Author Archives: susan

I’ve just returned from a week up in Far North Queensland to gale-force winds, rain and grey skies. And it’s Spring! In like a lion, out like a lamb is the old saying. In between tottering out for swims, beach … Continue reading →

When faced with an overload of distressing, worrying and just plain awful events swirling around in the friendship and family circle, not to mention in the wider world, sometimes I just need comfort reading. Lately comfort has come through gardening … Continue reading →

I read Wilding by Isabella Tree at breakneck speed and now I wish there was a sequel. So I could see if more peregrine falcons, nightingales and Purple Emperor butterflies arrived, and find out what happened with the pigs, and … Continue reading →

William Mayne is one of the cohort of writers who formed the ‘second golden age’ of British children’s books. From the late 1950’s to the 1970s, writers like Rosemary Sutcliff, Alan Garner, Phillipa Pearce, L M Boston and Joan Aiken … Continue reading →

Here, sweet peas are in full bloom. I have rigged up a set of wire coathangers on chicken netting and old poles to make a fence for them.  I found a set of wire shelves which I brought home and … Continue reading →

We have lived for over seventy years in a world of motorways, roundabouts, high-rises, cooling towers, malls and pylons. They are part of a century that is already way behind us, slipping quickly into history. The structures that we think … Continue reading →

I was hanging out for the release of this book. I love Olivia Laing’s writing, I love gardens and gardening, I’d read the reviews (poetry and literature and history and digging holes and watching the green spikes of unexpected bulbs, … Continue reading →

Neurotribes is a journey through the history of autism, and I’m sorry to say that some of that history is almost incomprehensibly cruel. Like the Nazi policy turning long-care institutions for the care of disabled children into death factories – … Continue reading →

The ‘Career Novels for Girls’ were listed on the back cover of this book, Catrin in Wales, which is actually almost an anti-career book. As you will see. Our young heroine, 18-year-old Catrin, is restless after completing her secretarial studies. … Continue reading →

No, I haven’t read any of the (late 1950s) Bodley Head Career Novels for Girls. But if I had, I would have had a rewarding career in physiotherapy!