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?

Chances are you’ll know that I object to the whole ‘battle’ language of cancer, and not least because when people die they are said to have ‘lost the battle’, which always makes me sad. I’d rather think of people being overwhelmed (thanks to the late Christopher Hitchens).

Listening to the news the other day, there was a report about a bomb going off, and ‘innocent civilians losing their lives’. Which makes me upset. Upset because these people have died: and upset because some lazy journalist has decided that they have ‘lost’ their lives.

Let’s think about losing. I lose keys, and knitting needles, and the odd pound coin down the back of the sofa. I lose track of time, I lose interest, I lose my place in a book.

But, if I were on a bus and that bus had a bomb on it and the bomb went off, I would not have lost my life. I would have had it wrenched from me. I would have stepped on to that bus with everything I feel about living intact. I would have carried with me the preciousness, the beauty, the value of every breathing day of it. And I would have kept hold of that until the moment of the flash and the pain and the being caught up in someone else’s wrong-headed idea of what’s reasonable and decent in the world. I would have died; been killed; had life pulled out of my unsuspecting arms.

But losing my life? No. I would never be so careless. I am sorry, so sorry, that we live in a world where some people think it is OK to be careless with the lives of others, whether by carrying a bomb or drinking too much and getting behind the wheel of a car. But please, let’s not think, for a moment, that the people who get on to a bus, or a plane, or are walking down the street when someone on a mission murders them, have carried life so lightly that they could have dropped it as easily as a bright tuppence that spins, coppery, in the sunshine, just out of reach, before dropping down a drain.

Loss, and losing, have their places in our lexicon of death. When people close to us die, we feel their loss acutely. We have lost something then, because what we valued and treasured has been taken from us. We reach for it, and it’s not there, not in the place that we left it, not in any of the places that we look. That is loss, and we should call it that.

But please, journalists, newsreaders, commentators, people who talk and write and opine about the terrible things that happen in our world, think before you speak of lost lives.

… my ten complimentary copies of Italian Bah!.

This photo reminds me a little bit of Joy’s 6th birthday party, which was a Pink Party. Everyone wore pink, all of the food was pink – I even dyed the bread, and my bread-maker was never the same again.  When the photographs came back – it was the days of film – they all had a sort of miasma of pinkness.

But I digress. Obviously, I will keep a couple of copies for posterity, but I have no idea what to do with the others. It seems crazy to have lots of copies of a book that I cannot read. So, if you know of a person, or a group, or a centre, that might benefit from an Italian edition of Bah!, please let me know, either via comments or email.

Grazie!

They’re sparkly and comfy and pretty as anything.

(The pattern is V-Junkie from this book.)

I knitted another sparkly pair, as a present for Scarlet.

(The pattern is Monkey, free here.)

And I’ve just cast these on. Toe-up instead of cuff-down, just for the crazy sock-knitting hell of it.

But I’m also knitting a blanket. So it’s not a jag. It’s not.