BORAYA IS FINISHED! (well, the First Draft)

The Flower Seller in Her Youth

I am sitting here at my desk this morning in a state of mild distraction, not knowing quite what I am doing. I have been reduced to clearing out my overflowing ‘pending’ trays and I have just ordered a Christmas present over the internet.

Yesterday I was just as feverishly busy as I have been during any mornings of the last four months, bashing out the first draft of my first novel - Boraya.  But all good things must come to an end and Boraya did, quite suddenly,  around ten to one. I wasn’t quite expecting it, but it was a convenient time all the same to stop for lunch.

To be fair I knew I must be approaching the end because I had already written an epilogue and I knew that when the novel reached the point at which the epilogue began I should have to stop.  But the epilogue, telling of the characters’ futures, seemed a rainbow’s end, forever dancing a tantalising 2,000 words before me.

And then all of a sudden, bump. I decided that readers could just imagine for themselves Vladimir’s historic visit to the Zurich chocolate factory which his great great grandfather had left with his Swiss wife in 1902 in order to found the Imperial Boraya Chocolate Factory in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg.  Besides I had left Vladimir comfortably ensconced with Elizabeth, the diffident young Scots woman whose remarkable romantic and developmental journey the book is really about, in an enormous Swiss bateau lit; so to picture him in complex negotiations about the price and specification of chocolate seemed quite redundant.  And Zurich in late April seemed as good a place as any to let the epilogue begin.

Nevertheless that wasn’t really the end because I had remembered that in her travels between Russia and Scotland Elizabeth had all the time been carrying an urn full of ashes, which she had promised to scatter over - or at least healthily beside - the cauliflowers and artichokes of the Breton countryside. Quite why Elizabeth should be carrying such an urn and a portfolio of certificates relating to it, I shall not immediately reveal, but I can say that she and Vladimir fly to Paris and then take the TGV down to Brittany, scatter the ashes in a little copse of trees, share one or two memories of the deceased and make it back to St Petersburg in 200 words, which must rank for something in the compression stakes.

And so, serendipitously, the scattering of the ashes, though occurring in the middle of the book, was the last bit of it I wrote.  So now, having promised myself some days off before commencing the task of editing, I am at a loose end.  The question that I asked myself ‘could I write a novel’ I have answered. It is done.  Boraya exists.

In fact, not only is it done but its writing has proved far easier than ever I imagined. Indeed the mistake that I made at the beginning was to imagine at all.  Because, in the short experience of this beginner, I discovered the truth in the assertion I first heard advanced by Graham Greene to the effect that an author has really very little idea of what he is going to write until he has written it.

Once my main characters and their setting were reasonably established; once, as it were, I had given them houseroom, they just took over and the manuscript wasn’t mine anymore but theirs.  They acted out their stories and brought along their friends to help them, too.  People I couldn’t dream of suddenly tumbled into the story, demanding their own share of plot: one little minx even ran off with a British Member of Parliament.

Indeed, I took myself to the laptop each morning as though I were reading a book rather than writing one.  I wanted to know what would happen next and the words just appeared on the screen to tell me.

Of course, the characters did occasionally need my help. Vladimir became stuck in hospital and it took me a week to figure how to get him out convincingly;  the transportation of the factory at the end of the book also took some time. Then, there was research - books to read and endless queries to look up on line.  Friends chipped in to help here, too. But in the main, the characters did the work for me. I even found myself on one occasion borrowing one of my character’s mannerisms.

During the writing somebody said to me ‘you talk about your characters as though they are real people!’  But to me they are real people: lovers, heroes, villains, workers, dreamers, young and old, male and female.  Even the old vodka-sodden woman who sells flowers salvaged from the florists’ dustbins in the snow on Nevsky Bridge is real to me.  ‘A wilted rose brings luck,’ she says, unconvincingly, in a creaking voice that echoes a door opening slowly in an empty church.

And she is an echo.  But then in Saint Petersburg the echoes of the past are all around.  Echoes of the 900 day Siege of Leningrad blow through the story like an icy wind: heroism, resilience, the common good, self-sacrifice, the horror and inhumanity of war. The Boraya chocolate factory is not without its scars, or its secrets.

Now the less interesting part of the story has to begin, the re-writes.  One thousand words is simple enough to edit - but one hundred thousand means that you have to edit not just for sentence and paragraph fluency but for consistency between material written months apart.  Still that is for me to worry about.  For the moment I just want to thank everyone who has supported me and encouraged me and helped me on this first stage of the journey.  


The picture shows Alexei Alexeievich Harlamoff  (Russian painter, c 1840–1925) The Flower Seller. 

PEANUTS

Fennie Dove After Hawk Attack

‘PEACE MISSIONS!  Bloody peace missions!  They are to doves what jury service is to people: sometimes interesting, but always a bloody nuisance.  People think they’re simple: fly to so-and-so, pick up an olive branch, on to the war zone, deposit the branch, fly home.  Easy-peasy!  You pick up a whole shedload of karma points and an extra helping of peanuts. Even a medal if you’re really lucky. After all it’s what you’re made for, isn’t it? Elephants roll logs, doves fly peace missions.

‘Well, there I was: called up. “Fly here,” they said. “Where?” I said. “There,” they said.  “Blimey,” I said, “that’s a long way! Dangerous, too.”  “If you’d rather not, Fennie,........” they said. “If you’re feeling off colour......”

‘Of course I’d bloody well rather not! But you’d never live with yourself, would you, after that?  I mean that’s your self-respect gone for a Burton.  Yellow? You might as well be a canary!  So ‘OK,’ I said.  They gave me a big bowl of peanuts and told me to take an early night.  It’s lonely work flying peace missions; like reconnaissance, you always fly alone. In the cold and lonely sky.  Best not to start long books.

‘Crack of dawn next day I’m off, out of the loft and flying high over the fields.  I climb as high as I can for there’s always the risk of some crackpot shooter. What is it about boys with guns? I’m a dove, fella.  But I always say that if you see even the flash of a man before you get properly upstairs, then dive.  Dive!  Shooters always expect birds to climb, you see. So if you dive they fire over the top of you. Dive and the worst you’ll get is an outfield pellet through one of your primaries. Might twinge a bit if it hits the spline, but you’ll be OK. If you’re lucky someone will imp it out for you.

‘I got a pellet up the bum once. That was painful I can tell you.  Thankfully,  just the one. Almost out of range; lodged under the skin. Still there, too.  I get a tweak sometimes sitting on a nest. And another thing, if you do get hit, keep flying, that’s the rule: there’s probably a dog on the ground.

‘Where was I? Oh, yes!  Peace missions.  Well, we don’t set out with our olive branches, not that we have too many olive branches here anyway.  Fortunately, most wars these days seem to occur where they grow olives - have you noticed? Funny that. My solution to the problems in the Middle East - cut down the olive trees!  Ha-ha! No? My little joke!

‘So you fly down to the war zone in the morning, sneak into an olive grove,  all the while watching for trainee belligerents with their 12 bores, pick up a likely branch and then follow your nose fast and low towards the smell of cordite, hedgehopping all the way.  You find some dusty market square in the middle of the tanks and artillery, leave your olive calling card, and get the hell out even faster than you came in, praying that no-one has time to take a bead on you. If you hear a gun, then corkscrew, corkscrew!  Who cares about a few bashed wing tips? The only good thing about a war zone is that most people don’t use shotguns.

