JollyHog sausages I doubt it once the truth hit

Easy-peel shrink-wrapped

Resealable will come open in the cupboard and let in a thousand weevils

Tomatoes grown for flavour unlike the others grown for … grown for … grown for …

Ready-to-eat peaches ready-to-rot four weeks later still as hard as cannon shot

Ripe-and-ready avocados for a seven-minute window next Tuesday while you’re out

SpoiltPig sausages It’s about perspective

Ripen-at-home bananas but only in someone else’s home, not yours

Extra fine beans the person who thought them edible should be fined extra

Small cauliflower tiny floret

Family cauliflower as in the Osmonds or the Amish

Fresh tuna steaks on offer £173.99 for two

Honeydew melon no promises made and we all know why

0% fat 100% despair

small cucumber easily mistaken for a gherkin

large cucumber easily mistaken for something that should fit in your salad drawer

Free From joy

HEARTY sausage rolls guaranteed cardiac arrest

Sharing pack of Maltesers ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Tomatoes on the vine tomatoes very much OFF the vine

Heinz Sandwich Spread vomit from 1970s children

Spinach 3 kilo bag Spinach for one

HECK sausages the pig’s final thought

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I’m sure you noticed because I had hundreds of messages saying Fran, Where Are got on with your lives in the meantime, wondering why you felt so light of heart.

What happened in June, then, to distract me? Hang on. I’ll check back in my diary and see what excuses I can come up with.

I’ll leave out the online Ocado deliveries and trips to the chemist for deodorant and the day I spent in the kitchen culling unused mugs and kitchen utensils.

Why would you do that? I hear some of the regulars say. That sounds exactly the kind of irrelevant trivia you offer.

Ah, yes. Between 5-12 June, I went with my husband to Looe, Cornwall, where we stayed in a three-storey traditional holiday cottage with a spiral staircase so narrow and precipitous that there were handrails and ropes installed to keep you alive while ascending/descending.

No, there wasn’t a downstairs toilet. Yes, we are both in our sixties. No, things aren’t as elastic as they used to be.

I did take a video of myself navigating the staircase to send to my three grown-up kids and show them how risky it was and how brave we were being. I had a caring and compassionate message from my older daughter saying something like ‘You’re scaring me. Please make sure my dad doesn’t fall.’

Despite the likelihood that we would die by staircase while on holiday, we had a lovely time. My sister lives in Looe so we spent some days at her sea-view apartment, which overlooks the sea, gazing at the sea and saying, ‘Look at that view of the sea.’

Did I mention that she has a sea view? No, of course I’m not jealous.

We didn’t have a sea view in our cottage, although what use is a sea view when you’re lying prostrate at the bottom of a flight of stairs with all your bones rearranged and one of your eyeballs rolling along a carpet?

Still, the cottage was fitted out beautifully with a strong sea side theme. I particularly liked these salt and pepper shakers. It’s a shame we didn’t notice them until Day 2 because on Day 1 we’d been to the supermarket to buy salt and pepper.

The cottage was called ‘Curlews Cottage’ so there were curlews in every room. Here’s one of them.

I don’t really know what to say about that so let me check the internet and see if I can find some curlew fascinating facts.

Okay, I’m back.

According to wildlifetrusts.org, an old Scottish name for the curlew is ‘whaup’ or ‘great whaup’. Its evocative call has been immortalised in the poem, The Seafarer, which dates back to 1,000 AD, but may be even older: “I take my gladness in the... sound of the curlew instead of the laughter of men”.

Anyone who’s been to see bad stand-up comedy probably feels the same.

During our holiday, we visited a cafe and decided we would stick with the ham or cheese option because children can be chewy.

One more photo before you lose heart. Other people’s holiday photos are one of life’s ‘things to get through’, aren’t they, like visits to the dentist, the ads on Youtube, and overcooked cauliflower.

This sign was by the front door of the cottage. Boots in Cornwall are much cleverer than other boots, reading their own notices and everything.

Other things that happened in June, none of them potentially fatal …

1. I joined a five-week Monday evening poetry course offered by Writing West Midlands and taught by the fantastic poet Liz Berry. Look, see!

We weren’t in a room.

We met via Zoom.

We learned about metaphor

and what it’s for.

We learned about simile

willingly.

And we learned about line/

breaks.

As you can tell, the course was transformative for my art and you’ll soon be seeing my new collection in the shops.

(The charity shops.)

2. June, for me, was also about tennis and football. I play a particular type of tennis and football called ‘Watching others do it.’

3. One Friday afternoon - 19th June - I went to Kenilworth Books to chat to customers and sign copies of my books. The bookseller found a 1970s playlist on Spotify because ‘Cuckoo in the Nest’ and ‘Home Bird’ are set in that decade. We found out how many of those tunes have become classics because she, despite being a young ‘un, as in, someone who wouldn’t have needed the handrails and ropes in Cornwall, recognised many more than she’d expected to. Think Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’, Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’ and the Bee Gees ‘Tragedy’ for starters. I did sing along to some but when I did the flow of customers stuttered so I sang them to my insides instead.

4. The last week in June was RID-I-CU-LOUS when it came to the weather and I stayed as still as I could without being mistaken for rubbish and taken away by the bin men. Heatwaves aren’t as punishing in Warwickshire as they are in Greater London, where we used to live, but I still find it hard to cope. In my diary, I crossed out ‘Eye test, Boots’ - an appointment I rearranged because I couldn’t face getting onto the bus into town and being braised alive, expiring along with all the other passengers until we all ended up floating face-down in a sweaty soup along the aisle.

I would choose death by staircase any day.

If you’re still reading this post, congratulations, you hardy survivor. If you’re new here, and I know some of you are, my subscriber/follower numbers having gone up since I posted a photo on ‘Notes’ of a headline typo, you are most welcome and, yes, the posts are usually this lacking in real substance.

For those who didn’t see it.

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If you smiled, buy me a coffee!

I first felt the hair in my eye while watching Michael Portillo travel around Japan by train but I don’t think it was anything he did.

As the evening drew on, my eye became more and more irritated and scratchy. I’ll get that out at bedtime, I thought, expecting it to be the usual: an eyebrow hair that had gone south or an eyelash come loose.

No.

I went upstairs to put my pyjamas on and extract whatever little hair was rubbing against my eyeball. Boy, it must be a sharp one, I thought. By now, I was blinking, blinking, blinking, and not in a coquettish Marilyn Monroe way.

I turned on the Big Overhead Light and peered into the magnifying mirror. I swear, I heard the screechy violin music from Psycho when the woman is in the shower and the man with the knife steps in. A long hair that can only have come from my head or from a passing yak was inside my eye socket, curled onto the surface of my eyeball, trying to strangle it.

Thanks to Herbert Bieser from Pixabay for the yak. It certainly has hair to spare.

I did that thing where you tap your eyeball with a fingertip. Usually, an offending hair will stick to your finger and, there you go, you can switch off the Big Light and slide into bed.

This yak hair was having none of it. It had claimed ownership of my eyeball.

Look, just go to bed, I told myself. Your body knows what to do. It will heal itself. The hair will have worked itself out of your eyeball by the morning and there it’ll be on the pillow.

I woke this morning, still blinking. Whether I’d been blinking all night, I don’t know, or maybe that explains the dreams about the lighthouse and the broken street lamp.

I looked in the magnifying mirror again. The hair was still there and my eye was red and weepy. However, I could see one end of the hair this time, tantalisingly near my lower eyelid, whereas last night, both ends were behind my eyeball and working their way into my hippocampus.

How to get it out? I couldn’t risk blinking, otherwise it might move and disappear again. So I stared like a mad woman into my mirror, eyeball bulging, and tapped at the hair’s end with my finger.

Pff, it said. Jog on.

I tapped again. It really hurts, doing that when your eye is already angry.

The yak hair laughed.

I tapped again and, for good measure, became the first person in the history of the world to pray, ‘Lord, please help me get this yak hair out of my eye.’

I had a reason for the desperate prayer. I was due to speak at a day-long Zoom writers’ conference run by the Association of Christian Writers, appearing on three panels, and I didn’t want to start the day with ‘Honestly, I’m not crying and I haven’t been assaulted. I have a yak hair wrapped around my eyeball.’

I tapped once more and there it was, the end of the hair, on my fingertip. Then I gave it another infinitesimal tug - I didn’t want it to spring back and slice my eyeball in half like a piece of cheese wire on Brie.

Slowly but surely, out the hair came.

