Author: Paula Harmon

Ginger

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

One cold winter afternoon, I went to get some coal for the boiler after school and discovered something unexpected.

It wasn’t the first time I’d found something odd when getting coal.

Our house was at the top of a hill and its back garden and the garage and the large coal bunker were below it on a slope which became our back garden. When we’d moved in, there was a field between the end of our garden and the gorge where the river was. Now there was a housing estate.

The drive at the side of the house which led to the garage wasn’t long (our house was the normal sort of size), but it was steep. Dad taught me how to control the clutch on the car and how to do hill starts on that drive before I was old enough for lessons on the public road.

The coal bunker was at the bottom of some very steep steps and was so large it only needed to be filled twice a year. There was no mains gas in the village, so we used Calor gas for cooking and coal to feed a boiler which heated water and the central heating which Dad had had put in after we moved.

One of my chores after school was to get coal for the boiler if necessary. The first odd thing that had happened during this exercise was on a chilly March afternoon when something other than coal slid into the enormous scuttle. It was a package addressed to Dad. When he came home and opened it, he said ‘Oh! I’d forgotten I’d ordered this. They mustn’t have been able to put it through the letter box in December. Shame we didn’t realise. Still, it’s undamaged. Happy Belated Christmas Paula!’ It was a hardback copy of the Diary of Anne Frank with a tooled leatherette cover. I still have it.

But this time, the surprise was alive and not in the bunker but in the garage, making a pitiful squeak.

Now, the garage was enormous, but no car ever went inside because there wasn’t, somehow, room. However that’s another story though you can get the gist here. I put down the scuttle and went to investigate.

A tiny ginger kitten peeked out through a gap in the door and mewed.

Now, a couple of years before I’d smuggled a black kitten home in my cookery basket. She had belonged to a friend who said the kitten would be drowned and had likewise smuggled her to school. I can’t actually recall how we managed during the school day, but we did. When I got home, I called the kitten Magic. I kept her hidden for maybe just a few hours before I confessed, expecting to be told that I could keep her, even though we had another cat already, but the answer was no.

I had been heartbroken. This time, I was older and further into my teens and I wasn’t going to back down without a fight. So I picked up the little frozen scrap of ginger fur and took him indoors.

I have no idea what had changed since I’d smuggled Magic home, but I didn’t have to fight. The answer was yes, we could keep the kitten. But while I was trying to think up some imaginative, mystical name for this hungry ball of grubby reddish fluff, my mother named him Ginger and that was that.

We never discovered where he’d come from. For all we knew, he’d been dumped on us purposefully. But it seemed somehow that he’d just arrived from nowhere all on his own. Whatever really happened, whoever didn’t want him missed the loveliest pet.

Our existing cat was none too impressed at first. She was middle-aged and very ladylike. All of a sudden her quiet domain was invaded by a hooligan of a tearaway, rushing round the house, bouncing out on her from corners, trying to entice her in games and wrestling. She watched with disapproval and occasionally swiped him when he stepped too far out of line.

Ginger didn’t care. He was the sweetest, gentlest cat I have ever known. A neighbour child brought his little sister round once. She was around eighteen months old and waddled over to Ginger, who was watching her in curiosity. Before anyone could stop her, she grabbed his ears and twisted. It’s as well she didn’t do it to the older cat who’d have swiped her without compunction, claws and all. Ginger just sat there until I could rescue him, although you could tell he wasn’t happy. We didn’t have any other small children round after that, but if we had, I’m sure he’d have hidden as far as possible out of the way until they’d gone.

With that and three other exceptions, Ginger was the happiest cat.

One exception was travelling in the car to visit grandparents in Berkshire and Wiltshire. The older cat loved it. She’d be sick once, which we prepared for. Then she’d clamour to come out of her basket and spend the rest of the journey wandering about the car before settling on either the back window shelf or Dad’s shoulders. Ginger on the other hand, huddled miserably in his basket until we’d arrived wherever we were going, at which point he returned to his normal curious, chirpy self.

