I have booked a waltz with the Duchess of Greenwich

Listening to - This Woman's Work - Kate Bush

There is a battle going on in our house at the moment. My wife has been given The Teatime Islands by Ben Fogle (The nice one from the BBC's Castaway 2000) which is about his trips to the various far-flung islands that still remain in the British Empire - Ascension, The Falklans etc. As you may suspect her reading time is curtailed at present due to baby-care duties and I keep getting my hands slapped when I pick up the book with a view to racing though it. A condition of non-disclosure has had to be made like it was when I read the last Harry Potter through first. I am now trying to think of a book to fill the gap, having finished the Joan Bakewell Biog and Cider with Rosie for the fourth time. I am also in the middle of Hard Water by Jean Sprackland, who I saw on the local news programme because this book was nominated for this years Whitbread Poetry Prize; it didn't win but she is a local poet. For some reason I keep putting local landscapes to the images conjured up by the poems in this book.

As Hard Water seems to have a loose theme maybe I should choose one for myself.

Skidding softly across the mud of the fields behind our house, I fell for my companion, wholly, like dropping down a well with no end until I fely myself balanced at the centre of the Earth, bobbing gently where there is no gravity because all the mass of this planet is outwards. I am the centre of what they used to consider the middle of the Universe. Everything you could think of is away from here. The winter became the finest season that year, the ice a necessary accompaniment to the hard life without fire or oil. What music sounds in my head from that time? We have no sound, no record; the technology is absent and music comes through tinny speakers.