with his hat set jauntily a-head

That hat again - Francis on Goldenray

There's something extraordinarily cheering about watching Francis set out with his MCC panama just five or ten degrees off the vertical. It means that he's away on a jaunt and he knows that he's totally legit in escaping the school run and the cooking and the shed for a few hours or days. Usually of course the panama means cricket - England at Lord's or the High Roding Colts at any number of green venues tucked all over the county. But, as neither of those almost interchangeable delights are currently in season, this week he's popped on the panama to fly to Dubai. For literature not leather and willow.

There could have been a crisis. Once he'd read Peter Carling's fab review of Strange Days Indeed in the Washington Post we almost needed to make a mad dash to St John's Wood to purchase the next size up in straws. Luckily Carling had a quibble. He didn't like the book's subtitle. The 1970s were only A golden age of paranoia not the definitive THE. As that's always been my line (and Francis agrees, though not his publisher) the person currently feeling smug is me. And I wear woolly hats which expand ad infinitum.

Jenny Uglow kicks ass

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'.

new cover for Strange Days Indeed

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!)