The dead of winter – mountains of snow, a muffled city in the slushy cold. But there’s lots of life at my bird-feeder, and every morning, little raccoon tracks weave through the garden. This is a good time to do some serious reading – to spur me on, I’m plowing through some great books on writing creative non-fiction. Let me know if you’d like a list.

And I’ve started serious work on a new project. I can’t say “a new book” – much too scary. Maybe it’s not a book; maybe it’s an article that just keeps on growing. It’s about the Beatles and the early Sixties, and will come partly from my diaries and scribblings of that time, which are plentiful. We diarists are able to delve so deeply into our own pasts. It’s a moving, sometimes funny, sometimes very unfunny journey

Yesterday, for research, I went to the show called “Rain – the Beatles experience” and was embarrassed by how much I enjoyed it. It’s so fake – four guys who look and sound kind of like the real thing, singing the songs – but that music is so powerful, touches me so profoundly after all these years (forty-four, to be exact), that it’s impossible not to melt. At the end we were all singing “Hey Jude,” of course, and swaying, the Hummingbird Centre full to the rafters with all ages, from little kids to the very old. True musical genius, those boys had, from beginning to end.

And even now – Paul McCartney’s latest CD is a joy. I am a Paul girl. That’s my book, and it’ll keep me warm at this cold time.