When I get up out of bed of a weekday, I invariably turn on the Radio 4 news and listen while I'm shaving and then having breakfast to the woes of the world. However, I unconsciously do the same on a Sunday and find myself listening to the Sunday service, which takes the place of weekly news. I leave it on for the hymns mainly, which instantly take me back to my childhood, not because I faithfully attended church (though I did do that sometimes) but because in those days we had an assembly first thing in the morning at school which included bible stories and hymns, both of which I am grateful for now. I'm not devout, but both the stories and the songs can feed the spirit and raise it up on their own merits. Handel's 'Thine Be The Glory' is a superbly lifting piece of music. There are many others. You don't have to be a believer to find joy in such music. And stories like Samson and Delilah (a woman spurned) and David and Goliath (a bully gets thrashed by the nice boy of the class) are equally engaging. I am swept back to that 5 to 11 year old Garry at Felixstowe Langar Road Primary School, the smell of cabbage and potatoes still lingering from yesterday's school dinner, belting out 'Rock of Ages' tunelessly from well-used lungs and listening enthralled and appalled to the story of Joseph being left to die in a pit by his brothers. Aaaahhhh, Nostalgia.

Birds on a Twig

Outside my window in Spain is a tree with a long curved bare branch, not much more than a twig. Every morning at dawn chorus time the birds come and land on this perch, usually only one at a time, but following each other in fairly rapid succession. Different birds - goldfinches, crossbills, blackcaps, greenfinches, others - and they stay for a minute or two, singing and moving around in a slightly agitated manner, before flying off. The thing that surprised me though was the fact that they always face the rising sun. Not a single bird ever lands and faces the other way, with his or her back to the sun. It is almost as if they are carrying out the 'Salute to the sun' which most Hindus (and others) perform in the Far East. I believe I have come across a certain form of behaviour which might indicate something - I'm not going to tell you what, because I'm writing a paper - and hopefully a Nobel Prize will follow eventually, when they realise what a tremendous insight I've given to Mankind. 

San Jose

Yesterday was the Festival of San Jose in our little village of La Herradura. The Spanish have a great capacity for enjoyment (without the need to get drunk) and the fiesta reminds me of my childhood. A fairground is set up overnight along the seafront, with rides, toffee apples, candy floss, bright lights, blaring music, loud callers, and all the things one associates with fairgrounds. It seems to appear as if by magic, growing from a sleepy beach strand into a razzy-jazzy monster. I love it.

Today, Sunday, there is the horse show, an amazing spectacle of riders - haughty Adalucian women with their hats tilted over one eye and proud-looking slim men on beautiful beasts with high curved necks and silky manes and tails - a show which has to be seen to be believed. There are flamenco dancers weaving in amongst the horses and riders, as they perform superb feats of skill in the sandy ring watched by the whole population of the village and the surrounding mountains of the Sierras.

Speaking of superb feats, congratulations to the Irish on winning the Six Nations yesterday (said through gritted teeth) with England missing out narrowly - twice - once when the French beat us by two points and once when the Irish beat the French by two points. Also on the same day I beat my friend Keith at table tennis for the first time. He is a brilliant player. However, Keith has Parkinsons and while he shows no symptoms with a bat in his hand it is obviously a lose-lose situation for me. I can hardly go around bragging that I beat a man with advanced Parkinsons, can I?

There is a stark beauty in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Andalucia, but also a grimness in their visage that I haven't experienced in other mountain ranges. Driving through the first pass from Motril to Granada on the old road the sheer cliffs on either side of the road rise up vertically into the sky, bleak and massive, and lean over as if to say, 'Here we are, you puny mortal, ready to clash together when we feel we need to crush you.' I search vainly for some green vegetation to break the broad expanse of grey, but there is none: only black pits of half-caves too high to be of any use to man or beast, though perhaps the birds use them. I see so very few birds in those dark avenues between the shoulders of the mountains that I wonder if they have ever seen any life. True, the higher one gets the more open the range becomes, terminating in the snow-capped peaks of Mulhacen, the highest of them. I have to say I'm always in the grip of tension driving the narrow winding roads, some of them without any barriers between their outer edge and a vertical drop of hundreds of feet and my stomach knots every time we journey up to one of the Moorish villages that perch on lofty ledges. However, at the end of the climb is a rustic meal in a rural restaurant - hardly a restaurant really, since most of them are the living rooms of a local family - of the highest quality. Potatoes cooked in olive oil (poor man's patates), rabbit or goat stew and home-made wine. Absolutely delicious if you're a meat-eater and enjoy an old-fashioned meal. Braving the big-shouldered mountains, with their immense, threatening drops, has its rewards. Going down the twisty roads doesn't quite hold the same terrors.

