Month: June 2025

Apples, Pears and Triangles

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

When my sister and I were teenagers, our parents went away for the weekend leaving us to our own devices.

Is this a tale of wild parties? Nope. We were far too boring.

Instead, we started a two day super low calorie diet.

Started.

The first meal was a raw egg beaten into orange juice.

One sip was enough for both of us. We’d been brought up not to waste food, but…down the sink it went and the diet went in the bin.

At the time, my sister and I were slim, healthy and fit, but we were both self-conscious about our busty figures. ‘You’re an inverted triangle shape,’ the magazines told us (apparently is a carrot shape now). We could have been apples or pears or hourglasses. We didn’t want to be any of them. We wanted to be like the girls on TV.

The negative body imagery I grew up with was not simply through media and peer-pressure (then nowhere near as bad as it is nowadays) but from years of little comments (made as if we weren’t there) by the extended family:

  • ‘He’s rather a trencherman isn’t he?’ (*)
  • ‘Her feet are large – I imagine she’ll grow up to be big.’  (She didn’t.)
  • ‘You’re not as thin as you used to be.’ (I’d just had a baby.)
  • ‘Isn’t that dress is a little tight/low cut/short?’ (No.)
  • ‘Their busts must be from their Polish great-great-great-grandmother.’ (She wasn’t Polish and no one knew what she looked like.)

(*In case you don’t know, a ‘trencherman’ is an old-fashioned term which suggests someone who’d not only eat their meal but what it was served in (a trencher originally being a piece of stale bread used as a plate).)

One of my earliest memories was hearing someone say Dad ought to lose weight and being upset because I thought he was lovely and cuddly. It wasn’t till much later that I realised the risks to his health.

He really did try.

He started every fad diet going, and what Dad ate, the whole family ate. Luckily for us the diets only lasted as long as Dad could bear them (generally about two days).

He kept a complicated graph on which noted his weight daily down to the quarter pound. When later quizzed as to why, he said it was because of a diet he’d been on which had worked. Was he still on the diet? No. He’d just kept the graph habit. My sister and I rolled our eyes. We didn’t understand the genetic element of the situation nor the psychological one.

I had a different battle at eighteen. A combination of negative body image, a broken heart and struggling with my A levels meant that my life felt out of control, so I controlled the one thing I could: eating.

I wasn’t trying to make myself ill. I’d had a friend who became anorexic and was taken out of school a few years earlier.  But caught up in my own misery, I couldn’t see I was risking the same.

There was little recognition of eating disorders then. They were seen as a lack of self-control rather than a psychological issue. The parents of the friend with anorexia initially insisted she was just losing puppy fat. But she’d told me she’d started cutting out food because bullying from boys at school and feeling second best to her brother had become too much. I hope she got the treatment she needed. The parents completely cut her off from her former friends and I never found out.

I myself didn’t become anorexic because Dad spotted how thin I’d become and said so. I realised it must be bad if he noticed and started to change what I was eating.

It was a struggle to get back to normal, not least because shortly afterwards I went to university (despite duffing up my A levels) and was too shy to go to the refectory to eat with strangers. I fundamentally lived on crackers and soup until I made lifelong friends and started reaching a sensible weight.

You might not believe that if you saw me now. A combination of menopause, medication, genes (perhaps) and a sedentary job mean I’m no longer a carrot but an apple and need to lose several pounds.

Proffered help is sometimes trying.

A (male) doctor said ‘It’s so easy for post-menopausal women to gain weight but so hard to lose it.’ Little chuckle. ‘My wife’s forever complaining when I tell her she can’t eat carbs!’

How humorous.

I drink wine and I don’t exercise near enough, but I prefer healthy food. I’ve never been a comfort eater, but I am a boredom eater.

I explained all this to the doctor, who said that my ideal diet was poached chicken, poached eggs, lentils and no carbs. Thinking I’d infinitely prefer to give up wine than pasta, I got off the call with a desperate urge to make a massive bowl of macaroni cheese.

Instead I cooked eggs. (Poached, with no orange juice in sight.)

