Well, it’s the start of a brand-new year. The vaccines are successfully battling Covid, including the new Omicron variant, thank goodness. I’m a ‘glass half full’ woman and feel sure that a little further into the year we’ll be able to live a much closer-to-normal life. How I’ve missed meeting friends at the cinema and theatre. Casual nights out we took for granted. I can’t wait to attend all of them again, but without the dreaded mask.
Nothing was more depressing on New Year’s Day than to see a thousand people at the magical New Year’s Concert in Vienna’s Musikverein hall all having to wear face masks to be admitted. The musicians of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra only removed their masks they’d worn at every rehearsal for the big day itself. This is all a sensible precaution, but may the day soon come when we can see people’s faces and more importantly, their expressions.
The nights are drawing out! Pulling the curtains at four-thirty, you might think this sounds premature, but every day from now on we get an extra two minutes of daylight. By mid-February this rockets to a heady three minutes! And they add up. That’s already 24 minutes as I write this. And by the time my next book comes out in April we should at a rough guess be enjoying around four extra hours of daylight, speeded up by putting the clocks forward an hour at the end of March.
Talking about the next book, I have an exciting announcement to make for a brand-new series called: The Bletchley Park Girls. The first title is Summer Secrets at Bletchley Park, to be published by Avon HarperCollins on 28th April this year and the second title: A Winter Wedding at Bletchley Park follows in November, in good time for Christmas.
The two heroines couldn’t come from more differing backgrounds and each has her own problems. But the one thing they have in common is that they are determined to do their bit for the war effort. At the start of the war in 1939, Dale Treadwell in Summer Secrets is a junior reporter on a London newspaper and Rosie Frost in Winter Wedding works in a factory in Norwich, Norfolk. Neither girl, along with practically every member of the public, has any knowledge of the secret goings-on in a certain mansion in Buckinghamshire – that is, until fate takes their hand and leads them to Bletchley Park.
I hope you’ll join these two valiant heroines as they struggle to crack the German and Italian codes as well as juggling family relationships and friends – not to mention secrets, betrayals and romantic suitors.
A Happy New Year to you all and see you next month!