J D Davies - Historian and Author

The website and blog of naval historian and bestselling author J D Davies

Matthew Quinton

Cover Story

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Battle for All 1I’m delighted to be able to headline this week’s post by revealing the cover of the new Quinton novel, The Battle of All The Ages, which is number five in the series and is due to be published in the UK in June. Thanks to my publishers, Old Street, for doing such a tremendous job, and to Conn Iggulden for providing such a generous blurb. Our original contact was entirely unsolicited, as it turns out he’s a big fan of the series!

The cover art is Abraham Storck’s painting of the Four Days Battle of 1666, which forms the centrepiece of the book. Storck’s painting is held at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and full details of it can be found on the museum’s website. The section shown on the cover shows De Zeven Provincien, the flagship of the great Dutch admiral, Michiel Adrianszoon De Ruyter, and the Royal Prince, flagship of Admiral Sir George Ayscue. The latter is aground on the Galloper Sand and will soon surrender; Ayscue remains the only British flag-officer to surrender in battle, and the loss of the Prince caused a sense of national shock that has been compared to the loss of HMS Hood in 1941.

The Four Days Battle followed a controversial decision to divide the British fleet. As I wrote in Pepys’s Navy:

In January 1666 France…declared war to fulfil long-avoided treaty obligations to the Dutch. The command of the British fleet for the 1666 campaign was given jointly to Prince Rupert and George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, but at the end of May they divided their fleet, with Rupert sailing off to the west to intercept a French fleet that was believed to be approaching British waters. The intelligence proved false, and on 1 June Albemarle found himself with 56 ships, facing the Dutch fleet of 86 under the brilliant Michiel De Ruyter off the North Foreland. The ‘Four Days’ Battle’ that followed was one of the great epics of the age of sail. Rupert rejoined on the third day with 25 ships, but after another day of fighting, the British fleet was forced to retire, having lost three admirals captured or killed…several thousand men, and ten ships, including the great Royal Prince.

Matthew Quinton and his ship are at the heart of the action, and as well as dealing with a superior Dutch enemy, he has to contend with problems among his own crew – notably the tensions between the seamen and the newly created Marine Regiment (the precursors of the Royal Marines), and the presence of an eccentric and unpredictable character with a special connection to the King. During four days of ferocious fighting, Matthew and his friends – the likes of Lieutenant Kit Farrell, the Reverend Francis Gale and Phineas Musk – are tested to their utmost limits.

In the second part of the book, Matthew is sent by the King on a dangerous mission to discover the truth about why the fleet was divided; was it treachery, incompetence or simple bad luck? In doing so, he finds himself regarded as an enemy in his own land, in a place with strong residual loyalties to the fallen Commonwealth; is forced to denounce a friend; and battles a mysterious enemy, the so-called Hell Hound. All the while, his thoughts are torn between these immediate dangers and developments far away, notably his wife’s sickness and the frantic efforts to repair the fleet so it can sail out again to gain revenge on the Dutch. The book culminates in the second great sea-battle of the summer of 1666, the St James Day fight, before Matthew finally confronts the real and unsettling truths about the division of the fleet.

As usual, The Battle of All The Ages is based closely on real events, particularly during the battle scenes, and a host of real historical characters make an appearance. These include King Charles II, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, General George Monck, the famous Dutch admirals De Ruyter and Evertsen, their British counterparts Sir Christopher Myngs and Sir Robert Holmes, and the notorious Restoration rake, the Earl of Rochester. Action at sea, intrigue, Restoration poetry, and a foul-tempered monkey – what’s not to like? And if you fancy a sneak preview, the first chapter will be available on my website in the near future!

Worthy Causes, Part 2

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The Scottish Houses in Veere (credit to scottishdiasporatapestry.org)

Quite by chance, I came across the news that the ‘Scottish Houses’ museum in Veere, the Netherlands, is on a hit-list of thirty-four properties that the Dutch state intends to sell off as part of its own austerity programme. The museum has launched a fundraising campaign in the hope that it can purchase the historic buildings and give them an independent future, but with so many rival demands on charitable donations, they will clearly face an uphill battle. There seems to have been remarkably little publicity given to this in the UK, even in Scotland, so this blog is my attempt to give it some!

