Chocolate Gothic

Imagine a house where every room has a writer tucked into a window seat with notebook or perched with laptop or a whole flock of them huddled in animated discussion. It's a 17th century farmhouse with flagstone floors and each Gothic window opens onto an expansive view of the rolling Cotswolds hills. The house itself is leaking stories – like the adjacent Thimble Cottage, built to house the mad mistress of a long-dead ancestor. Visitors sleep in the turret or rooms with gargoyles under the eaves.

It's the perfect setting for the annual Mayday gathering of the Leicester Writers Club. Here we plot murder and mayhem between communal feasts at the long dining-room table. 'How can we do a car crash on-stage?' one group debates. That's the 'Nuts and Bolts of Scriptwriting' workshop. In another room, someone edits an explosive scene about a Welsh mining community. Later we discuss Writers and Blogging. There are sessions on Writing Dialogue, Editing Your Poem and that writers' nightmare – How to tackle a Synopsis of your Novel.

Several brave souls volunteer to feed sixteen with their best recipes. Let me recall the home-made Polish barley soup, the sausage and pasta supper and the extravagant chocolate cheesecake... And we closed on Sunday with a 'Writing Feast' of the weekend's words. To my surprise, I'd managed a new poem and a monologue inspired by Middle Stanley's railway tunnel. Indeed the house fairly hummed with writing for three days. And in between dinners and redrafts and rambles round the lake – there was a community renewing itself in the shared pleasure of stories. Long may this May-time ritual continue.