About Me

Spending ten years as a journalist was an amazing experience and the four years I’ve spent writing books has been even better. I won’t pretend it’s all hard work when I get to travel the world and do brilliant things, especially now I can take my ‘office’ (laptop, husband and little boy) wherever I go. So that’s what this Blog is about – the places I’ve been, the things I’ve done and how those experiences feed into the books. I’ve always prided myself on having been everywhere I write about; for example, Daddy’s Girls features Mustique, Megeve and Manhattan, and was written in Port Isaac, Cornwall (which is in the opening scene of Gold Diggers). This Blog will hopefully give a bit more insight/detail into what those places and were like and to maybe give you a sneak peek into who and what might be in the next one!

Thursday 16 July 2009

Summer 2009 - Australia


As I write, I am sitting at a little desk in our rented house in Noosa, on Australia's Sunshine Coast. From here, I can see the huge waves breaking on the beach. The plan of course is to make a start on the next book, but it's easy to get distracted, with so many beautiful views wherever you walk - and who wants to stay inside when the sky's blue? Still, on the way here we did manage to squeeze in a couple of days in Bangkok (amazing hotel right on the river), then a week in Double Bay in Sydney, then a road-trip through the tropical north, including a hair-raising drive to the Undara lava tubes (proper outback complete with 'roos and emus wandering about, but no real road to speak of), a day snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef and a wonderful visit to the Cape Tribulation in the Daintree Forest - the world's oldest rainforest. I'll update more as we go, but here are a few photos to be going on with. That's Sydney harbour from the top of Rose Bay in the top photo, by the way - beautiful.

The Bush


Note that there isn't usually that much tarmac!

White sand between the toes



Me on the beach at Cape Trib. It was seven dollars for the hat!