Veere in 1652

The Scottish Houses date from the sixteenth century, and bear witness to the remarkable maritime and economic connections between Scotland and Europe. In 1541 Veere, a port in the province of Zeeland, became the staple for the Scottish wool trade with the Netherlands, and a substantial Scottish community was established there. The Lord Conservator, who oversaw the trade, was based in the houses that now form the museum. The staple survived until 1799, so remarkably, it endured through no fewer than five Anglo-Dutch wars, especially the three great ones in the seventeenth century! I came across Veere’s remarkable history when I was researching those wars in the 1990s, and visited the town on a couple of occasions. I thoroughly enjoyed the museum, but perhaps I enjoyed a meal and beer in the cellar restaurant, once one of the storehouses for the Scottish wool merchants, even more! The unique history of Veere also fitted with the growing interest in Scottish history that I was developing at the time, and which ultimately led to my book on the so-called ‘Gowrie conspiracy’ of 1600, Blood of Kings. My liking for the town eventually found expression in the ‘Quinton journals’, too: it’s the home town of Matthew’s wife Cornelia and her sea-captain twin, and it’s where, in Gentleman Captain, Matthew hears the news of the restoration of the monarchy in England.

When so many heritage sites in Britain are under threat of closure and running fund-raising campaigns of their own, it’s difficult to make a case for contributing money to a foreign institution. But I’ll certainly be making my own contribution to the campaign to save the Scottish Houses, and if the passing philanthropic billionaires to whom I referred in last week’s post feel so inclined, I’m sure their generosity would be highly appreciated in Veere!

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I’m delighted to announce that next week, ‘Gentlemen and Tarpaulins’ will be playing host to a guest blogger – bestselling author Louise Berridge, who’ll be talking about the campaign that she’s leading to erect new memorials to those who fell in the Crimean War. It should be a fascinating post, and a truly worthy cause with which to end this mini-series!

Merry Christmas, Restoration Navy Style

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Henry Teonge, a Warwickshire clergyman, was fifty-five when he first went to sea as a naval chaplain, presumably forced into the job by the extent of his debts. In 1675 he joined the Fourth Rate Assistance, commanded by William Houlding, which was despatched to the Mediterranean as part of Sir John Narbrough’s fleet, operating against the corsairs of Tripoli. Teonge kept a lively diary of his time aboard the ship, and during his subsequent service on the Bristol and Royal Oak. This is one of the best contemporary sources for the nature of shipboard life in the Restoration navy, and I’ve used it often during my research for the Quinton books. For example, several of the ‘menus’ for officers’ meals in Gentleman Captain were taken straight from Teonge, while my description of Matthew Quinton’s Christmas at sea aboard the Seraph in The Mountain of Gold was based closely on the following passage in the diary – his account of Christmas 1675 aboard the Assistance, near Crete.

24 Very rough today. No land yet. Our decks are washed for Christmas.

25 Christmas Day we keep thus. At 4 in the morning our trumpeters all do flat their trumpets and begin at our Captain’s cabin, and thence to all the officers and gentlemen’s cabins; playing a levite at each cabin door, and bidding good morrow, wishing a Merry Christmas. After they go to their station, viz. on the poop, and sound three levites in honour of the morning. At 10 we go to prayers and sermon ; text, Zacc. ix. 9. Our Captain had all his officers and gentlemen to dinner with him, where we had excellent good fare: a rib of beef, plum puddings, mince pies, &c. and plenty of good wines of several sorts ; drank healths to the King, to our wives and friends; and ended the day with much civil mirth.

Zacchariah Chapter 9, Verse 9 reads (in the King James version that Teonge would have used) ‘Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.’ (The first part of the verse was later used for a famous soprano solo in Handel’s Messiah.) Teonge records no specific New Year festivities, although he did write a poem as a special New Year’s present for Captain Houlding. William Houlding, a former East India Company captain, held several important commands in Charles II’s reign, including that of the London in the 1673 campaign, and died on 20 September 1682.

A NEW-YEAR’S GIFT TO OUR CAPTAIN.

ACROSTICON.

W — hen Phoebus did this morning first appear,

I — nriching with his beams our hemispheare,

L- eaving the darksome night behind him, and

L — onging to be at his meridian;

I — magine then the old-year’s out of date,

A — new one unto Jove let’s dedicate—

M— an should not be like an old almanack.

