Hurricane

Mien host is a hurricane. When she arrives she appears as a force of nature, then she disappears again to Hamburg, or Malta, or Cologne, or on to expensive yachts where she will play the Carly Simon to any Warren Beatty. She's the kind of woman who cranks energy. She is the weather, and I'm that bunny rabbit sitting in a field for a day in the rain in West Cork. I like it but I cower rather before it, but I stick it out too. The weather is lovely, but I'm not quite the poet to do it justice, you'd have to be Homer to do that.

This time she brought along a new couch, humped up those terrifying flights of steps by German men who knew how...hump...hump...hump- 2.5m of it, four Berlin floors up. A herculean task if you ask me. I was exhausted at just the thought of it, being on the receiving. But there's enough room for plenty of couches in this place and, as I've noted before, there was still nowhere comfortable to sit on account of the aesthetic rather than functional criteria generally applied before my blogged interventions which of course, my host read, and acted swiftly upon. But this new couch is so splendiferous I fear even sitting on it, it being so comfortable and all. It is a real sofa for afternoon naps which I shall be frightened of taking. We must not spill anything on it. Maybe we'll buy a plastic cover, if they make one that big, for insurance.

They are very big on insurance here, given a certain historical hangover assurance is a constant necessity. Even my hosts dog, a huge hound called 'Sonic' (I have always suspected after Sonic Youth) has liability insurance.

Sonic brought us a copy of Patti Smith's autobiography. We will love it. Poetry and seventies rebellion, I guess that's what we stand for.