Long time no post, I hear you say. But inspired by guilt, here I am again. It’s springtime, and so the sight, yesterday only, of the spring sunshine, inspires me to return to the topic of my garden. How lovely it was to see all the open faces of the purple crocuses, and just a few yellow ones, too; in the warm day that qualified as spring, yesterday, I even saw bees visiting one flower after another. It’s my ambition to have flowers in the garden at every time of year, and in fact, in this year’s mild winter, there were polyanthus that flowered in November and December. I saw a daffodil about six weeks ago, in someone else’s garden, but we haven’t achieved that, and in fact the buds are only now appearing in ours. We had about 19 snowdrops - the fact that I can count them shows how few there are. Now I’ve split them for about the fourth time, so that they are in about four or five different places. One of these days, my border will be full of them - that’s what I’m setting out to achieve. I did the same thing with polyanthus many years ago, and now they are dotted all over the place in the garden.
Apart from enjoying the colour, I am anxious to provide a good habitat for bees, which seem to be in danger these days, so I’m always pleased to see a bee visitor. This reminds me that my short story, The Honey Hunters will be out shortly, in e-format. It is to be published by www.untreedreads.com and you will also be able to find it on Amazon and other outlets, probably within the next fortnight. In the meantime, my other books have been doing extremely well as Kindle books. A Bottle of Plonk had a free day, recently, and this inspired quite a lot of interest. However, I am receiving hard cash for my efforts too. I am getting monthly royalties from Amazon, three monthly royalties from Untreed Reads, and my payments from Public Lending Right and the Authors Licensing and Copyright Society have been paid to my bank, this month. All very satisfactory, though not enough to live on, unless I had had the appetites or needs of - well possibly a bee.
On the entertainment front, I’ve recently seen The Iron Lady which I enjoyed and, in Haslemere, performed by Opera South, Merrie England. Last night I watched an old Lewis. I wonder if anyone else has seen this one, in which Hathaway returns to the place where he lived in his youth and meets up with a family called Mortmaigne. I’ve seen this a few times, and each time, I wonder how much the scriptwriter of this was influenced by Brideshead Revisited with its aristocratic family, the Marchmains, and the hero who returns to Brideshead and remembers the family there. I’m currently reading Imaginary Friends by Alison Lurie. Review will be available soon.
