It's cranefly season, and this summer, there is an unusual number of them.

Every night, John opens his bedroom window with the lights on (and the doors closed). He feeds the craneflies he catches to the spider that has set up home on the window frame.

Every morning I plead with John to set Henrietta free. I may have a point, because now is the time that the spiders in our garden mate.

"Look at this," John says. "These two spiders are trying to mate. They are strumming to each other."

I step up to the bush he kneels in front of.

"Isn't that sweet?"

"No." The insignificantly tiny male carefully strumms the thread the female has spun. She in turn rises up, fangs poised, presenting her genitals at the same time. "It's a game of life and death."

The dance continues. He strumms; she responds briefly. He advances; she does not move. He bounces back. He strumms...

"If I was her, I'd parceled him up by now," I say sourly. But then my heart leaps. He's advanced again. This time, he's not backing off. He's almost there...

It's the last move the male ever makes. The female pounces faster than the eye can see. Even as we watch with bated breath, she's already encasing the hapless suitor in a silver cocoon of silk. She darts across to her web with the parcel dangling from her abdomen, then returns to the thread, turns it around and starts to feed. The suddeness with which this all happened shocks me. Nature and her ways.

"It's time to put Henrietta out," I say. "Do it today while the sun still shines, so she too can feast on men."

For now at least. Until the end of November, I will focus mainly on fiction writing. I have one story to polish and submit to a professional market, another ditto for an unpaying (but prestigious) website, a third for the writers' group and finally, a novel to write—based on the first story.

This should keep me busy for a while.

If you feel like it, you can check my occasional progress posts in my lifejournal (I signed up for this as part of the 2005 Worldcon community, and it has become my writer's blog, off-and-on.)

I'll be back here with the occasional Tadley tidbit, or news about preparations for our Australia trip in January. But basically, hanging out here will be an excuse not to write.

It's nearly a week ago now, but it feels much longer. Perhaps this is because of the dreamlike quality of he day.

Odd to think that in my 41 years, I've never been to a major rock festival before.

I got a cold at the Reading festival. This has set me back a few days and I haven't been able to blog much, even when Tony Blair came up with probably the first of his senile-politician-waiting-to-be-kicked-out-of-office proposals the other day. It signifies that he wants to be pushed, rather than do the honourable thing and resign from his leadership. Alternatively, the guy is serious. It doesn't bear thinking about.

What the PM wants to do is to target children of supposedly dysfunctional families to prevent them growing up to become troublemakers. Babies and Toddlers with ASBOs, I hear you ask?

"No, I mean before they are born."

That was a quote from a Newsnight interview. I didn't hear wrong.

The website offers people help with using a mouse and keyboard and then asks questions such as 'What are the public holidays in Britain. What are the four national holidays?' (Do you even know the four national saints?)

Worse: 'Do women have equal rights to men? Do they receive equal pay?' —What do they want to hear from a graduate of St. Hilda's?

After twenty years of living in this country, I cannot answer these questions. Neither can John. The solution: order the handbook from the home office and learn by rote. There isn't an online version.

Yep, it's that time of year again. John's birthday is here.

I'm still broke, so I thought I'd make him another chocolate cake to show off in the office.

Last year, the effort ended in near-disaster, took 6h instead of the advertised 75 minutes but in the end yielded an impressive result (if I may say so myself). I doubt that this year's effort will look as good, primarily because I'm not using frosted rose petals for decoration (we're out), but I'll see what I can do with marzipan and chocolate. At least I now have a camera to record the result for posterity.

The version of Sachertorte I remember eating as a kid always had a layer of marzipan under the chocolate glaze, so this year I'm including it. The recipe loosely follows Orangen Sachertorte, but with considerably less (apricot only) filling and brandy instead of orange liqueur (the local shops aren't sophisticated enough to have miniatures of Cointreau or Grand Manier for sale).

...and the Greenland write-up will resume tomorrow. All my photos have now been uploaded to Flickr (much quicker from home) and I'm in the process of sorting them. On a disappointed note: I spoiled the film in the Nokia when I tried to change it (it wasn't fully spooled back) and some very good pictures of humpback whales off Disko Island have been lost. I carried that brick of a camera and the big, fat tele-lens with me specifically, but got carried away in the heat of the chase.

In other news: Jessie has asked me to become a BNA moderator. I'm thinking about it.

