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My husband, Alan Franks, leaves The Times after 32 years. I met him soon after joining the paper in 1987.  He was primarily a feature writer and among the many high-end celebrities he interviewed were Anthony Hopkins, James Baldwin, Yehudi Menuhin, Terry Eagleton about On The Gospels, Anthony Powell and Harold Pinter. I could go on and on. I am in the process of putting many of these onto his website, alanfranks.com. Every year, on my birthday in December, he hands me a book o poetry that he has written over the previous 12 months. The other day, before breakfast, he handed me a sheaf of foolscap paper. This unexpected smmer-time gift was a 120,000 novel he had written in what little spare time he had. Called 'Sins of the Sons', it is about misplaced guilt. It is set in in a place similar to Richmond where we live and where he grew up, and touches on the deeply-buried but sometimes detectable seam of post-war anti-Semitism that subsists still in Britain, and its effects on the innocent. As his former boss Nicola Jeal told him when she heard, "Most people go away and try and write a book. You've written a book before you've gone!" I couldn't put it down and was late for a press conference that day. Muswell Press are publishing it, and it could be out by Christmas or soon after.

And with the silver change we'd prove

The truth of Love to life's own end,

With hearts the years could but embolden,

Had I a golden pound to spend.

Francis Ledwidge

June 2010