a day of interviews

Current work: nonfiction today
Listening to: Genesis, Calling All Stations
Reading: Lilian Darcy’s Café Du Jour (just finished it – was very, very good)

Busy day today – spending the morning in BBC Radio Norfolk’s NCR room chatting to radio stations across the country. Am going on be on BBC Southern Counties Radio and BBC Radio Manchester in the morning; am also doing a pre-recorded one with BBC Radio Leeds. More to come tomorrow and Wednesday. (And in between I’ll probably nip into the library and work there.)

This is all promotion for Mills & Boon’s support for the Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign – for every Modern or Modern Extra books bought this month, M&B will donate 10p to the campaign. Although I don’t have a book out this month (my next two will be available on the Mills & Boon website in November or in shops in December), M&B have asked me to do the promotional activity because they know it’s a cause very dear to my heart – I lost my mum to breast cancer, and my 2006 RNA award shortlisted book, Where the Heart Is, is very closely involved with the subject.

Apart from that, I spent Sunday morning baking – we went swimming in the afternoon with friends and had tea over at theirs, so of course I needed to make cheese stars and cookies and lemon cake. (Yes, THOSE ones. The recipes are all on the website.)

radio

I’m on BBC Radio Norfolk at 11.15 this morning, talking to Chris Goreham about the Norfolk Almanac of Disasters. And then I’m skiving off for the day with DH and the kids. The words ‘Simpsons movie’ are being bandied about…

Yesterday – as it’s a special place for us – we went to Wells-next-the-sea. The sun was shining. And we sat on the beach for about three hours (sans book, sans PDA) just watching the clouds scud across and paddling with the kids and collecting shells; the water was lovely. Best thing about Wells is that the beach is enormous. Although there were loads of people there, we weren’t crammed in and you still had lots of space. (I liked the pattern of lines here. I should've maybe taken this with less sky and got the line of seashells in too, but I'm still playing with the camera and getting used to it.)

One thing I hadn’t seen before: when the wind blew, little clumps of sand started rolling down the beach, a bit like a cross between a snowball and tumbleweed, gradually increasing in size. Very odd.

Came home to find the most lovely bouquet of flowers from my best friend. (Waves to London with a big smile.) Then out for dinner, when we had another draughts match between son and DH. Son was getting fed up with being trounced (chess is his game – interestingly, it seems he’s 14th in his school British Chess Championship, so how come he’s taken until now to tell us?) and challenged me. I’m not good at draughts so he was beating me… until DH took over, and taught him some finer points of strategy (i.e. why I’d done badly and why son ultimately lost the game). It’s lovely watching them doing some father and son stuff; this and pitch-and-putt will definitely be bonding for them. (Son claims to be rubbish at sport, as does daughter - help, they were meant to inherit DH’s sporting brilliance, not my hopelessness!)