You’ve seen those magicians pulling scarves out of hats, haven’t you?

It was a long hair, sticky with whatever lives inside of my eye #toomuchinformation

Long? you say. How long is long?

In reality? Five or six centimetres. But, while it was emerging from inside my skull, 17 miles.

The relief!

I did consider framing the hair. After all, it had caused quite a drama, and having a picture in your hall labelled ‘The yak hair that was in my eye’ would be a talking point with guests when things get awkward at the going-home stage and people are putting their shoes on and no one knows what to say.

Instead, I blew the hair off my fingertip and it landed on the carpet. It will meet the vacuum cleaner soon and it can go and wrap itself around dust balls and bits of dropped flapjack.

The conference went well. It was nice to be able to talk about my writing process and my thoughts on social media marketing rather than about the yak hair/eyeball scenario, although maybe the audience would have felt differently.

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Inside Fran’s Diary …

If you’re near Warwick next Saturday 23 May, come to the lovely Warwick Books in the marketplace and say hello. I’ll be signing my Jackie Chadwick books AND, because it’s #FosterCareFortnight, I’ll have a senior social worker with me from Warwickshire’s fostering team. Together, we hope to raise awareness, and the bookshop is kindly donating a portion of any profits to the Care Leavers’ Association. This is going to be a special one - I’m looking forward to it.

On Saturday 30 May, I’m performing a couple of items in Leamington Spa at our church’s annual entertainment evening, raising money for Christian Aid. Come along! Here are the details on Eventbrite.

On Friday 19 June, I’ll be at Kenilworth Books, another super indie bookshop in Warwickshire, signing copies of ‘Cuckoo in the Nest’ and ‘Home Bird’ and chatting to customers about all things reading.

On Saturday 4 July, it’s the Whitnash Fun Day and I’ll be there with other local authors, being interviewed as part of a Warwickshire Libraries initiative to promote The Year of Reading. It’s free - come along if you’re local!

There are several more events still at the tbc stage - watch this space.

In between all that, I’ve be steering clear of yaks.

By the way, both ‘Cuckoo in the Nest’ and ‘Home Bird’ are only 99p on Kindle at the moment. Hurry!

No, not a whole flapjack. Give me credit.

I knew something was wrong - it kept sticking to the floor as I walked - schlup schlup schlup - but I couldn’t be bothered to investigate until it started to PROPERLY annoy me.

Eventually, I looked and saw that it was a small piece of flapjack, picked up, no doubt, from the kitchen floor. My husband had baked a batch the day before.

Actually, three days before.

Maybe four.

I know. We are slobs.

It took a while to pick it off my sock. It had stuck quite stubbornly as though determined to become part of the sock in its own right. Perhaps it was disillusioned with its life as an oaty snack.

I didn’t have time for its existential angst, though. I pulled it off my sock.

No, I didn’t eat it, you at the back.

No, I didn’t think about it.

Here’s a picture of (according to me) one portion of the flapjack.

It’s not the first time I’ve had food stuck to me, and why are you not surprised?

I trained to teach English in secondary schools when I was 40. There was one huge advantage to this. Pupils thought I was an experienced teacher and, if I pretended confidence well enough, I mostly escaped the drubbing teachers get if a class knows they’re a newbie.

This is why I didn’t understand when, one day, after a very satisfying and hot school lunch, I tried to teach Macbeth to a class of fifteen year olds who were generally compliant and respectful.

This could have been because of my inspired and brilliant teaching. It could also have been because I taught them after lunch and they had all been anaesthetised by carbs.

Anyway, on this occasion, they were smothering giggles all the way through the lesson and nudging each other even while King Duncan got tragically murdered and his household mourned.

The class would settle down for five minutes and then be laughing again.

I got very cross but this made them laugh even more. Secondary school pupils love seeing teachers get flustered. It’s major entertainment for them and who can blame them especially when they’re undergoing compulsory Shakespeare?

At the end of the lesson, I sent them off to their next class, glad to see the back of them.

One quiet girl stayed behind and loitered near my desk. Oh good, I thought. This redeems the lesson somewhat, that a pupil stays behind to ask an intelligent question.

‘Hello, Katie,’ I said. ‘Can I help? Is there something you didn’t understand?’

‘Miss,’ she said, pointing. ‘Did you know you had pudding on your chest?’

I looked down. Sure enough, there was a sizeable blob of blackberry crumble and custard sitting on my shirt, the dark colour of the fruit bleeding into my clothing.

It would have looked like a fatal wound the same as King Duncan’s except that his didn’t have a school pudding attached.

‘It’s been there the whole lesson,’ Katie added, superfluously, and wandered off.

I tried to call, ‘Thank you!’ after her but the words wouldn’t come, silenced as they were by shame.

So, I may have had flapjack stuck to my foot, and it may have been temporarily annoying, but at least I didn’t have thirty teenagers watching.

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Inside Fran’s Diary …

The diary is filling up (as in busy not about to cry).

I thought it was going to be a quiet year because I don’t have a book coming out - not one that anyone’s told me about - but telling the world about ‘Cuckoo in the Nest’ and ‘Home Bird’ is still an ongoing project especially as the publication of the third book in the series (working title ‘Third Bird’ only not really) rather depends on sales figures for the second.

So, tell everyone you know about Jackie Chadwick and you might get to find out what happens after Book 2 and whether …. uh oh, NO SPOILERS!

Sunday 26 April will see ‘Cuckoo in the Nest’ become 3 years old. Here’s a picture from the 1970s-themed launch in Leamington Spa Waterstones. My daughter made these cheese and pineapple hedgehogs. Genius.

On Saturday 16 May, I’m one of the authors taking part in an online conference run by the Association of Christian Writers. If you’re a writer (at whichever stage) and a Christian (ditto!) and you didn’t know about ACW, look here.

If you’re near Warwick on Saturday 23 May, come to Warwick Books in the marketplace and say hello. I’ll be signing my books but also telling people about Foster Care Fortnight, an important event in the fostering calendar that aims to raise awareness, as do my Jackie books in their own way.

On Saturday 30 May, I’m performing a couple of items in Leamington Spa at our church’s annual entertainment evening, raising money for Christian Aid. Come along! Here are the details on Eventbrite.

There are several more events still at the tbc stage - watch this space.

In between all that, I’ve decided I’ll sweep my kitchen floor more often.

It was World Poetry Day last week so here's a poem for you.

I wrote this after hearing about a couple who'd won squillions on the Lottery. I mean, how must that feel, in those initial hours after you get the incredible news?


That first night

That first night we knew,
we turned over and over, hot and
restless with the weight of it,
the passioned love or hate of it,
the vague uncertain shape of it.

That first night we knew,
we lay, blinking into our moneyed dark,
troubled what to do with it,
how to share, and who, with it,
whether we’d stay true, with it.

That first night we knew,
we waited for an unfamiliar dawn,
wary of the form of it,
the heat or torrid storm of it,
the all that glitters norm of it.

Image by Paulo Diniz from Pixabay

Or am I just bitter, because it's never happened to me ... and isn't likely to unless I start doing the Lottery?

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Making flapjacks. Sugar in the pan. Syrup in the pan. Butter in the pan. Touch of spice. Heat and stir. Oats in the pan. Bish bash bosh. Cut a piece of grease proof paper the size of your tin. Simples. Try to persuade the piece of grease proof paper into the tin. Not so simples. Recall how easy it is to buy flapjacks from shops. Tip mixture into baking tin and squash it down. Realise you don’t have enough mixture. Nor do you have a smaller tin. Regret being born. Bake mixture in oven thinking, what the hell, I’ll call them flat-jacks. Take flat-jacks out of oven. Try extracting them from the tin, from the grease proof paper, from your mind, your soul, the part of your brain that does memories. Bite on one of your flat-jacks. Crack a tooth. Put the flat-jacks in a tin to offer to people you hate.

Cancelling a subscription. Open the laptop. Find the website. Sign in. Bish bash bosh. Select ‘My account’. See nothing helpful. Click on a hundred links in case they lead to ‘Cancel my subscription.’ Eat a packet of Hobnobs. Google how to cancel the subscription. Wander around the entire internet for 7 hours, learning about wildebeest, South American tribal customs and how to put out a pan fire. Sign into the website again. Click on ‘Settings’ as advised by the internet to find many, many types of settings, but not one you need. Start wondering whether you’ll miss £17.99 a month. What else could you economise on? Surely there are cheaper brands of coffee and toilet roll. Do you need the heating on? You could wear an extra jumper. Click on ‘Shut Down’ and realise the same has happened to every hope you ever had. Regret being born.

