Ebook download numbers since November 2011

          My friend Heather returned from the States on Sunday and hasn't had a fag for a week! Great! No reason for posting the photie here except that things are looking up a bit now and I'm looking forward to many happy days sitting in my allotment.

         I checked the historical data on the kindle books. It seems since November 2011, which is when Dave and I started putting the books on, there have been 16,348 downloads. Quite surprised by this. Most of the books were downloaded in the first couple of years, so new stuff probably gets downloaded more. When I had two novels published in paper, they sold about 1,700 each, if I recall correctly. Well, for most of the time there were ten books on kindle and nearly seventeen thousand downloads. So almost as many folk read the books that weren't published in paper as did the paper ones when they were published.

       Nobody would have read these books if it hadn't been for the ebooks arriving, so I'm pleased that I put them up. Also, I seem to have made about £200 and I promised myself I'd buy myself another guitar with the money I made, so I must do that soon.

       And I met someone in the pub last night who was doing physics at uni. So I quizzed her about the Prof Higgs stuff, which I cannot get a grip on. Anyway, when I asked her if consciousness could be a field, and she looked a bit flamonxed  and it did not seem to compute. Consciousness? What?! Of course, everything is supposed to have "buddha nature". Saying that might have been even more confusing.

       "Reality is not what it seems" by Carlo Rovelli says there can't be a Big Bang. Thank God for that. Everything coming from nothing seems like a very stupid idea. Probably can't understand that either!!

Malcolm McKenzie R.I.P.

          Today I was hoping to get through to Bellshill for the funeral of my wonderful nephew, my mother's first grandchild, Malcolm McKenzie. Unfortunately, there were no buses this morning to the train station and no trains to Bellshill in the morning anyway, so I had to change out of the funeral stuff and just sit here practising for him, for most of the day. It's probably too early right now to say much about this, but he will be surely sorely, sorely missed.

          Last year Malk had a diagnosis for a tumour on his bladder. It was removed. Because of this, I went on holiday with him last year to visit his brother and other folk, and go to Denmark and Hamburg. That was a very good idea, as it turned out. His mother passed away with cancer when he was maybe twelve and I thought he might be facing a near future with lots of chemotherapy and such, and have the hope that his passing the way he did - deep vein thrombosis, said the autopsy - was maybe a blessing. But we will all miss him. Died when he was fifty years old. Too young.

         Not getting to Bellshill today was hard. Harder than not getting to the Samye Ling for four days when I got the news about Malkand harder than not getting to the Holy Isle, where I was due to go on retreat for three weeks from the 27th February. The year so far says I should not make appointments. Everything I need is really here between my ears.