CLIMBING FRAME

Elder Daughter in Front of the Battered Climbing Frame

Rather than install a new kitchen at vast expense we have determined on a tarting up the existing one with new lighting, tiling and worktops.  Ken, the builder, is a little dubious. ‘It’s only a couple of week’s until the Howden’s sale,’ he opined plaintively the other day.   He said the same thing a year ago.  I think he’s on commission and I know he would like me to have a new Howden’s kitchen with fancy cupboards and lighting and oak worktops. 
      A charming young man even came out armed with a catalogue, refused a cup of tea, and carefully measured up.  Later Ken brought us computer images of how our kitchen would look.  It was showroom plus.  The epitome of good taste. How could anyone not fall in love with that? 
     The cost though was prohibitive.  ‘Well you did choose the most expensive options,’ said Ken.  ‘That’s because there were no prices in the catalogue,’ I replied.
     Alas the fancy images were given short shrift and the project postponed for a year and so we have gone instead for a facelift using beech worktops and new lighting from IKEA and some fancy tiling.  It will see us out anyway.  I sense our years in this house are limited.  In three or four we shall have downsized to some shoe box somewhere, stripped of a lifetime’s accumulated possessions.  We shall have to leave our kitchen behind. Ah well!
      Ken has disappeared again now in the way that builders do, though I have to say he did put in a prompt appearance to fix a leaking cistern and to carry out some major surgery on a hedge. This gives me time to learn something about tiling and worktops.  But for the moment I need to turn my attention building a climbing frame.  I was so appalled at the prices charged for climbing frames when the children were small that I designed and built one myself.  It was the shape of a truncated pyramid with a base 2 metres square and it had bars on the side for clambering up.  The children loved it - it became a house, a ship, a car, somewhere to hang wet washing.  It even became an umpire’s chair when we used to play soft tennis on the lawn.  Later its use evolved into somewhere to keep livestock: wrapped in wire netting it became a temporary pen for geese and chickens.  Finally it rotted and went the way of all flesh.  So now I am commanded by Younger Daughter to build another for Theo and Bean, a rectangular one this time, to fit the confines of her small Cardiff garden.  What are Sunday’s for?
    As it happens last Sunday I was travelling back from Le Havre, not somewhere you would wish to go unless you were going somewhere else, if you see what I mean, for it was bombed to bits in the war.  Three thousand French civilians died in the Le Havre bombing, so my friend who lives there tells me, and the then German commander actually pleaded to be allowed to evacuate the town.  It made no difference.   Anyway it was rebuilt in a concrete Stalinist style and won some UNESCO award, though I am not sure for what. In fact, like Slough,  another bombing might be doing it a service.
     John lives in a village outside the town and used to teach English there.  We were at university together in the 1960’s - those halcyon days when the authorities actually paid you for the privilege of giving up your valuable time to be educated. Not that either of us has done a very great deal since, come to that.  Still, there is time yet I tell myself. 
       I have been asked to return next month to Cambridge to give a talk on the amateur research I have been doing for the last thirty years on Neolithic sites in the Vale of Glamorgan and I am hurrying to prepare a booklet summarising this work and to have it printed before then.  I conclude that the Neolithic people must have been able to write and that they measured the circumference of the earth, which is something rather easier to do than you might imagine. You can even do it yourself if you are a good judge of distance, have excellent eyesight and some knowledge of Pythagorean geometry.  Of course you probably won’t be very accurate but that doesn’t matter: it is the principle that counts.  
     What the learned souls - students mostly - who will listen to me will make of this I tremble to think.  I cannot talk from a script - even notes distract me.   The only way I can address an audience and hope to hold their attention is simply to talk and hope I don’t dry up.  Nevertheless, I am scared. I see in my mind’s eye only a field of cold, hard, sceptical academic stares which any amount of smiling and amusing anecdote may fail to melt.  And to talk on buoyantly for fifty minutes when the audience is as receptive as a brick wall is hard, even when you know the material well.  I know,  I have often done it and in the theatre it is far easier to act when you have the audience on your side.
     Ken the builder is sympathetic and I sense knows the feeling.  I want him to repair the soffits and fascias at the top of the house where rot and jackdaws have made a hole.  ‘Are you OK with heights?’ I ask solicitously.  ‘Oh, I’m not worried by heights,’ says Ken.  ‘I don’t have a fear of falling.’ 
    ‘That’s all right then,’ I say.
    ‘No,’ says Ken. ‘It’s just the fear of hitting the ground that terrifies me.’
       

