Bit more of a profile (following on from Profile)

Bad sign - once I start it's hard to stop!
Living in a city is in some ways greender than living in the country round here. We have good public transport and the insulation of living in a terrace. The greenness sort of grew up around a kind of experimental archaeology, a desire to have a go at doing things as they used to be done, though I was also brought up by parents who'd been through the war and sorted their rubbish, grew our own vegetables, mended everything and walked where possible. Anyway, I've made my own candles and soap, turned sheets, learned to spin and weave (and incidentally to ride, fence and shoot). I think I have the vague idea that if the balloon goes up I'd like to be the one making soup over an open fire rather than the one clutching a worthless Blackberry and wondering why the street lights have gone out. I was of course a Girl Guide (in quite a practical unit - cake-icing one week and army assault courses the next). However, put me in front of a computer and I'm likely to ask how you light it (or warp it up, or cook it ...).
I started writing when I first realised that someone wrote those magical book things I was reading, and when I read my first Agatha Christie, on Boxing Day when I was about eleven, I realised I wanted to write crime novels. Long-suffering friends were forced to read these, quite often while walking to school (resulting in one friend walking into a lamp post). I started writing Murray's novels around 1995 but tried to give up around 2002 in the face of the unified apathy of the publishing industry. The final straw was a book called Mortification which was a series of articles by authors about the times they had fallen on their faces, and was less than encouraging. However, this seems to be my addiction, and I've been writing all kinds of things since, giving Murray a break, but ploughing on quietly on my own. Hence the reluctance to talk now - I haven't done it for so long!