There’s always a revival of a Rodgers and Hammerstein show going on somewhere.

In a former life, I was in a few. You might have seen me, in an end of the pier show, strutting my stuff.

Love of musical theatre runs in my family. My mother took me to the Hippodrome theatre in my childhood hometown. See this page. My love affair with the stage began then. When my little sister was born, she loved music, too, and her favourite song of all was Bali Ha’i from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific.

The best musical shows feature strong stories and strong characters, as well as memorable melodies, of course. One of the worst criticisms my mother might come out with would be you can’t come out of the theatre humming the tunes.

I’ve been humming Rodgers and Hammerstein tunes all my life. So has my sister. The year I played Bloody Mary at the end of the pier show, she couldn’t be there to see it. We both regret that. There’s a line in Bloody Mary’s big song that takes us both back to her baby days when she bobbed up and down to the rhythm of the music before she’d learned to say the words properly.

When I decided to write a romantic short story, I wanted to write about people who don’t quite fit into the usual parameters of what is considered the norm. We all have our own Bali Ha’i, a magical place where everything will work out just as we’d like it. In South Pacific, that place is an island, out of bounds to the marines. In my short story Not Rodgers and Hammerstein, that place is . . . you can find out here.

May we all find our own Bali Ha’i – wherever and whatever that may be.