Cicero observed in the first century, “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” Does what Rome’s greatest-ever orator believed still hold true today? A garden and a book – everything I need?

Well, maybe. Gardens, and flowers in particular, have been brought into sharp focus for me recently. In one of the two manuscripts I am attempting to complete, it was pointed out that the small and seemingly inconsequential, but recurring, details about geraniums in the story might be important…

Recently, someone asked me what it felt like to participate in the FT Oxford Literary Festival, and someone else what it felt like to have Off-Island on the cover of the Bookseller, a British trade magazine reporting on the publishing industry. Cringeworthy came to mind. Cambridge Dictionary defines cringeworthy as “making you feel very embarrassed.” Why, I asked myself, does just the thought of being self-published, of paying to appear on the front cover of the Bookseller, make me feel uncomfortable?

Hi Everyone,

I love the sunlight in May, especially here in England where grey is the default colour of the sky. For some reason, at this time of year (perhaps because there’s more light), when glancing up from my kitchen table or breezing past the dresser on the upstairs landing, something will catch my eye: an artifact, an object from my childhood, or my father’s life or even my grandmother’s, and I am still for a moment, remembering—dinner tables, conversations, banging doors, birthday candles, gifts and wishes.

Hi Everyone,

In this part of the world, spring means finally getting to venture out of doors, after a dark and relatively cold, remorselessly grey, winter. I’m not sure what came over me this spring but having thought about it for many years—like that online course in financial management from the London School of Economics that I still haven’t signed up for—I actually did buy myself a pair of underwater, or at least waterproof, earphones for swimming. Before now I’d somehow failed to get the job done—too many other pressing issues. Who really needs waterproof headphones for the pool? Who needs Debussy while doing the Australian crawl?

I am often asked how Oxford, England became my hometown, so I thought as I’ve recently written an article for the Oxford Times (24.1.19) on the same subject, I’d share the unabridged version of that article with you.

This newsletter has been running now for just over a year, and writing it once a month sets me happily on some sort of a conveyor that turns the year—at least in my mind’s eye. I see a clock, a belt, a current, perhaps gears rotating, one tooth meshing neatly into the next—January to February—31st to the 1st. Moving things on.

I wonder what 2019 will bring?

“Stay in the day,” some say. Don’t take the whole year at a time, a whole life at a time. “Keep your head where your feet are,” others advise, which simply means live in the present, this twenty-four hours, and trust that the rest will take care of itself—“one day at a time.”

Recently, when I was describing to a friend the numerous challenges currently facing my family and myself, she rejected the metaphor I’d just used, saying, “No, not a car pile up, more like a jewelry box – with all those lovely pieces you just toss in that can’t do anything else but over time get tangled up.