Beach, mountain, forest, or somewhere else entirely?

Beach, beach, beach!

The thing about mountains is, they’re high up. Not the worst thing in the world if you’re travelling there by car, or train, or even by cable car if you’ve got a head for heights, but if I had to walk a great deal then mountains are out. I live in a hilly enough place as it is, I don’t want to add more of a gradient to my life!

Forests sound lovely, and indeed, they are. Plants and trees are very important for the planet and we should do everything to protect them. The thing is, I’m highly allergic to the bloody things and if I had to live in a forest I’d spend most of the day crashing into tree trunks because my eyes would have puffed up to extreme levels.

I’ve always lived near the coast, so I naturally gravitate towards beaches. I prefer beaches in autumn and winter, though – mainly because I know the annoyance of trying to find a space on a local beach when the tourists come in the summer! In my mind, when I think of my dream house, it’s always on a beach somewhere. The sound of waves on sand is automatically soothing, and the noisy squawk of seagulls just reminds me of home. I love the smell of seaweed, even though that actually means it’s started to rot. Once I lived in a flat that was on the seafront, and the best part of my day was the walk from my front door to where a colleague would pick me up for work. The sun would be glinting off the water, if it was a calm day, and the waves would be lapping at the rocks on the beach. It was just a lovely way to start the day, walking the length of the seafront and listening to all the noises of the sea.

So beach, definitely!

Explain why you chose your blog’s title and what it means to you.

My blog’s title is “passionate about the past”, which is my attempt at a clever pun! Well, a pun, anyway.

As I’m an erotic romance writer, getting some kind of reference to passion in there somewhere seemed important. As I’m exclusively a writer of historical novels, the word past refers to that, so “passionate about the past” implies the historical nature of my naughty novels!

It’s a pun because I’m also half a historian – my degree was half history, half English Literature – and I love reading and learning about the past. My favourite time period is pre and post Norman Conquest and the early medieval, but I’m quite willing to watch and read just about anything to do with the past. My only caveat is that I’m really not that interested in twentieth century history, having studied that to death for GCSE and A-Level. The further back in time I can go, the better!

Describe your last attempt to learn something that did not come easily to you.

If anybody had told me just how much maths was needed in knitting, I never would have started it!

I’m not an artistic person. My stick people look pregnant! I don’t have the patience or the manual dexterity to draw or paint, but I’ve always wanted to do something creative. So, one year,  I decided to learn how to knit. There was one of those part work magazines out that gave you a ball of wool, needles and an instructional DVD to start you off and then if you bought each week’s magazine you’d build up patches for a quilt.

Well, I never made the quilt. But I did learn to knit and purl, and I did create several scarves and hats. I even made a pair of red and white striped knee length socks, and I managed to turn the heel myself! I’ve made baby hats and bootees too, which are my favourite things to make because they’re small and easy to finish.

I’m not very good, not when you compare my things to either of my grandmothers who have been knitting for decades, but I’m proud of the fact that I did something that I find difficult, and that has so much bloody counting in it!

Was there a toy or thing you always wanted as a child, during the holidays or on your birthday, but never received? Tell us about it.

Oh my word, the great Mr Frosty Disappointment of 1984 – present day!

I was a really lucky child. I always had great Christmas and birthday presents. the best one ever was my very own desk – a wooden desk and chair suitable for a child, with inkwell and sloping lid that raised, just like old fashioned desks. The chair seat opened up too, and I was in heaven playing school with it, even though I went to school five days a week anyway!

Once a nerd, always a nerd.

However, no matter how many times I asked for it, there was always one present I never got: a Mr Frosty ice crunchie maker. Looking back now, I completely understand why my mother said no – the mess this thing would have made would be insane! You put ice cubes in the top, turned the handle to crunch them up and poured them into little cups, where you squirted them with flavouring which, no doubt, was packed full of E-numbers.

I yearned for this. I begged for this. It was the top item on my Christmas list every year until my teens, but it was to no avail. I never got a Mr Frosty.

I wasn’t alone in this – a quick survey of my friends reveals that most of them wanted the toy, but none of them got it. Our mothers were too smart to fall for the begging, it seems.

One of my oldest friends felt the sting of this, so one Christmas I scoured eBay for a vintage 1980s Mr Frosty. The look on her face was priceless when she opened it! Of course, she has two daughters and is ruing the day I ever gave it to her now that they demand to make ice crunchies on the living room rug, but that’s not important…

Write about a noise — or even a silence — that won’t go away.

This is a really difficult one for me to write, because when I’m anxious about something it’s not usually a noise that makes me feel upset.

