Home remedies

 

There are worse places to feel under the weather than an English garden in this recent weather …

A caravan called Doris

Wouldn’t this be the perfect place to write?

It’s a caravan called Doris, and it’s the star of a very popular garden at the Chelsea Flower Show this year, created by Jo Thompson, to celebrate the Caravan Club. Click on the picture to read the story.

I haven’t had the chance to go to Chelsea this time, much as I love it, and although it’s almost walking distance across the river. I’m missing it loads, because so many of the gardens look particularly fabulous this year. Lots of beautiful planting and topiary, which I love, and less razzamatazz, which I’m not so bothered by. The five year-old is desperate to go up in Dairmid Gavin’s scaffolding sculpture, which features a dining room, a vegetable garden in the sky and even a working shower. The views from it are incredible. All it’s missing, in the little one’s opinion, is a toy shop. Next time, Dairmid.

Jo’s garden – back to the caravan – is gorgeous, different, girly and intimate. As I watched an interview with her on BBC2, I suddenly thought how familiar she looked, and how even more familiar she sounded. It turns out we were at university together, studying Italian, ooh – about *that* long ago. Even more wonderful than her garden is to see how well things have worked out for her. She’s an award-winning garden designer (well, she would be, wouldn’t she?). If only we’d known then what we’d be doing now …

Over here …

You can find me on Girls Heart Books today. Click here.

I’m writing about poetry …

New discovery – the shoe box

Well, you live and learn.

On Tuesday, I visited Farnborough Hill in Hampshire. Not just any old school visit – not that they ever are just any old school visit, mind you. This was the school where my mother was head girl, fifty-one years ago (Hi, Mummy, if you’re reading this) and where one of my goddaughters is in year 10.

They suggested that I give four workshops and a talk. I suggested that if I gave four workshops and a talk, I would be muttering unintelligible drivel by the end of the day, as four workshops is a lot of workshops. However, they bravely decided to risk it and I agreed to give it a try.

Here we are at the beginning of the day, when I’d like to think I was sounding quite coherent. We are drinking hot chocolate and talking about books. YES!

Do I look as if my mother is watching me from just out of shot? She was. She came to visit with me. It was very lovely, but you can so tell she’s an ex-headgirl. Here I am pretending that I’ve forgotten that my ex-headgirl mother is RIGHT OVER THERE LISTENING TO EVERY WORD I SAY.

Anyway. After the hot chocolate my mother nipped off to London to do lots of fun stuff, and I got down to the workshops, which involved creating mood boards for various of our favourite characters, requiring lots of paper, scissors, old copies of magazines and Pritt. Also fun. Very fun actually. I can only hope the Year 7s and 8s enjoyed it half as much as I did.

But here’s the thing. I’d asked them to do some preparation before I came – thinking of which character they’d like to illustrate and pulling together some images that might represent their complicated, multi-layered personalities. I’d assumed they’d all bring magazine cuttings and postcards, but they didn’t. Lots of girls arrived with beautifully illustrated shoe boxes, or boxes of other sorts, and inside the boxes were objects they’d gathered from home to represent their chosen character. Bracelets and trinkets, spectacles and handcuffs, feathers and leaves …

My favourites were a padlock and some tea bags. Character? Dolores Umbridge. The tea bags were for her cups of tea and the padlock was for the Quidditch brooms. There were also printed out copies of some of her decrees. Quite wonderful.

As Carrie Bradshaw would say, it got me thinking. My mood board is a nightmare to cart around with me. It’s about a metre wide and nearly as deep. As soon as I try and move it, thinks start to fall off. And I can only attach things to it that are flat. A mood box, which is effectively what the girls had invented, is so much more practical: small and portable; just as good at containing useful, inspirational stuff; and it can hold objects as well as pictures.

I’m not sure how coherent I was by the end, but I was certainly inspired by the girls. That’s the thing about school visits: you go in to try and educate them (actually I don’t – I go in to try and remind them that reading and writing can be SO MUCH FUN) and they end up educating you.

Boxes. Who knew?

Coco and Mary

Today it was Nonie’s turn to blog.

What do this woman

and this woman

have in common?

How do they remind me of The Look? And why does Nonie approve of them so much? Find out by reading Noniesworld.

Hooray for Liz!

What we need, in these dark and dreary times, is something to lift our spirits. Something light, bright, white and totally divorced from reality. Preferably Spanxed up to the eyebrows, dripping with diamonds, and on the cover of Hello! magazine, arm in arm with a pristine, linen-clad Shane Warne. Bring on Liz Hurley. Oh, Liz, you may be bonkers, but we’ve missed you. Welcome home.

When I say ‘bonkers’, I do of course mean highly intelligent, fiercely ambitious, attractive, successful and admirably single-minded. Liz wants to be a rich country lady, living on a big estate with animals and crops and stuff, and jetting off for lovely holidays in palm-fringed places. And I don’t think there’s a box she hasn’t ticked, so all power to her elbow.

