Dougal’s Diary: It’s a Dog’s Life

Sarah, who grew up in Bristol, now lives in South-East London with two dogs, the occasional grandchild and a lot of mess. She’s had a chequered career as ballet dancer, cook, cleaning lady, salesgirl of outsize underwear in Littlewoods and actor. As an actor she worked mainly in the theatre: plays ranging from Shakespeare to improvised, both comedy and tragedy.Cooking combines two of her passions: travel and people. She’s catered in barges in Burgundy, private houses in America, many stately homes in England, run a delicatessen, a stall at a farmers’ market and been a judge on the Great Taste Food Awards. Good opportunities for hearing about the lives of others.Her need to write began with letters, sending home news of her adventures. At seventeen, travelling alone on the Trans-Siberian Railway and across the Sea of Japan. In Greece, as a drama student, when their van blew up at the Springs of Daphne and they explored the mainland, riding on bread vans and tractors before selling their blood for a fiver and hitch-hiking home on a lorry. Or in Morocco on a solo trip, in pre-mobile phone days, when she was chucked off a bus in the desert and found herself surrounded by hundreds of camels and similar numbers of men, all in local dress.Since then Sarah hasn’t stopped scribbling and joining The Write Place, a writing class in Dartford, encouraged her to put the contents of numerous exercise books into something more concrete.These days Sarah chooses less adventurous holidays, but might well send one of her characters off on a trek she doesn’t feel brave enough to make.Dougal’s Diary is Sarah’s first book.