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. 

GOING BLACKBERRYING

It was decided, it being a sunny afternoon, that I would take my little grandson blackberrying.  He even turned off, by himself, the television where the umpteenth episode of Shaun the Sheep that he had watched so far that day had been playing  a moment before.  He loves his Shaun the Sheep does our little Theo.
    Tupperware bowls in hand - a small one for him, a larger one for me - we set out hand in hand towards the lane where the blackberries grow, with Theo pausing here and there to pick some shrivelled offering growing by the roadside and putting it in his mouth. I explained about petrol fumes but I don’t think he was bothered.
    Eventually we came to where the fruit grew more plentifully.  I had taken the precaution of bringing with me some secateurs the better to approach some of the wilder hedges and started to snip, clearing a way for Theo. This was a mistake.  Here was a far better pastime than blackberrying. He demanded the secateurs and began to snip. I had lost one blackberry picker and in return - I turned round to watch his progress - I had gained a snipper of leaves, a little pile of which lay on the ground.  He was not one wit interested in cutting out the bramble shoots that had grown so vigorously across the path.  He just wanted to cut a happy little nest of leaves.  Luckily at that point I found a lovely little crop of fruit at the right height for him to pick. I relieved him of the secateurs and gave him back his bowl.
    But then came a howl - a howl of fright more than anything. I thought he’d found a dead body,  a half-eaten rabbit perhaps, he came rushing back to me gasping for breath.  He struggled to get the words out - “there, there!” he panted, pointing.
    “Where, what?”  I started to go over to where he was pointing.
    “No!” he shrieked.
    “There’s nothing here.”  And there wasn’t.  Not anyway anything that I could see.
    “Spider’s web!” he intoned in terms of dread.
    Now that I looked more closely I could see if I bent down to his height that the sunlight caught a corner of a cobweb.  Theo has a relaxed relationship with arachnids, but for some reason their webs terrify him beyond all reason.
    “It’s nothing,” I said, and avoiding the web as best I could, picked the blackberries.  Theo watched in anxiety as if expecting me at any moment to be turned into a pillar of salt. 
    I went further into the lane hoping that there might be fewer autumnal spiders’ webs but Theo was loathe to follow. I think he thought the vegetation which towered around us might suddenly come alive and imprison us.  Both literally and metaphorically another blackberrying avenue became closed off.
    Reluctantly I retraced my steps, but then found a bush which I could guarantee free both of overhanging vegetation and spiders’ webs.  At last Theo might add to the three meagre specimens in the bottom of his Tupperware.
    He began reaching hesitantly for the fruit, but then dropped the bowl and clasped his hands over his ears.  He came running back to me.
    “Bees, bees!” he shouted and he did a little jig on the spot still with his hands over his ears as though convinced that if you couldn’t actually hear a bee then it wouldn’t sting you.  The poor lad has never been bitten by a bee though  in recent weeks  he has unfortunately been stung by a wasp. Naturally, when I looked I failed to see any bees. 
    Another wail - this time Theo had been stung by a nettle.
    At this rate we were not likely to return home with much of a harvest. So then I hit on a plan.  Theo could give me his bowl and stay six feet away from the brambles and the nettles but from where he could still see to point out the blackberries to me, especially the low lying ones which he could see from his height and I couldn’t see from mine.  This plan worked most excellently.
    “There!” he would say, “there, underneath.  Look!”
    We had the bowls filled in no time and then we went home and baked a crumble with Theo mixing together the flour and the sugar and the butter, picking the mixture up and letting it slip through his fingers.  He even cleaned up the mess on the table afterwards.

MY OLD OFFICE

Blood clinic this afternoon so walked down to the Leisure Centre at half past three. Vast hall and only six beds in operation; didn't appear especially busy. But the greeter on the door consulted a chart liberally marked up with highlighter and said she couldn't fit me in until half past five. 'You see I've sent a lot of people away and told them to come back now.' I walked away and sat in the physic garden for half an hour reading. 

