Five Photos .. with Francine Beaton

My guest on the blog today is author Francine Beaton who, in her own words, is a romance writer, traveller, food lover, coffee lover, wine lover – lover of everything related with food except diets, wannabe artist and photographer. I’m delighted that she’s agreed to share her Five Photos with us.

Thank you for the chance to show you my photos, Sharon.

It was quite difficult to choose my five favourite photographs. As an amateur photographer I have accumulated thousands of photographs over the last few years. This time, however, I’ve chosen photographs more for sentimental reasons than their artistic value.

Love Story

My first photo is quite special to me. This is really the first photograph of my husband and I together. It was taken twenty years ago – in the days before selfies or phones with cameras. Our love story can actually make a good book. We met on Saturday, 6 June 1998, in Cape Town, South Africa when we were both 35 years old. I saw him the next day, and again the Monday afternoon for a couple of hours before he left again on a BP oil tanker for the Far East. That was the only time we have seen each other until 30 November, when I arrived in Scotland for my first visit. In the time apart we only managed to communicate by fax and letters and then, after he returned to Scotland, with one phone call a week. A few days after my arrival in Scotland, he took me to Skye to show me where his family hailed from. In March the following year I moved to Scotland.

Proud grandparents

When I was three months pregnant, we moved to South Africa. As my husband was in the merchant navy, he was away quite a lot so he felt it was best that I stayed where I had support of my family while he was away. My second photo was taken only a few days after the birth of our daughter. My parents-in-law came to visit for the first time in South Africa and this was one of the few photos of the three living grandparents with their granddaughter. Poor granda didn’t stand a chance between the two grandmothers. J My mother is the one in pink, looking smug.

Mother-daughter love

The third photo was taken on my wedding day in February 2003. I know, we did everything in a different order. This was a very special mother-daughter moment the photographer managed to catch.

White Horse of Skye

I took this photo on my second visit to Skye. My husband had been showing us where his father had grown up, and we stood there admiring the house at Bernisdale, next to Loch Snizort. When I turned around, here comes this white horse, walking straight towards me. How amazing was that?

Mum

My final photo is of my Mum, taken at my nephew’s wedding a few years ago. She passed away in January last year and this photo was on her funeral letter. She was one of my biggest supporters, and I wish she could have been here to witness that I had made my dream come true by publishing my first book.

Thank you very much for sharing your photos and the stories behind them, Francine. I’m sure your mother would be very proud of you. Love that photo of you and your daughter!

Francine grew up in Pretoria in South Africa, but as she said, she’s a nomad at heart. She loves travelling and had worked in Cape Town and lived in Falkirk, Scotland, Langebaan, Bloemfontein and Cape Town before she returned to Pretoria. At the end of the year would see her on another adventure when the family returned to Glasgow for the next phase in their lives.

Francine loves sport, especially rugby, and almost living in the shadows of Loftus Versveld, one of the oldest rugby stadiums in South Africa, it is no wonder that her debut novel, Eye on the Ball, and the series Playing for Glory has rugby as a theme.

You can find Eye on the Ball book here .

Apart from rugby, she also loves traveling. Her second series, Taste for Love, has food or drink as a theme. The first in this series is Taste for Coffee, set in Edinburgh’s Leith District.