rivierawriter

Here Today and Here Tomorrow

2011-11-17T19:48:00.004+01:00

You must have noticed, (he said presumptuously), that I’ve been less than diligent in my blogging this year. This is my excuse: it’s the likely cover of the masterpiece I’ve been working on for the past year or more, and which, to my indescribable relief, just went off to the anxiously awaiting publisher. It will be another in a series being published by I.B. Tauris that features interesting places like Tuscany, the French Riviera, Morocco and such, as seen through the eyes of the writers who lived and wrote there.
One summer evening in 1787, in the conservatory of his garden in Lausanne, Edward Gibbon put down his pen having finished writing The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He wrote later that he experienced two conflicting sensations: relief - at what he called “the recovery of my freedom”. But then, “a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion…”. As I handed my manuscript over the counter in Windsor Post Office, I understood, on an infinitely smaller scale, just how he must have felt. Relief, yes, and freedom - but also loss. My own “old and agreeable companion” will be called something like Florence and Tuscany: A Literary Guide. But while Gibbon’s magnificent work had taken him 23 years, my humble effort has been my constant companion for fewer than 23 months – but long enough for me to miss it now it's gone.
We thought, the DG and I, after visiting Florence and Tuscany for more than 15 years, that we knew something about the region, but our research over these past months has shown us only how much there is yet to know about this wonderful place. Writing books about writers is both absorbing and exciting: it links them unforgettably with places you know and love, but there’s a bonus: the writers that you know introduce you to new and different writers, and together they lead you to places that you only thought you knew. I hope the book will do the same for its readers, whether exploring for themselves or armchair travelling. It’s been a fascinating journey for us, trekking in the footsteps of seven centuries of writers, from Dante and Chaucer to Sinclair Lewis and Muriel Spark - and a hundred others, and we’re sorry it’s over – especially as the next jobs are boring but necessary stuff like galley-proofing and the Index, but while I can’t wait to see it in the shops, it’s the great satisfaction of writing that, contrary to Gibbon’s “everlasting leave”, it’s not at all like pictorial art: because when the book goes out of the door, you still have it. For ever.

Mr. Butterfly

2011-08-17T15:53:00.003+02:00

Watched a TV programme the other night in which Rick Stein talked about food in the context of Italian opera – just when you thought they’d run out of hooks on which to hang cookery programmes. Still, the music was good. Stein disclosed to awe-struck viewers the favourite foods of assorted operatic composers, so I know - or I did the other night - the culinary preferences of people like Verdi, Rossini and Puccini.
Puccini was born in Lucca. It is one of my favourite cities in Tuscany, and not only because my wife and I got engaged there. A bronze figure of Puccini sits, bronze cigar in hand, outside his natal home. The town honours him with a festival of his music every summer. A plaque on a wall nearby reads: “Love and poetry tormented the genius but the musical city gave his magical violin the wings of glory.”
A century later, another tormented genius lived in Lucca: the great jazz trumpeter, Chet Baker. The funny valentine who thought he could live undisturbed in sleepy Lucca spent a year there as a guest of the Carcere di San Giorgio, the town’s ancient prison, for possessing heroin. Every evening, while his red Ferrari gathered dust outside, the pie-eyed piper drew fans old and new to gather on the city walls outside the prison to listen to him practise. Local jazz musicians would join in to entertain what was truly a captive audience. Chet’s appeal against his 22-month sentence was eventually successful and he was released in time for Christmas - as was his album, Chet is Back, on which he sang some Italian songs he wrote in Lucca jail.

A few years later I saw him in a small jazz club in Nice, but I didn’t hear him play. He arrived on stage two hours late, someone led him by the arm towards a chair; he sat and put his trumpet to his lips, but no sound came out. No one moved, and the few people who started to murmur were immediately shushed by their neighbours. He tried again, several times, but produced no more than a few squawks and some mumbled words about new false teeth. I never saw him again: the last weeks in the life of one of the world’s greatest jazz trumpeters - the musician who played alongside the likes of Gerry Mulligan, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie - were spent in the back streets of Amsterdam, the city to which he had always returned in search of his needs. His twisted body was found in the street beneath the hotel window at which he used to play.

In Lucca, no bronze statue sits outside Chet Baker’s custodial home; no annual festival celebrates his music, and no commemorative plaque records his passing. But there is a plaque in a cobbled street in Amsterdam. It reads: “Chet Baker died here on May 13, 1988. He will live on in his music for everyone willing to listen and feel”.

Serendipity

2011-08-16T17:13:00.007+02:00

This is the Casa Magni, the beachside house in the Italian coastal village of Lerici, on the beautiful Gulf of La Spezia, to which the English poet Shelley was sailing when his boat capsized and he drowned, just days before his 30th birthday. Writing about writers is an endless process of discovery: you set off seeking traces of a writer and discover places that you weren't looking for. The converse is equally true: while looking for unknown places, you find writers you didn’t know. While researching the last days of Shelley I found Lerici and the magnificent Cinque Terre – the five crepuscular “countries” to the west of the Gulf. In turn, researching Shelley led me to another writer that I didn’t know: his biographer, Richard Holmes, of whom I’ve been a fan ever since. Not the moustachioed historian seen on BBC TV, but the self-styled “Romantic Biographer” whose Footsteps is the sort of book I wanted this one to be. (It isn’t.)
Places can also introduce you to writers you thought you knew, but didn’t. I thought I knew English author E. M. Forster - but that was before I discovered the medieval towered city of San Gimignano (below) and read Where Angels Fear to Tread, which is set there. It was his first novel, begun on his first visit to Tuscany with his mother in 1900 at the age of 21 - eight years before A Room with a View and 21 years before A Passage to India. One critic of the book complained that “The picturesqueness of his diction is invariably marred by his superficiality of thought” – the very words I would like to hear said about me. But, superficial or not, there is youthful wisdom there. Forster on Italian so-called “bad taste”: “it is not the bad taste of a country which knows no better; it is not the nervous vulgarity of England, or the blinded vulgarity of Germany. It observes beauty, and chooses to pass it by”. And on parenthood: “a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and – by some strange irony – it does not bind us children to our parents”. Fair enough - parental love is essential to the survival of the race, but not the filial variety.

Almost there

2011-08-12T20:01:00.005+02:00

Taking a rest after four trips to Tuscany in ten months. We tried to get some sympathy but no one wept, so might as well admit that it was tremendous fun. It was like that song in Kiss Me Kate: We Open in Venice, except that we opened in Pisa last September, and then Florence, Livorno and Florence again, with side trips to Pisa, Siena, Lucca, Volterra, Arezzo, La Spezia, Montepulciano and San Gimignano, plus some writing and more research in between. Now that the research and writing on the Literary Guide to Tuscany is just about complete and the draft is almost ready for submission, I guess I should feel relieved, but can’t get rid of the feeling that there’s so much more of Tuscany waiting to be seen and that we just ran out of time.
Florence especially always has more to see. The great Sinclair Lewis – first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature - in his World So Wide called it “a city of ancient reticences and modern energy” – meaning it’s not just one city but several: Florence, the birthplace of banking, the city whose name became the first international unit of currency – eight centuries before the Euro; Florence the museum, existing thousands of years before the Romans arrived; Florence, cradle of the Renaissance; and of course Florence, the birthplace of Dante, Galileo, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci. All this genius from a city the size of Blackburn. Question: How many geniuses can you name from Blackburn? Answer: Nat Lofthouse.
There’s a large rock in the square by the cathedral, on which Dante is reputed to have sat in the 14th century while waiting for inspiration. It’s called Il Sasso di Dante – Dante’s seat - and it has since inspired many a poetic posterior: Browning, Wordsworth, Dickens - and me. (Well at least it worked for them.) A new marble Sasso di Dante appeared in the piazza recently, reputed to be a PR event promoting an adjacent bar, the name of which is, of course, Il Sasso di Dante. Now, to avoid confusion, the signage on Dante’s original granite seat has been changed. It is now labelled Il Vero Sasso di Dante - “The true stone of Dante”.

A Room with a View

2011-03-19T10:24:00.003+01:00

In 1901, the English novelist E. M. Forster and his mother stayed in the Pensione Simi on the right bank of the River Arno in Florence – a typical Florentine boarding house of the type frequented by Victorian tourists. “It had a cockney landlady”, said the snooty Forster, “who scatters Hs like morsels”. It gave him the idea for a novel, A Room with a View, published six years later.

In the opening scene of A Room with a View, a group of equally snooty mature English spinsters staying in the Pensione Bertolini are having a collective moan: one of them complaining loudly that she asked for a room with a view of the river, but did not get one. As she drones on, a male guest – not of their party – says that his room has a view, and that he would be glad to exchange rooms with her. The snobby complainer lowers her voice, content with something else to moan about: bad enough that, as the man’s accent and attire clearly reveal, he is from a social stratum lower than that of her or her friends, but he has addressed her without being spoken to.

There is still a riverside pensione at 2, Lungarno delle Grazie - not now called Pensione Simi - but we didn’t stay there: we rented an apartment nearby. It was in an ancient building - on the third floor - and the shutters were closed when we went in. We knew from the map that when we opened them we would not see the Arno. Instead, a bible-throw away, was this: Brunelleschi’s dome, waiting there since 1461. Who got the room with the view?

Space Invaders

2011-03-09T10:46:00.005+01:00

A new record: the spam percentage of my incoming mail yesterday was 100% - up from 95%. Usual stuff – Viagra, aggrandizement of genitalia and such. (How did they know?) I now even get spam comments on the blog, but fortunately they only reach me as e-mails and don’t get onto the blog. You’d think the spam filter that can keep them out of the blog could suppress them – but that’s way too technical for me.

Cautionary tale: this week I got a mailed invoice from a catalogue sales company. I had not heard of the company and had not purchased a Blackberry - I wasn’t even in the country when I was supposed to have ordered it, so I ignored the invoice. My Beloved, not being equipped with an “Ignore” button, calls the company. They say, ah yes, we thought it was suspicious when they gave us a delivery address different from the billing address, so we didn’t supply it. Then why, you may ask, if they didn’t supply it, did they bill me? Only one answer comes to my suspicious mind: because it was worth a try.

I had to go to Arezzo: having visited the natal homes of Dante and Boccaccio, I had to see that of the last of Italy’s immortal literary trio, Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch.
In keeping with his lifestyle, this little dwelling in the Via dell’ Orto was the most humble of the three.
Arezzo is Tuscany’s Tuscany: it lies in the region’s south-eastern corner so is close to the heart of Italy. It ticks all the boxes, starting around four millennia BC: Etruscan heritage, Roman amphitheatre, medieval ramparts, Gothic churches and Renaissance palazzi. The Piazza Grande (below) looks like a confused film set - and has been, e.g. The English Patient.
Chaucer was a Petrarch groupie, and came to Florence in 1373 hoping to see him, but I must admit I always found him the most difficult and least joyful of the three: Dante is thought-provoking and Boccaccio funny, but Petrarch is doleful. He was born in Arezzo in 1304 and left with his parents at the age of nine to follow the Papacy to Avignon, as good Catholics did. He studied law in Montpellier and entered the church, but was more interested in writing. The family retired to Florence, but Petrarch returned to Avignon in 1326, and the following year, at the age of 23, fell in love on sight with the beautiful Laura as she left a church in Avignon. He gave up religion and wanted to marry her, but she refused him on the very reasonable grounds that she was already married. While most men have a Laura or two in their lives, then move on, she became Petrarch’s passion and inspiration and he made rejection his life’s work, immortalising her in well over 300 poems.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks

2011-03-07T11:24:00.004+01:00

Just back from a windy whirl in Tuscany – not intentionally so, but we chose the wrong time of the year. Florence has almost exactly the same latitude as Nice, but that is where the similarity ends. Nice is sheltered from the northern wind by the Alpes Maritimes, while Florence nurtures it and even gives it a special term of affection, the tramontana (across the mountains). And it is cold: the Florentinos are dressed like Eskimos and we like Lear; every other shop is a gelateria – for which I swear they don’t need refrigeration.
On the plus side, the cities – Florence, Siena and Arezzo - are relatively crowd-free: the “tribe of wretches”, as Lord Byron called them, are a throng but not yet a multitude. But in the end, survival took priority over research, and that for southern Tuscany has been postponed until the temperature improves.

Saint David

2011-02-20T16:44:00.005+01:00

What about those Blues! (No, not Chelsea, Everton.) It’s the 119th minute –the last minute of extra time – and up steps Leighton Baines to take a free kick from outside the box. He curls it into the corner to take it to penalties. Dare I watch? (We don’t do well at penalty shoot-outs.) Then Phil hits the winner. A great team – and manager - performance against the west London billionaires who (a) are the FA Cup holders; (b) spent over £70 million on players last month; and (c), haven’t lost a cup game in three years. I thought I wasn’t into triumphalism in football – but please allow me this one: I don’t often get the chance. (We find out later that manager David Moyes had already decided that, should the game go to penalties, he would put Phil Neville in as taker of the fifth penalty - because he was sure Tim Howard would save one, so the fifth would be the most crucial one and he knew Phil could handle it.)
Reading next, at Goodison Park on March 1 - St. David’s Day.

Lord of the Lies

2011-01-27T16:19:00.002+01:00

We were walking in the street the other day when we saw a bunch of gendarmes arresting a kid. When I say “bunch”, I mean there were even more of them than the usual phalanx: roughly six or seven cops and one docile teenager, handcuffed behind his back. As we watched this rather one-sided encounter – which looked a bit like Manchester United versus the Dagenham Girl Pipers at Old Trafford with Howard Webb refereeing - up screeched a van-load of reinforcements. As the spectators on the pavement gave ironic cheers and someone suggested they send for the US Cavalry, one of the cops broke away from the crime scene and ran over to confront us, shouting, “We’re not cowboys!” and miming the drawing of a pistol. I took it to mean that he thought overwhelming numerical superiority was better than shooting first and asking questions afterwards.
Then last night I saw Lord Blair of Boughton on TV, labelled as "Consultant on Strategic Policing". Wasn’t he the Prime Minister who said he had been advised by the Lord Chancellor that he could legally start a war? No, that was another Blair – he hasn’t been ennobled just yet. This was the police commissioner in charge when that guy was shot by Met police on the Underground. OK, you mean the Blair who said that de Menezes had been warned before he was shot?
Perhaps the gendarme got it right after all.

Ricky Swannell has trouble with her vowels. She’s the woman who reports on the Australian Open Tennis every morning from “Milbourne”: “Fidera wan the furst sit sucks throy…”. She has no problem with the “the”.

Côte de Blues

2011-01-23T17:16:00.007+01:00

Lest I ever give the impression that Nice is a city of perpetual sunshine, let me come clean and show our street a couple of weeks ago. (If you never see my blog again it will mean that the Tourism Police have figured out where I am and zapped my PC.) Today, I hasten to add, it’s not like that: we will soon take our walk along the Promenade des Anglais in our shirtsleeves and find a sunny terrace on which to have lunch. (I think that’s what they told me to say.)

Stop me if you’ve heard this, but, disregarding the occasional blizzard, Nice is nice. It is the birthplace and capital city of the French Riviera. For a few centuries BC it was a trading centre for Phoenician merchantmen, who called it Nikaïa, after the Greek god of victory. When the Romans crossed the Alps in the first century BC, they established a hilltop city here whose ruins can still be seen in what is now the elegant residential suburb of Cimiez. The streets of Roman Cimiez still bear the traces of chariot wheels, but they have hip names (is hip still hip?), like Duke Ellington Alley, Dizzy Gillespie Way and Miles Davis Street – for today it is the home of the Nice Jazz Festival.
Matisse lived next door, and I used to wonder if he moved away for those ten torrid days in July.

France’s – and the Riviera’s - love affair with jazz is as old as jazz itself. While paddle steamers were carrying the new music up the Mississippi to the great eastern cities, GIs on their belated way to World War I carried in their knapsacks the first scratchy products of the burgeoning recording industry. New French words were coined or adopted - "rag-time" became "le temps de chiffon", and swinguer and le big band entered French dictionaries.

I wasn’t there at the time - I’m a relative rookie who’s been attending the Nice Jazz Festival for a mere 29 years. These days we sometimes walk up to Cimiez: the DG likes its fin de siècle architecture but not its exclusivity. But as we pass the Roman ruins I swear I hear music coming from the ancient stones: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Woody Herman, Charlie Mingus, Kenton…. Those were the days before Artistes’ Villages and neanderthal security guards: then, the musicians used to eat with the fans. My kids and I would sit and chat with the likes of Michel Petrucciani and Lionel Hampton. Now they and Satchmo are just statues; the rest are street names.