Another exception was when a young gander appeared in our garden and stayed there for a week. Apparently he’d been introduced to a harem of older geese in a local farm, and flown off in terror at their – er marital – expectations. For the whole week while we tried to work out who the gander belonged to and get him collected, the two cats stayed indoors, staring out in disgust at the invader in their garden, ears twitching as it honked loud enough to wake the dead, .

The final exception was a few years later when our older cat died.

Ginger spent days hunting round the house for her afterwards, chirruping miserably. He looked in all the places where she used to hide from his exuberance and all the places where she curled up to have her old lady naps. It was some time before he became used to being on his own.

I had left home long before Ginger himself passed away and I never got to say goodbye. By then, I suppose, he was Mum’s cat really. But I always thought of him as mine somehow: that little bundle of orange fluff that appeared from nowhere and became as I say, the prince of cats.

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).

Busy Doing Nothing?

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

What do you do when you have unexpected free time?

As a child, I wandered about in nature. I daydreamed and I wrote stories and poems. I read and read and read. I crafted things of little use and nil longevity.

I’m not sure when this changed, but motherhood didn’t help. All of a sudden my days involved keeping someone else alive and maintaining shreds of my sanity. Later there were school deadlines, afterschool clubs, sports events – an endless set of things to remember, to chivvy about, to attend, to plan.

Then the children left home, and all of a sudden, for the first time in twenty years, I was sometimes free.

For a while, I found I’d lost the knack to do nothing, but now I’m finally getting the hang of it again.

Option One: Do Nothing while Doing Something

I used to work with someone who couldn’t see the point of reading. In our one hour lunchbreak, I would buy my lunch, have a potter round town, then come back and read. My colleague ate her packed lunch and then sit in silence until 2pm. I know people who can’t see the point of reading unless it’s ‘improving’ or religious books. Me, I’d read a bus ticket if it was all that was available. While I read plenty of non-fiction, my favourite ‘waste of time’ is fiction including children’s fiction. Do I always learn something? Who cares.

Art doesn’t normally count, but in 2023, Liz Hedgecock and I did a Louise Fletcher ‘Find Your Joy’ taster course. Its aim (broadly) was to free your mind from all its preconceptions as you played with abstract.

The first exercise was to dissect a large piece of paper with masking tape, select five colours, paint at random then removed the masking tape to reveal the result. This was my effort:

But I hadn’t played by the rules. I’d decided that I wasn’t going to waste paint on something pointless, and wanted it to represent something. (Can you tell what I was aiming for?)

Then I read some of the heartbreaking comments people posted in the accompanying social media group, struggling because all they could hear in their heads was someone (often a mother or mother-in-law) saying they shouldn’t be wasting time when they had homes and husbands to look after. At first, I felt a combination of sorrow and anger, then I realised that I myself had decided to give that the first exercise meaning because I was obviously listening to some internal voice (probably my own). After that, I did the exercises without planning and if I learned nothing else, it was to mute that inner critic.

(Today, in the interests of experiment, I did that first exercise again without any plan. This is the result, which has no meaning whatsoever but I somehow prefer).

Option Two: Really Do Nothing

Are you good at being still, maybe sitting/lying in nature watching trees or looking for shapes in clouds or staring into an open fire watching the flames flicker?

As a fidget with a butterfly brain I am terrible at it, unless I’m staring at the sea or a river. My mind wanders or I’ll amble off to do something else. But a couple of Christmases ago, exhausted, I had the chance to try out a Virtual Reality headset where I could ‘stare at the stars’. I put on some ambient music, lay back on the sofa and inhabited that non-existent space for half an hour, emerging unbelievably refreshed.

Is Idleness Wrong?

Some feel that spare time should be filled with learning if nothing else, because doing something without a purpose is a waste of time. It’s perhaps a throw back to a fear that ‘the devil will find work for idle hands’ and that a bored unoccupied person is at best of no use and at worst potentially evil.

