OK, so it’s more than a couple of weeks, but I’ve been working on the assumption that everybody is on holiday and so I won’t have been missed.   It seems ages since my own holiday (if you can call it a holiday with six adolescents in the house), but the weather was perfect and I managed to get in some sitting on the terrace, which is all I ask out of a holiday nowadays.  Here is a picture of me, in fact, reading the manuscript on the terrace in the sun, with a glass of wine and my faithful hound at my feet, just to prove to all you doubters that the sun does shine in Scotland sometimes!

While we were there, my best friend – and occasionally sternest critic - read the seven chapters I had written, and gave them the thumbs-up, so I was much more confident when I came home, and writing the last three chapters was, in retrospect at least, easy.  I think this may have partly been because the last chapter is set in a fictional East African country, but based on my own trip to Kenya  in 1983.  I travelled with my cousin, and we stayed with another cousin and her husband who were working there.  It was a really golden trip, and I have had such a nostalgic time writing about it again, looking at the old photos and ringing them up to demand details.

We stayed in a house right by the beach, and while Max and Freya stay in a hotel, the verandah is just the same, with a view down to the blue, blue sea.  I even found a picture of it to show you, although I could remember it exactly.  We used to walk along the beach to the hotel nearby and sit in the shade drinking beer and eating crab mayonnaise sandwiches – why isn’t life like this any more???

 

I gave Freya and Max crab mayonnaise sandwiches, too, just for old times sake, and sent them on a drive through the bush which is remarkably similar to the one we did, and which is still one of the best drives of my life.

So here are some snaps from my Kenya album, to give you a flavour of the last chapter (I had such a good time sighing over the photographs that I got a bit carried away with the scanning, and then thought ‘Oh, what the hell … I’ll put them all in!’)

I finally finished last Friday, and had a well-deserved gin and tonic (or possibly two) to celebrate.  You can’t really tell from the photograph (yes, another one, I told you I got carried away) but I am clutching the entire manuscript in my hot little hand, having e-mailed it to the editorial department.  And yes, that gin did taste good.  All it needed was a crab mayonnaise sandwich and a tropical beach to make it perfect.