AN APPEALING HOUSE

I am writing this in my favourite place: in bed. On Saturdays I can be quite self- indulgent. ‘I am allowed,’ as the children used to say defiantly when they were growing up.  I like working in bed, it has many advantages and when I turn my head from the laptop I can see out of the bedroom window across the intervening valley to the white gable of a tall house on which the sun is shining.  Behind the house are trees and behind the trees is a sky of grey-blue.  It isn’t far away, this house, we are not talking of a big valley.  The house is no more, I should think than 300 yards away, 400 yards at most and the curious thing is that, although I must have walked past this house many times, I could not go to it and point it out and say ‘This is the house I can see from my bedroom window.’  The ground rises and falls, there are trees that hide and reveal, everything looks so different close to. 
    Houses are funny things: they have personalities of their own.  Last night, walking around the village for exercise and meditation I passed a house called ‘Greenfield’ that cries out to me in sadness whenever I pass it.  And always my reaction is the same.  ‘If my fairy godmother touches me on the shoulder with her sparkly wand, I shall buy you and pour money into you to make you snug and watertight and warm with thick carpets, and John Lewis kitchens and at least two staircases and roaring fires of apple wood logs. Outside there would be soft lawns around the ash trees and where I would take afternoon tea and listen to the tinkling of the brook running close by.  It is that sort of house. An old house, a traditional house, a comforting house, a house that feels home.
    Refurbished the house would be worth a £1 million, maybe more.  As it is - I cannot remember it ever having been lived in for at least twenty years - it might probably be worth half that. I doubt that it’s habitable at present.  What I cannot understand is why it has been left for so long, accumulating dereliction.  Once some years ago an estate agent’s sign went up plastered with the word ‘SOLD.’     A couple of weeks later it was taken down and the dereliction continued.
    Yesterday as I walked past - for the house lies at the bottom of the bluff on which St Quentin’s Castle stands and the Castle, which may once have housed the deposed King Edward II for a night or two, is one of my favourite places to walk to - I again felt the house’s presence calling to me like a stray animal or an orphan child.  Not so much, please take me home - such sentiment would be difficult for something made of a thousand tons of stone - but rather please let me be your home and look after you and keep you warm in winter and cool in summer where you could write to the sound of the tinkling brook, sitting with your back against the trunk of one of the ash trees.  And again I responded, that should my fairy godmother reach out and touch me so that I have fortune galore, then, yes I shall buy you and live in you.
    At this point I was approaching ‘Greenfield’ from its back, down the hill.  I now turned the corner, my unspoken declaration ringing in my ears as it were and suddenly there, in the garden, was an enormous double sign advertising the presence of a construction company.  Well, well, well.  Perhaps refurbishment will start at last.  Maybe the house will become grand again and all I shall have to do is either to win the Lottery on a rollover week or maybe have ‘Boraya’ hit the all time best-seller lists and to be made into a film - a box office hit of whose proceeds I would be awarded five per cent. 
    Or, on a more modest scale, I wondered whether they might be going to turn the house into retirement flats.  I might then even be able afford to buy one and so could write in the house to the sound of the tinkling brook after all even without fairy godmother’s intervention for I shall be needing such a flat sooner or later. 
    But then I wondered: suppose they are just going to demolish the house and instead build three or four modern ‘executive homes,’ stamping on the old house’s mystery and charm and grinding it into the dusk like a cockroach?  Or even maybe remodel the house, destroying its old world charm with some ghastly modern carapace of glass and steel.  I shuddered at the thought.
    So maybe that was the house’s sudden call to me as I walked down the hill: it really was the cry of an orphan child shouting, ‘Save me from the architect and his wrecking ball.’ 

LAST WRITE OF THE PROMS

Of course I blame Nigel Kennedy.

We’d been invited to a friend’s house for supper and a joint watching of the Last Night of the Proms which, apart from the wonderful Joyce DiDonato and Marin Alsop, also starred Nigel Kennedy.  At least he is British, the other two being and sounding - as Simon Schama was to observe - impeccably American.  Pomp and Circumstance internationalised at last.  But I miss the sea shanties.  Perhaps they couldn't be internationalised.

