The picture is of Tuscany, near Sienna, where we visited some friends we made in Hong Kong. They had a house nestling in the hollow behind that brown field you see in the foreground. Peaceful, beautiful, spiritual in a historic sense. I could have written 'Far From the Madding Crowd' there, but unfortunately someone else beat me to it.

Some funny things (I mean peculiar) have been happening to me lately. One thing is I have discovered that I seem to have invisible hands. When I use toilets that have laser beams to automatically turn on the water and dry your hands, nothing happens. I stick my hands under the tap. Nothing comes out. I wriggle them about thinking there needs to be movement. Not a drop. Another man comes and sticks his hands under the same tap and water gushes out like Angel Falls. Same thing happens with the hand dryer. Jetstream? Forget it. I don't even get a gentle zephyr. Maybe they don't work after you reach a certain age (and I have reached a certain age). Certainly other things happen when you break through the age barrier and find yourself at Mach Zero on the the other side. The other day Annette and I were in the car going over the Orwell Bridge and she was talking in her usual soft voice, so without thinking I reached over to the radio volume (the radio was off) and turned it up. To my surprise her voice did not get any louder. Then I realised what I'd done, what I had expected to happen, and was mortified. Annette, of course, simply laughed her socks off.

By the by, following Keith Brooke's kind publication of my memoirs 'On My Way To Samarkand' I decided to have a go myself at publishing my account of my 12 day motorcycle ride through the Queensland outback in 2008, a grueling, tough event for an effete writer, I can tell you. If you're at all interested you can find it on Amazon under the title 'Rookie Biker in the Outback'. It's more about the mystique and spirit of the Australian wilderness than it is about biking, since I am not really a genuine biker having only passed my test six weeks before leaving for Oz. It was a wonderful experience though, especially at a certain age.