Bright, cold skies in Norfolk, and a light dusting of snow on fence posts and roofs, with promise of more to come. It seems unbelievable now to think that only ten days ago I was paddling in the Indian Ocean and picking perfect sea shells off the beach.  The Galle Literary Festival was a wonderful occasion.  It took place in the old Galle Fort, once the Dutch colonial compound, situated on its own little peninsula at the tip of Sri Lanka, with its own lighthouse and breathtaking views of the sea in all directions. It's full of fine old buildings and many of the events took place in old halls or colonial residences.  The wide range of events included 'in conversations' with headline authors Tom Stoppard, Joanna Trollope, Richard Dawkins, DBC Pierre, John Boyne.  New books were launched by Romesh Gunesekera, Ashok Ferrey and Roshi Fernando.  A highlight for me was seeing Izzeldin Abuelaish, 'the Gaza Doctor', who following the lost of three of his daughters in a rocket attack wrote I Shall Not Hate, a book which is a passionate plea for forgiveness and reconciliation.  The hall was absolutely packed.  I enjoyed, too, visiting a school for a teacher training session. The school had been flattened by the Tsunami and only recently rebuilt.  It was very moving to see the memorial to the pupils that they lost in the tragedy.  The teachers seemed to enjoy a discussion with my husband about Charles Dickens, whose novels form in important part of their curriculum.  My own event was a 'literary breakfast', where I was interviewed by the bubbly and glamorous Shyamalee Tudawe, editor of Hi!!, Sri Lanka's best known society magazine.  The festival is clearly trying to reach out to the wider community, especially schools, and some of the visiting children's writers were helicoptered up to Jaffne in the north, an area which is still trying to recover after the end of the violence. 

Find more information and photographs on: http://www.galleliteraryfestival.com/  and these photos of my event from Facebook are just wonderful: http://www.facebook.com/Gallelitfest#!/media/set/?set=a.256798904390313.53196.112016622201876&type=1

After a bit of a rest I am now ten thousand words into a new novel, and taking every opportunity to sneak upstairs to my computer to write.  However, as ever, life interrupts, and one has to let it.  This month's excitement is a week in Sri Lanka at the Galle Literary Festival, courtesty of the British Council.  http://www.galleliteraryfestival.com/.  There I'm to talk about A Place of Secrets. I've visited Sri Lanka twice in the past, once as a child in the 1960s, when I remember stroking elephants and being overawed by The Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, the second time on holiday in 1991 with my husband.  We loved the country and the people we met, who were so hospitable, but were very much aware of its dark side, with soldiers everywhere and no-go areas. Since then there's been the Tsunami, and the terrible end to the war, and we hope to find out more about what it's like there now. 

It was the choice of Star Trek, Wolverine or Coraline and we plumped for Coraline (wouldn't you out of that lot?) and I'm really glad we did as it is the best animated film I've ever seen.  It was 3D, so we had the added excitement of wearing 3D specs and whispering to ourselves how weird EVERYONE ELSE looked wearing them.  It was the first time I'd seen a 3D film and it took me a few minutes not to feel like diving for cover whenever something jetted out of the screen at me.  It's a tautly told story - though you have to hold on tight round all the twists and turns - about a dissatisfied child who wanders into a parallel world where she can have her heart's desire - but at a terrible price.  The girl at the heart of it is a brilliant evocation of a grumpy, bored modern child, periodically utterly transformed by happiness.  The sets richochet between glowing fantasia and nightmare sinister.  This is definitely not a movie for young children, but my 16, 13 and 9 year old boys thought it was fabulous.  It's great for grown-ups, too. 

The night before last I heard a Baroque quartet called Florilegium play at St Peter Mancroft in Norwich and Lorna Anderson, a singer with a most beautifully expressive voice. It wasn't church music, but a lively mixture of secular music by Purcell and his contemporaries:  poems turned into songs about the healing power of music, about spirituality and madness and love; Scottish airs and perfect little instrumental pieces for recorder, violin, a viola da gamba (like a small cello) and a harpsichord..  I came home as though floating on a cloud.  My eldest son must get the same sort of feeling after a Death Metal concert - each to their own, eh?  I was sufficiently inspired by the experience to brush the dust off my treble recorder the next day, but the dog made her feelings perfectly clear by howling, so there's the end of another brilliant musical career before it's even started.  I've just printed off the first 112 pages of my new typescript to inspect progress with a cold eye... wish me luck.

We celebrated Bank Holiday with one of our traditional family jaunts - I wonder what other families do?  We park at Southwold by the water tower, walk over the bailey bridge, down to Walberswick beach, then along the water's edge to Dunwich.  Every year the children get quicker and I get slower, especially if there's too little sand and too much gravel.  The dog has the most exhausting time because she jinks between the two groups of boys ahead and adults behind, puzzled as ever at our strange human behaviour. At Dunwich we make straight for the Ship Inn for fish and chips.  Because of the dog we end up sitting outside in the rain and the wind, so overall this is a very bracing outing.  Back in the car, waiting for the others to come back from stocking up at the '1p, 2p' sweet shop (another family tradition), I read Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, and wish that I, too, could drop everything and go off to Italy for four months, then to live on an Ashram in India and then Bali.  I expect there are home-grown versions of doing this sort of thing - I wonder what.  Learning Italian at evening class?  Going on retreat?  Er.... Still, I'm enjoying the book mightily.

1st May and we're in for a long hot summer.  I did my O-levels in the terrible heat of 1976, and now Boy No.1 will do his GCSEs next month possibly with the same!  How past and present can echo each other and small coincidences take you back in time.  When I was sixteen all my friends and I were well practised in Saturday jobs and paper rounds.  Now most of that age will have had little or no experience of paid work at all. Insurance of under-18s is part of the problem.  A newspaper recently said that some new graduates emerge onto the jobs market with no work experience at all. My son will do a week unpaid in a bookshop at the end of June - it's a start, I guess.

It's been a perfect summer day.  We even managed our first barbecue of the year (but had to eat it indoors because of the wind-chill!)  The children (and labrador!) have been bouncing on the trampoline and swimming for about 20 seconds at a time in an unheated swimming pool!  I've been reading the proof of a children's novel, the first in the Misfitz series by Joshua Lacy (who wrote the marvellous Grk-the-dog mystery series).  Coming out in June, the Misfitz, featuring an extended family of stepchildren and half-siblings, are a modern Famous Five - but with the benefits of the internet.  Great fun!

I'm longing to sit down and continue writing the next book - ideas are stumbling in from all directions - but there is too much to distract me.  It's the school holidays, and there's a huge pile of washing that never seems to get any smaller  (why do children think a towel should only be used once?), and a heap of marking that I really ought to get out of the way... except I'll just empty the dishwasher, then there was that birthday card I had to write... and I've just noticed my youngest has been in his pyjamas all day...! Last week was full of exciting publicity events to do with The Glass Painter's Daughter, but now I'm back to real life again - it's difficult making the adjustment.   And there's not enough time for reading - I'm halfway through a biography of Thomas Hardy at the moment and deep in nineteenth century Dorset.