This time last year – What a Trip! Scruffle-Nut, A Cat Called Trim & My Friend Tertius

This week I keep reflecting back to this time last year when we flew to London to launch Scruffle-Nut, visiting schools, bookshops and libraries.

On the way my husband and I made a stopover in Singapore, where I donated a copy of My Friend Tertius to Raffles Hotel where we sipped drinks and threw peanut shells and imagined Tertius leaping about the garden. (In this true story, my characters, Arthur Cooper and Tertius visited Raffles.)

I talked to children from Squirrel’s Heath Primary School at the Gidea Park Library while still quite jet-lagged

and launched Scruffle-Nut at the Nomad Book Shop in Fulham Road, London supported by some of the wonderful team New Frontier Team.

We visited Pakeman School in Holloway to introduce My Friend Tertius and met Arthur Cooper’s son, Ed, at a hospital not far away. Ed was instrumental in the writing of this book and filling in one vital piece of information when I was researching and writing.

We visited as many of the important sights of London we had time for, rode the iconic red buses and ambled through the city’s wonderful parks.

We traveled north through the Cotswolds, along the Yorkshire Dales and up into Edinburgh, visiting bookshops while in-between I was writing a new story as we traveled.

We returned via Norfolk and stopped for a few hours in Donington, birthplace of Matthew Flinders, where I introduced A Cat Called Trim to his statue.

I stayed an extra week back in London after my husband flew home where I signed more books, met with publishers and enjoyed more writing time.

Looking back now, it was such a wonderful whirlwind and it’s lovely to be living it again through our photos and memories.