‘I know you want to get upstairs to safety as fast as possible but until you make 3,000 feet you’re just a target and a dove hit by a piece of 37mm shrapnel just isn’t a pretty sight.  So fly low through the lanes and alleys. If you’re cornered dodge into a building, there’s always a way out the back.  It’s only when you can’t hear the guns anymore that you pull back on the old stick and reach for the safety of clouds.

‘Well, I made it that time - or I wouldn’t be here now.  And they told me later I’d scored a bullseye. Cease-fire, exchange of prisoners, amnesties, peace treaties - the lot.  Not a bad day’s work for one little dove and a bag of peanuts.  They gave me a medal,  too. I’m proud of that.

‘But I won’t be flying any more missions. No more olive branches for me!  Ha! Wounded coming home, you see.  I tell you: never, ever, get demob happy.  Never relax your concentration, not for one millisecond.  I relaxed for a minute or two and I paid the price.  Right on the bloody doorstep!  ‘There I was, high in the sky, dreaming of a little nest of sticks and a couple of eggs under me and the gangly, squawky squabs hatching -  it’s about all I’m good for these days, but it’s remarkable how peaceful just sitting on a nest can be.  You can even feel the vibrations of the squabs inside the eggs, did you know? That’s real peace for you. That’s when you feel the sun on your back.

‘Sun on your back!  I’ve told you it was a long way.  Well, I’d been flying all day. Used up more adrenaline than an entire football team and I was tired as only a bird that has flown through a war zone can be.  That’s bloody tired, I can tell you.  I thought at first I wouldn’t get home and would have to put down in someone’s garden and beg for crusts, hoping they would have the sense to read the rings on my legs and make a telephone call. That’s an indignity, I can tell you, having your rings read.  But luckily the wind must have been behind me, I looked down and suddenly there was home: the river and the railway line and the two ‘L’ shaped roofs of the cote. Never have moss-clad tiles looked so good.

‘Now, normally, I would do a circuit to check all’s well, but I just wanted to get on the ground and fill my crop with peanuts.  Some cool water from the bird bath wouldn’t go amiss either, I thought to myself.  So, like a fool, I just dropped, didn’t I?  Wiggly-waggly, swish-swish, falling through the air - a disgrace to the whole avian persuasion; but after facing 37mm artillery who cares? I came in from the west with the late afternoon sun behind me....

‘I must have been about two hundred feet when zoom - thunk!  Suddenly, my neck was on fire, I had a searing pain around the clavicle, port wing suddenly useless.  Hawk!  Bloody, bastard hawk.

‘I thought my time had come: it had me fast in its talons and we were hurtling to earth.  All that successful artillery dodging and now this.  I was a goner.

‘The ground was rushing up, the air shrieking past. The hawk had been diving when he took me,  from above and straight out of the sun.  In seconds we would hit the deck.

‘But then a miracle: because I’d been side-slipping, wishy-washing, the hawk hadn’t been able to make a clean strike.  The way he had hold meant that I was tipping him forward, making him dive more.  He couldn’t straighten up.  He couldn’t pull out of the dive. In another second he would take us both into the ground.  He just couldn’t get his tail down, you see. If nothing else he would break his legs. “Good!” I thought.

‘“Let me go,” I yelled, but he just clung on, talons digging deeper.  His great black wings were desperately clawing the air, but at that angle they simply wouldn’t bite. If I was a goner, then so was he. The ground must have been feet away, when at last and with a great squawk of rage, he dropped me. I hit the floor and bounced. 

‘He got his tail down then but so great was his downward momentum that his feathers brushed me on the ground as he flattened out. He shot forward quite out of control. Well, every story has its funny side. Out of control? The hawk flew thwack into a great bunch of tall thistles.  He crashed through them, of course, big heavy bird that he was, but the prickles must have hurt.

‘I could see him climbing lazily away as I lay on the grass, the breath knocked out of me.  He’d be round again in an instant. Could I move before he came back? I had blood running down my neck. My port wing dragged, the muscles in spasm from the hawk’s talons.  I have to say that he’d probably have had me if it hadn’t been for the lovely woman who cares for us coming out of her house at that very moment rattling the peanut tin. Saved! Never has a fortnight’s confinement in the hospital hutch seemed quite such an unalloyed pleasure. 

 ‘Anyway, nice to meet you.  Good luck!  Always best to corkscrew left, what?’



A friend of mine who keeps doves was kind enough to name one of them for me.  A fine strong dove that would fly away during the day and come back at night.  Then one day the dove appeared as you see in the picture - the victim of a hawk strike. Well, I wondered what the dove did during the day and that formed the basis of the story.

BORAYA AND A TRILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT

Interior of Mari Vanna Restaurant, London

 Last Sunday I went up to London to meet a Russian friend, who I had last bumped into at a wedding in Brittany. She told me then the 'famous' (well, at least in our family) Russian hedgehog joke.  "A hedgehog was crossing the road one day.  All was well when it set out but when it reached the middle of the road, it rolled over and died."

That's it.  No follow-up, no punchline. A mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma as Churchill might have said.  Anyway, I have only met two people (apart from my friend) who thought this remotely funny and one of them was me - but there we were last Sunday, several years on and the conversation rattling away as though the intervening time had been a minor interruption.

She had very kindly agreed to help me with the novel, which some of you may know I am writing.  I have always wanted to write but have always been very bad at it - bad at the technical stuff, let alone the creative bit - but gradually all that is becoming easier.  On the internet, on social networking sites and so on I find that many of those whom I have come to regard as old and dear friends are writers of one sort or another and I suppose we inspire and encourage one another, though sometimes I think that I have the best of the bargain.  Having written some 85,000 words now I can talk about 'my novel' for it undoubtedly exists.  It isn't finished yet but what remains - some stirring stuff that includes a car (or rather lorry) chase, a death, a birth, and a  marriage, is all outlined and should be complete before Christmas when the real work of editing will start.

 'Boraya' is about a chocolate factory and is set mainly in St Petersburg in the late 1990's.  It is a romance but also a story of what happens to people whose lives are overwhelmed by external events.  I suppose I was inspired subconsciously by that great volume of Russian literature which becomes addictive when you are a languid and forlorn teenager.  I remember my biology teacher complaining that I was reading surreptitiously during a tedious lesson and having my book shown to all the class much to their amusement. It was a paperback edition of 'Seven Short Novels by Chekhov.'  The book had cost me seven shillings and sixpence and I still have it on my bookshelves, though I suppose decades have passed since I looked at it.

Yet if you write a novel set in a country that you have never visited and in a well-known city, you have to try and get the details reasonably correct.  Interviewed at the Hay Literary Festival this summer William Boyd confessed that he had written a book set in the Philippines and afterwards he had been complimented by the country's tourist office, all without ever going there. He said he just used a guide book and his imagination - so it can be done. Nevertheless mere mortals like me need help.

It isn't just what the protagonists might see around the city;  that can be derived from guidebooks.  No, it is everything else. I wrote down on the train a couple of dozen questions to ask my friend.  Food figured largely among them and it helped that we were eating in a traditional Russian restaurant - the 'Mari Vanna,' so Russian that everyone, staff and customers, spoke that language,  and I was forced out of politeness to say 'Spasibo' to the waiter.  It was a good introduction to Russian food and Russian interiors, this one more like a set decorated for one of Chekhov's plays than a London restaurant.

