Step Into The Story

Now here is an idea for a story setting! I was reading my English Heritage magazine and came across a reference to the medieval vaulted passageways that lie beneath the City of Exeter. Apparently they were built to supply fresh drinking water to the city and are unique in the UK. These days they are a tourist attraction. Exeter's early water supply came from springs and the Roman garrison sourced water from two local springs and brought it into the city via an aqueduct. In the Middle Ages, Exeter became a great ecclesiastical centre and the earliest passage was built between 1346 and 1349 to serve the city's cathedral. The water pipes ended at a fountain in Cathedral Close that supplied clean water to Exeter's clergy. The same stonemasons who worked on the magnificent cathedral were also tasked with constructing the vaulted underground passageways and their masons' marks can be seen on the walls. The tunnels were constructed by digging a trench in the clay, lining it w...

So it’s bash romantic fiction week, as usual. Oh no, not again, I hear you cry. When will this end? Not in the near future, I fear, but we can but try to tackle these prejudices about OUR genre. On Open Book on Radio 4 yesterday the BBC managed to be stereotypical and snide (in my opinion!) about Regency Romance as a fiction sub-genre. A reader had contacted the Open Book Reading Clinic to ask for help in breaking an addiction to Regencies, which she had developed during her studies for a PhD. Personally I can’t think of anything nicer than relaxing and being entertained by Georgette Heyer after a hard day’s study, but I can see that if you genuinely cannot pick up anything other than a Regency romance you might be looking for some advice on how to expand your reading. That’s fair enough. What is neither fair nor courteous, in my opinion, was the view put forward by the studio guest, a novelist and playwright, whose contention was that an intelligent, educated “grown up” woman had a “...