I think the closest thing I can think of for this prompt happened on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday in 2002, when my grandfather passed away. There had been no indication that he was ill – he’d had heart trouble in the past, but there hadn’t been any signs of the heart attack that killed him that night. He was in his favourite chair, reading his newspaper when my grandmother left the room. When she returned, he had died. She rang my father in a panic, and he and my mother rushed to the house. My father attempted CPR, but it was no good. He was gone.

I had waited at home – I was in that awkward in-between phase when I was working full time but hadn’t saved enough for a house deposit yet – and eventually my mother rang to tell me that she was staying the night at my grandmother’s house and my father was returning home. I was to look after him, she urged.

I had no idea what to say to him. He wasn’t crying, but he wasn’t talking either. I tried to say the things that I thought you had to say, but you couldn’t exactly call it a conversation. It lapsed into silence. I stayed as long as I could with him, but in the end of the pressure of that silence was too much and I caved. I went upstairs to bed and left him to sit in silence downstairs. We’re not overly-demonstrative in my family – love is shown in gestures rather than in words. I didn’t have the words that night, and I didn’t have a gesture either. All I had was silence.

What’s your learning style? Do you prefer learning in a group and in an interactive setting? Or one-on-one? Do you retain information best through lectures, or visuals, or simply by reading books?

This is an interesting question, because I had to actually sit down and think about this carefully. I have different learning styles for different activities, I think!

When it comes to academic learning, I’m very much an old-school type: individual learning, from lectures and books, with notes taken by me then re-written afterwards to consolidate everything I’ve learned. Pictures are nice, but not necessary. Maps are more important, especially when dealing with areas of the world I’m not familiar with. This is how I learned during my degree, which I’m very grateful for. I hate working in groups because it never goes well – there’s always someone who never pulls their weight, there’s somebody who just doesn’t understand the information and underperforms and there’s usually a bossy know-it-all determined to be in charge of everything and throws a hissy fit if someone deviates from their planning.

As I’m usually the hissy fit throwing, bossy know-it-all, I prefer to avoid group work. It’s just easier for everybody concerned, and it has the added bonus of me retaining friends and avoiding having heavy items thrown at my head. Win-win!

When it comes to doing something practical – assembling flat pack furniture, knitting, checking the oil and water in my car’s engine – I can’t just rely on reading written instructions. I need to watch YouTube videos, instructional DVDs or have someone physically demonstrate the correct actions for me to work it out. I like the helpful pictures on the IKEA leaflets with the little man putting the bookshelf together, while my mother is baffled by them. She can jump straight in and work it out from looking at the pieces, while I need the images to help me visualise the finished product.

You have 15 minutes to address the whole world live (on television or radio — choose your format). What would you say?

I haven’t said much about the latest American election on my social media pages. Partly because I’m mindful that not all my readers will agree with my political views, and partly because I feel that as I’m not an American citizen I shouldn’t be criticising anybody.

However, I do think that if I could reach the whole of the world, I would have to talk about the truly terrifying rise of the extreme right wing in many countries in the world. I’d have to talk about how the media are being used to terrify the populace into believing lies by rich, white men who want to damage democracy in order to line their own pockets. I’d have to talk about how schools aren’t being allowed to teach critical thinking, which results in people not being able to see the scare mongering thundercunts who are using them to elect idiots into positions of power in order to carry out the agenda of smarter, shadier figures. I’d talk about the rise of vicious attacks on people of colour, of people who look different because of their dress or religious beliefs or sexual orientation.

I wouldn’t just talk about the hypocrisy of people who claim to follow a certain religion and then blatantly disregard the main tenets – I’d shout it from the bloody rooftops. I’d force people to listen to the stories of people who’ve been betrayed by their own governments and forced to leave their homes because they’ve been bombed, gassed and tortured. I’d make them watch the retrieval of the dead bodies of children that have washed up on the shore as their parents fled in terror from religious fanatics and corrupt leaders.

I’d want people to wake up and see what’s in front of them and realise that everybody can do something to change it.

We can support charities that will support the refugees. We can call and write to our representatives to let them know how we feel about the issues. We can support those individuals brave enough to speak up against injustice. We can challenge those around us who repeat the lies that they’ve been told. We can educate our children about the truth of our world. We can obstruct those who try to make the world worse, not better.  We can refuse to accept the shit that is being forced down our throats by a biased media and seek out those who report the real stories.

I’d want to tell people that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but there is a chance to save it, if we’re just willing to work together and not let our differences divide us.