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.

A LAST LOOK AT THE MILL

It is quite amazing, isn’t it, how many conditions you can believe yourself to be suffering from if once you start clicking on those myriad websites that deal with health.  In fact someone might well organise a hypochondriacs’ conference at which there could be a competition to do just that.  Prizes could be awarded both for the severity and the rarity of the condition at the root of your malady.  Anything would do from an allergy to a rare insect bite through to some less romantic condition, gallstones, say, or alcoholism.  I could imagine a quiz: hypochondriacs versus the doctors and we could all place bets on the outcome.
   
Recently I have become convinced in this way that I suffer from ADHD - that is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder - and, for good measure, Hypothyroidism.  I suspect I actually suffer from neither of these as you can’t be hyperactive with an underactive thyroid, can you? Though in the small print they do say that even if you are not hyperactive you may still have an attention deficit and that is, I fear the case with me.  My attention wanders all too easily. After about ten years I become bored and need to move on to something else.

    I am now totally bored by politics, for instance, despite in my heyday having been a Parliamentary Candidate and having written umpteen policy papers, the contents of at least some of which my fellow politicians have inflicted on us, though naturally enough without acknowledgement.  Well, there are many others in the same game; one can’t be proprietorial.  But the business of politics, though clearly as important as ever, seems now to me to have become ever more shabby and worthless.  We know only too clearly what the outcome will be of their efforts to improve our lives, which is that the mess will get worse and we shall be left to clear it up ourselves with less money than we had before they started. Look at the latest scandals; indeed, at the latest legislation on gay marriage which, while I have nothing against it, does make me think that the Government, like Nero is fiddling mightily while Rome burns.  I rather identify with the sign that allegedly greets you at the Canadian Border: ‘We don’t care who you marry so long as you both watch hockey.’

    But we shall muddle through, I suppose, until one day the system collapses. My grandchildren I fear will have a harder life than mine has been. I still get emails from my former political friends, flattering me and soliciting money and help, but the spirit is no longer willing and neither is the flesh. My attention deficit disorder has moved me on and my hypothyroidism means I can’t be bothered anyway.  Though maybe of course I’m not suffering from these at all but something else that I haven’t discovered as yet.  It’s the one good thing about being a hypochondriac: you can always find something else that is wrong with you.

    If I appear in a sombre mood it is because the Mill down in the Auvergne belonging to Rosie and Jim’s son, where we have passed so many happy days in recent years, is sold.  They are down there even at this moment collecting up bits and pieces ready for the new owner to move in.   I doubt I shall see it again, which is really most sad for, with the sun shining, it presented with its trees and meadows and river and hills, the most perfect combination of atmosphere and environment that a human could wish for.  On sunny days busy insects buzzed endlessly and you could almost hear the wildflowers growing, and the apples, peaches and walnuts swelling further with each shower of rain.  The river and millrace chuckled endlessly, the swish and clatter of water, while deep in the woods the wild boar rooted, the deer skipped and martens went about their deadly hunt. Nearer the house, the great walnut trees provided shade under which flourished a whole encyclopaedia of minor wildlife.  And beyond the boundaries, in all the many villages round about, flourished the most beautiful stone architecture in the whole of France.

    On my last day there last summer I took a deckchair and a book and some chilled white wine and sat at the bottom of the lawn under the walnut trees where the forested hillside begins its steep climb to the village, looking back at the house and imagining that I was Logan Mountstuart, the protagonist of William Boyd’s great book ‘Any Human Heart.’  Logan does something very similar in a not very distant though fictional part of France at the age of 85 and unfortunately suffers a heart attack while leaving his book to investigate a bunch of thistles.  I didn’t have any thistles to investigate at the Mill, nor am I 85; maybe that is why I am still here, but next time I am on a health website I shall read up about heart attacks. You never know.  

JE NE SAIS QUOI

La Brasserie du Nord and Chicken and Chips

My great Indian doctor friend, Behjat, sadly no longer with us, was a man of great compassion and understanding and he used to make the best gin and tonics in the world. He used the same four ingredients that everybody uses - gin, tonic, lemon and ice - but his gins and tonic were incomparably better than those of anyone else and certainly were better than mine, even when I adopted his method of mixing, which was to add the lemon juice to the gin before you added the tonic. I think this was because he also added a secret fifth ingredient and that was ‘je ne sais quoi.’