Sending a birthday card. Spot ‘Auntie Audrey’s birthday’ on the calendar over your breakfast coffee. Today is Saturday. Her birthday’s Monday. Congratulate yourself. You’re in time. You’re sure you have a suitable card in a drawer. There’s a postbox at the end of the road. The post gets collected in half an hour. Open the drawer. Bish bash bosh. You’ve always loved your your mum’s sister. Such a sweetie and worth all the effort. You find two cards in the box. 1) Sorry about your loss. 2) Congratulations! You passed! Regret having an Auntie Audrey. Why can’t people stick to one child? Pull your coat on for a trip to town. The post goes at 12 from town. Get to town at 11. Choose a card from the stationers. Leave the stationers. Go back into the stationers to buy a pen. Leave the stationers. Go back into the stationers for a first-class stamp. They only have second-class left. Walk to the post office. Join a queue of 103 people, all with queries about driving licences and applications for passports. Buy a book of eight 1st-class stamps because of the look on her face when you said one stamp. Hand over half your bank balance. Sit at a grimy table to write the card. Write ‘Happy birthday, Auntie, with lots of love’ while having alternative bad-bad words in your head. Apply the stamp. Realise you don’t have Auntie Audrey’s address. Ring your mother. Leave an answerphone message. Go to a cafe. Order a coffee, a toastie and cake. Hand over the other half of your bank balance. Your mother calls with the address. She wants advice about her vacuum cleaner. Give rapid, unreliable advice. Write Auntie Audrey’s address on the envelope. Leave the cafe. Reach the postbox at 11.50. Watch the back of the post van as it disappears from view. Regret being born.

Do you have any other ideas for things that start off easy and end up complicated? Let me know in the comments.

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Inside Fran’s Diary …

Last Wednesday, I was chuffed to be invited to the Kenilworth chapter of the Book and Pudding Club. The club chose ‘Cuckoo in the Nest’ for their March read and had all kinds of nice things to say as well as some pertinent questions. Here we all are. Can you spot me? I’m in something stripey like Where’s Wally but not red and black.

I hope the club members will go on to read ‘Home Bird’ too. They sounded intrigued.

I ran a mini-competition and a lady called Sue won a signed copy of ‘Home Bird’. Here she is receiving her prize while my cake waits patiently.

This Friday, ‘Home Bird’ will be a year old. Happy birthday, book!

If you haven’t read the sequel to ‘Cuckoo in the Nest’ yet, here it is! If you have, and enjoyed it, please share that opinion with everyone in the whole wide world, however you can. My humble thanks.

The diary is filling up (but not with tears, like me after the flatjack incident). As well as helping on the planning committee for my local Society of Authors group, there’s an author talk at a local event, a performance at an entertainments evening, a role on a panel at a writers’ day and a visit to a literature festival to talk about my books. Details all tbc so watch this space.

Yep, keep watching.

Don’t move!

Are you still there?

Congratulations! You kept watching! You have won a prize nothing, there’s no prize. Sorry.

She was reading a book.

‘Hey, listen a minute,’ I said. ‘The clue is Elizabeth deceived against the odds by Raymond.’

‘What?’ she said.

I said, ‘I think it might be cryptic.’

Sometimes I amaze myself. The insight! The perception!

‘You’re on your own,’ she said. ‘You know I hate cryptic clues.’ She went back to her book.

I frowned over the clue. ‘Well, Bet is short for Elizabeth. And that would link with the odds.’

‘If you say so,’ she said.

‘And, then, maaaaaybe, if Bet has been abbreviated, perhaps you have to shorten Raymond to Ray. What do you think?’

I think she was hating my voice as well as hating cryptic clues by now.

‘Bet and Ray,’ I said. Sometimes when you say it out loud, it’s easier to work out. ‘Ray and Bet. Bet. Ray. Ray. Bet.’ I tried lengthening the vowels. ‘Beeeet. Raaaaay. Raaaaaaaaaaaaay. Beeeeeeeeeeet. No, I don’t get it. Why is it about deception?’

(I’m sure you’ve clocked it by now, reader.)

I wrote it out at the bottom of the page to see how it looked. Bet. Ray. Bet. Ray.

There was a hiatus while my brain shifted into gear like a rusty machine, something early Industrial Revolution. I think next door must have heard the crunch.

Then, the connection, albeit the slowest ever.

‘BETRAY!!’ I said, holding the crossword book aloft like Excalibur and shaking it at my friend. ‘BETRAY. BET. RAY. BETRAY! Deceived. Betrayed. BETRAY! How did I not see that?’

We nearly wet ourselves laughing. Oh yes, she got involved then, because she may not be entertained by cryptic clues but she found my denseness most amusing.

It reminded me of a story I heard from an English teacher colleague who had, while reading aloud to her sixth form class, misread the sentence ‘He felt misled by her’ as ‘He felt mizzled by her.’ It took her a long time to get the lesson back on track. She told us the story in the staff room at lunch time and we were all sympathetic and kind about it all laughed until we wept.

She was dubbed Miss Mizzled and taunted in corridors for months after that and I think she got the same treatment from the pupils.

These are the kinds of errors we would prefer to make alone and never admit to others, in the same way as we would rather stub a toe or sneeze tea out of our noses when alone. But, where’s there’s fallibility, there’s usually a keen audience, lapping it up and enjoying the schauden … schaudenf … schadenfr … seeing someone else’s humiliation.

It’s like those optical illusions such as ‘Magic Eye’ pictures. We’ve had a book of them for years.

Someone thrusts a picture of a forest in front of you, and says, smugly, ‘Can you see the tiger? It leaps out at you. Can you see the tiger? Surely you can see it. It’s a tiger. Orange stripes. Staring eyes.’ until you feel you’ve let the whole world down, only being able to see a forest.

‘No, I can’t, I can’t. Where is it? What tiger? I can only see trees.’

‘Seriously? How can you not see it? Stare through the picture, not at it.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘Honestly. Stare through it. It’ll jump off the page.’

‘No, all I can see is the fores -’

And then ..

‘WHOA!! Look at THAT!’ You back away from the picture. The tiger is about to claw your eyes out.

Then, once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it and you become one of the smug, shoving the picture in front of other people as though you’d spotted it instantly and can’t understand why they can only see forest, the idiots.

OR you never see the ‘tiger’ and spend the rest of your life an outsider, a reject, an alien, disregarded in the neighbourhood and talked about at cocktail parties.

I feel I ought to make a profound statement about life to wrap up this Substack post, finding some significant connection that links the anecdotes, but at the moment I can’t think of anything.

I’m sure you can, though. Let me know when you see it.

Even better, let me know if you’ve got a story of your own in which you were humiliated as I’m sure all my subscribers would love to read it.

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‘

Many of the best writers have planned their novels using post-it notes including Austen and Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson famous novelists born since the invention of post-it notes.

I did take a photo of my wardrobe but, if I show it to you, you’ll be able to zoom in on the post-its and in [unspecifiednumber] years’ time, when the book is published, if the book is ever published, if the book ever chicken-well gets finished, you’ll be able to say to me ‘What happened to the scene in which she buys the cute, goofy dog?’ and I’ll say ‘Oh, I took that scene out’ and you’ll say ‘You took the dog OUT?’ and that would be the end of our relationship.

Here’s an image, instead, by Gerd Altmann on Pixabay. Gerd was obviously still waiting on ideas.

I realise I sound like a pompous egomaniac. Who’s to say you’d even bother zooming in on the post-its to see what happens in my book? You have a life to live, people to see, things to buy, bits of fluff on your sweater to pick off, toenails to clip.

And there’s no dog in the story anyway. I made that up.

Yep. I made it up that I’d made a dog up.

It’s much safer to have no dog in the first place than to write a dog into the draft and then drop the dog - like a stone down a well - and risk losing all one’s friends and potential customers.

I’ve planned three books now using this post-it note strategy even though it’s possible to use software such as Scrivener or the ‘Navigation Pane’ feature on Word - and probably even Excel if I understood it - to achieve the same goal: list the scenes in the book, organise them into an order, and swap them around if necessary. And it will always be necessary.

But there’s something about the tangibility of post-its that is more satisfying than seeing the scenes listed on a screen.

(Tangibility is a word, then. I was expecting a red wiggly line.)