My paternal grandmother despaired over her post-menopausal but quite average weight and her greying hair and her soft face. I loved all of it and couldn’t see the reason for her distress then. But I understand now.

I’d like to be thinner not just – or even – because it would be healthier, but because deep down I still want to look like women on TV, even though they’re the middle-aged ones not the teenage ones.

Is that a society thing or a me thing? Dad and his daily weight graph is no different to me and my weight-loss apps which are only relevant if I’m eating less and exercising more.

Part of me wants to say ‘Come back next week and see if I’ve rejoined the gym and lost some weight.’

The bigger part knows ‘Maybe I will, maybe I won’t, but I need to love myself as I am either way.’


UK Help Links

Beat Eating Disorders

Menopause Matters

Obesity Support Groups

Diabetes UK

Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI). Image credit ID 21036277 | Apples And Pears © Elena Schweitzer | Dreamstime.com

Shelf Life

~ Paula Harmon ~ 1 Comment

The other day when I needed rice wine vinegar for a recipe, I discovered the use by date of ours had expired seven years ago. For the record, we probably hadn’t used it 2018, but it did prove that we need a cupboard audit.

No one has ever accused me of being a tidy person, but I try to be organised in the kitchen. Unfortunately I’m constantly undermined by my husband who thinks it’s a waste of time and thinks the fact that I have the spices in the spice cupboard in alphabetical order hysterical. There’s a sort of running battle because he puts things where he sees a space and then of course the chief chef (e.g. me) can’t find them and remonstrates and he rolls his eyes etc etc etc.

Use by/Best Before dates of course are somewhat new. Our parents and grandparents used their noses and brains. Admittedly, until forty years ago, the variety of things we take for granted weren’t as easily available (or a desire to cook several different cuisines), and my grandmothers having endured ten years of the Depression followed by thirteen or so years of rationing, were both very frugal. and unlikely to buy things they weren’t going to use.

They both cooked good plain British cooking (yes it’s a thing) with fresh ingredients. One grandmother also made macaroni dishes and the other also made curry. One baked her own bread. The other made the thinnest ever crêpes suzettes.

In contrast, I store ingredients for recipes from Jamaica to Malaysia, from France to South Africa, often bought on a whim. Periodically I realise a ‘best before’ is rapidly approaching and adjust what I was planning to cook accordingly.

There are things in the cupboard whose dates we’d never check: treacle, golden syrup and marmite. It’s hard to see how any of them could go off, and I suspect the treacle may outlast me.

On the other hand, there’s a tin of Confit de Canard which my husband bought in France in 1993 which was put in a cupboard when we got home and subsequently forgotten. The use by date was 2001 and we’ve moved twice since then, bringing the tin with us because we feel guilty about throwing it away. My husband swears it’ll still be fine. He’s probably right, but I’m not taking the risk and said he can eat it on his own and if necessary clear up afterwards. So far, he hasn’t tried to prove his own theory.

So it’s obvious that things on kitchen and fridges shelves have a life span. Is the same true of things on other shelves?

Books for example.

For irrelevant reasons, I recently tidied the bookshelves in my daughter’s room. It includes the books she left behind when she moved away, plus a few she adds when she comes to visit. It covers her reading life from age ten to nowadays plus art books, Spanish dictionaries and the Modern History textbooks she never returned to school.

I extracted the latter to sneak back somehow, noting with depression that (a) her Modern History course ended with the 1980s Cold War when I was a teenager doing a Modern History course which ended with the 1950s Korean War and (b) it’s all repeating itself. Again.

Then I put her novels in alphabetical order by author. This resulted in a bit of a bonkers mix. Monica Ali’s adult novel ‘Brick Lane’ nestles against Frank Cottrell Boyce’s middle grade novel ‘Cosmic’ which nestles against Malorie Blackman’s young adult novel ‘Checkmate’ etc.

A collage of bits of my own bookcases are below. I know that I’m fortunate to have all these books and the space to have them by the way, but that aside, if you can’t abide things out of order, you may need to brace yourself before looking closely.

