Easter

Happy Easter Everyone!

Buds are at last starting to appear!  Bring on the Easter Eggs, the sunny days the chicks and bunnies, the roast turkey on Easter Sunday, the hot cross buns, the four days off!

Easter bunnies looking at a little Victory! Let's face it we all need a little victory now and again!  Have a lovely time everyone.
 
 

The Heart of Overdown

It will be out tomorrow, my supernatural thriller, it gives me a pause and a chance to give my poor Overdown inhabitants a rest for a few months.

It has been one of the hardest to write, the research has been scary, and it has been a real mission to get it finished. 

Andy as usual made my pencil sketch into a wonderful book cover that glows off the page.

Life for me has always had it's spooky moments, and I have tried to incorporate that into everything I write.

Whether it be a phone call I took at 8am, from my father in hospital to tell mum he was all right. Followed by the Hospital ringing back at 9am, to say he'd died at 4am with a nurse holding his hand.

To playing guess the cards with my sisters hold up a playing card from the pack and one of the other girls had to guess it. We got it right so many times we got bored playing it. When I was working at the BBC I filmed a programme on probabilities, and the game we played should have been impossible!

Then there was the photo in my Cornish house with the ghosts - I asked them to all get in the photo, and they did, eight orbs of the men who died in the Levant mine under my house
in the 1960s. 

The weekend is over, and back to the next book A Farthing for Oxford, almost finished. No supernatural stuff in that, it's all about a midwife's life in the English Civil War.

The Weekend

We should have been going to The Big Bash - a training session for the Sealed Knot, Kings Guard, with a party afterwards.

The caravan needs looking at, still under guarantee so it has to be done as soon as possible, before the start of the season.

Hubby is dog tired, working in two different offices, he's looking forward to sleeping at the weekend, but can't really, we have things to do. Even not going to the bash we have things to do. He travels about 3 hours a day now. Is out of the house for 10/11 hours. I hardly see him, and when he comes home he's so tired and frustrated with his work, he eats, watches comedy programmes then falls asleep on the sofa.

The weather is crap, raining now which makes me hurt more than usual.  Yesterday I was phoning the Doctor about a Tick bite I had when I was very ill last year that never heals, I have a blood test for Lime Disease next week. I woke up with an allergy rash on my stomach, usually caused by washing powder, and I feel dizzy with my ear problems and blocked sinus.

What an old git.  I never thought I would be like this. 

I thought I would be in my house in Cornwall, and every weekend have friends and family to stay. Go to Godrevy Beach Hut on a Sunday, have breakfast there, read the Sunday papers and walk along the headland.

Saturdays would be spent watching the sea boil around Cape Cornwall, going into Truro to shop. We both worked from our office at home nearly nine years ago, so at least we had seven years together everyday, it's more than most people have in their married lives, and we loved it.

We had great doctors, which I didn't see that often luckily. We went to Sealed Knots at the southern end of the country, we had sea views and a pet seagull and best of all great next door neighbours.

I never expected to be in a Cotswold village, isolated and ill, while my darling man goes out and works all hours.  Oxfordshire may suit some people but not me.  It's pretty, it's posh, but I have never been so ill since we moved here.

I write. This blog outpouring of  words keeps me going. My many books keep me going,
although if you do put your head above the parapet, you do get shot at. Funny how I remember the few bad reviews but not the many good ones.

So onwards and upwards hopefully.  I MUST try not to be such a misery!

 Hopefully, as Dickens' Mr Micawber used to say, "Something will turn up!"
 

Doctors and Nurses

That got your attention!

I was looking at myself this morning feeling a bit down as I never seem to be well these days or have that "Wow it's great to be alive" feeling.  Been a long time since I had that.
These days I wake up thinking - I've got another day - wonderful!

A lot of how I am today is down to Doctor's finances.
When I was younger and before I moved to Cornwall, I was working hard, eating nothing, constantly tired, and putting on weight.  All signs of thyroid deficiency. I went to the Doctor and told them that my sister had the same and could I have my thyroid blood test.
They did that and said it was borderline - I was fine.  I didn't feel fine at nearly 20 stone and asleep all the time.

When I registered with the Doctors in Cornwall, they were shocked. "Why on earth are you not having your thyroid treated?  We'll start you right away!"  Thank you!  Basically it was because the Doctors in Buckinghamshire couldn't afford to put me on Thyroxin so they didn't.

When we moved to Oxfordshire I registered with the doctor and told her my allergies were getting worse, could I see a specialist please?  No need for that, I was told, just avoid the foods you are allergic to. I would like a patch test as I don't know what I'm allergic to at the moment. Small laugh, no you'll be all right.  Again down to cost.
5 anaphalaxsis later and nearly losing my life I went private, and re-registered with my current doctors surgery, who sent me to the John Radcliffe for treatment.

Over yet?  No. Not really in the past six months I have been told by a Doctor who has now left the surgery, that it was highly unusual for anyone to have two burst ear drums and refused to give me antiseptic drops for the blisters on my eardrums or antibiotics to clear up the infection.

In the A&E on a Sunday night I was sitting with my husband, when he heard my eardrums burst - yes it was that loud - and blood and pus seeped down my cheeks.  Again down to cost. The lovely doctor in A&E took a swab and told me this could have been easily cleared up by antibiotics.

