Do what you will though, of course. If said purchase proves laborious, he will be made to compose a charming thank-you letter whatever the gift.

My book is due for publication ‘some time in the next year’ or so I’m told. The delays and postponements are heartbreaking. I have a small blunt-instrument headache at the mere thought of it. But I try to put the difficulties behind me. Have had, in the meantime, two other things published: one in Crosscurrents, a little magazine quite well thought of, and another in something called City Voo-Doo (which I have a feeling will exist for about three editions and then go defunct).

The thing is (and I admit this cautiously and own it as a challenge): I am still finding it quite difficult to work without a drink. I find myself wanting to write that in invisible ink, lemon juice, or in such teeny-weeny writing you need to get a magnifying glass out to read it. But I tell you because I know you won’t judge me, and admitting it enables me to look it in the face, so to speak. My working days were always all about alcoholic beverages. The beverages knitted together the whole painful stop-start line-for-line word-for-word process. What does one do in the gaps without it?—there is a process, a pause, between thought and creation and it requires a prop. A cigarette is no contender. And they say cigarettes will kill me too.

Meanwhile, to help me on my way, my husband has purchased me an electric typewriter. I’ve said to him: ‘Jo, I’m not a secretary anymore, I don’t need to put down 80 words a minute, you know!’ but he seems to think an electric typewriter, rather than the more modest manual chug-along type, will help me break my habits of the past.

I don’t write poetry on a typewriter in the first place, of course, and never have—though it’s true that publishers don’t like to spend their time deciphering spidery hands from the nineteenth century. My new typewriter is a Smith Corona Portable and it fits rather nattily in its nice little case. I wasn’t sure at first, I admit, but it does truly make me feel businesslike. Should John Honey at Vellum muck me about any further, he may not get any more good poetry out of me, but he will get a ferocious business letter from me and my Smith Corona.

I am trying to spend more time with Owen, but he likes it so much at Ornella’s little house, and the country air is so good for him at the Parishes, that I feel selfish if I object to the current arrangement. Hannah’s presence here might tempt him home.

Have you heard anything more about her intentions? I had hoped she would write. But nothing yet. I guess she’s still waiting to hear about university.

With all my love,