We spent a long time eating the excellent food - I tried the Siberian Pelmeni, which are a kind of dumpling - while discussing what Russians call each other.  When you would use the ultra-formal equivalent of 'Mr' or 'Mrs,'  for instance, and when you would use the patronymic - that is your addressee's father's name - as in, perhaps, Mikail Sergeievitch, or when you would just use a first name?  But what happens if you are a foreigner?  Under what name would you book a table at a restaurant? What happens even if you don't have an official father (well, you can always invent!).   The name of the restaurant itself is a first name and a patronymic, for the name is a contraction of Maria Ivanovna - a very common name, apparently, in Russia and one that is contracted in speech to 'Mari Vanna.'

Almost everywhere I turn in the story I find a different world.  I am now an expert on the botulinum toxin (nothing to do with the restaurant I hasten to add) for that figures in the story too, as of course does the terrible history of St Petersburg.  As the story unfolds the experience is more like reading a book than writing one in that my characters keep on surprising me. They keep me entertained at least and I hope one day they will entertain you too.

*****

On a completely different topic there has been much discussion in the course of the recent American Presidential Election of that country's trillion dollar deficit.  That figure always worried me.  Surely that can't mean that the US Government spends a trillion dollars more than it receives in taxes?  But then I thought of our own deficit - about £160 billion.  Express that in dollars and we have around $250 billion, which is of course a quarter of a trillion.  If we say that the US economy is about four times the size of the British economy then their deficit really isn't any worse than ours.   Trillion dollars it is.  What an amazing amount of money!  We are all living on tick to an absurd degree.  Easy to say but knowing what to do about it is another matter.

The photograph of the Mari Vanna interior is taken from the internet. I am unsure to whom the credit is due but offer thanks in advance.

CHIPS AND FISH

Atlantic Salmon Migrating Upstream

Yesterday we arrived early at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, which really  is in a Camelot sort of spot beside the dark tumbling river Tummel and in the shadow of the lowering hills.  The sun shone but we took limited advantage as we were soon entombed in the entrails of the theatre with a guide showing us that hidden land beyond the proscenium arch, all the wizardry and gadgetry, the levers, pulleys, trucks, lights and rooms hidden deep in the earth, which all the same manage to have windows looking out across the river.

In this nether world, carefully stacked and parked, we saw the sets of the play we had seen the day before and more bits of set belonging to the play we would see today. We saw the actors' dressing rooms, the costume rooms, the wig rooms (full of wigs, naturally) and the green room, called that for a reason long lost in the mists of time. We learned that the actors work up to 13 and a half hour days for two months learning three or more plays at the same time and rehearsing over and over so that they can then appear in them for our benefit eight times a week. I think such practices are medieval and should be banned.  After all with most of the acting profession 'resting' why make one man or woman do the work of three.  But I suppose that would increase the price of tickets.  Still did they not say something like that about the cost of cleaning chimneys?

It's exhausting enough doing one play, but to finish a matinée and then go straight into something else requires a stamina that has long since passed me by - but then these actors, I suppose, don't have to lead normal lives, don't have to shop or run businesses or write books. Yet even if I didn't have to do these things I very much doubt I could do their job even if I were blessed with a modicum of acting talent.

We are here in the Highlands on holiday with Rosie and Jim, this land of mountain, river and lake and we also took good advantage of these aquatics, for conveniently the theatre is located next to a hydro-electric plant so if ever you are bored with the mechanics of putting on a show you can wander along the riverbank for five minutes to watch the salmon climbing the salmon ladder.  So far this year 5,163 salmon have passed through the 15 metre ladder. The season is from April (Spring fish) to October (Grilse and Stragglers) and the average is 5,400 fish (salmon) in the season, so this is likely to be a below average year, yet more evidence of the inexorable decline of the world's most beautiful fish.  We saw only a trout of some unknown persuasion in the observation chamber, but you never know what you are going to see there for suddenly out of the darkness will come a black shape,streaked with silver and vivid in the brown water. It will fix you with its beady eye and hooked beak, snarling almost in its rush to find the gravel redds in which it will spawn and then to limp back, spent and flattened to the reviving waters of the sea.  Only one in ten salmon make it back to the sea but among those 5,000 salmon that return each year five will have returned three times, or so I have always supposed and so perhaps be candidates for the 49 and three quarter pound monster, a plaster cast of which hangs on the wall of the power station. These in the picture are not so large, but convey the image of something looming out of the water, like silver spotlights in a theatre.

HOMEOPATHY AND BILL

Samuel Hahnemann, Founder of Homeopathy

My daughter suggested I go to see the homeopath who she had gone to see when little Theo had a recalcitrant cough that proved resistant to normal medicine. The homeopath (Bill) gave her some tablets which worked wonders and so she had great faith in him and told me to go along in turn instead of complaining endlessly about my own digestion, a malady which for decades now has baffled medical science and kept me uncomfortably awake at nights.

Of course I was sceptical.  But Bill said he welcomed sceptics and I have to confess that the consultation was most interesting and proved a valuable experience. We talked for almost an hour and a half while Bill made copious notes.  Later I felt that just talking about the problem had been therapeutic for I then began to see that all my symptoms seemed to be connected to some underlying nervous or emotional reaction.  Stress in other words.  And driving and striving, too hard. I must learn to be calmer, I concluded, though Bill didn't say this himself.  The world is quite capable of getting on without me.

At the end of the session he gave me three minute white pills to take, then and there, which would, he said, 'reset' my digestive system. They tasted like sugar.  He said the active ingredient in them belonged to the same plant family whose fossilised remains make up the South Wales coal field.  And he invited me back in six weeks to see whether anything has changed.

While I found the consultation therapeutic in some psychological sense,  I simply cannot believe the claims that highly dilute medicines work.  We are talking of dilutions as weak as a pinch of salt in the Atlantic ocean in some cases, according to the research I have looked at.  Still, I'd rather have three little pills that last six weeks than to have take half a dozen prescription medicines everyday - a separate medicine for each symptomatic condition - whose effects on each other in combination have never been tested.  Maybe that is the reason why homeopathic remedies are so dilute - just so they won't (can't) do you any harm.  Meanwhile you benefit from a sympathetic ear and a chance to relate all the symptoms to one another and to your lifestyle.

We also spent a little time discussing something that has always interested me: the difference between a living and a dead body. What happens at death? What changes biochemically? One moment the life force is there; the next it isn't.  One moment a person or animal is patently alive, the next it is dead.  So what changes? What has happened? And couldn't whatever has happened be reversed before the body begins to rot?  This life force, Bill reckons, courses through us all and through every part of us; sometimes, and in some places, it is stronger than others. Sometimes it becomes blocked or obstructed. Sometimes it requires re-setting. This, he reckoned, he had just done.

I am not persuaded.  I feel rather that he has allowed me to see for myself what I need to do to change things - although I am not at all sure that I know what I should be doing, moment by moment, to make this change.  I agree with him about the idea of a life force and of this becoming obstructed.  I think this is the basis of several healing methods.  And, as is well known, certain people, whatever kind of medicine they practice, are just 'healers:' that is they have a beneficial effect on sick people just by being with them. How this works I cannot even begin to guess.  But I should describe Bill as one of those 'healers.'

