It's so nice you can lick the air. I just want to express my thanks to The Management for the lovely weather because I have been complaining and grumbling lately. We're all like puppy dogs: happy in the sunshine, whimpering when we're cold or wet or put upon.

Do you find, as you get older, that you have total recall? About the past, that is. You probably have trouble finding your car keys, if you don't have ONE place to put them, but if someone drops a name, a place or an action, or refers to some past event, you're off and running with more details than you knew you had in you. You have to be careful not to wear out your audience and not to overkill with too much detail and also - for heaven's sake - do not repeat yourself. My advice to you is to write it all down. You'll be grateful for it later and you won't turn people off with your verbosity. I'm a great fan of paper.

Sometimes I have picked up a piece of paper with a few lines on it or perhaps a short poem, and I liked what I saw and wondered who wrote that. ( I usually give credit for what I quote.) Then I realized, hey, I wrote that! What a delicious discovery. It doesn't last, of course. Nothing does. But glimpses like that give me hope. The American writer Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking) compared those bits of paper to collected pieces of string. Each length is too short to keep or too long to throw away but if they're rolled together, on top of one another as they accumulate, in time they add up to a sizeable ball, albeit useless. Maybe a cat could play with it. But your ball of paper, or wad, or pile, whatever - your paper - each with its little Thought for the Day, now that's better than a ball of string, and it's all yours. Nice thought.

You can tell I'm feeling more optimistic, can't you?