Divided loyalties: Everton played West Ham yesterday, the beleaguered team at the bottom of the table and in need of the points, and supported by one of our dearest friends. Whom do you support, knowing he was going all the way to Liverpool to support them? “Let the better team win”, I prayed, “so long as it’s not the Hammers”. God in his wisdom gave the right result – two-all.

In for a Penny

2011-01-21T10:29:00.005+01:00

He was born in Hailey, Idaho in 1885 and raised in Philadelphia. He moved to London in 1908, aged 23, where he lived for sixteen years, and in 1924, he and his English painter wife, Dorothy, moved to Rapallo, on the Italian Riviera.

He was Ezra Loomis Pound, a leading figure in the modernist literature movement, who edited and promoted the work of many of his contemporaries: W.B.Yeats, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot… His astute but ruthless editing - and enthusiastic patronage - were key to the success of Eliot’s The Wasteland. In beautiful Rapallo, writing and producing plays and concerts, he became a much-loved but slightly nutty local character, even as an enemy alien during the Second Word War.

On May 3, 1945, two days before the end of the war in Europe, he was visited by two armed local ex-partisans, who, saying that the Americans had offered a reward of half a million lire for his capture, arrested him. On May 24, two weeks after Germany had surrendered unconditionally, Pound was taken, under heavy military police guard and handcuffed to a burly military policeman, to the U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Centre near the village of Metato, a few miles north of Pisa. The word “Training” in its title is a euphemism: the DTC was a punishment camp. Ezra Pound had had no trial, he had been given access to a lawyer, but the lawyer failed to mention that he was working for the US Army. The instructions from Washington were concise: “Afford no preferential treatment” – and they were carried out to the letter. Pound’s “cell” was one of those reserved for the most dangerous criminals or those under sentence of death by execution. It was a six-feet-by-six wire cage with a concrete floor, open to the elements on all sides - an early rehearsal for Guantanamo Bay. He was the only civilian out of almost 4,000 military prisoners; he had no bed and was allowed no exercise or verbal communication; he was fully exposed to the Tuscan sun by day, and by night watched under floodlights.

Pound’s crime was that he had criticised his own government: not only that, but he had done so on Italian State Radio. The content of his talks, which were monitored by the FBI, was both anti-war and anti-Semitic, and the fact that he had agreed to talk solely on condition that each broadcast would be preceded by a statement that he would not say anything “contrary to his own conscience or his duties as an American citizen” was not taken in mitigation.

After more than two weeks under these harsh conditions, he finally cracked: “the raft broke and the waters came over me”, as he later wrote. He was taken to Washington to be tried for treason, the penalty for which was execution. Pound’s breakdown was probably a blessing, because psychiatrists decided he was mentally unfit to stand trial and he was transferred to a medical compound and given a bed, table and writing materials, and allowed exercise. Five months later, before being committed to a Washington insane asylum, he was allowed a visit from his wife and daughter. He languished there for the next twelve years, during which time he completed his famous Pisan Cantos.

He was released in 1958, following a vigorous campaign by his fellow-writers, including Eliot and Hemingway – who, in accepting his Nobel Prize for Literature, asked why Pound was still a prisoner. Pound returned to his beloved Rapallo, and later to Venice, where he died in 1972.

You might say that for speaking on a Fascist radio station, he should have been executed for treason. William (Lord Haw Haw) Joyce was. But try replacing Pound’s name with that of Gary McKinnon, the Asberger’s sufferer who hacked into the Pentagon computers from his bedroom just to see if he could; or that of Julian Assange, an Australian internet activist who thought Governments were too secretive. They and their ilk now face the self-righteous wrath of the land of the Free, but for what - eccentricity? During the same war, P. G. Wodehouse went to Berlin several times to speak on Fascist radio. He was knighted by the Queen.

Happy Return

2011-01-19T18:09:00.002+01:00

Taxing times: 15.23 GMT today, to be precise. That’s when Her Majesty’s Inspector of Taxes acknowledged receipt of my Tax Return. I can now direct my creative talents elsewhere. So – good news – I won’t be spending my birthday in the Tower. Not only that, but he has promised me a substantial refund. Good news? Well, partly –because the HMIT, being more optimistic about my earning power than I was, had taxed me accordingly - in advance of course. In other words, he will be refunding a minuscule proportion of my own money. But at least the nightmare is all over until next January – made slightly more nightmarish than usual because my least favourite financial software vendor, Quicken, pulled the plug on my accounting package, and, since Microsoft already pulled the plug on theirs last year, I had to learn another one. So welcome to Bank Tree – a quarter the price of Quicken and much nicer people.

Now the bad news: according to the BBC, Everton’s Steven Pienaar is to join Tottenham for a fee of about £2.5m. Sorry, how much was that? “He's certainly not dear is he?" said Harry. I know Harry’s a pretty slick deal-maker, and I know midfielders come cheaper than strikers, even those who don’t strike very often and have earlier use-by dates, but 2.5million… Makes you wonder what ‘arry would have paid for Darren Bent – certainly not ten times that, as the former French teacher at my old school just did. But, like the HMIT and Bank Tree, much nicer people.

The Umpire Strikes Back

2011-01-17T23:06:00.003+01:00

Liverpool lost their match against Manchester United last week. They were the worse team, agreed, but they should not have lost the match. They lost it through a dubious penalty awarded to the home team (the referee having been the only spectator bamboozled by an obvious Berbatov dive), and the fact that Liverpool had only had ten men for most of the game. The referee who awarded the dubious penalty and reduced Liverpool to ten men, causing their captain to be suspended for the next three games, was the man who refereed the World Cup Final, Howard Webb.
Nothing new there: Rule 20.5 in the referees’ handbook decrees that bigger teams must get more penalties than smaller teams, especially on their home grounds. (Liverpool have “won” more penalties that any other Premiership team: Everton have been awarded one penalty against Liverpool in the last 73 years. Wolves haven’t had a single one this season.) Liverpool drew 2-all at home to Everton yesterday - one of their goals was a penalty.
We know that Captain Webb is way down the list of a pretty dire bunch, but right now, let’s not get into whether he was justified – except that his body language at the time indicated what politicians call a “U-turn”. Let’s not even get into whether a referee who, simply because he was a native of a neutral country, once refereed a World Cup Final - handing out a record 14 yellow cards in the process - should suddenly become all-seeing if not saintly. Surely a medal from the Queen would suffice?
No, this is about a Liverpool player called Ryan Babel, who saw a Photoshop mock-up of aforementioned Webb wearing a Manchester United shirt, thought it funny, and tweeted it. He has been subjected to the full venom of blazerdom and will be summoned to Lancaster Gate, placed in stocks in Hyde Park and pelted with fruit by buffoons called Platter or Blatini. The club has yet to decide his punishment – they are waiting for the Blazers to tell them what it is.
This just in: Babel was fined £10,000 today. Blazers do not do humour.

Too many cooks...

2011-01-12T11:27:00.005+01:00

The two-year blog sabbatical has passed: as, we hope, has the English winter – and so, I guess, have the loyal readers. I was tempted to post today on England’s decisive cricket victory, but everyone else is posting it, so I’ll just note a coincidence: my last post before the hiatus was about cricket and Alistair Cooke. So is this: in the final game of the recent Test Cricket series, the man of the match - and of the whole series - was Alistair Cook.

No turgid history of the last two years’ events, I promise – they were a great couple of years, but recounting them would resemble a Windows update: shut down when finished if not before. Briefly then, did some writing – articles, Memoir of my first 25 years, and Foreword to a new edition of Tobias Smollett’s (1766) Travels in France and Italy. Moved house to downtown Nice, (more about Nice later)had a stroke but recovered – thanks to TLC by the DG. We don’t have a panoramic sea view any more, but one more conducive to writing – a library. And started another book, this time Florence and Tuscany: A Literary Guide for Travellers – hence the photo of the Arno.
About to start the most creatively challenging activity of them all: the Tax Return, which has to be submitted by end January.

It's not Cricket

2011-01-05T13:18:00.003+01:00

Bleary-eyed again this morning, but happy - my two bottles of Meursault are safe. The Sydney Telegraph front page of a couple of weeks ago carried a full page headline across a picture of Peter Siddle, the Aussie fast bowler, which read, in huge caps: “OUR POM DISPOSAL EXPERT”.

I love it when they do that – it seems to bring out the normally dormant jolly-old English fighting spirit. What does Henry V say? “In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility – but when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger…” Another Oz journo gem was the “controversial no-ball” that kept Cook in the game. Why “controversial” when 50 million people around the world saw Beer bowl a no-ball – replayed many times over? The same 50 million, plus 40,000 at the SCG, saw that ball hit the ground on its way to Hughes which he tried to claim as a catch. Alistair looked at him disdainfully but didn't move. When it was replayed on the big screen, 10,000 cheered - the Barmy Army. 30,000 were in silent contrition.
Siddle’s contribution: 1 wicket for 98 runs; runs scored: O
Cook's contribution; runs scored: 189.
Hope we finish it off tonight – I can’t stay awake much longer.
Once more unto the breach, once more...

Nice is nice

2011-01-03T22:43:00.005+01:00

This is where we used to live - Villefranche-sur-Mer, but we don't live there any more. We decided we would like to try some city living.
Forgive the baggy eyes, but play starts in Sydney each morning at 11.30 am in the England v. Oz “Ashes” series, which is 11.30pm at night here – and I have wagered two bottles of Meursault on the result. (By an amazing coincidence, cricket and Alistair Cooke were the topics subjects of the previous post, two years ago – and England’s leading batsman in the present series is called Alistair Cook - strange?)
We now live five miles eastwards
along the coast, which is nice.
Every good wish for 2011.

Last Post

2009-01-06T18:20:00.004+01:00

Neville Cardus – later Sir – was the greatest of cricket commentators and writers, and equally famous as a music critic. He worked in these two fields for most of his 87 years. In his soft west-country burr, Cardus would often correlate these two interests in his commentaries. (Of W. G. Grace: “He orchestrated the folk music of cricket”.) On retirement, he closed his final cricket commentary without a dramatic farewell. He said, as he always did, “I’m now handing over the commentary to…”

A fellow-writer with Cardus at the Manchester Guardian was a young Lancastrian named Alistair Cooke – later Honorary Sir - whose goodbye to broadcasting was equally unpretentious. In his 95th year, he closed the longest-running series in broadcasting history as he had done for the previous 58 years: he said, in his gentle mid-Atlantic voice, “Goodnight”. His 3,000 scripts, totalling some seven million words, will soon be available on-line.

As an admirer of both journalists, but with a mere three years of bloggery and only 117,717 words (including these) on the clock, you will appreciate that I would have to emulate their lack of sentimentality.

Last post by Riviera writer on Tuesday, January 06, 2009.

Chain mail

2008-12-31T19:22:00.003+01:00

I just sent an e-mail to Mr P. at well-known publishers Archant. I got an automated reply saying “I’ll be out of the office until January 5. If the matter is urgent, please e-mail Mr S.” Deeming the matter reasonably urgent, I mailed Mr S. – and got an automated reply saying “I’ll be out of the office until January 5". Fortunately he did not say, "If the matter is urgent, please e-mail Mr P." or I'd still be at it next year.

Speaking of which, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish that loyal but diminishing band of readers a very happy, healthy and prosperous new year, and may your comments continue to be as creative, lively and penetrating – but conspicuously more numerous – in 2009 than in 2008.

BA Humbug

2008-12-08T12:40:00.005+01:00

Just when I’d decided to retire from trying to be a consumer champion comes this credit-crunch-crushing offer from British Airways to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the One-World Alliance: reward, 10,000 BA miles!
All you have to do is this:
1. Fly First Class or Club long-haul.
2. Connect to another airline in the “Alliance”- American Airlines or one of nine others, including Finnair, Malév, Jordanian, LAN etc.
3. Complete the journey before December 19.
Not exactly an offer you can’t refuse – if you can afford to do all that, 10,000 BA miles (enough to take one person Economy Class to Glasgow) would be a highly resistible incentive. (You could buy them for £310.)

Enough of the caped crusading; I’ve decided to emulate the DG and move into Human Interest. So now, lest you get the impression that life on the Côte d’Azur is a bowl of cherries, a pip: we have new neighbours downstairs, who I hope read this. They have a three-year-old child. So did we, once, six times between us, and it’s a precious age. But these people are so precious about theirs that every movement we make causes them to ring – or shout – up to ask us to be quiet because the child is asleep. It must sleep 23 hours a day. They complained that our cane chairs scraped on our terrace, so we carpeted the terrace. They complain when we use the vacuum cleaner. They complain to our guests. Yesterday we returned from a long walk, changed into slippers – and within five minutes they rang to ask us to stop stamping.
We’ve been here eight years, and no other neighbour has ever complained. We spend only about six months of the year here, we read or write – neither very noisily – and play Scrabble, keeping score with felt-tip pens. We never have parties, rarely use the TV, and we tip-toe about the apartment in soft slippers.
So, having decided that we had compromised as far as we could, we called on them to ask if they could try to be a little more reasonable. (The child slept through the discussions.) Whether or not they appreciated our problems we don’t know – but they haven’t complained since.
If they do, we’re thinking of renting our apartment out to Michael Flatley for a while - as a rehearsal studio for River Dance.

American Excess

2008-12-03T21:33:00.008+01:00

Dear American Express,
Your current advertising says that American Express cardholders “gain access to a more exclusive world”. I fear you may have carried exclusivity to a point of excess. I have spent many hours over recent weeks trying unsuccessfully to access my own account.
The problem is that when I click “My account” and key in my ID info, I am told it does not agree with your records. I obviously can’t see those records, but I know that my details have not changed in years.
I call “assistance” (from France), key in my card number as requested and a man immediately ask for my card number again, then goes through the security routine and says there is nothing wrong with the card and assures me that I will be able to log in. I go back to the beginning and go through this loop again. And again. And again. And I get locked out.
I can’t e-mail you because when I click “E-mail us” I get “Site unobtainable”. I can’t use Help or access FAQs because it requires my ID reference, which you say is wrong.
A nice man named Chris listens to my woes and tells me he’ll give me a temporary password that will get enable me to log in. It doesn’t. Back to the beginning and repeat. Again. And again. I am now locked out.
Can you possibly imagine how frustrating and time-consuming all this is? Since there seems to be no way of solving the problem, I suggest that you cancel this card and issue me with a new one.
Yours sincerely

It's not just Amex is it? Security is the "Health and Safety" of the internet - the one-size-fits-all excuse. In fact, angry as I still am, I'd say AmEx are one of the better ones.

Speaking of excess, a Mr John C. Thomason of Colorado has a letter in the current Riviera Reporter: “I love everything about the French, but…” [sound familiar?] “…why are you French people…” [this to an Anglo expat magazine] “…afraid of Moslems and Russians”?
Blah, blah, blah, then “One day you people will get the same as us and then what? Cry for help a third time?”
Editor: Every issue we get at least one letter from a nutter. You’re the winner this time.

The Write Stuff

2008-11-28T17:18:00.007+01:00

What do you do when you discover that the book you’ve been working on for four years has just been published - by another writer who’d been researching it for twelve?

It seems writing is as much a test of character as of creativity. When John Stuart Mill decided that he was would never finish writing his history of the French Revolution, on hearing that Thomas Carlyle was working on a similar project, he generously gave Carlyle his entire collection of books on the subject – there were no lending libraries in those days.

So when Carlyle finished The French Revolution in 1835, he lent the one and only manuscript – there were no photocopiers either – to Mill to read. Mill’s housemaid, thinking it was scrap, burned it. What did Carlyle do? He sat down and wrote it again, and then – how's this for trust? – sent it to Mill to review. (Presumably he'd changed his housemaid by then.) It turned out to be Carlyle’s greatest work. Then he founded the London Library.

When Charles Dickens wanted to write a novel set against the background of the Revolution, he relied heavily on Carlyle’s book and reading list, which by then he was able to borrow from the Library.

It’s an interesting thought that if there’d been no Mill, Carlyle might not have written The French Revolution, without which there might not have been A Tale of Two Cities – and, worse, no London Library. Today, if you search the Library catalogue under “French Revolution” you get 575 responses.

