How rats balance

Ratty's moved south by a couple of hundred miles, to the country, where mellow fruitfulness is the order of the day. Apples and feijoas carpet the earth beneath the trees; rampant tomatoes and strangely shaped gourds gad about the vege garden and huge oranges thud as they land. We've seen chestnuts, avocadoes and persimmons lurking in the orchard.

With all the moving about, many projects to be embraced, correspondences to be kept up, fruits and vegetables to be saved from the sudden decay of late autumn (not to mention ebooks to be promulgated, which Ratty seems to forget is his raison d'être) the rodent has been seeking poise and calm. I'll give him 15 minutes with his Om Shantis, then I'm calling him off the fence and giving him a job (said the Little Red Hen).

Meanwhile (a favourite blog adverb, I notice) The Siren is out there doing its sultry thing and reports back have been more then favourable. We love hearing from readers.

Amigas received an agreeable notice from Tim Jones writing in the New Zealand Herald.

And lovely designer Caroline Jackson became Caroline Pope a couple of weeks ago (congratulations, Caroline) which means she's almost back from her honeymoon and ready to make the final pre-formatting adjustments to The Linen Way. Which — exciting news — is to be excerpted this month in the prestigious New York poetry review, Parnassus. That's the hard copy version; they've promised to hold off on the digital one until we're ready to publish the full work.

To close: in case any of you didn't see this glorious selection making the rounds of FB recently, here's inspiration for the use of expired pumpkin vines and rustling delphinium stalks: Old People Wearing Vegetation.