Different shelves are supposed to have different functions: research, general novels, the ‘I have a literature degree honest’ shelf, general non-fiction books, and of course cookbooks. But not everything is where it should be. I like to think that part of the reason for that is because books like to wander about when I’m not looking, but I have to admit, most of it is just me being lazy.

Some of the books are new, some second-hand, some from my childhood, some gifted at various times in adult life. Some were once my father’s, some once belonged to his aunt. I think the oldest book is from the 1850s (a volume of recipes) and possibly after that an 1890s children’s book which was my great aunt’s. Some books are other people’s – borrowed, lent or left behind by one of my children or their partners until they have space for them.

Hard as it is to believe (and please don’t tell the ghost of my father if you meet him in a second-hand bookstore), I do periodically reduce my collection, but it’s never an easy task. With the exception of ‘Jude the Obscure’ and ‘The Noodle Maker’ both of which I was more than happy to get rid of, I feel like I’m giving away a kitten for adoption when I donate books to charity shops etc, hoping desperately that each will be cared for properly in its new home.

In ‘The Unpleasantness at the Belloma Club’ by Dorothy L Sayers, Lord Peter Wimsey describes books as lobster shells. His theory is that as you grow and change, you’ll discard them and replace them with something else.

For me, I think that’s true of the art I’d display, but it’s not for books I own.

There are perhaps some I’ll never read again, but I keep them because they hold memories. These were read to me by my father. That was once on my grandmother’s (very tidy) bookshelf with the blue glass jar of humbugs on top. And these, like songs on the radio, recall a point in time and just looking at them will bring memories and emotions back.

Like my daughter, I’ve kept books from childhood which I periodically read and enjoy every bit as much as I ever did.

So no, I don’t agree with Lord Peter Wimsey on this occasion.

Maybe rice wine vinegar and Confit de Canard have a shelf life.

But for me at least, books don’t.

What do you think?

Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (generative AI).

What’s The Incomer All About?

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

The local women’s guild threatens to uncover what Rose is hiding. Who can she trust? Is it Sky who fears the guild? Or Rob who hates it?

As odd becomes sinister, Rose begins to wonder: does the Guild want them to leave…

or to die?

As a contemporary fantasy, ‘The Incomer’ may seem like a major diversion from murder mysteries, but if you’ve read some of my short stories, you’ll know that I have always had a fascination with the magical and mystical.

And while this book involves werewolves, shapeshifters and selkies (and a little romance), it is chiefly character driven as are all my books.

It is about what happens when people find themselves in an extraordinary situation. It is about brother and a sister coming to terms with and overcoming more than one grief. It is about fighting someone or something that is trying to destroy them. It’s about learning who you really are and starting again. And more importantly, perhaps, it’s about friendship.

I actually started it long before any of the characters in my other novels even popped into my head, and I thought you might like to know some of its background and how it reflects my writing – if not personal – journey. (Which, while it involves small towns, doesn’t – so far – involve werewolves, shapeshifters and selkies. As far as I know.)

Back in 2010, my husband gave me a laptop for my birthday. Up to that point, we’d shared a PC , but he knew how much I wanted to start writing again and this was his gift to make this happen.

I started a few stories, but one of those t I didn’t finish was called ‘Reverse’. It is now ‘The Incomer’.

It started much the same: Rose and her TV presenter brother Simon have moved to the Highlands to hide a secret. Simon has become a werewolf in an incident which killed Rose’s husband. There’s a possibility of a cure, but they need to keep their heads down for the time being.

Unfortunately no one will let them hide.

First Emmeline of the local women’s guild turns up, then a peculiar young woman called Sky who seems to fear Emmeline.

That’s as far as I got.

I realised that the story needed more space and I didn’t know what to do so it went in the cyber drawer and stayed there.

In 2016 I thought ‘Reverse’ might be a good project for Nanowrimo (a challenge to write a complete – if first draft – 50,000 novel in November). I got half way and… I can’t remember what got in the way at the time, but I stopped again.

