Loveliest of trees, the cherry now is hung with bloom along the bough – at last! It started to come out sometime in March but then retreated under the onslaught of the epic rainfall.
It has been almost Biblical around here, how glad we are that we live on top of a hill. Fortunately the children’s treehouse, newly-built in the garden, provided an extra option if the water levels got literally Noah-esque.
Not that the rain has been all bad – the wonderful waterfall in the woods near where I live, and which has been dry for a couple of years, is now gushing back over the stones in a swirl of foaming white. I go to sleep to the distant rush of the newly-thickened stream in the valley. And when I drive over the moors to Yorkshire to visit my parents, the famous Derwent Dams look nicely full again, Last summer they were distinctly arid round the edges and looked a bit sad.
The fields, when I drive up the lane home, are alive with the little white flashes of bunnies’ bottoms.
The daffodils are still out and we have had a brilliant showing of tulips, but only in the bits of the garden where they are surrounded by box. The ever-more-rapacious rabbits have even taken to eating those this year. I wish I could call Wallace and Gromit to get rid of them; nothing seems to work. They sit on the lawns right by the house eating the grass and waving at us when we glare out at them. If we go outside to chase them off, they lope away with a resigned and weary air as if to convey it’s hardly worth us bothering, they'll be back as soon as we turn our backs. The fields, when I drive up the lane home, are alive with the little white flashes of bunnies' bottoms. 'Ah! How sweet!' say guests from the city. I used to think that too. Now, when I survey the ravage that rodent-teeth can inflict on a garden I am amazed to remember how I loved my pet rabbit as a child. Read on…
'One of the country's greatest comic authors' ★★★★ The Mirror
'Tapping into the nation's joyous embrace of April's royal wedding, the witty, wonderful Wendy Holden has assembled a dazzling cast of bronze-legged socialities, highly cheek-boned princes and Cinderella lookalikes to entertain her army of fans this summer.'
DAILY MAIL
MARRYING UP
is getting rave reviews
★★★★ No 1 Entry 'a brilliant juicy Cinderella tale' HEAT
★★★★★ 'This fabulously witty story of love, social-climbing and downright snobbery is a riot of a read.' CLOSER
'Pin-sharp social-climbing comedy' GRAZIA
'Social snobbery and barefaced ambition... a modern fairytale that chimes perfectly with our post-Wills-and-Kate world' GLAMOUR
★★★★ 'Love moves in mysterious ways…' STAR MAGAZINE
'Light as a feather royal romp' Bella
Radio Interviews
Hear me on BBC Radio Leeds One on One - me, my music and Rupert Murdoch's sword!
I also appeared on Radio 4's Women's Hour – Sea Shanties, Social Climbing and Birth Control
Hear me talk to Radio Derby's Andy Potter – Wendy Holden, waterways and open gardens.
Britain's Wittiest Writer
Galleries
My Wonderful Winter Garden
My garden in the lovely snow last weekend. See my writing hut, the woodland walk, the lower path and the vegetable garden with a thick coating of the white stuff My Garden.
What I'm Reading
Mad World by Paula Byrne
The Flyte family of Brideshead Revisited were based on real people, the charismatic Lygons of Madresfield Court. This fascinating book traces Waugh's friendship with these staggeringly wealthy aristocrats and is full of crazy parties, outrageous characters and wonderful period detail. I particularly loved Evelyn's failed Reggie Perrin moment – intending to end it all, Waugh wrote a suicide note in Greek and headed into the sea, only to be stung on the shoulder by a jellyfish and run straight out. He drank so much it's amazing he had any brain left to do anything.
Boy by Roald Dahl
I recently read this to my children. Dahl's account of his childhood abounds with the themes that would later become familiar in his fiction. Sweet shops and sadistic schoolmasters essentially. The descriptions of being caned are so vivid that my own bottom started to throb in sympathy. Dahl's mother has now joined Duchess out of the Aristocats in my pantheon of maternal role models, although there is possibly some guilt in Dahl’s portrayal of his as a beacon of sanity and serenity.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
I think this evocation of a lost dream is my favourite novel of all and as such I won't attempt to describe it. If you haven't read it, you must. And then watch the splendid, faithful, glamorous, margarine-lensed 70s film version with R Redford and M Farrow.
See what I have been recently reading