What to do?  Wait and go back, or go home?  Once giving blood seemed to be easy and fun: the staff were helpful, there was almost a party atmosphere in the sesssions in the old Town Hall.  You met your friends.  Now in the vast hall of the Leisure Centre with six beds pressed against one wall and what seemed like an army of staff checking and re-checking lest someone who whose mother had Creuzfeld Jacob’s disease and who had sex (with or without a condom) somewhere in Africa that wasn’t Egypt might be trying to slip through the net.  There's a mighty dead hand over everything.  I suspect it has something to do with the re-organisation of the Health Service but in an attempt to cut cost and do things better they are killing the golden egg laying goose. In this curmudgeonly mood I turned away and went to have a small beer in Aboreal on the way home.  

Aboreal, which is a pleasant cross between an restaurant and a bar is a lovely place, full of distressed and limed woodwork.  There are street tables (the whole front can be opened up on sunny days so there isn’t really an inside and an outside) but also comfortable sofas.  Dining tables also.  It is a place to sit and read or to meet your friends.  The staff are friendly and efficent and whenever I have eaten there it has been a happy experience. It was also once my office.  I had a square little box which I rented which now lies in the middle of Arboreal.  One corner has been cut off to provide access and one wall is now the rear bar, but I can still say, ‘this is where I had my desk’ and ‘here I kept my filing cabinet.’

After supper I wandered out just as the sun was setting to check the greengages on the tree. They are just turning and one or two are already ripe and beset by insects who mine deep cavities in the yellow flesh. Not such a good crop as last year - the spring was cold and wet and the wildlife that might have fertilised the blossom stayed firmly indoors. So I suppose I should be grateful for what fruit there is. Nothing quite beats the taste of a ripe greengage fresh off the tree, the soft feel of the fruit taken either by fingers or tongue is sensual and luxuriant. And next to the tree is a hibiscus whose flowers lend a touch of the exotic with their oriental shade of purple. It goes with the green fruit. Wimbledon colours!

Strange to think that these same sensations, the fruit, the light, the flowers would have been available (more or less) to my neolithic people who might have stood 6,000 years ago on this very spot, pausing perhaps from surveying operations.  Earlier I had begun the job of condensing all my neolithic research into a little self-published book to take with me when I have to give a talk to a university student archeology club in Cambridge in November and I want to have something to take with me.  It is a task that I have long put off and I was glad to have started it.

We tend to think of the Stone Age as above all else uncivilised and primitive. But they are only 240 generations away from us. They were also clever and - so I argue - could write and do mathematics. They measured the earth accurately and based units of linear and area measurement upon the result. We have them still today. The cricket pitch at one chain or four poles is exactly one two millionth of the earth's circumference.  Busy with their monumental stones and demonstrating their mathematics these people unfortunately overlooked the science of metal working and so were wiped out by more aggressive folk in the iron and bronze ages. 

PLAY AND PROJECTS

Reading Oscar Wilde's 'An Ideal Husband'

10 August
Summer party this afternoon and our staged reading (under my faltering direction) of 'An Ideal Husband.' The weather looks as though it will be kind - a blessing (as Poirot might put it) 'most considerable,' though interestingly the Welsh weather forecast illustrated the afternoon with an ominous patch of blue over the Vale of Glamorgan, while the UK forecast foretold a sunny afternoon everywhere. As the Welsh forecasters work from the same data - indeed the same maps - I wonder how such differences (which occur frequently) happen. Anyway 'Ideal Husband' by Oscar Wilde is our entertainment for this afternoon.

Later
Afternoon passed off very well, considering. All the actors played their socks off and the weather was kind, the garden lovely and the music transporting. (As the piano was placed between beds of lavender, Bach wafted towards us in the interval on the calming scent).

We even had a pigeon come to visit - not, a dove of which I am particularly fond, though it did have a large white flash on its neck and therefore may have some dove blood from way back.  It rather crashed landed in the ash tree that hangs over the river not twenty feet from where we were playing and it may have been shot for I heard distant popping, as though the farmers were busy with their guns, and the bird’s feathers looked ruffled.  But it didn't appear seriously hurt, more exhausted than frightened.  Anyway it climbed higher in the tree and from its position in the gods sat watching the third act of the play.  The thought occurred that the bird might have been old Oscar himself, reincarnated and come to watch how his play looked one hundred and twenty years on. Do the dead take on the forms of living creatures?  Many people seem to think so.

