It's officially spring, and I've survived another winter. Not that my survival was in doubt, logically, but when did logic have anything to do with it? By the end of every autumn, the dread of winter has seeped into my bones, my spirit has sunk to my soon-to-be-chilblained toes and I'm wondering whether I have the fortitude to endure it all over again. Which is pretty ridiculous when you think that daytime temperatures in my neck of the woods usually make it to at least the mid teens, but that's the way it is, and I don't need a shrink prodding around in my psyche to tell me why. Anyway, spring is now sprung, and even though today it's not looking very convincing, things can only get better and my spirits are rising accordingly.

Meanwhile I've had to face the cold, hard fact, this last winter, that I'm far less disciplined and industrious than I'd like to think. For two months, I've sat here and sogged, with all the motivation and enthusiasm of cold suet pudding. If I'm being kind, I offer excuses on the basis of age and the fact that I've had what was thought to be whooping cough. (Fortunately it wasn't, although I'm not sure what difference it made when the symptoms were the same and I still had to do the antibiotics and the inhaler, and either way, it drained the batteries like headlights on a parked car.) But the unpalatable truth is that I am bone idle and a thorough disgrace, and I'm suitably ashamed of myself. The fiction folder on my computer is choked with quasi bright ideas that fizzled after a paragraph or two, competitions have come and gone without the benefit of my entries (which funnily enough never seem to win, but hey!) and the first chapter of a novel remains just that - a first chapter.

But I'm hopeful. Spring is here, the wattle is blooming, and perhaps with a bit of a prod, my creativity might unfurl itself from its dozy winter hide and burst forth in a shower of brilliance that will dazzle us all.

Ah well, you can dream...