Robin Pilcher

It’s been a bit of a strange time, these past few months. I headed off in April to the house in Spain and, on one particular evening, had a brilliant moment of clarity, seeing exactly how the new book was going to begin. I was up early the next morning, got myself organized with the laptop and a cup of tea, set up the first page and started to type. Three words in, the phone rang. It was news that a good friend of mine, whom I knew to have terminal cancer, was not expected to last more than two or three days. He had called me to the hospice a couple of weeks before to ask if I would give his fourteen year-old daughter a hand to organize his funeral. There is no way that one refuses that kind of request – but I honestly hadn’t expected him to go downhill so fast. So I switched from the fledgling chapter to the internet and booked myself a flight home, and headed off leaving my wife alone in Spain.

I arrived back in time, but then consequently found that he had also made me an executor of his will, and the whole process of sorting out his estate took the best part of five weeks. Since then, other things have occurred which have got in the way of writing; my fellow director of Shortbread stories opted out, leaving me to find a new direction for it – that’s still on-going; a wild wind hit Scotland hard about a month ago and devastated an avenue of 250 year-old oak trees that arch over the main road at the bottom of the farm track. The local council maintained that half of the trees belonged to me, so, with every tree surgeon in Scotland engaged in clearing the widescale damage, I was left with little option other than to break out the chainsaw and get clearing. And then, on top of that, an elderly member of my family was not well, so that was another thing to deal with.

This is not a moan, actually. These things happen, of course, and ‘worser still happens at sea.’ But I haven’t yet got back to ‘zoning’ in on the book. It’ll happen – but not just yet.