Still, Nigel Kennedy made me think of three very pretty female violinists who play ‘Kalinka’ on YouTube.  Well I guess they play it in lots of other surroundings as well but I always used to listen to them when I was writing my novel  ‘Boraya’ to put me in a suitably Russian mood and when I got home after the Proms I played the video again.

Suddenly I was transported back to Borayaland - to the Casa Malinka dacha:  an eerie feeling - half way between a dream and a memory.  I wandered through the rooms of the dacha, sensing the atmosphere as though in an empty house, being reminded of the events and the people and the conversations that I had placed there.   I had written these but now I felt that I had merely been a fly on the wall and that the events I had imagined had really taken place and I had seen them.  Strange and bewildering this confusion of memory and imagination.

Casa Malinka wasn’t based on any house I had ever seen being a Catalan house on the Gulf of Finland, with an onion dome on the roof; large windows, big heavy doors and a long garden, falling gently away from the house.  It was as though I had lived there once - which I suppose for the nine months I that was writing the novel - I had been.

'Boraya'  still has no takers, however.  The manuscript - or should that now be ‘e-script?’ - lies on a London agent’s slush pile awaiting the end of the month when the sands of hope will run out.  It is looking as though I shall have to publish it myself.  We’ll see.  It was a learning experience, though still a good read and a page turner.  Maybe a little unsubtle, but little in Russian life is subtle.  Some people have read it avidly, others it seems to have left cold.  I suppose as my first (possibly my only, who knows?) novel it has a special place in my heart.

All of which makes me yearn to get on with writing my second one - 'Henric's Mill' - which will be set in France and which spans the life of a refugee from the 1920’s Russian Civil war who escapes from Russia with his sister’s papers - something that leads to all sorts of complications.  The story set first in Paris and then in the Cantal runs through the Second World War and up to the present (more or less) when Felix, the protagonist and now in his late eighties becomes a refugee from French Justice and escapes back to Russia.  Felix's character is slowly forming in my head and beginning to tell me the hoops through which he wants me to jump.

But instead of being able to get on with composing such entertaining nonsense I am hard at work trying to publish all the Neolithic research I have done over the years in order at least to  have a proof copy of a small book when I have to give a talk to a student archeology society in November.  The text is more or less written but it is taking ages to transform it into the typeset and illustrated pdf file required by the publishers.  In this case it is the pictures rather than the characters that seem to have minds of their own.

Yet I did do something this week for the first time (or at least the first time that I can remember, which isn't the same thing) and that was to pick up my neighbour’s six year old from school.  The neighbour had had to go to London and my task was to take her daughter home and give her to the babysitter who would be arriving - or so I was told.

I stood in the rain with huddled groups of other parents awaiting the magic hour at which the school portals would open and the children emerge.  Except they didn’t.  They come out one at a time and these days each has to ‘spot’ a parent or parent substitute before being released.  Luckily Rose knows me quite well, but she was one of the last to come out and the rain was heavy.  I wondered if I had come to the right door.  But eventually there she was and so we were able to run home while she told me a long and involved story she had written that day about a white rabbit called Milly who had a brother and a sister (also white rabbits) and a Mother rabbit, called Lily (or maybe Lilly), who was Ginger.  I didn’t catch half of it and all the rabbits ended up in a tree at one point from which they descended by simply leaping to the ground.

I protested.  "Rabbits don't climb trees," I said unhelpfully.

“That’s the thing about stories,” said Rose a little crossly.  I can make my characters do absolutely anything I want.

Bright confident morning! Clearly the rabbits haven't started yet to argue with their author. 

BORAYA

On their blog  The Lazuli Portals,  Joanna and Ron are soliciting responses to a questionnaire about writing works in progress.  I had fun in filling this in (I am a glutton for questionnaires) and so thought you might like to see the responses.  Thank you Joanna and Ron. 

What is the working title of your book or project?

Boraya

Where did the idea come from for the book or project?
 
I was once at a New Year Party and met a Russian who, at 9 o’clock, said he was going to bed as it was midnight in Russia.  The whole novel grew from that premise.

What genre does it fall under, if any?

This is hard.  I hope, above all, people will find it a good story.  I weave together three broad genres: romance; thriller and historical - at the same time the book isn’t an historical romantic thriller.

