I still can’t quite believe it. A few weeks ago, now, my U.S. publisher’s publicity person, Laura, emailed me with “THE BEST news.” Even though Laura never capitalizes like that, I was quite unprepared for what came next. ESPERANCE HAS BEEN NOMINATED FOR THE L.A. TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN SCIENCE FICTION!!! I feel like the father in the movie A Christmas Story, who is over the moon because he has won “a major award.” Now, in A Christmas Story, it has to be said that the major award turned out to be a plastic lamp in the shape of a lady’s stockinged leg, but being nominated for an L.A. Times Book Prize is the real deal. And I know it’s a cliché, but it really is an honor just to be nominated. The other nominees are Stephen Graham Jones, for “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,” Jordan Kurella, for “The Death of Mountains,” Nnedi Okorafor, for “Death of the Author: A Novel,” and Silvia Park, for “Luminous: A Novel.” I’ve only read two of the four and I don’t know I’ll have time for the others before the award ceremony, but the two I read are just incredibly good, and the other two will undoubtedly be in the same league, so I am genuinely stunned to find myself in the same company. I do win for shortest title, though!
I will be ditching the day job to fly out to L.A. for a few days to attend the awards ceremony, the afterparty (I’ve never been to an afterparty—certainly not in L.A.!), and to sit on a panel the following day at the L.A. Festival of Books. The L.A. Festival of Books is reputedly the largest book festival in the United States, so I imagine it’ll be quite something. Plus, compared to Edinburgh, the weather is sure to be amazing. What a rush!
Despite the various traumas that have rattled our world from pole to pole, 2025 was a pretty good year for yours truly. Esperance came out in May to terrific reviews, including just recently best-of-2025 lists from Booklist, CrimeReads, and LA Public Library among others. Readers have been kind; and I had the opportunity to meet readers, fellow authors, and a whole bunch of delightful people at a variety of book festivals, including Cymera, the Harrogate Crime Writers Festival, and Bloody Scotland. All in all, I couldn’t have asked for better experiences.
As for 2026, one hopes that the world will calm down a bit while, literarily speaking, there are a lot of fun things to look forward to. LOD is on track to be published in the fall, I’ve had a military SF short story accepted for publication (a real departure for me), and I am putting together an outline for a third Quiet Teacher novel. No title as yet, so let’s just call it Murder in the Third for now. 🤣
On top of that, Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s Creative Writing Centre, has asked me to present an online masterclass (their word, not mine) on worldbuilding. It’s on their website for February 5th so it’s all official and far too late for me to back out. As regular readers of this blog will know, I am a huge fan of Moniack Mhor, having attended three times now on writers’ retreats. This, though, is the first time I have been asked to teach and I’m a wee bit nervous about it. So much so that, appalling procrastinator though I am, I have already prepped the presentation and finalized the slides! 😇 Fingers crossed it goes OK. Nerves aside, I am really looking forward to it.
Then, starting on February 8th, I am back on tour. That’s when I will be taking part in a panel devoted to police procedurals at the Cheshire Crime Writers Festival in Frodsham. (I was going to add Frodsham’s county, but if you can’t figure that out there is something seriously wrong with you.) After that, on February 21st,I will be back at Granite Noir, in Aberdeen Scotland. I had a freezing good time last time I was there (although my blog makes no mention of the temperature!) and am looking forward to renewing acquaintances and meeting a whole bunch of fun new people. Hopefully, it will be warmer than last time but, as it’s Aberdeen in February, I’m not counting on it. Hopefully the weather will be warmer for Shetland Noir, this June. I don’t have full details of the program yet, but I am confident that, like last time, it will be an absolute blast!
So, lots to be looking forward to. Here’s hoping 2026 will be a better year for everyone.
As some of you may recall, I have been anxious about the fate of D______, my latest novel and something of a prequel to my debut, Braking Day. I had sent it off to my agent, the estimable Brady, for review, after which it was due to go to my editor, the hard-driving Aranya, for the final verdict. For several weeks, I have been on tenterhooks. But now the verdict is in.
I am happy (relieved!) to report that the verdict has been overwhelmingly positive. If you like SF, SF mysteries, or can tolerate SF for the sake of a mystery, D______ will not disappoint! Aranya, Brady and Brady’s assistant, James, have made a number of excellent suggestions that I will be incorporating into the final text, but D______ is very much on its way.
