Saturday, June 06, 2015

Pope Benedict XVI...

...is the subject of the current project on which I am working with co-writer and TV presenter Clare Anderson.  We meet alternately in London and the country to work...so Saturday saw us sitting in the sunny garden of the Anderson home deep in the English countryside, with books about Benedict XVI and Bavaria, while birds chirrupted and the family dogs scurried about...

Clare and I have known each other for something like 30 years, working on various projects - when we first met I had just returned with my husband from an Army base in Germany, and Clare with her husband and bunch of small children from some years in America. Over the next years we would meet very occasionally - both busy with family commitments - as we wrote for different magazines and sent feature articles back and forth. It seems funny now to realise how much could be accomplished with typewriters and scribbled corrections - computers have made things so different from  the days of re-typing and Tippex and carbon paper and visits to libraries to pay 20p for a photocopy...

After our book on St John Paul the Great was published last year we had a splendid celebration at Warwick St by kind invitation of Mgr and Mrs Keith Newton,, with  our wonderful publisher Tom Longford of Gracewing , and with Neville Kyrke-Smith of Aid to the Church in Need who wrote the Foreword, with lots of friends and a lot of talk and laughter and toasts and fun.... Then later, we had a family dinner for just the four of us - the Andersons and the Bogles -  and the two husbands, who get on well, discovered to their amusmenent that they are in fact very distant cousins...both have an interest in family history, and a chance remark got them checking over some books and family trees and the link was found...


No comments: