It's been more than two months since I initiated this blog, and since then there's been silence. Not a spectacular production rate. Not down to lack of energy on my part but to being away and then, well, waiting for my web designer friend Mr Stephen Hallowes (yes that is his real name, and yes he does get ribbed about being "Deathly") to come down to visit and set me up on my own computer here in Cornwall so that I can blog as incontinently as I like. Main events since: a trip to talk about the Berlin Wall at the "Ways with Words" Literary Festival at Dartington in Devon. A sell-out -- most of the events there are, in case you think I'm bragging -- amid delightful surroundings. We stayed in an attic room usually inhabited by one of the lecturers at the College of Performing Arts based there (but soon to move to Cornwall). A jolly, intimate atmosphere and all the writers, most much more famous than me, very friendly. And after that I finished a proposal for a new book, which I'll be writing again for Bloomsbury, publishers of DRESDEN and THE BERLIN WALL. It has finally stopped raining in Britain. For now. More about the new book soon. Once I get started on that, I won't much care what the weather's like.