Yesterday rocked. I managed to slip out of work mid-afternoon to the Tropisme bookshop in Galerie des Princes where Neil Gaiman was signing books. Unfortunately I was in such a rush in the morning that I couldn't find my copy of American Gods, but I did have both Neverwhere and Don't Panic! to hand. The author graciously signed both, commenting that I had the rather rare first editions, with covers by Dave McKean.

Then it was off to meet Zoran Zivkovic. Not the charming, short, bearded, English-speaking science fiction writer, but the firm, tall, cleanshaven Prime Minister of Serbia, courtesy of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. He gave a damn good speech, though the translation was a bit dodgy, and gave me a direct answer when I challenged him on the interview in Der Spiegel (English) - basically that he had been misquoted. (I went to the lengths of buying Der Spiegel this morning, and found he was right.)

Lousy night's sleep unfortunately, but luckily today has been mostly meetings, including some rather tired young politicians from Serbia and Montenegro this afternoon. Off to Greece tomorrow, back Sunday.

I put a bunch of code from AddFreeStats on my website on Sunday, and have been rather stunned by the results so far. Much the most popular page is my review of "Flowers for Algernon", not so very surprising as I understand that the short story is on every high school reading list in America. But a reasonably strong second is my fairly recent page on the Book of the Prophet Amos. There must surely be loads of other sources on Amos out there, and I can't pretend that my analysis is particularly scholarly or even devout.

And today for some reason my review of "Bloodchild" has overtaken the Prohet Amos. It must have suddenly come up on some university course, I suppose, or maybe there was a programme about Octavia Butler last night.

Also the Curse of the Presidents seems to be a steady performer.