Finally: A hectic weekend lies ahead as I may get my paws on a ticket to the Reading Festival on Sunday. In keeping with the annual tradition, there will be engineering works on the trains. I may have to fix up Rob's old bicycle (yes, we still have it Rob, if you're reading this blog...).

Sound-bite from Saturday afternoon in the pub in Ilulissat: "You're from London? Are you Muslim?" That was a new one, but this is how we're currently perceived in certain corners of the world....

20th August 2006

When the sun comes out, with the clouds still hanging low in the sky, the light of the arctic summer is unique. The sky shimmers with mother-of-pearl shades of baby-blue, light turquoise and just a hint of gold. It is the same light we sometimes see just after dawn, but it had just turned 9am, and it was already full daylight.

We were approaching Disko Island on the Najaaraq Ittuk and I stood on deck, rubbing my mittens and looking out for humpback whales.

19th August 2006

Last night, for the first time in 48 hours, the clouds lifted. It was an opportunity to shower and wash my stuff without it feeling futile. Afterwards, I sat at the picnic table outside the campsite and watched the shadows lengthen, spellbound by the luminosity of the ice in the blue-grey light. However, as soon as the sun descended behind the rocky outcrops, the temperature dropped. I had to smoke with my mitts on. The magic moment was further disrupted by some of the Germans (whom I dubbed the ‘Hitler Youth’ because of the way they’ve taken over the living room) coming outside for a smoke and talking at full volume. I was determined to finish my book, but by the time they left and I could again concentrate, it was so dark that I had to hold it right up to my nose.

Apart from that, I was paranoid about the time. I have an early start on Sunday, so I set the camera alarm to 6 am to try whether I would hear it. As a result, I kept waking up in the increasing light, thinking it must surely be six by now, but when I checked, it was 3:34 am. When the alarm eventually went off, I didn’t hear it.

I woke up at 7 or 8 am, to the familiar sound of the tent pane flapping in the wind (I hate that tent), with the rain offering its piddling accompaniment. I went back to sleep, but the weather did not change by nine, ten or even eleven o’clock. It was an affront. I had enough of the constant rain.

I stayed inside the tent for as long as possible, because at least it was warm by then and struggling into my boots and wading through the mud seemed like too much work. By the time I eventually got to town, it was a quarter past one and the stores were shut. At least, I still have some ship’s bisquits, tinned fish and processed cheese for the whale watching trip tomorrow. The forecast looks brighter and I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

18th August 2006

To recap:

• It’s pissing it down with rain
• The campsite is full of Germans
• Not one picture has come out

I don’t know why the latter happened. Apparently, the little knob next to the rewind lever wasn’t turned back into the right position after I changed the film on the boat. But at least the digital pictures have come up alright.

Today was a day for smoking a pipe in the bar. Failing that, I retreated there for a few cigarettes. David Gilmour was up on the big screen, looking like one of my old college professors, pumping out ‘How I wish you were here’. He reminds me of my age. They were good once—how does it feel to be seventy-something and look back at that?

Slowly, the fog was creeping in from the sea, obliterating all the colours outside, wrapping everything in a grey blanket. Ping Floyd are a hell of a soundtrack to the fog.

Another excursion boat left the harbour. Hell of a day for it. It is too expensive to go on these boat trips and for once I was glad that I didn’t have one planned until Sunday.

On the screen, David Gilmour laid down one hell of a guitar solo. He still has it, but it is scary to see how old he is now.

The humid cold seeped through the walls of the bar just as it did through the pane of my tent, my sleeping bag and my woollen blanket the night before. It chills right to the bone.

Gilmour made his guitar howl. I think of the dogs howling last night, every time the rain picked up.

‘Shine on you crazy Diamond’ came on, and it reminded me of my time at the Danish boarding school, where we always used to play that song; then of the Pink Floyd gig John took me to just after we met. Life’s coming full circle.

The fog was lifting. The prospect for tomorrow and the weekend should be brighter.

OK, so I'm not going to do this in sequence. Too boring.

I'm struggling a bit with my English at the moment, so flowery descriptions will have to wait for my BNA writeups...

16th August 2006

I have travelled the world—well, fifty countries or so—but only rarely have I seen a sight which literally made me gasp.

This morning, after I had peeled myself out of the tent and piled some rocks on the pane to keep it from flapping in the breeze—which would be called a 'gale' back home—and as I turned around on my way to the toilet block, it happened again.

The mundane reality of campsite life was abruptly brushed aside as the Northern hemisphere’s mightiest glacier lay spread out in the bay below like a dish on a plate: