Spring is in the air - and winter is lurking in my chest.

Soon as the sun comes out our ragged old polyanths, rescued from the garden last summer and rested in the vegetable garden, do their best to out on a show.

I'm at a standstill. My usual hideous winter cold arrived last weekend and I am producing a stream of unspeakable effluents, wheezing piteously and sleeping in fits and starts.

Thank goodness, then, for the splendid BBC iPlayer, which allows me to view archived programmes like the history of Life magazine (1936-72), and a fascinating issue of Who Do You Think You Are? in which Martin Sheen discovers the revolutionary past of recent ancestors on both his mother's and his father's side, one in 1920s Ireland, the other in 1930s Spain.

It is such a delight to have resources like these available on one's desk, a few mouse-clicks away. On balance, I'd settle for modern life over any past you care to dredge up.

The constant need to bring in some sort of income, in betwen royalty payments, advances and the like, has resulted in a fat manuscript arriving by post this morning. It is 320-odd pages in length and has to do with the life of the Danish philosopher Soren Kirkegaarde, about whom I know absolutely zilch. This time next week I will be full of him.

I have run out of gas already. Time to guzzle some more fluids, gaze at the patterns on my sun-blind, and imagine that I've slipped into a Philip Marlowe novel.....