This time, I’ve used two colours of post-its. The green post-its are for the ‘current narrative’ - the main story I’m telling - and the orange ones are for ‘past incidents and information’ that the reader needs to know. I love peeling a post-it off the wardrobe and saying, ‘Sorry [name of character] but you’ll just have to wait until later to find out that she was lying’ and re-siting it further along the wardrobe. I feel powerful and we all need those kinds of illusions in our lives otherwise we’d dive headfirst into our compost bins and wait to be suffocated by peelings.

The post-it system is not fail safe. Depending on how long it takes me to finish the book, and, at the current rate of progress [you are cordially invited to my launch party in 2037], the post-its may start losing their stickiness. One by one, during the night, they’ll come unstuck and either droop drunkenly to one side or detach completely, floating to the carpet like autumn leaves as I sleep (as shown in this image by No-longer-here at Pixabay).

Also, some post-its are perilously near the inside edges of the doors so that when I need a clean shirt or pair of trousers, I open the wardrobe and Scenes 20 and 21 fly off, taking out a major plot twist and a flashback that might never find themselves put back in the original place in the story.

As well as this, some of those ‘scenes’ should end up as one sentence and some as four chapters and there’s a danger with the system that I’ll get the balance wrong.

On the other hand, all of these disadvantages to the post-it system might make the novel ambiguous and disrupted and intensely bewildering, therefore much more likely to win the Booker Prize.

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Happy birthday to my Substack! I’ll bake us a cake, dear Substack, but you are just an online platform which can’t eat cake and I am a human so … guess what mwah ha ha.

Anyway, I came here to write about cushions.

This kind.

[Image by Mijoun from Pixabay]

Sofa cushions and I have not been friends over the years. I’ve seen them as fussy and extra-to-requirements and always felt bewildered by sofas piled high with cushions when the sofas themselves are perfectly comfortable.

Until recent events, which shall become clear, across the three sofas in our two downstairs rooms, you’d normally have found two cushions: one for my husband to tuck behind his aching gardener’s back and the other so that I’m not judged by visitors who read Woman and Home.

They’d be old cushions, too, circa the 1990s: shapeless and floppy, like people who’ve lost weight too quickly on Mounjaro and now have more flesh on their outsides than on their insides.

This long-held antipathy towards cushions was illustrated when I had some counselling a few years ago with a female counsellor who is a cushion fan.

She soon got used to my routine. Enter the room. Decide which chair to take. Remove from the chair any cushions and put them on the floor. Sit down.

It became a running joke and, when my series of counselling sessions finished, I wrote the counsellor this poem.

The cushion complains 

I am a fluffy cushion.
I sit here on the chair
awaiting someone’s aching back
or bony derriere.
I’m flattened in the day time.
By night-time I need fluffing.
Those aching backs and derrieres
do damage to my stuffing.
My self-esteem is pretty good -
a cushion of good cheer -
except when Fran walks in
and makes her condescension clear.
She plucks at me disgustedly
and dumps me on the floor
where I lie, disregarded,
for one whole hour or more.
I think I now need counselling.
My psyche is in shreds. 
But who does cushion counselling?
Who looks at cushions’ heads? 
Who cares for cushions’ feelings
when they are tossed aside? 
Who tells us we’re deserving
when we despair inside? 
I’m just a fluffy cushion,
not even worth a mention
while Fran gets all the therapy,
while Fran gets the attention.
Soft furnishings deserve some love.
We're frail beneath the stuffing. 
She gets her stuff all dealt with
while I make do with nuffing.  

Well. There has been recent cushion drama.

My husband and I bought three new sofas which were delivered last May. They’re in chocolate brown corduroy-type material and we’re very pleased with them. What we weren’t expecting, though, was that six enormous fat matching cushions, each one as round and squidgy as a dart player’s belly, would arrive free with the sofas.

‘No one warned me about these,’ I said to my husband. ‘We should have been notified.’ I’m sure people feel the same when drunken aunties turn up unexpectedly at Christmas or when people who holiday abroad find snakes in the toilet bowl.

We ripped three square miles of plastic from the cushions and piled them up in the living room. The tower came up to my shoulders.

What to do with them? The new sofas themselves came very bouncy and plump so cushionry seemed super-profligate and, anyway, with all six cushions on the sofas, there’d be no room left for bottoms, leaving people perched on the edge of the furniture as though expecting an emergency or suffering a burst haemorrhoid.

‘If we put two on each sofa,’ I said, ‘I’m just going to spend my whole life throwing cushions on the floor like a spoilt child.’

My husband was suspiciously silent on this.

What’s more, the new cushions looked to me like the vindictive type that would know when someone didn’t like them and would expand surreptitiously during the night until we were forced out of our own home for lack of oxygen.

‘But they were free,’ my husband said, because he’s a sucker for a bargain of any kind and can’t be left unsupervised near market stalls on Saturdays because if someone is selling 300 bananas for five pounds, he will buy those bananas even though they’ll be a festering heap by Wednesday.

We compromised about the cushions. We sent our two 1990s cushions to soft-furnishings heaven and found room in a cupboard upstairs for two of the new ones, all the other items in that cupboard saying, ‘Oh, pur-lease, give us a BREAK!’ as we shoved the cushions in and forced the door shut.

The four remaining cushions have been distributed across the three sofas. That’s four more than I’d prefer, and two of them do indeed live on the floor, but I like to call myself reasonable.

Unlike me, my husband’s gardener’s back is delighted with its new cushion and said, ‘Ooh, that’s more like it.’

Image by jacqueline macou from Pixabay

I should perhaps have more therapy to explore the reasons I might be anti-cushion. I suspect deeper issues such as core beliefs about comfort and luxury and who deserves them, because I’ve also spent sixty years being suspicious of blankets and throws kept in living rooms, thinking them only for people’s beds or for sofas that dogs sit on or to wrap up cold babies and nonagenarians.

But I might have to invent a gambling habit or profound feelings of worthlessness because who contacts a therapist and asks for help with their attitudes towards soft furnishings?

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'I messaged him. ‘Did you call me?’

It’s the kind of stupid question you ask when you’re nearly 64. The evidence is there on my phone. A missed call. My son’s name.

It’s like when I say, ‘It’s me,’ when I phone someone. ‘I know,’ they say. ‘Your name is taking up most of my screen. Don’t waste breath at your age. Who knows how many breaths you have left?’

My son messaged me back. ‘Yes, I have a question. When I was seven, I wrote to the queen. Can you remember what I asked her?’

That would have been in 1993, then.

I could imagine him typing that message and saying to my daughter-in-law, ‘I don’t know why I’m asking her this. She won’t remember.’

He’s right. Not only do I not remember what he asked the queen but neither do I remember him writing to the queen.

(I do remember that he was once seven. I hope I get some recognition for that.)

I replied, ‘I’d forgotten that you wrote to the queen.’

‘I thought you might have,’ he wrote back.

I asked my husband, ‘Do you remember him writing to the queen when he was seven?’

‘Hm,’ he said. ‘You know, I think I can vaguely remember something.’

I messaged my son. ‘Your dad says he can vaguely remember something.’

He replied with ‘ha ha’ but I imagine that was just because he couldn’t find a strangling emoji.

My son often says to me, ‘You don’t seem to remember anything from my childhood.’

‘I do,’ I’ll say. ‘For instance, I remember all those times we ended up in Minor Injuries with you after you’d had mishaps.’

‘Name me one of those mishaps,’ he’ll say. ‘Give me specifics.'

‘Er - you fell off a few walls, I think. Perhaps the swings?’

‘See.’

‘I remember what happened when you were only a few minutes old,’ I’ll tell him. ‘Surely that’s impressive.’

It doesn’t mollify him. At a few minutes old, he’s unlikely to have stored the incident in his memory so he can’t confirm whether I remember it properly or not.

Here’s the story.

After his birth, a nurse I hadn’t met before was taking me and my new baby son up to the maternity ward in the lift.

He’d been born just before midnight on 12th March.

The nurse looked at the baby and then at me, creased her forehead in a frown and said, ‘I’m trying to work out whether your son is the 12th or the 13th.’

‘Crikey!’ I said, shocked. I thought, what a crumpled gargoyle I must look if she thinks I’ve had twelve children. ‘No, he’s only my second!’

‘I meant the date!’ she said. ‘Was he born on the 12th or the 13th?’

