Birthday Celebrations
- Attfield Dutt
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
I’d like to thank everyone who sent me birthday greetings from Kolkata, Copenhagen, Australia, Europe and closer to home in Wales. Instead of a takeaway celebration for the family, I decided to include a variety of Indian meals with our usual order from Waitrose, which seemed to go down very well. Then last night our son gave me a newly published biography of Gordon Brown, which I shall immensely enjoy reading; he surely stands head and shoulders above all the other politicians we’ve had in the last half-century.
Birthday celebrations aren’t quite over – there’s a family expedition to Big Pit coming up; I might tell you about that next week, although I’m not sure if I will actually go down the mine shaft with the others – we’ll see. I have relations who urge me to walk further and get fitter… Does everyone?
I’m now over a decade older than my father ever was, and I wonder what he would have made of my writing about Kolkata and Darjeeling in my latest novel A DISTANT VOICE IN THE DARKNESS, where I used his three-hundred-year-old family home. I’m currently working on the sequel, when the same characters are twenty years older. A baby born near the end of that book is now a teenager; he’s a gifted violinist, and I’m enjoying researching what music he enjoys and wants to learn.
There’s a Kindle edition of the earlier novel for £3.50 if you prefer ebooks, but if like me you want to hold a solid book in your hands, the paperback is £9.99. My recent short stories FRESH BEGINNINGS can be ordered free on KindleUnlimited, or £1.77 as an ebook on Amazon, who I see are currently selling the paperback for £5.02.
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