interesting names – and a discovery

Current work: Med duo
Listening to: Diana Krall
Reading: Sarah Morgan, The Italian’s New-Year Marriage Wish (as always, a fab read – her Italian heroes are always gorgeous)

The National Office of Statistics has released the top 10 names given to babies in England and Wales this year. In descending order:

Boys' names: Jack, Thomas, Oliver, Joshua, Harry, Charlie, Daniel, William, James, Alfie.

Girls' names: Grace, Ruby, Olivia, Emily, Jessica, Sophie, Chloe, Lily, Ella, Amelia.

The list of the top 50 names for each is on the press release at http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/names1207.pdf - interesting reading for novelists. I’m using one of the girls’ names this time round (Madison) – but my hero is Greek so his obviously doesn’t appear.

I was messing about on YouTube yesterday for the right music to act as background to the book. (There’s the Venetian masked ball… and then this scene involving a hot air balloon that wasn’t in my original outline, but makes perfect sense because of the masked ball. Thank you to the lovely RNA members and fellow M&B authors who responded to my squeaks for help on research – waves particularly hard to Fiona Lowe in Aussie and Jenny Haddon.) Anyway, I discovered someone with a pretty good voice (except for the vocal runs – he does them well, but I prefer jazz without too much ornamentation). But… even more than this, this guy has a really, really spectacular smile.

And stunning eyes.

Smouldering, in fact. One of the comments to one song moans that he looks as if he’s just got out of bed. Uh, honey, that’s the POINT of a romance hero *g*. Works for me. (Wish my DH could sing like this. But no - I get bloody Badfinger crooned at me. Sigh. If I show him the clip he’ll do a parody, so am not doing that.)

I think my Greek doctor hero just morphed.

Am I sharing?

Heh. Just call me Kate Greedy :o) (And yeah, I know exactly who’s going to email me over this and make demands.)

I’m going through a real jazz phase at the moment. Have just been verrrry naughty and bought myself three albums on Amazon (not from the YouTube singer, who isn’t signed – the day he is, I’ll pre-order his CD) and a George Shearing (jazz piano, no vocals - and it took me AGES to wade through his albums and find out which one has 'The Shadow of Your Smile' on it. Would've rung Dad but it was a bit late. Look up 'George Shearing' and 'Smile' on YouTube - is fab performance in Tokyo including a bit of Bach).

As you can probably tell, the dark days of December are over for another year. Relief. I didn’t do the waking-up-crying bit this year, but I haven’t been very nice to live with, this week. I apologise if I’ve sounded bad-tempered or just plain miserable recently. I did try not to.

And I also apologise for not posting about something important yesterday: happy second anniversary of being an M&B Medicals author to my friend Margaret McDonagh (who writes lovely, lovely, family doctor books and is also in the Penhally series with me next year).

Anyway. I’m off with my Greek doctor until the kids surface.