15 August
Each year there comes a day when the weather says 'summer is over; autumn has arrived.' The seasons change in a day. One moment you are out in the garden until nine o'clock, basking in bare sleeves and the next you are thinking about lighting the fire, looking for dry logs and it is dark at seven. The wind gets up and the rain is no longer summer rain but autumnal, borne in on an Atlantic wind that makes the trees toss angrily and which finds from somewhere you hadn't noticed little piles of dried leaves to blow around. The air smells different: an autumnal fruity smell; an odour of finality. That's it, it seems to say: growth over, the year over, downhill all the way now. Of course, young September will rebel and October may bring fresh crisp frosts and magnificent colours to the foliage; fruit may be abundant and be not yet ready for picking, but there comes a day when you know that that is it for another year and that day was today - 15 August - early,  so perhaps we are in for a hard and unrelenting winter. At least in these Bardic parts of the kingdom.  Stock up little birds, fatten yourselves up at my bird table, nibble away you rodents that scurry in the nightime - for it is a long time until next May and there will be hungry months ahead.

This morning however it is brighter and sunnier - but in an autumnal sense now. I am still worried by the lack of insects and the absence of House Martins in the sky. Last night when I walked to the castle for a bit of exercise as I often do, the bats were out in force, searching perhaps for a hatch of something or other.  Having just written that I notice a fly and a bee basking in the sunshine on the wall outside my office window. The bee seems to be trying a handstand, which on a vertical wall is rather difficult.  Anyway he has now given up and flown away. The starlings that used to be so numerous and which used to nest under my eaves are also now completely absent.

16 August
If I walk for thirty five minutes along the disused railway line - full of rabbits now - and with cows and sheep grazing among the hawthorn and ash on every side and then if I turn off and walk up through an elderly wood lit by dappled sunlight on the leafy branches and so up the hill I eventually turn the corner and there is a thatched pub that serves draught Bass.  And that's where I have just been to sit in the autumnal sunshine and sip a pint of the best beer to have been brewed since 1777 or whenever it was that Bass was first brewed - before the French and American revolutions certainly - and ponder on my various literary projects.

I am experimenting at the moment with self-publishing a book I have long had on the stocks - a bit of first world war history - grim for a day such as today, or any day really.  It was begun in 1983 and it has been sitting on my conscience since.  Then in November I have to give a talk in Cambridge about my researches into Neolithic measurement: I have been asked by an undergraduate archaeology society, so I think it’s time to assemble all the papers and website data I have accrued in the last twenty or thirty years and make them into another book, which I could hand round and even autograph.   The material is all written: I’d just have to edit it and prepare a continuous text.  After that there’s ‘Boraya’ - my great (at least in words) Russian novel which at the moment sits in London on an agent’s slush pile.  If there’s no interest come November then I’ll publish that myself, too.

Now I must prepare some supper: avocado, lettuce, tomato, feta, smoked salmon, perhaps with a glass of white wine if I feel extravagant. Afterwards we shall have the remains of some pastries, which a kind neighbour bought over this morning, and contemplate tomorrow. The sky is blue and, wonder of wonders, there is even a House Martin in the sky. It must have put in a fleeting appearance just for me.  Or maybe it’s the spirit of some dead ancestor just checking up.

A VISIT TO LONDON

The Cherry Orchard

 Last weekend we went to London to stay with our friends who live in Dulwich - a part of London quite impossible to reach without enjoying long spells trapped in the purgatory of the South Circular Road.  In the  habit of these things the road is neither really south, nor circular nor even a road, being bits and pieces of roads tacked together on that familiar British pattern of ‘make-do and mend.’  Apart from the M25, I asked, when was the last time that a major road was built in London? The 1950’s I should imagine.  Boris, get weaving.

    But I shouldn’t commence one of these increasingly rare blogs with a rant when I spent a good part of the weekend surrounded by great beauty. I ate breakfast in a cherry orchard. No, really, I did, in the heart of Surbiton and only a stone’s throw from the River Thames.  Admittedly all the cherry trees had been felled and the land used to build the Surbiton equivalent of dachas - just as Chekhov predicted in his play - except that is for a single ancient specimen that was still producing knicker pink blossoms with Japanese extravagance left in the middle of our friends' garden where we admired it from the comfy furnished warmth of a conservatory while eating a type of meal known only to Londoners (they say London is a foreign country) which started with almond croissants, fresh rhubarb and yoghurt and progressed via black pudding, baked tomatoes, fried egg and sausages made from wild boar to ordinary butter croissants and jam.  And all this while contemplating the cherry blossom like Madame Ranevskaya herself.  Sublime would not be an excessive adjective with which to describe this gastronomic experience.
    But I mustn’t confuse you or you’ll be thinking that Surbiton is in Dulwich.  It isn’t.  We came home via Surbiton which lies on the river Thames to the South West of London, whereas Dulwich lies in the South or South East.  From Dulwich we went to Greenwich, which is on the river, and which claims to lie at the centre of the earth and has the Meridian line to prove it. (In passing you might think that Boris might have named a Tube line ‘Meridian,’ especially if one ran out to Greenwich, but I understand from my friend Angus who joined us on the Greenwich trip and whom I have known since University days, that the reason there are no tubes in South London is because the ground is sand, whereas north of the river it is clay. When you tunnel into sand it collapses, apparently, thus foiling your idea of a tube train.  So that is why the overground railway predominates south of the river but makes up for the land stolen for the tracks by providing a rich harvest of railway arches underneath which a good part of the commerce of London started, apparently).

