A Spring Postcard From Exbury Gardens: Breathtaking Beauty pic.twitter.com/1tODNEQdUJ @exburygardens

Lucky I had a camera because when I got home I couldn't believe what I'd seen

The house - a noble perspective of lawn

Exbury Gardens is a visitor attraction set in the New Forest of Hampshire UK. The grounds run down to the Beaulieu River. Wild ponies wander the roads as you approach. The Isle of Wight and the Solent are visible as you wander along the river path. I had the fortune to go there yesterday. It's a job to write about the place without sounding like an OTT tourist brochure. It is just SO beautiful that really you just have to see the photos. The beauty has a quality of unreality which I suppose is to be expected in a created garden.  I wish I knew more about plants. Certainly there are 

From the dressing room palette of Madame Butterfly

azaleas and rhododendrons. I also spotted some king cups which have always been a favourite with me. They seem to cry out the joy of the sun and lush meadow land with their open faces. I had not seen any for years and suddenly I spotted them. My mind raced back decades to a John Clare poem.   

Green lush and beaming out vibrant joy

A Bank Holiday weekend lies ahead. If you get the chance give yourself a real overdose of beauty and get down to Exbury. Be sure to take your camera. My final shot is a close up of a Rhododendron. To me it represents an abstraction beyond reality. Maybe this is the way we are supposed to see things - as if everything is something more than itself. I guess this is what great gardeners seek to achieve - a transcendence beyond the truth of itself - a fiction of beauty - like a once dreamed kiss that suddenly is on your living lips.

Maybe dancers, maybe a melody - always beyond this world.

PS. Keep an eye out for Her Majesty. Seemingly she's a fan

Emma thinx:  We tolerate beliefs because no one knows the truth.

If you go down to the woods today - #Bluebells #poetry #video pic.twitter.com/kq9vFPaOJP

Oh to be in England
Now that April's there.....

So begins the famous poem Home Thoughts, From Abroad  by Robert Browning, written in 1845 when he was feeling homesick in Italy. It is a lovely poem and I have always taken pleasure from poems of Nature. One of the few "arty" things I learned at school was the poem "Daffodils" by William Wordsworth.  In later life as a wannabee poet I discovered the words of John Clare and wept with frustration at my dullness. These days what poetry I have I secrete in my novels like a pinch of mono-sodium glutamate among the stir fried bean sprouts of new love. (Guess what I've been cooking for dinner?)

It was a release to get away from the office and go to the Bluebell woods at Mottisfont in Hampshire. I took my camera and tried to capture the crushing fragility of such beauty. All I could think of was the poem by Oscar Sparrow entitled simply "Bluebells".  So much of our longing as humans comes down to a need to hold on and endure. Humble flowers with their immense beauty and perfume fade before our eyes and we cannot hold them any more than we can hold ourselves on the shingle shores of Time. And yet in poetry we can pass on a few moments that in the act itself of sharing, flower over and over as seeds, roll over and over as waves, kiss over and over as innocent lovers: as if no bloom before had offered such beauty or no lips before had ever known the joy of the kiss.

These were my feelings when I first read Oscar Sparrow's poem. Putting away all the bawdy splash and dash of selling the stuff and beating the drum which is a novelist's/publisher's life, I was in those woods - trying to hold back Time, trying to breathe in the blue. 

Emma thinx: Memory is your portrait. Select your poses to paint you. 

Putting Some #Free Love And Sex On Your Tablet pic.twitter.com/QP68aAdQV #romance

Cop on the cover - definitely NOT undercover!

I could not believe my ears. I was driving along listening to "Woman's Hour " on the BBC radio. The presenter announced the result of the latest official sex survey in the UK. People are having less and less sex! They are having less sex than in Victorian times which was before evolution had provided polite ladies with any orgasmic bits. (Didn't they have hands or curiosity?)

 The official reason is that the tablet and the smart phone are our true love mates. We even play with them in bed. The result is that on average folk are doing it THREE TIMES A MONTH. 

Now, without shocking you with my domestic survey stats I feel I can speak as an active writer of Romantica. The production process requires a fair bit of imaginative role play. Serious academic literary critics call this unashamed erotic fantasy. You can imagine the state of me at the end of a hard day. Three times a month wouldn't get me through a couple of scrappy chapters of drugs, crime and car chases. I've always wondered why writing about sex makes me feel sexy but writing about burglary doesn't make me want to steal other people's televisions.

At once I realised something had to be done. I had to save the British nation from further decline. I knew it would be impossible to convince lovers not to take their digital devices to bed. Of course the answer was simple; supply everyone with a free copy of  Passion Patrol 2. It wouldn't be long before the manhood of Britain would rise up and the ladies would lie back and think of England as they did in the time of sexy Queen Victoria. 

And, if you believe the reviews it's a thumping good tale of action, crime, love and sexual pleasure set in the crucible of race, class and wealth of modern Britain.

Emma Thinx: The idea of free love is for those who've never loved.

French Resistance - a nation of #bookshops against the world

A book shop - a true symbol of modern French Resistance

In France there are book shops.  In England a few still cling on but they are hard to find. Whilst the French have embraced much of the out of town retail centre/shopping mall culture, the book trade is still in independent hands. The sale of books online lags far behind the UK and The USA. A few Parisian sophistogauls possess Kindles but I suspect even they read e books about propagating chic organic cucumbers in their attics.

Eventually I plucked up courage to enter my local "librairie". After all, I am Anglaise and so are my books. I imagined they would not be impressed by some Femme Franglaise swaggering in to anounce myself as the only International Number One Best Seller of female fantasm in the village. So - I took in some respectable material - my series of children's books and of course some serious poetry which I publish at Gallo-Romano media. I met a wonderful French lady.

"No one buys poetry or children's books," she said, selecting instead the crime soaked oversexed romance which is my more worldly genre. "There are many English in the region - this is the stuff they like," she assured me. Obviously  she knows what appeals to the daring fantasy follicles of the Anglo Saxon lady.

The bookshop "Le Passage des Heures" is a little marvel. Books on The Forgotten Vegetables of France lounge casually on the shoulder of Emile Zola. The place is adorable for a book groupie like me. We talked about the price of my books. I mentioned Amazon. A Gallic eyebrow shot out the roof of the building. Seemingly, the affairs of Amazon are of no interest. 

"We resist!" said the lady. 

A Corner of a foreign fenetre that is whatever Emma

Indeed they do. France is still a very foreign country - no matter where you are from. Being French is a talent and I will never be equal to it. Generally they understand how awful it is to be foreign and are very kind. As a result there is a bookshop in Saint Savinien with my books in the window. Merci beaucoup.  Eat your heart out Waterstone's. 


Emma Thinx: Foreign - a land of fear, spice and possibility. 

Give A #Dog A #Free Home - http://t.co/bWCW8z7aMy 11-13th April Amazon Worldwide

You can't drive a better bargain than free!

There is a long tradition of novelists taking real characters and turning them into literary figures. Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Severus Snape, Indiana Jones, Dorian Gray and Alf The Workshop Dog were all based on real people .....and a dog of course. 

If you want to check out the real Alf  FOR FREE you will able to see him live by using the interactive features in Alf The Workshop Dog which goes free on 11th, 12th and 13th April.

In the story Alf the homeless mutt helps out at a Bus depot workshop by finding tools and sniffing out waste food on a fleet of buses. Do I hear you saying "Aah - poor thing".  Well, here's your chance to give a dog a home and learn the whole story. 


Emma thinx: Police dogs work on leads.