Well, at the Writing Britain exhibition at the British Library yesterday, I listened to a recording of Ciaran Carson reading his poem ‘Belfast Confetti’. I hadn’t come across it before, and I thought it startlingly, starkly beautiful. Less than three hours later, on the train, I was reading The Boy Who Could See Demons by Carolyn Jess-Cooke, and there was the poem, quoted in full.

If that isn’t a poem saying it wants to be a blog post, I don’t know what is. Click here, and you’l find a page with both the text of the poem and a box which is a recording of the poet reading it. I’d recommend the second option: I think you will find it a minute and eighteen seconds well spent.

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1. I went through the copy-edited manuscript for Thrive, and it needed hardly any changes. (That sentence shows very well why a copy editor is a girl’s best friend.)

2. All of my travel arrangements have worked (so far).

3. A man on the tube who was looking over my shoulder as I played iPhone Scrabble (I don’t think he was being nosy, it was just busy and he couldn’t really not look) burst out,’Oh, I say! Well played!’ when I put STANZAS on a triple word score.

4. Another man on the tube, who looked as though he had spent all day painting and/or plastering, offered me his seat. I declined, because I had been mostly sitting down all day and I suspected him of mostly standing up.

5. I met up with Ned, and I drank rhubarb cider, while he went for mulled apple and honey.

We were at The Udderbelly to hear John Sinclair and Howard Marks, who are a million times more effective than any ‘just say no’ drugs campaign, but the event was oddly charming.

6. I had sorrel for the first time in my life, and it was DELICIOUS. Nathalie (provider of the sorrel, in a sauce with salmon) says that even I, with my Northern clime and my anything-but-green fingers, could grow it.

7. My beloved godson Ellis left this note by my bed.

It was accompanied by a tableau of fighting cat action figures and a meringue, wrapped in a tissue with a daisy on top.

8. I saw Jo, who works in publishing, which was a lovely thing in itself, AND she gave me two shiny new hardbacks. I think people-who-work-in-publishing forget how utterly thrilling for a reader it is when someone gives them a book. (Please see earlier comment re copy editor.)

9. Smita told me possibly my favourite ‘you can’t argue with that’ quote of all time, from Wyatt Earp: “Speed is fast, but accuracy is final.”

10. I have decided to let a kitten find me.

I hope you are having one of those weeks too.

It shouldn’t really be quite so happy-making. The situation in Tibet is horrible, the idea of ladies with poison in their headscarves trying to murder a 76 year old monk surreal. (Oh, OK, and also a tiny bit funny, but only because they didn’t succeed.)

But just hearing the Dalai Lama talk – about the need for letting go of anger, of the way he is sure things will change for the better – is enough to lift the heart, I think.

See what you think, here.

More good news on the novel front: there’s going to be a German edition of ‘Surrounded By Water’! Hooray!

I have no idea when, yet. I’m guessing it will be sometime after I finish the manuscript…. which I’m now 50,000 words into. More than half way, I think, although you never know when someone’s going to wander off and do something unexpected for a couple of thousand words. (I don’t, anyway. Who’d have thought that Blake….hmm? Full of surprises, that one. )

a glorious bodice-ripper of a family saga, full of lace and velvet and revolting peasantry and people gasping in parlours  - and attics, for quite different reasons. (No, I’m not telling you, you’ll have to read it for yourself.) And one of the best things was that, when I got to the end, I didn’t have to wonder What Happened Next because I could go straight to my shelf and pluck down The Favoured Child. Which I will follow, in due course, with Meridon.

I’m not sure whether my love of three-books-in-a-row is just another manifestation of my big book fetish: there’s definitely something about having the feeling of living properly in another world.

One of my favourite reading experiences ever was Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, the end of which saw me sobbing my heart out in Carluxccio’s in Kingston, not just for the end of the story – no! no! let there be love! – but for the loss of these books that had kept me breathless and enchanted for weeks.

Maybe it’s not so much the trilogies that are special, as any series, and the opportunity to engage long-term. Margi, a frequent commenter here, has written a bit-more-than-a-trilogy for older children, about a squirrel called Urchin who lives on the isle of Mistmantle, and those books are enchanting and beautiful and come highly recommended, especially for those of you who are still lucky enough to read to small people on a regular basis.

What trilogies/series do you recommend? Has anyone got through Lord Of The Rings? I must admit that ‘The Hobbit’ pretty much finished me, so I put that particular trilogy on the ‘life’s too short’ shelf.

11. The smells you get after rain. Lots of people mentioned this one, and I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t… especially when I walked through the garden yesterday afternoon and was ambushed by that honest, earthy, promising smell.

12. The fact that there’s a word for the smell of the earth after rain. I didn’t know this, but Rachel and Lou did. (I know Rachel and Lou on the physical plane, and this doesn’t surprise me a bit.). The word is ‘petrichor’.

13. I’d thought about the joy of watching a small child jump in a puddle: I hadn’t considered what a life-saver jumping in puddles is, for a family with small people who have been cooped up in bad weather. Natalie’s family has a name for this: ‘puddle hunting’.

14. Sarah mentioned the way spiderwebs look, and that sparked a very clear memory for me. I was a child, I was (I think) on one of those Sunday-afternoon walks that, when you’re a child, it seems puzzling that the grown-ups are so very keen on. And there was a fence – I suppose I must have been about eye-level with it – stretching away into the distance, and it was covered in spiderwebs, and they were all glistening and gleaming.

15. So, let’s add, rainy days spark old memories that make you smile.

16. And then, there’s the whole washed-cleanness of everything, afterwards.

It’s beautiful, here, today. I may go spiderweb-hunting.

So this morning, I thought I’d have a bash at thinking up some reasons to love the rain. Please, join in in the comments. (Unless your house is flooded, your car is under water, your kitchen ceiling has collapsed under weight of water, or similar, in which case you are exempt, and perfectly entitled to snarl and grouse and ignore me.)

I love the rain because:

1. I get to do my whole dress-and-flat-boots thing for a bit longer. Which is, let’s be honest, not unlike getting to wear a nightie and slippers all day.

2. Northern places built of grey and beige stone glow and hum with life when they are wet.

3. When you don’t have to go anywhere, sitting inside listening to rain on the windows feel extra-comfortable and warm.

4. When you do have to go somewhere, there’s a good chance you’ll see a small child jumping in a puddle.

5. If you have access to a small child, you get to play at jumping in puddles yourself.

6. Prolonged rain cancels out the traditional ‘don’t talk to anyone in case they think you are weird/mad’ rule, so you get to chat to people in doorways, in coffee shops, during dashes through car parks.

7. The garden has grown every time you look at it, like that thing with a new baby when you put it down for a sleep and when you go back two hours later, those li’l feet are practically breaking through the bottom of the babygro.

8. Rainy weather is good writing weather, and reading weather, and knitting weather. All of which suit me very well.

9. When I go for my head-clearing after-writing forty minute walk through the fields, my walking boots make fabulous squelching, squerching noises, and there’s something about those noises that make me madly, laugh-out-loud, disproportionately happy.

10. There might be a rainbow.

Over to you…. Why do you like the rain?