Count down to winter

Today is the day after the longest day of the year. It's beautiful, sunny and warm with a gentle breeze. My one and only follower has reminded me that I haven't continued blogging and that I should - all in the sake of creative writing!

I have just been to the garden centre to buy some wigwams for sweet peas I bought ages ago, so this is not going to be long as I must plant them. There are lots of weeds to be pulled too and general tidying up.

We have a new puppy, a border terrier called Rory who is very sweet but has become a bit wild.We have started taking him to classes and there is one tonight but I am going to ask John to take him as it's book club tonight.

We have been reading "Deaf Sentence" by David Lodge. This is a Times review of the book.

"Lodge's hero, Desmond Bates, is a former professor of linguistics four years into a gratefully taken early retirement. Lately, however, the activity with which he had imagined that he would fill his freedom from academic servitude has begun to languish. He misses the structure of the university calendar that spared him for so long from waking, as he does now every morning, to confront the question: what shall I do with myself today?

There is more: Desmond's second wife, Fred (short for Winifred) has undergone a middle-aged renaissance - launching a successful interior-design business and simultaneously subjecting herself to a radical makeover. The effect on Desmond, he records, is “an unexpected onset of... late-flowering lust”.

Something beside his vague sense of purposelessness is bothering Desmond: the eight-year age gap between Winifred and himself seems to be widening, his sense of it intensified by the contrast between his increasing deafness and occasional impotence, and Winifred's newfound vigour. The scene is set for catastrophe and it duly approaches from two directions, embodied by Desmond's elderly father and a disturbing young American student, Alex Loom, who is determined that Desmond, rather against his will, should supervise her PhD thesis on the stylistic content of suicide notes." It was an easy amusing read, rather poingent in places especially when dealing with his father and the ecentrities of old age. So I am looking forward to the discussion tonight with my group of girlfriends from the village.

In the book club we meet once a month and we choose books opnce a year and that time is coming up soon. So any good reads anyone? Last month we read "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peeling Pie Society". This was a fun read too but sad too in places. Read it if you can.

Well I had better get out into the garden now!