I have been absent from here for a while and the longer I didn't write the harder it was becoming to even think about doing so.

Since returning from England after my dear old dad's funeral, I have been strangely phobic about cyber-communication in all its forms. I read my e-mails but it has been a huge effort to reply to them when before I would zap out a reply quickly. I have been reading LiveJournal, just not posting.

So, I'm back. Life goes on but grief is a tricky bugger as it ambushes you when you least expect it. Crying while swimming lengths is not recommended as it messes up your breathing.

I have been doing a lot of reading, and whereas I have not not been writing I have been pre-writing in my head. Oddly, for me anyway, what I seem to want to write is poetry, something I have not done seriously for at least twenty years. I handed my latest novel in just before I left and I should probably tell my editor that I am now back, but perhaps I need to wait a little longer before going back to 1812 and a troubled father and son.

We celebrated our 28th wedding anniversary yesterday and I am happy to say that we both remembered. It's a long standing joke that we often forget it entirely. When we lived in England and I was still working as a teacher, it sometimes fell on the day after school ended and we would normally be travelling somewhere that day and suddenly remember mid way on a plane journey. For some reason, we both have difficulty remembering whether we got married on the 30th or 31st of July. Our memory tweaker is that we got married exactly one year and one day later than Prince Charles. Happily, there are no similariies between the two marriages. We went to a new local restaurant, Quatrefoil and had a very good meal indeed. We invited T along, but romantic that he is he managed to make sure that he was working and arranged a ride home so that neither of us had to drive to pick him up from the golf course at 9:30 p.m..

T is enjoying his job and we hardly see him for when he is not working he is playing golf - 54 holes in one day is his record. There are far worse things a fifteen year old boy could be doing.