Recipes, Tales and Adventures

Four nights alone in Evie with Ursula the bike — cycling the Caledonian Route 78 towards Fort William, editing Celia's opening chapter on the fly, and sharing a bench at Cuil Bay with a Yorkshireman who made Scotland feel a little more like home.

From pole dancing in the 1970s to a suspicious email with a missing apostrophe — this week's blog is about authenticity, fake photos, and why the smallest details are always the giveaway.

It's almost August, which means three whole weeks with Minnie, foraging for windfall fruit, and maybe an episode of Beyond the Tearoom. This week I'm sharing the McLean Windfall Crumble recipe from Book 6, The Tale of Florence and the Turtle.

A week in the Lakes with no WiFi, no deadlines, and no plan — and how doing absolutely nothing led to an unexpected discovery about Jane Eyre, Celia the Accidental Cyclist, and the strange way good ideas find you when you finally stop chasing them.

Last week, Keir Starmer announced a social media ban for under-16s. What does that mean? One girl who has apparently gone viral on social media pla...

I had it all planned. A whole day to write. Mr M was out. It was just me, Florence, and the kind of uninterrupted quiet that a writer dreams about. What I actually did was wait for the gasman, eat an entire packet of custard creams, and accidentally discover that I'd cut off a vulnerable woman from the emergency services. As you do.

The Murphy household is a TV-free zone. Beatrix was a Border Collie who wrote her own ending. And somewhere between a campervan in the Lake District and a 17-minute countdown, everything changed.

Evie is back from the campervan hospital, Ursula is loaded up, and the forecast says rain. Naturally, I headed straight for Blair Atholl. Three nights, 48 miles, a castle, chunky chips, a German cyclist's question about midgets, and a man in Dalwhinnie who wouldn't share his bench. All in a day's work.

A weekend in Halifax to watch Dr Rhona Morrison's show at the Victoria Theatre should have been straightforward. It wasn't. A tale of train chaos, a Tunnock's Teacake, four bars of Cadbury Dairy Milk, and why paper tickets might have been right all along.

What happens when you spend a Sunday scrolling through ten years of Facebook posts and accidentally discover you've already written a book? Add a cycling epiphany, a smoking gun from 2017, and a Border Collie with a criminal record, and you'll start to understand my weekend.

In November 2024, I walked into Girvan Primary School with no plan and came home with the seed of an idea that would change everything. This is the story of how The Magical Adventures of Florence the Border Collie went from a single school visit to a 23-book series — and how a Beatrix Potter box set, a brilliant illustrator, and a very lazy Border Collie made it all possible.

I have never been good with numbers. Never. Not even a little bit. This week I've been thinking about the teacher who made sure that never mattered — and about the rather wonderful way life brought her back into mine decades later. Oh, and there's a guitar involved.