Things were a little stormy... but now I'm on cloud nine

BBC meteorologist Carol Kirkwood weathered personal heartache when her first marriage ended. Now, with a new hubby and a second career as a successful romantic novelist, things couldn’t be sunnier

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FORGET the weather, here’s the news ‘about Carol Kirkwood. Everyone’s favourite breakfast TV forecaster has firmly established a parallel career as a bestselling writer of romantic fiction. Her first four books skipped up the charts and now here comes the fifth, Meet Me At Sunset, published this week.

As ever, she starts with the setting. For this latest offering, it is Majorca. “I love everything about it,’ says the permanently sunny Carol. “The scenery, the beaches, the mountains, the food, the people...”

On holiday there, sitting in a favourite restaurant one night with husband Steve, her eye was caught by an elegant woman in her 50s, hair in a chignon, ramrod straight back, dining alone and drinking white wine from a slender glass.

“I’m a real nosey parker, I love people-watching, and my mind went into overdrive,” she chuckles.

“I started fantasising about this woman’s life and why she was on her own. I decided there and then that she was going to be the main character in my next book.”

As fans of Carol’s chart-topping novels will know (“I’m no Tolstoy — these are beach reads, pure escapism”), this is a familiar tale of broken hearts, blackmail and betrayal, Hollywood glamour, closely guarded secrets and a last stab at happiness as the sun sets over the golden sands. “It’s a fairy story,” she says, without apology.

Carol’s loyal readership is predominantly female “although my dentist loves my books and he’s a man”.

What about the main man in her life? Just before Christmas 2023, Carol, 63, married serving police officer Steve Randall.

For 25 years she was married to Jimmy Kirkwood, not the Northern Irish hockey player as is so often mistakenly reported, but a Scottish businessman.

There was no dramatic ending to the marriage, she says. It just ran its course. That said, it is not easy breaking up with your husband if you have a public profile.