H – eavens guide you, sir, that Paul’s words may be true,

O — ld things are done away, all things are new;

U — nto the rich endowments of your mind,

L — ift up your noble courage: Fortune’s kind

D — irections bid you forwards; your Assistance

I — s beggd by Mars for th’ Trypolenes resistance-

N — ‘er man more fit bold acts to undertake,

G — od with his blessings make you fortunate.

On 6 January, Teonge recorded the hilarious festivities for Twelfth Night.

6 Very rough weather all the last night, and all this day.  We are now past Zante; had we been there this day, we had seen a great solemnity ; for this day being Twelfth Day, the Greek Bishop of Zante doth (as they call it) baptise the sea, with a great deal of ceremony; sprinkling their galleys and fishing-tackle with holy-water. But we had much mirth on board, for we had a great cake made, in which was put a bean for the king, a pea for the queen, a clove for the knave, a forked stick for the cuckold, a rag for the slut. The cake was cut into several pieces in the great cabin, and all put into a napkin, out of which every one took his piece, as out of a lottery. Then each piece is broken to see what was in it, which caused much laughter to see our lieutenant prove the cuckold, and more to see us tumble one over the other in the cabin, by reason of the rough weather. 

And with that glorious mental image of the chaplain and officers of the Assistance laughing uproariously and falling over each other (and, presumably, the great cake), I’ll wish you all the compliments of the season and a very Happy New Year!

Thanks so much to all of you for your support of this blog and my books during 2012. Gentlemen and Tarpaulins will return on Monday 7 January, and 2013 will be quite a year! I’ll be using the blog to build up to the UK publication of ‘Quinton 4’, The Lion of Midnight, and the North American publication of ‘Quinton 3’, The Blast That Tears The Skies, both in April, and then to the launch of Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales in July. There are also some other interesting irons in the fire, so please continue to watch this space!

Venetian Interlude

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To ignore entirely the basic rule about never starting any piece of writing with a digression: I think it’s probably fair to say that when you’re lost at night in the eerie, empty alleyways of Venice, the last thing but one that you need is for a monk suddenly to emerge directly in front of you. The very last thing you need, just a few minutes later, is to encounter a girl wearing a red kagool.

Yes, seriously.

So much for the spookiest experiences of our recent short stay in la serenissima. This blog will now concern itself with rather more grounded matters, notably some of my impressions of the city’s naval heritage; many others have ranted about the overwhelming crush of tourists in parts of the city and the sheer incongruity of, and potential damage caused by, vast cruise liners passing a few yards off the historic waterfront, so I’ll leave all of that to one side. From my point of view, the standard tourist circuit of St Mark’s, the Doge’s Palace, the Rialto, and so forth, was matched by my experience of the Arsenale, the great dockyard of the Venetian Republic. We were lucky in that our apartment looked out directly over the dockyard’s stunning land entrance, and that we were in town during one of the ‘biennales‘, the biennial cultural festivals that take place within the Arsenale itself, meaning that large parts of it are accessible for just a few weeks; the site still contains active naval and military establishments and is generally closed to the public. The famous biennale, the art festival that coincides with the Venice Film Festival, takes place in odd-numbered years, but we were able to visit the architecture biennale. Now, my attitude to modern architecture is pretty much the same as the next man’s, as long as the next man happens to be Prince Charles, but it has to be said that many of the festival displays were impressive and interesting (although inevitably, there were also frequent dollops of pretentious tosh). Even so, I was probably the only person in the building at the time who was more interested in taking photographs of the roof and the walls than the displays of model buildings that so engaged the hordes of earnest young architecture students all around me: the main display area was inside the dockyard corderie or ropery, originally built in 1303 and rebuilt in 1576-85 into a huge building some 316 metres long.

From the corderie and the adjoining artiglierie,  the former workshops, we were able to sit out and enjoy the unseasonable hot and sunny weather on the quayside of the Darsene Nuovissima, the newest dockyard basin (‘newest’ meaning fifteenth century), alongside the huge Armstrong, Mitchell crane, the last survivor of nine vast hydraulic cranes built at Newcastle between 1877 and 1905 and installed in shipyards from Liverpool to Japan. A major conservation project is now under way to preserve the crane for the future. Nearby are the Gaggiandre, two superb covered docks for galleys built between 1568 and 1573, when the naval power of the Venetian Republic was at its height.

