Time, the eternal editor. Footman. Editor.

Apparently sometime in the last forty years I have totally rewritten T S Eliot's "Marina" in my head, so that his line "What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands" had become to me "What ships, what shores? What savage rocks, what islands?"

I like mine better, at least as matter for posts and short stories and such. No matter. I will talk to you while the broccoli gently steams.

Today I have distinguished myself largely by cleaning the stovetop. It was time. I know there are those who hold that it should be done regularly, even daily; I know people who do it scrupulously after dinner. I admire, but do not propose to join. By the time I've delivered dinner to the table, I reckon that chores are over and I'm done, I just want to slump with m'wife and m'wine and m'cats if they're willing, watch TV or read a book and let the day's end wind away from me onto that other reel. Even the dishwasher doesn't get loaded till next morning.

I did also find myself ambushed by (yet) another short story idea, also on Mars. I, um. May have written the first thousand words or so, when there were so many other things I should have been writing instead. I think I may have lost my nerve, when it comes to finishing anything. Not my craft, I won't believe that. Maybe it's just confidence, lack of, see under "Writer" above.

But anyway: I was reading how a captured British general (whom Lawrence had been sent to bribe free, to no avail) was held for the rest of the war on an island off Constantinople, and how the Turks threw him a party when the King sent his knighthood through; and at first I was all "...but the idiot lost ten thousand men, an entire expeditionary force, through sheer stupidity; why on earth was he getting a knighthood?" and then I was all "...oh, wait, don't be an ass; why single him out, when every general else was losing men all over and being knighted regardless? Of course he got his knighthood, it would be another triumph of British civilisation to deliver it to him in his captivity" - and then, rather belatedly, "...oh, wait. Isn't that a story...? On Mars...?"

And yes, of course it is: so I am writing of the Armistice, while the Russian-occupied moons zoom over the Red Planet and the British below keep their own paroled men prisoner (to save them being shipped to the hell of Russian Venus); and I wanted to call it "What Savage Rocks, What Islands" but of course that's not a quote now. Bloody Eliot.

Okay, broccoli's done, and so am I.