Birthday 2021

Statue at Orisson in the Pyrenees

I celebrated my birthday - my present from Natalie was this website! - by completing my book on Mary the mother of Jesus. I have asked how much we can know about the individual woman behind the Gospel picture as a figure from history. It is around 70,000 words with 17 chapters. The title is Stabat Mater: Mary and the Mission of Jesus. I now need to find a publisher!

I also have a short novel (around 45,000 words) in the pipeline called Diamond Jubilee. This is a nostalgic look at 1960s blues music which raises issues around the civil rights movement of the period and how far we have come in the sixty years since. Diamond Jubilee is the name of a female character, a straight-talking blues singer from Chicago.

I guess that for a lot of people the lockdown has been a time of completing creative projects that had been on the back burner. Those, and the fact that Donald Trump lost the American election, might have been the good things we can salvage from 2020. We might also appreciate our front-line workers a bit more. A birthday is a time to look back, and it seems like an age since the last one when nobody had any idea what was about to come.

Natalie created a French theme for my birthday. We have not been there since 2017 and so we are missing France! We played two board games - Carcassonne and Orleans - winning one each, ate lots of lovely French food (you can get some very tasty stuff delivered), and watched a French murder mystery set in the Auvergne, our favourite region.

I hope everyone is OK. We need to get through the next few weeks somehow.

Chris