If applicable, who would you choose to play your characters in a movie?
 
There are 23 characters, who would require casting if ever the book became a film plus various historical characters.   I have been wrestling with who might play the younger characters but no-one quite seems suitable.  I’d have Dame Judi Dench, though, playing Ludmila, the matriarch, and, were he up to it, Peter O’Toole, playing the elderly Loic, the nearly eighty year old gardener cum groom at the Casa Malinka dacha.    But I’d also need a younger 1940’s version of Peter and perhaps someone to play Loic's father.  

There are two horses as well: Borodino and Tantsovshitsa.
 
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your manuscript or project?
 
In Russia love, war and chocolate inspire ordinary people to do most extraordinary things.

Will your book or story be self-published or represented by an agency?
 
Have to see first whether anyone wants to take it up.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
 
I began in August and was finished by mid December - so four and a half months.  It’s about 120,000 words.  I'm on the final edit at the moment.

What other book or stories would you compare this story to within the genre?
 
I can’t think of an easy comparison.  I have definitely been influenced by Rose Tremain and William Boyd.

Who or what inspired you to write this book or story?
 
I met Rose Tremain at the Hay Literary Festival some years ago.  I didn’t know who she was.  She didn’t know who I was.  Rashly, she told me to write.   Boraya, I suppose, is the result.

What else about the book or story might pique the reader’s interest?
 
Well, there’s some good sex in it! And a lot of snow!  I’d like to think there’s a fair amount of human interest, too, given that it’s a book about four principal characters: one Scots, two Russian and one French, compelled by love, war and chocolate (Boraya is the name of a chocolate company in St Petersburg whose uneasy privatisation forms the backbone of the novel) to do extraordinary things.  It’s a story of people a long way out of their comfort zone and also a city moving between grandeur, terrible affliction during the wartime siege, and rebirth.

Although the story is set mainly in the late 1990’s there are excursions into the 1940’s and although it is set mainly in and around St Petersburg, we drift to London, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Zurich, Brittany even.  On the way we meet various historical figures, including  Elizabeth the Great, the illegitimate, cross-dressing, washerwoman’s daughter who becomes Empress of Russia, (who proves yet again that fact is always stranger than fiction);  Rodolphe Lindt, who accidentally revolutionised chocolate making in the nineteenth century, and Flora MacDonald, whose eventful life on two continents is reflected in that of her descendant - the Elizabeth MacDonald of Boraya - whose unknown Russian leaves her at nine o’clock on New Year’s Eve. 

Oh, there’s a ruined wooden church in it as well.

TAPS AND SERVICE

I rang Ken our builder on his mobile.  It rang and rang and eventually the answerphone kicked in.
I should have insisted that he fixed the taps in the bathroom when he was here last autumn but he was anxious to move on to another job and by mutual consent we agreed the bathroom taps could wait.  But now the taps can wait no longer:  they have expired.  You turn the handle but water flows there none, if you see what I mean. The plastic widget that holds the metal splines of the tap has worn smooth rendering the tap useless.  The only thing we can be thankful for is that the tap expired in the off position rather than the on.

Now I don't know whether you've ever had anything to do with taps, but they are a conspiracy on humankind.  Not only do the manufacturers contrive continually to change their designs, thus making it quite impossible to replace like with like, but they are hideously expensive to buy.  Nor is that all, for you cannot buy the little plastic widget, worth about 3p without buying a whole new tap.  I don't call it a conspiracy for nothing.

 There are goods that you buy - mobile phones for instance - which make you wonder how anything so complex can be made so cheaply.  With taps it is the reverse.  We have had taps since Roman times and though they are simple devices involving no complicated technology they still lag behind in the value for money stakes by a mile.  Which might be understandable if taps were rare, but most people have at the very least half a dozen in their houses and some many more.  Why then are taps so expensive?  It's a question to put to the government; it might take their minds off the deficit. Think of all the taps there must be in government offices!

Anyway, there we are, or rather there Ken isn't, so I set off down to the Post Office through the rain and sleet to post a parcel consoling myself that I would pop into Waitrose afterwards for a free regular cappuccino to which my little green loyalty card entitles me daily.  Though I have my laptop with me I find - or in this case fail to find - my reading glasses.  Luckily I can go over the road to our newly refurbished and ultra-efficient local library and pick up a most excellent pair of reading glasses, gold rimmed, half moon, in a cigar type metal holder for only £4.99, which seems to me to be another piece of incredible value, besides which the purveyors of taps should bow their heads in shame. 

