Catchup in real life (win a book)

Have been doing some exploring with the kids, involving areas of the county we haven’t really gone to before. (This is work. As I've just sold another nonfic book, I'm working on three at once plus one on spec, all of which need pics and therefore mean family research trips. DH is with us, this week, and the younger members of my research team are a tad disgruntled to find that means no cafe and chocolate cake. Oops.)

Norfolk has more round-towered churches than anywhere else in the country. This is Hales church, which is seriously pretty – thatched roof, Norman blank arcading outside (and a fab Norman door), and inside you can actually see the imprint of the weave of the basket in the Saxon splay window.

We also have a very odd church tower at Burgh St Peter (the church is actually dedicated to St Mary, not St Peter). It was built by the Boycott family as a kind of memorial - the family whose name has passed into general usage as the word 'boycott'. Charles, the grandson of the man who made the tower, was a land agent who tried to enforce rent rises for an absentee landlord in Ireland; everyone refused to speak to him or his family, to work for him or to sell him goods.

And just to prove how rural an area this is – here’s a brood of pheasant chicks who took over the road.

From there we ended up at the seaside. This is the new big wheel at Yarmouth.


And here are the wind turbines. The sky is not blue, by the way. This is a North Sea storm about to blow. (See clouds on the pic above, taken about three minutes before.) I liked the quality of the light here. You'd never believe I had a huge funfair right behind me, with one of the oldest rollercoasters in Europe, would you?



In other stuff… I’m doing an interview at Book Talk with J&J, so do drop by and take up the chance to win a copy of One Night, One Baby.

The Modern Heat girls are also doing a whole series of blogs at I Heart Presents – so do drop by there, too!