The Victorian painter and poet, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, faced a different test. When Lizzie Siddall, his model, lover and, later, wife, overdosed on laudanum, he was distraught. Before she was buried in Highgate cemetery, he touchingly laid the manuscript of an unpublished book of his poems in the coffin beside her, implying that “Without you my poems are worthless”. But when, some years later, Rosetti decided he would like to publish the poems, rather than write all them out again, he had Lizzie’s coffin exhumed, took out his poems and buried her again, remarking that she was still as beautiful as he remembered. As always, Dorothy Parker put it succinctly:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Buried all of his libretti,
Thought the matter over – then
Went and dug them up again.

What am I going to do about the book? I wish I knew.

Mafiaville

2008-11-21T12:22:00.014+01:00

Palermo airport is called Falcone-Borsellino airport – for the two judges who were murdered by the mob there in 1992. Getting there at 1.00pm Monday for Alitalia’s 3.20pm flight to London seemed ample time. It was: the crews went on strike and I got home at midnight Tuesday. I won’t go as far as the guy who set up a special website to complain about his Alitalia experience, partly because the airport staff were incredibly helpful, but mainly because the guy is being sued by the airline. But next time I’m going by sea.
The amazing thing about Palermo is that whenever you think you’ve seen it all, another marvel pops up. The Piazza Pretoria is just one of many: a 16th century square – except it’s round – with a fountain in the middle, hidden around a corner from the Via Roma, surrounded by statues, which, instead of concealing their genitalia, Botticelli-like, with fluttering gauze or long hair, do it with their hands, like footballers facing a free kick. The square seems too small to hold so many statues together, until you try to photograph them - then you find it’s too big to fit into the viewfinder.
About five miles south of the city is a 12th century Benedictine abbey with a panoramic view across Palermo and its bay. It was founded by William II (William the Good), as a penance for the fact that his father, (appropriately, William the Bad), embezzled the country’s money on earthly pleasures. Williams I and II (pair Williams) are buried alongside each other in the abbey. Strolling the cloisters on a quiet autumn afternoon, you could imagine William II checking off his beads and meditating on his future image, eight centuries later. Just to make sure, he put old father William in a black sarcophagus. His own is white.

Lyon’s Corner House

2008-11-14T17:05:00.008+01:00

We spent All Saints weekend in Lyon, France’s second city. It sits between the Rhone and Saône, and it’s where the two rivers converge. Fittingly, for the weekend of the dead, it rained almost non-stop. There’s a block of flats on a corner in Lyon, one side of which is flat, windowless and pretty boring. Or was, until a local art school decided to make it a monumental trompe l’oeil. A lot of people chipped in money for paints, ladders, etc. and this is the result. Even standing right in front of it it’s hard to tell if the windows, cats, cars etc. are real. They're not: only the delivery van and the pedestrian crossings out front are real.

The next weekend we were in Palermo, Sicily. It is one of those cities whose fictional image is so intense that it obscures its factual one. Oh yes, there’s still a Mafia presence all right, but the visitor doesn’t see it – unlike St. Petersburg, where the mobsters sit proudly in their smoky-windowed Mercedes as they speed along the pavements. What the tourist sees is what travel brochures call a "bustling" city that lies between a blue crescent-shaped bay and a concentric semi-circle of green mountains. There are baroque churches in dozens and almost as many medieval monasteries. The picture is a 12th century mosaic the size of a cricket pitch.
Its cathedral is a hodgepodge of architectural history, from Roman to Moorish to Norman to Baroque with a touch of Gothic – yet strangely harmonious.
We were a group of “mature students” who, almost 12 years ago, met in the semi-circular piazza in front of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena and every year since then have deserted our patient partners to go off to some historic European city for a weekend of museums, galleries and food. The main difference this time was that – thanks to a strike of Alitalia air crews - the weekend became almost a week. One of us is still waiting for his suitcase.

Sarnies with Grandma

2008-10-29T18:14:00.011+01:00

Mexicans call it La día de los Muertos; the French Toussaint, posh English All Saints', but as linguistic imperialism spreads, we will all soon call it "Hallowe’en". Not belonging in any of the above categories, as children we called it "Duck-Apple Night". I don’t know if that was a uniquely Liverpool thing - but it was an evening on which we did silly things with apples – floated them in basins of water or hung them from ceiling beams, and tried to eat them without the use of hands or implements. Apples being autumnal, I guess it was the Scouse Hallowe’en.

But no one does it like Mexicans. In Guanajuarto, in the central highlands, some 200 miles north-west of Mexico City, I was asked if I’d like to see the museum. “What museum?”, I asked. “Las Momias”, he said. It sounded friendly, but it turned out to be a ghoulish library, its shelves within easy touching distance on either side, except that on the shelves were, not books, but dead bodies.

There were men, women, and children; most of them naked, but some were partially clothed in funereal black. They were emaciated and covered in parchment-like skin that stretched across their bones like over-filled shopping bags. In eyeless faces, skin was drawn tightly across cheeks and jaw to reveal blackened teeth in demoniac grins.

I kept thinking that I must be more than half way in, so that I would see fewer of them if I kept going than if I turned back - but on and on went Las Momias - the Museum of the Mummies - room after room of corpses piled on corpses from floor to ceiling, most of them frozen into agonized positions that did not say “RIP”. By the time I reached "the smallest mummy in the world" - the petrified foetus of a woman who had died in labour - I'd seen enough.

It was my first taste of the Mexican fascination with death. In Mexico, La Día de los Muertos is a national festival, a day on which families load up picnic hampers and folding tables and chairs and trip merrily off to cemeteries to cavort among the ancestors, the adults drinking wine and beer and the children eating skull-shaped sweets.

Outside, kids in Nike trainers were offering coloured postcards of the bodies - lying on shelves, sprawled in the dusty street, or standing in line like a cadaverous Miss World contest. Other kids sold rock effigies of corpses.
That’s not 'rock', as in archaeology, but 'rock' as in Brighton.

Don’t Tampa with history

2008-10-25T17:07:00.015+02:00

One thing about Villefranche is the strange signs they put up. Every pedestrian crossing has a sign saying "If you want to cross the street, press the red button below", and there's an arrow pointing down to the button - which is green.
Outside the Post Office, a notice says "Open Monday to Friday - except Thursday and Saturday". And in the middle of the town there's a building site. They're going to build 44 houses. The notice outside has been there a long time. It reads: "Completion date October 8, 2007". That's right, 200seven. The only problem is they haven't started work on it yet.

Tonight’s the night folks. This is the night the Phillies walk off with the World Series of baseball. You can't get odds on them not to. Why is it called the World Series when the teams all come from the same country? And it's not even an American game? You don’t have to go to Coopertown, NY to celebrate the alleged birth of baseball – in 1839. The rules of Base-Ball were established in England – in 1744. I like Tampa – nice weather, great Dali museum - but the Phillies will do it tonight, you'll see.
If you can stay awake long enough.

Senator wrecks Jazz Festival

2008-10-22T22:28:00.017+02:00

That Chicago – it sure is one laid-back city. One of our reasons for choosing it was jazz. It was the first northern city to get into the blues – thanks to a river with a long name and lots of New Orleans jazzmen looking for work. Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven – that sort of thing.
“Hyde Park Jazz Festival!!” the brochure screamed, “Sunday from 11am till late”. Wow, this is it, we thought, pity we fly out to London that evening, and that it’s two buses and two train rides from the city and the same to get back. We’ll have to leave it at 1.30, but still, a couple of hours’ jazz before we leave will be fun – a lasting memory of Chicago.
At 11.30 there's no one there. At 12 noon some sound equipment turns up. At 12.30 some locals and a photographer arrive. There’s a problem: some nouveau-riche Hyde Park resident has his house surrounded by Secret Service men 24/7 and they can’t even walk their dogs, let alone drive. “God – if he gets elected it’ll be worse!” they say.
At 1 o’clock the stalls are opening – near-beer and pretzels. 1.30, still no jazz, and we have to leave.
Moral 1 – don’t believe tourist brochures
Moral 2 - Don’t go to a jazz festival near a presidential candidate’s home.

Chicago has two other famous sons: Ernest Hemingway, who spent his first 18 years in Oak Park, and Frank Lloyd Wright, who began his architectural career with the great Louis Sullivan, then started his own practice in Oak Park. In fact Oak Park really rocks, especially Louie’s Bar. (Has the number of Louis’s in this town anything to do with Satchmo?)
A week later, back in Villefranche, a letter arrives from Chicago: “I found this notebook in Oak Park, Illinois. Hope it finds you”.
Nice people, even if they can’t run jazz festivals.

Bread and Baroque

2008-10-21T12:46:00.007+02:00

When someone says Turin you think of Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino and Juventus – the former familiarly known as Fiat and the latter as Juve. But it’s not all Fiat and Juve - after this weekend we’ll remember it as Baroquesville. Every public building and street seems to have been designed as part of some sort of Grand Plan – which of course they were. We went there because it was the only city within a thousand or so miles we hadn’t been to – and loved it. Neitzsche said, “This is the only place where I am possible”, which is about as helpful as what he said about Nice – “like a plant I grow in sunshine”.
Not a lot of sunshine in Turin – but they have the answer to Piedmontese weather: the streets are lined with cloister-like (but baroque of course), marble-clad arcades, and you can walk 18km. of the town - including intersections - without getting wet. It doesn’t help a lot against the wind but then neither does it seem to impact the sales of bread or ice-cream – or the warmth of the people. We'll be back when they play Everton - forza Blues!

Pit-bulls on parade

2008-10-16T09:47:00.004+02:00

After Chicago it was a nice change to hear a few different things in the news other than The Campaign - things like the FTSE and Rooney's form. But now, just as I'm getting ready to start listening to it again, and just when I thought it was relatively clean, it's turning nasty. Here's Frank Rich in the NYT today:

'[...] what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.'

Not that I'm entirely in favour of that particular legislation, but I don't think that sort of talk is permitted in the UK these days. But then, neither are pit-bulls.

What's in a name?

2008-10-15T20:14:00.003+02:00

Newcastle’s new manager - football’s answer to Gordon Ramsay - used 46 expletives in his first press conference. So said The Telegraph: the more sensitive Times made it 50. His complaint is that the press doesn’t understand him. Now that surprises me.

The other Gordon is chucking our money at the financial sector in the hope that it defibrillate the economy – as the FTSE drops another 314 points today. One wonders, since the beneficiaries of his largesse are those same people who mismanaged their shareholders’ money, why they are being given another try using the taxpayers’?
But there’s a more important question. Is it fair to reimburse British savers who put their money into foreign financial institutions that failed because they were badly managed – and not to reimburse British savers who put their money into a British financial institution that was subject to government regulation and went belly-up because the government regulated it badly?
We are of course talking about Equitable Life - to which a million British savers entrusted their pensions. They did so because it was government regulated, and because most MPs – including our prudent Prime Minister – also entrusted their pensions to Equitable. It went bust eight years ago and the Parliamentary Ombudsman gave maladministration by the government as a critical cause. But Equitable pensioners still get less than 2/3 of the pensions they paid for and the Treasury won’t say anything, let alone do anything. How Equitable is that?
The reason for the Treasury delay seems to be either that the government is deliberately taking its time, knowing that demographics will eventually solve its problem. (More than 30,000 Equitable pensioners have died since the crash and obviously the death rate - currently 15 per day – is increasing.) Or, do MPs not want to explain why they did not lose their pensions?
There’s only one solution. Equitable Life – a name that opens up whole new vistas of irony - could change its name to include the word “Scotland”.
Talking of ironic names, the Schools Minister, Ed Balls, who once endorsed SATs as a better way of comparing schooling quality, then, when the SATs system collapsed, said it wasn’t his area of responsibility, now says that SATs have been dropped in favour of school report cards, to present a more accurate measurement. Hey! School report cards! Great idea, Ed.

Apostrophically yours

2008-10-12T14:34:00.007+02:00

This is how a Villefranche gift shop promotes its products to departing cruise passengers. It may infuriate Lynne Truss, but I bet they sell more gifts and T-shirts than copies of "Eats, Shoots and Leaves". (It's next door to Michel's.)
American politicians have known ever since Truman’s "If you can't stand the heat..." that voters prefer their politicians folksy and illiterate - hence Sarah's "Doggone it" and George W.’s "Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?".
As Alistair Cooke once observed - and Maureen Dowd quoted in the NYT (punctuation corrected) - “Americans seem to be more comfortable with Republican presidents because they share the common frailty of muddled syntax and because, when they attempt eloquence, they tend to spout a kind of Frontier Baroque”. Sarah just shoots.

Grapes, anyone?

2008-10-09T11:17:00.004+02:00

A bit tense around here today – they’re announcing the Nobel Prize for Literature. Not that I’m over-optimistic: it’s supposed to be about your life’s work and I only started writing after senility set in – or perhaps because senility set in. And there are many who’ve been in the queue longer than me - just look how long Pinter had to wait for his (it takes longer for lefties – Greene never got one at all - he should never have called the hero of Brighton Rock "Pinkie".).
And besides, what chance has anyone got with a bourgeois name like mine?
I'm not holding my breath, but still, I'm cheered after Horace Engdahl’s recent words – he’s permanent secretary of the body that awards the Prize. In fact, I never had a better chance, because he seems to have ruled out American writers this year.
Maybe it’s part of the world trend today, but he's been saying things like “Europe is the center of the literary world,” and that “the U.S. is too isolated, too insular”.
Charles McGrath in the NYT seems to agree. It’s because, he says, “in the United States, a Nobel usually doesn’t produce even [a] modest uptick in sales”. Could he be confusing cause with consequence?
Who wants the Nobel Prize anyway? Beckett thought it was the worst thing that happened to his career; Sartre refused it; Yeats thought it wasn’t generous enough; Steinbeck never wrote a decent thing after it: and Hemingway shot himself.
So keep your capitalist bauble, Mr Engdahl. It wouldn’t exist had it not been for the explosives industry.
Grapes, anyone?

My kind of town

2008-10-01T16:16:00.009+02:00

The good news: Chicago was fantastic. Everything about it, with one exception, (see bad news). It’s a sort of mini-New York, but calmer, quieter and more polite – they even stop at Stop signs. Incredible buildings, great galleries, interesting museums, nice people, perfect weather. All-in-all nine wonderful days.
The bad news: the food. Amazingly bad. In nine days, we hit about a dozen restaurants, and only one you would think of going back to. OK, so we’ve been spoiled by Nice and Villefranche, but you never in your life saw such theatrics – glamorous hostesses, chatty waiters, (“Good evening, I’m Matt and I’ll be looking after you this evening”), poster-sized menus, incessant iced water top-ups, (not by Matt), all building up to cold, bland, half- cooked crap.
Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh on Tempo, which did excellent but obscenely large breakfasts, and the Bistro 110, but please, don’t even go near to Devon Seafood Grill, Bice, Italian Village, Ditka’s or the Art Institute Restaurant. Their chefs should be dragged forcibly to McCormick and Schmick – the one we went back to, twice - to see how it should be done.

But those buildings – we’ve got stiff necks from gazing at them. Because of the great fire that flattened the city centre in – was it 1871? – they’re all relatively modern, but different, from the mock-Gothic Chicago Tribune to the mock-funnel Trump Tower (right). Collectively, they make excellent backdrops for views of Lake Michigan.
More later – we haven’t finished with Chicago yet.

Horse sense

2008-09-15T13:02:00.005+02:00

It sounds like the ultimate in British academia, but it’s actually a tiny village five miles from the sea in bucolic Dorset, an English county named after a former Dallas Cowboys quarterback. The village is called Oxbridge, and it’s so small it doesn’t have a pub, a Post Office or even a phone box, and you had to stand by a window on the top floor to get mobile access. All this is to explain why we’ve been offline for a week. OK, so you didn’t notice.
We were in this 17th century cottage – which is a bit of a misnomer because although it has a thatched roof, it’s not exactly a humble Hardy-esque hovel. It’s got an Aga kitchen, a walk-in fireplace on which you could spit-roast an ox and a lounge the size of a basketball court.
The surrounding countryside is fantastic for walking – subject to two major drawbacks: one, it rained all week; and two, after our English summer the surrounding fields were quagmires. We did venture out once but got lost, then spotted a carved wooden sign saying “Oxbridge 1m.”. We finally emerged at the other end two hours later, after I had slipped backwards into Wellie-deep, willie-deep mud and been dragged out by the DG at the other end of her umbrella. Our attempt to avoid the rest of the path led to our getting lost again in soggy fields of malevolent, face-slapping corn, to finish up at exactly the same mud-bath as before.
What? Of course we're going back next summer.

