Outside, the London traffic thundered, horns honked, taxis bobbed and weaved, police sirens wailed and screeched past and buses waited impatiently for passengers to board at their stops. Inside, it was 1889 from dawn to dusk, night and day, right down to the typically severe Victorian schoolroom discipline. It was a world in microcosm in which Victoria was on the throne, corporal punishment was the norm, authority was unquestionable and a girl like this, even one of marriageable age, could - and would - be returned to childhood: and if you were to as much as show the young honourable Amelia Fotheringale-Sloane, heiress to the famed Fotheringale-Sloane estate, a mobile phone she'd turn her pretty head away in terror.
Nothing to do with the NEW book, but inspired by a sequel to one of my earlier works (one of the INSTITUTIONALISED series - some of you may remember it) which never got much further than a hint at the end of a story and a few words on my hard drive - oh well! Something about this image just brought my mind back to it - I'm not entirely sure what, but that's often the way. The cane resting on the desk is of course something I created and later added; you have to imagine the metronome is positioned somehere close to the viewer's position.
By the way: I'm still hard at work on the new book, even though also still working with the artist, Roger Benson, and working on a book on Mad Cows Disease / CJD and other protein conformation disorders in the background.
I'm also very soon going to reinstate direct, non-moderated, commenting on this blog, since it has been some while since there has been any attempt to post spam - perhaps as early as this very afternoon. So there will no longer be that annoying delay between you writing in and you seeing your lovingly composed comment up in lights... Nice, eh!