So today I look at the baggy skin and cellulite as I have lost a lot of weight, feeling that I wish I could be back to normal.  I was completely deaf and now I am partially deaf - thanks to that Doctor.  I lived on porridge and mashed potatoes for a year while my allergies were finally sorted out due to Doctor number 2.

My life has not been fun over the past five years and it's all been down to Doctors finances.
Children get the best treatment, then teens to thirties, forties and over - it seems- who cares?

I have worked hard all my life, still do, demonstrate History to visitors in historic houses to entertain them. I have written over ten Murder Mystery novellas, one serious history book,
The Women of the English Civil War, one of the comments on it's reviews was that the book was too short.
Well, I'm sorry, I was so ill when I wrote that I thought I was dying so I did as much as I could to get it finished.
I have finished The Heart of Overdown a supernatural thriller this week and it's just been proof read, and A Farthing for Oxford, a faction book based on one of my Civil War women
is nearly finished.

I hope I'm not nearly finished.  I don't feel too good today.




 

Nightmares

Been having quite a few recently.

Some have just been puzzling, I was walking along with a friend of mine from the 1980s Matt Forrest - now a huge film director and animator, and he was dressed like a dentist in a white coat. He asked me why I wasn't getting better.

Does this mean as my husband suggested, I was desperate for the loo and my brain was scaring me awake to go?  Or do I need my teeth seeing to?  Or am I not actually getting better?

I am I think, the dislocated knee is okayish the only problem I have now is getting up from a sitting position.

Then I dreamt about my ex husband, I suppose it was because I had been watching old family movies with my sister and saw him as he was in his twenties - slim - blond permed hair, but the most striking thing was he looked exactly like my son at the same age. A clone !

I dreamt he asked me to meet his wife and his new family, I went and they were arguing all the time and he'd got fat and pudgey faced, and of course as always, it was my fault!  I woke up thinking that my brain hates me. But really grateful I have a lovely husband and not the spiteful manic depressive that my ex turned into.

Then after writing a particularly gruesome passage of my new book Heart of Overdown I went to bed re-thinking the passages, how gruesome should it be, should I calm it down a bit?  

When I fell asleep I was with Rollo, one of the Vikings and his washboard abs were covered in blood and he had his axe over his head ready to strike.   Teach me to watch back to back Vikings - woke up at 4am sweating with my heart pounding and realising the terrific bang I heard was just Dave next door going to work (he's a farmer and we hear him go out every day at 4am). He even got a new door because we told him we can hear his door bang every day. (bless him). Turns out it wasn't the door, he just doesn't use the handle lock at all and slams it shut. However, not Rollo about to chop my head off. Phew.

Vanilla Vikings my husband calls the series now, the Mercians, Saxons, Celts and Franks are all into  kinky sex practices.   Not the Vike, it's all chop and pop with them. Straight up sex.

Anyway that was beside the point - I have a strict avoidance of cheese in the evening meals
because I always dream or have nightmares when I eat it.

No nightmare Wednesday, but woke up having difficulty breathing. Ted a cat of at least a stone in weight was sitting on my chest watching me. He does this when he can't wake up my hubby for him to feed him, he knows I will prod hubby to move!

I don't exactly dread doing to bed to sleep, but I don't exactly look forward to it either.

But it's weekend and we don't have to get up at 5.30am so Andy can arrive in work by 9.am

Have a good weekend everybody, will let you know when "Heart" is up on Amazon.

xxx





 

Researching other realms

My research for the final Overdown book has taken me into places I really didn't want to go.
I always research everything I write, whether it's history or fiction. It has to have it's feet planted firmly in the truth.

The last woman imprisoned for witchcraft was as late as 1951 before the 16th Century Witchcraft Act was repealed. 

Another woman was imprisoned by MI5 during the war as she was a medium receiving messages from sailors who had died. They were on a British ship that had been sunk in the Atlantic, and the Government had not released the fact it had sunk, because it wanted the enemy to believe it was still in action as a deterrent.  She was put in prison for the duration of the war so that she could not release any other secrets from the spiritual realm.

Then my research led me on to human sacrifice. Yes it still happens today.  Usually it's African tribal lore that defines a child as a witch, they are then tortured and killed for the good of their relatives.

The last recorded white sacrifices were in the 1930s. There were several groups who wanted to use their powers to affect changes in their own lives, to explore other realms, one idea put forward was that at the point of death of the sacrificed person a door would open to the beyond, and living people would follow the soul through the door to see what was there.

Notable Warlocks included the notorious Aleistair Crowley (who still has followers to this day) and famous people like W.B.Yeats the writer and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, famed for his logical Sherlock Holmes stories.

So the time has come to close the book so to speak on the people of Overdown - at least for the moment, so that I can write the history that needs to be told.

Oh by the way - does anyone remember my piece on Pigeons during the war?  BBC History Magazine has again picked up on one of my ideas and this month has a big article on them.

Perhaps it's the zeitgheist, or perhaps someone is cribbing ideas from my blogs, either way it's really annoying, so please stop, so I can get paid for my work.

Thank you.   Have a good day.