No doubt 21 pages of her, Shane and their children, dressed always and only in crisp white vacation wear across the middle of Hello! will fund the odd chicken, villa somewhere nice and feed for the horses. Not only that, but it gives them a chance to air their side of the story about their whirlwind romance, the marriages that didn’t seem to be over at the time (but apparently were) and the real chain of events behind Shane’s new eyebrows. They sort of look, in these pages, as if they’ve died and gone to Hurley heaven. I’m not sure that’s quite what they were going for, but whatever.

She is, uncannily, what would happen if you crossed Katie Price with Joan Collins (not that I would recommend crossing either of them, frankly). If you turned the glamour up to 11 and removed any shred of privacy or normality. She is the celebrity Hello! was made for. And Shane Warne ….? Oh, the bonkersness of the whole thing is fabulous.

I feel a bit sorry for famous people who value their private lives. It must be hard to explain that actually you don’t want any attention when you’re not working, when for Liz, being on holiday with the children is work. However, nobody can complain that she doesn’t take this work deadly seriously. 21 pages! Plus the cover! All colour-co-ordinated and everything.

I mean – hello?

 

Don’t Mizz Out

Well, I knew it existed because a fan told me it did and I’d seen it on eBay. But now I know it exists, because I saw it with my own two eyes at Victoria Station. (And, Reader, I bought it.)

The latest edition of Mizz magazine comes with a range of lovely goodies, and if you’re lucky – which you would be if you bought it from Victoria Station today – one of those goodies is Threads. The slightly smaller version that I love because it just so cute and cuddly.

So there I was, in WH Smiths, with my friend Sophia (honestly, she’s called Sophia – Soph for short – and she pronounces it the same way as me, too, which is SEW-fia) and there was my book, on top of Jessie J’s face, within spitting distance – not that it would, of course – of Company, Glamour, Bliss and Vogue. Nonie would be so happy if she knew. A part of me thinks she does know.

Soph asked me how I felt, seeing it there, but to be honest I was too busy taking this photo to really notice. I think I felt nervous. Nervous that the next book is proving so tricky to write. (Second album syndrome, except it’s my fifth, and it’s a book.) Nervous for The Look. Have you bought your copy yet? Nervous that maybe loads of girls will put my GORGEOUS, PERFECTLY SIZED little book aside and not read it and fail to find out how much they might have enjoyed it.

I think I’ll probably enjoy the moment more when I come back to this blog, much later, when the new book’s going smoothly at last and I’m confident that The Look has found its place, and I can just be proud of how far Threads has come, and grateful for my lovely publisher, Rachel, for getting it shrink wrapped under some free makeup, and on top of Jessie J.

Happy Easter

Have you come across the story of Voker Kraft yet? He started decorating the tree in his garden in Saalfeld with Easter eggs in 1965 – when his children were young, the tree was just a sapling and it took 18 plastic eggs to decorate it.

10,000 eggs later … Herr Kraft’s tree is a national wonder.

I love these pictures.

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Happy Easter, everyone!

 

QoT

If you feel like voting for your favourite author, and making one UK lady (or gentleman, but honestly, puh-leese) you can find out what and why here.

Just sayin’ …

 

Roman mummy

So, after the blog tour came … the Actual Tour. I spent a couple of weeks in March travelling to  schools in London and talking about writing books, creating characters, choosing book covers and other fun stuff. I mostly met girls (perhaps unsurprising given the current pinkness of my page edges), and they were – all of them – quite lovely. By which I mean very lovely, not quite lovely.

They also had extremely good names. Many of which I will be stealing for future books. There were, for example, two Tigerlilies. And a Candy Darling (that was her first name – I love her mother already). But mostly, they were just charming and delightful young people. I really enjoy my tours.

Then came the Even More Of A Tour Tour. I’d been promising my 11 year-old for ages that if he worked hard this year, I’d reward myself – ahem, I mean him – with a trip somewhere interesting. And as I’ve spent loads of time in Italy over the years and he’s just started learning Latin, Rome seemed like a good idea.

So I booked it, assuming the March weather would be rainy and yucky, but at least we’d miss the worst of the summer heat and the summer crowds. And then the weather went and got ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS for the four days we were there. Not a cloud in the sky. Not one. Once. And we had a wonderful time.

We took 319 photos. I will spare you most of them, but here are some. Check out the sky.

Blue. It was March. Sometimes you just get lucky.

Piazza Navona. Just - wow.

If you go in March, the forum is full of wisteria and cherry blossom. Go in March

Travelling with an 11 year-old, it is hard to resist the charm of a well made, antique horse's bottom in the Colisseum

Mummy writing. (In a cafe on the terrace of the Victor Emmanuel Monument. Which I recommend. Because from it, you can't see the Victor Emmanuel Monument.)

Roman lunch

This is what happens when you let the 11 year-old take the pictures. (It's remarkably lifelike, actually.)

Not. A. Single. Cloud.

If you haven't been, Rome looks mostly like this from high up. Note the complete lack of the Victor Emmanuel Monument in this picture.

And this.

At the Capitoline Museums. My favourite foot.

The head of Constantine. Also enormous and fab.

Ditto

Can't remember which goddess this was. Sooooo beautiful.

Bridge statue near Castel Sant'Angelo. Did I mention the sky was cloudless?

Louis Vuitton's shop window in the Via Condotti. A rainbow quiver of arrows. In honour of The Hunger Games, we assumed.