I came to La Palma with a six-month contract to work at the observatory as a software engineer and immediately fell in love with the place. Then I fell in love with a tall, dark, handsome Palmeran, who I met in the Isaac Newton Telescope (under the stars, on the heart-shaped island). My six-month stay has lasted thirty years so far, and I still feel smug every time I see a plane leaving because I get to stay. I wholeheartedly recommend the island for a holiday. Browse this website to find out why.
La Palma has amazing night skies. When I got made redundant from my job at the observatory, I retrained as a tour guide, specialising in astronomy, called a Starlight Guide. I mostly showed groups around the professional telescopes at the Observatory at the Roque de Los Muchachos, but I also enjoyed showing people the other glories of our miniature continent.
I started writing fiction at middle school in Leeds and never stopped. So far I've published 50 short stories and three books. There's a non-fiction guide to the astronomical observatory at the Roque de Los Muchachos (A Breathtaking Window on the Universe ), an anthology of children's stories inspired by La Palma's starry skies (The Seer's Stone), and a science fiction anthology (The Dodo Dragon and Other Stories)
Then my life took a turn. I was struggling to get my tour guiding business off the ground again after the pandemic, and far too busy to take notice of an annoying muscle contraction in my thigh for months. When I finally went to the doctor, it turned out to be cancer, a soft-tissue sarcoma.
It's a good way to find out which of your friends are solid gold. Lucky me it turned out to be almost everybody.
Unbelievably, two weeks after my diagnosis, a volcano erupted 4 km from our house. A mountain range runs between us and the lava, but we had to sweep up ash sometimes. Worse, flights to Tenerife, where I was having tests at the university hospital, became unreliable so we had to take the ferry. But we counted ourselves lucky. 800 families lost their homes, and many farmers lost their fields. I felt guilty that we did so little to help, but cancer takes all your attention.
I had radiotherapy to try to shrink the tumour, but the doctors couldn't save my leg and it had to be amputated right at the top. I spent most of my 60th birthday in the recovery ward, happily unaware that someone was running wild with my credit card details on the other side of the Atlantic - luckily my bank caught the unusual activity and I got almost all my money back. Then I had chemotherapy and I'm happily in remission.
I've been putting my life back together ever since, but I'm getting there. I can't go hiking or dancing any more, so I've started knitting teddy bears, painting and trying out disabled sailing classes. We've installed ramps and a stairlift and I'm learning to use an impressively large prosthetic, nicknamed Clanky. Now I'm looking for an agent to represent my whodunnit set in the observatory, Death Under Dark Skies, and writing a memoir about the last three years, Hoppily Ever After. I'm also looking into the possibility of doing story hour for children as a pirate. I mean, any 8-year-old can see I'm a pirate, right?
There are some advantages to my new life. Now that I can't work for a living, I have more free time for writing and knitting teddy bears. My husband does most of the housework. But I don't see nearly enough of my old friends, the ravens.
You can find me on Blue Sky and Instagram.
