All Excitement on the Blogging Front!

No, not me, I haven’t done anything exciting, but there’s a blog party going on over at Rosemary Gemmell’s Flights of Imagination Blog.

There is champagne and cake – need I say more? Oh I do? Well you can read excerpts from Rosemary’s new Tween Novel The Jigsaw Puzzle plus a giveaway!

It seems lots of my Facebook and Blogging friends are turning fifty this year and you can read about Sally Quilford’s new special 50^th anniversary pocket novel over at her blog.

What have I done? Well I’ve just finished a story that took me weeks to write and hours of research. The hardest story I have ever written. I lost count of how many times I wrote and rewrote the first 300 words before I finally found my voice and got it moving. The final 2000 words arrived in a day once I’d finally got going.

It’s for a special project and it may not be accepted, but I enjoyed the challenge.

Ooh get me, two posts in a week! I think I need to go and lie down now – but first I’m going over to Flights of Imagination for some champagne and cake.

All Quiet on the Blogging Front

I haven’t been in Blogland much lately. I don’t know why.

I think the subject of the weather has been exhausted and there’s that other thorny subject that some other bloggers have been brave enough to mention, but I’m not one of them.

But I did find an interesting little snippet during the course of some research I’ve been doing which I’ll share with you.

In 1647 the London Corporation of the Poor was established and one of its provisions was to erect work-houses. Two confiscated royal properties were given to the Corporation and by 1655, one thousand adults and a hundred children were employed there.

Children in the care of the Corporation learned basic literacy. And people didn’t have to live in the work-house, but could either work from their own homes or turn up on a daily basis to work.

I wonder what became of those people when Charles II came back and reclaimed his properties in 1660?

My Gt Gt Grandmother died in the Tendring workhouse in 1904 (the lower pictures if you follow the link). It was a cruel twist of fate that her son in law, my great grandfather, died in that same workhouse at the age of 92 in 1968. It was of course a hospital by then, but it was a grim place and even as a child I felt it had an unpleasant atmosphere, but I did like going to visit Grandfather and he always had a tube of Trebor Mints or Polo Mints in his bedside locker for me.

Anyway, that all very nicely brings me to a bargain I found today!

Among my favourite books (that is books I like to read more than once) along with Jung Chan’s Wild Swans, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Alfred Lansing’s Endurance and Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne is The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell.

And the bargain - it’s free on Kindle and only £1.99 in paperback. And well worth a read – and a re-read!

Dogs, Dogs, Dogs!

On Easter Monday we braved the cold and went to the All About Dogs Show at the Suffolk Showground.

Dogs were welcome, but we left Indy at home in the warm. He’s very particular about his walks now and, understandably, he gets nervous in unfamiliar surroundings and situations.

It was lovely – so many gorgeous dogs in all shapes and sizes. We stopped at the Retired Greyhounds Trust stand and I watched as my Beloved became completely besotted with a very pretty little brindle greyhound.

The show is well worth a visit and there are more coming up at Newbury, Newark and Norfolk, by which time perhaps the weather will be more pleasant.

Oh and I came home with a puppy. I won him on the Wood Green Shelter stall.

I don’t think Indy was impressed!

What on earth is it? I'm not posing with that!

Oh for goodness sake, all right then, if I must.

You might as well take it away because I am not, absolutely not, going to sleep with it!

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!