town, city or village and, once the assistants grasp that Greek is not exactly one’s mother tongue, they switch swiftly, graciously and mostly effortlessly into English. And it makes me feel very ashamed that, after 20 years of going to Crete – with 8 of those years spent...

I am currently re-reading Riceyman Steps by Arnold Bennett.  I first read this when I was a student studying  for an English Literature degree and Bennett was required reading and the starting point for our Modern Fiction course – we didn’t call them modules in those days!  I loved his writing then and read everything he wrote with The Old Wives’  Tale probably my favourite.  I recently found a copy of this in our local Oxfam bookshop and will move on to it next. Riceyman Steps is set in Clerkenwell in London, an area I first got to know well in...

For the past couple of months, I have put my third novel aside and returned to my first novel that I finished some years ago, but only ever published as an eBook – with minimal publicity so that, no doubt, approximately 11 people read it….! Partly, my cautious approach to releasing this novel was sheer fear – how dare I think anyone would be interested in reading 300 pages or so of a novel I had entirely imagined and created?  I was hardly a novice writer when I wrote it with decades of publishing short stories with women’s commercial magazines...

Worthing was the setting for the UK Southern Book Show on Sunday October 28th – and it was a good day for making contacts with a lot of other writers and readers. For me, the highlight was delivering a talk on aspects of writing. I managed to cover: sources of creativity, exploiting memory for writing, characterisation and techniques of flash fiction – by going at a break-neck speed and with the support of a lot of hand-outs so that, hopefully, the audience members had something to remind them and to look back on once they left the room, a little...

There I was, at the alarmingly young age of 19, holding my first acceptance letter from a Conde Nast publication: the editor of BRIDES magazine had accepted my very first piece of writing submitted in the hopes of being published, a humorous article entitled SISTER OF THE BRIDE, and was paying me £15 for the privilege. I was launched! This was going to be easy, I thought. A career in freelance journalism to sit alongside a few years of teaching, after which I would abandon the classroom in favour of devoting myself entirely to the (manual at the time) typewriter....

Nine days or so in Crete back at our house, Blue Heaven, in Gavalohori, and there’s time to return to my new novel and actually make some progress.  Writing whilst looking out at the White Mountains in one direction, over the village and across to the coast in the other, somehow makes it far easier to focus then when trying to write at home with constant distractions of the phone ringing, an untidy house calling for my attention and the cats demanding to be fed!  (although we do appear to have a Cretan cat who likes to attach himself to...