An email popped into my in box from my publishers the other day “You’re going to America”…
Well they didn’t mean me exactly, they meant my book is being published in print (it’s already available as an ebook), but I can tell you I am no less excited about it.
When I went on a day trip to France in 2004 it was with the idea of buying wine for my dad. My mum had passed away two years before and my heartbroken dad was drowning his sorrows with a drop of the hard stuff. My plan was to wean him off whisky and onto to wine which I thought would be an improvement.
My husband Mark, me and my dad set off on a cold winter’s day. Sleet fell, the sky was ominously grey. We took a ferry to France from Dover, bought some wine and then looked for somewhere to have lunch. I pointed randomly to a town on the map about an hour from the port of Calais and off we went only to find that we were too late for lunch. We didn’t know then that 12-2 for lunch really means what it says, get there late and there’s no guarantee of a meal.
Wandering the streets of the town with a moaning dad and husband I stopped to look in the window of an estate agent. The agent offered us coffee and to escape the freezing weather we accepted and even let him show us some houses. Despite my protestations that we had no money he was insistent we give him a budget. On a whim I told him 100,000 euros and he, quick as a flash, presented me with three properties to look at. We (I) decided to take a look. The properties were awful. The first two were positive monsters, the third one was a house of horrors but something happened there that was to have a profound and life changing effect.
It also led to me writing a book about what happened when I bought that house of horrors for less than a Hermès Birkin bag, gave up my job in London and life in the city and moved to France in pursuit of rural bliss.
So, though I won’t be coming to America in person, unless James Corden asks me to be on his show (in which case, if you’re reading this James, I shall of course graciously accept) I sort of will be through the pages of my book.
I hope you enjoy it when it comes out in print on 25 August 2017…
Available at Amazon, Book Depository, Barnes & Nobel and good bookstores everywhere!