I should call him, he said, should there be any sudden changes, but I suspect there won't be.  I cannot imagine how one can have an allergic reaction to a homeopathic medicine.  But I do feel that he achieved something and that if I can only remember the feeling of calmness that he was able to engender then I shall improve. I was pleased anyway when I wrote the cheque for his fee for I thought it money well spent.

The test will come in six weeks time. Whether by then I will have learned to divert a part of my life force towards my liver and away from silly and stressful things, I do not know.  Is writing a blog stressful? Am I holding up my hand and shouting 'me too!' in a vain attempt to find some echo in the ether that tells me I exist and that I am important?  I am sure that was the case once.  Now, well, I think I can honestly say that I am writing this for myself. If anyone is amused by what I write that is fine.  If not, no matter.  It is not time wasted.  The sun is shining and I shall enjoy the day.  Light a candle, smile and enjoy a glass of wine.  Eat a square of dark chocolate and look at some flowers and do whatever work requires to be done today.

The picture, courtesy of Wikipedia is of Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), the acknowledged founder of homeopathy. As he lived to the ripe old age of 88 at a time when most people were lucky to live half that time, the proof of his pudding can be seen perhaps in his longevity. 

KALINKA

The Snowberry

Some of you may know that my alter ego is writing a novel about the Boraya Chocolate Factory in St Petersburg - or Leningrad as it used to be. The novel has various historical flashbacks to the 1941-1944 siege of Leningrad when three-quarters of a million of its citizens starved to death. The encircling German forces were held just 15 kilometres from the city centre and across no man's land in temperatures of minus thirty degrees the opposing lines of soldiers would sing to each other. One German soldier, called Hockenjos, was so impressed with the Russian song 'Kalinka,' drifting on the night wind across the snowy ruins, that he memorised it and later wrote it down. An example of how music bridges even the most bitterly opposed cultures.

 There's a YouTube version of Kalinka performed in Leningrad - or rather St Petersburg - by the choir of the Red Army, assisted by some unlikely types known as the 'Leningrad Cowboys.'  I don't know quite what either the haircuts or the shoes of the Cowboys signify but close your eyes and you can imagine how, with a few vodkas, such singing could have kept the cold - and the enemy- at bay. Na Zdrowie! 

Despite the majesty of the rhythm and the catchiness of the tune, Kalinka, is more or less a nonsense song about the little snowberry - Symphoricarpos.  Wikipedia provides the picture of the snowberry above and also translates the Russian lyrics of Kalinka as

Little snowberry, snowberry, snowberry of mine!
Little raspberry in the garden, my little raspberry!

Ah, under the pine, the green one,
Lay me down to sleep,
Rock-a-bye, baby, rock-a-bye, baby,
Lay me down to sleep.

Little snowberry, snowberry, snowberry of mine!
Little raspberry in the garden, my little raspberry!

Ah, little pine, little green one,
Don't rustle above me,
Rock-a-bye, baby, rock-a-bye, baby,
Don't rustle above me.

Little snowberry, snowberry, snowberry of mine!
Little raspberry in the garden, my little raspberry!

Ah, you beauty, pretty maiden,
Take a fancy to me,
Rock-a-bye, baby, rock-a-bye, baby,
Take a fancy to me.

Little snowberry, snowberry, snowberry of mine!
Little raspberry in the garden, my little raspberry!



In fact there's another, instrumental version of the song played on by three young women with violins which is also very catchy.   And not only musically catchy.  For the trouble I find in trying, as a complete tyro, to write a novel is that the characters begin to take over.  There's this troublesome girl called Olga who works in the chocolate shop, who first demanded a friend and then a job in London and now she's telling me that I ought to have known that she also played the violin. Well, what can you do?  Another character, sent me to eBay to buy a silver 1866 Napoleon III coin which is his lucky charm and a third just saunters into the picture as a kind of Russian eminence grise.  He is actually, he tells me, the economic planning chief of St Petersburg who sits behind an enormous empty desk in a very large office in a fictional part of the Mariinsky Palace which I call the Prefecture.  I tried to model him on the Communist mayor of Calais who I met once when I was trying to help a British company build a new factory there, but as usual he has become his own man - at least he has tried to.  You reach his office by a 1930s lift which is very small and slow and full of carved wood and delicately engraved mirrors.  This actually comes from Barcelona.  It wasn't very practical but was very beautiful and riding it you almost regret that Mr Otis (if ever there was a Mr Otis) had been allowed to dominate the world's elevating industry.

Despite the references to the Leningrad siege, this is actually a love story surrounded by chocolate, or at least a chocolate factory, presided over by Ludmilla the elderly matriarch, who with her roller pin arms, wispy grey hair, liver spots and her Leningrad defence medals is all the wise and aged grandmothers you have ever known.  Her problem is that she will never stop working or stop fighting.

The main protagonists, though are Vladimir and Beth (who know each other as Lenin and Elizabeth). It is pretty obvious from the start that they will fall in love because this is a love story, but where will love's path take them?  They are like corks bobbing around on the turbulent river Neva and having met Beth briefly at a New Year party, Lenin now finds himself showing her the sights of St Petersburg on a cold snowy January day (which isn't exactly the best time to see the city).  Anyhow, here is a part of their journey.  (I have a feeling that he should be humming Kalinka and she joining in with the bouncy bits - you see how the characters dictate what they should be doing?)

They had reached the river now, and were standing on the abutment looking out across the river at the rushing torrent of black water with its cargo of ice blocks.  “Look down there, Elizabeth,” said Lenin, raising his voice a little against the tumult below and pointing vaguely in the direction of the water beneath them.   Beth tried to follow. 

“No no!  There!"  Again he held her arm and she experienced a frisson of delight.  She looked at him, the wind lifting the flaps of his fur hat.  His arm pointed at the grey granite of the abutment wall.
She could see now a  ledge about ten feet above the river where a little snow had collected.  On it nestled a shape.  “Is that meant to be a bird?” she asked, peering beneath her.

“It’s a statue of a siskin,” replied Lenin softly.  “A type of finch with colourful yellow and green feathers.  Very common here in summer.”   

“But it’s tiny!” exclaimed Beth.  “What does it signify?”

“The smallest statue in St Petersburg.  Only 11 centimetres tall,” answered Lenin, holding one hand approximately this distance above the other.   Too cold to stand still, they walked on as he talked. “The little siskin commemorates the old Imperial Legal Academy which stood just by here.  You know the students at the academy had to wear gowns of yellow and green so they became known as ‘siskins or Chizhik Pyzhik.’  I think there must have been some other statue or model at one time because we say that Chizhik Pyzhik helps students with their love affairs, especially when they don’t go too well.”

And so that little statue was Chizhik Pyzhik?” asked Beth, wincing at her memory.

“Well a new Chizhik Pyzhik” said Lenin.  "Because it was only put there a year or two ago.  I don’t know quite what happened to the old one.  In fact I think there are now several Chizhik Pyzhik for people keep stealing them.  They are supposed to help Russian students to travel around the city without paying on the buses or the metro!  Though I don’t know how!”  Lenin's face was straight though Beth could see the corners of his mouth involuntarily turning upwards.  "It's true! Really!" he protested.

