As I write this, Frances is preparing to fly off to San Francisco. Indeed I am typing this so as not to get in her way for it is past the point where I can help. It is just a touch unkind of Fate that, on the one day we have to leave the house in the middle of the night, a blizzard is expected. If you never hear from me again I shall, ironically, have perished in the snow in the attempt to get Frances to California!

She is going to show our books at the event described above . . . and to meet a lot of nice people and, I hope, to have an enjoyable time. Everyone says I should go too but I really do prefer to stay at home for some reason and someone’s got to do the printing! She also reckons that I can be a liability if I try to ‘present’ our books at a fair for, if someone looks at a page for more than a few seconds (which they should, of course, do), I presume they must have seen an invisible imperfection in the printing . . . and I have to start apologising for it!

So I will continue to print Glenys’s lovely images on the Black Marigolds pages and talk to my friends, the grazing swans!