About the Author

I don’t spend all my time wandering the beaches and gazing out to sea - although that was my vision when I moved to the Isle of Wight in 2003. Sometimes I wonder how I ended up here. It wasn’t part of the grand plan which was, in fact, to have no plan at all.

It started when my husband and I sold our half of the rambling old Herefordshire rectory in which we’d raised our family. Keeping only a few treasured possessions we bought a caravan and literally trundled off into the sunset. The Old Dharma Bums, I called us – with apologies to Jack Kerouac. My husband commented that our bums could be a bit wrinkly - he had just celebrated his sixtieth birthday with a grand party and fireworks which lit up Herefordshire. And although not quite eleventy-one like Bilbo Baggins, he was ready to disappear for a while.

We saw it as a rite of passage – based on the ancient Hindu tradition of handing responsibility to the next generation, relinquishing accumulated possessions and old habit patterns. A time to head for the forest with begging bowl and stout stick to find enlightenment - except we had a modern caravan and a four-wheel drive. And in the coming months there was plenty of time for contemplation on the meaning of life, the universe and everything. It was also an opportunity for me to plough through a stack of my writing – journals, stories, poems, two novels – which I had penned throughout the busy years of mothering and working as a nurse, homoeopath, counsellor and interfaith minister. Writing was my touchstone, a way of understanding and grounding my life experience and for exploring the complexity of relationships and spirituality.

When we finally got hooked by The Undercliff of the island, and the homemaking urge returned, my scribbling habit resumed and soon The Sorrow Of Sisters was flowing onto the paper. My hobby – that’s how I thought of it. But my bookworm daughter and various Wight writers thought otherwise . . .