Jerusalem © Bill Silvermintz

Many, many years I spent a few months on the kibbutz in Israel, and I’m now deep into writing a novel loosely based on some of my experiences there.

Writing fiction inspired by real, lived experiences is always an interesting challenge. As a country in constant flux, Israel has changed immeasurably since I arrived in Tel Aviv aged 18, explored Jerusalem’s market stalls, watched the sun rise over the Dead Sea… Borders have shifted and many of the places I knew well may no longer even exist.

Although Israel will mainly be witnessed via the main characters’ flashbacks to the time when I was there, I want to check my recollections are accurate (particularly as the underlying theme in the novel is the fallibility of memory), so this is an exercise in fact-checking as well as finding out new facts.

But my most important job may be to make my fictional kibbutz sufficiently different to the real one, Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha’amakim, to ensure I don’t cause offence to the kibbutzniks who live there, and the first step of this is to give it a new name - but I have no idea how to do this.

Creating a fictional village name for my novel Anna Speaks was relatively straightforward - I researched place names and looked at how different words from different historic and live languages slot together - so we get Fen, from the Middle English word Fenix meaning phoenix or the old English word for marsh, and Celli, from the Welsh word meaning grove.

But there are more than 200 kibbutzim in Israel, with no obvious pattern to their names. I haven’t been able to break down the individual words into any Hebrew meanings, so the lexicographic logic is a mystery.

In these situations I always think it’s a good idea to go to the experts, the Kibbutz Program Center, the Israeli Embassy in London, and even a journalist working on the Jerusalem Post, and English-language newspaper I used to read when I was there.

So the preliminary query emails have gone out. I’ll let you know how I get on…

The house of Twink

I seem to have spent a lot of time with small people in recent weeks, by which I mean children, not the vertically challenged. In fact, one of these was my husband’s niece, nicknamed Twinks, who is all of six years old and is expected to reach over six foot when she’s fully grown.

At the moment she’s still pretty dinky though. She came to stay with us on Saturday night and apart from staying with grandparents who live a few minutes walk from her parents, this was her first time away from home without her mum, so we were a bit anxious. What if she refused to go to sleep or turned into a monster at midnight or, worse, cried? As it happened, she was an absolute angel from the moment she arrived till her parents picked her up the next day.

Twinks arrived with enough luggage to see her through a week away, with a pink wheelie case stuffed with Disney princess dolls, a hairbrush, Mrs Bunny the hot waterbottle and a spare pair of knickers. She also brought a pink backpack filled with a pink book of fairy stories, a pink toothbrush and toothpaste, and a furry pink (see a colour scheme developing here?) pencil case bulging with felt tip pens.

As soon as her mum and dad were out of sight I handed Twinks a pink apron to wear and I put on a navy blue one I’d been given by a Scottish cookery school I’d reviewed. Then we covered the living room floor with newspaper and set to work with a massive pad of paper and some kid-friendly watercolour paints. I painted a boat and Twinks painted a tall red house, then Twinks painted a picture of me, her and my husband in a boat bobbing on a blue green sea beneath a sky filled with blue seagulls and pink stars. Love the creativity, especially the fact that she made James the smallest of the three of us when in fact he’s 6ft 4″.

After a bath to wash off the excess paint, I tucked Twinks up on an inflatable bed in her pink princess duvet and we read a story together. Then it was time to sleep.

Just one small problem: our spare room is small and narrow and sits directly alongside our neighbours’ kitchen. Almost as soon as I left the room they decided to switch on their extractor fan and filled our spare room with a strange whining, growling sound and a smell of cooked potatoes. Poor Twinks! She shouted out in protest and I stayed with her for a while until the noise and smell drifted away, at which point a motorbike roared past and someone nearby set off some fireworks.

“Why do you live in the city when it’s so noisy?” she asked.

“Well, because we work in the city,” I said.

