Breaking the Moulds

An apology from the publisher would have been nice. A bottle of wine would have been even better. But Sweet FA is just insulting. Maybe they are licking their wounds.

So I have been getting on with appraising a manuscript by a favourite author of mine. His name is Clifford Peacock, he's 80 and I hope he won't mind my blowing his trumpet for him. After we had worked on his first book together, Robert Hale offered him a two-book deal. He has now written a memoir of his years spent as a District Officer in Kenya in the 1950s and it is such a fascinating and absorbing read that I am finding it hard to break off for meals. The sense of time and place is just terrific, the anecdotes are a mixture of dastardly and entertaining and I just don't want to it to finish - though it's nice to know that I still have 40 pages left to work on tomorrow. It's called Donkey Down the Well and I hope it will get published, as it deserves to be out there on Kindle and on the book store shelves.

I have just finished reading Hilary Boyd's Thursdays In The Park. One reason I enjoyed it so much was because it contains references to Waterlow Park in Highgate and even the coffee bar that I used to frequent. It was good to read a heart-warming romance about older people for a change. I tried to place a Gran Lit book for ages, but agents and publishers told me there was no market for it - just as they told me I was too old to publish a book (!!!) and they'd have to hire a model to pose as me for publicity purposes (how insulting is that!). So thank you to both Hilary Boyd and Clifford Peacock for breaking the moulds.

(Clifford can be found at: http://www.cliffordpeacockauthor.co.uk)