Happy birthday, Shakespeare!

Well, City of Ships is "finished." That is to say I have a 84K+ word document which I have now finished checking. But there are a few scenes I want to add before sending it off.

I also wrote my essay on Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini - the difference between the book and the film. Most of the in-between has been spent celebrating my birthday and enjoying the sunshine.

I share it with Hitler, which irked me for many years. Why couldn't my mother have hung on a few days and let me be born the same day as Shakespeare? But then I wouldn't have been an Aries. And I am.(Actually I think that he was too. At least not a Taurus).

I've nearly finished reading the fascinating Peter Ackroyd Shakespeare book, which has had to languish while I read several novels by people I knew and a book I'm reviewing. And I also read The White Tiger.It was OK but not really so remarkable as to win the Booker.

And I had to laugh at the blurb, which said that Adiga was giving us a rare view of India's dark underbelly, or some such. Every single book set in India that I have read has shown me nothing but that underbelly! Rushdie, Desai, Mistry, Roy - when do they ever do anything else?

I would have seen the film, In the Loop, but couldn't face going into a dark cinema to listen to someone swearing like Alastair Campbell, while the sun was shining so temptingly outside.

I saw the last episode of Lewis and still didn't spot the scene I saw being filmed in St. Giles last year.

Elementary

It's lovely when a school visit goes well. My trip to the Abbey School in Reading (girls' independent) was one such. It was a day early for World Book Day and everything went as it should, from the moment I saw the parking sign saying "Reserved for Mary Hoffman" till I left, bearing chocolates, flowers and wine. Even the PowerPoint worked! And the IT guy stayed through all three sessions, just to be helpful.

Only about a handful of the hundreds of school visits I've done in my life have been like that. If there were more, I'd be more willing to do them.

I took delivery of my four mosaic prints by Robert Field this week. Bob was organising an exhibition in Cirencester and came over for dinner with a friend.

We're not sure quite where to hang them yet but it must be somewhere good. They are quite stunning. We couldn't make it to the private view of this new exhibition but we'll have till May.

The details of the Mexican wedding we've been invited to in October just came. It sounds very exciting - in Tampico.

But now I realise that I'm leaving for the Bologna book fair a fortnight today and the weekend in between is the SAS conference in Coventry. But the book is going much better.

We went to see Julius Caesar in Bristol yesterday. It was very good and so much better than the one we saw at the RSC in Stratford two years ago or so. And it made me feel that it was a much better play than I had given it credit for.

We've seen the first segment of the film of The Garden of the Finzi-Contini in Italian class. I've seen it before but was struck by how strong the adaptation was. Bassani hated it and there are some bits towards the end where I'd agree with him. But I did enjoy it.

I'm now reading Peter Ackroyd's biography of Shakespeare and loving it.