A date with your ex

That's what it's like when you really want to be getting on with the JA - new book - but the proofs of the last one arrive. It's now nearly three years since you did the first draft of what's just dropped through the letter box. Some bits - some very few bits in my case - your editor didn't object to so they're now completely unfamiliar. Did I write this? Those are the best bits though. Most of the proofs are so like that person you once thought interesting but now...well, you've heard the stories, you know how they end. You know what they want to drink.

Finished the proofs yesterday. Can't just go back to the JA today. That's tacky. Decide to have another day off. Get out of this village. There's an added reason to do this. At home this terrible howling noise is making it hard to write a note to the milkman never mind anything new. The noise is coming from my dog Jem who has just had his second birthday. He's not celebrating -he doesn't know, after all, there wasn't a cake - but what he does know is that in dog terms he's now a man. And there are two female dogs in the village who are definitely up for it. Wild-eyed dogs that are complete strangers are appearing on the green and risking death by tractor just to find these bitches. Bitches is exactly what they are- they're making Jem's life and therefore my life a misery. Not exactly feminist this thought: why must people have female dogs at all? Without them, all the village companion animals could live in this sort canine Cistercian retreat, pleasures of the flesh not on the agenda. Well not that pleasure. There's still long country walks. And bones.

As it does every year, the eggspiracy interest has finally folded - we live at the end of a lane so it can take weeks for something else to come along. Last recorded mention of eggs from neighbour was that this time the eggs seemed smaller than previously. They weren't. But who do you complain to about a falling off in quality of anonymous gifts?
What I promised myself I'd do today is not spend any more time wandering round out there soliciting hot news of somebody's trip to the gym (You're going AGAIN today? - long pause - Yes, it seems just the once won't do it) and more time working on The J.A.

I've been thinking I need somewhere else to say things rather than to friends and family. Out loud. Over Easter what happened for the last three Easters happened again. Someone in our village left a chocolate egg on the doorstep early Easter Sunday. Not quite everyone in the village gets on but most do. This gives the inhabitants two things they can do. 1. eat the egg and 2. develop their conspiacy theories about who does and who doesn't get an egg. Me and my husband have eaten our egg by mid-afternoon. I don't need a theory. I know why some people don't get eggs. So I was telling someone who doesn't live here about the egg-gift (o-oh, nice they say) but I can't stop there. I have to say if I was writing this on the fifth year...I tell them what would happen. There's silence. Not even nervous laughter. Got to stop saying things out loud.