As I sit on my sofa, coffee on one side, a cacophony of paperwork on the other, quietly freaking out at the fact that tomorrow we’re heading off on tour, it seems fitting that I’m the most recent guest on the Just Get A Real Job podcast.

You might have seen this news already if we follow each other on the old social medias but I thought it deserved a blog post all of its own.

This month was a delightful one for reading. I found myself constantly engrossed in a one book or another and ended the month with my nose still in about three different novels!

As soon as I read the blurb for My Dark Vanessa I knew it was my kind of book and I was 100% correct. Slipping between present day (well 2017) and various points in the past, the novel explores the relationship between Vanessa and English teacher Jacob Strane which begins when she's his 15-year-old student.

Ooooh this book! I’m going to be so careful how I review this because I really loved launching into this novel with a fairly limited idea of what to expect within the pages.

In February 2020 I started a six month writing course with Faber Academy. At 10am on a Tuesday morning I joined another 14 writers - made up of a variety of ages, experience and backgrounds - and we nervously and keenly filed into Bloomsbury house for the first time.

There’s an entry in my now long neglected diary which is introduced in such a reverent way that you’d think I was announcing I’d won a Nobel Prize. So, if you were sneaking into my personal journals (don’t do that please) you might feel it a little anticlimactic when the next line announces, “Last night I told my boyfriend I have OCD”.

While Spain is on military shut down and Macron has given all French citizens a financial safety net, the advice in the UK is a little less clear cut

Well here we are, finding ourselves in the middle of an unprecedented quarantine period not even three months into 2020.