Radio show and portrait

Hello everybody and sorry for the long silence. I'm very conscious that I haven't posted anything here for a long time (and haven't said much on the message board lately either). The bad news is that this is going to be another short message; the good news (for some of you, I hope) is that this is because I'm busy writing at the moment.

In the meantime, I quickly wanted to post a couple of things. The first was to say that anyone with a digital radio - or access to BBC iPlayer - can listen to BBC 6 Music this Sunday, 12th December, at noon, and hear me introducing an hour's worth of recent music that I like. Programme details are here.

The second thing is to give my thanks to Chiara Coccorese (www.chiaracoccorese.com) who, when I visited her in Naples a couple of months ago, made this beautiful portait. Click on the thumbnail to see it: