Spring still far behind

3^rd March 2010.

It was great to see my piece in the Daily Telegraph. Father Bill has put the photo of me onto his fridge. But I shouldn’t have read it again. They put extra statistics into side-bars and it has disturbed my peace of mind.

Last night I felt a frisson of fear return like a cold draft. I kept busy, painting and listening to the radio and cheered myself up, but when I went to sleep I had an unpleasant dream.

I seemed to be living in a very small place, so small I had to lie on a shelf. My fellow tenant had brought with him his pet crocodile, a very large aggressive looking animal. I was terrified of it, it was going to destroy me and where was the cat? He was grumpy about taking it away. I tried to ring the landlord to complain but could never get through. None of the numbers worked.

Then I was trapped in a tall building trying to find an exit. I met Torin Douglas from the BBC who advised me to get out through the basement but when I got down there and looked out there was a raging river outside.

Woke up to a report on the Today programme about hundreds of thousands of refugees trying to escape over the border from Libya – all running from the ferocious Gaddafi crocodile.

Another bitterly cold day. Even the swimming pool water seemed warm compared to the outside air. The birds on my lawn seem famished. I try to put out food for the small ones, particularly the robins but as soon as I go out there with my bag of seed I am swamped by pigeons with the size and determination of oviraptors.

My friend’s tortoise has come out of her sleep but now has to be kept going with a special heat lamp. The tortoises I knew as a child must have been much tougher, some of them made it through the great snows of 1962-3 in just a cardboard box beside a coal fire inside a kind of wooden tent laden with drying vests and pants.

No word from Colin Firth yet – he must be back from Hollywood by now!