On my recent truly whistlestop holiday in America   –  I seemed to spend a lot of time navigating New York’s Penn Station and wondering about destinations with names like Babylon and Ho-Ho-Kus  – I visited two friends who are painters by profession. Seeing them in their studios made me consider their working lives and how…

  ‘Tis done. First draft of Anyone for Seconds? is on its way to my editor and I, as is my custom after delivering a book, am leaving the country. I used to run away because I feared being unmasked at long last. The dreaded knock. The Literary Police on my doorstep. ‘Laurie Graham, we…

Today I’m going hunting, but not over hill and dale. The last time I was aboard a horse I was swiftly unseated and I can take a hint. The book is almost finished and I now have to face reading it, from the beginning and quietly putting to death its most egregious flaws. It isn’t…

  Today, thanks to the dirty tricks of my computer, I lost  –  not once but TWICE  –  my morning’s work. The first time my laptop did a sudden, spontaneous, ready-or-not reboot without having the courtesy to auto-save my 500 words.  So I rewrote them. Perhaps they were even slightly improved. But I was so…

At last the Perfect Meringues sequel has a title. My editor, who had rejected every brilliant suggestion we offered her, went away on holiday and while the gears of her mind were disengaged came up with Anyone for Seconds? Which gives us a nod towards Lizzie’s former incarnation as a TV cook and also makes reference to the…

I sometimes think we anglophones don’t appreciate what a rich and wonderful language we use. We may not have thirty different words for snow but hey, why give the rail networks another twenty nine reasons for torturing us? I love to learn any new word and this week’s treasure is ‘yuglet’ for which I must…

Marcel Proust had his madeleine crumbled in hot tea. Yesterday I had a moment too, because the supermarket had peas, actual peas in their pods. I brought a bag home, though it was lighter when I arrived because I sneaked a few while waiting for my train. Peas in their pods transport me to summer…

Thank you, dear readers, for your title suggestions. Some of you went to a great deal of trouble and I make special mention of Signor Uccello for Fifty Shades of Grey Mullet. Totally unusable of course but it did brighten a wet Monday morning. I now feel vindicated in my opinion that we need a…

Plans A, B and Z accomplished, I’m back between the traces hauling behind me one very delayed novel. I really have to get on with it now, not least because I have a million ideas about what I want to write next. Well, a couple of ideas at any rate. That’s what holidays can do…