Home Thoughts Weekly

I have to admit to feeling a teeny bit nervous when I’m invited to join She Runs: Cardiff for their Zoom book club to chat to them about my running memoir/guide, Running Kind. This brilliantly supportive women-only social running group based in Cardiff deservedly won the Run Wales Group of the Year in December 2020 for their fantastic efforts to encourage and engage their 1.1k followers. Their lockdown activities, with a strong emphasis on health and well-being, have included virtual couch to 5k, themed runs, monthly challenges and a book club which has attracted great runners, popular authors and now, gulp, me. Zoom’s new to me so my daughters break me in gently with a rousing game of family unicorn bingo. Tom and I wear our unicorn headbands and there are tantrums - bingo cards upturned, a sin-binning - laughter and tears, not least mine when it’s over because it’s both so lovely to see the family and so painful wondering when we’ll see them for real. So I’ve Zoomed, I’ve pre...

New year, new x-ray. ‘You look fab, you’re really proactive about your health - you’re my kind of girl,’ says the nurse practitioner sympathetically. ‘But, you’re not going to bounce back the way you used to and you’ve had a serious injury.’ I’m not vain and I’m not looking for the Elixir of Youth, but since I left A&E without a follow up appointment, I would like to know why, after all these weeks, my ribs are still making an audible clicking noise.  It’s six weeks today since I found myself in the back of an ambulance feeling very scared and broken. The superficial damage to my face has healed. It took four weeks for the feeling in my upper teeth and the roof of my mouth to begin to return, although two of my front teeth still only have partial sensation. (The dental work starts this week.) There are patches of numbness in my face and top lip. My ribs are uncomfortable rather than painful (although sneezing is agony) and it seems that if I want an explanation for the cl...

One of the most exciting moments for me, as an author, is that first glimpse of a new cover. All the hope, the dreams and the hours of hard work brought together and epitomised in a single image. I loved the cover of my first published novel, Turning the Tide , so much that I framed it and put it on my study wall. I have to admit, though, the the girl on the cover, cast away on a pile of rocks, looks nothing like the Harry Watling of my imagination. My heroine, Harry, is a fierce, angry, scared woman with a chip on both shoulders who’s prepared to take on the world to save the business her father started and wouldn’t be seen dead in anything except a pair of oily dungarees. When Turning the Tide went to Norway, Harry transformed again; her hair’s grown, so have her legs, and she’s wearing a teeny-tiny pair of shorts my Harry would never have had in her wardrobe. Eloise Blake, the heroine of my novella, Only True in Fairy Tales, is a reclusive woman who’s been badly hurt and ...