Saturday Night And Sunday Morning

I spent a fair portion of Saturday printing off the edited and rewritten version of The Quiet War. Now it will go off to the copy editor, who’ll scrutinise it for every kind of goof and mark it up, and then I’ll get a final chance to fix the prose before it gets set. This morning, frosty and crystalline, a fine long walk along Regent’s Canal and hooking through Camden to Regent’s Park. Where snowdrops and daffodils are in bloom together, a very odd sight to someone used to gradation of the seasons. When I started this blog, two years ago, I noted in early April that my neighbour’s magnolia tree was just coming into bloom; this year, about six weeks earlier, it’s not that far off. It’s like being caught in one of those scenes in the old movies, where calendar pages flip by to signify passing time, except they’re blowing past all at once, as the whole wide world teeters on its axis . . .