Author. Screenwriter. My new dual timeline romantic thriller set in Cairo, The Key To The Island House, is out now. https://teapawt.net/t.co/Hv3q6kthK3 Agent: @MoylettLisa
London - mostly
Joined December 2007
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Amanda Lees retweeted
SIR PATRICK STEWART (1940-2026)
Before everything else, Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire, the proud county in the north of England which he loved to the end. You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues. He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love.
We first met as ambitious young actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company half a century ago but we weren’t in the same productions. My first strong memory was a few years later, meeting him in the street in central London when he told me about an offer to take over a leading part in 'Star Trek'. “But Patrick think of your stage career in the UK. Do you really want to risk—getting lost in Hollywood for years and years?”. Well, he took the risk and thank goodness for us all that he did for not just his devoted Trekkies but film and theatre audiences, who marvelled at his using international celebrity to star in a string of cinema successes ('X-Men' of course) and in great classical plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Arthur Miller, Peter Shaffer, Pinter and Beckett at Stratford-upon-Avon, in London’s West End and on Broadway.
America was his adopted home, where he met his adored Sunny who has cared for him through sickness and health, through thick and thin. But he never forsook his origins: and the proudest achievement of the most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic, was his appointment as Chancellor of Huddersfield University in Yorkshire.
His farewell performance in 'Avengers: Doomsday' is yet to be seen.
Ian McKellen 29 October 2026
Photo: University of Huddersfield
Amanda Lees retweeted
In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to:
Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund
alzresearch.org/giving/
Alzheimer’s Foundation of America Caregiver Resources
alzfdn.org/donate/
Photo Credit: Tommy Garcia
Amanda Lees retweeted
Shocking neglect and abuse of retired Lt Col Stephen Maguire DCM SAS, a natural born leader of men who spent 40 years in service to his country, and his son's long fight for justice. Please share Ben's post widely: "My father, Retired Lt Col Stephen Maguire DCM SAS, is a man who spent nearly 40 years in dedicated service to this country, serving from 1970 until 2009. He is a natural leader, a decorated soldier, to those who served with him. However, he has been completely abandoned and betrayed by the very system he gave everything to.
I am fighting for justice for my father. This struggle is a mirror of my own life; my own journey marked by the negligence of MPs, charities, and veteran services which led me to the absolute rock bottom of homelessness as a veteran myself. I know exactly what it is like to be discarded by the people who promised to provide support.
After years of fighting, we finally have a pathway toward the right care, but the damage is already done. The sheer scale of the failings along the way has crippled a man who likely only suffered from PTSD. What should have been a manageable recovery became a total collapse because of institutional incompetence.
This isn't a failure of one person or one office it is a systemic rot. For too long, the UK government, regardless of which side of the fence they sit on, has played a political game with the lives of our veterans. Whether it is Labour or the Conservatives, the result is the same: service men are treated as assets when they are useful and as liabilities the moment they are broken. We are told our sacrifices are "remembered," but the reality is that once the uniform comes off, the care vanishes.
We sought help for my dad, worried about PTSD and dementia resulting from his service. Through the SAS Association and Veterans’ Aid, he was referred to various healthcare facilities. Instead of professional care, he found negligence from these referrals.
In the last few years alone, he has been through multiple institutions that have failed him. We've dealt with incorrect diagnoses, doctors who tried to push him out of their care because he was "too difficult," and the removal of life-saving medication that led to him being sectioned under the Mental Health Act. He was sedated and left to decline without specialist care. His PTSD was completely ignored, and his medical history was dismissed. In one instance, he was admitted to the hospital due to low sodium caused by the excessive use of anti-psychotic medication.
The most infuriating part is the silence from the top. MPs have explicitly ignored this situation and failed to act for a Lt Col in 22 SAS. The "Military Covenant" is nothing more than a piece of paper used for photo opportunities while men like my father are left to rot.
The system has failed. The NHS has failed. Veteran charities have failed. From the MOD passing the buck to the medical incompetence of the facilities, my father has been abandoned like thousands of others.
I am posting this because we need accountability. It is not enough to simply "help" now; there must be justice for the way he was treated. My father spent four decades looking after his men and serving at the highest level for the United Kingdom; it is a national disgrace that the government failed to look after him and many like him.
Do not listen to the rhetoric the government continues to push. As this is an example of what happens after 40 years of dedicated service.
Please share this. We need the people in power to answer for this. We need leaders who actually lead, not politicians who just talk."
facebook.com/story.php?story…
bobshepherdauthor.com/2023/1…
Amanda Lees retweeted
He was a Catalan, not Spaniard, and his name was Joan, not Juan.