Getting back on the horse

2008-09-14T12:19:00.004+02:00

Now I understand how Captain Scott felt when he got to the South Pole only to find that Amundsen had been there already and was on his way home. The book I’ve been researching and writing for the past four years just came out. But it doesn't have my name on it.
It’s the writer’s nightmare – that someone else is working on exactly the same subject as you and that their book will come out a few months before yours. (I published my first article touching on this subject in April 1999.) You watch the archives and borrowings of relevant books from the libraries to see if anyone else is taking out the same ones, and it seemed that nobody was: that’s because they’d already had them years before.
It’s by Carol Burnell and it’s called Divided Affections: The Extraordinary Life of Maria Cosway, Celebrity Artist and it’s published by Column House, Lausanne. She has been working on it for, not four, but twelve, years, and it shows. I almost wished I could say it was badly written and sloppily researched, but it’s scrupulously researched, lovingly written and beautifully illustrated. I haven’t finished reading it yet but it’s clearly a tour de force and will be the definitive work on Cosway herself, and leading figures in late 18th century European art and politics - and of course Cosway and Jefferson.
Ah well – you know what they say when you’re thrown by a horse.

The secret is out

2008-09-04T19:24:00.005+02:00

You heard it here first. We said it on May 19, 2006, again on June 2, 2006, May 25, 2007 and again on June 3, 2008. (That’s not an editorial “we” – or even a Nintendo one – it’s “we” as in the DG and I). You will already have realised that this is about our second favouritest town in England – even if most of it isn’t: Hay-on-Wye.
Hay is in the news lately. There's this survey they do every year to find the happiest town in the country. This year the first place, at the top of the short list of 273, is none other than Hay-on-Wye in the county of Wopsy – whoops, I think that should be Powys. Good news and bad, of course: good that its qualities have been recognised at last, but bad in that this is probably the end of Hay as we know it. It was OK hidden in the total obscurity of the RW blog, but BBC1 did a feature on it the other morning and now its fame has spread throughout the whole English-speaking world and the USA. Things will never be the same.

This is to warn you about Hay. Don’t even think of going there – they speak a funny language with a consonant-to-vowel ratio of a thousand to one. It never stops raining; the spring lamb chops are inedible and nobody speaks to you – they’ve all got their noses stuck in books.
Don’t take my word for it, listen to Boubacar Touré. Who is Boubacar Touré? you ask. Only president of the Timbuktu Twinning Association, that’s who. Hay is twinned with Timbuktu. Why? Because every town in Britain is twinned with somewhere; because it provides excuses for exotic trips for overworked local councillors; and because, at least according to the twinocrats, both towns are interested in books and they’re both on rivers. But old Boubacar tells it like it is. He said on a recent visit to Hay that there are also some differences. "We have sand, Hay has mud and trees and it's cold," he said.
Hay for the hayseeds.

Jumping to Occlusions

2008-09-03T19:53:00.007+02:00

Dear Tony,
You remember your speech at the Labour Party conference in September 1999 - when you promised “everybody will have easy access to an NHS dentist within the next two years”? The BBC headed it “NHS Dentistry for All” and there was rejoicing throughout the land, especially among pensioners.
I did have an NHS dentist at the time, whom I'd been with for many years. Then he retired, and overnight his practice went 100% private. At the same time, by an amazing coincidence, my teeth suddenly jumped from a six-monthly check and clean to an urgent programme of occlusions, extractions, root canal treatment and preventative orthodontry. Cleaning became "Dental Hygiene".
I couldn't understand how you would treble the number of dentists in just two years, so I thought I’d check your progress. Finding an NHS dentist at all was difficult, but we eventually found one. And they could see me - in two months’ time. Not exactly “easy access”, Tone.
Well, the two months were up yesterday. “Oh, yes, we can do this on the NHS. But you’ll get metal fillings and it will take at least eight weeks – or you can go private, give me £1,070 and I’ll do it whenever you like“.
“Thanks, I’ll think about it”.
“Sure, that’ll be £16.20”.
“But you haven’t done anything”.
“£16.20”.
Look, Tone, I don’t expect you to do anything about NHS dentistry. I realise you’re busy these days, what with the speeches; having to sort out your mess in Iraq - all those bereaved parents; bringing peace to Palestine, consulting to Corporate America; Emeritus Professoring; keeping the EU from finding out what happened at BAE, and acquiring new mansions, so I don’t expect you to do anything - any more than I expected it in '99. I just thought you'd like to be kept you up to date, and I can't do it tomorrow - I'll be at the dentist's.

She Stoops to Conker

2008-08-20T15:58:00.013+02:00

A school headmaster at Cummersdale in Cumbria, Mr Shaun Halfpenny, has thwarted the efforts of the Health and Safety police by issuing safety goggles to his pupils, thus clearing the way for the introduction of Conkers into the school curriculum. Having yawned through the Olympic Games Finals of the Mountain Bike and BMX, I think it’s time to consider the inclusion, not only of Conkers, but other long-neglected playground sports into the Olympics programme for London 2012. With our trees groaning with horse-chestnuts after the wet summer, it’s not too early to start training.
The said headmaster’s name suggests that the time may also be propitious to campaign for the acceptance of Shove-ten-p (formerly Shove-ha’penny) into the Olympic schedule.
As host nation, the opportunity is, well, golden. We should be campaigning now for the acceptance of other quintessentially British sports, (though I’m not sure about cricket). Tiddleywinks, for example: if jobless teenagers were busy tiddling their winks on street corners there would be less knife crime.
The only problem is that if the IOC were to allow the above classifications, the fiendish frogs would lobby for inclusion of their much more lethal sports, such as Boules, or its Provençal variant, Boules Carrées, (square boules), designed for mountainous regions to avoid the boules from rolling down-hill. (It's true - the Boules Carrées World Championships are being held in Cagnes-sur-Mer this weekend.)

Scots Wha' Hae

2008-08-17T16:27:00.006+02:00

The party’s over and we’re back in rainy Windsor, which is only slightly less wet than Edinburgh. The Edinburgh Festival was great fun – not just the Book Festival but THE Festival. So much going on – allegedly 1200 venues – and that wasn’t the Festival proper - only the Fringe. We had only time to see five of them, but they were all brilliant, especially a couple of plays: Air Swimming and You Don’t Need to Know That – a Kafka-esque tale of a guy who failed to fill in a form that he had never been sent and finished up on the guillotine. Reminded me of the fascist antics of Wachovia Bank – now threatening to “disable” my account and impound the $7000 that’s in it. (Perhaps they didn’t like my blog.) Even managed to survive the shock of going down to breakfast and bumping into John Prescott.
Ah yes – the Edinburgh International Book Festival: we were the same price as Prescott but the BOSGOF was better value – buy one Scouser, get one free. It went rather well, despite the fact that we were in the graveyard slot at 8.30 pm. Not quite a sell-out crowd but an excellent turnout, no one walked out, no eggs were thrown and – as Nicholas confirms, (Comment, below) - we flew the flag for our natal city.

Which is more than I can say for Everton yesterday.

What's the plural of Scouse?

2008-08-05T16:58:00.009+02:00

In case it has escaped your notice, the Edinburgh International Book Festival starts this Saturday, August 9. This is undoubtedly one of the key literary events of the year. Edinburgh is the place to be in August, especially this year, because on Monday, August 11, you will be able to see two Scouse authors for the price of one. Nicholas Murray, novelist, historian and biographer (of Bruce Chatwin, Kafka, Aldous Huxley, Andrew Marvell and others), will be talking about his latest book A Corkscrew is Most Useful: The Travellers of the Empire, a colourful collection of real-life accounts of travel in the Victorian age. Joining Nicholas on the stage of the Peppers Theatre on Monday evening will be your genial blog-host, talking about - What was it now? Oh yes - my book The French Riviera: a Literary Guide, a virtual literary tour of the Riviera covering the lives and work of the many writers who found inspiration there. Afterwards, both of us will be signing our books in the Festival bookshop.

Edinburgh International Book Festival, Monday, August 11th, 8.30pm. Hope you can make it.

CCL

2008-07-26T16:32:00.005+02:00

The Secretary of State for Culture, Media, Sport and Capital Letters, Andy Burnham, in an interview in The Times today, lists his interests: “Everton, the Labour Party and the Catholic Church – in that order”, he says. Well, one right out of three isn’t bad for a Government Minister - and at least he had the order right. It should qualify him for the post of party leader, except that he's not only English, but Scouse.

In case it escaped your attention, this is my 250th post. No, no, please, no fuss, flowers or fireworks. I wish I hadn’t mentioned it now – I can just hear you saying “And this is after 2½ years’ practice?”

Speaking of posts, I was standing in the queue at the Post Office last week and I saw these marker pens. Ah yes, I need marker pens, I say, and pick them up. But by the time I get to the counter I’ve found, on a label containing seven words, not one but two grammatical errors. I point out to the clerk that “pens” is plural, not singular, and that the plural of “CD” is “CDs”.
The clerk is unimpressed, and Italian. He says what the lady in Marks and Spencer said when I complained about the “Ten articles or Less” sign. “Do you want them or don't you?” he asks.
It’s my doryphoria again. Interesting word – means being excessively pedantic: it’s derived from the Greek word for a spear carrier. So why don’t we call spear carriers “doryphores” instead of “spear carriers”? What’s worse is that it also means Colorado beetle, despite the fact you never see a Colorado beetle, nor me, carrying a spear. Confusing.

But it’s not all bad news: Premiership football is only four weeks away.

A matter of form

2008-07-04T14:56:00.003+02:00

We all know how big business goes out of its way to make itself inaccessible to its customers - try making a complaint to Microsoft or France Telecom. I sympathise totally with the man who drove his Mercedes into the dealer’s showroom – through the window – in an attempt to get their attention.
I’ve been wondering how to get the attention of my bank.
I used to use a friendly local bank in rural Pennsylvania where they were helpful and efficient and gave you peppermints - and didn’t charge seniors checking fees.
Then, a few years ago, it was eaten up by an ugly giant bank, promising greater efficiency, more security, high tech online facilities etc.
The ugly giant is called Wachovia Bank - a name that would be much more appropriate if spoonerised.
I’ve been trying to use these supposedly secure online services – but the trouble is they're so secure you can’t use them. When I try to register they tell me I’m already registered, but when I try to log on they tell me my e-mail address is wrong!
When I try to ring the "toll-free" number (which is not toll-free but very expensive), after 20 minutes pushing cascade buttons, a dalek voice tells me to hit a key that doesn’t exist on a French 'phone. And when I e-mail – this is the worst – they reply with a standard form letter.

“I regret we were unable to fully assist you via email”, it says; then, incredibly, “If there is anything else that we can do for you, please do not hesitate to contact us. Have a great day."

It goes on: “I value your business as a Wachovia customer and look forward to
continuing to serve your financial needs.” Yes, “continuing”!

"If you have additional questions or concerns, please contact us via e-mail”.
But when I do so, they send another form letter. Their form letters are all the same – except that they have a random name generator which selects from a list of tasteful female first names, so they appear to come from some nice, caring lady with a '40s Hollywoodish name like Barbara, Audrey or Alison. When I say “Please, Marilyn, I beg you, do not send me another form letter”, the reply is – Aw, you guessed it.

Now they have the gall to start taking $5 out of my account every month because it’s a “dormant account”. Whose fault is that?

In New York last year, I thought I’d foil the system. I walked right into their branch on Sixth like I used to do in Paoli, PA. They said mine was not one of their account numbers! Remember the name: Bachovia Wank. The funny thing is, I’ve been trying to send them money.

The Crakow dawn

2008-06-26T12:34:00.009+02:00

We spent the summer solstice, (they call it “Wankia”, which is not as bad as it looks - I’m told just means White Night), in Poland, in a city called Crakow – so nice it makes you wonder why all those Polish people decide to come and live in Birmingham or Slough. Slough doesn’t have a gallery on anything like the scale of the Czartoryska Museum with its Breughels, da Vinci, Rembrandts, etc. In fact Slough doesn’t have a gallery at all.
And, unlike our language, Polish is so easy – word order is voluntary and there are no articles - definite or indefinite. The only slight problem is in trying to speak it. Our stop was Plac (square, that’s easy) Wszystkich Swiętych - even the tram drivers couldn’t say it. It made Casablanca’s Bashri Ibrahimi seem child’s play.

We took a 140 kilometre side trip. What do you say when people ask about your day? “Great”? “Terrific day out – enjoyed it immensely”? No, not if the visit was to Auschwitz. It’s something you do because you feel you should - unlike its earlier guests, who didn't have a choice.
In fact it was a beautiful day, and a pleasant journey – early harvest being gathered, hilltops perched by ancient castles and brooding monasteries…
Then you see the railway sidings, and the ramps where they opened the cattle trucks. Their journey was as different from ours as it’s possible to get: up to five days without food or water and no comfort stops. On the ramps, the cargo – Gypsies, Jews, Polish political prisoners, foreign resistance, prisoners of war (Geneva convention - what’s that?) - was “sorted”. Women, children and incapacitated males to the right, able-bodied males to the left, to be hired out as slaves to the IG Farben plant down the road.
The women were further sorted – the able-bodied became slaves and the rest rejoined the old, pregnant, disabled and the children. They were the lucky ones: their journey was nearly over.
Before the visit, we too are sorted: first by language, then by destination: Auschwitz and Birkenau here, Saltmines over there. Wear your badge and remember your bus number. But our numbers are self-adhesive - not tattoos.
The overwhelming impression is of Teutonic efficiency – mountains of no-longer-needed suitcases here; of shaven hair there (to line the overcoats of our brave soldiers on the Russian front); spectacles here; shoes there; prosthetic limbs here; teeth (after gold removal), there. In the end, when there was nothing left but naked bodies, they were gassed and shoved, by able-bodied fellow-prisoners, into incinerators – 30,000 bodies a night when on full production. The ashes went to the IG Farben factory to be made into fertiliser. (Farben thought the SS were charging too much, so they in-sourced the operation: they opened their own concentration camp.) It is recycling gone mad.

Back in our comfortable hotel room, watching those lavish, meaningless corporate image ads on CNN, we wonder what IG Farben’s corporate ad would look like. “Our most important asset is our workforce – until they drop dead”? “Half a century’s experience in unnatural gas”? But you don’t see these ads because it’s not called IG Farben any more – today it’s called Bayer or Hoechst.

When the Russians arrived in 1945, out of 1.5 million former inmates, there were only 7,500 left, including 90 pairs of identical twins. Of the 15,000 Russian prisoners of war there remained 90.
Of the 7,000 guards there remained, of course, none.

The Hay wane

2008-06-03T20:04:00.010+02:00

Another Hay is over (sorry, never got around to telling you about Milan. It's a wonderful city, the Pinacoteca di Brera art museum is one of the best anywhere, La Scala is on Verdi Street, and that's the Victor Emmanuel Gallery over on the left - a sort of up-market shopping mall). Yes, Hay waned and we've already booked for next year. New readers start with my post for May 25, 2007: this year's was the same only wetter and windier. As it's all under canvas, this means that the car parks closed and the rain on the roof and the wind flapping the canvas made things pretty inaudible at times, which was an advantage if you've come to hear Cherie Blair - which we hadn't. We did go with what we thought were open minds to hear John Bolton, but they didn't stay open - I just hate him more than I did. Some guy tried to make a citizen's arrest for complicity in crimes against humanity but a bunch of hefty SS men dressed as stewards grabbed him. (The guy, not Bolton - that would have been news) We didn't bother with Jimmy Carter because we didn't think he would be worth £50 - even at only half the price of Bill Clinton, but we liked a lot of things - in particular a documentary-in-the-making called Jazz Baroness, featuring Monk, Parker and others. But once again we've come back burdened with more books than we have room for, so we're having a book sale to make room for them. What am I bid for a 1998 Michelin Red Hotel Guide - in pristine condition?

Ford - or Trabant?

