Roman Holiday

Today the hedgehog visited a Roman town. To those of you in other parts of the world, this may or may not sound exciting, but in Yorkshire (the place of the hedgehog's present burrow), it's joost plain daft, as they say here. I'd like to say that it was the old Roman Town of Olicana, which it was, but it's now called Ilkley, which is a lot more prosaic.

There were no Roman soldiers marching up the streets, since I was about two thousand years too late, but once a year there is a Roman day, where people wear cardboard armour covered with tinfoil, and stonk about like a mass formation of wallies. Fortunately, this was not the Roman day, either.

Instead, Hedgehog and Hedgehogette visited several charity shops in succession, bought little or nothing, swithered about cuppas in a tearoom, did nothing again, and came home.

If it weren't for the wild excitement of life, I don't know what I'd do.

The novel and agents situation remains the same. I'm still looking for a nice, kind, good, reliable, enthusiastic literary agent for my crime/detective thriller number 1, while I try to write number 2. You heard about it here first.

I'm also waiting for the news that I haven't won the Arvon poetry competion again, but that will fail to drop through my letterbox later on, sometime in Novemeber.

As they say, "Nil carborundum illegitimi"

October Blues

How on earth did we get to October, 2006? Hedgehog must have drifted off into some kind of aestivation since the last blog.
How is the novel marketing getting on? It isn't. After a few feeble attempts to approach agents, Hedgehog succumbed to the pressures of domestic crises and Open University marking (which is what he's employed at part-time now). Novel1 is no closer to getting to the world, and Novel 2 stagnates at about one page so far.

What your spiny correspondent needs is a good hoof up the prickly rear, which he ought to administer himself. It may happen.

Meanwhile, we trundle through the warmest October that can be remembered. (No frost yet). Just in case you were wondering, the oct part in October means 8, as in the 8th month, just as September means 7th and November 9th. The anomaly is due to Julius and Augustus Caesar (try spelling that as Cesar, my transatlantic friends), who were ruthless, all-powerful rulers who suffered badly from meglomania (so no difference there from today, then).

More rambling nonsense later (perhaps).