Saturday 6.05 am. Cala Deia, Mallorca: We’re in the middle of the mother of all electrical storms. It’s taken nigh on 8 hours to reach us. I first saw flashes on the far horizon around 10 pm. Thick gobbets of rain drove me in at around midnight. I slept for a few hours with the windows wide open, but then I could feel the wind building. Ozone was zinging through the air and making one’s ears sing. I shut the windows fast and unplugged my computer. The lightning was permanent by this time, as was the thunder – like a cavalry charge of the Heavy Brigade. Finally, I could take the strobe effect no longer. One’s heart was racing and one felt sick. It was impossible to look at. Seriously frightening. I shut the inner shutters and still the room was highlight through the cracks. Even now my ears are singing – and the thunder is coming back. Sweet Jesus! Hours and hours and hours of it. I should think the animals out in the fields and olive groves are rigid with fear. Frankly, the ozone is so powerful one can scarcely breathe. The rain is throwing itself down outside. The thunder seems to be walking across the water. As one’s ears clear, the rain and wind get stronger and stronger. There was a moment there when I thought all the shutters would be sucked away. One’s heart races uncontrollably – I’m thirsty as hell. This is an extraordinarily primitive feeling. It’s by far the longest storm I’ve ever experienced, at nearly 9 hours so far. Believe me, you wouldn’t have wanted to be in a sailing boat tonight. Even I felt vulnerable here in this great house. I kept my feet firmly off the floor and now, well, let’s just say I can feel my fillings. In a minute I am going to open the shutters again and take a peek. What a humdinger!! Jesus. It’s still going on, though it seems (I hope) to be away from us now. At one point it moved away and came back. Uh oh. Here it comes again. The rain is redoubling in energy. Maybe it’s going around in circles. Wow! The lightning is coming back, I think. I’ve never known anything like it. It’s simply continual. When it was over us you simply could not look out of the window – impossible. It made you sick to your stomach to look out. Like a million camera flashes all at once. It’s still difficult to breathe. And the horizon is lighting up again. We are still pre-dawn here, and the contrast is stupendous. This is the storm I saw a few years ago with C – sheet lightning. But straight over us this time. You really don’t need it. Oh fuck…I’d better switch these lights out.

6.50 am: The storm is persisting, but a fair way away now. The sea sounds like a leaking cistern through my open window. My bones hurt and my teeth are still on edge. The main storm hit us at about 5.40 – as I said, a 6 hour approach. One can hear the banging of the surf and the distant rock of thunder. The sky is still lit up from time to time, but nothing like before. On the Eastern horizon there are the beginnings of a faint luminosity – the sun, not the storm. A long way to go yet, though. A lot of water under the bridge…(Casablanca). In the distance the sky is still lighting up like Gotterdammerung….the outline of the headland is becoming gradually clearer, with the occasional distant flash of sheet lightning. One is a good deal calmer now. The actual storm itself, when it was on one, was terrifying. The only word for it is all-encompassing. Sort of takes one’s full attention!! No more sleep for me this morning, I think. Now the cicadas are starting to chirp. Bush telegraph? “Shit, Johnny, you never heard anything like it. Damn thing nearly blew my wings off.”

This is a wonderful story and I want to share it with you. Last week, late at night, our neighbours came in and asked for our help. They had found a bird of prey lying on the ground outside their wood store. The likelihood was that it had been chasing a martin or a pigeon at dusk, and had flown into some telegraph wires. Either way, it was stunned. I got our cat basket from the shed and put the bird in it. I at first assumed from its colouring that we were dealing with a female sparrow-hawk. The bird simply looked at me with the detached gaze all birds of prey seem to have, as if it was saying to itself, ‘Well, whatever you are going to do to me, get on with it.’

I left the bird in its basket in my upstairs study, facing out towards an open window, so that it could hear the call of its mate. I also put a scallop shell filled with water into the basket. I left the bird lying down. When I returned in the morning, it was standing up. This seemed to me a good sign. So my neighbour and I took it downstairs and placed it out of the pen and onto the sward, hoping it might try to fly off. It was soon clear to both of us that the bird was incapable of movement. It could open its wings to their full extent, but then simply pecked forward onto the grass and lay there, looking at us. It was then I called my friend Tim, a professional falconer, who lives a couple of miles down the road.

“That’s not a female sparrow-hawk,” said Tim. “That’s a male hobby. Much rarer. There are only about 2000 breeding pairs in Britain. And he’s damaged his wing. In fact he may have broken a small bone in it. I’ll take him straight to the Hawk Conservancy Trust’s Bird Hospital.”

Last night, Tim called again. “He’s fine. He’s a mature male. He’s flying around his cage. Kim at the Trust has done a wonderful job on him. All he had was a bruised wing joint, probably from flying into the wire whilst in hot pursuit. Now I need to bring him back to exactly where you found him, and let him free. He’ll need to meet up again with his family.”

Tim arrived with the bird at 1pm today. As my neighbours were away for the weekend, Tim and I took the bird out to exactly where he was found. At first he wouldn’t leave the basket, so we gently tipped him out onto the sward. He looked at us, twisting his head almost completely around on its axis. Then he hopped a few paces and took off - straight up into the sky, like a dart. Within thirty seconds he was hundreds of feet directly above us, clearly checking his whereabouts - we could actually see him jinking here and there in the wind eddies, searching the nearby woods and above the lake with his eyes. “He’s looking for his mate,” said Tim. “Let’s hope she’s still here.” For a precious few minutes, he seemed to be performing, up there in the air spirals, just for Tim and me - higher and higher he went, until we had difficulty making him out any more. Then he stooped and disappeared.

Tim and I stood there for a while, watching the empty air. “Wasn’t that something?” he said. “In a few weeks time he’ll probably be heading back to Africa.” Yes, I thought. And taking something of us with him.

I recently found myself speculating on how differently authors approach the art of writing. Some prepare their work to the enth degree before even starting to write - others, like me, have a vague idea of where they are heading, but are prepared to take more of a risk on the ride. The second modus operandi still calls for some extreme powers of organization, but these are mainly mental, not pictorial. Most of the creative writing classes one reads about recommend thorough preparation before embarking on a novel. I’m partially pro this - one must, needless to say, do one’s preparatory reading and preparatory thinking to avoid being coated in rotten eggs. But nothing quite prepares one for a character who forces him or herself into one’s book and changes everything. This can only happen when one is open to serendipity. And the only way to be open to serendipity is not to know entirely where one is going with a thing.

It happened to me just the other day. There I was, happily writing along, when a character trotted in from left base and insisted on considerably more than a walk on part in my work-in-progress (the third and final part of my Nostradamus Trilogy). I didn’t cavil. I didn’t even rail against the Fates and reverse over him. I simply let him in. When that happens, the character begins to inhabit you. It happened with Alexi Dufontaine in the first novel in my trilogy, The Nostradamus Prophecies. One minute he wasn’t there, the next minute he was. And fully formed, too. I simply had to write him into being. I’m praying the same will happen with this new character. Who’s called Amoy, by the way. And why Amoy? His mother named him after the sauce. Now how the heck do I know that? Isn’t it great being a writer…