Well, I got back on the horse. It’s been, looking back, a tough year, thanks to our dear little friends, the petty bureaucrats. That I kept writing at all was a big ask, because you have to be able to turn your mind from present problems to a world inside your head. In my case, I have a small head, there is not a lot of room for more than one thing. Anyway, CECILY – another ALIDA LEACROFT Regency will soon be available. And finally I got to putting a short up on Amazon again.

Many years ago, in another time and place I met a woman who was both incredibly resilient, and yet, in a way, so full of micro-cracks from the stress she’d been through, that I thought the least jar might break that rigid control of her adult lifetime and shatter her. You see, she was happily married. Adored her husband, and he was a good man. But he had worked (and not for my then country and was honorably retired) for… a government agency about which she was allowed to know nothing. Most of the time he’d go off to the office. But every now and again he’d have to travel, suddenly, without warning, and without her having the least idea where he was going or what he was doing. Or… how long he would be away, or… if he’d ever come back. He would go, eventually -as a long-retired, elderly man, to his grave, without her knowing.

Things like close friends were… awkward, so she avoided them. And the years of controlling her fears, never speaking to anyone about them, had, I think been harder on her than him. He knew where he was going, might even have an idea of how long or how risky. All she had was her imagination, what clothes he had packed, the news of where there was some unrest, and to wait, and hope, knowing that even if that hope came good, it could happen again. Controlling herself, over and over. She was always polite, kind… and intensely private. That ‘distance’ had become ingrained.

I admired her courage enormously. As an author, one of the things you do is to put yourself inside someone else’s head. I am glad I did not have to live there. I wrote this story as my attempt to understand it, in honor, as it were, of her memory, and those many others who had to keep the faith without betraying it. Those who wait, and can never share that waiting.

It’s me getting back on the publishing horse again, too. It’s just a short, and cheap. But it is up there.

If wake before I die