Born in Scotland a long time ago and was a late starter as I got my degree when I was in my thirties with a family of three which was something of an achievement. I taught history in various schools in Scotland and the Channel islands and started to write, first for children and then for adults. Hodder and Stoughton published my books but when they amalgamated with Headline I seem to have dropped between the cracks. However, I continued to write because I enjoy creating characters and getting them in and out of situations and dilemmas so that by the time Kindle appeared I had a reservoir of unpublished work of which 'A Power to Charm' is one of the latest. My family have been assiduous in keeping me up to date and I have used a computer since the eighties and found this amazingly helpful for my writing which I used to do in longhand in MS books! and then type out laboriously on a sit-up-and-beg Royal typewriter so old that I recently spotted one in a museum. Because we lived and worked in the Channel Islands and had a sailing boat we went to France a great deal and eventually bought a tiny house in a tiny village where we spent longer holidays. We lived in Spain for three years after retirement, though we held on to the little French house. We found that the heat and the food in Spain did not agree with us. We then moved back to France. There we have bought another house (with fewer staircases)and a large garden complete with two resident squirrels in the Departement du Tarn quite near the village where we still have many friends and as our old house has been bought by a family member we can still enjoy its view. I like to draw and paint as well as write but my work is not only amateur it is unfashionably representational so I have sold very few paintings.