Contributions from my friends

My friend Lynne pointed me towards this article in the Guardian which suggests that Orhan Pamuk has fled to the US for fear of his life in Turkey (following the Hrant Dink murder). Apparently the wee boy who murdered Hrant Dink also made threatening comments about Pamuk. That is a shame....though I suppose different cultures have different ideas of what is offensive and what is not. This does not help the Turkish government trying to join the EU. It's hard to hold this huge country together, what with the more fundamentalist East and the more forward-looking West of the country.

My friend Pat's photo of the snowdrops in her garden. This beautiful little picture of spring in Ayrshire reminds me further of my snowdropping times at Finlaystone - Pat's snowdrops have 'single' flowers, but there are also 'double' flowered snowdrops. When we picked our bunches of 50 we had to make very sure that we only had those of either type in the bunch, not mixed up together. Unfortunately they largely grew together....