New Yorker Festival Information. Also treeclimbing.

It's been announced. I'll be interviewed by Dana Goodyear for the New Yorker Festival on Sunday October the 3rd at 1.00 pm.

The complete Festival schedule is up at http://www.newyorker.com/festival/schedule/glance

Tickets will go on sale on Friday at noon, Eastern time. http://www.newyorker.com/festival/tickets for info. Getting on the internet from here is hard work, so I probably won't remind you.

I'm disappointed that I won't get to see Ian Frazier or Malcolm Gladwell talk, as they are both on when I'm on. Not sure if I'll get in to New York in time to see Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith on the Friday night, although I'll do my best. I definitely want to see the Live From New York SNL panel on the Sunday (waves at Bill Hader and Seth Myers).

Also, the Stardust movie is finally out on Blu-Ray.

And yesterday I climbed a tree, and picked a shopping-bag full of plums. I think I should climb more trees. Have already cooked and/or eaten most of them. Tomorrow I go back up the tree. Depending on how the writing is going I may or may not ever come down again.

Labels: a tree, literary festivals, new yorker, plum trees

Had we but world enough, and plums.

I'm off the edge of the world right now, and have unplugged from the Internet. I have no phone signal, and the kind of spotty, barely-there occasional internet connection that would have been amazing in, say, 1992, but right now is the equivalent of not having an internet at all. (You cannot watch a YouTube video, for example. Big emails take forever to come in, and these days all emails are big.)

There is a plum tree, however.



And there are sheep.


I am writing, except when I go for walks or cook. Eating sensibly and exercising and just grabbing some peace and quiet to work in. For the first couple of days I mostly slept, finally recovering from the combination of transatlantic jet-lag and late-night-Melbourne-video-conference.

Yesterday I assembled an office chair to sit and write in, and I am sitting in it now.

Tomorrow I plan to pick some plums. I miss my family and my dogs and the world, but I'm loving the recovering, and loving the silence. I'll rejoin the world at the end of the month in, I hope, enough time to see the filming of some of my Dr Who episode. Then back to the US for the Boston Library talk and Amanda in Cabaret* and the New Yorker event and the Ig Nobel prize night, and the world will start again. And probably the blog will too.

*Over half the Cabaret performances are now sold out, before the official opening night. If you want to go, you should book a ticket. Or there are VIP tickets for sold-out nights. Signed, someone who left it too late for one night he wanted to go and had to buy a VIP ticket to a sold-out night.

Labels: honestly there's already a plum trees label on the blog, plum trees, queenless sheep

Drunken air part two

This is a film that Sharon Stiteler took yesterday of our bees buzzing around in my plum trees. I actually started wanting the bees because of the plums, because there were never any bees when they were in bloom...

Labels: bees, plum trees