With springlike optimism in the air, my name is now down for the Latitude Festival in July, probably reading from Cleaning Up. I really hope I’ll be able to do it, especially as some friends are getting married in Italy not long after that, and it would be just wrong not to go.
July sounds a long way away, but the three months that have passed since the stroke have gone by in a flash, and I’m starting to climb the walls here. Actually, I’ve never been to a festival sober. If I manage to go, should I take a portable scrabble kit?
And now, a Nature Note. Forget the first cuckoo, have you noticed the number of robins there are? They’re everywhere, single and in pairs. One flew along the gardens next to me as I walked down the road the other day. And Alex was sitting in his garden the other day when two of them came up and started hanging about on the lawn. Then, apparently, one of them flew up, perched on his knee, and started singing at him! To cap it all, a few days later another robin, or even the same one, appeared and sat on his shoe.
Apparently robins are very territorial, so this robin, if it was the same one, was probably shouting to all the other robins in the vicinity, ‘Hey losers, check out my Big Pink Thing. Eat eggshell, mingerz.’