Beth laughed and then she laughed again full and hearty against the wind.  “If ever I am sad, just say Chizhik Pyzhik to me and I shall remember the little statue and I shall smile a big smile” She beamed and without really being conscious of what she was doing she leaned against him slightly.  Lenin was now laughing too.  Despite the cold and the wind both felt calm and easy with one another, as though love had already arrived without either of them noticing or ever thinking that it might be remarkable;  and of course they would have denied its arrival, even to themselves.  

Lenin began to hum Kalinka.

HEARING LOSS

I was due at the hospital one morning this week for a hearing test, when someone rang saying that the consultant was unavailable so could I come in the afternoon instead as a vacancy had unexpectedly occurred.  As hearing loss is pretty much irredeemable I hoped I wasn't filling 'dead mens shoes.'  Still, as it had been five months,  I went and handed in my letter to an unwelcoming receptionist  who said to wait in the waiting area.  I had brought a book.

Not knowing whether I was deaf or not I thought she might have spoken with ex-agg-er-at-ed em-ph-as-is.  I suppose I should have responded 'pardon?' but couldn't quite bring myself to the required level of facetiousness.  The receptionist did not look like the sort of woman who might welcome a joke.  Besides, no doubt that is what people do say to her multiple times everyday.  Perhaps that's why she looked jaded.

I had barely time to read a page of my book when someone on the far side of the room mumbled my name.  I waved, but he seemed to be short-sighted so I had to take a chance that I had heard correctly. That's my hearing problem in a nutshell: I can hear sound well enough, it's deciphering it into words that's the problem. I can hear that someone has pronounced two syllables - but which two syllables?

That's what I explained to a young and attractive lady audiologist into whose tiny green soundproof cubicle I was admitted after a further spell of waiting in a corridor. She had me explaining the whys and wherefores of my condition (such that it is) and peered into my ears, perhaps to check that they weren't full of earwigs or dead mice. They weren't.  Then she slapped some headphones on me and told me to press a button when I heard a noise. 

The noises - or rather tones - came first in one ear and then in the other. Most were very faint. Anyhow I thought I had most of them.  She wrote the results down on a chart and the result looked like our economic performance in recent years.  It seemed to be downhill all the way from the lower frequencies, although curiously enough the very high frequencies I could hear better than the ones just below them.

She told me I needed a hearing aid.  Pardon? I said.  For the fact is that I don't really want a hearing aid at all, fussing with something stuck in or behind my ear.  (In actual fact the aid that she said she would recommend contrived to be both these things, being fixed somehow behind the ear but having an eel like tube that plugged into the ear itself.)  I have to acknowledge though it would be a useful device for watching television where I find that the actors mumble so much that subtitles are an asset.  Ditto when people call me on the telephone and I cannot tell the difference between an S or an F in a postcode - or, surprisingly because they don't sound the same,  between 2 and 3.  I work on the basis of choosing whatever alternative I think it isn't and then I find I am usually correct.

I would find a device very useful in such situations I said, but she said sternly that that part-time use wasn't permitted.  I would have to wear the thing all the time.  The brain needed to learn to hear again, she said.   I didn't argue.  We'll see how things work out.  I might just forget. She gave me an envelope full of matronly advice about hearing aids and said the device would be ready for fitting in a few weeks. They would write to me again.  'Thank you,'  I said and prepared to leave - 'but you have to see the doctor', she said.  'Why?' I asked, 'what will he do?'

So I waited again and then was ushered in to see a beaming faced consultant to whom I had to go through all my previous explanations again while he tried to find something wrong with me: general health? blood pressure? heart?  I felt like saying 'seek and ye shall find:' for few bits of me seem to be working as they should, though compared with most of the inmates one finds wandering in and out of the hospital corridors I have a lot to be thankful for.  Then he looked at my hearing test results and decided that because there was a disparity between left and right ears when it came to the higher end of the spectrum this might be due to a benign growth on the auditory nerve and that this required an MRI scan.  I said I didn't suffer from claustrophobia.

To reassure me he said they only find something in 1 in 100 scans and when they do find something they just keep an eye on it if it is only small.   But why?  It's no wonder the NHS has no money. It isn't even that I am properly deaf. If they want to scan something I am sure my arteries or liver or appendix would give them far more interesting results than my auditory nerve.  We'll send you an appointment he said.  Afterwards I'll review the results and write to you.  'Can't you just send me an email?' I queried. 'We're not geared up to that yet.'  Again, no wonder the poor old NHS has no money: all those letters.

It so happens for the 48 hours since coming home from the hospital I have been ill and off my food, feeling totally zonked and unable to work.  I am (I hope) better now, and of course the illness may just be a coincidence but it underlines my belief that hospitals are places you go to get sick and are best avoided.

*****

Now, for you delectation and delight here are a few pictures from our summer garden show 'Wind in the Willows, which I directed last Saturday.

Here are most of the cast before the show. Toad and Rat at Extreme Left

Toad, Rat and Mole and Audience

Toad in Washerwoman's Dress and Engine Driver

THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW

The lovely Pondside has tagged me for a 'Kreative' Bogger and invited me to write ten things about myself that readers may not know.

1. Spain:  As a baby I lived in Gibraltar and had a Spanish nurse.  Like Logan Gonzales Mountstuart - the protagonist of 'Any Human Heart' - the first words I heard were therefore Spanish.  Ever since then I have collided on and off with the country and its language.  My signature dish is 'Gambas a l'Aillo' or prawns in a spicy garlic oil which I first tasted in Barcelona.  I was also privileged to tour the Sagrada Familia cathedral in that city with its (current) architect, high up among the pinnacles where workmen were installing coloured glass.  Then at another time I found myself run off the road and almost killed by the King of Spain - or rather his minders.  We'd taken a wrong route to the airport.  Not difficult in Spain.

2. Cuba:  A wonderful place with wonderful people and the only place I have ever been followed by my own spy detail.  He wasn't very good and to embarrass him we took him to lunch.  Whether because of this of no, I subsequently found myself sent the Cuban Vice-Minister for Agriculture and spent a happy day, taking him to lunch and touring dried flower establishments and growers in South Wales. In an unguarded moment I must have persuaded the Cubans of the commercial possibilities of dried flowers.

3. Europe: Growing up in the aftermath of war and as chance would have it in the company of young people from every continent I became a committed supporter of an all embracing Europe.  Nothing very exciting happened though I did write new English lyrics to the European Anthem and was on television once at the European Parliament arguing for an elected European President. 

4.  Flying:  My father was in the RAF and I grew up yearning to fly. At school I won a flying scholarship and learned to fly a plane before I learned to drive a car, going solo in under six hours at the age of 17. Sadly, I subsequently found that I didn't really care for flying after all.  I was in a plane once that was struck by lightening.  It sounded as if Thor had cracked us with his hammer and all the lights went out for a few seconds.

5. Work: I have had a multiplicity of jobs, not all of them paid: agricultural labourer, Gestetner operator, storekeeper, occupational psychologist, senior civil servant, politician, insurance salesman, European business consultant, eurocrat, journalist, recruitment consultant, editor, small business owner,  actor and UNESCO vice-chair (in Wales).  Of the 15 organisations behind these occupations, 8 went out of business either with me still on board or shortly afterwards.  I have worked for myself for the past 28 years.  Now in my mid-sixties I am embarking on the new career of novelist.

