This is just to announce that I have put Juliet online under a Creative Commons licence. It is serialised daily, and will end at the start of April… Enjoy.

The book is called “Black as Snow” and is available from this link.

There is a meme circulating around the web that seeks to incite people to read 50 books in the coming year. This is a great initiative, and I’m all for it. In fact I would like to do the same.

If you have noticed my reading lists along the side of this [infrequent] blog, then this might strike you as curious. Last year, according to that list I read in excess of 120 books. In fact, I have probably forgotten to note about 10-15, and my total is nearer to 150, than 50.

So why seek to read 50 books in 2007? I think it is because I read too much, if that is possible. Since the beginning of this year, I have been demolishing two to three books a year. Again. Perhaps I should be spending some of that time doing other things. Like writing.

Let’s see.

I have been a wery naughty boy. In fact, because I have a stinking headache, and am preparing to go and lie down instead of working, because working at 2 mph, is probably worse than working at all—I’d say that it is so bad I am currently in a zone of neagtive productivity and tomorrow I will have to unwravel the little I did manage today—and to make things worse, I’m now typing terrible run on sentances in the blog that I haven’t updated since June. That’s life for you.

But this is not why I am a very naughty boy.

No, sirreee.

I am a naughty boy because, as said daughter told me the other day on the phone, I haven’t announced my unbounded joy to the world that my daughter is now a Judge.

So much so, I was going to entitle this post “My other daughter is a judge” [This was designed to be a reference to those stickers that appeared on beat-up cars in the 70s and 80s proclaiming, “My other car is a Prosche”. Or whatever.] But I dropped this idea because the aforementioned daughter might not appreciate being referred to as ‘the other daughter’ [which I can understand], and so would telephone me to complain. AH, the things you have to do to get your daughters to telephone you…

Theoretically parenthetic asides aside. My eldest daughter is an English Teacher, and quite happy with her lot. And so, the secondest has just been accepted into the ENM which is the French National School for Judges. Technically, I believe, for the first two years she is an Auditor, but she gets sworn in at the end of the month, and has already had her robes [and hat] prepared for the day. The youngest daughter—for the moment still at school, and having just started playing with career choices, currently wants to be a chef. We’ll see.

What is wonderful for Nadja, is that she has worked towards this for years. Whenever we tried to approach her during, more or less, the last decade she always shooed us off, quite firmly, saying that she was studying. Which, it seems, she was. And today all that has paid off.

I won’t be going down to Bordeaux to see the ceremony, not as a way of sulking for having been spurned, but because they have limited invitations to only two people each, and she is taking her companion, Philippe, and her mother. But I will be with her in spirit, every inch of the way.

Big hugs to you all.