This month my research for this blog sent me down a whimsical rabbit-hole of verbal delight.

I promised to delve deeper into ‘manifest,’ the Cambridge English Dictionary Word of 2024: ‘manifest’ - “To use methods such as visualisation and affirmation to help you imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen.”

The words of the year for the Oxford, Cambridge and Collins English Dictionaries form an interesting snapshot of the evolution of word meaning and of contemporary society.

I love a good Christmas song – everything from dreaming with Bing Crosby, driving home with Chris Rea to Hallelujah-ing with Handel. But there’s nothing like a traditional carol.

This month’s word is inspired by a quotation by Scott of the Antarctic, who described Captain Oates, a member of his ill-fated expedition as, ‘a delightfully humorous cheery old pessimist.’

Do you have any quincunxes in your garden? October is the time for re/planting spring bulbs - how about a tulip quincunx?

Originally the word ‘cloister’ meant ‘a place of religious seclusion,’ a religious community, ‘cloistered’ or ‘closed off’ from the world.

The word scriptorium rolls off the tongue rather deliciously. It refers to a ‘writing room,’ especially in a monastery or abbey where monks used to copy manuscripts. The word derives from the Latin, ‘scribere’ to write, from which we also have ‘scribe.’

Recently I’ve been repeatedly saying and writing the word ‘twelfth,’ as ‘The Twelfth Cross’ is the title of my novel, coming out on July 6th. It’s an unusual word – 4 consonants in a row, which occurs rarely in English.

This week David and I are on a working holiday revisiting the locations of the Eleanor crosses in the Midlands. I’m making contacts for author events for The Twelfth Cross (coming soon) and also shooting footage to help promote the book.

I carried my cuppa into the dining room. Huh? Didn’t I just bring my laptop down and put it on the table? Apparently not. I headed back upstairs to my spare room cum office. No laptop. What?! Up another flight of stairs to the bedroom for one of those ‘just in case’ looks. Not there either. I felt discombobulated.

Serendipity has long been one of my favourite words and researching its origin has felt like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole, each discovery only leading to another, even more bizarre.

My coming soon novel, ‘The Twelfth Cross,’ is set mainly in the year 1290 and involves a journey to the 12 locations from London to Lincoln that would later host the Eleanor Crosses. When the action is at Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire, the antagonist Derian Scand protests that another character's version of events is ‘a cock and bull story.’