Photo by Donovan Reeves on Unsplash

The nurse was much amused - more than I was at the time, with stitches where needles should never go and a startled pelvic floor, and I imagine she told all her colleagues during the tea-break. In fact, she probably has a Substack account called Birthing Bloopers where she writes about stupid things post-partum women said and did. I hope, for her sake, that her memory is keener than mine.

They say, don’t they, that as you get older your long-term memory stays sharp while your short-term memory gets worse?

I think my short-term memory has forgotten that my long-term memory was supposed to stay sharp.

So, mostly, when any of my three adult children say, ‘Mum, do you remember that art project I did / that sleepover that went wrong because … / my performance in the play when I was …’, it’s a futile attempt to draw memories out of me, like someone who knows there’s a £50 note in the compost heap and goes foraging for it only to be disappointed.

I wonder what was in that letter to the queen. ‘Dear Queen Elizabeth. Please could you send me a better, more attentive mother, as well as a drum kit and a Nintendo Game Boy.’

***

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Now for the regular swap from being inside Fran’s head to having a sneak peek at Fran’s diary.

Inside Fran’s diary

I may have brought you here under false pretences. Things have quietened down, diary-wise. I don’t have any promotional events in 2026 so far unless you count stalking bookstores in a large floppy hat and sunglasses to see if they still have copies of my books.

I’ve written Book 3 in the Jackie Chadwick series but am waiting for a decision from my publisher on it.

In the meantime, because waiting for that kind of decision shrinks your veins and curdles your gall bladder, I’ve started writing a new novel. It’s not set in the 1970s, not about Jackie Chadwick and not, so far, as easy to write as Jackie’s stories were. Perhaps that’s because I’m only 15,000 words in and expecting too much at this stage. Perhaps it’s because it’s not a very good book. I’ll keep you posted.

This term, I’ve volunteered to go into the local secondary school (where I once taught English) and run a creative writing club after school on a Wednesday. We’re three weeks in and, so far, no one has run out weeping or thrown their notebook on the floor in disgust - even me - so we’ll crack on and see how that goes.

In the meantime, should I get booked for the Hay Festival or the Albert Hall, I’ll let you know.

An ancient traditional New Year blessing for you all. 

May your picnics and outings be free of the wasp
and your loo rolls be fluffy and gentle and soft. 
May all your dropped toast land butter-side up.
May you find no dead flies lying drowned in your cup.

May packets be easy, straightforward to open
and no eggs in your shopping the ones that got broken.  
May your hoover bag never need emptying first. 
May your party balloons and your bladder not burst.

May all your prawn sandwiches prove toxin-free.
May each step that you climb be kind on your knee. 
May your Instagram feed give you relevant ads. 
May you not get the wrinkles you thought were your dad’s.

May every train toilet be properly locked
and your washing machine yield up every last sock.
When you stub your big toe, may you be on your own.
May you not drop your soup on your new mobile phone.

May your bus come on time and the seat not be sticky, 
and each child you meet not be snotty or sicky.
May your bin be returned to the place it was left.
May you not send your mother your brother’s rude text.

May there not be wet chewing gum stuck to your chair
and may none of your post be delivered elsewhere. 
May the wine that you drink not be wine that is corked
May you not slip on dog turds when out for your walks.

May your New Year be happy, as much as it can,
despite grumpy poems from cynical Fran. 

1. People you’ve felt sorry for in the bus queue wave you on when the bus arrives.

2. Your children reach the age you thought you were.

3. You learn to crop photos on your phone and then actually tell people about it.

4. You think about contacting one of your old teachers but realise they’d be 109.

5. You visit a city centre and wonder if it’s on fast-forward.

6. You cheer on anyone with grey hair on reality shows.

7. You finally understand why they say ‘Mind the Gap’ on stations.

8. You get birthday cards with pictures of sheds and watering cans.

9. You say ‘Why did I come in here?’ even in the bathroom.

10. When you hear that Queen released ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ fifty years ago you say ‘Surely not’ until people tell you to shut up.

11. You refuse to use the self-service machine and wait fourteen minutes to pay a human for a black biro.

12. If you eat later than 8.30pm you are ripped limb from limb by a wild dog in your dreams.

13. You remember when people minced their own beef.

14. You still respond ‘To meet you, nice’ if someone says ‘Nice to meet you.’

15. You regret your earlier scorn about elasticated waists.

If this list resonated with you, and even if it made you cry, there’s a similar one in this post from March 2024

Can you add any more to my list? I’d love to hear them in the comments!

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If you smiled, buy me a coffee

Inside Fran’s Diary …

7-21 November - I’M GOING TO JAPAN TO VISIT MY DAUGHTER!!!!!!! I’ve been watching videos about things not to do in Japan and realising that things not to do in Britain include not watching videos about things not to do in Japan.

Tuesday 2 December - I’ve been invited to chat to this wonderful book club about ‘Cuckoo in the Nest’ which is their December Book of the Month.

Thursday 11 December - I’m giving a morning talk about ‘Finding the Funny’ to the wonderful Probus Club. They meet at Leamington Rugby Club and when I visited them last year to talk about ‘Language Change’ they were kind enough to laugh at my jokes so this year they’ve invited me to talk about how to make a joke funny. This had better go well.

The irony is, I’ve always been envious of people who have that ‘wisdom streak’ in their hair: a startling strip of grey or white amid otherwise dark tresses, like a lightning bolt or a flash of silver paint. Sometimes it grows naturally; for others, it appears after a stressful or painful life event. Either way, it looks striking, and I’ve never looked striking, even though I thought I did in 1976 in my Bay City Roller tartan trousers and blue eyeshadow made from cobalt and asbestos.

I would have welcomed a wisdom streak. But I never asked for one in my eyebrows.

It’s too late, I realise, for me to get a proper wisdom streak now that most of my hair is greying anyway. That would be like an artist painting a snow scene and then including a white cat in it with its eyes closed, like this.

‘I think I have a dramatic wisdom streak in my hair at last,’ I would say pleadingly to friends, and they would lean in closer to peer at my greying head and say, ‘No, Fran, we think you have a fear of death.’

I suppose I must be grateful for the white hairs in my eyebrows even though they seem a poor substitute. They may not be full-on wisdom streaks: perhaps ‘common sense streaks’ or ‘sometimes does the right thing but often cocks it up’ streaks.

The first white eyebrow hairs appeared about a year ago and I plucked them out although, as I’ve said, they’re hardy beasts and dig their heels in like ancient tree roots or toddlers who don’t want to be taken out of the swing.

But they’re indomitable. They keep coming back, sometimes appearing overnight like Jack’s beanstalk did.

‘Jack, my son, what is that in our garden? It’s blocking out the light.’

‘It looks like a beanstalk, Mother, reaching into the clouds.’

‘It’s appeared overnight, just like Fran Hill’s eyebrow hairs do.’

‘Mother, you have such a turn of phrase. I hope that simile makes it into our story.’

Do you remember the former UK Labour chancellor, Alistair Darling? He was famous for having snow-white hair but sooty-black eyebrows. If you google ‘Did Alistair Darling …’ the first search result is ‘Did Alistair Darling die?’ (which he did, sadly, at the age of 70) but the second is ‘Did Alistair Darling dye his eyebrows?’

His obituary in The Guardian (and there’s a photo) says that his hair went prematurely white and he was always surprised that his eyebrows hadn’t. But it was that stark contrast between his hair and eyebrows that made him look so distinctive.

No danger of that for me.

*gets up to look at photo on the mantelpiece of Granny *

My mum died young so I can’t use her to predict how things might go for me. But a photo of my gran, who died at 95, reveals that although her hair was white at that age her eyebrows were only halfway there.

It’s late in the day, I suppose, to embrace ‘dramatic’ although you wouldn’t know it for the number of bloggers and Instagrammers urging me to go wild now I’m in my sixties. I did have chocolate sprinkles on my Starbucks coffee this morning, if that counts, and I wore a pair of socks for a whole day last week despite knowing there was a hole in one of them.

There is some comfort in that even though I don’t have a wisdom streak I do have a full set of wisdom TEETH. Not everyone’s wisdom teeth develop so I’ll call that a win. They’re not as attractive a feature as a streak in the hair, however, or anything people want to admire voluntarily, as I’ve found out, trying to show them off at parties.

‘If you’re really desperate,’ you might ask, ‘Why don’t you get your hair professionally dyed and have a wisdom streak put in?’ And I guess that’s possible except that if I had that kind of money to burn I’d be on a cruise and eating oysters from a golden platter, not here, writing a Substack post about my eyebrows.

