A northern lass, I’ve always been proud of my roots, and so it’s hats off to Liverpool, European Capital of Culture 2008, a city with a future to match its glorious past.  Not surprisingly, its fame has spread to the four corners of the globe, for the city boasts The Beatles, two outstanding cathedrals, two first class football teams, and a magnificent waterfront that now ranks alongside the Pyramids and the Taj Mahal as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Add to this a wealth of world class architecture and a host of museums, galleries, theatres and shops, not to mention the real heart and soul of the place, its people, renowned both for their accent and their sense of humour, and is it any wonder that the city is iconic?  Liverpool has had its fair share of writers and poets, too: Beryl Bainbridge, Edwina Currie, Roger McGough, Brian Jacques and Carla Lane, to name but a few, and now, yours truly.

Visits home are always nostalgic, having grown up in the thriving market town of Ormskirk, just twelve miles to the north of the city of my birth, and with family links to Southport, the very first ‘garden city’ and now a charming seaside resort complete with the oldest surviving pier in the UK.

So where is home these days, I hear you ask?  Well, home is where the heart is, and that’s Hednesford, a former mining town in Staffordshire, right on the edge of Cannock Chase, a designated Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty with its herds of wild deer, publicity-shy adders and rare plants such as the Cannock cowberry and the fly-catching sundew.

In true romantic tradition, meeting my husband was a definite case of love at first sight. Having trained to teach in Dudley, now part of Wolverhampton University, I was offered a job in the area and went along in some trepidation to meet some of the staff.  ‘I’ve just met the man I’m going to marry,’ I confided later in my friends, and sure enough, three years along I was a blushing bride tripping down the aisle.  Two years on from this our beautiful daughter was born and all that was  needed to complete the happy family was a trio of cats, snow white Missy and her two kittens, Smudge and Whiskey, beginning to show their age now alas, but doing okay all things considered.

So this is me in a nutshell, a teacher of English and Special Needs in a West Bromwich high school that is soon to take on the status of Collegiate Academy, and in those rare moments of free time, avid reader and writer of romance.  Oh yes, I almost forgot, this year I will be celebrating my Pearl Wedding.  That’s thirty years with the man of my dreams and rarely a cross word between us, not least because having vowed ‘to love, honour and obey,’ I am more than happy for my husband to have the last word, that’s the last word as in: ‘Yes dear.’