2008-05-19T18:07:00.010+02:00

It took me 4½ hours to get to Cannes on Saturday – normal time
one hour – for the last 10km of which I had to leave the car and catch a bus – which took two hours.
You guessed it: it’s the annual bunfight known as the Cannes Film Festival. Hotels, quintuple-priced, are jammed, not to mention the fancy villas. For example, Château Microsoft, otherwise known as Chez Ballmer, which faces us across the bay on Cap Ferrat, housing, this week only – according to Riviera Radio - Brad Pitt and the very preggie Angelina Jolie (How do you get a nice name like Jolie? You start with a name like Voigt.) and entourage. The USS Microsoft lies just offshore awaiting their every whim. Here’s a picture so you can glimpse the sort of good cause that your generous contributions are supporting.

On Saturday the Film Festival was less crowded than usual. No, not because Harrison Trabant was indisposed but because of the vast crowd attending the Big Book Signing at La Gaude. Those who know about these things decided to spurn a 65-year-old super-hero for a slightly more mature writer. An animated - and thirsty - gang of literary connoisseurs assembled at the Villa Luciane, including the hostess, Chantal Paillard; the illustrator, Bernard Payet (who also exhibited his original works for the book); and an anonymous Riviera writer. They were up in the foothills of the Maritime Alps celebrating the six-month anniversary of the launch of the well-known The French Riviera: A Literary Guide (ISBN 978-1-84511-455-8).

Oh ye of little faith

2008-05-12T13:02:00.003+02:00

On January 21, I announced what I thought would be Everton’s historic but short-lived arrival in fourth place of the Premiership. “Historic” and "short-lived" because no-one gets into the Big Four unless they’re dripping in money or foreign-owned or both. Sure enough, the People’s Club, owned and run by mere Brits, went down to fifth. But what’s incredible is that they stayed there, and yesterday the season finished - with the Blues STILL fifth.
They did a fantastic job, but special congratulations go to their Scottish (well, nobody’s perfect) manager, David Moyes, who won the prestigious Fink Tank Best Manager Award, for gaining the most points per pound spent.
I've nothing against the Big Four – in fact I love them all, except Man. U. – but in that sort of company, Best of the Rest is pretty good.

We’re off to Milan. No, we’re not really realtor-dodging – we always go away Pentecost weekend because we have some neighbours who always come Pentecost weekend. We board the train at our local Villefranche Dinky Toy station; but the train stops at Menton on this French side of the border and everyone has to get off. An anouncement says it can’t go any further because Italian Railways are on strike. With a couple of kilometres to go to the border and most people going only to the market in Ventimiglia – a further eight km. on the other side of it, about half waited for a promised bus, and the other half – which included us – headed for the Menton bus station.
The best we could do there was get a very crowded bus to Garavan, about 200m. from the border. Across the border there’s another split. About half decide to wait for the local bus to Ventimiglia, the rest – including us - decide to walk there. We didn’t know at the time that the Italian buses were also on strike, but with train tickets to Milan and hotel paid for, we were too mean to take a chance, so off we set with the rest in a remake of Exodus. Differences: while Charlton Heston may have had the Red Sea, he didn’t have a suitcase with dodgy wheels and it wasn’t uphill all the way.
We had planned to call a cab from Latte, 5k along the way, but with 200 metres to go, along came a mirage with a Mercedes emblem on the front and the word TAXI on the roof and in ten minutes we were in XXmiglia. But it was market day: the traffic was at a standstill, so we had to walk the last 500 metres!
At the station we find the strike will end at 1 o’clock and there's a train to Milan at three. It was quite a lunch.
And what about Milan? That will have to be the next post – I’m on sympathy strike just now.

The shaming of the true

2008-05-08T18:42:00.002+02:00

It is a well-known fact – and was put on the public record by my cardiologist in the spring of 1996 that I am “inordinately fond of cheese”. I thought it an elegant turn of phrase and have since been known to use it myself, but of course never failing to credit the assumed author.
But it would seem that Dr Ilsley could be a plagiarist.
There I was, innocently looking up how to catch a shrew alive – I’ve already got one, but hell, you can’t have too many – when I came upon, in the section on shrew-catching on page 18 of a book called Small Mammals, by Adrian Barnett and John Dutton - published in January 1995 (remember that, it’s significant) the following phrase: “contrary to popular opinion rodents are not inordinately fond of cheese".
Of course, it’s possible that the good doctor – which he is – could, exactly one year later, have coined the expression himself. But it’s much more romantic to think that he took the trouble to hone his micro-surgical skills on field-mice, and consequently was able to save my life.
If they sue, he can count on me as a character witness - if I'm still around.

Off to Milan tomorrow, ostensibly for some Gothic churches, parmigiano and Jack Daniel's, but it's really to escape real-estate salemen. See you next week.

Caid mille failte

2008-05-06T21:58:00.003+02:00

It’s my Mum’s birthday today. She would be 118 years old if she were alive - so I guess it's a good thing she's not. She hasn’t had the same coverage as Dad because she died much earlier so I knew him for longer. But she was as much a part of what I am as he was. If he was me, the brakes, she was the accelerator; he, hermit, she, gregarious. They were both Celts, but he was the Welsh one and she was Irish.
They lived in an era before the word “baby-sitter” was invented - when having kids was the whole point, not a temporary interruption of your social life. (A young relative complained recently that she couldn’t go somewhere because she had to babysit. When asked for whom she was sitting, it turned out that she would have to look after her own child!) That’s how lucky we were - Nancy and Walter made a lifetime career of my brothers and me. I’m no judge of how well they did it, except that I wish my own kids had had something as good.
They were a traditional working class couple – in those days a wife who worked was a reflection on the husband’s manhood. But she did – she cleaned for Mirabel Topham, who lived on - and owned - my school-holiday playground, Aintree Racecourse.
My memories of Sunday nights in 58 Arthur Street, Walton, are of ceilidhs, though they may not have happened every Sunday, except in my nostalgic haze. My mother was Scouse-Irish, and on those – let’s call them occasional - Ceilidh nights our little house would shake to the Gaelic music on Radio Eireann, to which Mum, aunts and assorted expatriate Micks would dance - or sometimes sing. That “shake” was literally true, because someone – usually Jimmy Gardner, to whom - for he was the tallest – would be deputed the task of pushing back the wet-battery radio to stop it falling off the sideboard. We kids were usually in bed at the time, but missed nothing, and heard, rather than saw, the ceilidh, but my mental image of the scene was of something between Riverdance and Gaelic football on rollerskates.
The signal for the end of the evening was the midnight time signal followed by what I used to think was a jolly nice quickstep, but know now was Amhrán na bhFiann, the Irish national anthem. Even now I still can’t hear it without a momentary flashback. Happy Birthday Mum.

This is not this

2008-05-05T17:48:00.007+02:00

I just realised that if you Google me in search of this blog, you may get a page on Writers Weekly which indicates that I have contributed to its Forum six times since 2004.
Except that I haven’t - it's a coincidence. The author, it seems, is one Heather Stimmler-Hall. Ms Stimmler-Hall, although she has a far more distinctive name than mine, has a rather similar profile – travel writer, lives in France, (it doesn't say Everton, but, being from Phillie she could be an Eagles fan, which is as good) and uses the handle "rivierawriter". Since it seems she has been using it for four years to my three, she probably has more right to it than I. There are other differences: her picture’s a give-away for a start. It’s as much like me as Dorian Gray’s was to him, and it’s clear to even the most visually challenged that this is no TJ in disguise.
So I hope we can continue to enjoy our respective places in Blogland and that she’ll trust me not to bask in her fame or accept any work that is rightfully hers. I just wanted to say I chose the name innocently because that’s where I live and what I do sometimes.

Talking about distinctive names, Joan Hunter-Dunne died last month. She had obituaries in all the posh broadsheets; The Times (OK, not a broadsheet now, but still posh), The Sunday Times, The Guardian and even a leader in the Telegraph. What did she do? Well – er, nothing really. In her 92 years, her only claim to fame was that she worked in the same government office as a future poet laureate, John Betjeman, who, without knowing who she was, heard her name and, enchanted by its hypnotic, train-like ca-diddly-dah metre, wrote a poem that began “Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn, furnished and burnished by Aldershot sun”.
Philip Larkin was much impressed. and Joan might have gone on to even greater literary fame, had she not ruined it all by marrying a man called Jackson. “Joan Jackson” didn’t have the same cachet - or metre - so that was the end of her career as a muse. It could have been worse – she might have married someone called Jones. Not a name that's going to get you an obit. in The Times.

Don't bank on it

2008-04-25T18:23:00.009+02:00

I have a lot of problems with my Bank – not the least of which is their staff’s infuriating habit of calling it “Haitch SBC”. (I resolved that at the first opportunity, I would ask the management why their staff training didn’t include advising people the name of the firm they work for - but the next manager I spoke to also called it “Haitch SBC”.)
With staff exhaling violently whenever they announce themselves, their call centres must be like wind-tunnels.
But collective aspiration is a minor irritation. Another problem is their web-site. Why do so many big companies have user-hostile websites while smaller ones are usually much easier to use? OK, their businesses are less complicated, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who used to scream at the British Airways screen, “Go and look at Easyjet’s”. In the end they did, and it shows. Perhaps HSBC should look at Nationwide’s.
But the site's most annoying idiosyncrasy – of many - is the way it asks you, in the middle of whatever you’re doing, if you would prefer NOT to be logged off. If you happen to be looking elsewhere at the time, you’re off.
(The creeping "haitch" is not confined solely to HSBC - a guy in Curry’s the other day tried to sell us a TV that was “Haitch D ready” – it sounds like a folk singer. I wouldn’t buy anything from a guy who says “Haitch D ready” even if he didn’t have halitosis.)
Not only that, but the words he should have aspirated, like "have" or "here", he pronounced "'ave" and "'ere".

I’m enjoying a Christmas present, Passionate Minds, about Voltaire’s affair with Emilie, Marquise de Châtelet – one of the first women physicists - in the early 18th century. Writing about the Enlightenment period, author David Bodanis says, “In writing your thoughts in a letter rather than in a private, confessional diary, you’re showing that you’re proud enough […] to expect that other people will want to hear what you’re expressing, about yourself. Emilie wrote an immense number of such letters[…]”
Sounds like she was also the first woman blogger.

Could I have a word?

2008-04-23T17:21:00.004+02:00

Things are not going too well domestically. In fact things are grim. Every year we start a new series of Scrabble and it’s my unspoken resolution to win the Scrabble World Series, but I never get further than Most Promising Newcomer – which, considering I was one of its Beta testers when it was launched, is stretching it a bit.
What’s even more galling is that back in January I was leading 10 games to 9 and rehearsing my lap of honour. Then she won the next seven games on the trot. The score now is DG 22; Wordsmith 15.
I may have identified the problem: I discovered only last night that there are four “u” tiles in the set. All these years I've had the unshakeable belief that there were five. And, since all my favourite words have multiple “u”s – crepuscule, unguent, pustulate, unctuous, and my ultimate favourite, curmudgeon (which she says is appropriate because I am), I consider myself unfairly handicapped. Either that or there were five and she’s hidden one.
The solution came to me last night. From tomorrow – can’t tonight, it’s the big footy match – we adopt the European system. She will play with the tile set she knows and loves. Mine will be Polish.

BA humbug

2008-04-16T23:32:00.003+02:00

I did a post a couple of years ago warning people to watch out for guys – it’s always guys – with diminutive names. (Unless of course they’re jazz musicians.)
At the time I meant politicians. (You knew where you were with Mark Antony - he didn’t call himself “Markey”; it was that Pompey who was up to no good.) But who would trust a guy called Bertie Ahern, the Irish taoiseach at the time? And if he’s a double-diminutive, like his predecesor, Charley Haughey, you have to be twice as wary.
Now Bertie, whom Charley called “the most skilful, […] devious[…] and cunning” of politicians, (from Charley, praise indeed), has quit over “unexplained transactions” of about £600,000.
What I said in 2006 was
‘He said it was “a misjudgement”. First it was “only $60,000”, then “a speaking fee”, then “an unsolicited gift to help me over my separation” then “a loan”. Now, it’s a misjudgement.’
But Bertie’s replacement is obviously a man on whom you can depend: he has the solid, diminutiveless name of Brian Cowen. But according to my news bible, The Week, it seems he’s not known as Brian Cowen. In political circles they call him “Biffo” – an acronym for “the Big Ignorant Fucker From Offaly”.
Meanwhile, highly-paid British Airways PR consultants are trying to hide their new Chief Exec because of the Terminal 5 debacle. (Following on the “Gate Gourmet” and the “wearing a cross on your necklace” debacles - which admittedly weren't on his watch.) Next it’ll be the "Great Third Runway Debacle". I’d like to write to him to complain about aircraft noise, but he’s the diminutively-named Willie Walsh.

Weather retort

2008-04-08T17:08:00.005+02:00

I took this picture three days ago, when the bay didn’t look like it does now. It’s been raining most of the time since then: at times you can’t see the other side of the bay. I’m not looking for sympathy – in fact I no longer tell people in England when we have bad weather. They have this conspiracy. “It’s beautiful here”, they all say – whether it is or not. They don’t actually say, “Na na ni na na – serves you right for gloating about your weather all these years”, but you can tell by the smug tone that it’s there.

It’s tough being a football manager. Steve MacLaren, when he was England coach, once – just once - carried a huge umbrella, quite reasonably, to keep the rain off his Simpson’s suit. The tabloids made him the national wuss. Even the Guardian, no less, gave “Sheltering under an umbrella” one of the ten reasons why he should not be England manager. (Although some of its other reasons - like playing Joleon Lescott - have since been endorsed by the new manager.)
The result is that ambitious football managers, if they want the England job, have to stand out in wind and rain in just their suits - like poor Gareth Southgate last weekend, catching pneumonia, while the ones who’ve already made it – like the nose-picking knight – can be snug in their Umbro-supplied anoraks.

Jones's Law

2008-04-08T10:56:00.004+02:00

I once had dinner with Gilbert Northcote Parkinson, author (this for those under forty) of Parkinson's Law. In awe of the best-selling humorist, I spent days preparing for an evening of merry banter. The food was excellent, but it was a long and tedious meal: I assumed my repartee had failed to bring out his latent humour, but later consoled myself with the thought that funny writers are not funny in person because they're too busy worrying about what funny stuff they're going to write next or in which tax haven they're going to live. Over the years I have derived much comfort from assuming that the converse is equally true: that the reason I can't write funny is because I'm such hilarious company.

I didn't write this either - I stole it from the Sunday Times:
Doctor: "You're going to die".
Patient: "I'd like a second opinion".
Doctor: "You're ugly".

We had fun over dinner last night with the thought that British place names don't appear in song titles because, unlike American ones, they're not glamorous. It explains, for instance, why "By the time I get to Wigan" never made it to No 1; nor, I guess, will "Sunderland, Oh Sunderland" or "In my mind I'm goin' to Wolverhampton".
Penny Lane anyone?

Irritable Vowel Syndrome

2008-04-02T19:12:00.003+02:00

I spent ten years in New Zealand (for the same offence today you’d probably get eight and be out in four) and when I got back to England I found that when I asked for a pen, someone would give me a pin. I had caught IVS – the dreaded Irritable Vowel Syndrome.
It’s an illness that affects all Kiwis; it’s highly contagious, and the only cure is expatriation. We saw how quickly it affected Ian Botham and David Gower when they covered the recent series of Tist Metches.
You don't feel a thing - it strikes at your vowel movements: IVS sufferers transform the letter “a” into an “e”; “e” into “i”; “i” into “o”; “o” into “u”; “u” becomes “a” - or disappears completely. Thus: Wan p’lls beck th’ cendlewock bidsprid, gits ap, drissed, end cetches thu bas tu wurk. Somple, usn’t ut?

Thet’s ut for thus wik – but you can see how cetching ut us - must stop now before my Spellcheck overheats. Next week: double vowels - “oe”, “ou” etc., and how to distinguish a Kiwi from an Oz. (Th’ Kiwis are the wans thet lit as wun Tist Metches.)

Once more unto the beach

2008-03-28T11:26:00.005+01:00

As the English winter goes into what seems to be its 10th month, I’ve been turning grumpy. “If you’re so rude about the French”, asked a puzzled but loyal reader, “how come you can’t wait to get there?” Easy – I’m not rude about the French: I may not be mad about Sarko, but then I’m not crazy about most politicians, whatever their nationality or party. In fact, French pols are probably closer to the will of the people than ours are: at least they didn’t join George and Tony’s war while a million people walked the streets in protest. And yes, I have more French friends than English ones; and yes, perhaps I should give Sarko a decent chance. He’s certainly making the right noises, which is more than you could say for his predecessor: and his predecessor – the famous Resistance hero - was even worse. Meanwhile we Poms can’t talk: we have the man who isn’t Blair – or anyone else for that matter. But all will be well next week – just one look at that blue water and I’m Monsieur Nice.