Although it won’t be called D______. We have settled, probably, for L___ o_ D______. I’m still blanking out the words because I’m not a hundred percent sure there won’t be a further change. I have been caught out like this before!
Normally, this is the point where I whine about the publishing industry changing one of my perfectly good titles. But in actual fact L___ o_ D______ was my suggestion. As the manuscript took shape beneath my fingers, L___ o_ D______ felt like a better title than D______, and that’s the one I used when I sent the draft out for review. The publisher pushed back on that a bit because L___ o_ D______ comes up in searches as a Bollywood movie (!!!) and that will make finding the book using a search engine a wee bit harder. What a world we live in, eh? This is not something that would even have been considered until a few years ago.
Nonetheless, as neither the publisher, Brady, nor I could come up with anything better, L___ o_ D______ remains intact. If (if!) it continues to remain intact, L___ o_ D______ will mark the second time in a row (after Esperance) that my choice of title will have survived contact with the professionals, so maybe I’m starting to get the hang of it!
My tour of the book festival circuit continues with a recent appearance at the Black British Book Festival at The Barbican in London. It was an enormous amount of fun and an opportunity to talk books and the writing of books through a slightly different lens. It was a particular pleasure to meet Edinburgh-based Tendai Huchu and fantasy author Marvelous Michael Anson for the first time. As always at events like this there were a number of budding writers in the audience, and it was a pleasure to share what someone called our “publishing journeys” with them. Neither Marvelous nor I have been overnight successes (there is a lot of rejection in publishing) so both of us, I think, were able to offer up some hope to people who might otherwise become discouraged.
Book signing at the Barbican (by Ayo Okojie)
Which got me thinking about celebrity authors, who, at least in publishing terms, are overnight successes. They rock up to a publisher with an idea for a book, get it published and, lo and behold, instant best seller. I’ve mentioned before that there is a certain amount of resentment in the crime-writing community about the fact that not only have celebrity writers not “paid their dues,” a significant number of them can’t actually write and rely heavily on ghostwriters. Personally, I’ve always been rather relaxed about this. If you’re a writer and you think a celebrity’s road to publication has been easy, my response has tended to be along the lines of, “Fine. Go out and become a celebrity then.” Not as easy as it looks! Celebrities have worked long and hard to earn the fame that guarantees their publishers an instant bestseller. Why they should be criticized for that is a mystery to me.
The ghostwriter criticism is a lot trickier, though. I have tended to the view that if the reader enjoys the product, that is answer enough. Who cares if the celebrity actually wrote it?
And yet. If you’re a celebrity chef, say, that the public can’t get enough of, you can’t just launch a music career. You have to be able to, you know, sing. If you can’t, you will be found out lickety-split and reduced to the status of amusing novelty act. The Eddie the Eagle of music. But if you’re a celebrity who can’t write, a ghostwriter and a decent editor can make that particular deficiency vanish from the page. It is, in a sense, a fraud. The reader thinks they’re consuming the talents of the celebrity – maybe a glimpse into how they think – when it’s entirely possible that what they’re reading is the celebrity’s idea for a book (the easy part, as I once heard Anne Cleeves describe it) turned into something enjoyable and real by the talents of a different person altogether. And then what about the talents of celebrities who really can write, like Richard Osman? Fabulously successful though his books are, are his achievements being somehow devalued by the lurking suspicion that because he’s a celebrity he must have had help?
This was my confused state of mind when, running far later than I usually do in the mornings, the actor Reese Witherspoon popped up on my radio to announce that she, too, has now written a book. Before I could reach over to switch stations, though, she went on to explain that she’d had help: none other than the great Harlan Coben. He’s on the cover with equal credit. And why not? He’s Harlan Coben! Paradoxically, though, because Ms. W openly admitted to having help, I felt that she had probably written more of this book than I would originally have been inclined to believe. And if Reese Witherspoon (who could totally have used an anonymous ghostwriter) is happy to share credit, why can’t everyone else? The thriller writer James Patterson famously writes with co-authors to maintain “his” prodigious output, and no one minds a bit. Perhaps it’s time for the celebrities and publishers who use ghostwriters to finally come clean. The “Children’s Division” of the UK’s Society of Authors has recently called for exactly that. They have demanded more transparency for the “unsung” ghostwriters behind celebrity-authored children’s books, with the ghostwriters to be given credit on the cover as a matter of course. Although it would remove the “ghost” from ghostwriter, this strikes me as no bad thing. In a world already chockful of deceit and misdirection, a little honesty in the world of celebrity book writing would be a welcome breath of fresh air.
