Westron wind

Well, the frescoes are all over now and I shall miss them.We ended with Altichiero in Padua - a fine cycle. But it will be good to get Thursday mornings back - I have so much to do!

Finished covers have arrived for City of Secrets and finished copies of Kings and Queens of the Bible (due out in May). Secrets proofs should have come but now won't till Monday and I'll have only 10 days to turn them round. It all takes away from Troubadour but it certainly makes me feel like a writer. (Actually this is true all the time now).

The Falconer's Knot has been nominated for a prize in the States. I'd love to win this one because I could then say I had a "Malice Domestic Agatha Award"! That would certainly be worth having.

I had to drive over to a Gloucestershire village to meet an artist last week and would have been lost without Tim - lots of leafy lanes and muddy roads. As is his wont, he said confidently "you have reached your destination," at a point where there were no street names. I parked on the green and wandered up a street with no house names when a man carrying the Guardian passed by and said "Are you looking for X?" Obviously you can take the girl out of North London but not vice versa.

I read Stardust and actually thought the film was better, in terms of a more coherent plot, though it's possibly a bit overbalanced by Robert de Niro's camp pirate captain, which wasn't even suggested in the book.

Am now re-reading John Julius Norwich's Shakespeare's Kings, in preparation for The Glorious Moment, which is happening the week after next.

I heard lots of versions of Poulenc's Gloria on CD Review and felt nostalgic because my London choir sang it at least once. Also heard Melvyn's Bragg's In Our Time on King Lear, where Jonathan Bate said, incredibly, that Cordelia "couldn't think of anything to say" in the first scene, showing that even Shakespeare scholars can be downright daft, And the three experts agreed that the storm scene was like The Waste Land. I think Becket would be the better comparison.

I saw far too much television! Torchwood, ER, Life in Cold Blood and Lewis. This last was a scream, especially the producer's idea of a typical student house in Oxford - red brick double-fronted, lovely big living-room with tastefully chosen furniture and no dirty dishes etc. etc. Eat your heart out, People's Republic of East Oxford!

I didn't feel the earthquake but was kept awake most of last night by the hurricane - why wasn't that on the news?