Book Events and Bees

I shall be talking to Michael Schmidt about my Golding biography at the Glasgow Book Festival on Saturday 13 March at 3.30 in the Mitchell Library.
More bee news. I replaced the wooden slides on the two hives where they had been eaten and two weeks later the slides on one hive had been eaten away again to enlarge the holes. A fellow beekeeper says it is rats, which may be right, though the holes do not seem big enough for a rat to get through. The weather is too cold to open the hives and see how the colonies are, but last Sunday the sun was shining and, though there was a bitter wind and an air temperature of only 5, bees from the central hive of the three were flying - so maybe all is well. Hope so.

Beekeeping Problem

I wonder if any other beekeepers have had the experience I have had this weekend. I went up to check on the hives after a fortnight of snow and ice. They are WBC hives and I found that on two of them the wooden slides that I put on in the autumn as mouse-guards had been gnawed away in several places to enlarge the apertures. The colonies seem quite OK and on Sunday, a sunny day, they were flying in large numbers. Presumably the gnawing of the slides was the work of freezing or starving mice during the cold spell, but it's astonishing to me that they could have managed it given that the slides are a quarter of an inch thick and solid cedar. The third hive had a metal mouse guard, fitted under the little roof over the landing board, and this had been pulled forward. When I took the top lift off the hive I found that the quilt had been chewed up to make a neat mouse-nest of soft fabric, a bit like a ball of wool. There was no sign of mice, so I suppose they had heard me coming.

Book Events

On Friday 22 January at 7.00 I'll be talking about my biography of William Golding at the Savile Club, 69 Brook Street, and on Tuesday, 26 January, at 6.00 I'll be giving the William Golding Memorial Lecture at the University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus (also known as the Tremough Campus), Lecture Room A. The lecture will be based on newly discovered facts and documents that shed light on Golding's engagement to a local girl during the 1930s - an episode in his life that he fictionalized in the love affair of Sammy Mountjoy and Beatrice in Free Fall.

Book Event

On Friday 20 November I'll be at the Bridport Literary Festival and will be discussing my biography of William Golding in the Bridport Arts Centre at 11 a.m.

Book Event

I'll be giving a talk at the Royal Society of Literature on Monday 2 November. It will be called "William Golding: The Making of a Novelist" and will start at 7.00 in the lecture theatre at Somerset House. Claire Tomalin will be in the chair.

Books and Bees

On Wednesday 14 October at 6.30 I'll be giving the Laurie Lee Lecture at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature - it will be in the Everyman Theatre, and on Friday 16th I'll be talking to Stephen Derry about my Golding biography at the Wells Literary Festival (7.30 in St Cuthbert's Church).
On the bee front: at the Man Booker dinner on Tuesday the Chair of the Judges James Naughtie told me that he is now a beekeeper. It seems that the literary world is gradually being taken over by bees - which can only be good.

Book Events

On Sunday 4 October at 4.30 I shall be at the Ilkley Literary Festival, in St Margaret's Hall, talking about my biography of William Golding to Professor Gweno Williams of York St John University.