The snow has all gone now. It melted so fast that there’s been some localised flooding. When Zoë and I went up to the radio studios on Saturday, we ended up fording a fair few torrents across the road. On the plus side, the underside of my car got a good wash, as did the alloys.

One thing that the melting of the snow has revealed is the sheer amount of dross that was hidden underneath. Quite apart from the grit and grime (no doubt leftovers of all the rock salt that people were panic-spreading like manic fools) there is mountains of litter. Strange – I don’t remember wheelie bins being upended on the day it snowed. But that’s just what it looks like has happened. I may have to take a broom to the front drive.

On the writing front, the heavy edit of ‘Orb of Arawaan’ is nearly complete. Finally I’m starting to see a semblance of the book I should have written in 2004. Still, better late than never. It also sets me up to remember the charectors and plot for writing the second book in this trilogy (yes – I heard the ker-ching noise coming from somehwere too. What’s the point in publishing a book if you can’t pay the bills off the back of it?). I’ve also been having email exchanges with the agent, and things look very promising indeed for ‘Bringing home the stars’. The first three chapters have been tweaked, and he’s looking through the rest of the book whilst (I presume) a plan is formulated for pitching it to the publishing editors. Fingers crossed, touch wood and all that.

I’ve been doing some more model making over the last couple of days. Grove street yard – the layout I was building – has been completed, so I’m going through the long forgotten remnants of my bits box looking for little projects. Much of the stuff in there ended up in the scrapyard section of the layout, but some of the things left were some rather decrepit Ratio signals I built years ago. They never looked quite right, and I realised that I had some of the componants painted black instead of off-white. So I retrieved all the bits from the bottom of the box (the years and the rummaging in the boxes have been hard on weak glue joints) and have been painting and rebuilding. They look quite good now. The only thing is that there isn’t any option to add them belatedly to Grove street yard so I guess I might have to just build another project to put them on…