Colin Harvey – author

It’s a warm, damp Saturday afternoon that doesn’t seem to be able to make up it’s mind what to do.

Since I’m on holiday I’m not doing much work, although I’ve critiqued one piece of flash today. Instead Kate and I did a little shopping and lunching in Bath (the all-you-can-eat Lebanese mezze is highly recommended), and this afternoon has been spent watching rugby league and listening to cricket — when there’s some play.

And catching up on other people’s blogs. One of my new favourites is Madeline Ashby, who I first read in Shine. Her blog is as elegant as her fiction, and makes me grind my teeth with envy at the apparent ease with which she posts. Her latest entries muse about Stanley Kubrick, Playboy magazine and avocadoes. Head over there and enjoy.

I realized as I got up this morning that I only have five more days of holiday. I have no idea where the time went, since we seem to have done very little, but it seems like only a day or two ago that I was waking up on the Friday before Easter and thinking, three whole weeks of no uni!

They, whoever the mysterious ‘they’ are –aliens perhaps, or tribal elders?– say that time passes faster as one gets older. What they don’t really hammer home is that it hurtles by as if you’re on the Cresta Run, so that the seasons seem in memory to become a series of stop-motion snapshots; flick! It’s winter and snow carpets the ground; flick! now it’s spring and leaves are shouldering their way out of the buds. flick! Now it’s summer, and heat and languor hover just above ground level. flick! Here comes autumn again…

But for now it’s spring, and out in the garden, the wildlife is stirring…

It’s been a day for remembering things almost too late.

I intended to post a chapter or two from Damage Time on the blog, and as we were walking Alice along the seafront at Clevedon, I slapped my hand to my forehead in best Homer Simpson fashion as I thought of it. Fortunately we got home at a reasonable hour, so here‘s Chapter 2. It’s short enough to be squeezable in at Suite101, unlike most of them — so why not scatter chapters across the cyberverse in best Hansel and Gretel mode?

But before that, I’d had another doh! moment as I went to clip Alice’s lead on her collar, only to realize with a sinking feeling, that she didn’t have her collar on…so faced with a choice of a fifteen-mile return journey to fetch it, or some lateral thinking, we turned her lead into an impromptu choke-er, string.

It seems that the amnesia running through the novel may be catching. Or perhaps the novel is my way of coming to terms with my Emmenthal-like memory.

Chapter 3 is here, by the way.

Grr! The plan was to take this week off, but we can’t go out today as we’re waiting for a delivery of kitchen tiles.  And we can’t even sit outside as the workman have turned up to re-lay a water pipe outside our front gate. Cue a tractor- mounted pneumatic drill, and the smell of scorching pavement wafting across the graden.

Oh well, nothing else for it but to tidy up one of those reviews I almost finished before Eastercon. In this case, it’s a play, as we went to see Noel Coward’s Present Laughter recently.

At least the workmen should be finished by tomorrow…

…comes the reckoning, as I wrote over at suite101.

I woke up this morning feeling as if I’d somehow committed some terrible sin by having a few nights out. I must work on suppressing this Calvinism that overtakes me from time to time. But only after I’ve written a review…

Another one of the weather/light related blog posts over at suite. Are you beginning to sense a recurring theme here? <g>