In 1941, a Spaniard walked into the British embassy in Madrid and offered to spy on the Nazis.
The British turned him down.
So he went to the Germans instead, pretended to be a loyal fascist, and got hired as a German spy. His plan was to lie to them for the rest of the war.
It worked better than anyone could have imagined.
His name was Juan Pujol García. Before the war he had tried his hand at running a chicken farm and a movie theater. He had no spy training. What he had was a deep hatred of both fascism and communism after the Spanish Civil War, and an incredible imagination.
The Germans gave him a codename, invisible ink, money, and orders to go to Britain and recruit spies.
He didn't go to Britain.
He went to Lisbon, Portugal, and made everything up.
Using a tourist guidebook, maps, magazines, newsreels, and a British railway timetable from the library, he wrote long, detailed reports about life in England. Military movements. Morale. Ports.
He'd never been there. He made mistakes. He didn't understand British money. He once reported that dockworkers in Glasgow would do anything for a liter of wine.
The Germans loved him anyway.
Then British codebreakers reading German messages noticed something strange. The Germans were hunting for a convoy that didn't exist, based on a report from some agent in Britain they'd never heard of.
The British went looking for this mystery spy. They found Pujol. In 1942 they finally took him on and brought him to London.
Now he had real help. MI5 gave him the codename Garbo, after the actress, because they thought he was the greatest actor in the world.
Together with his British handler, Pujol built a fake spy network for the Germans. It eventually had 27 imaginary agents. Each had a name, a personality, a job, and a backstory. A Welsh nationalist. A Venezuelan student. A Greek sailor. Some of them recruited their own imaginary sub-agents.
When they needed to explain why one agent had gone quiet, they killed him off. They even put a fake obituary in a Liverpool newspaper. The Germans reportedly paid a pension to his widow.
Who also didn't exist.
Then came D-Day.
Hours before the landings, the British let Pujol send a message warning the Germans that the invasion was coming in Normandy. It was timed so it would arrive too late to matter, but it made him look brilliant.
Three days later he sent the most important message of his career. Normandy was a trick, he said. The real invasion was still coming, at Calais, led by a huge army under General Patton.
That army was fake too. But the Germans believed him.
German forces that could have been rushed to Normandy were held back near Calais for weeks, waiting for an attack that never came.
The Germans were so grateful they awarded him the Iron Cross.
A few months later, King George VI made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire.
He's one of the only people known to have been decorated by both sides of the war.
After the war, afraid of revenge from surviving Nazis, he faked his own death from malaria in Africa and disappeared to Venezuela, where he lived quietly running a shop.
For decades the world thought he was dead.
In 1984, a British writer tracked him down. Pujol came back to Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day and met veterans who had landed on the beaches.
Some of them thanked him.
Amanda Lees retweeted
In 1941, a Spaniard walked into the British embassy in Madrid and offered to spy on the Nazis.
The British turned him down.
So he went to the Germans instead, pretended to be a loyal fascist, and got hired as a German spy. His plan was to lie to them for the rest of the war.
It worked better than anyone could have imagined.
His name was Juan Pujol García. Before the war he had tried his hand at running a chicken farm and a movie theater. He had no spy training. What he had was a deep hatred of both fascism and communism after the Spanish Civil War, and an incredible imagination.
The Germans gave him a codename, invisible ink, money, and orders to go to Britain and recruit spies.
He didn't go to Britain.
He went to Lisbon, Portugal, and made everything up.
Using a tourist guidebook, maps, magazines, newsreels, and a British railway timetable from the library, he wrote long, detailed reports about life in England. Military movements. Morale. Ports.
He'd never been there. He made mistakes. He didn't understand British money. He once reported that dockworkers in Glasgow would do anything for a liter of wine.
The Germans loved him anyway.
Then British codebreakers reading German messages noticed something strange. The Germans were hunting for a convoy that didn't exist, based on a report from some agent in Britain they'd never heard of.
The British went looking for this mystery spy. They found Pujol. In 1942 they finally took him on and brought him to London.
Now he had real help. MI5 gave him the codename Garbo, after the actress, because they thought he was the greatest actor in the world.
Together with his British handler, Pujol built a fake spy network for the Germans. It eventually had 27 imaginary agents. Each had a name, a personality, a job, and a backstory. A Welsh nationalist. A Venezuelan student. A Greek sailor. Some of them recruited their own imaginary sub-agents.
When they needed to explain why one agent had gone quiet, they killed him off. They even put a fake obituary in a Liverpool newspaper. The Germans reportedly paid a pension to his widow.