I am not long back from Stirling and the world famous Bloody Scotland crime festival. What a great time!
As some of you may recall, I attended Bloody Scotland a couple of years ago to do a breakout author spotlight, which took all of three minutes to deliver and an entire evening to prepare. This time, I was participating in an actual panel, Murder Most Speculative, with Ben Aaronovitch and Nick Binge. It was a reunion of sorts: I shared a panel with Nick at this year’s Cymera Festival in Edinburgh, while Ben and I appeared together at the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England. And, like Harrogate, the topic was the how (and why!) of writing SFF crime mysteries. The panel was chaired by Scottish writer Zoe Venditozzi, who carried out her task with charm, verve, and insight – no easy task, let me tell you: we were in a Scottish pub on a Friday night. The default setting was, er, rowdy.
One of Zoe’s questions – an observation, really – has stuck with me ever since. Not least because it’s got me worrying that I am a hopelessly naïve human being. She congratulated me on writing a book with strong female characters, a statement that left me somewhat at a loss. Not because it wasn’t true but because she thought it worth mentioning. A female character is a character, after all. Some are strong, some are weak, some are charming, and some are complete a—, well, not very nice people. I made the (to me) obvious point that women are half the human race and that if you’re not using them, you’re losing half of your potential story. To which Zoe responded that I would be surprised at how few female characters there actually are.
In the past, I thought to myself, but not now, surely? Isaac Asimov, one of the great writers of 20th century SF, had almost no female characters in his books, and certainly (with the stunning exception of the robot psychologist, Susan Calvin) no strong ones. And it’s the same with JRR Tolkien. There are female characters in Lord of the Rings, for instance, but they tend to be other-worldly and ethereal, far from the center of the action. That said, though, Tolkein was born in 1892, Asimov in 1920. They are authors of their time. Times have changed.
Or have they? There are definitely more female authors in SFF these days, and Crime has always had great female writers (think Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, P.D. James), but what about the characters? Thinking through the books I have read lately, there are plenty of female characters but, Tolkien-like, many of them are not at the center of the action, regardless of how strong or high-achieving they are. Digging around a little more, it turns out that Dutch academics carried out a study on this very subject in 2020 (Actual Fictions: Literary Representation and Character Network Analysis, Cambridge University Press). Comparing Dutch novels written in the 1960s with more modern times, they found almost nothing had changed with regard to female representation. As summarized by one of the authors:
“The emancipation in novels has made very little progress between 1960 and 2010. In general, the male-female ratio is pretty constant: 70% of the characters are male and only 30% are female. Not only that, but female characters in novels continue to operate on the margins of social networks.” So, Zoe is right it appears.
In which case, I have a simple suggestion for my fellow writers. Regardless of whether you plot meticulously or write by the seat of your pants, every time you introduce a new character, alternate the sexes unless there is a compelling reason not to. How hard can it be?
Normally when I return to this blog after so long away it is with a profound feeling of guilt. Not this time. I have been sooooo busy! Honestly! Some of it is the day job. For a variety of reasons, we are shorthanded at work, so that’s been taking up even more of my time than it usually does.
Then there is the small matter of revising D______. Last time we were here, I had just finished the first draft. Since then, it has gone through two more iterations and is now in the hands of my agent, the estimable Brady, who will endeavor to make it better before I hand it over to my editor for her to make it better before it’s finally allowed out into the world.
The revision process for D_______ has been . . . interesting. Even with a week’s writing retreat at Moniack Mhor (which is as stunning in summer as it is stark in winter), everything seemed to go more slowly. In the end, I found myself eating up more and more family time just to keep my head above water. Worst of all, I had to push back my delivery date. Now, asking for more time is quite normal in publishing, where deadlines are, um, flexible. But I’m a lawyer at heart. Asking for an extension to a previously agreed schedule is, quite simply, excruciating.
