Things you sometimes see from your writing desk V

Bit quiet on here, I know. I've been in Wales for a week with pretty dodgy internet and with my head deep in my novel every morning, and we've had another family member staying so have been off on long family walks for the rest of each day. Tonight, though, it's just John and me again and the rain is just bucketing out of the sky, and surprisingly, in spite of that, I have some decent internet connection for once!

As for the novel, well, maybe it'll go down in history as the most reworked novel ever - or maybe not, but then I guess it's some consolation that James Joyce will probably beat most, apparently. Having finished the next section, I ended up reworking the beginning once again - yet again! All good, though: it's just lovely, that feeling you get when the more you write the more of what you've already written comes in to focus, and then what you haven't yet written comes into brighter relief, too, and the whole thing starts drawing together...

Before we left Manchester I took this pic of the tree I look down on from my writing room. The clematis has long finished flowering, of course, and the significance now is that inside it, beyond the darker depression you can see in the middle near the top, there's a blackbirds' nest. And it's the third nest our resident blackbird pair have built this summer! The first two nests they built much lower down, and magpies got the eggs of the first one. The second brood hatched, but there was a tremendous drama concerning the neighbourhood cats. Every time a cat came into the garden the blackbirds would set up the most tremendous row, sometimes to the extent that I couldn't work, and divebomb the cats who at first seemed quite bewildered. Quite frankly I think they alerted the cats to the presence of their nest, and in the end we kept finding dying fledglings on the lawn..

I could hardly believe it when I looked up from my desk one morning, well into July, to see the cock bird emerging from that gap in the tree, and later the hen alighting on a branch lower down and looking around very carefully before shooting in.

Talk about perseverance. Bit like me and my novel...

Oh, and in one of my brief and interrupted forays onto the net last week I discovered that I had beaten Jenn Ashworth, author of the clever and engrossing A Kind of Intimacy, in Benjamin Judge's World Literary Cup - for entirely spurious and non-literary reasons! And I can't give you a link because while I have been writing this the connection has become dodgy again, and I don't even know if I'll manage to publish...