Shoot-out at the Old Kop corral No one likes political posts, so, to the Matter of the Greatest Importance in the RW household.
The MGI is that Everton are fifth in the table - two points behind Liverpool, who are fourth, and there remain only seven games to play. Only the top four teams go into the Champions League. You get the picture.
On Sunday afternoon, the two play each other for the 207th time. If the Blues beat the Reds, we (I mean "they") go a point ahead and become fourth. If the other way round, Everton go five points behind. Wife is a Reds supporter – bless: she was very young at the time. It was built into the (unwritten) pre-nuptial agreement that I am forbidden from making disparaging remarks about them, even if they are a foreign-owned and –coached bunch of overpaid prima donnas, awash with money that you'd think they might be sharing with their poorer neighbours and – until 1892 – landlords. Now - another pillar of the pre-nup is the Exception to the Non-Disparagement Rule: that it does not apply when the two play each other. Now can you feel the tension?
Even had to iron my own blue shirt.

Stance and Circumpomp

2008-03-26T18:46:00.006+01:00

We had a distinguished visitor in Windsor today: the vertically-challenged president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy and his new wife, Carla Bruni - so we went along to show a bit of entente cordiale. The Castle pulled out all the ceremonial stops – bands, cavalry, parades. Not Sarko. The last time I saw a republican president in this country it was William J. Clinton, and he did a walk-about and shook hands with us all. Not Sarko: he was met by the Queen at the railway station but, contrary to the advertised schedule, arrived by car, decided to stay at the castle one night instead of three, and, instead of travelling in the open coach with the Queen, skulked in the back of an enclosed carriage. At least he was polite enough to discard the Ray-bans – they're not an absolute necessity in Windsor. If there’s not much of him to see in bright sunshine, as the pic shows there’s even less in a shrouded coach.
Mrs S was a different item - I guess her name would translate into Charlie Brown. They went up to London to meet the PM. If he’d called in the Defence minister they’d have had three of a kind.

Au revoir Maroc

2008-03-08T17:26:00.006+01:00

Take-away chicken We were kindly invited to Larache this weekend - it’s up north near Tangier - but we refused, mainly because it would be an eleven-hour round trip and we go home tomorrow. But there's another reason: the Rough Guide to Morocco advises that, if invited out, it’s considered polite to take food - and recommends a live chicken. The thought of sitting on a train holding a live chook for 5½ hours was too much. At least we wouldn't have to bring it back.

Tomorrow we swap our cloudless skies and 22 degree temperatures for rainy, 8ｰdegree London. We’ll miss Casablanca. We’ve had fun lampooning the strange, but we’ve really enjoyed the people here. OK, so the odd taxi-driver may have tried to rip us off - just like those in London do - but hardly anyone else. We’ll remember the many acts of kindness: the kid who got us through the labyrinthine Medina of Fes and refused any reward; the passengers on the train who told us to stay put although we were clearly in someone else’s seats and the rightful occupants were standing in the corridor (we moved); Hassan, with whom we've chatted every day, despite the fact that neither party could understand a word the other said. Will we be back next winter? As they say here, inchallah.

TAnGier

2008-03-07T11:03:00.005+01:00

In a quandary over Cliff's tag. Because of baggage restrictions, I only have three books with me, and two of them don't have enough sentences on page 123. There's the Casablancan yellow pages - great cast, crap plot - which would bring us into Auto-collants, or Self-adhesives, so it looks like I'm stuck with book three.
It's called Morocco and is a collection of writings about the country. The quote is from Tangier: A Different Way by Lawdom Vaidon, American freelance journalist and table-tennis champion of northern Morocco for seven consecutive years, and tells of a cosmopolitan part of Tangier called Soco Chico, home to fugitive expatriates of various kinds. The first two sentences are about Bill Burroughs, heroin addict and wealthy grandson of the adding machine tycoon.
"He could produce an excellent curry when he felt like it, and though his quarters usually resembled a sea of books, typing paper, temporarily discarded clothes, syringes, needles and the remains of yesterday's spaghetti, he remained a popular host. The 'different' novel that he was writing was published in 1959 as The Naked Lunch.
Everybody in the Soco was respectful to Paul Lund, a self-styled and proved criminal - he had spent three years in Dartmoor - who was on the run from the English Midlands."
Good book as far as it goes, but one editor, Robert Bidwell, died before publication and the other, his wife Margaret, seems to have lost interest in it and didn't even bother with an index. Surprising, really, in view of the fact that the publishers are the eminent TPP, publishers of such unforgettable works as The French Riviera: A Literary Guide, (ISBN 978-1-84511-455-8).

Fes tivities

2008-03-06T11:14:00.005+01:00

We stayed in a riad in the old town. They’re a sort of posh B & B, usually hidden down some dark alley in the Medina, and - even after three days of residence - not easy to find. The Riad Arabesque is a former Andalusian/ Moroccan palace tastefully restored, its sumptuous reception hall looking as if Sydney Greenstreet might stroll in at any moment in a crumpled white suit. The first night they told us that dinner would be “special”. It was held in one of the rooms off the hall: singers and oud players - are they oudists? - wandered in and out as we reclined on low couches and more cushions than John Lewis’s; people plying us with Morrocan delicacies like stuffed aubergines, sun-dried tomatoes, and wild artichokes - thirteen dishes in all; at the end of which we could hardly move. That was the starter. After that came the lamb tajine, with which we coped gamely before falling back exhausted into the cushions. That was when the chicken tajine arrived. I recall vaguely refusing various deserts: dates, fruits, etc., and cheese and as we struggled upstairs the DG saying something about surgical intervention, but it’s all something of a blur. Breakfast turned out to be similar, but with only 12 courses. We gave dinner a miss.

Halfway between Fes and the coast is the Meknes wine territory - mile after mile of flat, sunny vineyards which produce most of Morocco’s wine. We knew some of them beore we got here, (even Windsor has a Moroccan restaurant) but we decided to try our luck down-market - and got as far as the Gerouane - red, white, rosé or gris (a near-rosé) - without problems. One of these would cost you 32dh - a whole £2 - but our favourite red is still the Domaine du Sahari Reserve, costing an outrageous 63dh, or £4. We found the answer to what happens to empty bottles: they go in the poubelle - there are no facilities for recycling them. But it still hurts.

It was like missing an open goal and I blew it. Our American friends who live in an eagle’s nest, high above Villefranche, are often telling us that they’ve seen (100-miles-away) Corsica - while we who spend our lives down in the town haven’t seen it since the mid-eighties. But the other day they mailed to say that they saw Elba.
It was probably the only time in my life I’ll have the opportunity to say “And are you now able?”, and I didn't.

Fes please

2008-03-02T21:17:00.008+01:00

We took the comfortable four-hour train trip to Fes. It’s the oldest of the ancient imperial cities - founded in the ninth century by the great-grandson of Mohammed himself, and from what we could see, not much changed.
In fact there are at least two Feses. When the French took over after 1912, the enlightened French Governor, Hubert Lyautey, decided to leave the old medieval Fes untouched and to build the new French colonial city outside of the old town. (Edith Wharton was so taken with Lyautey that she dedicated her book, In Morocco, to him.) There are only three kilometres between the old town and the new, but the difference is striking: one modern, prosperous, with wide, tree-lined boulevards, fountains and pavement cafes; the other the seething Medina, the ancient Arab quarter - the quarter is ancient, not the Arabs - its narrow streets so winding and undulating that it’s impossible, even with a compass and solar navigation, to keep one’s bearings for more than a few minutes. It doesn’t help, either, that the streets and landmarks are hardly ever labelled, or if they are, it’s in some Jackson Pollock-like script like the product of a leaky paint tin. Your only hope is that some ten-year-old kid will take pity on you and ask what you are looking for. Then the challenge is to remember the name of the mosque (of which there are over 400) that you were so confident of remembering when you read about it the previous evening.
Such is the topography of the Medina that the only practicable means of transport is donkey-powered. Sad-looking - but then, what have they got to laugh about? - spindly-legged donkeys and mules squeeze by, almost invisible under their huge loads, while recumbent on top of it all is the animal’s owner. When Napoleon called the English “a nation of shopkeepers”, he obviously hadn’t seen Morocco. The souks consist of miles upon miles of tiny stalls, their size seeming still to fit Mark Twain’s description when he was here in the 1860s: “about that of an ordinary shower-bath in a civilised land” (in Twain's view there was only one civilised land). Every fourth shop seems to be a shoe store - just like the shopping malls at home except that there’s not a chain store in sight.
Among the seething crowds of locals, tourists are comparatively rare - but they’re there, in their M & S chinos and Panama hats, Indian-filing behind their guide like baby ducklings. As a group passed us, someone called out the first English words we'd heard in three weeks: “donkey-poo”. And the warning was passed down the line: “donkey-poo, everybody”.
Most people wear floor-length, hooded djellabahs, the men's woollen, those of the women - in scarves but not veils - lighter-coloured and more decorative, and the girls wear smaller replicas. The young guys wear baseball caps and football shirts bearing names like Beckham and Ronaldinho.
But I never saw anyone wearing a Fez.

A refuse you can’t offer

2008-02-26T19:35:00.006+01:00

We tend to accumulate - not excessively but on a fairly regular basis - wine bottles. This is not a problem - certainly not in Windsor, where the Council give you a special container and call every Tuesday to empty it; or in France, where you take them to a nearby recyclage. But what to do with them here is a serious and growing problem.
In Morocco, it being a Muslim - and largely boozeless - country, drinks receptacles come in either plastic or cardboard: there's no need for glass bottles, and there are no facilities for recycling them. When it’s only a matter of a honey- or mustard-jar or two, there’s no harm in putting them in with the rubbish. But putting bottles into landfill is something we are now conditioned not to do. We can't leave them for the landlord to dispose of. What to do? Answers on a post card.

As predicted here, Everton beat Manchester City last night and are now back in fourth place, and breathing down the neck of the number three. It’s an over-used word I know, but it really is phenomenal, especially when you think of the money Chelsea and the other big guys spend. I’m surprised that no journalist - as far as I know - has remarked on this phenomenon: though it‘s something Finkelstein may well have done. It seems to me there’s a great story to be written based on the ‘points won per pound spent’ value of our top clubs’ management. When it happens, David Moyes‘s canonization - if not sainthood - should be assured. But there's a cloud on the horizon; a problem more serious than wine bottles. Would this marriage survive both Everton and Liverpool being in the Champions League next year?

Greetings and a message to the faithful reader(s) in Valencia who join us nearly every evening around happy hour and are now north of us for a change: thanks for your interest and support. By the way, what do you do with your empties?
Off to Fès in the morning.

Going places - but not the right ones

2008-02-24T13:46:00.011+01:00

Getting around is always a challenge for me. As I tend to get lost easily, I carry a compass and map as if traversing the Gobi desert - even when going to Windsor Post Office. But in Casablanca it’s especially challenging: it’s not only the unfamiliar street names, but the fact that they are in the gradual process of replacing the old French names with Moroccan ones. This means that every street map you get is different depending on when it was printed. Further complications are that not many of the streets are sign-posted anyway, and even the locals do not know the current nomenclature.
The other evening I was having difficulty directing a taxi driver to our street - Bashir Ibrahimi - and, thinking that the problem was my Arabic pronunciation, I asked him what its original name was, so that I could find it on my map. He said. “I don’t know - taxi drivers know only the French names”. (That space under the sign is where the original name - which I now know to be Rue des Quinconces - used to be.)
So the procedure is as follows: find a street that you both know that still has a French name and navigate from there. It‘s a bit like the old Radio Four game, Mornington Crescent:
“Avenue de Londres?”
“No.”
“Rue Foucaud?“
“No.”
“Boulevard de la Resistance.”
“Yes!”.
The other day I had to get to the British Embassy to get something signed. What I had thought was an impeccable pronunciation of “Royaume Uni” was repeated back by the driver as “Roumanie” and off we sped, crammed with our shopping into the back seat of a Fiat Uno, not knowing whether we were on our way to the Roumanian Embassy - or Bucharest.

Je n'egret rien. The DG complains that I am obsessing on storks. There seems to be some controversy about whether they're storks or egrets: can anyone help? But who was it gave me the camera?

Back last December I posted that Everton were fourth in the table. I did it in a hurry because I thought it wouldn't last out the day. Well, they are still fourth, even if - unless they’re playing one of the top three - they continue to appear last on Match of the Day. You can guess why I’m posting this now: Liverpool play Middlesborough later today.
(OK, so now you know I didn’t manage to post this in time. The Reds beat 'boro and we’ve now swapped places with them. But we play Man City tonight...)

Blessed are the pizza makers

2008-02-22T12:44:00.007+01:00

They make great pizzas in Rabat, thin and crispy and not smothered in tasteless cheese. All the food is good in fact - I only highlight pizzas because I liked the title - but the best bit is the bill. Salad, sole and filet steak, a good bottle of wine and coffee for two people (that’s one bottle of course) with tip, set us back £24.
Rabat is about 100 kilometres north of Casablanca, but a universe away if measured in terms of civic pride. Wider boulevards, cleaner streets, shallower potholes, clearer air, quieter traffic and more discreet calls to prayer. Perhaps the last two are linked: Oxford City Council is currently debating whether to allow one of the city’s mosques to do its muezzin over loudspeakers. If they do, let it be along the lines of Rabat. Casablancan worshippers are summoned by something along the lines of a Brazilian football commentator on steroids – a noise level that I guess is necessary to compete with all the other street sounds. The DG asked a guy yesterday if they’d ever thought of bells. He smiled indulgently - it’s a national characteristic that no one admits voluntarily that they don’t have something.
The menu last night listed about a dozen items of fish:
“I’ll have the turbot aux fines herbes.”
Shrug. “Sorry, we don’t have turbot.”
“OK. I’ll have the St. Pierre aux champignons.”
“Sorry, no St. Pierre.”
“What kinds of fish do you have?”
“Sole.”
At the newsstands, it goes:
“Do you have The Times?” The answer is either “It didn’t come today” or “There are none left”. In three days, we never saw an English paper - which after all isn’t surprising: we haven’t seen a Brit or American, or heard an Anglo-Saxon word since we’ve been in Morocco. It’s doing wonders for our French, if not our Arabic.

That's the 12th century gate to the Kasbah in Rabat. We went to Rabat on Edith Wharton’s recommendation. She was right. New monuments can be impressive, beautiful even: old ones are also moving. The walled town of Chellah, just outside Rabat, for example: first - from 20BC for three centuries - the Romans, then in the 12thC everyone left and it has remained uninhabited ever since. (Well that’s what it says in the guidebooks, but a security man pointed out the house, half-covered in foliage, and garden where the first French Governor, (from 1912) Marshall Hubert Lyautey, had lived - clearly derelict, but far from a 2,000- or 900-year-old ruin.) Edith was very impressed by Chellah; and apparently also by Hubert, whom she knew when she was here in 1917.
But there are other inhabitants who hardly get a mention: hundreds of them. They’re everywhere you look, occupying every height and mating, with a call that’s a strange rattle like a North American woodpecker in low gear. Yes, storks. All that's missing is the hoarse whisperer, David Attenborough.

Isn't she lovely

2008-02-17T22:55:00.005+01:00

Everyone asks if we’ve seen the Grand Mosque. We went there yesterday. It’s big - I mean BIG. The nave would comfortably house Wembley and the Giants Stadia and still leave room for Goodison Park, (though perhaps the Emirates would be more apt). It’s also exceptional in that non- Muslims are allowed in, except on Fridays - and I’m glad to say one is allowed, exceptionally, to carry one’s shoes in a bag rather than leave them at the door - much more sensible, (especially during Ramadan, when it can house 25,000 worshippers) than coming outside to find a 50,000-shoe mountain. Especially if you’ve just bought a pair of Bally’s and you aren’t the first out.

Strange things happen in taxis: if there’s an empty seat, people will stop you and - - if you’re going their way - hop in. Very eco-friendly, and presumably helps keeps the price down: the most we’ve paid so far was still less than £2 - for a 5-kilometre trip. Kids approach you at traffic lights, selling roses or paper tissues - and today a guy stopped the car, waited until the driver wound his window down, and said, ‘Madame, Monsieur, I would like to sing you a little song.’ - and bursts into it, accompanied by cab driver on Arabic obscenities. As we speed away, the Casablancan Stevie Wonder just manages to extricate head from taxi in time to prevent it departing therewith. Off to Rabat tomorrow, for, we’re told, a bit of sanity.

