About Me

I grew up many years ago in a convent boarding school where my parents sent me for a better education while they hosted cocktail parties and were diplomatic over dinner.

Here my wings were clipped and I was bound to the stone corridors and cobbled courtyards  of a 9th century manor house.  I learned to practice piano, polish my shoes and debate heatedly, I managed to avoid muddy sports, meet boys in the local town and spend holidays at school, I performed in operettas as leading men and prima ballerinas and was appointed Head Girl in my final year.  After taking exams I did not stray very far from my cage by attending an all girls Catholic college in London where three hundred teachers were turned out each year to make their living among children.

My fledgling wings carried me to Guernsey where I was put off Island living after five years.  The folklore that when someone sneezed in town everyone gets a cold had me furiously racing motor boats to get me off the claustrophobic rock, for a living I managed a seaside cafe, bar and full restaurant and learned to butcher frozen meat with a band saw.  Severing heads, forelegs and hind quarters to be weighed, priced and bagged teetered on the bizarre.  After half a decade I left for mainland Spain.

In Southern Andalucia I taught water ski-ing and wind surfing when I wasn’t lying on the beach getting a tan.  I learned how to speak Spanish, smoke Gauloise, drink white wine and eat Spanish food, Mediterranean fare to swoon over.

When I’d done with swooning and was good and brown I returned to London to pick up where I’d left off, which was…not teaching!  I worked at a car rental place near Victoria station which was busy from 8am to 8pm.  Somewhere among the crowds of tourists waiting for their cars, my blue eyed cowboy spotted me.  He was just another American to my ear but after weeks of persistence and vases full of flowers lying around my flat I caved between sneezes and agreed to our first date in Paris.  Impressed, my brother took to tucking my passport into my bag each time I went out and I was eventually whisked off to Texas with a snazzy duffel and professional driving skills under my belt.

As Mrs. Texas I joined the family music business and took a job as a Ticket Master manager.  For ten years I learned to write memos, chair meeting, hire and release staff, draw up training manuals, keep the computer room on its toes with requests for automation in the phone room and bedazzle everyone with my command of the Queen’s English.

I became a mother in my spare time and it wasn’t until the children began upstaging Corporate America that I came to grips with parenthood and set myself the task of raising Cain, four of them!

Now I’m on the other side of middle age, my children are all alive and kicking old enough to start their own circles of life.  My blue eyed cowboy and I are spending time away from the family home, it’s safely sold so we have no choice, in an effort to balance ours lives more fairly, one on each side!

I’ve cut my hair, thanked my grandmother for endowing me with its whiteness, resisted the temptation to brace my teeth to American perfection, welcomed laugh lines to remind me to smile always, never cried me a river but have been known to shed a few tears every once in a while, relaxed my British reserve, worn the same size since I was eighteen, kept myself in shape with equal amounts of dance and yoga, walking and sitting, softened my heart to absorb all the knocks parenthood continues to grace me with, tolerated silly jokes, loved my husband through it all, and deepened my faith with the One true Lord I live to the glory of each day.