The buds and the bees

You'll be pleased to hear that my hibiscus bud turned into a flower. Here it is in all its glory, and a day or so later, there was a second one. And that was it. All the rest got eaten, bitten off, or simply disappeared. Disappointing. Next year I'll have to see if there's some way of protecting them.And this is a picture I may or may not have shown before. Around the centre is a bee. I wanted to capture this at the time when I was worried about lack of bees in the garden. The cranesbill, or perennial geraniums seemed to attract bees. Alas, they have more or less finished flowering now.

It's been a busy week since the family lunch. I tried to finish my account books to take to my ex brother in law, who's also our accountant, since we were invited to dinner at his house last night. We were half way there, when I remembered I'd left them on the floor of the office. We didn't turn back. We carried on and had a lovely meal and most enjoyable evening. We didn't leave till past midnight and didn't get to bed till 1 a.m.

Earlier in the week, we had a Guildford Writers' meeting and I read out a rehashed version of an earlier extract of the novel in progress. The consensus was I had improved it.

And there was also a meeting of the reading circle, at which we discussed Felix in the Underworld by John Mortimer. The general consensus of opinion was that it was not one of his best. I found it funny at times - he does good dialogue, as, of course, can be observed in the TV series Rumpole of the Bailey. As both a barrister and a writer, he was able to satirise both the legal profession and the world of writing and publicity. (The publicist in the novel constantly lies to all her novelists, saying that she's read their work and found it wonderful.) I think the fault lay in the way that his characters were, in the main, caricatures and it was difficult to feel empathy for them. Maybe some writers have no intention of trying to make you care about their characters, and perhaps John Mortimer set out purely to write a farce, and not to involve his readers in the lives of his characters. But it is difficult to get involved with a book if you don't care what happens to the fictional people in it. And this was the case with Felix.