So there I am sitting in Waitrose, with my coffee and new reading glasses, and tapping away at the front end of Boraya - which, in case you were wondering, isn't a car but a novel with an overly long introduction from which I have to remove at least 10,000 words of carefully crafted and much sweated over prose.  This makes me weep almost as much as the taps.  Still it has to be done, but it makes me worried and anxious.

Now Waitrose staff (or Partners as they prefer to be called) are programmed to respond to worried and anxious looking customers and so, before long, Julia makes her smiling appearance beside me.  I reassure her that my troubled brow has nothing to do with my inability to choose the right brand of olive oil or a possible absence from the store of Duchy Originals, and that on the contrary I am exceeding content with everything apart from the problem of the front end of my book.  Not to waste a conversation with a customer Julia then produces a card and invites me to email a cordial sentence to Waitrose encapsulating my experience in the store that day, for which, she implies, there is a prize of £500. 

Now £500 for one sentence isn't bad going.  It's about £20 a word. Exeter Writers are running a short story competition with a £500 prize, but for that you have to write 3,000 words, or thereabouts,  a mere 20p a word.  I intend to enter it.  I have a story written.  But £500 for one sentence beats this hollow and so when I got home I thought I would compose a particularly soupy paeon of praise to Waitrose customer service in general, and Julia in particular, and I duly ventured into the website to post it.  I may have had to wade through a number of survey questions about my grocery shopping, but hopefully my telling observations about customers and staff being one happy partnership have been properly recorded.

In the middle of this I see the answerphone blinking.  It is Ken, asking me to ring him back.  I do and we make contact. 'I'm in Cornwall,' he says.  'On holiday.  I'll ring you next week.'  If he's in Cornwall, I think, it will be a bit of a busman's holiday for him what with landslips and houses collapsing.  I hope he has taken his tools with him.  So, our taps will have to wait.   The grandchildren who look forward to splashing in the bath will be seriously put out and we ourselves will have to make do with showers.  Meanwhile I live in hope that Ken's bill for installing new taps in the bathroom will be matched by a timely voucher from Waitrose or a cheque from Exeter, but I am not holding my breath.

A WALL OF 'POST-IT'S

    Following my last post here I can say that the Mill is now sold, which is a relief to its owner but sad for us.  So I won’t write any more about the Mill although no doubt bits and pieces from our many visits there will find their way into stories I may write in the future.
    Surprisingly, perhaps, now that I think of it, there’s nothing about the Mill in Boraya - or at least nothing that I can remember.  The second draft of Boraya is coming on apace.  I’m averaging about 4,000 words a day of editing - which is really rather more than plain editing:  there’s an awful lot of verbal garbage to be removed, but also new material to be inserted.  I read an article a couple of months ago about the hundreds of rotting wooden churches in Russia, many built in the eighteenth century and now in an advanced stage of collapse.  The pictures of these churches looked so romantic and beautiful with their spires and their onion domes and their bell towers leaning at odd angles, that I had to put a fictional one into Boraya.
    My fictional church, built in 1745, remains standing despite wind, rain and heavy snow.  It is dedicated it to Saint Demetrius, a Greek saint from Thessalonica, and it stands in a clearing where the ground rises a little near the village of Kokkoila whence on November 8 (the Saint’s anniversary according to the Orthodox calendar) some of the older villagers bring icons and try to enter the building despite the chained and padlocked doors and the signs that indicate mortal peril from falling timbers: a very practical case of ‘abandon hope all ye who enter here.’
    The temperature is minus twelve on the night that Elizabeth and Vladimir visit the church of Saint Demetrius.  They are on horseback and the ground is covered in snow; a full moon is shining, silhouetting the church black against the sky and the horses have to plough through drifts of white, sparkling powder. 
     But characters are a bit like young children: you can only control them so far.  I had intended that Elizabeth and Vladimir should just ride to this church, but Elizabeth, of course, has to dismount and then find a fragment of rotted wood from the church to put in her pocket.   She wants, she decides (nothing to with me, guv!) to have something to drop into the coffin of the gardener at Casa Malinka, who used to visit this church long ago, for it was his death that was largely responsible for bringing the couple together.   So now I have to extend the funeral scene too.  And so it goes on, words are trimmed out and bits of story put back in.
     We were invited out to dinner by some actor friends the other evening and they showed me a book in which various well-known writers had been asked to submit a picture of their working spaces and to describe how they wrote.  One photograph stood out: it was of Will Self’s study which showed an entire wall covered with ‘post-it’ notes, each with a jotting about the piece he was working on.
     I was intrigued. What a wonderful idea! Because I find one problem with writing a novel  (Boraya is the first I have attempted) is that you can only see a small part of it at any one time.  An artist who paints a picture can see the whole work at once; so can a sculptor or your average poet. But a novelist can only see about a page at a time.  Not enough.  By putting ‘post-it’s’ on a wall you can get some reminder of what is happening.
      I will try that when I finished this second draft. There is some re-shuffling to do, particularly at the beginning.  And then I will read the whole thing out loud.  After that it should be finished: I hope in about six months.
    Still not a lot will happen today: the grandchildren are here, Theo and Isla.  I have already pushed Isla (10 months) twice around the block in her pushchair with the object of getting her to fall asleep. We are going out now to ‘Bijou’ - a play centre with a tall tower full of ropes and nets and slides where 4 year old Theo likes to romp while I drink a coffee and remember what it was like to be four years old.  I can remember it in fact very well.  It seemed like yesterday.   But how would you feel if you were suddenly four years old again and without memories and experience?  Almost naked, I would think, and certainly scared. Who am I? Who are you?  Who are all those people?

