At lunchtime I applaud our beautiful tamariki for protesting climate change. Calling for global action. Inspirational. Our younger generation leading the way for the planet. I’m so proud I want to hug them all. The world is looking up. After lunch, I sit in the audience for a panel discussion at

The truth is, I find myself thrown back into my Masters at the IIML, when having been accepted with a brilliant submission, I got there and found my ideas ran off like disobedient terriers. I went through an angst filled period of self loathing, resignation that I was totally useless, a complete fraud and was not worthy. 

Then I got down to writing.

Writer in Residence…it conjures up a Roald Dahlesque picture does it not? In an overstuffed threadbare armchair, crocheted rug over the knees (granny squares 101) with a leather bound desk (spotted with ink, and bearing the scratch marks of an author’s unpublished despair). Stabbing furiously at a typewriter (Olivetti Leterra 25). The residence is an orangerie circa 1922 with wooden framing, glassed panes: some slightly cracked from the insistent tapping of the peach trees outside, on a warm Francophilean day.

I am, for my sins- it pay