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FROM PARADIS TO PERDITION. A YEAR IN FRANCE. The much-awaited sequel to the bestselling Pensioners in Paradis has arrived!  And here’s the good news:  it’s now available to pre-order at just £1.99/$2.99 and won’t be debited until 20 June 2018. 

What on earth could have happened to change the English couple’s joie de vivre and their love of all things French? Did they hit that je ne sais quoi that essentially divides the French from the English? Or was it that dratted Brexit referendum that threw a spanner in the works?

We all want to know!

So, draw up a chair, pour a tot of whisky or a glass of (French!) wine, and enjoy the fine art of self-disparagement.

To pre-order right now from wherever you live (click on your flag):  www.authl.it/9v7

Enjoy!

25th March 2018

Carcassonne. A beautiful, mediaeval French cite normally thronged with tourists. I remember riding around the ancient battlements on the horse-drawn caleche. But not this week.  I remember taking the audio tour of the castle and puffing up all those cobbled hills to the numerous cafes and restaurants, viewing the blissful countryside from on high. But not this week. This was the week where yet another terrorist killed and injured innocent people. And this was the week when a French gendarme showed incredible bravery. How to stop more innocents being shot in the future? Same solution as in the US.  Everyone gets angry at life’s injustices, so it’s imperative no-one has access to a weapon. So, a) an armistice for citizens and gun groups to hand in all guns to the local police prefecture, and b) a ban on the manufacture and sale of all guns. What a fitting tribute that would be for a brave, brave gendarme. Anything is possible where there is sufficient will.

18th March 2018

For the first time, two of Israel’s Dead Sea Scrolls, dating from c.200 BC and written in Hebrew and Aramaic - the language of the Jews of Palestine - are to be displayed publically in Denver. One reads Musar LeMevin, instruction to One who understands. Two artifacts, two messages to the world. Absolute, unequivocal, undeniable proof that Israel has always been the land of the Jewish people, and the importance of understanding. Stephen Hawking, who died this week, knew that. To be able to explain his supreme knowledge of physics from a physically-useless body he used a remarkable, world-beating voice microchip developed in Israel. He died on Einstein’s birth date and the 300th anniversary of the death of Gallileo, Hawking’s now famous instruction being Look to the stars not to your feet. Maybe the title of his book should read A short history of timing?  In an increasingly dangerous world, we should all learn something from both Israel and Hawking. Biblical history is shouting to us from the cosmos. Understand each other before it’s too late.

11 March 2018

It’s all about women. Thursday was international women’s day and today in the UK it’s mothers’ day. Is the old Weinstein era over? Golda Meir had it right when, at a time of multiple rapes and her advisors proposing that there be a safety curfew for women, she said ‘If there’s to be a curfew, it should be for men - the perpetrators - not the female victims!’ For centuries outstanding women were overlooked in favour of  men. Rosalind Franklin did all the hard work in the discovery of DNA but the Nobel Prize went to two men, Crick and Watson. Many women writers had to hide behind male pseudonyms to be taken seriously. Today many researchers doubt that the plays by Shakespeare were written by one person. Think of the difference between the kingly battle plays and those like As you Like it, where Rosalind dresses as a man. The latter is much more likely to have been written by a woman who knew that the only way to get noticed in a man’s world was to dress as a man. In today’s UK politics, I get irritated when Theresa May is bullied every week at Ministers’ Question Time by an overwhelming number of men in the Commons. No other country seems to do this. I believe there’ll never be global peace until every leader is a woman!

4th March 2018

Half a million pages read. That’s what my publisher says, so it must be true. My intention when writing the above book was to show the comedy of life. Does the world ever learn from this comedy of errors? I see that, here in the UK, opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn was awarded the Sean Macbride Peace Prize. Who was Macbride?  Former Chief of Staff of the IRA!  A friend showed me last week a till receipt for a purchase from Amman Airport, Jordan. The printed place name on the Jordanian receipt? Palestine! From around the globe, I see that the world’s male leaders are still jockeying for personal glory by either increasing the land area of the country they lead or, as in the case of the EU, by pressing for an ever more grandiose Federal United States of Europe. I’d like to think that the latter is for the good of the people, but my feeling is it’s more to increase the prestige of France and Germany over an enlarged empire. Didn’t they learn anything from WWII? The older I get, still the comedy of errors continues.