The picture by the way is courtesy of Google Images. I trust no one will mind my using it. If anyone does then I apologise.  If you go to this website http://www.richarddavies.co.uk/woodenchurches/ you will find plenty more and if this helps to promote action to save some of these wonderful structures, then it will all have been worthwhile.

USHANKA

My ushanka, ordered hurriedly from Amazon when the snow threatened, came this morning.  Arriving early,  the stalwart postman braving the ice had the kindness to hide the parcel in a green garden refuse bag under the table at the side of the house and scrawl a note to that effect on an envelope pushed through the door.  How thoughtful!  Our postmen and women struggling through all manner of weather burdened down by pound upon pound of junk mail, are really quite noble.  Postal spam is a wicked burden on them and us and I'm sure if the Government promised to abolish it it could count on at least five thousand extra votes in every constituency.

So there I have it and you can see it above.  The ushanka - a cold weather hat like a tea cosy with flaps that let down to cover the ears if required -  is a fetching shade of grey, and supposedly the authentic Soviet army model.  It is gunmetal grey and made, I think, from felt with a cotton lining. The outside isn't fur but has a thick carpet-like pile. Anyhow I can vouch for its warmth.  The ushanka even came complete with a  fetching detachable Soviet cap badge in gold and red, the hammer and sickle emblem surrounded by gilded leaves and securely attached by means of two long brass pins.  I have to say that I think it looks very pretty.

I was even in two minds about leaving it on but then I thought it would be asking just too much from my friends and neighbours who must think me eccentric enough as it is. So reluctantly the cap badge has gone; though it can no doubt be easily re-instated if ever there is a need.  Inside on the lining of the ushanka is printed a cartoon of a rabbit and some words in Cyrillic script and the figures 89 - which may well refer to the year of Soviet era manufacture. My ushanka may therefore be already 24 years old, though if so it has been stored well against the day when I might need it.

Also printed is the size, ‘60,’ which refers to the circumference of the head.  I find this slightly too large: the ushanka keeps falling forward, slowly tilting forward over my eyes, but a little padding will remedy that easily.  By my calculation someone whose head is 60 centimetres in circumference has a brain 10 per cent larger than someone whose head is only 58 centimetres in circumference and yet heads apparently range from 54 to 65 centimetres without noticeable effect on the intelligence.  In any case if your brain is too big you become, I understand, an idiot, which perhaps explains why cows and elephants are not the Einstein’s of the animal kingdom. They have large brains but don’t do much with them, except for never forgetting an injury.  Crows, on the other hand, could probably pass the eleven plus, and they have to make do with something the size of a large pea.