The Quick or the Dead

2008-02-16T16:26:00.004+01:00

We’re still trying to get the hang of the Casablanca traffic and hoping we get it before it gets us. It reminds you of the old Irish joke about switching from left- to right-hand drive in stages - cars only for the first year, then trucks and busses. The Casablancan Highway Code as I read it is: cars stop on red lights, bikes and scooters never. Pedestrians have no idea what‘s going on, because, to add to the excitement, the colour of the lights is a secret to all except drivers approaching the crossing. Thus ‘cars still’ means you can cross, but only until the lights change, an event that you do not become aware of until three lanes of bikes and Peugeot 106s are hurtling towards you, horns a-braying. There are traffic cops, but their function is unclear: sometimes they’re pro-lights, sometimes they’re anti. When in anti-lights mode you can’t tell which stance means Stop - profile or full frontal? - until he's approaching wielding a wad of tickets.
It sure keeps your weight down, but I can’t help wondering how many lives might be saved by a few Run like Hell!/Don’t Run signs

I’m not complaining - honest. We don’t have a word for depaysagement - unfamiliarity I guess - the thrill of not being at home - of expecting the unexpected. It’s more fun than being in Florida or Grand Canary - or even Windsor - where everyone speaks English and you can’t get lost. We have a super apartment, in which, although we can't both be online at the same time (one of us is XP and the other Vista, and each system jealously demands the deinstallation of the other's driver!) we have so far coexisted amicably. Just watch this space...

Another try at looking at you

2008-02-14T14:46:00.003+01:00

When Murray Burnett was sitting in the Grand Hotel du Cap on Cap Ferrat writing Everybody Comes to Ricks – later to be given the much sexier name Casablanca – I suspect he may never have been to Casablanca. If so, as well as telling us about the corrupt police chief rounding up the usual suspects, he would have mentioned Air Quality. The AQ reminds you of LA on a bad day – with added dust. Construction and deconstruction seem to be Casablancas cottage industry, and the guys who aren’t knocking something down or building something are watching others do it. If doing any of these, youre allowed to block whole pavements, leaving the rest – ie. tourists and women – to dance pasadobles with the traffic.
Ah yes, the traffic. Tahir Shah, in his otherwise excellent book, The Caliphs House: A Year in Casablanca, fails to mention it. When a Casablancan checks out a new car, he must test the horn first, for noise level and durability. The average motorist has one hand permanently on the horn, one on the mobile phone, one on the gear stick and one on the wheel – using them in that order of priority. OK, so that’s four: I guess the horn must be foot-operated. The first result is double-glazing -defying, ear-plug-penetrating, noise, 24/7. The second result is that other drivers don’t notice it any more, thus causing klaxoneurs to klaxon, not less, but more, in the hope of even being noticed.
I should explain why this post is apostrophe-bereft: I cant find it. Its bad enough learning to use a French/Arabic AZERTY keyboard and having to go through afterwards changing the qs to as, but now I live in fear of Lynne Truss reading it. (The DG did have the presence of mind to bring her laptop but the ADSL line isn’t – hey! An apostrophe – what did I do? – Vista-compatible). That’s (another one!) enough for today. Ill tell you something about Casablanca later.

Heres looking at Casablanca - through the haze

2008-02-14T14:27:00.001+01:00

To Erm is Human

2008-02-07T16:52:00.000+01:00

After England’s pedestrian performance against Switzerland last night – literally so, since much of it was played at walking pace – the BBC selected two Scousers for interview, and we saw Rooney and Gerrard competing to see how many “erm”s you can get into a single interview, I think Gerrard won by 47 to Rooney’s mere 35. But to be fair, Gerrard was asked more – erm – questions than – erm – Rooney. And they couldn’t interview the coach because they don’t have an “erm” in Italian.

Road to Morocco When you look in the London Library catalogue for books about Morocco you get 249 responses. But don’t get too excited, because in half the cases it’s a reference to the binding. Like Hope, Crosby and Shakespeare’s 1623 folio of “The Tragedie of Julius Caesar”, we’re Morocco-bound. We’re Casablanca-bound to be precise: I’ve had the trench-coat dry-cleaned and am learning not to grit my teeth when friends put on funny accents and say “Play it Sam” or “Here's looking at you, kid”.
Having spent some time in Marrakech a couple of years ago, we decided that this year we would spurn the tourist traps and see out the last of the winter in a real working city.
But we’re beginning to have misgivings, whatever they are, because we fear we may gone too far. Sandford’s, London’s leading map shop, can sell you maps and guide books on Marrakech, Fez and Meknes, but not of Casablanca. The Moroccan Tourist Board produces a glossy brochure called “The Imperial Cities”, which recommends doing a 1,047-kilometre road trip that takes them all in: Marrakech, Fez, Meknes and Rabat. Casablanca, although it’s on the route and is bigger than all four of them put together, does not get a mention. Casablanca is literally not on the tourist map.
But as I said to the - erm - DG, “It don’t amount to a hill o’ beans. We'll always have Marrakech".

Fœtal attraction

2008-01-21T18:27:00.000+01:00

There’s a story in today’s paper about a woman who is about to become the UK record-holder in surrogate motherhood. She planned to get out of the womb-rental business after number seven, but has now decided she doesn’t like not being pregnant, so is going for the record. Phil Wallis, chairman of something called the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Committee said, “We have to make sure women are not psychologically damaged as a result of surrogacy.” The mass-producing Mum, who doesn’t want children but charges £12,000 a pop to hatch them, said, “I wish I was ten years younger so I could fit more in”. Looks like it’s too late, Mr Wallis.

It’s crisis time in Jones Towers. No, I’m not blogging again, honest. I just had to publish this while it’s still true: after their win at Wigan yesterday, Everton are now FOURTH. More importantly, that puts them above Liverpool! You’ll appreciate the urgency when I tell you that Liverpool play Aston Villa in 2½ hours’ time. So what’s the crisis, you ask.
The crisis is that the DG supports Liverpool.

Hello, goodbye

2008-01-07T00:45:00.000+01:00

It hasn’t been a good year so far: Everton were put out of the FA Cup yesterday – by a team 62 places below them.

The more perceptive will have noticed – but don’t feel inadequate if you didn't - that the word ‘photograph’ in the previous post is the 100,000th word of this blog. It’s a milestone of sorts: it also marks the second anniversary of the start of the blog – on Twelfth Night, 2006. More significantly, it’s about the length of the average novel, which means that if I had decided two years ago to put the same amount of effort into a book, it would be ready to go right now – whereas in fact I don't have a book, and have made negative progress on the one I was working on. By “negative” I don’t mean zilch; I mean worse than zilch: I’m further away than I was two years ago because a lot of the earlier research has gone stale and will have to be done again.
The review of my 2006 resolutions to see how actual performance compared hasn't exactly been cheering either. I make it 100%: 100% failure. Failed to improve on score rate against the formidable Moll at Scrabble; didn’t get weight down (though it isn’t up either); but the most abject failure of all was Resolution One: to produce 2,500 usable, sellable words a week. I didn’t reach that many in the year. Hence the goodbye – but I hope it’s au revoir as I’ve made the same resolution for 2008, and if I make it, I'll be back.
So this New Year’s Resolution One is to have another try at giving up the blog. If, after 100,653 words, 6,537 visits and 10,096 page views, I had had anything blogworthy to say and still haven’t said it, then it isn’t worth saying. So that’s it – cold turkey. Finish. Regrets? (I’ve had a few, but then again too few to mention.) Yes, lots of them – it has been great fun and I’ve met some wonderful people. Do I hear you say, "dilettante bloggers, they never last - but he'll be back?" I hope you're right. Till then have a great year.

No such thing as a free lunch

2007-12-15T11:09:00.000+01:00

It’s nearly time to say farewell to Wiltshire. It’s such a beautiful part of the country that I feel like a traitor, but let’s face it, we’re fair weather Wiltshirians and in just two weeks we’re out of here. As a young airman I spent the coldest winter of the last century just a few miles from here more than six decades ago - the camp’s entire plumbing system (with the fortunate exception of the cookhouse) froze solid and no-one washed for 10 days. It’s no place to spend a winter.
But, as you may recall from previous posts, we’ll have many happy memories of this county. We’ll miss the cottage, the cosy fireplace, country walks, the changing seasons, the pubs, the wild life, and above all the quiet – despite the occasional crunch of heavy artillery practising on Salisbury Plain.
Not all the memories will be happy ones: the Wiltshire Police, for example. We set off one day in late summer to meet with former father-in-law and dear step-mother-in-law in Winchester. We had a very pleasant lunch in that fascinating city with its beautiful cathedral – inspiration to Keats and Austen. (Did you know that Winchester is the home of England’s first library, cricket club, and lawn mower racing circuit? Neither did I.)
We had a very pleasant day before going our separate ways – they back to Spain and we to France. It was only marred about two weeks later when in the mail came a photo of the back of my car, with some numbers on the bottom saying I was accused of speeding in a 30mph zone, and if convicted could be fined up to £1000 or go to jail.
However, if I cared to give them £60 and take three points on my license, they would forget the whole thing.
I explained politely that, although I may have been distracted because I was on a strange, badly-signposted country road trying to find a cross-country route to Winchester, I would be surprised to have missed a speed limit sign,(adding the usual stuff: 50 years accident-free driving blah blah blah). They informed me that a speed limit sign is not necessary if the street lamp poles are closer together than 200 metres!
I resisted the temptation to point out that I don't normally carry a 200-metre tape measure, or to make the cheque payable to Winchester Police Revenue Enhancement Scam, but it probably wouldn’t have made a difference – they’re so awash with money that they haven’t bothered to present it yet. The most galling part of it all is that I’ve never seen Wiltshire Police doing anything that police are supposed to do. They’re probably too busy buying more cameras.
I'm sure we'll be back in the spring – but perhaps not in a Jag.

I've been quiet about Everton lately for fear of putting a jinx on them, but this headline from last week's Sunday Times says it all: ten games without defeat. It's out of date. It's now eleven.

5.15pm West Ham 0, Everton 2. Better make that twelve.

Remember Pearl Bailey

2007-12-07T18:20:00.000+01:00

It's the day on which, on 1787, Delaware became the first state to ratify the Constitution. Did it call itself the United State?
The date also reminds me of a story Ronnie Scott used to tell about a Japanese racist who, every 7th December, attacked Pearl Bailey. Jazzmen can be funny. Humphrey Lyttelton, at 86, still chairs one of the funniest quiz shows on radio. Benny Green, who used often to play alongside Ronnie, said he knew an Indian cloakroom attendant named Mahatma Coat. Benny used to do a Sunday afternoon record programme, in which he was known to talk about my late brother Walter. That’s fame for you - I had a brother who was mentioned by Benny Green on a radio show. You can’t get much more famous than that: they’ll probably want me on I’m a Celebrity now. It was also Benny who said, bemoaning the disappearance of live jazz clubs, "Now is the winter of our discotheque". They're not writing them like that any more.

Reservoir Gods

2007-12-05T17:28:00.000+01:00

After the success of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, which has spent many months in the best-seller lists and has elicited so far no fewer than 657 customer reviews on Amazon, I thought it might be a good idea to piggyback on his theme and write a book about dog worship: The Dog Delusion.
The thought came on after a few months in Nice, where it seems that every sweet old lady sitting opposite you on the bus has, peering from a basket on her knee, the face of a tiny ferret-like creature.
Doggy faces on the bus and doggy faeces in the streets. The dogs of Nice are the least continent in the continent. Paul Theroux got excited about them in Pillars of Hercules. The municipal powers place plastic bags and special containers in the streets so that the animal on one end of the lead can collect the droppings of the animal on the other. In some villages the residents hang brightly-painted brushes and shovels on their walls as a hint – but sadly too high for the dogs to reach.
There are many parallels between the two forms of worship: the anthropomorphism, or the way even some non-believers think there’s nothing wrong with belief because it gave us great works of art and, well, it doesn’t do anyone any harm. (Try telling that to someone in Belfast, Iraq or Palestine.)
I know this guy who’s a magazine editor. Lovely chap, but he is to dogs what I am to cheese, (as my cardiologist once wrote to my GP: "This man’s problem is that he is inordinately fond of cheese".)
Well this guy is inordinately fond of dogs. No matter how hard you try to divert his attention, conversations with him will inevitably get around to dogs. If they don’t, he brings the subject into focus with some subtle, oblique reference – like "Do you have a dog?"
He did it the other day. I said, "Why do you ask?"
He said, "It’s just that I find that people who like dogs tend to be nicer people than those who don’t".
I said, "I guess I fail then, I just don’t like them."
He frowned. So I said, "But Hitler did".
He’ll never plug my book now.

Last weekend Nice celebrated the return of the tram after 50 years’ absence. They called it a Fête du Tramway and it was great fun. The “new” mode of transport was free for the weekend and – such is the public passion for freebies – packed. The streets were equally packed and there was a genuine air of celebration.
You bet there was – we’ve had four years of traffic chaos for this.

It’s launched!

2007-11-27T23:33:00.001+01:00

Exclamation marks and sighs all around. The signings up and down the Riviera – from Cannes to Monaco - were fun, with the occasional funny moment. Like the American lady who came across me signing books in a Valbonne store and said, “What’s it about?” Drawing myself up to the full 1.70, I said it was about the lives of writers.
“I’ll take one”, she said, “I love trivia.”
Five years of research encapsulated in three words.

Curried pronoun We’re expecting guests for lunch and she’s in the shower. The oven timer goes off. So I shout “The timer’s gone off”.
“Just turn it off”, shouts shimmering shape from shower.
So I turn off the timer.
Some time later, there’s a scream from the kitchen. “Eeeek! You didn’t turn it off. The lunch is ruined!”
“Yes I did,” I say.
Things were tense. My attempts to point out that according to such distinguished authorities as Strunk and White, Lynn Truss and Fowler, a pronoun always replaces its most adjacent noun, did nothing to calm the situation. We got ready in chilly silence.

Among the many great curries that she has made, I would have to say that this was by far the most memorable. Jamie Oliver would slaver in envy. Michael Winner would have called it ‘historic’.
I swear it was those few extra minutes cooking time...

White lies, damn lies… Statistics - you either love them or hate them. I’m addicted. I don’t mean statistics the way politicians use them: Tony Blair’s famous ’45 minutes’, for example. Or the way they use them to get out of embarrassing corners, adding in a decimal point or two to give them an air of authenticity.
No, statistics can be used for useful things, like proving that the signs of the zodiac are a load of cobblers – or that John Terry passes back to the goalie 3.6 times more frequently when playing for England than he does when playing for Chelsea - or that Alan Shearer shouldn’t be a candidate for England manager just because he scored a lot of goals, since 62.4% of them were from the penalty spot.
Or the fact that the percentage of left-handed people being born in the world increases every year and if it continues we’ll eventually all be left-handed. Or that the percentage of boys to girls being born to Inuit mothers is decreasing every year, so that there’ll soon be no male Inuits.
Yesterday, The Times, as if to prove my point, ran a story about a Mr Beane who has taken some hickie baseball team, Oakland A, to victory against major league teams – with statistics. They’re the new steroids – and they’re legal.

Into each life...

2007-11-22T18:36:00.000+01:00

A message to all of you Schadenfreudsters out there: it’s been wet and windy on the French Riviera for three days now and shows no sign of abating. You can barely see across the bay. Not torrential tropical stuff, no thunder and writing, but English type rain: dull, dark and interminable. DG and I, claustrophobic after three days of watching the stuff go past the windows, decided to venture out this afternoon. Kitted out like Captain Scott in the gear we bought for the transit of Cape Horn, we got as far as the gate. We’ll try again tomorrow.

I know graffiti is an Italian word, but until Naples I didn’t realise how widespread a practice it was here. Very few vertical surfaces remain un-tagged. This is the railway station at Herculaneum, the town that was buried under 21 metres of ash by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79, and not found until nearly 20 centuries later. The Romans left their graffiti, too. After all, it’s only leaving your mark to show you came through.
Like blogging in fact.

See Naples...

