This is the first summer for two years I don't have swallows nesting
somewhere in the house.

When I opened the door the breeze blew an irridescent confetti across
the floor; butterfly wings. Red Admirals seem to have settled and died
in every room of the house. ( I rescued two I found bettering
themselves against the window panes. I've no idea how they get in -
perhaps they arrived as caterpillars and pupated in the house?

It's 8pm, and it the sunlight is brighter now than it was at midday.
The last time I slept here was Easter, when sleet was still falling, and
by 4.30 the curtains were drawn. Now I can read on the porch until 10,
and walk through the wood without a lamp at 11.

PS -

The stench of trainers in an unventilated Italian sleeper apartment is
as the fragrance of honeysuckle compared to the range of whiffs
explosively produced by 3 hungover unwashed squaddies drinking carlsberg
and eating egg mcmuffins at 8am on the Peterborough - York stretch of
the East Coast line.

I also have beer on my keyboard.

Quick Summary of the past 4 months

January: Frantic writing to meet deadline for "She Writes" - mentoring
program for British Women in Screenwriting.
Also - a long weekend with Corry and John, travelling through London on
the proceeds of a writer's grant. They'll be living in an apartment in
a hill town in Umbria for 3 months (Bastards!). Made faggots.

February: Frantic writing to meet deadline for a careers conference at
my old school. I have no idea what I can say except - "a career in
screenwriting involves 10 years training and practise and something like
90% of successful screenwriters leave the industry within 10 years of
their break through". Not sleeping well - actually, that an
understatement. By the end of the month I am subsisting on 2 hours a
night. Zombification ensues.

March: Frantic writing to produce new draft of old screenplay at
request. Also write, design and print manage new company brochure.
Still not sleeping - except for the 15 minutes face down on the keyboard
after lunch.

April: Volcanic Ash, Flu and Florence: While everyone was talking about
the new Dunkirk, and repatriating brits from Spain via the Bay of
Biscay, I was heading in the opposite direction, by train to Florence.
It rained and I shared an overnight carriage with 4 terrified teenage
boys. Woke up to rain and the smell of feet. No one can produce
trainer- reek as effectively as a 16 year old male. Or sleep so
soundly. Arrive Florence. Eat Gelato.

May: Writing frantically to meet deadlines for Galway Film Fair. Summer
arrives - even at the stone caravan. Then it disappears again. Obsess
about Gelato.

"The moon is like a toenail, floating in a murky glass of wine"

I was stumbled into a meeting of a group which had "ambitions" to
represent all British screenwriters. It was a glum experience. I had
wandered along with a friend, a producer who had been asked to give an
"update and download" from the Cannes festival, which had finished only
a few days earlier.

It was a glum experience - The venue was a basement, lined many year
before with offcuts of lino and carpet, and furnished with donated
sofas. The audience stayed in their coats (it was cold down there) and
listened politely as the producer described the state of the market,
then, just as politely disagreed with everything he said.

In vain he explained that he wasn't in fact proscribing what writers
should or shouldn't write - he was only describing which scripts - of
all kinds - were making it into production, and how.

I think I understood what was happening. Would be writers spend time in
their heads creating a singular reality. It makes perfect sense to me
that they would continue to do so when they emerged back into the real
world. Sensitive dramas about Polytechnic lecturers facing the mid-life
crisis still not outselling lo-budget horror? La-la-la, fingers in
ears, it's not true.

Then we broke for refreshments. I queued at a trestle table to buy wine
drawn by a volunteer from a wine box. It cost £2.00. I looked down.
There, in my glass, floated the toe nail clipping, a chunky crescent of
keratin that seemed to sum up the evening.

I was invited back a year or so later, by the same friend, who had been
asked by the group's committee to help them increase membership and
income. He wanted them to hear input from a screenwriter who had chosen
not to become a member.

I didn't mention the toenail.

Instead, I told them that I read their e-letter every month in the hope
of finding something relevant, but they only offered the same handful of
classes, recycled endlessly, and which all seemed to be addressed to
small scared animals living in holes under the pavement:

"Want to be a screenwriter? Get over your fears in this friendly
workshop, where we will explore ways of getting your ideas onto the page
- by the end of the afternoon you'll be writing! - £5.00 plus small
charge for tea and coffee"

I suggested that once this might hook beginners, they should attract
working writers to offer master-classes for those were trying to improve
their skills - like impro to improve dialogue writing, or ways to
tighten scene structure, or tips on improving packaging for pitching.
It would cost more - but I, and people I knew, would certainly pay for
the extra value they would offer.

"Oh, no" they replied "writers are poor. And shy. Very shy. Oh no -
we'd never get writers along to classes like that!"

"Most the emerging writers I know are holding down some kind of job, and
are motivated to learn. You can offer concessions if you need to - but
there are also those who can and will pay!"

No - there aren't any writers like that"

"I've met them in screenwriting groups - and at Cannes"

"Writers don't go to Cannes. If they went to Cannes they'd be producers"

"I went to Cannes"

"Writers don't go to Cannes"

It will come as no surprise to you that this organisation, which defined
its membership solely as writers without money who were too shy to
actually, well, write, folded without trace a few months later.

Arrrggghhhh - so unfair!

- I've had a smear of chocolate ice cream on my nose all afternoon, and
no one at work told me.

And yes, this does mean I made it to the Gelato shop. One scoop of
bitter chocolate sorbet, one of raspberry. Mmmmmm....

No icecream in the stone caravan - at least, not now the snow has
(finally) gone.
Inside it's as crisp and dry as a biscuit.

Ok, ok - I am ashamed

Euro is teetering on the brink of a second banking crisis - and I am
still fretting about the availability of ice cream.

I sit at my keyboard fantasising about tall cones of soft icy intensity
- coffee, pistachio, rose, lemon, almond - and then settle for a dash to
the newsagents for a tiny tub of Wall's Cream of Cornish.

Or - maybe - just maybe -

If I write 10 pages in the next 24 hours, I will make the 30 minute
round trip and queue at Scoop in Short's Garden!

The worst thing about our little heat wave is...

... that it is impossible to buy really good ice cream within walking
distance of where I am sitting right now.

I've been spoiled - I spent a weekend in Italy last month, eating gelato
at least once a day - and now a magnum fished out of the freezer bin at
Tescos just doesn't cut it. Too sweet, too rich, no intense shock of
flavour to cut through the milk and ice.

Ahem...

... normal service will be resumed shortly.