The snail says, "Alas!" And the snail says, "Alack! Why must I carry my house on my back?"

Like the regretful snail from one of my favourite poems as a child, I, too, say alas and alack. What with one thing and the other, I have not entirely been the blogger I should be. I apologise most profusely, I grovel before you all, particularly my peevish friend Edmund, whom I kept promising that I would update this blog.

I have not been blogging but I have been writing quite a bit. I had a comment published in the Guardian last week on the Wikileaks revelations about Morgan Tsvangirai, I wrote on Tendai Biti's budget for the South African Sunday Times, I am currently writing a review of Voice of America, EC Osondu's first book for the Observer, and of Shailja Patel's Migritude for the Africa Report. I am doing a massive piece on education in Zimbabwe as well as something on my current obsession, diamonds, diamonds on the inside, diamonds on the sole of my shoes, Lucy in the sky with diamonds, diamonds are a girl's etcetera, diamonds in Zimbabwe.

So my kittens, I may have been absent from this place, but I have kept faith with the world of letters.

Speaking of letters: the best thing that has happened to me in the last couple of months is that my son woke up one day and could read! Yes, he sits in a corner by himself and actually reads to himself. He even read to me a sentence from Maugham's Of Human Bondage. It is quite a miraculous thing ... one day, a printed page means nothing at all, the next, it opens up an entire world. If there is one thing I want for my son, it is to give him the tools to form what Maugham in Bondage calls "the most delightful habit in the world" Here is Maugham:

"{When Phillip Carey read} he could think of nothing else. He forgot the life about him. He had to be called two or three times before he would come to his dinner. Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading, he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment."

If, by the way, you have not read Of Human Bondage, that heart-stoppingly good doorstop of a novel, I have to ask you seriously: what are you waiting for? That is one of the pleasures of being on sabbatical: I am reading all the books that I promised myself I would read, but never did. Next, War and Peace!