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Inside Fran’s Diary …

Tuesday 28 October - Do you remember I said I was talking on Zoom in September to members of the Care Leavers’ Association, a group for adults who spent time in care as children/teenagers? Any adult of any age can join for support and connection, as I have. This Tuesday is the follow-up: I’m running a Zoom writing workshop for any members who’d like help with life writing and recording their own experiences.

7-21 November - I’M GOING TO JAPAN TO VISIT MY DAUGHTER!!!!!!! I’ve been practising with my chopsticks, mainly practising dropping noodles.

Tuesday 2 December - I’ve been invited to chat to this wonderful book club about ‘Cuckoo in the Nest’.

Thursday 11 December - a morning talk about ‘Finding the Funny’ to the wonderful Probus Club. They meet at Leamington Rugby Club and when I visited them last year to talk about ‘Language Change’ they were kind enough to laugh at my jokes so this year they’ve invited me to talk about how to make a joke funny. This had better go well.

In between all that, I’m trying not to look in mirrors.

Here are the results.

I don’t mean, as in, there was a competition and I came second. I mean, here’s what I wrote in my notebook.

(I’ve put the different forms we experimented with in capitals and linked to an explanation in case you want to try one for yourself.)

First, she asked us to write an ACROSTIC poem to introduce ourselves, using the letters in our names as the first letters of each line. I was glad I hadn’t been christened Gwendolyn or maybe Zsa Zsa Sweetie-Pie.

Fan of strawberries.

Rather fond of chocolate, for balance.

Absolutely here for chocolate-covered strawberries.

Not on Tuesdays, for balance.

An apology: Ideally, poems would be in single-line spacing and I know I’ve managed it before but can I remember how to do that on Substack? Nope. That’s why I’ve put them in italics instead.

***

The second task was to choose a season and a familiar place and we were to write a HAIKU. Emilie played a dastardly trick on us, getting us to write a ‘word bank’ before we wrote our poems and then telling us we weren’t allowed to use the word bank. What a monster!

I wrote about the graveyard behind our house and what it might look like in autumn. I’d written all kinds of interesting things in my word bank like ‘trees bowing, shredding’ and ‘leaves crackle and pop’ but they were now BANNED.

This was my haiku.

Where the dead lie still

leaves grieve their quiet passing,

shrouding them in hues.

Emilie said, ‘If you’ve got spare time, write a second one about the same place but in a different season.’

So, I did.

No one springs back here

but the buds, the hopeful buds,

loud above the graves.

The third task was to write a PRAISE POEM and Emilie showed us one that someone from Sudan wrote in praise of his/her bull. It begins …

My bull is as white as silvery fish in the river

white as the egret on the bank

white as new milk

It ends …

Drink, O bull, of the river;

am I not here with my spear to protect you?

Emilie said that praise poems often work best when the subject is something unimportant or unremarkable and this made sense to me. I wrote about a peach.

In praise of a peach (after a poet from the Dinka tribe, Sudan)

My peach is as velvet as a party dress,

as velvet as sudden darkness,

as a puppy’s ear.

Its flesh is as sweet as kisses,

as sweet as a compliment,

as sweet as pennies.

My peach is fresh like a morning.

It is late summer and early autumn both,

sitting between the two, arms folded.

My peach has secrets

and moments it is proud of,

pleased with its own roundness

as though it crafted itself from treasure.

I shall cut my peach,

each slice a gift from the sun.

Sing, O peach of mine.

***

The last exercise was to work with a poetry form called The Golden Shovel. No, really.

It means using some words from an already-existing poem and making them the last words in each line of a new poem. Emilie had brought a selection of poetry books so that we could find a poem to use.

I liked the look of one called ‘Earlswood’ by Fleur Adcock. A line in her poem goes like this:

Air-raid shelters at school were damp tunnels.

I know! A challenge, right, especially the ‘at’ and the ‘were’. I’m not sure how well it worked. But this was my poem.

He lived his life like an air-raid

so that we’d flee for shelters.

Like prey, we didn’t know where we were at.

His mealtimes were like school -

his craven pupils, we were -

dinners cooling, our palms damp,

instincts begging for tunnels.

***

I don’t know if any of these poems will ever get polished or perfected or published or performed or other things beginning with ‘p’. For now, they’ve just been Popped on Substack and into your consciousness and that will have to do for now, especially while Simon Armitage still has the Laureate gig and no one’s called me about a possible succession bid.

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Inside Fran’s Diary …

Tuesday 30 September - A new venture for me, talking on Zoom to members of the Care Leavers’ Association, a group for adults who spent time in care as children/teenagers. Any adult of any age can join for support and connection, as I have. On this occasion, I’m sharing about my writing life and how I went from foster child to author, and soon I’m running a Zoom writing workshop for any members who’d like help with life writing: recording their own experiences.

7-21 November - I’M GOING TO JAPAN TO VISIT MY DAUGHTER!!!!!!! Whoop whoop!

Tuesday 2 December - I’ve been invited to chat to this wonderful book club about ‘Cuckoo in the Nest’ which is their chosen Book of the Month for November. I see that their October book is Percival Everett’s ‘James’ which is one I must catch up on.

Thursday 11 December - a morning talk about ‘Finding the Funny’ to the wonderful Probus Club. They meet at Leamington Rugby Club and when I visited them last year to talk about ‘Language Change’ they were kind enough to laugh at my jokes so this year they’ve invited me to talk about how to make a joke funny. This had better go well.

Burping Love - A man finds he can’t control his emotions when his lover has indigestion

Don’t Be Cruet - Someone pleads with their spouse that it would be mean to go to the fancy dress party dressed as a condiment when he’s specifically asked her not to

Always on my Mink - a man can’t stop thinking about his lover’s habit of using his pet as a cushion

All Shoot Up - someone is agitated when he orders his friends to indulge in illegal drug-taking and they refuse

Suspicious Winds - a couple in a lift eye each other speculatively about continual bad smells

Can’t Help Falling in Looe - an affectionate pair travels to a Cornwall village only to find many trip hazards

Stock On You - A man states his intention to stay with his lover for ever even though she regularly spills gravy on herself

Jailhouse Sock - prisoners dance enthusiastically when someone’s lost hosiery turns up

Return to Fender - a man vows determinedly to send back any letters he receives from a guitar manufacturer

It’s Cow Or Never - a man tries to persuade his lover that if she insists on staying vegetarian, they have no future together

Heartbreak Motel - a man is devastated that he can’t afford to stay in his usual luxury while he gets over a failed romance

That’s All Tight, Mama - a man tries to convince his parent that the jumper she knitted him needed to be a size bigger

Glue Suede Shoes - A man assures everyone that they can do anything they like to him but they need to wait while he repairs his footwear

Love me, Fender - a man changes his mind about his relationship with a guitar company

Frying in the Chapel - A man finds peace of mind by cooking eggs and bacon in a sacred building

Treat Me Mice - someone with a loose hold on grammar pleads with his veterinary lover to prioritise his pets

Hever - a man feels his temperature rising at the thought of taking his lover to visit an English castle in Kent

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Right, then. That’s enough absolute blatant nonsense for the day. Here’s a rundown of my comings and goings for the rest of the year. Fortunately for you, I haven’t included trips to Tesco for milk, or appointments with the chiropodist.

Inside Fran’s Diary …

Monday 15 September - A free morning event at Alcester Library, in conversation about my books and writing, hosted by Warwickshire Libraries.

Wednesday 17 September - I’m chairing a Warwickshire Society of Authors event with a panel of 3 writers sharing about their writing ‘rituals and routines’: those which work and those which very much don’t. Any Society of Authors member is welcome - come and join us at this free event but don’t forget to sign up.

Saturday 20 September - I’m attending the one-day South Warwickshire Literary Festival, held right here in Leamington Spa. I’ve signed up for a workshop on poetry with the fab Emilie Lauren Jones, and I’ll be womanning my own stall for the day, selling copies of my books.

Tuesday 30 September - A new venture for me, talking on Zoom to members of the Care Leavers’ Association, a group for adults who spent time in care as children/teenagers. Any adult of any age can join for support and connection, as I have. On this occasion, I’m sharing about my writing life and how I went from foster child to author, and soon I’m running a Zoom writing workshop for any members who’d like help with life writing: recording their own experiences.

7-21 November - I’M GOING TO JAPAN TO VISIT MY DAUGHTER!!!!!!! Whoop whoop!