'Je ne sais quoi' is French for ‘I don’t know what’ and it is the phrase best used to describe what turns the ordinary into the extraordinary.  It is applicable to anything that is made through the agency of human hand or human brain. By turns ‘je ne sais quoi’ may comprise love, imagination, flair, enthusiasm, art - or any such adjective.  'Je ne sais quoi' is particularly applicable in the kitchen.  A meal cooked with ‘je ne sais quoi’ is magical; a meal cooked without it may look identical, but will taste flat.

I was thinking of this yesterday coming back from a family party.  We had gathered in a large pub and restaurant near Bath to celebrate three noteworthy events: my elder daughter’s 40th birthday, the engagement of her sister-in-law,  and her father-in-law’s 80th birthday,  all of which occasions took place in sufficient proximity to one another to induce us to push the boat out. We were fourteen altogether, ranging in age from eight months to nine hundred and sixty months, (work it out!) and a very happy party was had by one and all.

Such parties bind the nation together.  It is difficult to imagine anyone in that group being thrown out or disowned by the other members.  In fact rather the reverse for I suggested that if we all sold our respective houses - we had six between us - we could afford to buy something so large that we would never ever get on each other’s nerves.  We would meet perhaps once a month like ships passing in the night in great corridors and by pooling our resources we might be able to employ people to do the ironing.

I have always fancied living in such a house though no-one else unfortunately shares my enthusiasm.  I think you could call it 'je ne sais quoi' applied to living.  It is, after all, what the musicians do in ‘Quartet’ that marvellous directorial debut film by Dustin Hoffman that I saw earlier in the week and which is worth a couple of hours of anyone’s time. It is not only Mr Hoffman's acting that boasts 'je ne sais quoi,' which, now that I come to think of it seems applicable to acting and theatre at least as much as it does to cooking. 

The only slightly disappointing thing about our day out was the food for which we paid an average British price of around £25 a head for something that sadly lacked this 'je ne sais quoi.'  (In France we should have paid a great deal less, despite their VAT and high social charges and the food might well - though not alas certainly - have been better.)  Still, it isn’t easy to say what this food actually lacked. It would have passed any culinary inspection but you had the feeling that the chef wouldn’t really have chosen to eat it himself. It looked pretty, but was devoid of sparkle, the ordinary rather than extraordinary.  The 'je ne sais quoi' wasn't there.

Note, this doesn’t mean exotic. A piece of dry toast can taste extraordinary, so can simple mashed potato and so can chicken and chips, which is what I chose for my main course on the grounds that I ought to be on fairly safe ground.  But chicken and chips is a dish that cries out for 'je ne sais quoi.'  I can remember from thirty-five years ago a chicken and chips in the basket served in the bar of the old Hand Hotel in Llangollen (Wales) and another chicken and chips eaten in ‘La Brasserie du Nord’ in Paris twenty years ago.  In this large busy restaurant they must have been serving one hundred portions of chicken an hour and yet the birds were succulent and truly magical.  More recently, down at the Mill, I can remember sitting on the sunny terrace of a little restaurant in Conques eating chicken and chips, so beautiful cooked and tasty and so carefully presented, that washed down with a splendid bottle of Gaillac rosé I thought that maybe I had already died and gone to Paradise.

My expectations were excessively raised perhaps by such memories.   The appearance of yesterday's chicken couldn’t be faulted; neither could the taste in any absolute sense it was just that somehow a vital ingredient was missing: the ingredient of 'je ne sais quoi.'

I flip through the paper at breakfast this morning. A headline says ‘Eight Easy Dishes. Restaurant Food at Home,’   but nowhere in the notes and instructions does the article mention ‘je ne sais quoi.’
In fact now that I come to think about it this ingredient is missing from a very great part of British life.  This wasn't always the case, but today we seem to have lost the ability to inject a little magic into what we do, preferring to settle for the ordinary, the conventional, the simply dull.  On this depressing thought I had better end.  Still the sun is shining, the cold weather has departed and spring will be here in a month or two.

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.