Fidelma cook biography of williams

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Fidelma cook biography of williams

Login Subscribe. Log in Subscribe. She was a wonderful writer — readers took her to their hearts and she took them to hers. Fidelma also broke a world exclusive when, along with her BBC Scotland crew, she discovered a cull of seals and their pups on Orkney. The story went viral but she was told to stand down by a senior news executive because a BBC team was on its way from London.

Following an exchange with the senior news executive she later resigned from the BBC in protest. She was rarely seen without a cigarette in her hand or between her teeth. She was a petite woman whose ability and character won over reporters following her appointment in the s. She had great ability as a reporter and as deputy news editor, and in a crisis she could have a story re-jigged quickly, clearly and concisely.

Portia is my fourth afghan. I am blonde, but bleached…. In the expectant silence of lunchtime in rural France, where life stops for two long hours, a long-nosed nudge pulls me out of my dark, introspective reverie interspersed by the odd self-pitying sniff. Portia is splayed out under the outdoor table, raising her head in what appears to be total contentment.

She is looking for more chunks of my chicken and is eating more in one go than she has ever done in her life, having until now had little desire for food. She is not even chewing neurotically at her fur, and I decide to stop giving her the numerous pills that she has been prescribed for her various allergies. I realise she has gone native, settling into this bewildering new life with an ease and speed that I can only envy and hope to emulate.

I mentally slap myself for my pathetic whining of the night before. Goodness, if Portia can do it, then so can I. Over the next weeks and months, as I came to terms with this incredibly beautiful backwater I had washed up in, and as my money ran out in trying to make my neglected little farmhouse attractive and comfortable, Portia proved to be my mainstay and icebreaker.

Afghans are rare in France, particularly in villages on a route to nowhere, and so even the most gimlet-eyed old women melted into smiles and crossed over the road to coo to her and then to me. These are women who ordinarily would take weeks — probably months — to unbend and acknowledge my presence in their insular, family-locked world. Even more extraordinary, she melted back, entranced apparently by their soothing endearments, allowing them to pet and admire her.

Here in La France profonde, old women dress with formality and dignity, and there is a relinquishing of all efforts at sexuality, and yes, by definition, faux-fertility. There are no attempts to hold back, or shun, time and squeeze their sagging bodies into elasticated jeans and T-shirts. No make-up employed to tease the lips into baby pouts, grotesque parodies of what they once were.

By day, old-fashioned pinnies, tied in a thin bow at the sides, cover weighty bosoms; hair, its natural grey, is clasped back into buns or pulled high on the head. And the conker-brown faces of these women, heavily fidelma cook biography of williams by the sun, tell of a lifetime of work and pain.