As for the underlying cause of these tribulations, I am far from sure. On my worst days, I worry that D________ is simply no good and that I have been applying endless amounts of lipstick to a literary pig. On my middling days, I berate myself for being overly ambitious and reaching beyond my abilities to tell a story. And on my OK days, I figure that D______ is simply a new frontier for me – part psychological thriller, part noir in a sci-fi hull – so getting it right is bound to be challenging.
But mainly I worry that it’s no good.
A couple of months ago, I attended a launch event for this year’s Bloody Scotland crime festival, to which I have been lucky enough to be invited. Linwood Barclay, the great Canadian thriller writer, was on stage. In discussing his writing process, he likened sending out his finished manuscript to waiting for someone to mark his exams without the slightest sense of how well or badly he’d done. For the first time in my writing life, I know exactly how he feels.
Time to start work on something else. Take my mind off it.
L-R at Cymera 2025: Marco Rinaldi, Roisin Dunnett, Yours Truly and Nicholas Binge. Courtesy B. Schenkenberg.
D______, first draft: complete at 94,100 words.
One of the bizarre things authors seldom mention when talking about their latest book—Esperance, in my case—is the duality of the experience. Because, in truth, saying that you’re here to talk about your latest book is almost always a lie. The “latest” book is the one you are working on, the one that has yet to see the light of day. The one that occupies your thoughts as you wrestle with character and plot and the ordering of words. Even though this unborn effort is the one filling your writing mind, it’s not the one you’re meant talk about. The one you’re meant to talk about is the one that you wrote two years ago or longer. All the time you talk about the book you have written, you think about the one you are writing. You become the literary equivalent of Schroedinger’s cat: the creature that, thanks to the bizarre dualities of quantum theory, can be both dead and alive at the same time.
This “have written/am writing” duality hit me quite hard at this year’s Cymera Festival. After the humiliating discovery that I knew far less about SF than I thought, my ignorance being spectacularly exposed at the Friday night SF quiz, I was lucky enough to be part of a wonderful panel that included Roisin Dunnett, who talked about her debut novel, A Line You Have Traced, and Nicholas Binge (an SF quiz genius), whose not-debut novel, Dissolution, came out in March. Chaired by the author, podcaster and SF-quiz monster, Marco Rinaldi, we had a great time talking about books, the writing of books and life in general. My only regret was that we didn’t have more time for audience questions. They had some great ones: challenging and really hard to get to grips with. There were plenty more left to go when Marco had to call time. Bummer!
On the other hand, Marco’s calling time also brought a temporary truce in the battle raging inside my skull. The “be professional” part of my brain was furiously trying to concentrate on being present in the room; the “screw this” lobe, however, was trying to drag me back to the draft of my [actual] latest novel, D______. Why? Because I was struck by inspiration right there on stage and was itching to get back to it.
As regular readers of this blog will know, I am more plotter than pantser, although I don’t find either of these terms particularly helpful. They imply a rigidity of approach with no overlap between the two. My outlines are just that: outlines. More nautical chart than roadmap, they point in a general direction. How I get there depends very much on what I encounter along the way.
In the case of D______, what I had encountered in the days leading up to Cymera was an impenetrable reef roiling the shallow waters between myself and the intended destination. I very much knew where I wanted to land, but I had no idea how to get there without tearing massive great holes in both plot and character development. Or, less pretentiously: given all that had gone before, I couldn’t make the ending make sense.
Until I could. While Roisin and Nick were making great points about the writing life, I could suddenly see it right in front of me: the narrow but navigable channel into harbor. YES!!!
Somehow, somehow, I managed to both keep my seat and not blurt any of this out on stage. Panel and book signing done, I rushed back to my laptop to get started. It took me a week or two to get there but the first draft of D_______ is finally done. Ironically, I completed it the day my son graduated from college, so the two things will be forever linked in my mind.
Esperance goes on sale next week! The release date is May 20th in the US and May 22nd in the UK, Tuesday and Thursday being the traditional publication day in those respective countries. Also, the days on which they hold their elections. Coincidence, right?
Mind you, publication and election day have this in common: it’s the day the public get to decide whether they have the slightest interest in what you’re offering. Like many a pol, I’m pacing about nervously anticipating the verdict. I think Esperance is great, but what about everyone else?