Personally I never feel like I have to educate myself if I don’t want to. While on holiday for example, I’m happy soaking up the atmosphere and people-watching. To me, this ‘doing nothing’ is highly valuable, not just as a writer, but as a human. To observe people makes them real and not abstract.

And think of all those ‘idlers’ who changed the world for the better. Admittedly a lot of them were wealthy and someone else was doing the laundry, childcare and dinner prep, but all the same – they sat and observed, they experimented, they wrote down ideas and we ended up with novels, art, steam engines, radio etc etc.

In her novel ‘Early in Orcadia’, Naomi Mitchison imagines the discovery of the Orkney Islands by a group of pre-historic people. It starts with an old (by their reckoning) man who has survived so many challenges that he is honoured with the right to do nothing. Because he has the time to sit and think as he watches the sea, he realises there is something out there to investigate. In the same group is a woman who is so constantly busy with keeping her family alive that she never ‘does nothing’. Once in a blue moon she looks at wads of wool picked off thorn bushes, convinced that there must be something useful to do with it, but has no time to figure it out.

One discovers something by ‘doing nothing’. The other will only discover how to weave if one day she able to ‘do nothing’.

Yes, evil can come from idle hands, but so can creativity. Our world is absurdly busy and increasingly stressful and we need to rest to cope with it.

So don’t listen to a voice that tells you something joyful or restful is pointless. Don’t be afraid to do nothing. It will always be ‘something’ really and your mind and spirit will thank you for it.

(PS – if you want to see Liz’s art website, click here)

(PPS – don’t panic, the people in the sketch below are alive and well – they were doing yoga!)

Words and images 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).

Obstacle

~ Paula Harmon ~ 2 Comments

‘Don’t touch it!’ says Norindis. ‘It’s manmade.’

We all look at the rock blocking the crossroads. Thrust into its centre is a large sword, its blade engraved in some unknown script.

‘How do you know it’s manmade?’ I say. ‘Maybe some other otherworld being did it.’

‘An elf like us would have put that sword in straight and enchanted it with proper runes that appear and disappear according to how annoying we want to be.’

Brendillion scratches his ear. ‘Tons of our stuff is manmade. That’s why we lure humans here, isn’t it? So they work and we don’t have to.’ He gives me an awkward smile. ‘Sorry Astrillia… you know what I mean.’

‘We don’t keep humans to do this sorta stuff!’ Norindis flicks the leather bound hilt and makes the sword twang. ‘And this is iron. How’m I gonna get my unicorns past? Flaming humans – coming here, polluting our… highways.’ He twangs the sword again.

Brendillion tenses, ready to dive in before Norindis gives it a third twang and releases something we can’t control.

‘Which human?’ he ponders. ‘We haven’t got many now apart from those hippies we nabbed at Woodstock in 1969 who think they’re still there.’

Pandotha frowns. ‘We’ve got a shedload of “misunderstood” teenagers.’

‘They’re useless,’ argues Brendillion. ‘We’d send them back if their parents didn’t prefer the changeling replacements.’

‘So it’s one of us,’ I insist.

‘No,’ Norindis snaps. ‘It’s manmade.’

At this point my human husband Derek appears. His only magic skill is making my heart flip when I see him, even after ten years. He wandered into our realm by accident and stayed by choice.

‘Wotcha Nobby,’ he says. ‘What’s with the new street furniture?’

Norindis clenches his fists. ‘Address me properly, stinking human!’

Derek makes a flourishy bow and declaims ‘Greetings Nobby. What wisdom too deep for my human brain has led to this impediment to traffic?

Norindis roars. ‘How’d you do it eh? Why’d you do it?’

‘Not me,’ says Derek. He inspects the stone. ‘Excali….Interesting,’ he says. ‘Hundreds of years ago, a boy pulled a sword out of something like this.’

‘An elf?’ says Pandotha.

‘Human,’ says Derek. ‘He’s supposed to come back if the world got into a pickle again, which…’

Norindis spots a teenage humans slumped in torpor against a tree staring into an object no amount of magic has yet prised from his hand. ‘You! Come here! Pull this out.’

