Right now (when this post is released) I”m in Cambridgeshire. I’m staying with some friends from the science fiction community. They live in the middle of the fenland. Mostly my time with them is time out with friends, but we’re also going to see some things. By ‘some things’ I mean an old church that’s associated with one of my favourite Medieval historians: Henry of Huntingdon. Also museums. Also…fenland. I am learning to understand the fens. I’m also revising the research from a novel I never wrote because I ended up in hospital having a major heart operation. The novel that emerged from that dramatic year was The Year of the Fruit Cake. I had planned to write a novel set in the late seventeenth century. I won’t pick up that exact same novel, not with so much change din my life, but St Ives and its surrounds may be part of another novel.
I’ll spend my weekend with one of my fellow History Girls, Rosemary Hayes. She’s promised me some of my favourite places, including Lavenham in Essex and a rather brilliant museum of rural life. If all goes well (and our plans are not firm yet) while you read this, I’ll be at one of those places, or maybe at the house Lucy M Boston wrote into the Green Knowe stories. This is somewhere I’ve wanted to visit and to photograph since I first read a Green Knowe book when I was a child. Ironically, visiting it would be work-related… but still very, very special.