"Travels on a Greyhound Bus" -- 5 day free promo over Easter

My novel "Travels on a Greyhound Bus" will be free on Amazon from 17 until 21 April inclusive.

This is an easy, fun read about how relationships change over time and how people react when those relationships come under pressure. It has some good independent reviews from Laura's Book Reviews and Kirsty I Heart Books, and has 4.6 stars on Amazon.

You can download  "Travels on a Greyhound Bus" at Amazon UK and Amazon.com.

The blurb follows below:

People change. Relationships evolve. But sometimes by too much...

Hip students Araminta Stewart and Giles Richmond meet entirely by chance when travelling around the USA by Greyhound Bus. They hit it off. Some twenty years later, they are married with three children and have reached a crisis point in their relationship.

Araminta thought she knew what she wanted all those years ago. But now she’s got it, is she really happy? Or could there be more to life than this?
Told from Araminta’s point of view, "Travels on a Greyhound Bus" follows the couple as they navigate these two very different periods in their lives. While their early relationship flourishes, their later relationship appears to be disintegrating.

Faced with disappointment, frustration and the biggest challenge to their marriage yet, the question is: will Araminta and Giles’ relationship survive the journey of a lifetime?

The Signature of all Things

I recently read a really interesting book called 'The Signature of all Things' by Elizabeth Gilbert.

This book tells the story of Alma Whittaker, who is born in 1800, at the beginning of a new century, to vastly wealthy botanical explorer Henry Whittaker and his highly accomplished and knowledgeable Dutch wife. Alma is highly intelligent and, unusually for this time, her mother insists on Alma receiving an education equal to that of any man. Alma grows up to become a first-class botanist, carrying out research and publishing her findings  in the journals of the day. Despite (or perhaps partly because of) her academic success, Alma is unhappy in love and marriage.

We follow Alma as her life unfolds, beginning in Philadelphia, moving to Tahiti in middle age, and then finally settling in Holland.

If you enjoy expansive novels that cover 'big' issues such as the lot of women, the discovery of the new world, and the progress of human knowledge then you, like me, should also enjoy 'The Signature of all Things'.

Buying cars

We’ve recently been shopping around for cars. Not having bought a car for a few years, I had forgotten how annoying car salesmen can be. They really do go in for high pressure salesmanship.

So, for example, we test drove a car and liked it. We’d done our research beforehand so we knew that, if the car was a good drive, it was quite likely that we might order one. Once the salesman understood this, his hard sell started.

First of all, he told us that, actually, he could sell us the showroom vehicle that we’d just driven. This was the model up from the one we wanted to buy and had lots of additional features which meant, if we bought it, we’d end up spending £2,000 more than we originally intended—and we’d said right at  the outset that budget was a real issue for us. Furthermore, despite the fact that the showroom model had a few thousand miles on the clock and had, naturally, been driven by lots of other people, the amount that the salesman offered to knock off the RRP was miniscule.

All-in-all not much of a bargain, in our opinion. ‘But why don’t you want to buy it?’ the salesman asked us, feigning surprise (badly!). ‘Because we’d be spending £2,000 more than we intended for a model that we don’t want...’ we replied. Duh!

We stressed that we weren’t going to make up our minds, even with regard to the model that we were interested in, there and then. Our salesman then had to explain all of this to his boss and the boss had to come out and shake hands with us before we were allowed to go.

After thinking about it over the weekend, we decided that we would indeed buy the model that we had always had our eye on. There was a bit of a backlog of orders—a couple of months’ worth—but this didn’t bother us as we weren’t in a huge rush.

A couple of days later the salesman rang us to say that, if we liked, we could have our car a little earlier as there was already a car of the model, colour, etc. that we wanted on order for the showroom. The only snag was that this car had a spare wheel—we hadn’t gone for this optional extra because it cost an additional £100.

In the end, we went for the car-with-spare-wheel that would be ready earlier, largely because the salesman could give us an exact date for its delivery, whereas we knew that if we stuck to our original plan, there was a significant risk that the date would slip even further due to the large backlog of orders.

Despite out best efforts, the salesman managed to persuade us to spend £100 more on a new car than we had originally intended. How irritating!

War Horse

We recently went to see an ‘as live’ showing of the play of Michael Morpurgo’s ‘War Horse’. For those of you who don’t know, the National Theatre Live is a scheme that broadcasts real-time performances of National Theatre productions to cinemas worldwide. The ‘as live’ extension is when those broadcasts (or films) are replayed at times after the live performance.