So here we are in my Spanish retreat once again, avoiding the winter in UK. I feel a little guilty being able to escape the rain and the floods, though I don't think we've had any in Suffolk to my knowledge. Last night Annette and I went to a small restaurant to celebrate her birthday and the flamenco guitarist was absolutely wonderful. Such talent in these guys who seem to have a small audience for their brilliance. When I feel like grumbling that my readership is not great I should think about these musicians and dancers along this coast, who are clearly geniuses in their art yet seem happy to play for an audience of small numbers. I admire them immensely. The singers in flamenco are also terrific. The songs are belted out at full volume in gravel tones - they call it 'Canto Jondo' - and to ears other than Andalucian might sound unmusical. I was raised in Aden and am used to Arabic music and the canto jondo singers definitely owe something to Moorish antecedents. I love it. It knocks me back in my chair with a great blast of sound and I often see other tourists looking at the exit wondering if they need to escape quickly before the place collapses under the singer's onslaught. 

Into Cappadocia

Just returned from a week in Cappadocia, Turkey. Great group of fellow travellers of mixed nationalities. We saw the tour advertised in Annette's 'Archaeology Monthly Magazine' for £195. 'A week in hotels, a guide, transport, flights - all for £195? Wow, we must do this,' we said, thinking, This is our reward for subscribing to an intellectual magazine which we scan while in the bath. Later we found out it was advertised in almost every other magazine, including 'Girl Guide' and 'Women's Institute Magazine'. Ho hum. When we arrived at Antalya Airport we did so with two plane-loads of passengers all going on the same cheap holiday. 400+ people scrambling for 20 to 30 coaches (I didn't count them). We were on number 2 coach and the friends we had booked with were on number 10 coach, both going to more or less the same places but not together and not at the same time. We managed to get that sorted out with a sympathetic guide (our man Can - pronounced 'Jan') who kept us together. In the end, it was fine. Thirty people on our coach, sharing meals and hiking over beautiful Turkish plains and mountains. The rock formations in Cappadocia are astonishing, including some cave-dwelling homes now vacant. It wasn't warm, but not that cold either, though there was some snow in the mountains. We saw lots of ancient monuments and buildings, some of us had Turkish baths, others wanted to go ballooning but failed because of the high winds. Food was good. Company excellent. And I won at gin rummy twice. Of course, we had to visit 'my brother's carpet shop' and a cousin's leather store, oh, and not forgetting the gold and diamond place either, but hey, you expect that in Turkey and there was no pressure to buy. The Japanese and Indians in our group made up for the rest of us and I'm sure they got some jolly good bargains. We bought four Turkish carpets in Hong Kong in 1990 and since they last 150 years we'll wait until AD 2140 to buy new ones.

Victor Gollancz has just reissued my trilogy 'The Navigator Kings' in an omnibus edition. This work, which contains an enormous amount of research, visiting Fiji, Tahiti, Aitutaki and (twice) Raratonga and talking to oral historians, as well as delving into books on Polynesian navigation and sailing techniques, I believe to be the best of my efforts. It is a strange conception, I admit. I do a geographical juggle, exchanging Britain for New Zealand, so that when the Polynesians finally invade 'the land of mists' their vessels land on the shores of Scotland (the main protagonist being a Celt). The story is jam-packed with Polynesian myth and legends, and indeed, folk lore. They have their giants, fairies and dwarves; their strange islands inhabited by strange beings; their fantastic voyages (some of which were real) and their gods, demi-gods and ancestral heroes. I'm very proud of the trilogy and hope it gives some enjoyment to readers. It gave me a lot of joy researching and writing it, learning about the peoples of Oceania and the way of life.

On a different subject completely, I'm not sure whether it's because I always (according to Annette) have my head in the clouds, or whether the years are telling on me, but I've had one or two aberrations lately. One I've spoken of before: we were in the car and Annette was telling me something which I had difficulty in hearing, so I automatically reached out for the car radio volume control so that I could hear her better. Two is more recent: I was watching a local team play football when one of them scored a goal. I stood for a few seconds waiting for the slow-motion replay. 

Yes indeed, I think my dependence on modern inventions is beginning to overwhelm my common sense.