The Best Laid Plans

It was our intention to watch two hours of The Apprentice on our return to the UK. However, the local Majorca paper warned us that TA had been brought forward to make way for a football match. Considering the time I spent with the video instruction book, programming the thing before our departure it's very irritating. Just as well we read about the change, though, as M would have accused me of getting it wrong, as footballers leapt on to our screen.

It was also our plan to spend the last week sunbathing, but apart from cool and cloudy weather, we also had two days of more or less non-stop rain, as well as colossal thunder storms - similar I believe to the UK. It was in in one such dramatic storm a few years ago, in which I sat at my computer, tempting providence, and wrote a love scene in Tainted Tree.

My writing has proved of interest to a couple of the other guests who are intending to look up A Bottle of Plonk and Tainted Tree on their return. It would be wonderful if those who enjoy the books could tell their friends. Those of us without access to major publicity must rely on others to spread the word.

When I explained to one interested lady that I wanted people to read my work, she comforted me, saying, 'Oh well it won't just be one person; if we read it, we'll pass it on to someone else.' Buy the books, people. Don't borrow them; don't lend them.

I was awed by North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell's tour de force. At a guess, 200,000 words - both a love story and an intelligent discussion of the cotton trade, the industrial revolution and labour relations in 1850. I could never write anything like that. The immediate lack of rapport between her main protagonists was reminscent of Pride and Prejudice, but there was so much more content. More like something of George Eliot's perhaps. It was also surprisingly modern. Thank goodness for the novelists of those days who wanted their women to be strong and independent.