The polls, sorry: reviews have been encouraging, so I have hopes. Book Page have given it a starred review, which wraps up by saying, “Lovers of sharp, fast sci-fi from the likes of Neal Stephenson will be right at home with Esperance. For this reader, it scratched about a dozen itches at once and then some. It’s exciting, inventive and murky, an ocean worth the plunge.” Library Journal also gave it a starred review (I’m not providing the link because of spoilers), recommending it, “for readers who love intricately blended genre stories that ask big questions.” One blogger describes it as, “Part (very weird) murder mystery, part speculative fiction and a wow ending. . . an evolving surprise from start to finish,” and Women.com have listed it as a great choice for book clubs. So, all in all, I couldn’t hope for a better send off.
Plus, stop the presses! Locus Magazine, one of the SF world’s premier publications, is going to review Esperance in its June issue! Fingers crossed they like it.
I think the last thing I have going on before Esperance sees the light of day is a podcast interview with Quick Book Reviews on May 19th. That’s the interview date, at least. I’m not sure when it will go out, but shortly thereafter, I imagine. I’m a little nervous about it, but in a good way, I think. QBR is kind of a big deal when it comes to book podcasts: John Scalzi was on it recently, which was really something for an SF geek like yours truly, so I don’t want to stuff it up.
As regular readers of this blog will know, when it comes to social media, podcasts etc. I’m a bit of a dinosaur. I have a barely used LinkedIn for the day job and that’s it. Twitter/X terrifies me, and I can’t dance to save my life, so Tik Tok is out. I’ve never done a podcast before but, nerves notwithstanding, I’m kind of looking forward to it. I mean, it’s just radio for the 21st century, right? I can do that.
Life, Shakespeare tells us, “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Start with the preceding link, head on down the rabbit hole of the world wide web and I’m sure you will come across all sorts of erudite analyses of Macbeth’s despairing words as his story (Shakespeare’s version, anyway) heads towards its bloody conclusion. Personally, I take a much simpler lesson from all this. “Real life” is a terrible template for a story. It has no narrative arc, no plot. It begins and ends, of course, but what goes on in the middle is a random mishmash of cause, effect, unintended consequences and bolts from the blue. There is no underlying rhyme or reason. The art of the biographer or memoirist is to take the roiling, senseless mishmash of life’s many events and, by judicious cherry picking, manufacture a narrative arc out of it. Life is a plotless mess. But it can be mined for stories.
As a for instance, being a person of a certain age and temperament, I am just back from a cruise on Cunard’s Queen Victoria from Southampton, England to Lisbon, Portugal and back. My intention was to eat, sleep and write (what else are vacations for?) but my spouse had other ideas. “Get out and about,” she said. “See the world,” she said.
“Or else.”
Having experienced “or else” before, it seemed prudent to stop writing long enough to see what Lisbon had to offer. A lot, it turns out. It is a visually stunning city of narrow cobbled streets clinging to unrelentingly steep hillsides that overlook the Tagus estuary, easily wide enough and deep enough to accommodate an entire fleet of cruise ships many times the size and draft of the legendary Titanic. Having been leveled by an earthquake in 1755, it has an architectural coherence about it that most cities lack. It is oddly reminiscent of Edinburgh’s New Town, which was built at roughly the same time, though, having been built by Portuguese rather than Scots, it is a New Town of vibrant color and wrought iron balustrades, raised to the sky in a settled expectation of sunlight.
Lisbon, Portugal
Having climbed high enough to reach the botanical gardens, we ate lunch at the awesome Pica Pau restaurant and made our leisurely way down to the waiting ship, roughly an hour before final boarding.
Which is when I discovered that I’d left my backpack at the restaurant, backpack being shorthand for passport, laptop and a variety of other things it might be best not to lose. As I write this, it occurs to me that you might reasonably be asking what I thought I was doing lugging a laptop up hill and down dale during a shore excursion. Honestly? I have no good answer.
An hour to get there and back was tight but doable thanks to the wonders of modern technology. My wife boarded the ship and I returned to the quayside, all set to summon an Uber.
Which is when my phone died, plunging me back into the 20th Century. Suddenly, I’m a monolingual alien stranded on a distant planet, with no easy means of communication. I wandered out of the docks and into the nearby streets where I managed to wave down a taxi. It’s a taxi. They’re used to tourists. And they all speak English.
