Monday morning- must be time for coffee

Monday 9th March

Just listening to a Radio 4 interview with Joan Bakewell who has just written her first novel at 74 – feel this should inspire me. Listening to her talk though I am slightly downcast by what an interesting life she has had, including a long running affair with Harold Pinter. I am finding writing regularly in this blog a help in that it actually forces me to sit down and think about my writing, so perhaps as an aspiring writer I should continue with this course of action rather than rushing out to find difficult and brooding playwrights to seduce!

It has rained so much overnight that the lawn is flooded and I had to fish a frog doing a rather frantic breaststroke, out of the pool. I put it into the large water pot with the goldfish but it now seems to have disappeared. I peered hopefully into the pot hoping the goldfish haven’t eaten it. Charlotte is theoretically in charge of feeding them so it is quite conceivable that they are so ravenous that they would attack a frog with relish.

The highlight of the morning was hearing the leathery flap of wings and looking up to see a host of bats flying overhead in the very early dawn as they returned back to their roost in the Botanic Gardens. As the light of the day came in all the cockatoos that live in the trees down by the beach come to life with incredibly raucous cries. To my ears they sound almost prehistoric and during the odd moment when I can actually hear them over my fevered panting as I lumber round the running circuit I feel as if I have been transported back to a Jurassic jungle.

I am off to meet a friend for coffee. We probably meet up once every couple of months and we always go to a patisserie owned and run by a Frenchman who is both a friend of my friend and also crews with Simon on the boat that friend’s husband races every Friday evening. We have now probably met at the patisserie four times for our incredibly indulgent coffee, friendship and chat enlivened by the delicious little morsels the owner keeps slipping us. Every time we arrange to go my friend waxes lyrical about how charming it will be to sit out on the pavement on a little table and how we will feel as if we are part of a Parisian neighbourhood. I start drooling at the thought of my sugar fix, guzzled whilst pretending I am in Paris without the language difficulty, and without fail each time we arrive it begins to pour and we end up sitting on a pair of milk crates inside the shop. Still absolutely delicious and still a real treat, but definitely not Paris.