Who also didn't exist.
Then came D-Day.
Hours before the landings, the British let Pujol send a message warning the Germans that the invasion was coming in Normandy. It was timed so it would arrive too late to matter, but it made him look brilliant.
Three days later he sent the most important message of his career. Normandy was a trick, he said. The real invasion was still coming, at Calais, led by a huge army under General Patton.
That army was fake too. But the Germans believed him.
German forces that could have been rushed to Normandy were held back near Calais for weeks, waiting for an attack that never came.
The Germans were so grateful they awarded him the Iron Cross.
A few months later, King George VI made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire.
He's one of the only people known to have been decorated by both sides of the war.
After the war, afraid of revenge from surviving Nazis, he faked his own death from malaria in Africa and disappeared to Venezuela, where he lived quietly running a shop.
For decades the world thought he was dead.
In 1984, a British writer tracked him down. Pujol came back to Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day and met veterans who had landed on the beaches.
Some of them thanked him.
Amanda Lees retweeted
Staff repositioning the Stones at #Stonehenge today ready for the the end of British Summer Time on Sunday ⏰⬅️ #BST #clocksgoback #thattimeofyear 😀
Lighter mornings, darker evenings and a WHOLE extra hour in bed! 🙏
Amanda Lees retweeted
THE HORROR OF BEING LONELY AT SEVENTY.
by Michael Whelan
The cruelest part of growing old isn't knowing that life is getting shorter. It's wondering how much of it you'll have to spend without being loved the way you once were.
At seventy, loneliness is not simply an empty house.
It is a body that still remembers what it feels like to be loved.
God, how I miss being held.
I miss holding Rebecca's hand. The beautiful simplicity of our fingers finding each other without either of us giving it a thought. I miss cuddling in bed after a long day, feeling her warmth against me, knowing that whatever horrors the world had waiting, for that one precious moment, we were safe.
I miss someone telling me I look handsome.
I miss hearing those three ordinary, extraordinary words: "I love you."
And perhaps most heartbreaking of all, I miss saying them to someone who could whisper them back.
These are the little things we take for granted until death comes along and steals them.
For years, I cared for Rebecca as Parkinson's and dementia slowly took possession of the woman I adored. Cancer had already ravaged my own body. I was exhausted, frightened, and sometimes so overwhelmed that I prayed for one afternoon when nobody needed me.
Now I have more afternoons than I know what to do with.
What a cruel joke.
People think loneliness is about having nobody to talk to. They're wrong. I can talk to friends. I can laugh. I can attend a gathering and appear perfectly happy.
Then I return home.
Nobody asks how my day went. Nobody reaches across the couch to touch my arm. Nobody notices that I've put on a nice shirt or that I'm unusually quiet.
And the bed.
Dear God, the bed.
There is something almost unbearable about having an entire side of a mattress available when you'd surrender everything you own to feel someone breathing beside you again.
At seventy, society seems to assume our need for tenderness has somehow expired.
It hasn't.
My heart is seventy.
My need to be loved is ageless.
I still want affection, companionship, laughter, romance, and the glorious comfort of knowing someone is genuinely happy that I walked through the door.
I don't want to spend my remaining years merely remembering what love felt like.
I want to feel it again.
And perhaps that is what makes loneliness at seventy so terrifying.
I am not finished loving.
I am simply living in a world where the person who knew how to love me best is gone.
But love does not vanish just because the person who awakened it is gone. It remains in the hand that still reaches across the sheets, in the words that rise to my lips with nowhere to land, in the part of me that still believes tenderness is worth wanting.
So every night, when I turn out the light, my hand finds the place where hers used to be. I always tell her how my day went.
And for one aching moment, in the darkness, I am not only remembering what I lost.
I am remembering that I am still capable of love.
And perhaps that is not the loneliest truth of all.
Perhaps it is a promise.
The heart that can grieve this deeply has not gone empty. It is still open. It is still reaching. Somewhere beyond the silence of this house, there may be another hand waiting to find mine—not to replace Rebecca, because no one could, but to meet the love that remains.
Until then, I will keep getting up. I will put on the nice shirt. I will answer the phone, accept the invitation, sit beside someone who needs company, help other caregivers how to get through another day and let the world surprise me when it can.
I have lost the life I knew.
But I have not lost my capacity to live.
And as long as I can still love, still hope, still reach toward another human being, my story is not over.
The bed may be empty tonight.
But I am still here.
And here, even at seventy, is not the end.
