The Cidershed

A skillfully woven evocative and colourful tale of an Australian & an English backpacker whose lives intertwine, 2011.

A commentator wrote of A Foxtrot Through India: Its clear and uncluttered style allows the reader’s focus to remain firmly centered on the unfolding narrative and the characters within it. There are also some wonderful moments of restraint when describing interactions between the characters of Sam and Josh – such as having the paragraph describing Josh seeing Sam for the first time, as she is pulling a shopping trolley up the stairs, end simply with, ‘She looked up and smiled.’ Or when, during a conversation with Sam, Josh reflects, ‘she beat me to the last piece of papaya, at the time it seemed like a great hardship to forgo that last piece’

Another critic wrote:This is entertaining, fun and very well written.The thoughts, the narative come in waves of joy, memories are triggered by other memories and wash back and forth over the reader as the story progresses in different locations and at different times.'

Susan's Country Kitchen a real food cookbook, Anthony and Susan Thorogood, 2011.

Susan’s Country Kitchen is full of her popular recipes created and tested over a decade, some of the recipes have been published in the Australian Weekend Magazine. It is a cookbook with a twist, using best farm produced ingredients the book includes: cooking with cider, English traditional country fare, some of the best vegetarian recipes you have ever tried, sweet things without sugar that are very healthy and the results yummy! and there are even recipes to make scrumptious cider in the home. I was given “Susan’s country Kitchen” cookbook and a bottle of cooking cider for my birthday in November.  Apart from the fact that my husband has been cooking from the book, (which makes it the best gift I could have been given) the recipes we have so far tried are absolutely delicious. 

Noahs Nuclear Niche an assortment of crazy plays from the 1970s, 2010.

Writing about one of the plays Planet of the Cows Tim Llloyd said in The Adelaide Advertiser 'Big Red and Daisy Bell are just two normal farm animals, a bull and a cow, before they decide to head for the big smoke and see how the other half lives. At first things aren’t too bad and city humans swallow their prejudices, even eating at the same restaurants as cattle, and going out with them. But the warmth between humans and cattle does not last. Anthony Thorogood has the tremendous advantage of being able to write fresh and fluent dialogue which makes the play come alive. It is indulgent and funny, with everything from terrible puns about cows to sublime comments on Australians’ behaviour.

Lazonby Arthur Albert Algernon Aloysius Horatio Hieronymus Edvard Eggbert Eisteddfod Shufflebottom-Frobisher-Smythe The Third: Lofty to his friends, newly graduated from Cambridge University travels to the north of England by train and three well endowed backpacking wild Tasmanian Sirens storm his first class compartment, A strange Northern woman named Faye who is writing a Goffic Horror swoons into his life and the mysterious, enigmatic and unknowable, red headed and wild eyed Larisha batters her way in as well, is she warewolf, vampire, or just a nice girl? nothing for Lazonby will ever be the same again.

A police drama to end all police dramas.

A comic extravaganza inspired by such famous comedians as Laurel and Hardy, Albert and Costello, Spike Milligan and the Goons, John Cleese of Faulty Towers fame, that great Scottish funnyman Billie Connolly and especially the gang of twenty blokes I worked with in the 1990’s in Dulux’s paint warehouse in South Australia, they could be funnier and more hilarious than any television funnyman. Bigfoot Littlefoot and West is a surreal, irrelevant, irreverent and irrational comic Who Done It to end all Who Done Its.

I originally wrote the first three stories in this book in the mid 1980s when I was living in Yorkshire, there was a Sargent West, a Detective Littlefoot but no Bigfoot! And the three stories were serious Who Don It’s. Then in 2010, twenty five years later, I was fiddling with the television, I’m not always good with knobs. ‘I’m good with knobs,’ Bigfoot would say. Anyway all I could find to watch on the old television were: sententious, supercilious and superannuated police dramas it’s all tedious, tortuous and tiring, said a voice inside my head. Suddenly Big Foot appeared and started carrying on like a two bob watch, he has never stopped.

I set myself a simple plan when writing Bigfoot Littlefoot and West it has to be irrelevant, irreverent and irrational. I wrote the stories without stopping to think, I wrote without stopping to check on mundane things like: plot, characterization and truth. I just opened the flood gates and set words down on paper, it was great fun and the way to read the book is not with a critical eye but just to let the flood gates open.

Bigfoot likes to tell the odd joke especially at times of crisis, neather Bigfoot nor I invented the jokes, I simply collected them, if people told me a joke and I thought it was a good one I wrote it down so I must thank all those anonymous jokers out there for the jokes. One commentator has mentioned that this book should come with a Health Warning: read in moderation or it does your head in.