Tuesday, 9 March 2010

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.

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Thursday, 8 October 2009

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.

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Tuesday, 8 September 2009

Book Event

On Saturday 12 September I'll be at the Dublin Book Festival talking about my Golding Biography and Lord of the Flies in a joint event with Declan Kiberd who will talk about his book Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living. It will (I think) be about the competing claims of Golding's novel and Joyce's to be literary classics - also about why Ulysses comes high in the list of books that people have tried to read but failed (Moby Dick and Proust's A la recherche are the only ones that even come close to it). The event is at 4.30 in the Pavilion Theatre Dun Laoghaire.
About bees: mine have left Apiguard more or less untouched, hardly any has gone down into the brood chamber. Is this common?

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Wednesday, 26 August 2009

Book Festival

I shall be doing two events at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Friday 28 August, the first at 3.00 in the RBS Main Theatre about my new biography of William Golding, and the second with Sebastian Barry in the Scottish Power Studio Theatre, about Faber & Faber's 80 years of publishing.
Re Beekeping. Does anyone have experience of Apiguard for countering varroa? I'm using it for the first time this year as I read that the varroa mite has become immune to Apistan, which I have used till now.

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