Amanda Lees retweeted
From some dude named "Luke" on Fakebook ( I laughed out loud on this one):
"Fuck my life , Before anyone starts, no, she’s not been neglected, abandoned or rescued from a shipwreck in the North Atlantic. The daft little bastard has been out in the garden, in the rain. She’s got an entire house to sit in. Warm beds, soft blankets, central heating, food on demand and two fully grown idiots who wait on her like she’s the fucking Queen of England. But no. Apparently today was the perfect day to go outside and audition for the role of a drowned Victorian orphan. And rather than dry herself off somewhere sensible, she’s dragged her soaking wet carcass upstairs and collapsed on the bedding like she’s just walked 400 miles through enemy territory to deliver an urgent message from the front. Look at her!! She looks like somebody’s tried to clean a chimney with a fucking toilet brush.
And the expression on her face!!! Like the humans are the bastards responsible for the weather!!
I’m half expecting her to cough up a tiny bit of seawater and whisper, “Tell my story.” £50 says she’ll be demanding Dreamies within the hour. Has anybody else got a cat with absolutely no survival instincts, or have we somehow adopted the world’s first waterproofing failure with whiskers?"
Just had to share. I laughed so hard!
It’s Children In Read time…the charity book auction that benefits kids as part of Children In Need and I’ve honestly all out this year. Lot 257. See you there jumblebee.co.uk/childreninre…
Amanda Lees retweeted
Neither Cartier-Bresson, Banksy nor Cold War Steve could have come up with such an image. Absolutely perfect composition and lighting (even the road signs are perfect)! 😍
Amanda Lees retweeted
I have two articles in this month’s edition of The Light. Here’s one - about the diabolical murder of a retired NHS surgeon in hospital.
His daughter Jan is in my support group.
Be warned: this story is absolutely horrific.
Amanda Lees retweeted
A research into cat behavior shows that domestic cats regard humans as social peers rather than superiors, often perceiving their owners as large, awkward kittens.
Far from being aloof or defiant, a cat’s apparent indifference stems from a profound interspecies mismatch in social expectations.
As anthrozoologist John Bradshaw explains, cats—unlike dogs—never evolved to recognize humans as dominant leaders or authority figures. Instead, they filter all interactions through an exclusively feline framework. Behaviors like kneading on your lap or licking your hair are not mere displays of affection; they are the same grooming and bonding rituals cats reserve for close kin or pride members. In their eyes, we are simply enormous, somewhat clumsy fellow cats who require inclusion in the group.
This absence of hierarchical deference accounts for cats’ frequent disregard of commands or household rules. Treating us as equals, they follow cat-to-cat social protocols in every encounter. The “gifts” of dead prey on the doorstep or constant shadowing around the home are acts of care toward what they see as a big, furless, rather inept companion.
Recognizing this mindset transforms the human-cat relationship from one based on authority and obedience to one of mutual companionship. It turns out that while many owners believe they have domesticated their cats, the cats themselves are quietly convinced they are patiently tending to their oversized, adopted family members.
[Bradshaw, J. (2013). Cat Sense: How the New Feline Science Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet. Basic Books]
An excellent evisceration by @MarinaHyde…
I’ve written about Tom Hiddleston’s current press tour, which I am hugely enjoying
marinahyde.com/p/tom-hiddles…
Amanda Lees retweeted
Extraordinary letter in @ft from former UK defence attaché at Moscow embassy - we warned you about Putin but you listened to the City instead
Amanda Lees retweeted
Nobody did more to block the truth than Boris Johnson whose first act as PM was to ennoble the Baron of Siberia but he did not act alone. Nor did Keir Starmer make any attempt to disclose what the govt knew.
But now the govt must tell us what it actually knows.
2/
Amanda Lees retweeted
So, a British PM finally confirms what many suspected for a long time- direct interference from the Kremlin on Brexit vote.
So- is this the point we not only undo Brexit ?
And is it time to haul Johnson May and the whole shebang in front of the courts for deliberately withholding this information from Parliament and the public??
They knew - the referendum result was unsafe but still she and then Johnson persisted with it and wouldn't let Parliament discuss it.
Is there consequences?
And - Remind us about the roles played by Aaron Banks, Steve Bannon, Nigel Farage, Cambridge Analytica, Murdoch, Trump in advancing Russian interests by severing Britain from Europe?!?! With DISASTEROUS consequences.
Amanda Lees retweeted
hey does anyone else also thinks its eerily coincidental that the moment women with autism and adhd start to get recognised and diagnosed we suddenly see a wave of people pushing this ‘over-diagnosis’ rhetoric
ADHD and autism at risk of over-diagnosis, says report, with author due to speak to BBC bbc.in/3VBz5jE