Roll on five months. I’d taken leave from work to spend with my children during their Easter school holiday, but as teenagers they were more interested in hanging out with their friends (and of course, revising for that summer’s exams) than day trips with me.

I suddenly realised that I wasn’t remotely upset. On the contrary, I was ecstatic.

This was the first time for years when I’d have whole days to myself, to do what I wanted, without worrying about keeping other people entertained.

So I dusted off ‘Reverse’ and finished it. My husband came home from work on the Friday evening moments after I typed the last sentence.

It needed work and was way too long, but I was happy. In as much as I’d had a clue where it was heading in 2010, it had ended up somewhere much better.

The short story was going to be entirely about Simon and Sky with events seen through Rose’s eyes, with her in the background.

But as I wrote, Rose changed, and because she changed, so did the direction of the story.

The start is the same: Rose is a widow. She’s her brother’s PA and also his protector, because he’s not good at protecting himself. Simon is the extrovert celebrity. She is an introvert, perceived by others to be in his shadow.

But as I developed the story, Rose started pushing against other people’s perceptions and tackling the sinister things they’re facing by herself.

Suddenly the novel became as much about Rose and about her friendship with Sky as about anything else.

It wasn’t until I was reading the first chapter act to my writing group and discussing it afterwards, that it occurred to that Rose had changed, because I myself had changed.

When I started that short story in 2010, I was juggling a job and caring for primary school age children. I was lucky I found time to sit down at all let alone write. I wasn’t in the background in my job, yet I felt I was in my domestic life.

By 2017, my children were more independent. I was to, to a large extent, the good deal freer.

Also, I had joined a writers’ group, and ‘met’ writers on line. Many of these people are now my closest friends.

The creative side of me which had been stifled for a long time, was no longer in the shadows. I’d stopped worrying about trying to explain creative ideas, because I’d found a tribe who wouldn’t dismiss them as mad or stupid and laugh at me.

In fact, I had stopped being in the shadows and stopped letting life just happen. In the process, my characters had stopped being people who largely observe or suffer events, but instead take action even if their personality makes that hard.

Rose is still the introvert I imagined her to be. She is still a little shy. But she’ll fight for her brother, and she’ll fight for herself.

If I’ve whetted your appetite, you can pre-order the e-book here. It will come out on 1st July 2025. The paperback and hardback will be out on 30th June. Although there will be other books in the series, ‘The Incomer’ can be read as a standalone, so I hope you’ll give it a go.

And if you do, I hope you like it.

Words copyright (c) 2025 Paula Harmon. Image created using Canva. Book cover by 100covers.

Sanctuary in Art?

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

I’ve often said that messing with art helps me de-stress and since perhaps you can tell from my previous blog post that the last few months have been stressful, you might wonder if I’ve been following my own advice?

The answer is: ish.

Every year Liz Hedgecock and I do a challenge for Lent, and this year we decided to try mixed media art. Unlike Liz who is a much better artist, and more disciplined, I apply the same approach to learning art as to learning most things: that is, I fiddle until I’ve figured it out, or something’s exploded.

This year, I wanted to experiment with a combination of watercolour, acrylic, fine liners, markers, and modelling paste. As I didn’t have modelling paste, I wondered if I could make some using stuff from home. Thanks to an internet ‘recipe’ I produced a sort of gloop using cornflour (cornstarch) and PVA glue. Did it work? Nope. So I bought some and started again.

It was well into Lent before I got going, and then I worked on it for thirty minutes a day until it was as finished as it was going to be.

Even though it’s not quite what’s in my head, and only one of the hares (yes, they’re supposed to be hares) looks like a hare (ish), the process was happy and positive, largely because I was enjoying messing with the colours, and experimenting without overthinking what I was doing. I think I might do it again to see if I can get closer to what I envisioned.

So that was April.

Some time in May I saw some prompts for a sketching challenge based on finding positivity in nature.

As a lonely, bullied child, I would find my peace, reassurance and grounding in the local woods or by the local river. There I discovered comfort in being part of something so big, that my problems seemed small, hidden in a beauty which made the ugliness of school life recede. Although I don’t do that sort of wandering as much as I should now, I do have a lovely garden in which the writing shed hides surrounded by greenery.

So with that in mind, I decided to create something from the first prompt, which was ‘Sanctuary’.

Time went by and I couldn’t even find half hour an to do anything, but after work on a particularly stressful day, I took some art stuff and a glass of wine down to the writing shed aiming to start a small simple watercolour painting.

However when I arrived at the shed, I set out my small selection of brushes, a little bottle of water and my glass of wine, but couldn’t find the little pallet of watercolour paints that I could’ve sworn I’d put in my bag. I went back to the house but couldn’t find them anywhere, so gave up, and using watercolour pencils instead, did what I could, periodically dipping brushes and pencils in my wine instead of the water (which doesn’t improve the flavour). By now, however, I was mentally in the wrong zone and don’t really know what I’m doing with watercolour pencils.

I was aiming for an image of myself in the writing shed being creative and happy as seen through the branches of our rather overgrown cherry tree.

This is what I ended up with.

Me, stuck in a birdcage in the middle of a jungle.

(Naturally as soon as I got back in the house, I found the little watercolour palette disguising itself against the black background of the basket which I called sac magique, in which I cart things around sometimes.)

I gave up trying for a bit.

Then a couple of weeks ago, my husband and I spent a few days in the Languedoc. I needed a break from writing and editing, but not creativity. So I took my travelling sketching kit.

My husband and I, despite both being city born, are country mice by nature, and usually rent places in the countryside. But this time, we stayed in a place with a balcony overlooking Place Carnot in Carcassonne. We enjoyed people watching and listening to the buzz of conversation from below, and wandering the area. Wherever we went I sketched little scenes from what I saw in front of me.

It was so freeing making myself capture something as best as I could quickly without working out composition or what the picture was trying to say. That’s not to say there wasn’t a story – or couldn’t be a story – behind each one, but I was simply having fun and resting my mind.

Last week turned out a good deal more intense than I anticipated when I wrote the previous blog, however everything on my rationalised to-do list got done, albeit a day behind schedule.

So afterwards, I thought, ‘Now I’m feeling calm, if tired, I’m going to the shed to try my sanctuary painting again’ and I did.

The result is below.

You can make of it what you will.

I showed photos of both ‘Sanctuary’ paintings to my oldest child’s partner, without any context.

He said ‘Pretty colours and shapes’ about the first until he spotted someone inside at which point he said ‘Ah – a gilded cage. Pretty, but a cage all the same.’ He then looked at the other one, still no context. He said ‘The water droplet makes me think of freedom, free flowing. It seems peaceful. It’s a place of rest and safety not a cage.’

Now, it’s true that he has a psychology degree, but at this particular moment, he was squinting at my small phone in bright sun while drinking cocktails, and despite being very short-sighted, hadn’t brought his glasses. So his assessment possibly has the psychological robustness of a ‘What sort of boy will make my ideal partner’ quiz in a teenage girl’s magazine.

But I like it and I’m sticking with it.

What do you think?

All words and pictures copyright (c) 2025 Paula Harmon. None must be reproduced without express permission or credit. No permission is given for any to be used to train artificial intelligence.

All Change Please

~ Paula Harmon ~ 2 Comments

This is a virtual hug for anyone who’s been in a state of utter overwhelm.

And it’s an apology in the unlikely event that anyone out there has missed my random ramblings.

I had heaps of things I intended to blog about after I posted the last on 4th November 2024. Then my mother was offered the chance to move from an upstairs maisonette to a ground floor maisonette and while it was something we wanted to happen, it was somehow the trigger for my life to spiral down an Alice in Wonderland style rabbit hole, passing paint pots, books, carpets, laptops and online forms, without ever seeming to land.

The problem wasn’t the move itself, but the time-frame. Everything I had to organise, including redecorating and recarpeting the new place, had to take place between mid November and mid December. Fair play to local firms: the carpet people, a decorator and a removal company all stepped up and made it happen.

