sentient \SEN-shee-uhnt; -tee-; -shuhnt\, adjective:
1. Capable of perceiving by the senses; conscious.
2. Experiencing sensation or feeling.

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A lazy day spent reading the newspapers and watching films. We managed to get a bit of a lie-in this morning, as Liam and his friends had commandeered the living-room, where they had stayed the night on the couches watching films and not sleeping. They were still wide awake at midday, and there was no sign of any flagging right up until 3pm, when his friends were being picked up. They had their breakfast in the dining-room and their lunch in the garden. Linda and I sat in the living-room watching The Missing, followed by I, Robot (okay, I watched this one myself), then One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. No need to say which of the three was a classic, which was overlong and very slow burning, and which was big-budget Hollywood hokum for the unthinking masses (and there is nothing wrong with a bit of Hollywood hokum now and again!). As usual, Linda cried at the end of Cuckoo's Nest - and just in case you happen to be one of the people who has only just come out of a cave in deepest Nepal, and who has neither seen the film, watched the play nor read the book, I won't tell you how it ends. For those of you who already know, then you don't need to be told, and I suppose you can guess why it manages to get Linda crying even now, 30 years after it was made. I didn't cry, of course, because I'm a man, and I have seen the film lots of times before, so I am able to prepare myself for the ending in plenty of time. While Linda was in the kitchen, I actually managed to see an episode of the X-Files that I had never seen before - it was a very old one, from 1993. Didn't Gillian and David look so very different back then! I spent most of the evening in the garden, enjoying the long summer nights that we get here. Still humid, but no sun.

Last year Robin, my publisher, came visiting