Our move to Gloucestershire has invigorated us. We follow a strict physical regime, rising early, doing press-ups and handstands, and making up several jokes before breakfast. It has stopped raining. Reverend Hawker spends much of his time alone, developing his electronic “Keyboard to All Mythologies” which, I have no doubt, will in time prove a very useful poetic tool.* I am busy editing the voluminous diaries of Philip Crashaw, which we have brought with us. (I forget: have I yet recounted the remarkable series of events that led to their discovery in an abandoned attic of our old abode?) We will continue to publish excerpts from this surprising relic of the Victorian age, and are currently approaching experts in the hope they might say: “One of the most extraordinary survivals of the Victorian Age,” “Kilvert and Woodforde and My Secret Life have nothing on this”, “Undoubtedly genuine”, and such like. Henry the Raven, meanwhile, prods the cheap patterned curtains aside and peers hesitantly through the window at the glassy world outside, where shadows creep down hillsides and the ash trees stir restlessly in the sunshine and wind. (As I mentioned before, it has stopped raining.) And it is into this glassy world that Algernon disappears for long hours, working on his new side project, available here, a countryside journal completely devoid of puns.
(*When it is finished Reverend Hawker says he is going to call it the Casio Casaubon, but I have no idea why.)
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