“When I grow up I want to do what you do,” she said, and I was flattered until I realised that somewhere along the line, I’m not sure how, Twinks has got it into her head that I draw for a living. Not far wrong, I suppose – I do produce pictures but with words.

It made me think about being six years old and having endless possibilities about what to be. I clearly remember believing that by the time I grew up someone would have realised I was really a princess so I would, by now, be living in a turreted castle and wearing a crown. But I guess living in a tall red house and being a writer is a pretty lovely second choice. I only hope Twinks is as happy with her future choices. Providing the colour pink is involved in some way, I’m sure she will be.

Pink skies © J Darley

I’m a fan of summertime. Warm days, sunshine, a world full of thriving wildlife and flourishing greenery - what’s not to like? This passion means that often at this time of year I feel a flutter of foreboding. But not this year. This year I’ve fallen in love with autumn skies so dramatic that summer seems pale in comparison.

October has been generous with its colour palette. One advantage of shorter days is later sunrises, which means that when I walk to the train station I’m treated to visual acrobatics as astonishing pinks, pale blues, frail gold and silver somersault through the air, so slowly they seem only to seep.

Then in the evening I arrive home to floods of apricot, copper and peach so intense I wish I was a painter so I could attempt to capture a sense of the overwhelming the richness. If I saw someone wearing a dress in these colours I would either envy them their boldness, or dismiss their taste as gaudy.

Nature seems to be putting in one final, heartfelt effort, as wildflowers soak up the remaining heat from the season, squirrels bounce by and, this morning, the river’s lone cormorant raised his thread-beaked profile to greet me.

This cormorant is an old familiar. Once as I walked in to town I watched him wrestle an enormous eel on to the slick riverbank where the pair fought like something out of a vintage dinosaur movie, until a greedy gull swooped in to rob the cormorant of his prize.

This morning, however, there was no drama - merely a moment of contemplation in the early light that made me smile.

I just got shot back in time by the cowboy and Indian pattern on a stranger’s someone’s tote bag. I was walking behind the poor woman and found myself staring fixatedly at her bag, sunk into nostalgic memories of my grandmother’s house in Hampshire.

We stayed there very rarely when I was little, mainly because she didn’t like children. Yet on the one occasion I do recall stay over I slept in a room decorated with the most glorious un-PC wallpaper - all colourful cowboys and wagons, wigwams and Indians.

Long before we knew it was racist in any way, my sister and i used to play Red Indians for hours, usually sporting fearsome stripes of facepaints with feathers in our hair and bamboo canes standing in for spears.

My granny told me she’d chosen the wallpaper especially with me in mind, and whether that was true or not I remember feeling incredibly honoured she’d gone to so much bother. I still remember the look on her face when she told me, and how much I hoped that meant she liked me despite me being the youngest of her grandchildren, and by that reasoning the most childish of all.

© Rodolfo Clix

I’m coming towards the end of a three-month stint on a magazine. Long-term contracts like this are gold dust, and a curious reminder of what my life was like when I was features editor for a particular magazine rather than being freelance.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working as part of a team, getting to know the way the mag works, seeing and contributing to its development… These are the things I miss when I’m flitting from job to job, and I know I’ll be sad to leave.

One of the perks of this time has been the break from wondering where the next month’s rent is coming from. There’s something delightful about having a regular income, even if it means daily commutes and spending most of my time in an office. All in all, I’ve enjoyed having a something of a routine for a while. I’ve liked coming into a place where people know my name (like the pub in Cheers, ahem) and chatting by the kettle and going for bagels on Fridays, as well as the satisfaction of working on an issue from beginning to end, planning future issues and giggling over the more bizarre requests from readers. It’s been interesting to gain a deeper insight into a specialist subject, learn new terminology, come to understand the needs of a very picky readership and suss out this particular company’s way of doing things.

That said, moving on after three months was always the plan and I’m hoping it will open me up to new possibilities.

As of October 19th I’ll be available for writing, editing and PR, so give me a shout if you need a hand. I’ll be happy to oblige!