LIFE is a journey along whose path we learn different things, sometime about ourselves, sometimes we know where we are going while at other times we are lost.

Judy Leigh, from Wellington has written a road trip book, and while not giving us a road map at the same time, she does allow her characters to experience life up close and personal.

Her debut novel which will be published in paperback, audio and digital on April 19, is called A Grand Old Time.

In the blurb about the book it states: “Evie Gallagher is regretting her hasty move into a Dublin care home. She may be seventy-five and recently widowed, but she’s absolutely not dead yet and on a road to adventure.

Judy, 57, has been on her road of own discovery. For 20 years she worked as an Advanced Skills teacher of Theatre Studies.

But when her own children left to go to university she decided to ‘pick up the pen’ and follow her passion for writing.

This she did by completing an MA in Professional Writing at Falmouth University in 2015.

Judy said: “I wanted to know I could do something other than teach. I could have done the course and then gone back to teaching but writing for me had been a passion since I was three-years-old.

I loved the course as it was a fantastic opportunity. I had always wanted to do teaching but this was what I wanted to do.

“I think a lot of people who want to write cannot as they just do not have the time. Time is a luxury and I now have the time now.

“I started off this book as part of my project. I read parts of it to my fellow students who were very diverse.

"It was a hard to get their attention but I did and wrote the final 30,000 by Christmas which meant I had finished the book.”

One of the people Evie is based on in a small way is Judy’s mum Irene Stephens who was fun and feisty Judy has already written her next four books.

Her second novel could be called For Old Times Sake.