Discounts and doorbells

Book News:

There's a 25% discount on The Hit List direct from the publisher this month so buy early buy often. And this weekend only, there's also a 20% discount on Sunday Haiku from Rainbow Ebooks, so Sunday is definitely a good shopping day.

Meanwhile, The Delaneys and Me found itself briefly at No 62 in the Amazon charts, and Tommy's Blind Date was equally briefly at no 50. That was certainly a nice feeling anyway. I've also, much to my delight, looked again at The Executioner's Cane, and have this weekend added 2,000 words to its wordcount, hurrah. It might just become a novel one day, you never know.

Recent meditations are:


Meditation 440
After the clamour
of battle
and the stark
inevitability of death:

the quiet washing away
of blood
and the song
of the women.


Meditation 441
The sea calls him
even now in this land
of desert and whispered song.

It is like God:
mysterious, other,
a depth and story

he cannot imagine
and to which
he may never belong.


The Sunday haiku (there's been a heck of a lot of ladybirds about over the last couple of days, mainly all over our white outer door in colourful fashion ...) is:

Sun-flung ladybirds
paint my door with promises
red and ebony.

Life News:

K returned from Dubai (hurrahs!!!!) which was totally delightful and brought me a present of a camel in a snow-globe. So I can add that with pride to my burgeoning snow-globe collection. I'm sure it will be happy to join the old Pope in a snowstorm, the Holy Family in a snowstorm and Noah's Ark in a snowstorm, amongst others. Never say we're not classy here in the shires.

Yesterday, Pauline and Tony from Kent visited us for lunch and we played catch-up which was great. Pauline's been keeping up with the traumas of the House Saga (or rather Lack of House Saga) and very sweetly (pun not intended) bought me loads of goodies to cheer me up - including wine, home-made jam (mmmm ....), a box of chocolate biscuits, and an outrageously enormous box of Thorntons which is actually so incredibly large that it won't even fit in the fridge. Well, gosh, and thank you, my dear!! I suspect that K and I will be nearly as large as the box after we've eaten them all ...

Meanwhile, the DIY project is continuing - and we now have, for the first time in the 17 years of being here, a real-live front doorbell. Whatever next? It's almost like being normal members of the local community, you know - like having a real bridge to the outside world, which up until now we've largely ignored as nobody knows how to get up here anyway. We live in terror of someone actually ringing the dang thing, but I suppose that, like the phone, we can always on the whole ignore it. Sociopaths 'r' us, eh ...

Anne Brooke