Vignettes' is a book of short stories and anecdotes by Penelope Harris. It is her first publication and she is very excited! See below for her foreword for this project. Paul. 

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"Where do stories come from? In my own case I had a thriving business at the Quaker boarding school I attended selling what can only be described as a precursor to Fifty Shades of Grey, although my knowledge of male anatomy was a little hazy at the tender age of twelve. An early departure from said boarding school led to a stint at art college and then, on my long suffering father’s insistence, to Miss Marie Plumtree’s Academy for Young Ladies in Leeds. Attempts to earn an honest crust met with varying degrees of success until I thankfully married at the age of twenty. I spent the next 20 years happily hunting on Exmoor and flirting with the local farmers. I returned to art college, my husband having died and a degree of common sense having kicked in, as I now had to young children to think about.

It was my second husband who gave me the confidence to actually get a meaningful job at the ripe old age of 49 when the infamous Rose West trial began and I was taken on by SKY and HTV as a court artist and later as a police artist, those being the days before technology took over from talent.

I spent the next 12 years travelling the country and working harder than ever before in my life, covering trials and coaxing descriptions out of frightened victims, both of which I was surprisingly good at. I also took commissions for portraits. At long last I had found my niche.

After my second husband died I began a series of diaries written for five old school friends in the sleepless small hours and it was these five ladies who encouraged me to keep writing after I moved to Cornwall four years ago.

Where do stories come from? Most of mine are based on the truth with a bit of tweaking should honesty become a problem. The characters I use are on the whole a likeable bunch and drawn entirely from my imagination, so I apologise if you think you have met any of them. You haven’t. Any similarities to persons, living or dead, is purely a coincidence and certainly not intentional." Penelope Harris