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.

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.

A NOVEL EXPERIENCE

Squizzey - the bestest little grey squirrel in the world

"Why don't we meet," she suggested - "seeing as you live close by?"

"Why not?" I answer.  See you next Wednesday!  And lo! it came to pass that I met the lovely Kathryn Eastman from the Nut Press in Cowbridge's newly opened Costa Coffee shop this week.

But that wasn't all - oh no -  for who should have come along as well but Squizzey - 'the bestest little grey squirrel in the world' (though he does have a tendency to say so himself) - the cool dude with his name on his blue polo shirt.

He sat on the table, playing umpire as Kath and I drank cappuccinos.  Ominously I think he was taking notes.  He has a blog as well which you can find here.

Now it seems a universal experience that whenever blogging friends meet they find - not that they are total strangers meeting for the first time - but that somehow they have become old friends already, with a great deal in common and even more to talk about.  Thus it was with Kath.  She had sensibly suggested we exchange photographs, but I would have known her instantly the moment she walked in through the door.  Two hours flew by and I'm sure we might have continued for another two hours had life not got in the way.  But we have plans to meet again and continue where we left off. 

Kath has a lot of advice to give and she was most helpful in suggesting websites and publications that I might look at to develop my own writing.  Since entering a couple of stories for the Choc-Lit Short Story Competition in January, I seem to be beset by competitions.  I sent off a story about learning to drive in February to one Writers' Group that I have recently joined.  There's another local competition in connection with the Cowbridge Book Festival, but the biggest current challenge is the Good Housekeeping/Orion Books competition for an unpublished novel.  Write a chapter of about 5,000 words and a synopsis and get it to us by 31 March, they say.

I have never written a novel and have no idea whether I could write one, but - a bit like climbing a mountain - I'd very much like to try and having a competition like this is a great spur.  (I discount entirely any chance of winning: the competition is useful only in that it provides a pressing deadline).

If I find, thanks to this competition, that I can scribble out one tolerable chapter and synopsis, then I might conclude that it might be worth continuing for a few more chapters.  I have found myself thinking more and more about the interesting characters in my Choc-Lit story and asking what happened to them before they met (and what will happen to them afterwards) and who all the other people are that flip the levers of their particular pin-ball game.  Thus has evolved, I told Kath, a wider, more complex story: part romance, part history, part thriller and set partly in St Petersburg, the most northerly metropolis in the world and capital of the Tsars.

Conceiving the synopsis and sketching out these initial 5,000 words has been fun.  Fun because,  if you will excuse the pun, it is, for me, a novel experience.  It is fun because I have no idea of how I should proceed, so the learning curve is steep and challenging.  No two novels are the same, it seems,  even if they are by the same authors.  Some are descriptive, some are personal, some go on inside the protagonists' heads, some are like film scripts. The canvas of the blank page can, I admit, be terrifying, but to me it is like a seaside cove to a child, filled with rock pools in which lurk all manner of exciting wildlife.  I have only to close my eyes and my characters are there telling me what to write down.  In both cases there are so many unknown things waiting to be discovered. 

In some ways it has been remarkably easy, compared to what I am used to.  When you are writing non-fiction you have to find something to say that is reasonably researched and true, or at the very least have an opinion about something that is reasonably true. If you are writing fiction on the other hand, if you do not know what to say you can just make it up.  For that's the thing about fiction, as someone said once, it doesn't happen. 

I'm also finding it fun to be able to make characters do things.  Having directed plays I try to make the actors appear in a certain light and present their personalities in the way I want.  This doesn't always succeed: the actor may be stubborn or I may fail to make him do what I want.

What a relief then to know that as a writer I have the power - should I so wish it - to make my characters turn somersaults in at the door, or to stand on their heads, or to present an angry, a facetious or a woebegone face to the world whenever I so decree;  I can dress them however I desire, even make them appear in shining armour, and move them back and forth in time.  (Virginia Woolf did this with Orlando.  Poor soul, he found himself being dragged through four hundred years and changing gender in the process). I don't think I'll go quite that far,  but it's nice to know that one can. 

"How's it going to end?" asked Kath.  At this point, Squizzey, who had started to look a little bored as I had rambled on, pricked up his ears and licked his pencil. 

"I don't know," I said, and here I looked directly at the Squirrel.  "For it may of course never end, in the sense that the story may languish still-born at the end of the first chapter.  In one sentence I may move everything two hundred years into the past and give everyone cholera and that will be that."  Oh, the power!

But if I should ever get to chapter seventeen, eighteen, nineteen: what then?  I just don't know.  (Well maybe I do know - sort of - but that far ahead the crystal ball is still a little cloudy).  I hope nevertheless that it will all end happily.  For the goodies anyway.  Baddies (and there are some) will just have to take their luck where they find it and hope they catch me on a good day.

(Otherwise they might just end up being liquidated by squirrels).