Mr Blackbird
16 February

As I wake up and move around the house, I am serenaded by the liquid tones of one of the local male blackbirds.

The combination of the lengthening days and the rising temperatures have convinced him that it is time for mating and territorial displays. Consequently, the singing out of his patch each morning as the night comes to an end.

The strategy of taking a week's holiday at the beginning of February has really paid off. I feel very relaxed and I'm driving home from work in total daylight. Sunset is not until 5:15pm by which time I have usually been home for at least an hour. Sunrise is heading towards 7:30am so, although I wake up in the dark, there are glimmerings of twilight by the time I am breakfasting and the drive to work is in reasonable light.

The good news is that, for the next twelve weeks, we shall gain a full 30 minutes of light per week and so the days really will start to open out from now on.

This is also half term week in Sefton so the roads are commensurately empty of traffic making the driving even easier than usual.

Ross and I have continued with our preparations for the building works. We are gently boxing up the books from the box room. We do two or three and then take a break and the do two or three more later on. In amongst that, we are sorting out books that we no longer want. So far, we have taken about two hundred novels to Oxfam in Crosby. Some of them are already out on the shelves for re-sale.

Ross doesn't feel the letting go of the books to be a very big thing - certainly not in the way that I do. I feel as though I am letting go of whole areas of my young adult life. I think it feels as though it is cleansing but I am not quite sure.

There's also been quite a bit of socialising. On Saturday evening, Mitch dropped by. I say dropped but it was a certain arrangement between him and Ross as my beloved was in need of herbal medicines which said Mitch had access to. He stayed for about an hour and a half whilst we drank a glass of wine and talked a lot.

Come Sunday I had a full day at Quakers, doing door duty and then, after a shared lunch, participating in one of our Quest discussion groups. Replete with spiritual feeding, I hopped over to see Phil. Phil now has his own blog which focuses on his major personal and professional obsession with the world of pop. It also features a very dodgy photo which makes him look like the star child out of 2001.

And then on Monday afternoon, Roland and I had a very pleasant chat and a coffee at the Olive Tree along College Road.

Over the course of Sunday and Monday evenings Ross and I watched The Return of the King. It's been over three years now since we saw it first on the big screen. I do think that Tolkein's ending is better with the Hobbits returning to a devastated Shire. It underlines the full cost of tackling evil through war. But the film is a magnificent achievement and you cannot underestimate the spectacle.

Following on from the Beethoven Experience, the Bach Christmas and Webern Day, we now have the Tchaikovsky Experience which gives us all of Tchaikovsky and all of Stravinsky as a leavener. I'm not as engrossed as with the previous examples. I'm not saying it should not have been done; I'm sure there are many people round the country who are enjoying the whole thing immensely. This time, it's just not for me.

I finished off Birthday Stories edited by Haruki Murakami. This was Robert's Christmas present to me. It's a collection of short stories based around the theme of birthdays. There are some clever tales and some which are less appealing. It reminds me that I really must try to read some William Trevor sometime.

The week at work passed well. I sorted out some City and Guilds paperwork, made a little progress towards getting my V1 award organised, wrote a goodly part of a commercial training course, helped out with teaching the Networking module and helped supervise Friday's unit assignment.

Friday night, we took the plunge and travelled to Southport Arts Centre to see the Hoghton Players perform Iolanthe by Gilbert and Sullivan. We'd seen the group a few years back performing The Mikado at Rufford Old Hall. This was probably not a fair test of their mettle but, after Crosby Gilbert and Sullivan Society's lacklustre showing in Ruddigore, I didn't have enormously high hopes. Let's admit that Crosby's set and costumes were better but, in all other respects, this was a far better show; better sung; better acted; better music; better story and lyrics. Ross and I very much enjoyed ourselves even if the disabled access at Southport Arts Centre is a joke.

The pre-Equus publicity machine is continuing to pump out the press stories. And the photographs keep coming - though how many are being released by the publicity machine and how many are finding their way onto the Internet via a barrage of mobile phones is impossible to tell. There must be several tabloid newspapers buying up seats by the dozen so that their employees can sit through three hours of modern drama so that they can try to snap Daniel Radcliffe on their mobile phones during the ten minutes that he sheds his clothes.

Anyhow, it looks as though we can prepare ourselves for such future gems as Harry Potter and the Buns of Steel.