I wish my ushanka had arrived yesterday which was Day One of the Great Whiteout.  In fact we only had about three or four inches of snow but it is quite remarkable what changes even a little snowfall like that can bring. On the roads, even with the much reduced traffic, the pristine whiteness soon turns to slush - a grey, gunmetal at first and then for some reason it turns to a warm brown.  I have never understood why.  But out in the countryside the snow remains deep and crisp and even.  And pure white of course.  Yesterday I went for a walk in the gathering gloom of the afternoon and marvelled at the transformation: tranquillity and calm  everywhere descended.  There was a wind blowing and it had again started to snow;  moreover, the snow was lying as the thermometer had again fallen below zero.  Sliding occasionally on the ice, with the snow in my face, battling up the hill,  I felt like Scott on his way to the South Pole, but it was an exhilarating and elemental feeling and when I returned home tired and exhausted I drank a vodka to warm me up.

Vodka? Ushankas? I feel Boraya is turning me into a species of Russian. Perhaps because I have returned to the novel after a deliberate step back and layoff over Christmas and New Year.  First, reading the book, then reworking in my mind all its little connections and consequences and now, at last, putting fingers to keyboard. The country dacha in which Elizabeth and Vladimir begin their romance now has a name - the Casa Malinka - and a provenance in the shape of a Calalan architect.     Its ‘distinctive characteristic, the one that remains forever in your mind, is the external decoration.  It is painted extravagantly in broad vertical curving bands, alternately pink and blue,  and those swirls of colour even in winter bring the warm sunshine of Barcelona to the Gulf of Finland.’  

I have these swirls of colour in my mind - can’t get them out of my mind - have I seen them somewhere?  A photograph, perhaps? Or have I imagined them?  Anyway, unless or until she repaints,  (which she won't do while I am writing the novel) Elizabeth is stuck with them.  ‘Poka.’ 

DEAD, VAST AND MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

One of my Christmas presents this year was Richard Burton’s diaries - a real doorstopper of a book.   Absolutely everything has been included regardless of how repetitive, banal, trivial or uninformative.  It is hard to write a diary whose greater part doesn’t suffer from these characteristics and Burton’s is no exception, but a decent editing job would have produced a book a third the size and much more informative. The editor (Chris Williams of Swansea University who have custody of Burton’s ‘papers’) has also included a mass of footnotes many of which serve little elucidatory purpose.  You might ask then why anyone should want to read it. 


The answer is because the diaries are like gold ore. Among the 'dead vast and middle of the night' entries are brilliant flashes, dramatic observations, fascinating accounts of people and places, illusions and self-deceptions, strengths and vulnerabilities, which make the writing as interesting as the acting.

I am a great fan of Burton and have often been entranced by that magic voice.  I can also remember standing on stage once in front of a 650 watt spotlight struggling to deliver a particular speech and turning to him in my head for help.  Quick as a flash I heard his voice telling me to concentrate on pronouncing each word; if I did this the line would follow, he said.  Whether it was my imagination or the great man taking pity on a fellow thesp what he suggested seemed to work and I drank his health in the bar afterwards.

Though why it is that we drink people’s health, I have no idea.  Booze did for Burton in the end just as it has done for so many of the great and good.  Still it is said that people who drink moderately live longer than those who don’t.  I used to wonder whether this really meant anything in that some of the most miserable people that I have met have been elective teetotallers.  And if one thing kills you faster than alcohol it is misery.  But however would we manage social occasions without it? 

Such as, for instance, Twelfth Night, a long forgotten part of the Winter Festivities calendar which I have been doing my bit all my life to resurrect.  Among our little theatre group here we have now a tradition of doing something on the evening of 5th or 6th January: the jury is still out on which is the correct date.  This year we read a play - Patrick Barlow’s 39 Steps adaptation, which is currently touring the country.  Fourteen people came in all, including a ventriloquist’s dummy called Sonny Goy, and a very good time was had by all.

In the invitation we stated that nibbles would be on offer but so many people brought food that we have been living on leftovers.  But why is it that everyone brings red wine to parties and then asks for white?  My stock of white wine is now seriously deleted but I have enough red wine to float a battleship.  I think I shall have to specify something about this on the invitations next year.

