A Month Off

I guess that I should just regard it as a month's holiday in Brazil. Even naked apes are entitled to holidays! It turned out that the computer wasn't quite dead after all and, after a clean it shed its shroud and stumbled, a Lazarus-in- Paradise, forth from the workshop and here we are again; although, a new computer is on the way. I had nearly forgotten what clouds were until a couple of days ago as we had had a nearly biblical forty days without rain but seeing them reminded me that every cloud has a silver lining, and the consequence of my enforced seaside holiday was not deck-chairing and hammocking with tall drinks but writing with a pen and paper (with short drinks). The result is that I have mapped out a novel with a legal mystery and greed and sculduggery and a bit of romance as the themes. It's been boiling away in my head for nearly thirty years and is the one novel that I have in me. I guess that JFK was right and the only failure is not to aim too high and miss the mark but to aim too low and hit it - and so my aim is a book in which someone might say that Peter and  Ian Fleming meet Sir Impy Biggs. But we'll see...