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Okay - the short background.

Life begins in 1959 (helps to know) in Dublin as Adrienne Phillips - the name being the result of a disagreement between my parents about whether Siobhan or Penny was the better name. Actually, my father chose John but Mother Nature had different ideas and Adrienne was in honour of a beloved great aunt...who was a nun. This becomes significant later.

Education at a variety of convent schools and ultimately at Trinity College Dublin, a wonderful experience which I didn't fully appreciate, being barely 17 when I started and still at the absorbing stage. A gap year would have helped with confidence and a few pennies would have helped even more. The wisdom of hindsight, says she.

There were no jobs for newly qualified teachers in Ireland in the '80's so I took the job offered one fine November morning. It came in a letter - Are you employed yet? Come over here quickly - I need a first form mistress. You'll be fine. Can you be here by Monday? This was Wednesday. I packed my bags and arrived in the UK on Saturday morning with a suitcase held together with a belt (really) and knowing only two people in the entire country - the nun who had just employed me ( a fellow student from Trinity's H.Dip) and my elderly great aunt (the aforementioned- she's hugely important).

The following summer, still intending to move home and get a job now that I had a bit of experience I packed for the DUblin flight. When the plane landed there was some news waiting - my best friend died of leukaemia as I touched down and there would be no chance to say goodbye now. At her funeral her close friends avoided one another, our mutual affection and shared sorrow being too intense for any of us to bear. Instead I gravitiated towards a friendly faced girl who recognised me from Trinity. In the course of conversation, she mentioned she knew someone who lived near Weybridge (that was one person more than I knew - St Maur's staff were older than I was and mostly married and settled. A raw Irish girl had little place in their social world) and suggested I should look him up. I did.

One meeting led to others until on a wet Saturday in october, my new friend arrived at the door of the house where I had a bedsit with a flatmate of his in tow. The flatmate was handsome, flash (Cream soft top MGB GT glistening in the rain behind him) and I was in the middle of washing my underwear - as you do on rainy Saturdays when you don't have a scial life. I invited them in for coffee and realised, half way up the stairs that the aforementioned were hanging, dripping on a clotheshorse in the kitchen.

'Hang on a minute,' says the nice Irish Catholic girl, 'I just tneed to remove my knickers.

'No need for that,' says the flash friend, 'we only came for the coffee.'

OOOOOOOOH! What a smart ass creep!

Reader, I married him.

more on this later....

So - it's takes a year of talking about the need forsome computer savvy behavior before she gets the finger (index, both hands) out and sets up a blog.....thanks to Meg Gardiner for her encouragement and advice ('press that - NO - that one!). The next step is to set up the pages of information, aboutwho I am (easy - it's in the title), what I do (write), and where to next.More on this later...

Chances are this will appear in the wrong place but it would help if you read the ABOUT and then understand how things work in my world - a sort of divine order that runs more on faith than skill......if I press this, what'll happen?

Up to date news - In October, my third book is published. That's SOFT VOICES WHISPERING and Ann, if you're out there, you read some of this years ago - it's even better now! Non-Anns need to catch up with TOPPLING MISS APRIL and THE JIGSAW MAKER.

This is only the beginning.

Now to get back to fixing my email. It receives, it won't send. Why don't I understand these things?