The Arsenale as a whole was, at one time, the largest industrial enterprise in Europe, covering some 115 acres and employing 2-3,000 men. During the Middle Ages it used a sophisticated production line system for building ships and galleys, many centuries before Henry Ford ‘rediscovered’ the technique (so much for history being bunk, eh, Henry?). But as the republic’s power waned, so did the Arsenale’s; by the late seventeenth century the workforce was less than a thousand strong, making Chatham dockyard larger, and its focus was increasingly on mercantile, rather than naval, ship repair. Today much of the huge site is clearly under-utilised, despite the occasional fillips provided by the biennales, but in a sense this is probably a good thing – the conversion of the Arsenale into yet another dubious tourist trap would probably destroy much of the character that it still preserves, namely that of a naval/industrial complex of the first order.

Just outside the Arsenale is a splendid museum of naval history. It’s very much my kind of museum – lots and lots of fascinating exhibits (four floors worth), maximum utilisation of space rather than the minimalism and wide open spaces that characterise so many modern museums, excellent bilingual explanatory panels that provide plenty of historical detail rather than treating all visitors like children or morons, no touchy-feely ‘interactive’ exhibits…sorry, here endeth the rant against current orthodoxies in British museums…  It’s splendidly priced, too – a mere 1.5 euros! Like some other tourist sites in Venice, the naval museum displays a half-hearted ‘no photography’ warning but then makes no attempt whatsoever to enforce it. My innate British law-abiding streak was rapidly discarded once I’d noticed that all the Italians and the inevitable massed ranks of German tourists were happily snapping away without any jobsworth intervening to stop them (i.e. what one expects to happen in museums in the UK), so out came the camera. The museum’s collections are eclectic, ranging from the expected – yes, there’s a room full of gondolas – to the unexpected, such as a fascinating room full of displays charting the surprisingly strong naval connections between Italy and Sweden during the last five hundred years or so. It also has an excellent collection of ship models, the most notable being that of the last bucintoro, the ceremonial barge of the Doges and the setting every Ascension Day for la sensa, the remarkable ‘marriage ceremony’ between Venice and the sea; sadly, the real thing, together with most of the Arsenale, was destroyed by Napoleon in 1797. There are also carvings from Venetian galleys of the 17th and 18th centuries, together with relics of more recent eras – a lot of material about the Austro-Hungarian navy, including part of the stern of the pre-Dreadnought battleship Wien, and many exhibits about the Italian navy of World War I and II, including an example of a submersible ‘chariot’ like the ones which attacked the British battleships Valiant and Queen Elizabeth in Alexandria Harbour on 19 December 1941.

All in all, Venice is a naval buff’s dream, especially if you can get there during a biennale. So will a future Quinton story be set there?

No spoilers, but what author could resist such a setting? In my period, Venice was in decline, a fact demonstrated most clearly by the loss of Candia (Heraklion, Crete) in 1669 after a siege of 22 years, the longest in history. Yet it rallied, thanks partly to the astonishing character of Francesco Morosini, the admiral who surrendered Candia to the Turks. Tried for cowardice and treason on his return to Venice, he was acquitted and went on to lead the Venetian conquest of the Morea in 1685, subsequently being elected Doge – the nominal figurehead, or President, of the Venetian Republic. Add such ingredients as the Republic’s secretive Council of Ten, its feared state security body, and the Bridge of Sighs through which prisoners passed from the Doge’s palace to the prison cells, and there’s clearly plenty of raw material. But if I ever do get round to writing a Venice-based Quinton story, it’ll be quite a long way down the road!

The Moniker of the Rose

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A relatively short blog this week. When it’s published, I’ll be in Venice – and by complete coincidence (naturally!) we’re staying next to the great Venetian dockyard, the Arsenale, and the naval museum. Does this mean that a future Quinton story might be set in Venice? I couldn’t possibly comment…but hopefully next week’s post will contain some of my impressions of La Serenissima. 

Meanwhile, I’ve just finished reading Merivel, Rose Tremain’s excellent sequel to Restoration, and quite close to the end, she extricates herself beautifully from one of those awkward little problems that authors sometimes create for themselves. Having created in the first book a fictional character named John Pearse, the hero’s best friend, Tremain must have approached the final illness of King Charles II with the mounting realisation that she’d need to include one particular real historical character, the King’s surgeon in ordinary…one James Pearse. She digs herself out of this hole with the dexterity one would expect of such an accomplished author, but it does illustrate the minefield that the choice of  names can present for a writer of fiction. I learned that lesson not long after Gentleman Captain was first published, when I received a slightly puzzled email from the mother of an eight year old in Manchester named, yes, Matthew Quinton. Fortunately his life is probably less likely to be affected by this coincidence than the impact that their fictional alter-egos will have had on the real-life James Bonds and Harry Potters, although one does sometimes wonder about those who coincidentally bear the names chosen by authors for their most evil and psychotic villains. Somewhere out there, for instance, must be some real Jim Moriartys and far more Patrick Batemans…

Indeed, this whole area of the choice of names for fictional characters is a potential minefield, especially as one goes further and further back in history. The undeniable fact is that the ‘name pool’ was much smaller in the Middle Ages, and even in the Early Modern period, so an author craving ‘authenticity’ is likely to run up against the hard truth that to be really true to the time, one would have to have several characters called John or Thomas, Elizabeth or Mary, with all the confusion that can potentially cause. Hilary Mantel, the well deserved winner of a second Booker Prize, must have encountered this problem countless times when writing Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies – too many Thomases, too many Annes and Catherines – but again gets round it ingeniously. My particular favourite is Thomas Wriothesley; rather than having Thomas Cromwell call him Thomas, potentially leading to echoes of Monty Python’s ‘Bruce’ sketch, she has Cromwell bestow on him the nickname ‘Call-Me’, from ‘Call Me Risley’, thus also having a neat dig at some of the more absurd pronunciation/spelling dysfunctions prevalent among the British aristocracy. (Cue more Monty Python, namely the ‘Luxury Yacht’ sketch – and if anyone, particularly anyone under the age of about 40, thinks I’ve gone stark staring mad this week, google ‘Monty Python’ and the name of the sketch to see what I’m talking about.)

In practice, this problem impacts on the names I’ve used in the Quinton series. In the Stuart period, there were inevitably a lot of Charleses and Jameses, named in honour of the kings, and despite the potential for confusion (because he would have to interact a great deal with his namesake, Charles II), I knew that the elder brother of Matthew, as the heir to an earldom born in the late 1620s, would almost certainly have been named Charles. But otherwise, I’ve tried to vary characters’ Christian names as much as possible, drawing on my two main sources for names – gravestones and thirty years’ worth of student mark books. At least the Puritans provide much-needed variety – hence the real Praisegod Barebone and my invented character in Gentleman Captain, Godsgift Judge. I recently tweeted a few favourites from some local gravestones – the splendid Original Jackson (did he have a sister called Plagiarism, or a brother called Unique?), the simply astonishing Nimrod Folbigg (now that should be the name of a Bond villain) and the hilarious but intriguing Gotobed East; just what set of circumstances led to a child being inflicted with that, and just how tough a time of it would he have had growing up, even in the eighteenth century? Just to prove I’m not making these up, I’ve included photos of the memorials to the last two gentlemen, in the churchyard of Cockayne Hatley, Bedfordshire, and in Ely Cathedral respectively.

Finally, though, I have a feeling that I might be about to run up against my own version of the Rose Tremain moment. I’m working on an idea for a novel based on a real character whose life story provides a very unusual take on one of the most intriguing periods in British history. I want to use his real name and the few known facts about his life as the basis for the plot. Unfortunately, his real name is Matthew, too…