Tuesday 2 December - I’ve been invited to chat to this wonderful book club about ‘Cuckoo in the Nest’ which is their chosen Book of the Month for November. I see that their October book is Percival Everett’s ‘James’ which is one I must catch up on.

Thursday 11 December - a morning talk about ‘Finding the Funny’ to the wonderful Probus Club. They meet at Leamington Rugby Club and when I visited them last year to talk about ‘Language Change’ they were kind enough to laugh at my jokes so this year they’ve invited me to talk about how to make a joke funny. This had better go well.

I used this dog photo last time to advertise the 99p deal on ‘Cuckoo in the Nest’ but even though that deal’s over, the dog is still a beauty and worth a second look.

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I made a sponge cake yesterday and it turned out well.

I’ll say that again for any regular readers wondering if they’ve accidentally taken acid.

I made a sponge cake yesterday and it turned out well.

Yes, it transpires that I can make a cake which does all the things cakes do rather than all the things old balloons and dead people’s lungs do.

I can make a cake whose sponge doesn’t adhere to your tongue so that you can’t say ‘sponge’.

I can make a cake that no one could mistake for a cowpat with icing.

Gathered to eat the cake was my family plus an overnight guest, a friend who visits regularly. These are all people used to the variable nature of my baking efforts. The fact that they keep agreeing to come back shows a level of unconditional love that touches me deeply cue cheesy photo.

Nevertheless, I didn’t want to test this love too far, so, before anyone arrived, I tried the cake myself. If it’s as bad as the last one, I thought, I’ll put it out for the birds and pretend I hadn’t had time to make one, although the presence of comatose sparrows fighting for breath on the lawn might have given the game away.

I know it’s not the done thing to announce, ‘Hey! I made a cake for you all!’ and then present eleven twelfths of it but it’s still better than that moment when people bite into their slices and exchange glances as if to say, ‘Who’s going to tell her this is only suitable as a building material?’

Pleased to say, the responses were mostly positive although not all. My 11 year old granddaughter looked at hers suspiciously. ‘Does this have jam in it?’ she said.

I told her it did.

‘Oh well, never mind,’ she said, sighing as you do when you’re 11 and learning that the world is a harsh and unforgiving place with axe murderers, natural disasters and cakes with compulsory jam in.

But she ate it anyway, being stoic.

As Rudyard Kipling said:

If you can endure jam in a Victoria sponge while all about you

demand plain cake, you’ll be a man, my son woman, my granddaughter.

I’m particularly pleased that this cake was successful as I broke several rules taught to me by Mrs Gough, my old Domestic Science teacher at school in the 1970s. First, I beat the flour mercilessly into the butter, sugar and eggs rather than folding it in with a metal spoon and I ignored the mixture’s distressed cries as I did so.

Also, I used wholemeal self-raising flour and Mrs Gough said that this would make cakes dense and inedible, but many previous cakes of mine have been dense and inedible without the help of wholemeal flour, so that can’t be true either.

Finally, I opened the oven door to check the cake before it was completely done and then slammed it shut, something which would make Mrs Gough go pale and sweaty so that we had to pull out a chair and make her sit down.

I think that, like my granddaughter, I am discovering some hard truths, one being that Mrs Gough was fallible. It’s akin to the ‘Santa isn’t real?’ moment that has you weeping in the understairs cupboard, or the day you realise that the ice cream van’s music means there IS ice cream available, not that it’s run out, as your parents told you.

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Inside Fran’s Diary …

Monday 15 September - A free morning event at Alcester Library, in conversation about my books and writing, hosted by Warwickshire Libraries.

Wednesday 17 September - I’m chairing a Warwickshire Society of Authors event with a panel of 3 writers sharing about their writing ‘rituals and routines’: those which work and those which very much don’t. Any Society of Authors member is welcome - come and join us at this free event but don’t forget to sign up.

Saturday 20 September - I’m attending the one-day South Warwickshire Literary Festival, held right here in Leamington Spa. I’ve signed up for a workshop on poetry with the fab Emilie Lauren Jones, and I’ll be womanning my own stall for the day, selling copies of my books.

Tuesday 30 September - A new venture for me, talking on Zoom to members of the Care Leavers’ Association, a group for adults who spent time in care as children/teenagers. Any adult of any age can join for support and connection, as I have. On this occasion, I’m sharing about my writing life and how I went from foster child to author, and soon I’m running a Zoom writing workshop for any members who’d like help with life writing: recording their own experiences.

7-21 November - I’M GOING TO JAPAN TO VISIT MY DAUGHTER!!!!!!! Whoop whoop! She’s been there since 2019 and it’s about time I turned up for a cuppa.

Thursday 11 December - a morning talk about ‘Finding the Funny’ to the wonderful Probus Club. They meet at Leamington Rugby Club and when I visited them last year to talk about ‘Language Change’ they were kind enough to laugh at my jokes so this year they’ve invited me to talk about how to make a joke funny. This had better go well.

‘Cuckoo in the Nest’ is STILL STILL STILL 99p on Kindle if you’ve yet to catch up on it! This dog thinks you should.

… except that the rare lizard turned out to be a manky old sock.

It’s a slap in the face to any self-respecting lizard. I mean, I’m no natural empath, but I can see why a lizard might have found the story distressing.

I met a lizard in the street the next day and suggested he wrote a poem about it. He did, and kindly emailed it to me. He gave me permission to share it with you.

I’ll link to the news story below. First, here’s the lizard’s poem.

Insult 

I’m not, admittedly, a handsome lizard, 
or so my cruel mirror tells me daily.
I’ve never been approached to be a model -
not that I’m overweight, just – over-scaly.

My eyes are on the sides which makes it tricky
when chatting up a female in a bar.
She’s never sure I’m paying her attention
while all the other girls around her are.

Despite all this, however, it’s an insult
to read the news today. I am in shock
that a lizard could have been mistaken
for a smelly, crusty, old, discarded sock.

My eyes – they may not do me any favours,
But SOMEone needs to hurry to Specsavers.

***

Here’s the news story

I think you’ll agree that the lizard has some talent. I’m so pleased to be able to introduce his work to the world.

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Now for the regular ‘Inside Fran’s Diary’ feature in case you’re keen to avoid me.

Inside Fran’s Diary …

Monday 15 September - A free morning event at Alcester Library, in conversation about my books and writing, hosted by Warwickshire Libraries.

Wednesday 17 September - I’m chairing a Warwickshire Society of Authors event with a panel of 3 writers sharing about their writing ‘rituals and routines’: those which work and those which very much don’t. Any Society of Authors member is welcome - come and join us at this free event but don’t forget to sign up.

Saturday 20 September - I’m attending the one-day South Warwickshire Literary Festival, held right here in Leamington Spa. I’ve signed up for a workshop on poetry with the fab Emilie Lauren Jones, and I’ll be womanning my own stall for the day, selling copies of my books.

Tuesday 30 September - A new venture for me, talking on Zoom to members of the Care Leavers’ Association, a group for adults who spent time in care as children/teenagers. Any adult of any age can join for support and connection, as I have. On this occasion, I’m sharing about my writing life and how I went from foster child to author, and soon I’m running a Zoom writing workshop for any members who’d like help with life writing: recording their own experiences.

7-21 November - I’M GOING TO JAPAN TO VISIT MY DAUGHTER!!!!!!! Whoop whoop! She’s been there since 2019 and it’s about time I turned up for a cuppa.

Thursday 11 December - a morning talk about ‘Finding the Funny’ to the wonderful Probus Club. They meet at Leamington Rugby Club and when I visited them last year to talk about ‘Language Change’ they were kind enough to laugh at my jokes so this year they’ve invited me to talk about how to make a joke funny. This had better go well.

‘Cuckoo in the Nest’ is STILL 99p on Kindle if you’ve yet to catch up on it! This dog thinks you should.

Here’s a photo of the cake in question, and your first reaction might be, ‘It doesn’t look so bad … I could be persuaded if there were no chocolate biscuits in the cupboard.’

Don’t be deceived. It may look benign, but butter wouldn’t melt in that cake’s mouth and this may well be part of its problem.

No, a slice of it would stick to your palate like a clingy boy/girlfriend who won’t accept the end of the relationship.

I made the cake for my daughter-in-law’s 40th birthday. She came round with the family to open her presents and enjoy a celebration tea.

As you can see, I was generous with the candles, using one for each of her decades. There’s a candle missing in this photo. It probably ran away.

