โWeโll stay 6 months max. Itโs fine if youโre a hobbit, but no one else could live here.โ
โOkay. I might be able to do a year if we canโt find anything else. But no more. Agreed?โ
โAgreed.โ
6 years later and we were still living in our Hobbit House with nowhere to write but the kitchen table. So we decided to build ourselves a Foffice in our equally tiny garden. No, thatโs not a misspelling. We didnโt like the idea of an โofficeโ, too formal, so we combined โfunโ and โofficeโ to come up with โFofficeโ. Sad, but true!
But by the time weโd got around to the build, lockdown in the UK was in full swing and building materials were getting harder and harder to source. In the end the choice was to abandon the project or convert a tiny 6โ X 6โ shed into our new writing haven with whatever we could get from our local DIY store that was still open.
Not quite what weโd originally had in mind. However the fact that we built it ourselves with what we could lay our hands on during lockdown makes it perfect. Thereโs no heating except a small oil radiator and no air conditioning except opening a door, so in winter we write wrapped in throws with hot water bottles and heated fingerless mittens and in summer we write naked…well, almost!
Weโve written 8 books in our Foffice including A Lesson In Murder and we intend to write at least 8 more!
As well as building the Foffice itself, we also designed and built the desks. On the wall you can see the cover for the first book in the Lady Swift series, A Very English Murder. Itโs hard to believe that A Lesson In Murder is the 7th book!
In A Lesson in Murder, Clifford, Lady Swiftโs butler always carries a magnifying glass around with him. In the far left of the picture, you can see ours – itโs rather bigger than Cliffordโs as his is a nifty folding affair.
When Lady Swiftโs uncle dies, she inherits his country estate, Henley Hall. She also inherits his elderly, and very wilful bulldog, Gladstone. Hence, when we saw this pair of bulldog lamps when we were on holiday, we just had to buy them for the Foffice ๐ In A Lesson in Murder, Gladstone plays a rather significant role – no spoilers!
Verity Bright is the pseudonym for a husband-and-wife writing partnership that has spanned a quarter of a century. Starting out writing high-end travel articles and books, they published everything from self-improvement to humour, before embarking on their first historical mystery. They are the authors of the fabulous Lady Eleanor Swift Mystery series, set in the 1920s.
