It seems to have been a long and not very productive summer, if you can call what we have had here in the East of Scotland a summer. Lots of rain, cloud and rain again, whole weeks of it. Not much progress on any front.

The football story has kind of got stalled at chapter 3 but is still getting good reviews on YouWriteOn.Com - a site which contains some of the worlds most atrocious attempts at writing. One earns credits by reviewing other authors' works, so that yet other idiots can write equally ascerbic reviews of one's latest magnum upus (yes, I know it should be opus, but so many are really no - opus). At any rate, the site is an excellent way to expose one's literary children to the elements without the bother of sending them off to the massed ranks of literary ignorami posing as agents.

The problem is really that the site is supported by the UK Arts Council, which we as UK taxpayers pay for, but is open to anyone, and that includes damn Yankees. God knows what possesses these colonials to believe that they have any talent for anything other than bad films and losing wars. Football to an American means hundreds of hulking chaps clad in helmets and body armour desperately attempting to trample each other into oblivion whilst accumulating meaningless statistics about rushes and so on. Totally unlike the genteel game of soccer played largely by fashonista foreign mercenaries given to driving Ferraris and sipping champagne. The confusion faced by some American nitwit trying to review a book whose raison d'etre is the nostalgia felt by the average Brit for the game that dominated so many of our early lives is enormous.

The summer has so far seen birthdays (3), Wedding Anniversaries (1 #44) and a miscellany of other events too sensational to recount without the aid of a hearing trumpet and carpet slippers. Gammy leg has meant restricted walking, but making a bold effort to travel aroung the kitchen on the exercise cycle. Adventures with new bits for the computer and lots of gardening, planting, watering, weeding and generally creating mayhem with what limited nature we have access to. My only regret this summer is missing the Scone Show due to the increasing difficulty of manoevering a wheelchair around muddy field without the aid of a tractor. Oh well, that's summer for you.

And then there is the web site, of which more later......

Oh yes, and re-found an old pub with new owners and good food and thank goodness for the local Co-op, always friendly and always willing to scare away the heebies.