And after twelve years, Mum had finally decided she was ready to part with some of the stuff she’d brought with her when she left the place she’d lived with Dad. So cue days of decluttering while also packing. (A blog post in itself.)

In the midst of this, Liz and I published Death in a Dinner Jacket (the last, so far, of the Booker & Fitch series), and I was supposed to be publicising A Justified Death (book 5 in the Margaret Demeray series), while trying to finish work on the final (so far) Margaret Demeray Book.

On the personal front, my day job part-time project role was finally coming to an end and I had to decide whether to apply for another internal role or let the HR gods decide where to redeploy me (went for the former), and I needed to plan for a family Christmas – catering for seven people for four days at least.

Generally, I don’t mind change as I have a low boredom threshold, but not when there’s too much all at once. Six plus months later, I’m still traumatised by those packed (sorry) weeks of house moving – made worse by two days of heavy snow – and then Christmas itself, which was lovely except for my back deciding to ‘go’ after all the box-lugging just when I needed to do a lot of standing in the kitchen.

It really didn’t help that it was midwinter too, when the short dark days add (if you suffer with Seasonal Affective Disorder as I do to some extent) an extra layer of gloom and general fog.

I thought I’d manage to get a grip in January, then February, then… you get the picture. At work, my former team disbanded at the end of March – much emotion all round as we were very close – and I started a new job on 1st April. As that was a Tuesday, it was a very odd week.

It wasn’t until May that I started to feel back on top of things a bit, but between my last blog post and now, the following have somehow happened and looking back, I’m not quite sure how:

  • DP Publishers took on the publishing of the Margaret series apart from the audiobooks. They have republished all the ebooks with new covers, and will ultimately republish all the paperbacks with new covers.
  • I finished the sixth Margaret book and handed it off to DP. It will come out hopefully on 18th September and be available for pre-order hopefully from 16th July – and I will actually do a post about it, because in theory, book six is the last in the series unless of course, readers want more (tell me if you’re one of them in the comments)!
  • I moved all my audiobooks from exclusivity with Amazon/Audible and i-Tunes to a wider range of audiobook outlets, and just to let you know that the first three Margaret audiobooks are on 60% reduction until tomorrow (10th June 2025) at Kobo, LibroFM, GooglePlay and Nook. Madeleine Brolly, my narrator, is currently working on Murder Saturnalia. If you want to know about my audiobooks then check them out here.
  • I started writing a new mystery series set in the 1920s – not Margaret related at all – and somewhat inspired by one of the postcards in Postcard Whisperers.
  • Liz and I finished the first book in a COMPLETELY new project – a cozy romcom set in a world just like ours, only in which there’s also some magic. We had HUGE fun writing it and really missed the characters when it was finished. Needless to say, I miss the dragons the most. One in particular. More info soon and out hopefully this summer.
  • And finally, I decided to publish a book which has been finished and waiting for me to do something with it for a very long time. It’s called The Incomer and will be out on 1st July. Again, this is something completely different – a world like this one with paranormal elements, albeit not cozy. I’ll write separately about it soon because there’s something of a story behind the writing of it but perhaps a taster of the story rounds this blog off nicely. The main character’s world has overwhelmed her, so she’s moved to hide away as much as she can – but the locals have other ideas, and she has to fight back.

And so shall I.

I am still inundated with deadlines and pressures (some self-imposed) and as you no doubt are too, overwhelmed by helplessness in the face of current affairs. But I looked at my June ‘to do’ list yesterday, and after a moment of panic, broke it down into:

  • Must be done
  • Can wait
  • Outside my control

and re-wrote a manageable list which made me feel a whole lot better.

If you’re feeling like everything has got on top of you, I hope you can do the same.

After all, as someone once said in an office meeting (stopping the conversation dead for a few moments) ‘You have to eat the elephant in the corner a bit at a time’.

Words Copyright (c) 2025 Paula Harmon. Not to be used without the author’s express permission. in any way, including the training of Artificial Intelligence.  Image credit: ID 116632158 © Jozef Micic | Dreamstime.com