Best chocolate to fall back on, inexplicable research and Old Mills...

When times are hard, I fall back on chocolate.  In fact, I've fallen back on chocolate so many times lately that I have a permanent Walnut Whip impression on my left buttock.  Despite their outwardly benign appearance, Walnut Whips can be surprisingly knobbly, don't let that fluffy marshmallow inside fool you - oh no!  If you're really going to have to land on confectionary, can I recommend something a little softer, possibly a Flake, which will spread the weight nicely if you work it right.  Of course, you're picking the bits out of your underwear for a week, and finding little bits of melted chocolate in your M&S knee-to-ankle gusset will cause you to believe that you are going quietly rusty, but I still recommend them over Walnut Whips.  Or bars of Fruit and Nut, because a badly-placed hazelnut can leave you walking in a strange way for a week.

I'm still looking for the walnut.  But, to be fair, I did land on it with some force.

I don't know why I digressed in such fashion, for times have been far from hard lately.  No, in fact they've been decidedly squashy, not to say splashy in their unhardness. Flaccid, in fact.  So to commemorate these decidedly unturgid times, I have been starting research for another novel.  Now, bear in mind, if you would, that I still have the vampires bubbling for release this summer, a novel about amateur witches in its second (or is it third?) reworking, and the anti-social astrophysicist awaiting some kind of resolution to his septic-tank debacle...  So why am I even thinking about another book?

That, my comfortably-seated dears, is a very good question.  And it all revolves around a corn mill, a Co-Op, a filled in ditch and gravestones. I have become ever-so-lightly obsessed with the fate of this mill, the filling in of the ditch and erasure of the mill-site, also the epitaphs carved on some local gravestones.  And the Co-Op does have some remarkably good bargains.  And so, I'm doing research!  See me doing research!  Now go away and let me go on with it.  Oh, and pass me those Walnut Whips on your way out...

Like this, only not, because it's not there now.  But when it was, it might have looked like this.  Or not.  Er, that's the Mill, not the Co-Op, obviously.