A mini-post today... Just an excuse really to share some pictures of one of my favourite plant species... I love colour in the garden – and in the countryside too, of course, as you’ll have noticed if you’ve seen my recent posts. Blues are among my favourites, particularly in the countryside – bluebells, of course, being mine, …
Continue reading Little bishops’ croziers – the magic of ferns
I don’t often blog about matters unrelated to writing and historical fiction, but occasionally I just feel the need to write about something different, and that “different” is always to do with the natural world, specifically the birds and the plants I observe on my travels, whether locally or further afield. Of course there hasn’t …
I wrote much of this piece a couple of weeks ago for a smaller audience, but I thought I’d like to share it more widely, as our present global “pandemic” happens to have come at the very moment when I’m again writing about pandemic, so it’s uppermost in my writer’s mind right now… I’d hate …
This post was first published on The History Girls blogspot in November 2019. In September, our family revisited a favourite holiday destination. We hadn’t been there for several years and were eager to return. It being autumn, the weather was mostly chilly, and rainy, but it didn’t dampen our enthusiasm. Indeed, that sort of …
(Post first published on The History Girls blogspot.) Last month, my post looked at various aspects of food and eating in the 14th century, the period of my current fiction series, using a few descriptions from my novels as a shortcut to the evidence I have gleaned over my relatively brief time as an historical novelist. …
In my novels of 14th century England, I try to include a good deal of description of medieval daily life. Clothing, housing, furniture and furnishings, artefacts and tools, working practices, medical practices and, of course, food, can all help to place characters in context, differentiate the life styles of people of diverse stations, and bring …
The “inspirational homes” I discussed in my previous two posts represented the sort of mediaeval houses that might have been lived in by the poorer members of society and those of the “middling sort”. We saw how the way of life afforded by the homes of the wealthier members of society included more space, a …
