"I suppose that, if I had to pick a year to spend under house arrest, that this would have been it.  Why? Because I had a ringside seat at what must be the incomprehensible demise of the US as a major nation.  The depths into which Donald Trump and his accomplices have plunged that once widely respected country are horrifying, yet fascinating.  Having exorcised the appalling man at the polls last November, one might have thought - hoped - that it was all over, but no.  His malevolent Svengali influence over a huge sector of Americans persists and, from the centre of his sticky web in Mar-a-Lago, the toxic madness spreads, aided and abetted by outlandish Q-Anon conspiracy theories which are believed by millions of gullible fools.  And any nation with that many gullible fools among its population is in pretty serious trouble.  As a writer of fiction, I couldn't make this stuff up; that slow-motion, train-wreck, has been fascinating in a horrifying way.

But there are lots of things I've missed: apart from overseas travel to see family and friends, even ordinary social gatherings with friends locally were out, as was one of my favourite pastimes, catching the 73 bus into Valletta to just sit, sipping a cappuccino, eating a few pastizzi and people-watching.  I miss choir rehearsals, too, and our performances, especially the major concerts in St John's, or our foreign tours in alternate years.  I sing bass with St Paul's Choral Society and really enjoy that.  Our weekly Zoom meetings (Wednesdays), while enjoyable, are not the same as the real thing.  Thank God for Zoom.  Other weekly Zoom activities were Creative Writing sessions which I mentored on Monday evenings, and a tri-national  family quiz on Sundays.

A vet has to get on with cows too

Another 'benefit' of lock-down has been that I could get on with my other career, writing.  I write only fiction, far more liberating than having to do research if one is trying to write biographies or history!  My early novels featured a young vet as the hero who kept getting into scrapes with bad actors and crooks in the bloodstock world of horse-racing, etc.  They were popular enough to land me a three-book contract with Random House, but the days of amateur DIY sleuths are well and truly gone now since the advent of universal mobile phones.  Now, nobody has an excuse not to just call the police.  Twenty years ago, not being near a public phone box or not having the correct change would be enough to warrant a guy having a crack at a dodgy situation himself, but no longer; the hero of those days would be today's nosey busybody and fully deserve to be in whatever life-threatening hot water situation he found himself, his own stupid fault!  And so, when we retired to Malta in 2012 and I took up writing again, I had to abandon my erstwhile young vet hero and I took up writing police thrillers.  I'm glad to say that these, too, are doing well and that a few TV companies have expressed an interest in making a series, a kind of Maltese version of Montalbano.  As I write this, a team of TV screen-writers, is preparing a pilot episode for an overseas TV company, and those in the know say, if they're actually paying large sums of money to these specialists, then they are more than casually interested in the project.  TV script-writing is a very specialised skill as they have to compress a whole story into exactly one hour, including time for ad breaks. Fingers crossed and watch this space! 

My present literary endeavour is having a go myself at writing the screen-play for one of my early vet-hero books.  A TV director I know reckons that each of the three vet books should yield a four-episode series, so I'm having a go.  Why not?  Lock-down, again, aye?

My bread and butter writing career consists of providing the cryptic crossword for The Phoenix Magazine, one of Ireland's best-selling publications.  I've been doing this since 2006 and, though I would normally try to keep one or two puzzles in store, thanks to lock-down, I now have enough to take me well into 2022.  It's an ill wind, as they say.

The author-vet missed St Paul’s Choir during the lockdown

I'm sometimes asked if my 'two careers' aren't a strange mixture of Sciences and Arts - veterinary practitioner during the day and crime-writer at night?  I've never thought so.  I don't see why the two should be mutually exclusive.  In fact, I'm of the opinion that a university degree can be a double-edged sword: it can lead to a lucrative career, but it can also funnel you into a lifelong cul-de-sac.  Two of the main figures in our choir have mixed disciplines with great success.  Our Musical Director, Dr Hugo Agius Muscat, and our organist/pianist Dr Elisabeth Conrad, both have doctorates in some branch of music while, at the same time, doctorates in Science, being, respectively, a medical doctor and an environmental science lecturer. So I'm in good company!"

Next week: Gerald Strickland

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