Blasts from the Past

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I’ve been exploring the loft. To be exact, I’ve been exploring ‘my’ loft, i.e. the one above my workplace, ‘the Lair’. (As regular readers will know, this is a converted garage in the garden; probably the only garage in Britain with a bay window. Don’t ask, the previous owners had some very strange ideas…) The word ‘explored’ doesn’t really do justice to the nature of the operation; it’s impossible to stand upright in the loft, and as the first things that went in there after we moved in are at the far end, with more recent additions nearer the entrance, it’s very much akin to a Time Team dig, working on one’s hands and knees to remove the newer layers in order to reach the really ancient archaeology. The object of the exercise has been to get rid of the vast amounts that are surplus to requirements (farewell, 2004 bank statements) and to make space for more to go up there in the future (yes, books on medieval Scottish history used for deep background research for Blood of Kings, I’m talking about you). But I’ve been making some wonderful discoveries, becoming reacquainted with some old friends, and above all, rediscovering the evidence for the development of my writing career. For example, I’d forgotten quite how much satire I used to write at one time. I wrote quite a bit when I was at Oxford, probably reaching the pinnacle of my career as a comedy writer by penning a sketch for the 1979 Department of Educational Studies revue (Cambridge Footlights, eat your heart out). I continued to write satire during my first teaching job, in Cornwall, and still remember the po-faced reaction of senior management when one of my pieces (thankfully anonymous) fell into the wrong hands – believe me, Headmasters and their deputies don’t take kindly to having their self-importance pricked (and I say that as an ex-Deputy Head). Several of the items in question have turned up. For some reason, I decided that the school bore a certain resemblance to Colditz and thus cast the Head as the Commandant, with senior staff bellowing out orders in cod Allo Allo-style German accents; can’t think why.

However, the most exciting ‘finds’ have been the abandoned drafts of old attempts to write my first novel, and looking back through them, it’s now very easy to see why I gave up on them! They must all date from about the early 1980s to the mid-1990s: they’re all handwritten, and I abandoned that method in favour of word-processing around 1997-8. It’s impossible to date the drafts more precisely, but my hazy recollections suggest that in the early ’80s I was still convinced that I’d be the next Ian Fleming / Tom Clancy / Frederick Forsyth, writing techno-naval-global conspiracy thrillers; one in particular is  a labyrinthine plot involving Britain’s first Trident submarine, then just a sketch on a drawing board. (However, I’m quietly chuffed that I predicted one of the submarines in question would be named HMS Vengeance, probably about ten years before that name was actually allocated.) I’ve only dipped into it – the draft is quite long, maybe 20-30,000 words worth, and it now seems pretty excruciating – cardboard cutout characters including standard-issue CIA heavies, and so forth. At that time I was clearly still much more interested in the hardware than in such essentials as character development, and I was still convinced that one simply wrote ‘Chapter One’ at the top of a page and everything would flow naturally and inevitably from there; I hadn’t realised just how much time one needs to spend on plot construction, a longer and more difficult process than the actual writing itself!

At some point, though, the penny dropped and I decided to have a go at historical novels instead. Even so, there were a couple of odd detours along the way. For some reason now lost in the mists of the early 1990s, I started a couple of stories set in the 14th century.  Now, I wouldn’t say that what I know about the 14th century fits onto a postage stamp; probably more like the reasonably large books of postage stamps one gets at Christmas. Interestingly, though, one of them seems to be my first attempt to write in the first person, the method I later adopted for the Quinton series, so it clearly played a part in my development. I had a couple of stabs at Victorian-era novels and even bizarrely started a story set against the backdrop of the Welsh religious revival of the early 1900s (as if that ever stood a chance of having ‘bestseller’ stamped all over it…). Much more important, though, was my first attempt at a novel set in the Restoration navy – the real precursor of Gentleman Captain and the entire Quinton series. By now I was clearly putting a lot more thought into the preliminary development of the characters’ back stories, and the hero is – wait for it – a young gentleman captain of Charles II’s navy. What’s more, the villain is … [SPOILER ALERT FOR ANYONE WHO HASN’T READ GENTLEMAN CAPTAIN YET – DO NOT READ THE REST OF THIS SENTENCE!] …a former Commonwealth officer who seems to be loyal to the Crown but is actually secretly plotting treason. But for some unaccountable reason I decided to ignore the entire milieu of the Restoration and the second Anglo-Dutch war which forms Matthew Quinton’s world, setting the story instead in 1679-80. Re-reading the story now, though, I’m quite impressed with some aspects of it; indeed, I’m not going to reveal anything more of the plot now because I think it’ll provide material for sections of future books, if not the basis of the story for something like ‘Quinton 14’!

I suppose what all of the above proves, apart from the obvious lessons about the importance of plot construction and characterisation, is the main message that aspiring novelists might learn from my experience – try, try, and try again! Oh, and tidy your loft every now and again; you never know what’s up there.

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I’m not sure if I’ll be able to post Monday; thanks to a tennis-nut friend, I’ll be on Centre Court for the first day of Wimbledon, and I don’t know if I’ll have time to write a post beforehand. Watch this space!