Actually this week I have been ill, sunk by the same virus that seems to be knocking on everyone’s door and I was driven to my bed.  I cannot remember the last time that this happened. My brain refused to function and all I wanted to do was sleep.  The business carried on however and we have had quite a few orders which I struggled to despatch in my dressing gown.  I am better now but a week has gone by with no work done on the Boraya project.  I have printed out the text and it is now a great thick mass of paper.  The next step is to read it. But I am finding this difficult.  Other people have writers’ block, I have readers’ block.  This doesn’t reflect on the text; the few pages I have read are not bad, though I say it myself.  It is hard, though, not to keep spotting the infelicities of a first draft and the bits that will require reworking and so only half my mind is focused on the reading and the other on something else.  Still, I expect I shall get there, if the business gives me half a chance.

Meanwhile I shall read Burton.  At one point in his diary he says ‘if only I didn’t have to work then I might write a book or something.’ Richard, I know the feeling well, though you could, you know, have just walked out on the picture studios, bought a little place in the south of France and set about a life of scribbling or perhaps teaching at Oxford.  But it is all too late. I wish though I had your capacity for speed reading - two or three books a day - and with the ability to retain what I’d read.  What a turbo-charged mind!

CRISE DE FOIE

The Empty Sea Front at Tharon Plage

Our French friend and neighbour again kindly invited us to her house at Tharon to share the New Year reveillon.  The marvellous feast began with ‘amuse bouche,’ continued with a high plate of oysters, followed by scallops, cheese, salad, and finished with a rum baba. Through it all we drank champagne.  Eating all this by candlelight took us pretty much to midnight when we put on the television and counted down the New Year.  Of course, satellite television being what it is we switched to the BBC an hour later and watched Big Ben tolling out the old year and then the lavish fireworks bringing in 2013.  Two bites of the new year cherry, as it were.  I suppose if you were really in the mood and had a big enough satellite dish you could toast the new year 24 times in a single day.  That is if there are 24 time zones, which perhaps there aren’t.  Just as well as you’d need a break every now and then, wouldn’t you,  to replenish the crackers?

In France the provenance of food receives serious attention.  On the fishmonger's stall in the market, all sorts of shrimps nestled among ferocious looking lobsters waving their minor appendages.  Some were labelled as from ‘the equator,’ others from Madagascar, both were relatively inexpensive. Others, looking much the same, were ‘local,’ but twice the price.  Nevertheless, these proved the most popular and so we bought some. Cooked with garlic and piment they were delicious. We also bought conger eel (also local!) on the grounds that I had never eaten it before; the fishmonger cut it into steaks (the original animal looked large enough to have fed the five thousand) and gave us copious culinary advice. In the end we dusted and pan fried it, and while the result was interesting I suspect the poor conger will struggle to make the grade as a gourmet fish.

In France far greater attention is given to food, buying it, preparing it, eating it than in the UK, or most other places come to that.  With the emphasis on local produce and quality, bread baked twice a day, twice weekly food markets, traceability and a strong food culture, the proportion of French GDP devoted to eating must be significant.  What effect, I wonder, does that have on the economy as a whole? Compared to other industrialised countries, does it detract from the efforts to achieve a strong economy, or strengthen them? And does it make people happier, other things being equal?

Still you can have too much of a good thing.  In the interests of internationalism we made some carbonara - an Italian dish of spaghetti in a cheese sauce with small pieces of bacon - delicious but rich.  Not wanting to waste it I heated up the leftovers, adding more cream, butter and parmesan ......but a few hours later I was in agony.  I felt I had been kicked in the stomach by a horse.  I was suffering, so my hostess said, ‘une crise de foie,’  (liver crisis) something very well known in France and caused by eating too much rich food.  I wasn’t so sure.  I thought about those lardons of bacon and wondered whether I had heated them through properly.  I had researched the symptoms of botulism poisoning for my novel ‘Boraya,’ and I wondered if this could be the initial stages of a creeping nervous paralysis that would eventually kill me. Would the hospital in Pornic have Botulinum antidote?  No, said my hostess, it was ‘crise de foie,’ and it would disappear by itself.  Which it did, of course.  I even managed a rich butter croissant for breakfast the next day.