The boy looks up and whines. ‘Why me? It’s not faaair! Don’t wanna.’

‘Tsk,’ says Derek. His eyes suddenly sparkle, his hand stretches out…

I can see what’s in Derek’s mind: us riding into the city on glimmering horses to… disappear into an angry world of iron. I reach to stay his hand but he’s withdrawn it.

‘No,’ he says, the sparkle fading. ‘This is bad magic. It’s not a sword that’ll put things right now. Besides,’ he glances at the truculent teenager, ‘You just can’t get the Once and Future Kings anymore, can you?’

Words 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 Sword in the Stone Excalibur Stock Image – Image of magic, rock: 78763523

Barnet Fair (1)

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

When I was a teenager agonising over my hair, my paternal grandmother told me about her brother cutting hers when she was around the same age

At the time of this conversation my own hair was long, straight and mousy-brown. In theory it had been in fashion for a while (although it would have been more fashionable if blonde), but somehow it – along with me – never was. Now, a new fashion was coming in: shoulder length with curled sides. I needed a good hairdresser, possibly a perm and definitely curling tongs. None of these were things my mother thought worth spending money on. She considered me too young for a perm, could trim my hair herself and from bitter experience suspected it would take more than curling tongs to curl my hair.

‘I rather regretted letting him do it,’ said my gran, touching the nape of her neck where there were some adorable grey curls sticking out.

This stopped my whinging in its tracks. While my sister and I are now best of friends (which we weren’t at the time), I still wouldn’t trust her with my tresses and a pair of scissors. And what I knew of friends’ brothers, I definitely wouldn’t have trusted them.

‘Whatever did he do?’ I said.

‘It wasn’t his fault,’ she said. ‘He did what I asked him to.’

Halted in my tirade against parental unreasonableness, I asked the obvious question: ‘Whatever did you ask him to do?’

‘Bob my hair,’ she said. ‘My parents wouldn’t allow it. The bit where he shaved at my nape has never quite grown right since. Before my parents found out, I sold a lovely necklace I’d been given so I could go to a barber and have it done properly. They were horrified all the same, even though my mother once did something similar.’

Her parents were horrified? So was I. My gran was the archetypal housewife. She had married young, had never had to work for a living and never had an urge to. She’d fallen happily into running a home efficiently and well. She gardened, styled her home, baked and sewed with high skill and also joy. She was calm, conforming and believed in obedience and the status quo. The last thing I could imagine her doing was anything that horrified anyone. But what did she mean about her own mother ‘doing the same’?

It turned out that it all went back to cultural perceptions of femininity, modesty, and being a good Christian woman which we’ve now largely put aside.

My great-grandmother was in her late teens in the 1890s, one of the youngest of eight (I think) children. Her father would have been well into his sixties. While not remotely poor, they certainly weren’t in the ‘going to balls’ class, so when she obtained a party dress which exposed lower arms and neck, her father was apparently horrified. (Although I have a photograph taken of her in this extremely modest – by today’s standards – dress, so she must have been forgiven.)

Her daughter, my grandmother was the youngest by far of four, a teenager in the 1920s. The brother who cut her hair must have been a good six years older, since the eldest one had been killed in WWI. Their father would have been in his fifties and her mother in her forties. Bare lower arms and neck were one thing. Short hair and short skirts were something else altogether.

But WWI had accelerated what had already started in the 1910s – more sensible, practical clothes and hairstyles for women – and by the 1920s there was no going back. My great-grandparents forgave her. It was a very loving and accepting family, and they must have realised that the world was never going to be what it had been before the Great War and that fighting over the length of someone’s hair was pointless. Plus Gran had a married sister who was eleven years older and probably took her side.

