We had a lousy summer - so did a lot of people in .
In my case, since I love being out in the countryside, it meant lots of very wet walks or hacks on my horse. I bought more adverse-weather clothing this summer than at any time since I was working in Russia in winter.
But we are getting all our lost days back now this autumn.
Even this weekend, which was foggy and sometimes drizzly, produced some spectacular periods of bright, breezy weather and astonishing sunsets.
And last weekend, when my family was delayed meeting me at the stables, I sat for an hour under a tree in the autumn sunshine without a care in the world.
If I could write poetry, I would have been doing it then.
I can't, and anyway, you can't beat Keats:
Help! My pop up ads are talking to each other!
I occasionally get emails from a bank called Egg - silly name but catchy, which is why they chose it, I'm sure.
(It's actually owned by a much stuffier sounding financial institution called Prudential - I imagine the Egg project came up after a 'let-your-hair-down' Friday night session in the pub after a tough week at the Pru. "Let's do something really wild - let's start a bank with a silly name!")
Anyway, the emails from Egg arrive on Gmail, which picks up on words in the messages and slots in relevant advertising alongside.
But now, I notice that the ads generate further ads in ways that lead into a mad kind of word association.
So the Egg Bank email gives me lots of 'cheap loan' ads (there's no such thing, by the way) and also an ad for the .
That generates more furniture ads, nothing to do with eggs of any sort.
I'm not going to buy an Egg chair (Ihaven't got any money in my Egg bank) or any furniture at all.
But that doesn't seem to matter - I think the furniture ad is talking to the loan ad and doing a deal without me.
A lot of our programme today was about the threat of a Turkish army incursion into northern Iraq. The PKK rebels have been coming down from the mountains with greater force and bigger numbers this year, and the government in Ankara is under extreme pressure from its citizens to strike back.
The families of killed recently have had a prominent place on TV news in Turkey.
It's hard to see a solution to a conflict created by history.
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| 08:44 UK time, Monday, 29 October 2007