We very much enjoy going to the theatre, but when the show that we want to see is in London and we want to go en famille, it can be a very expensive pastime. For this reason we jumped at the chance of seeing an as live broadcast of ‘War Horse’ in our local cinema. We didn't know quite what to expect – would it be like being at the theatre or more like a standard cinema experience? Well, there was some attempt at making it seem like you were at the theatre – the cinema screen showed the audience and the speaker system played the sounds of the audience coming from the theatre auditorium before the performance started – but in fact, it really was just like being at the cinema. The view was not straight on to the stage, rather there were a number of different cameras and the view cut between these, much like watching a film. This worked well and must have been difficult to do technically, given the issue of having to work round the audience.

However, what I really enjoyed was the story. I haven’t read any of Michael Morpurgo’s novels before (although my kids have), assuming that they were aimed squarely at children only. ‘War Horse’ tells the story of (aspects of) the First World War through the experience of the horses who were put to work on the battlefield, and it resonates on many levels, highlighting the futility of war, the desperation of those caught up in it, and the effect that war can have on people’s sanity. All are issues very much worthy of adult attention. ‘War Horse’, rather to my surprise, is now on my to read pile.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and international cooperation

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the Malaysia Airlines jet that went missing two weeks ago. I guess we all have. The story has a high human interest factor. Not only what on earth can have happened to the flight (my husband and I have spent a good deal of time working through the possible options -- mechanical fault, explosion, hijack, pilot suicide; and one can imagine the Malaysian authorities doing exactly the same thing), but also the empathy that one feels with those left behind. How terribly difficult it must be to plan, to do anything, when you simply don’t know what has happened to your loved ones. As unpalatable as it may be, knowing with certainty that someone has died enables one to grieve, deal with the situation as best one can and, one hopes, eventually move forwards into the future. Not knowing what has happened, however, must make it impossible to know how to act. One must always be holding on to the hope that those people are still alive and will, perhaps, turn up again one day, however vanishingly small that possibility is in reality.

But the thing that strikes me most strongly in all of this is the amount of multi-national effort that is being put into locating a plane that was carrying 227 people. Not that I would want this to be any different (one imagines oneself in the shoes of the relatives of the missing here), but it is amazing that so many disparate countries (Malaysia, the US, Australia, China, Norway...) are cooperating so willingly on this task. This contrasts sharply with the current situation in the Ukraine, for example, which sits so dangerously on a knife edge and which, if the situation tips over into all-out war, has the potential for death and destruction on a massively greater scale. Yet there seems to be little likelihood of cooperation or reconciliation here, despite the stakes being so much higher.

What is it, then, that promotes international cooperation in the Malaysia Airlines case? Is it the human angle -- the fact that we can all empathise with the personal tragedy of the situation? But why, then, aren't we able to do this so easily in cases of war or famine? Perhaps suffering on a small scale is simply something that we can comprehend better than the ‘impersonality’ of mass suffering or mass loss of life. Or perhaps it’s just that, in the Malaysia Airlines example, those countries that are cooperating are able to put aside their personal agendas and their differences because these things have no bearing on the specific case in hand.

There doesn't seem to be a definitive answer. But the question is a valid one, and the comparison an interesting one to draw.

Public sector employment circle

I am employed in the public sector. The organisation for which I work is entirely government funded. It has no income stream other than that from the government. This means that I am paid by the government for the work that I do.

When I pay my tax and national insurance, some of the money that the government has paid to me goes back to the government to provide services like healthcare, education and pensions for me and my family.

Thus the government pays me so that it can pay itself to provide services for me. All seems a bit of self-referential, really.

Cultural weekend away

I had a lovely birthday weekend a couple of weeks ago, spending a cultural two days in and around London.

We visited two impressive stately homes:

Kenwood, in north London, has recently been refurbished. It is a beautiful Robert Adam-modelled mansion which houses a stunning collection of paintings. The grounds are very pleasant, too, and lead out to Hampstead Heath. We were lucky enough to have bright, sunny weather and so were able to take advantage of the outside tables in the restaurant area to eat lunch. Just about warm enough in the February sunshine if you kept your coats on! Kenwood is managed by English Heritage but, unusually, doesn’t charge for admission, so is great for family days out.

Hall Place and Gardens in Kent is a beautiful Tudor house with magnificent gardens displaying Tudor-style topiary. The house has an interactive display area in which both adults and children can learn a lot about everyday Tudor life. The house also hosts a programme of exhibitions. When we visited, there was an exhibition about the (now defunct) local textile printing industry. We also enjoyed lunch in the onsite cafe (not outside this time!). Once again, this was a good value day out for us – as National Trust members, we qualified for half-price admission and only paid £10 in total for the four of us.

The final element of my birthday weekend was an adult-only treat. The parents-in-law babysat while my husband and I enjoyed dinner out in London, followed by a trip to St. Martin's Theatre to see ‘The Mousetrap’ – great light-hearted fun, and very well acted and produced to boot. Highly recommended!