The cake has cherries in it but you can’t see them as these days glace cherries aren’t allowed to have toxic dyes added to make them pretty so they’re not even red. They look like the old glace cherries did, but scared.

We sang Happy Birthday to my daughter-in-law as we brought the cake in, candles lit, although once we’d cut the cake and tried it we realised that our singing had been inappropriately cheerful.

‘This cake is as dry as a desert,’ I said to everyone as they bravely fought their way through their slices in a way that made me proud to be British.

[I’ve just googled ‘Songs with Deserts in the Title’ and found a website that lists twenty. I must make a note of them for future dry-cake birthdays although I may not list the one called ‘Desert Me’ by Tantric as I fear the website creators have missed something.]

I don’t know what went wrong with the cake. In the recipe book, it was called ‘Cherry and Almond Cake’ and I followed the instructions to the letter. Usually, if you put ground almonds in a cake (that also has eggs and butter in it) it ensures that it will be moist.

Not this time. It couldn’t have been less moist if I’d hung it on the washing line for the day in a heatwave and then finished it off with a blowtorch.

The family was being diplomatic. ‘It’s not dry at all,’ they said. This was soon undermined when I suggested it might go well warmed up with custard and they all said YES! as though I’d discovered DNA.

As it was, I didn’t think custard would be enough to mitigate the cake’s issues. Windermere, more like.

We ate half the cake between us. It limited conversation while our lips and tongues were busy wondering WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL IS THIS, but somehow we all swallowed it down without any of it reappearing and anyone who’s studied gravity would know why.

My intention had been to give the family the rest of the cake to take home but I feared that this might give rise to awkwardness if the following week I’d asked if they’d enjoyed it when in fact they’d fed it to the neighbours’ dogs over the fence and then watched out of their front window as the dogs were rushed to the vet.

So, I kept it here and, between us, my husband and I have finished it off. We spread the slices with thick butter and jam and when I say spread I mean drowned.

It’s still a mystery as to why the cake failed. Perhaps I left it in the oven too long except that the recipe said one hour and I took it out after 55 minutes.

Did I use a tin that was the wrong size for the cake? Did I use small eggs rather than large?

Perhaps I have to accept that I’m not a very good baker and, just perHAPS, you’ve been around long enough to remember this photo of my 2024 hot cross buns (below) so are not surprised by my dry cake story.

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Inside Fran’s Diary …

‘Cuckoo in the Nest’ is currently 99p on Kindle if you’ve yet to catch up on it!

Monday 15 September - A free morning event at Alcester Library, in conversation about my books and writing, hosted by Warwickshire Libraries.

Saturday 20 September - I’m attending the one-day South Warwickshire Literary Festival, held right here in Leamington Spa. I’ve signed up for a workshop on poetry with the fab Emilie Lauren Jones, and I’ll be womanning my own stall for the day, selling copies of my books.

Thursday 11 December - a morning talk about ‘Finding the Funny’ to the wonderful Probus Club. They meet at Leamington Rugby Club and when I visited them last year to talk about ‘Language Change’ they were kind enough to laugh at my jokes so this year they’ve invited me to talk about how to make a joke funny. This had better go well.

(Here’s a photo of the one who didn’t get the girl.)

In case you’re wondering what to read next, I’d like to help you. Here are some other popular genres from which to choose, each with a brief definition.

nick-lit (1) - set in prisons

aerobic-lit - characters die while doing star jumps

bricking-it-lit - criminals can’t get up the courage for the crime and the narrative drags

quick-lit - haiku

Patrick-lit - set in Ireland

Bic-lit - biros battle with other biros for supremacy

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getting-on-my-wick-lit - 38 chapters of minor irritations lead to very low book sales

nick-lit (2) - non-violent books for the sensitive involving only paper cuts

I-get-no-kick-lit - champagne proves unsatisfactory to a main character

gastric-lit - like the Odyssey, only it’s a roast dinner

picnic-lit - a family looks for the ideal spot in a seven-book saga

citric-lit - a startling tale in which it turns out that oranges are, in fact, the only fruit

geometric-lit - a new angle on an old story

tick-lit - an army of Nike logos invades earth and sucks everyone’s blood

orthodontic-lit - in which characters brace themselves then get charged £3,000

Prittstick-lit - 30 primary school children look for lids in a story that has no resolution

hic-hic-lit - characters eat fresh bread too quickly, leading to staccato dialogue

nick-lit (3) - the male main character hasn’t learned to use capital letters

Ozempic-lit - a five-book saga becomes a slim novella but with constant nausea

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Inside Fran’s Diary

Book 3 in the Jackie Chadwick series has gone off to be Looked At and Considered for Publication. I’ve added the capital letters in case they make things more likely.

In the meantime, I’ve started a completely new project and am deep in research, which isn’t the worst thing you can be deep in.

Saturday 2 August - I’m doing a ‘Saturday signing’ at Kenilworth Books in Warwickshire, signing copies of ‘Home Bird’ from 10.30am - 1.30pm. These are always lovely events, spending a morning in a bookshop and chatting to customers. Come and say hello if you’re in the area!

Monday 15 September - A free morning event at Alcester Library, in conversation about my books and writing, hosted by Warwickshire Libraries.

Saturday 20 September - I’m attending the one-day South Warwickshire Literary Festival, held right here in Leamington Spa. I’ve signed up for a workshop on poetry with the fab Emilie Lauren Jones, and I’ll be womanning my own stall for the day, selling copies of my books.

Thursday 11 December - a morning talk about ‘Finding the Funny’ to the wonderful Probus Club. They meet at Leamington Rugby Club and when I visited them last year to talk about ‘Language Change’ they were kind enough to laugh at my jokes so this year they’ve invited me to talk about how to make a joke funny. This had better go well.

So, the challenge is not so much finding rhymes for ‘orange’ as it is writing a cohesive and meaningful poem about a citrus fruit, an underwater mountain, and plant and fungi spores.

Still, there’s nothing to stop anyone writing a non-rhyming poem about an orange if they feel like it.

And I did feel like it.

Orange

I should have known better.
It didn’t weigh meaningful in my palm – 
sparing with promise 
despite its Spanish cheeriness -
and, to give the orange its due,
it was a clear enough warning.

But everyone deserves some slack
and it would have looked wrong
sitting whole on the compost heap
with the rotting greens
although, in hindsight, it was
its only chance to shine. 

I split it in half cleanly
as if that might help.
Not even a drop of juice,
or maybe it was just teasing.
A seducer in a bright coat
but a husk of a person underneath. 

In quarters, it looked no better
and had left its aroma in Valencia.
I’d hoped for a hint of citrus
to suggest it had clung onto life
the way people search for eyelid flickers
around an aunt’s bedside.

The kick in the teeth, though, 
was in separating flesh from skin: 
pulling and splitting 
to find it came away like paper.
An old manuscript stuck to a desk 
with age and lack of love.

In my mouth, it had the wrong name.
It tasted beige, light green, grey, 
like bathos on my tongue. 
Even the peel now looked ashen,
unmasked as a fraud,
shocked at its own failure. 

***

So, that's my non-rhyming poem and I hope you enjoyed it in a depressing, melancholic kind of way. 

Still, I hate to be defeated. 

My name is Henry. I named the Gorringe.
My favourite fruit? A juicy orange.
Much tastier than eating sporange. 

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Leave a comment

Buy me a coffee

Inside Fran’s Diary

Book 3 in the Jackie Chadwick series has gone off to be Looked At and Considered for Publication. I’ve added the capital letters in case they make things more likely.

Saturday 2 August - a ‘Saturday signing’ at Kenilworth Books in Warwickshire, signing copies of ‘Home Bird’ from 10.30am - 1.30pm. These are always lovely events, spending a morning in a bookshop and chatting to customers. Come and say hello.

Monday 15 September - A free morning event at Alcester Library, in conversation about my books and writing, hosted by Warwickshire Libraries.

Saturday 20 September - I’m attending the one-day South Warwickshire Literary Festival, held right here in Leamington Spa. I’ve signed up for a workshop on poetry with the fab Emilie Lauren Jones, and I’ll be womanning my own stall for the day, selling copies of my books.

Thursday 11 December - a morning talk about ‘Finding the Funny’ to the wonderful Probus Club. They meet at Leamington Rugby Club and when I visited them last year to talk about ‘Language Change’ they were kind enough to laugh at my jokes so this year they’ve invited me to talk about how to make a joke funny. This had better go well.