Dear Jean, I am so grateful to you for your help: you should write a book yourself.

Dear Reader,

Ever since returning from seeing my son and granddaughters in Australia, I feel as though I’ve been running which, in a way, I have been because I’ve been trying to catch up. I had written a third of A Family Christmas before I left, but on arriving back at my desk I realised with some horror that the plot, which had seemed simple enough when I left, had changed into a story so complex that I could see no way of resolving it!

I had been away for just over two months and having to virtually scrap a third of a book and start at the beginning again . . . well, I’m sure you can imagine how I felt, and how my poor editor felt too. So instead of getting quietly on with the new story, I began to fiddle with what I had already written . . . and the awful thing was that though I had completely changed the plot, the names remained the same! And for some unknown reason I had named a goody Sam, in this book, whereas a couple of books ago (I think it was in A Sixpenny Christmas), the baddy had been called Sam. I cannot tell you how muddled this made us all, though we managed to sort it in the end!

But enough of muddles! Flash is now getting on for sixteen years old and was not at all delighted to come out of the marvellous cattery, where he is an elder statesman, after being incarcerated for over two months. At first he retreated into his bedroom and refused totally to come out, then he tried his ‘litter room’, and when we finally got him out of his cosy retreat he refused to look at us, turning his back and laying his ears flat whenever he thought himself observed.

He now takes in his stride the presence of my daughter-next-door’s two lurchers and two black cats, and they very wisely take no notice of him. But age has made him cautious and he no longer stalks the birds when they come to feed from the seed, peanut and fat hangers. They know in some mysterious way that he is no longer a threat and when we have a sunny day (rare!) he lies in a warm patch and observes in an avuncular manner – you would think him a model bird watcher with no more interest in our feathered friends than was proper.

And I am comfortably into my next book, the early part of which is set in the Yorkshire Dales, though that may change . . . plots have a habit of twisting round and biting you on the nose if you take them for granted. I search for a title, groan groan, always the most difficult part of starting a new book. How about The Seventh Wave? Only so far the sea hasn’t come into it. Or The Straight and Narrow? I don’t think so! Or Searching for Tom? That might do, because the story starts with Madeleine, who is around ten, trying to follow in the footsteps of Charles Kingsley, who wrote The Water Babies, when she discovers that Mr Kingsley actually wrote the book in the Dales near where she lives, and she begins to hope that he really did find the little creatures . . . well, you never know . . . if anyone out there gets a better idea . . . I leave it in your capable hands!