Golden Duck

We had a good weekend, or part of one, at the Aldeburgh Literary Festival. Would have been even better from my point of view if I hadn't had a gammy leg which sent me whimpering back to Essex on Saturday night. So I had the pleasure of watching Francis play Marx to Tristan Hunt's Engels on Saturday (AND Sandy Toksvig / John McCarthy on Friday evening - they do you well in Aldeburgh) but missed all the treats on Sunday.

Our friend Silas Brown was working on John and Mary James's bookstall for the entire weekend and was therefore in a position to dish out star ratings. On Sunday he returned at lunchtime ecstatic about Jenny Uglow's session on Charles II 'Jenny Uglow kicks ass!' is what he is reliably reported to have said. In the afternoon, however, he (sweet boy)decided that the Golden Cockle should go to Francis for his Strange Days speech. What, I wondered, could be even more laudatory that 'kicks ass'? I thought of our own children and their rich vocabulary. If they had genuinely agreed with Silas's high rating I think they would have said that Francis's session was 'really sick'.

I find myself at a loss for words ..

Monday March 8th 2010. Well, that's what I said (or didn't say) to start with but, now that I've seen the UK paperback in its strange new guise at both the Essex Book Festival launch and the Aldeburgh Literary Festival, I think it's rather brilliant.

(It also manages to match Francis's flashy new Essex Cricket Club Vice-President's tie!)

That's the new title for Francis's brother Andrew Wheen's forthcoming history of telecommunications to be published by Praxis. We thought the previous title, the Biggest Machine in the World was good but this one's a winner. And Andrew promises that WE will be able to understand it. (sub-title, by the way, is 'How Modern Telecommunications Evolved from the Telegraph to the Internet'. Just to be puffectly clear.)

Running sheets arrived on Friday - thrilled with the way the photos have turned out. You can see the dimples on their knees! Only sad that no-one - other than Francis, Roger and I will truly appreciate what a fabulous job Lesley did to get such wonderful clear scans from the yellowing pages of the 1934 US edition. She devised a method of scanning every page in colour then using paint shop pro to turn all the yellow to white. Then changed to grayscale. The result is a joy to look upon.    (Good to read as well)

I was truly delighted to meet Francis's cousin Nigina Romer at a family gathering after Christmas. Nigina's father was killed defusing a land mine in Agfganistan and she has grown up with her mother in Switzerland. Now, aged 16, she sails a laser radial and is part of Swiss National squad. Nigina's sights are set on the 2016 Olympics but my ambitions are rather more short term: I want to watch her compete in this summer's laser world championships at Largs. And I shan't feel in the least unpatriotic if I'm cheering her on to win.