Here I am with the RNA’s marvellous chair and writer extraordinaire, Katie Fforde - both of us wearing celebratory gold.

And chatting to the gorgeous and gracious Joanna Trollope.

I also met the lovely Adele Parks…

and Carole Matthews whose heels were snapped for Janet Gover’s shoe blog!

And here I am posing on that fabulous staircase. 

It was such a great evening and I hope we don’t have to wait another 50 years until the next one!

I also did a spot of signing with fellow author, Lola Jaye.  We ventured into central London on the hottest day of the year and signed as many of our books as we could find.  If you can find an unsigned one, it’s worth an absolute fortune! 

Here we are at Smith’s in Victoria.  Thanks to the lovely Ines who was so sweet and helpful.

I also attended a wonderful garden party at Oxford’s St John’s College with my Great Uncle Peter who was a student there in 1949.  The sun shone for us and there were cucumber sandwiches, heaps of cake and strawberries and cream.  It was perfect! 

Whilst in Oxford, we visited The Eagle and Child (also known as The Bird and Baby) where the ‘Inklings’ used to meet.  It was amazing to step into the pub where early readings of The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia stories would have taken place, and my uncle told me he was in Oxford at the same time as Tolkien and CS Lewis!

At Waterstones with Lisa Jewell

Then there was a fabulous fiction panel at Notting Hill’s Waterstones which I attended with Helen Salter. It was great fun and lovely to chat with Carole Matthews, Isabel Wolff and Lisa Jewell who has given me a lovely quote for my novel Molly’s MillionApril also meant a trip to the London Book Fair where I met up with my lovely German agent for lunch. There was also time to meet up with Juliet Archer for a writerly gossip on the steps of Earl’s Court.

Then, a surprise trip to Pembrokeshire where I managed to finish the first draft of my new novel, Connie Gordon’s Clan, and completely killed my right shoulder doing so. Ouch! The coast and countryside glowed with yellow flowers: primroses, celandines, cowslips, dandelions, buttercups and the ever-present gorse.

Flowers on the Pembrokeshire coast

Another trip took us to the Suffolk coast. Here’s Molly and me in front of the Butt and Oyster at Pin Mill – the setting of one of my favourite Arthur Ransome novels, We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea.

It’s always a magical feeling visiting somewhere that you’ve read about in a novel and I got very excited when I discovered Alma Cottage, believing that I might just bump into the Walker children or dear Jim Brading.

Our big trip of the month was a week on the Pembrokeshire coast where hubby painted and I made good progress on my new novel, Connie Gordon’s Clan. But it wasn’t all work and, doing our best to dodge the gales, we had many gorgeous, gorse-filled walks along the coast, spying the sweet violets, primroses and celandine.

It was also the London Book Fair and I went along to Earl’s Court to meet my lovely agents from Zurich and New York for the first time.

Unfortunately, it’s been a very mixed month on the writing front because two of the projects I started earlier in the year have been axed for one reason or another. But the good news is that I’ve begun a new project and this seems to have some staying power and I’m enjoying it very much! It’s the first in a new children’s series called Collingwood Castle about a young family who inherit a medieval castle in the north of England.

And, to make sure I don’t spend too much time at my desk, I took up Kickboxing and Karate this month. So, if the heroes and heroines in my children’s adventure stories get into a scrape, they will be able to execute a few neat moves!

On the movie front, I hear that Flights of Angels, (Unter deinem Stern) is going to be filmed in Berlin. Watch this space for more news soon …