The boulangerie is some three-quarters of a mile away, so someone has to walk or drive there to fetch the breakfast croissants. I prefer to walk for the route is along the promenade, most beautiful in the early morning when the sun is climbing over the grey winter sea.  Above you in the sky flocks of gulls ride the wind, all going in the same direction, as if they, too, are on some morning commute. Besides, the walk gives you an appetite, all that sea air and a chance to reflect.  In the middle of winter, Tharon is deserted, the houses shuttered until Easter.  Strangely this loneliness gives you a feeling of belonging, somehow, as if you and the solitary man on the beach with his metal detector were heirs to this holiday town.  I wondered whether he was also recovering from a ‘crise de foie.’

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. 

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.

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.

I WANT A MEMORY HAT

Lloyd Lee as Charles Dickens

 We've been enjoying a Book Festival in the town this week and as a small contribution from the theatre we staged a one man show 'The Squire of Gadshill,'  in which Charles Dickens reflects on his life and work.  This took place last Saturday evening and there I was all togged  up in Victoriana to serve behind the bar.  Lloyd Lee (who has taken this show all over Britain) looks the spitting image of Dickens and I am tempted to say sounds like him too, though I don't know if any of us know exactly what he sounded like.  But Dickens used to put on performances in which he read extracts from his novels, which Lloyd re-enacts in this show.

As Dickens he also talks about his working habits and recounts being asked in America whether the Muse was 'always upon him - or whether he had to coax it?'   And as it happens this was a question that I discussed with the lovely Kath Eastman when I met her for lunch a couple of days later when she came over to Cowbridge.

Dickens replied that frequently he had no ideas at all about his writing and just sat at his desk making dots and doodles on the paper.  But, and I think this may be the crucial thing, he always sat there 'until his time was up.'  This, he elaborated, was from ten in the morning to two in the afternoon (or four if writer's block had given way to writer's inspiration).

In passing I find it strange that this phenomenon of 'writer's block' appears only in the literary world (or is this just my ignorance?)  Is there such a thing as 'painter's block?' or 'potter's block?' Did Mozart ever sit at a piano, his head empty of musical ideas? Composer's block? And what about the engineers among us?  Do they have bridge builder's block?

Anyway, I have decided, given the inspiration of winning the little Creative Writing Competition that was a part of the Book Festival, that I shall now consign the label business to the afternoons - and if necessary the evenings as well if we are busy - and so keep the mornings free for scribbling.  I have resurrected a piece of military history that I first wrote on a typewriter in 1983. It was never published then and no wonder as it is terribly clunkingly written.  But with the centenary of the central incident fast approaching I have decided to re-write it, hopefully in a shorter and rather more pacey style.  It seems a shame to let all that research go to waste and I always intended to return to it when I had time.  I am about two thirds of the way through and so this particular labour will not be a long one.

I shall then return to Boraya, the Chocolate Factory in St Petersburg novel that Kath keeps urging me to get on with and about which I think about regularly.  So it will be as well to get my writing habit well established: nine until one with a half hour break for a cup of tea and urgent emails.

The best plans, however.......for yesterday morning I wasn't at my scribbling desk in front of the laptop but instead was taking the laptop to an appointment with the Genius Bar at the futuristic Apple Store in Cardiff, where no-one looks real and where everyone seems to speak in a strange mid-oceanic dialect, though I have to say they are all über helpful and ultra polite.   Apple - the Company - have done something amazingly clever, but the result is that last week, not having the right up to date software apparently, I couldn't receive emails for three days (except in the most cumbersome manner) and the whole computer slowed up as though you had put a tablespoon of treacle in the works.

The man on the Genius Bar fiddled around helpfully and quickly and there I was: sorted. He didn't even try to sell me a new computer.  He suggested I might like to buy some more memory, which could be easily and cheaply done. Unfortunately, only for the computer, I, on the other hand, would have to make do with the ageing memory I already have.  Why can't you buy memory for the brain? You could wear a little memory hat with chips inside it. The brain seems to communicate with waves and just this week we saw film of a paralysed woman operating a robot with her brainwaves. So why not?  I might suggest it to Apple.