After six long years, I'm en route back to Bangladesh, and the island of Bhola. Back in 2001 (yep, 21st Anniversary!) it's where my writing really took off, eventually leading to setting up Bhola's Children, So, this month, I'm cheating: a while ago I wrote a comic (hopefully) piece of flash fiction for a travel guide...here it is: Bangladesh?  Why? When Jennifer Lightfoot’s granddad won her a dream holiday in the local newspaper, she was unbearable:             ‘You’ll never guess where we’re going,” she crowed.  “You’ll never guess because it’s really erotic–‘(she was ten; she probably meant exotic.  Then again, given her later career choices, perhaps not).             She gave me a clue as the Mini-Traveller pulled off with the whole family squashed in, goggle-eyed.  ‘It begins with H and ends in N,’ she yelled.  ‘Ha-ha!  I bet you’ll never go anywhere I can’t guess…’             Thirty years on, Jennifer Lightfoot...

On Friday night, I had dinner with Sir Ian Rankin and Robert Aldridge, The Rt. Hon. Lord Provost of Edinburgh. For someone more likely to be found eating toast in front of the telly by 9pm, this might well have been the peak of my writing career.

Equality. Diversity. Inclusion...

I’ve barely blinked and July is over. Amidst the basketball camps, small-boy sleepovers and the meltingly hot trains and buses en route to England, I’ve made an attempt to put WriteRight work to one side and make some progress on my own writing, reading – it’s often the TBR pile that’ toppling – and listening.

If there is one certainty inside the unpredictable world of writing, it’s that there is rejection – masses of it.