A frantic, often fraught week that I could have happily done without; Wednesday particularly, I crawled home then, beaten and wildly exasperated. But that's all in the past.

A number of beautiful things floated across the last yesterday and today: two quite blissful days in Sheffield and being reunited with an old love.

The steel city: it could be Rome or San Francisco with all those hills, steeper for every Sheffielder to be as a lean and muscular as goats...except so many are n't; and at night, eerily like night time LA, well it was from my hotel room window.

Reunited with an old love. Not a physical thing...though I felt the stirrings, but the simple chance act of picking up a copy of "Herzog"' Saul Bellow's masterpiece. Just flicking through it was akin to being aroused. I love that book.