The whole conversation came back to me recently as I started writing a new project: a mystery set in the 1920s where the female main character is twenty-three. She hasn’t had her hair cut into a bob yet but a number of the other female characters have. (At the time, you went to a barber to have it done, holding a page from a newspaper with possible hairstyles in your shaking hand.) Will she get it cut or not? Haven’t decided yet.

I don’t think having her hair bobbed was Gran’s only rebellion. I believe that there was some concern about her marrying my grandfather. It wasn’t because he was unsuitable in any way as a person, or is family was less than acceptable. I think it was because there was a possibility of mental illness in his family since his father had tragically died by his own hand. Somehow my grandparents prevailed, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this.

I never did get that fashionable curled sides hairstyle while it was still in fashion and stopped nagging my mother. Perhaps I realised maintaining it required more skill than I had (or would ever have).

At Christmas, some months after the conversation I’m relating, my paternal grandfather unexpectedly died. A little after a year after that my paternal grandmother did too. We’ve always felt that a broken heart was more of a cause than anything medical.

For reasons I still can’t explain, one of the first things I did in my grief was to demand to go to a hairdresser, where I had my long hair cut into a short bob. Ever since then, my hairstyle had been fundamentally one of three styles: long and straight, long and permed, or in a bob.

But for the record, so far I haven’t got my sister to do it, and no one has ever taken a razor to the back to create the adorable curls that stuck up at a funny angle which my grandmother had.

(NB for anyone not in the know, Barnet Fair is Cockney Rhyming Slang for Hair. And I will be writing more about the subject.)

Words 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 Vector Set of Different Flapper Girls Icons in Modern Flat Style Isolated on White Background. Stock Vector – Illustration of hair, face: 87491137

Safe and Secure

~ Paula Harmon ~ 3 Comments

Imagine the town as a circle dissected roughly south east to north west by a road which came up from the cathedral city eight miles south. It snaked briefly past Tudor, Georgian and Victorian houses a Norman church, and Edwardian ones before eventually heading out into the wilds of the next county.

On the eastern side of the town, the land rose slightly. The latest housing estate now butted against gentle slopes and no doubt would eventually breach them. On the western side, the bypass ran in a curve, parts of it using the flat even ground which had once been the railway.

Centuries ago, the town had had a wall and a gate. Somehow, the landscape still girdled it as if they’d never gone.

There was little to do there apart from have your hair done, check out the estate agents, go to the mini supermarkets, see your solicitor and get a drink in one of three pubs before going home with something from the Indian or the Chinese or the chippy.

My boyfriend was a local, with ancestors buried a thousand years deep or more in the graveyard, while mine faded away in every corner of the Britain and Ireland and a little beyond. I was an incomer, commuting daily to the city for the last six months; gasping for air on a smoky bus which wound its way through hamlet after hamlet via lanes edged with fields and trees and wild garlic.

Travelling to visit relations or drives just for the sake of it, formed my earliest memories. I had never lived anywhere longer than ten years. Yet I’d been wondering if I’d found somewhere to put down roots. And then came evening.

Feeling restless, I’d made him walk to the southernmost boundary and stood slightly apart staring to the south, imagining the endless possibilities offered by the city’s railway station.

‘I really want to take a train somewhere,’ I said.

‘Where?’ He was baffled.

‘Somewhere, anywhere, it wouldn’t matter.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. Why not? Just for a change.’

‘What’s wrong with here?’

I’d offended him.

‘Why travel for no reason?’ he persisted. ‘It’s safe and secure here. Everything’s as it always has been.’

He put his arm round my shoulders and steered me away.

Yes, those town walls had long fallen down or been plundered for building material, and the town gates had long since rotted. But just then, as my boyfriend led me back to town, his arm felt like an enclosing wall and his words like the closing and locking of a solid gate.

In that moment, as we walked into the town’s smothering embrace, I knew I would never be able to make him understand about the train or that his idea of safety was my idea of stagnation.

I turned my head back to the open road. It was still calling. And one day, I’d leave alone to become an incomer again somewhere else.

Words 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). Credit for image: ID 330443752 | Woman © Anker | Dreamstime.com

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