Well, it's that time of year. [He typed, just coming back from his run, sitting naked and sweating profusely on a towel in front of the laptop.] I'd say the gardeners of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens must have planted the bulbs, the special bulbs, around March. Because they've just come up today.

You know the ones I mean. The ones that sprout blooming flowers on these warm days. Those unique blooming flowers. Young, shapely, beautiful, nearly completely naked women – wearing only the equivalent of string underpants – lying on their stomachs, all over the grass fields of the park.

Mark had a good alternate theory, back in the day. He theorized that mad scientists, in special underground laboratories, were breeding stunningly beautiful women – year round. But they fed only on sunlight. So, on very sunny days, the scientists would release the women above ground, where they would wander around – wearing, necessarily, very little to cover their skin – where they would, I suppose, photosynthesise. Plus mesmerize.

But I'm going with the "hot chick bulbs" hypothesis today – based mainly on the facts of them seeming to bloom right out of the grass, always in the sunlight – and their suspiciously even distribution across the park.

But not perfectly even distribution. I can hardly claim their presence did not impact my run. Normally, I plot my routes, on a micro-level, fairly carefully. Generally, I'm undertaking to be on the softest, safest turf; to be under bushy trees when there is too much sun or rain or heat; to be out from under the trees when there is not enough sun or heat; to stay out of the mud when there has been too much rain; to mind the dog mines; to stay far from the madding crowds; and, finally, all consistent with not cutting off any of the convex vertices (corners) of the park. (Which my questionable geometry tells me means I will run no lesser distance than the full circumference of the park, regardless of other divagations. I've actually spent a lot of time thinking about that. Ahem.)

But these were not the factors in my micro-route decisions today. The factors today may be guessed. And were admired.

Scores (perhaps hundreds) of young, shapely, beautiful, nearly naked women – and seemingly virtually all of them reading books, by far the sexiest thing about them. Which leads me to my final confession: I am, and always have been, an irrepressible spine-gazer. I just have to know what people are reading – and cute females quadruply so. But, today, and lately, there's an added, and irresistible incentive to spine-gazing: the chance, just the outside chance, of getting to use the unstoppable, the final, the perfect chat-up line: "Pardon me, would like a signature on your copy? Why, yes, I did write that." Despite a couple of blaze-orange covers, and any number of typefaces and section headers that looked like mine, I have yet to have the experience of seeing a stranger in public reading one of my books. Perhaps then life will be complete.

Until then, life is nice to look at it.

Subsequent Sweaty Naked Post-Run Addendum: One of my first reactions to the recent blooming was to think, Wow, what a lousy time to be totally unavailable. But a moment's reflection reversed that position: What a terrible time it would be to be single! Because I realised that being in a relationship had not obliged me to turn down a single overture, proposition, solicitation, or even flirtation. This is because I hadn't had a single one of those things. What being in a relationship had done for me was to make it manifest that, of all these enticing, beautiful, wondrous women in the world, at least one of them would have me. When you're totally single in such a world awash with female pulchritude, that feeling of Tantalus dying of thirst on the shore of a bottomless lake can be intolerable, nearly fatal.