6. Sport: I have no skill with edged tools, says my horoscope with uncanny accuracy.  Nor do I have any skill in sports that involve moving balls.  The only sporting distinction that I ever achieved was to become Oxfordshire U16 full bore shooting champion.  That wasn't even a 'sitting-down' sport; it was all about lying down and keeping still.

7. Education: At college in Cambridge I was full of angst.  I had over my desk a sign which said 'I am the biggest failure of the twentieth century.'  Still I became President of the May Ball Committee and just scraped an acceptable degree. 

8. I do love challenging conventional wisdom but I have to report that mostly conventional wisdom is right.

9.  I am physically male but mentally female which is sometimes a great handicap and sometimes a great delight.  I am reputedly descended from the 'most handsome man in the Highlands' - but then, aren't we all?  If we go back far enough we are all descended from someone.

10.  I love nasturtiums and I wear red a lot.

That's enough things you didn't know!






 

FINDING A BUILDER

Kevin, On His Rope, High In The Geodesic Domes of Eden

I am outside Younger Daughter's house situated in one of the less salubrious suburbs of Cardiff that roll away east of the Taff. The house is already famous for it figured in an episode of Dr Who having its top window blown out by the BBC's pyrotechnicians.  That was a couple of years ago.  BT - or Before Theo - who is now three.  I am not sure what Theo would make of windows being blown out in a sheet of yellow flame but I'm sure he would like to have a go.  Since then, of course, Isla has arrived; Butterbean in family parlance, so the days of BT, or for us before grandchildren, seem a long way back. How time flies.

Anyway her house lies at the bottom of a tree-lined cul-de-sac down the sides of which cars park in herring-bone fashion leaving an irregular gap in the middle which is simple to drive up but very hard to reverse down.  One of the things that impressed me about Ken was that he got into his large, red builders transit van and reversed up the narrow gap, between the projecting tail-lights of the cars on either side, at speed without once stopping or having to draw forward to re-align himself.  Someone to be taken seriously, I thought.  Someone with obvious talent

He had admitted to me that he did everything himself, apart from electrics and central heating, in which departments he relied on friends in the trade.  Driving too, he did himself, as we have just seen.
Younger Daughter had recruited him to refurbish her bathroom while she and the family went off to spent two months in a caravan at the Eden project in Cornwall where the No Fit State Circus - for which her partner, Kevin, performs aerial acrobatics on tall ropes - has a residency.

Having finished his work, Ken was reluctant to accept payment until the job had been 'signed off' and the Eden project being just too far away comfortably to nip back, Younger Daughter requested our help to meet Ken at her house to see what he had done.  She had already sung Ken's praises.  He was, she said, an 'intelligent' builder in the same way that a predictive keyboard might be described as intelligent.  Give Ken a budget, she said, and a broad idea of what you are looking for and he will do the rest.  And there we were: we opened the bathroom door and there was the rest in the shape of a very smart little bathroom in black and white with modern fittings all perfectly refitted and retiled and insulated - a bathroom that would not have looked out of place in a smart modern hotel.  I was bowled over.

So standing outside the house now in the thin rain that is Cardiff's usual trademark I said to Ken that perhaps he might come over in his red van, when he wasn't busy, and give us a price on some of the many jobs that need doing here.  His face lit up and shined as brightly as his bald head. He said he would be glad to.   No hurry, I said.  Ring us in a week or two.  And as Ken drove off backwards down the spiky avenue of death and we reversed hesitantly expecting to hear the crunch of metal on metal at any minute, we thought we had at last found someone who might help to get the house into shape at last before we come to sell it in a few years time.

In fact I find myself anxiously awaiting Ken's call, for the list of jobs seems to get longer by the day. As I lay in bed after waking this morning I remembered the barge boards under the eaves which have been attacked both by birds and the weather.  Then I remembered that we really did need a new loft hatch and then a folding ladder for access. All very tiresome.  Moreover, we have just had a letter from British Gas offering to service our new central heating boiler for £18 plus per month.  I wondered whether Ken's Central Heating friend might be prepared to do it for less. 

Picture of Kevin at Eden is courtesy of No Fit State Circus

EXHAUSTION

Peace be unto me! I've been lying on my bed most  of the afternoon drifting in and out of sleep.  Sheer exhaustion!  We despatched sister Sarah and niece Madeleine this morning on their way to visit another sister and thence my old step Mum, Rosamund, who is now 90 and has lost the use of her legs and has been committed - is that the right word? - to the caring arms of a community hospital.  I wanted to give Sarah a couple of bottles of wine for her but she wasn't sure whether the hospital allowed alcohol. If it doesn't - and I can well imagine that to be the case - it surely is another case of the world going mad.  When I spent time as an eighteen year old - Maddie's age - gosh was I then as svelte and fresh-minted as she? - in a geriatric hospital in Cahors in France (it's a long story) the local wine figured in copious amounts on the dining table.  I mean when you are that sort of age, deaf, in pain, without even the dignity of being able to get yourself on and off the loo, then alcohol is the one thing perhaps that makes life tolerable.  And who cares if you die of liver disease?  The wine should be available free, too, on prescription, with a tonic of gin every now and again.

I am even reviving my own poor self with a glass of the (as Alistair Cooke used to call it) 'twilight wine of Scotland.' Still I am not exhausted because of Sarah and her daughter, who are the most unexhausting and delightfully accommodating people on the planet, even though our day yesterday was spent mostly in wild goose chases.  We went first to the Job Centre to arrange a National Insurance number for Maddie who is off to University in Exeter shortly, only to find that the one in Llantwit had closed a dozen years ago.  And then we tried to open a student account for her at the Santander Bank but there was no-one in the branch who could help.  So much for customer service!  We even tried to do a bit of sight-seeing around Cardiff Bay - the Millennium Centre, the Oval Basin and the Bay itself;  thought we might possibly push out the boat with a tray of sweetmeats from the Turkish Bosforus restaurant - a curious edifice built on stilts over the waters of the Bay and to be highly recommended - but we could not find a single place to park.  If we were of a suspicious turn of mind we might have put it down to Friday 13th, but we aren't and so we didn't. So we ended up in the Deli at Marks and Spencer - a destination that was as an oasis to a weary caravan - to Sarah and Maddie who live in the rural south of France and haven't seen an M and S for two years. 

No, this overload isn't, or wasn't, caused by our visitors but by a whole concatenation of events too numerous to mention that have been tumbling over the horizon starting with the birth of little Isla May, our second grandchild,  a week before my birthday on 9 May and who now looks a twin of her mother at the same age - that is seriously grumpy, but with a winning smile.  Every front of my fairly pedestrian life seems to have swung into action in the last three weeks, necessitating constant activity, 14 hour days and seven day weeks.  The theatre, writing, the business, the social scene, visitors from afar, the garden, the children and grandchildren, holidays,  all have suddenly demanded extra time during which, of course it has rained practically everyday; indeed it is raining now in the time I had set aside to mow the grass lawn at the theatre. Still, its loss is your gain - or do I flatter myself?