Greenwich Park and the Maritime Museum. Canary Wharf Beyond

    Where were we? Greenwich.  Yes.  Home of Elizabeth, the unlikely heroine of Boraya, my Russian novel which just yesterday I finished or at least have done with for the time being.  One of the last things I altered was to put Elizabeth in the Trafalgar pub when she returns on a visit to Greenwich, where she used to live before she became sucked into her Russian maelstrom.  She had a flat somewhere near the park and the station, but she also visited the pub and last weekend I did the same and drank beer watching the river in full flood lapping at the pub windows.  It almost felt dangerous. We could almost have been in St Petersburg.

The River Lapping at the Gates

    Greenwich is just so beautiful that one wonders why the world ever again should need architects.  Sir Christopher Wren and Indigo Jones (and perhaps we could throw in John Nash and Capability Brown) have done all the work needed; they have produced the designs and the proportions and the perspectives.  Now our computers could just produce endless variations of their work. Modern buildings it seems are just shallow impersonations of architecture and ugly to boot.  The Shard, which towers above you when you stand on London Bridge station, may be profitable and clever but it is uncivilised and soulless. Give me Greenwich and St Pauls any day.

The Shard

  So we walked past the Observatory on the hill and eschewed the chance to stand on the Meridian line and headed for the Maritime Museum, to view our glorious ocean going heritage. Nelson is there of course, or rather parts of him, to wit his frock coat, which looks made for a twelve year old boy brought up on a poor diet.  How the musketeer in Redoubtable ever managed to hit such a small target is quite amazing. It can’t have been an aimed shot - just a lucky, or if you were Nelson, unlucky, chance. 

Queen Anne's House

    Still there was no getting away from Nelson, even in the Queen Anne House, built ingeniously for the wife of James I (or VI) by Inigo Jones over a species of the Old Kent Road.  It’s a lovely white box of a house that contrives to look both plain and beautiful, and a home, too.   Tardis like, it is bigger inside than out but sadly has been stripped of its furniture and now houses all the Maritime Museum’s pictures including the stonking great canvas - the size of Victory’s mainsail I shouldn’t wonder - that is Turner’s depiction of the battle of Trafalgar.  It is so large that Turner must have bought his paint by the gallon and I remember it with awe.

JMW Turner: The Battle of Tralgar

    All rather surreal, but then just in case visitors got carried away,  the students from nearby Greenwich University decided to stage a production of Shakespeare’s ‘The Winter’s Tale.’  We kept running into the cast as we wandered about looking at the pictures.  I asked one of them who was holding a bloody rag where the bear was and she told me that it was in my imagination.  I offered to play the bear, but as we were then half way through the play she thought my performance might be a trifle under rehearsed. It wouldn’t have mattered; the performance was anyway quite inaudible given the vast echoing chambers of the unfurnished Queen Anne’s house while the audience’s attention kept being diverted by the superb proportions of Mr Jones’ halls and galleries and the geometric patterns of his marble floors.  ‘Bear with me,’ I said  and turned regretfully away.

The Cutty Sark Tea Clipper

    Finally we looked at the Cutty Sark, magnificent against a grey sky.  But why, I asked, did people ever bother to race the tea home from China?  Surely it would have been cheaper to build a bigger, uglier ship that might have taken a fortnight longer to make the voyage but would have delivered the tea more cheaply?  No sooner had I asked the question than I knew that I was speaking with the spirit of the Shard, and not with the civilising souls of Sir Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones.  

Pictures are mine apart from those of Turner, of The Shard, and of the Cherry Blossom which are courtesy of Wikipedia.

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.