The Write Stuff with... Della Galton

Today it's my pleasure to welcome Della Galton, whose latest book Moonlight over Studland Bay was published last month, to the blog to talk about her alternative Christmas last year.  Welcome Della.

A motorhome, an odd dinner and a dog field – our alternative Christmas

I write novels with quirky characters because I’m quite quirky myself – write what you know LOL – but should Christmas arise in my novels, my characters invariably have quite traditional Christmases. Whereas I do not.

Last year my partner and I headed off to Cornwall in our motorhome on Christmas Day with our three dogs – two terriers and a staffie cross.  It’s a very large motorhome!  We had Christmas lunch parked in a layby on Bodmin Moor. More precisely we had part of our Christmas lunch as I’d got the timings wrong. More of that later.

We’d also booked a dog field for 12.00 midday – so the dogs could have a good run around and be tired while we ate dinner – and the same dog field at 3.00 pm for a repeat performance.

We arrived at the dog field at midday – surprisingly it was fully booked and we waited for a guy who looked just like Robbie Williams to come out with his two German Shepherd dogs. Maybe it was Robbie. Maybe he was having an alternative Christmas too! 

Dog fields by the way are big fenced fields you can hire by the half hour or hour where dogs can run freely. One of our terriers spent the whole hour trying to escape! 

Our Christmas dinner took a while to cook. (The main course, a LIDL bird within a bird roast, needed two hours which wasn’t quite enough time – being as I couldn’t cook it at the dog field.) 

Consequently, for lunch we had pigs in blankets, along with our starter of breaded camembert with dauphinoise potatoes. Then for our evening meal we had the main course with parsnips and roast potatoes.  

Christmas Day 2019 was fabulous weather. Warm with blue skies. A gem of a day tucked between all the wet, windy days either side of it. We played ball with the dogs and had our lunch looking out onto spectacular wild scenery.

Christmas Day night was awful weather. The wind howled across Bodmin Moor, the rain hammered on the windows and the motorhome rocked so alarmingly we thought it might actually be carried off in a tornado and deposited somewhere else – or at the very least fall over. 

Neither of these things happened, but sleeping was tricky!  It was a Christmas we will never forget. 

A motorhome, an odd dinner and a dog field! 

It was utterly brilliant.

We are now trying to think of a way of topping it for this year. Watch this space. 

I suspect that many of us will have a very different Christmas this year. I hope yours is happy and peaceful wherever you are.

Della Galton

www.dellagalton.co.uk

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Della's latest novel Moonlight Over Studland Bay is published by Boldwood. Available in paperback, audio, digital and large print.

Click HERE to find out more.

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