Has anything been achieved apart from erecting an IKEA bed which required 300 screws (and eight castors)?   I have adapted Alun Bennet's Wind in the Willows for the CADS garden party on 18 August.  I have received a cheque for £100 for winning a short story competition and encouraged by this have revised and submitted a synopsis of what I grandly term my 'Russian novel - Boraya' to our local representative of one of the London publishing houses.  The story concerns the acquisition of a chocolate factory in St Petersburg and has grown, like topsy, out of short story I submitted unsuccessfully to a competition run by the Choc-Lit publishers. We shall see whether anything transpires.

Actually this synopsis (or rather the particular take on the story) came to me when I was machine minding a 23 hour printing job that we had recently.  You can't listen to the radio all the time and so I found myself composing in my head:  not music but stories. I find that I can hold a set of ideas in my mind - like a dream - but as soon as I come to write them down they evaporate, because the idea doesn't seem to be cast in words, rather it is more of an experience. It's like trying to bottle smoke, tying down one bit seems to alter all the rest. I suppose ones words need to act as a trigger for someone elses imagination and thus allow them to recreate their own smoke or in this case images of a war-torn chocolate factory beside the mighty River Neva, which, incidentally, makes a good subject for a pub quiz question in that its flow is greater than any other river in Europe that flows westwards.
Only the Danube has a greater flow - and than debouches eastwards into the Black Sea.



The picture is of the River Neva and St Petersburg, courtesy of Wikipedia.

MORAL HYDRAULICS AT HAY

Hay 25 Draws to a Close

Last weekend I was perched, high up, on a plastic seat in a big tent listening to someone talking about 'moral hydraulics.'  And interesting it seemed too.  Yes, it could only be the Hay Literary Festival, whose 25th anniversary fell this year, and to which we make an annual pilgrimage to rub shoulders with the great and the good and spend a day eating over-priced grub and drinking wine whose cost makes you quite wilt at the knees.  Nevertheless, as I said to J, when you have to ship everything in to what is, in effect, a field and then ship everything out again and hire temporary staff - with all those modern regulations to trip you up -  the prices start to look quite reasonable.  Given the price of tents.


'Moral Hydraulics' - who on earth might be rabbiting about moral hydraulics and keeping a straight face, or at least a contented smiling face that makes him look as though he has just received a noble commission to go back to Columbia University and become King?  Yes it was  Simon 'Hi class!  I hope you are all in good form this morning and feeling bright because there'll be questions afterwards' - Schama, who with us is always a must-go-to-see.  His lecture last weekend, on Victorian England's search for some spiritual purpose and their consequent expeditions through the Holy Land to uncover the archaeology of the Bible and in the process equip Jerusalem with clean water (the 'Moral Hydraulics' of my title) had me literally on the edge of my seat.

For the first time in goodness how many years I actually felt alive and could feel the ideas whizzing around in the cortex.  My brain became a pinball machine with this idea, this memory, this connection, this 'wow' - all bouncing off each other and ringing bells.  I may have been missing my lunch but this felt like being back at university before the dreary business of examinations got in the way of education and one could luxuriate simply in the hot shower of ideas cascading upon one's head.  An hour, pretty much, of erudition, delivered pacily and without notes - a real tour de force.

Still reeling, we skedaddled out of Simon's lecture and made our way to meet William Boyd, being interviewed about his latest book 'Waiting for Sunrise'  of which he read us an extract.  Since reading 'Any Human Heart' - his novel cleverly written in the form of extracts from an 'intimate journal' - I have read several of his books and stories.  I like the style and sentiments and the way in which his own, defiant but slightly regretful voice, comes through his various protagonists. As he finished in good time for questions I thought I'd ask one and was disconcerted to find the television camera focusing on me and my torso projected on a giant screen.  It's true what they say, I thought: television does make you look a stone heavier. I wonder why? Maybe it is something to do with hydraulics.

The question I'd have asked Boyd if ever I had found myself next to him in a bar would have been whether he had actually tried skipping an evening meal in favour of red wine and crisps, which is what Logan Mountstuart,  the writer of the 'intimate journal' above,  does in his declining years in his house in France.  I suppose he has.  Come to think of it so have I, though not in France.  It seems such a remarkably civilised thing to do - a bottle of good burgundy, an entertaining book, a pencil and paper to make notes, a dog and perhaps a cat too.  And some good handmade crisps.  One could go to bed happy thinking that the evening had not been entirely wasted.  But only if one were dining alone.

But that would have been a question for the bar.  Instead I asked him what I thought was an interesting question about how in this, the two hundredth centenary of Dickens' birth, he thought that the profession of novelist had changed.  A question, I reckoned, that might have provided all sorts of avenues down which he might happily have charged - technological, abolition of censorship, competitive pressures, niche markets - and so on.  Instead he probably thought I was just some smart-arse and, perhaps caught off guard and having, perhaps again, like me, the type of slow brain that needs time to consider propositions properly, he simply floundered with the sort of answer that would hardly have got him into Columbia or anywhere else.

He would have thought me even more of a smart-arse, too, I suspect had I been able to carry through my intention to get him to sign a copy of 'Waiting for Sunrise' not William Boyd but Logan Gonzales Mountstuart.  Well, I thought it would make a change, given the number of copies there must be signed 'William Boyd.'  But it was not to be.  The queue was long and I was nowhere near the front and he seemed to be taking his time to talk to people.

Moreover, I realised suddenly that the next show was very soon to begin and I was supposed to be meeting others in the hospitality tent before hand.  My emquiries into Logan Gonzales Mountstuart (it is a feature of Boyd's writing that he chooses outrageous names) and his red wine and crisps habit will have to wait for another day.

So then an interesting presentation  on the ethical dilemmas of humanitarian medicine from the director of MSF in the UK.  Should you treat a diseased child prostitute brought to the clinic by her pimp knowing that she will simply be returned unwillingly to prostitution when she is cured?  Are you as a medical resource, simply providing a free medical service that the brothel might otherwise need to pay for?  Are you colluding with the pimp?

Profound questions indeed, but then it was time for a change of ideas and pace.  Our last show was Simon Callow - the actor - who wandered on to the stage in front of a thousand people and talked for an hour, again without so much as a note or a picture, about Charles Dickens who he has studied and read and played and has now written a book about.

We were expecting readings from Dickens but instead we got a biography that focused on Dickens' relationship with the theatre.  Absolutely fascinating! And delivered with an actor's panache.  Callow seemed to warm to the audience as he went along and while he started in a fairly pedestrian manner talking about some early comical experiences in playing 'A Christmas Carol,' he seemed to gather strength as he went on so that when he finished the applause rolled on and on and on.  A thousand people or so all applauding eagerly.  He seemed quite overcome and gave a very theatrical bow.  So  apart from managing somewhere to have a glass of bubbly in the sponsors tent that was that for this year.  But we shall be back next no doubt.

It usually rains at Hay, but we were fortunate in not seeing rain until the time came to depart. It had not rained then for two days and by then most of the mud had dried up.  The Macmillan nurses car park where we left our car was still open and conditions were almost civilised. We reached our car dry shod as the final Hay audiences were being entertained.

JUBILEE CELEBRATIONS

CADS In Holy Cross Church

 

 

 

 

 It has been a busy weekend full of Jubilee celebrations, marking Elizabeth II's 60 years on the throne. not something that we, or she, will see again.  It is quite remarkable when you think of it, 60 years of listening to and advising Prime Ministers from Winston Churchill to David Cameron, sixty years (and four children) of good times and bad times but she has come through it, elegant, graceful and smiling.  We have a lot to be grateful for.  I can never understand what the republicans think we should gain from abandoning an institution that works so well, which unifies the nation as no other institution does, which is above politics, which provides dignity to the office of head of state and above all which earns the country so much in tourist revenue.  Besides it is fun to celebrate from time to time.

