Thriller detective and police procedural novels seem to proliferate, along with television programmes in the same genre. It seems I can't turn on the tv guide or look into a bookshop window without seeing that the latest best seller or best watched is a crime thriller. There are dozens of them around at any one time. I too watch and read, though I find the standard of grammar in some of them a bit hard to swallow. I'm into a novel a the moment, but it's full of sentences like "(There was) an unshaven Neanderthal in a sleeveless, too-short undershirt chewing on a toothpick while sitting behind bullet-proof glass burping up a beer." The bullet proof glass was burping up a beer? I can hear my old fireside companion Raymond Chandler spinning in his grave. Of course, such writing sends a chill through me as I wonder if I do the same sort of thing. Probably, but I hope very occasionally and certainly not with the frequency I find in the short-chaptered, punchy-prosed, wad-thick novels that race to the top of the best seller list and stay there for six weeks. Naturally, if I could write thrillers I would do so. Money, money, money. Unfortunately I am completely inept at the genre.

The English language often bemuses me. On occasion I come across the written word 'golfing'. The other day it had me pausing to consider whether golfing is actually a word. I have never heard it used in speech. Everyone I know says they are going to 'play golf' not 'go golfing'. Yet it appears in thrillers all the time. One doesn't say 'basketballing' but then again, one does say 'swimming'. Hmmm. I went to my Chambers next (I prefer it to the Shorter Oxford which ain't short at all mate, but stands in two heavy volumes on a very weak bookshelf) and found that indeed 'golfing' is a legitimate word which does not point the scinger of forn at thriller authors who use it. Damn, I love to feel superior, but find I'm just a pedant after all and one who is frequently put on the back foot.

Annette and I live on the Shotley Peninsula, a triangle of land between the Rivers Orwell and Stour. We call it Mesopotamia, following the Ancient Greek meaning of the word and because it sounds exotic. It really is exotic in one sense: the wildlife abounds. We have no golden eagles or red squirrels, sadly, but we have most other birds and mammals, including otters, badgers, polecats, buzzards - the list is long. I like taking photos of my fellow creatures and have managed a barn owl this summer, both in flight and standing on a branch looking at me as if I were an alien. Owls are difficult, being around mostly in twilight when the light is poor, so often the photo is too fuzzy and out of focus. I have photos of four different little owls which are absolutely useless, even though it took lots of patience and many visits to take them. Yesterday at dusk however, Annette and I went for a long walk along the banks of the Stour, looking for little owls. What we found - having seen none for years - was a whole colony of hares. There are those who will tell you I have an obsession with hares and even follow the ancient Iceni practice of deifying them. The above photo is one of several taken at the going down of the sun and the close of the day. On the way home, guess what, sitting on top of a telephone pole was the one bird I had been trying to get forever. Annette sat in the car in extreme agitation on the bend of a narrow rural road, the hazard lights blinking, as I leapt from the vehicle to take the above picture. He looked at me as if he were posing for the front of a mag.

We've decided that it's time to revisit India, a country we have come to love over five or six previous visits. Annette has more depth in India than I have, since she taught voluntarily for several months at a school in Bihar in the North East, one of the poorest, least visited states. Together we did the Golden Triangle but our favourite destination is Fort Cochin, in Kerala. The picture above is of Annette standing in the garden of the 'Delight Homestay' owned by David. (Kerala is a Christian state and therefore Christian names proliferate). From the rooftop of Delight one can see a large open hard-dirt square which is used variously as a parade ground for soldiers, religious festivals, a marketplace, but more often than not, by boys practising their cricket skills. On any one day there might be a dozen different groups of boys playing their individual games. They play from dawn till dusk, give or take the school hours for those who attend. It is no wonder the country produces such good cricketers. I usually take a couple of dozen practise cricket balls to hand out the boys, who are often playing with boxwood bats and moth-eaten tennis balls. They invariably say, 'Thank you, Uncle,' which is delightfully polite and makes me feel good - which, let's face it, is of course one of the reasons why it's such a pleasure.

This time we are going to Gujarat (where the new Indian leader hails from). We know nothing about this state, which is situated above Goa. It will be exciting to explore a new region, but one which has a certain familiarity to it. There will be temples to see and Hindu gods to reconnect with. My favourite is Ganesh, the Elephant-headed bachelor, who got his ears and trunk when his father Vishnu believed him to be an intruder in his house and decapitated him. My understanding is that the severed Ganesh was given the head of the first animal he came across, which happened to be the largest beast in the land. All the Indian gods have creatures they ride on, to carry them from one place to another, and Ganesh's mount is a mouse. A rodent with broad shoulders?

India has some wonderful wild life, which is one of the many reasons I love the place. The number of colourful birds is amazing and given that a good proportion of the human population do not kill living creatures, fear of humankind is often absent, which allows one to get close enough for a good picture. I have just spent two years trying to get a photo of a kingfisher here in Suffolk and only managed it recently by incredible luck. (I'm not a bird watcher, I'm a bird taker - often only later finding out what I've taken.) My India kingfishers were taken sitting outside a roadway cafe, as the birds kept landing on a wooden fence. Interestingly, Gujarat is the last refuge of the Asian lion. What? Yes indeed, it was only when I was reading my Lonely Planet I discovered there is such a thing as an Asian lion. Now it would be great to see and photograph one of those in the wild and this time I will make sure I have enough juice in the camera. We saw two wild tigers when we went to the Rajastan - and my camera batteries were exhausted. It is ever thus.

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.