Except she didn’t.
A Lisbon cab
Now, I knew I’d left my bag at Pica Pau Restaurant, but only my phone knew the actual address: “Avenida Somewhere-Or-Other” wasn’t going to cut it. Fortunately, it was only a few yards down the road from an entrance to the botanical gardens. Which had had an enormous sign over the entrance.
“Jardim Botanico,” says I, all mock confidence and we are on our way. Desperate not to lose my best chance of getting back to the correct cruise terminal (Lisbon has more than one) frantic hand gesturing and repeated use of the phrase “cinco minutos” managed to convey to my bemused driver that I’d like her to wait while I ran to the restaurant, collected my beloved bag and ran back. For a panicked moment I thought she’d gone, but she’d thoughtfully turned the car around ready to return me from whence I came. A BIG tip later and I was back at the ship, with a whopping twenty minutes to spare before they pulled up the gang plank. Disaster averted.
Which is a fun story, right? The sort of thing you’d love to place in your raconteuring library under the heading “Stupid Things I Did On Vacation.”
But this is life. There are no endings, happy or otherwise. No plot. Three days later, about to board a train at Kings Cross to take me home to Edinburgh, I discover that I’ve done it again. I’d left my recently recovered bag (and laptop and passport) in the back of a London black cab, which had long since disappeared without trace. I’m not prone to meltdowns these days, but I had one right there and then, within spitting distance of platform 9¾. Stupid, stupid, stupid! And nothing I could do to retrieve the situation beyond a hopeless act of form-filling on the Transport for London website.
London’s black cabs. Famous the world over.
Thank God, therefore, for London taxi drivers – and their wives. On the train, several hundred miles north by now, I receive an email at my author address from Robert M. He’d found my bag in the back of his cab. His wife, having figured out my name from its contents, had googled me. Apparently, I’m not so difficult to find these days and they’d been prepared to make the effort. Thank you Mr and Mrs M! A thousand thank yous! I will be forever grateful.
But this is life. A tale told by an idiot. No plot, no arc. Only episodes. Without a doubt my next act of stupidity is lurking around the corner.
Somehow, I am 36,000 words into my new novel without having made a blog entry. How did that happen? No idea. Oh, wait. It’s been ages since my last blog entry. Too much writing, not enough blogging. Bad Adam! Bad! As ever, I don’t expect my working title to survive contact with the publishing profession, so we’ll just call it D______ for now. It’s possible, actually, that I might change the working title before I finish the first draft as I’m thinking there’s a “better” one. But, then again, what’s the point of making up two titles that will never see the light of day?
Anyway, D______ or whatever is a prequel to my first published novel, Braking Day. I don’t want to say too much more about it right now, but I’m very much enjoying writing it. Which is a relief because the outline, let me tell you, was er . . . challenging!
Rather than chat about D______, what I will be talking about — quite literally — over the next few months is Esperance. I’m going on tour! Well, not really, but I will be appearing at three UK book festivals over the summer. First up, I will be at Cymera, Edinburgh, Scotland on Saturday, June 7. Cymera, as long-time readers of this blog will know, is the first festival I ever attended as either a writer or a reader and I have been hooked ever since. I am really looking forward to going back there.
Esperance, unlike Braking Day, is not only a SF novel, it is also a murder mystery. As a consequence of that, I have had the incredible luck to be invited to the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, in Harrogate, England, which is a major, major gig on the crime writing circuit. So excited! I’m slated to appear on a panel tentatively titled, What Planet Are They On? on Saturday July 19, which should be an absolute blast. Old Peculier, by the way, is a beer. And “Peculier” is not a typo . . .
Finally, on Friday September 12, I will be appearing at the awesome Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival in Stirling, er, Scotland. Some of you may recollect that I was there in 2023 with a short (three minute!) spotlight appearance as an up-and-coming crime writer. This time I have been promoted to an actual panelist so I must be doing something “write.” (I know. I know!)
So, some fabulous things to look forward to. If you can make it to any of these, I would love to meet you!!! And in between all of that, one of my nephews is getting married and my son is graduating from college. It’s looking like it’s going to be a great summer. Even though, this being Britain, the weather will be sh . . .