Not Our Beacon

This isn't our beacon on top of  St Hilary Down, it's actually a representation of something in 1588 when the Spanish Armada threatened to make England a Spanish province.  Our beacon was very similar and would have been instantly recognizable to those folk of long ago, though they might have wondered why we made so many double barred squares out of planks of wood (pallets) and wondered just what they were for.  This enormous tower of wood was built in the middle of a field and some 300-400 people gathered around it in a big and happy circle.  Behind came a small army of officials (some with 2 way radios) ambulance men, firemen, a steelband man and a seller of hotdogs. The way itself was lighted by paper carrier bags filled with sand in each of which burned a nightlight. The beacon itself was ignited with firebrands made from a fierce, smoking pitch of the sort you see in Robin Hood films. (These, in fact, would have been a considerable improvement on the febrile Olympic specimens). The fire was to be lit at 10.15pm  We counted down the seconds 45, 44, 43, chanting in the darkness.

Cowbridge's Jubilee Queen

The whole scene then was medieval, the people gathered in their encompassing circle around the fire and singing - in this case, the National Anthem - as the flames curled and danced, high on a shower of sparks, far into the night, their faces glowing in the reflected glory of the flames. On the distant hills across the water,  pricks of light, glowed orange and showed where others were engaged in a similar activity. Most impressive, most impressive indeed. I met a couple of friends with a Thermos and we toasted HM's health in tepid coffee. I will have to request a hip flask for Christmas.

It was as well it didn't rain, not that it would have mattered to the bonfire but it would have mattered to we who toasted the Queen's good health and wished here, should it be possible, yet another 60 years and if not then long life for her children and grandchildren. But it did rain the next day, the day scheduled for street parties and maypole dancing, for the eating of cake and the performing of spectacles.

Children Dancing Round the (Indoor) Maypole

The King and Queen Process Through The Church

King and Queen Watch the Party

We produced our own reigning monarchs and King and a Queen and a little Prince and Princess. They moved among us encouraging the troops.  But if they reigned their rule did not extend to the heavens for the rain came down thick and heavy and continuous and the entertainments and festivities had to be moved inside, first to the Holy Cross Church - a fortified medieval construction built sometime in the fifteenth century on a much older site.  There the Cowbridge Amateur Dramatic Society had a stall to beguile likely souls into trying their hand at drama and their feet on the boards.

Later we repaired to a large function room where bands played and the children skipped and hopped around an indoor maypole, entwining each other about with ribbons, while their fond parents ate cake and drank tea from enormous urns, amid a sea of bunting and flags and general red, white and blueness.  We - folk from CADS - also put on a little show on the History of Cowbridge.  The children were still dancing much later when we delved into the recesses of this fine old medieval pub - much older than its patron the Duke of Wellington (of Waterloo fame) to find something a little stronger in which to toast the Queen's good health until it was then time to come home again and to put away our own noble Union Jack that has been doing service at Jubilees and Royal Weddings and the like ever since the first World War.  It was made somewhere in Lancashire of some traditional mixture of cotton or linen and the colours are softer and less garish than much that the modern world is offered from the factories of Guandong Province. 

COMING HOME

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

We are coming home tomorrow all being well.  After many adventures. We've had a delightful time.  Exotic weather. Hot, yet cool in the shade of the enchanted trees.  As ever I have eaten and drunk more than I should.  Our marvellous hosts hosted marvellously.

Our Shakespeare show, performed 'pour les voisins' went well enough.  We could have had a bigger audience, but it is not every day that you will find Shakespeare performed in 'La France Profonde' in front of the Deputy Mayor who is a proper mayor, though naturally with no chain.  There is no formality:  everyone kisses everyone else.  We drink rosé wine and eat smoked salmon sandwiches on the Mill lawn.  Under the walnut trees again.

We did the St Crispin's Day speech from Henry V and also some bits from 'As You Like It' and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'  for which I had a fantastically painted face thanks to one of our friends here who is a face painter.  Our French audience applauded dutifully.  We provided translations.   The Scottish play figured too.

We've been in the medieval town of  Figeac today.  It was Market day and we heard someone from a far-off country playing jazz on a piano in the Place Champollion. Then he switched to Bach.  Prelude and Fugue number 1.  Absolutely beautiful.  We set ourselves to walk around the town, to snap the ancient buildings teetering over their alleyways, but tiring we sat down to lunch - for me a tough steak better suited to shoe leather.  But the chips and salad were agreeable. Then over to our friends in Lessal, a forgotten hamlet nestling in a forgotten departement. They have a swimming pool but I didn't swim because the water was only 26 degrees. My delicate skin needs 30: not to feel cold. Instead we watched a Redstart feeding her chicks and drank china tea and contemplated why Buzzards ride the thermals.  Their house is on top of a hill whereas the Mill is at the bottom of a valley - so it is hotter and more humid here.

There are wild boar around, we see their tracks and where they have dug for roots along the walking trails we have cut on past visits. But they make no noise and the place is silent apart from the eternal chuckling river and the birdsong and the drilling of the cicadas in the uncut hayfields.

Sadly the Mill is sold so we may never stay here again, indeed may not even see it again, so there will only be memories and photographs.  It feels like a death.  The trees will grow on without me. The tractor will rust. I drank a glass of Sancerre under the walnut trees this evening to say goodbye.

The others are watching Miss Marple on the television, but I am out here on the terrace, typing away.  How quickly a week passes and we have done very little.  Reading, a very little writing and learning lines, even less cooking.  But still it has been relaxing but I could do perhaps with another week and then perhaps another.  I asked our friends whether they didn't miss the madding crowd of social life back home and they looked out over the rolling hills and said 'no.'

We went to see a neighbour's house. A tiny house of two rooms and a kitchen - no bathroom.  Unlocked.  Tiny windows.  The whole place black with smoke from the fire.  The only concession to modernity an electric cooker shoved into the grand inglenook and a stainless steel sink in the galley kitchen But it must have looked much the same two hundred years ago, with the drain running out of the wall and into a clump of nettles.  Dark, oppressive and dirty; a hanging shelf in the middle of the room to keep food out of reach of rats. Quite eerie - a regression to another age.  Yet in the midst of plenty. 

The old mayor brought us a bottle of walnut oil this morning. He said it was strong and it looked strong - a rich nutty brown, and yet it has hardly any taste apart from a slight mustiness, similar to that which still rises like a miasma from the old and disused walnut pressing chamber in the Mill here.  That too is dark, black and gloomy.  Like hell with the fire out.  Most curious. We delivered to him last autumn three sacks of walnuts and he has given us back three sacks of crushed walnuts. Our task now is to separate the shells from the kernels.  In the old days apparently the village would get together for this task and spend a day shelling walnuts and generally feasting and drinking.  Then the shelled kernels would go for oil.  I am an expert on this now.

It is still warm, but becoming too dark to write. The birds are still singing and a cock has just crowed somewhere in the gloaming.  Neither have the cicadas found it time to go and clean their teeth. I expect the first bat will be along in a minute.