2007-11-18T21:05:00.000+01:00

There are many fine churches in Naples. In fact the old part of the city is just a whole lot of churches with a few houses stuck in between. The churches have beautiful chapels containing poignant works of religious art. But the saddest altar of them all is dedicated, not to the Madonna, but to a Maradonna.
Diego Maradonna is an Argentinian footballer who played for Napoli in the 80’s – and helped them to win Serie A, Italy’s top championship, in 1987.
(In the World Cup of 1986 in Mexico, he scored two of the goals that eliminated England, the first by punching the ball past Peter Shilton, the England goalie, and the second – often called ‘the goal of the Century’ - after weaving past six England players. When accused of cheating by scoring a goal with his hand, he said it was "The Hand of God".)
The altar stands near the Piazza Nilo. It is painted in the colours of Napoli football club and bears such touching memorabilia as a plaque saying “Miraculous Chapel to Diego Amando Maradonna: Holy Year, 1987”; a bottle said to contain the tears of the Neapolitans when he left – and a notice saying that if you didn’t buy a drink [in the adjacent bar] you can’t take a photograph. I did both.

I name this book… Yes, it’s launched at last. It wasn’t exactly à la Harry Potter. First there was a rail strike, which prevented some people from getting there; others couldn't get in because of the traffic blockage that resulted - but phoned in orders. Finally, the main post office building - in the same street - started to drop masonry so the police closed the street. (We were wondering if a jealous J K Rowling had put a curse on us.) But apart from that Mrs Lincoln, the more determined fans got through and it was a qualified success

We have books

2007-11-15T19:17:00.000+01:00

Why, you may ask, is he sitting there with a beatific look on his face and a glass of champagne in his hand? Is it because it’s November 15, the Feast of St Albert the Great, philosopher, theologian and 13th century Wikipedia, who spent his whole life writing down ALL the knowledge that there was in the world at the time? (I’d like to see you do it today Bert.) No, he’s rejoicing because he arrived in Villefranche, switched on his answering machine, and heard an unmistakeable Australian voice saying that his books had arrived.
So for the benefit of those who were as worried as we were that we might have to hold a book signing without books, I’m breaking with tradition and posting on consecutive days. Thanks Indian Ocean, Rosie, DHL and Wells Fargo – I don’t have to sign pages of sticky labels after all. Cheers.

B-day-minus-three

2007-11-14T18:20:00.000+01:00

No, it’s not a small item of bathroom furniture: it's just that there are three days to go to Book-launch day. No, I’m going to go on about it today except to say that we (the bookstore owner and I) are getting nail-bitingly close to the launch – and the books haven’t arrived yet! They’re saying they’ve been delayed by monsoons in the Indian Ocean, but should be in the UK warehouse in precisely one hour from now. If they are, they’ve then got to get to Cannes by Saturday afternoon.
Worried - who’s worried?

Back from a week-end in Naples with a group of friends I first met in Padua almost eleven years ago. That was in February 1997, and most of us were in our last year of a course at the Open University, at the time doing 13th and 14th century Italian art. On that trip we also went to Venice, Florence, and Sienna – and in the course of our travels became very good friends – so much so that we resolved to continue our trips after graduation, and every year since then we have made similar trips to some European city. This year we went back to Italy for the first time.
It seems crazy now to have gone to Florence and Sienna, strictly avoiding anything to do with the Renaissance, but we did. We would lead each other firmly away from the Botticellis, Donatellos and Michaelangelos: they were ‘not our period’.
Ten years on, our artistic horizons have – like our shapes – widened, and we can now enjoy it all, from ancient Greek to Roman to medieval - to art deco.
Naples has all that and more. You go down a filthy, narrow street, able almost to touch both sides at once, dodging speeding scooters with wheezy horns. Washing - covered with plastic to protect it from the dirt - festoons the walls like political banners. You come to yet another Baroque church, encrusted with centuries of grime, open the door, and there in front of you stands a Caravaggio.

Better red...

2007-11-02T18:36:00.000+01:00

than dead? There aren’t many things that the French Riviera doesn’t have. Even snow has been known. But it does lack sunsets: unless you’re very high up, the sun will disappear behind a mountain long before it reddens the evening sky. But the Atlantic coast has crepuscular views like this every evening across the Bordeaux Lake.

The Riviera comes good in the mornings: this was the sun this morning as it peeped over Cap Ferrat:

Our beloved PM, Gordon Brown, is supporting a Bill to prevent criminals from making profit from their crimes by publishing books about them. “Are there no lengths Brown will not go to,” said Matthew Parris in yesterday’s Times, “to prevent Tony Blair from publishing his memoirs?”

It’s Toussaint – All Saints Day - the long holiday weekend in which everyone buys chrysanths and goes to the cemetery to visit defunct relatives. A morbid way to spend a beautiful autumn day - if not as ghoulish as the Mexican dia del muerte, when the kids eat skull- and coffin-shaped candy - but a good excuse for a long weekend. The UK’s the only place I know where they don’t have any hols between August and Christmas - no Toussaint, no Yom Kippur, no Labour Day, no Armistice Day, no Thanksgiving. But there’s a lot of people not visiting necropoli - they’re here enjoying the sunshine; some are even swimming.

You heard it here first

2007-11-01T14:02:00.000+01:00

You did indeed: remember this?

BREAKING NEWS!!! This just in.
The Book – you remember the book? – will release on November 1, and launch in Cannes on November 17, followed by other events along the coast: in Antibes, Valbonne, Nice, Monaco and maybe Fayence, in the following week or so. Details later.

Well, it wasn’t true. I know I told you that today was the expected release date, but I just heard that my books are sitting on a wharf somewhere, and are not, as we speak, leaving the warehouse by the truckload on their way to eager readers throughout the English-speaking world.
So please do not queue outside Wally Storer’s bookshop in Cannes on November 16 in anticipation of his doors being thrown open at midnight, because unless someone extracts their digit very soon, the book won’t be there.
It’s difficult, once someone has broken a promise, to place any credibility on what they say next, but, as you might expect, it was: “But we can guarantee that they will definitely be there by the xth”. So I won’t say anything until I’ve seen them myself - except that I hope you’ll be patient and not accept substitutes. It does exist, (I have an advance copy), and it will be at any good bookshop near you – soon.

Nothing to lose but your chains Yes, Marx – Karl, not Groucho – was right – there’s a world to win. But not the way the book market’s going. I went to town the other day to do a bit of book-plugging in the two remaining bookshops – and found there was only one! A year or so ago, Windsor used to have four good bookshops – WH Smith’s, one small chain shop – small chain, not small shop - and two independents. Now, WHS has pulled out of the serious book market, and there remains only the mighty Waterstone’s. They took over the small chain and the others gave up and left. It’s not all big W’s fault: not only were the independents squeezed by Amazon, but then the supermarkets moved in on the best-seller end of the market, which was what paid the independents’ rent and enabled them to stock the less fashionable titles. You might be saying, “How hypocritical – he didn’t complain when the same thing happened to the town’s small family bakers, butchers, pet food shops etc. - 'good for the consumer', he said”.
Yes, true, but we weren’t talking about books then – this is about Choice. Fight book globalization, support your local independent – all you have to do is find one.

Franglais Over lunch with a French friend yesterday, she asked what, in English, you would say to someone who was holding you up, to show them that you were getting impatient. We told her: she wrote it down and asked us to check it, then decided she should try it out. A former teacher, she is fairly unreserved, and soon the whole restaurant could hear her stentorian voice saying, repeatedly: “What ze fuck do you seenk you are doing?”

What’s an ostréiculteur?

2007-10-26T15:24:00.000+02:00

It’s the French name for a guy or woman who farms oysters – obvious when you know, of course. Not exactly a bird-puller, but it does roll smoothly off the tongue: “I’m an ostréiculteur actually – only in a small way of course. What do you do?”. You can ask me anything you want to know about oysters – but surprisingly no one ever does.
As you’ll remember from yesterday’s lesson, as you go north along the Médoc peninsula, on the eastern, or River Gironde, side, are vineyards. On the left or western side is the Atlantic Ocean, and the bay of Arcachon (pic), where 60% of the oysters eaten in France come from. As with Bordeaux wines, the initial consumers were the English –it was much easier to ship to England than to Paris. Parisians got their oysters from Britanny.

Oyster farming, or as we in the know call it, "ostréiculture", is labour-intensive and wet work, and it takes an average three years per oyster. (They are rumoured to improve one’s prowess in the boudoir - Louis XIV ate 150 at every meal.) Of course we had to partake of this delicacy, but for a different reason, along with the odd glass of Entre Deux Mers. The DG decided she didn't like oysters, so we did a trade. They were delicious.

What’s in a name? Plenty. What chance have I got with a name like mine when there are writers around with names like Peregrine Worsthorne, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Simon Sebag Montefiore? Imagine them in your class at school: "Where’s Simon Sebag Montefiore?" "I saw him in the bike shed with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Sir." "Thank you, Jones."

BREAKING NEWS!!!

2007-10-24T11:48:00.000+02:00

This just in. The Book – you remember the book? – will release on November 1, and launch in Cannes on November 17, followed by other events along the coast: in Antibes, Valbonne, Nice, Monaco and maybe Fayence, in the following week or so. Details later.

Route Nationale 1215, which runs north from Bordeaux, through Médoc on the left bank of the Gironde, is the most mouth-watering road in the world.
Its road signs should be bottled – and often are. Haut-Médoc, Moulis, St. Julien, and Châteaux like Beychevelle, Lynch-Bages, (where the DG bought me a ’98 in the hope it will mature in time for a special birthday next year), St. Estèphe, Château Lafite (pic), Ch. Margaux, Ch. Latour, Ch. Mouton Rothschild...
At Lamarque there’s a ferry across the river which at high tide you can drive on (that's the boat, not the river - important) and come back up on the other bank: Côte de Blaye, Côte de Bourg, St. Emilion, Pomerol, (a bottle of whose Château Petrus can set you back $8000)...
We return full-stomached, but, apart from that single Lynch-Bages, empty-handed. And as I’m dreaming of what might have been, she says “Red or white?” – and I’m down to earth, with a plonk.

Sick Transit
My words are vines, the grapes they bear
Nurtured and harvested with care
Hence, then, my rage
When, on the page
The vintage is vin ordinaire

Two Cities

2007-10-19T12:33:00.000+02:00

Bordeaux, the capital of the French wine industry - not the plural of bordel - reminds me of Liverpool in many ways. Unlike the cities of southern France, which face the Med, it looks onto a river that was once its life-blood, and it has a skyline.
Another link is the Celtic connection: many of the vineyards carry Irish names, like Château Lynch-Bages and the Châteaux Palmer, Phelan, Parker, Barton, Brown – mostly descendants of supporters of James II, who hoped, with the help of the Irish Catholics, to regain the English throne. Like most Scouses, I had forbears of both faiths: Irish Catholic ones in Drogheda, who used to take me to the site of the Battle of the Boyne and tell me sad stories of how James was defeated by William of Orange in 1690 - while in Liverpool my Uncle Bill would strut his Protestant stuff in bowler hat and orange sash every July 12 to celebrate his namesake’s proud victory.

Speaking in Tongues Why Bordeaux? I mentioned how we like to take French bus tours as a means of immersing ourselves in the language. The mistake we made on our previous “Total Immersion” was to take a French tour - of Sicily. As the guides were Italian, by the time the brain had unscrambled heavily Sicilian-accented French into something translatable into English, it had missed the next bit.
While it raised difficulties with the guides, the fellow-passengers, being French, presented no such problem, so it worked out well in the end. We learned a lot about the people, not much about Sicily. Still, we decided our next trip would again be a French one – but in France. Which was how we settled on Bordeaux, (starting from Marseilles: a pleasant 2½ hour train trip from Nice followed by a slurp of the local specialty – bouillabaisse). After living in Nice, the southern accent shouldn’t prove a problem, we thought.
It was. French as spoken in Marseilles is not just another accent – it’s almost another language. Those lovely people on the trip might as well have been speaking Martian as Marseillais. What’s worse was that although they could understand our French, we couldn’t understand theirs. So after struggling through meal-time chat three times a day, we finally started missing meals to spare them the embarrassment. Bad for our French, but good for the weight.
Once again it worked out OK in the end because unlike Sicily, the guides, being from Bordeaux, spoke understandable French, so we learned a lot about Bordeaux, but not much about our fellow-travellers.

In the middle of this confusion, England played France in the semi-final of the Rugby World Cup – and, to our surprise and embarrassment, won. Unlike the French press - with headlines like “England’s Vain Hope” etc., these people could not have been more gracious, and we parted with everyone wishing us bon courage for the Final on Saturday. We’ll need it.

Ah yes! Didn't mention the other kind of immersion: Wine. Next time.

Days of wine...

2007-10-11T00:54:00.000+02:00

Won’t be posting this weekend because we’re going to Bordeaux. Which reminds me of an old joke:
Man: We’re going to Bordeaux
Friend: I’ve heard good things about Bordocks.
Man: No, Bordeaux – like Bord-oh?
Friend: Boll-oh.
(‘Er indoors hates that joke.)
It’s about the right time of the year – the wine harvest – but that’s not the main reason we’re going. It’s about French. French coach tours are the only enjoyable way we know of ensuring total immersion in French - and wine. No sensible English couple would think of doing anything so stupid, so it's more French than tour – wall-to-wall French from morn ‘till nightie. Does wonders for your French conversation and is disastrous for your self-esteem. There'll be more on Bordeaux.

I have this long-time Oz mate – we go back to January 1960 so a golden reunion isn’t far off. He’s quite normal in most ways, but, like most Aussies, has a blind spot where sport is concerned. I, on the other hand, have a perfectly normal, healthy attitude to sport: I am always happy when the better team wins – so long as it’s England.
About 25 years ago, friend and I did a tour of the Burgundy vineyards – a thoroughly enjoyable experience - in the course of which we made the acquaintance of the Châteaux Meursault, which produces one of the best white Burgundies you can buy.
In memory of that trip to Burgundy, whenever friend and I have a bet, the prize is usually a bottle of Meursault. Last Saturday’s quarter-final of the Rugby World Cup, was such an occasion. Although my brain was saying don’t be so stupid, my heart said take the bet because you owe it to your country. We now play France in the semi-final, so wherever we are at 8.50pm. on Saturday, we’ll find somewhere to watch the match to see if England are in the final of the Rugby World Cup – and, more importantly, to see if I’ve won another bottle of Châteaux Meursault.
Actually, result of all our bets when averaged out over the years, is about 50/50, so in fact the same bottle travels between Villefranche and Cannes several times a year. Burgundy not being a good traveller (which is why the English drink Bordeaux), when the CM is eventually opened it will probably be undrinkable

This is no book…

2007-10-05T13:06:00.000+02:00

…Who touches this touches a man.
Yes, old Walt knew a thing or two. And it’s right here! A man on a motor-bike wearing a black helmet – not the bike, the man – just delivered it. It sits on the desk in front of me in its cellophane wrapper, unopened, (well, I know what’s inside) and pristine, and I can’t take my eyes off it. It’s beautiful. Excuse the self-indulgence, but the advance copies of my book just arrived. Bulk supplies won’t be in the shops until November 27 and the police are not expecting undignified midnight scrambles outside Waterstones. Neither have I (yet) been asked for an interview by John Humphrys or Jay Leno. But who cares? It’s here...

I’m trying to judge a short story competition. You can’t help but wonder at the number of people who want to write but who don’t read. I remember Gordon Ramsay saying once – he’s the TV chef who can only be seen after the 9pm kiddies-bedtime watershed because he’s so foul-mouthed. (Guess I should have wondered this before, but how do you have an evening watershed in the US with its different time-zones? It wasn’t a problem when I was raising kids there because in the US, TV obscenity is a relatively recent phenomenon.)
Oh yes, Gordon Ramsay. He said that lots of people want to be top chefs but they’re not interested in food. It’s the same with writing. Lots of people want be famous writers but they aren’t interested in books. It won’t work – it’s not what you get out of it that’s fun – it’s what you put in. It seems pretty obvious: after all, painters look at pictures all the time. Virginia said it right: “Books read us”.
But I digress – again: back to the judging. There is, as you’d expect, a wide quality range. It’s not just that some people write better: they may have been writing for longer, be better read (see above) or realised at the last minute that the deadline was almost upon them. But they all merit roughly the same amount of attention and comment, right?
You’d think this would mean that the better stories would be harder to critique, and that it would be easy to comment on a story that you didn’t like. It’s not what I’ve found. I could go on for pages about the bad ones, because I want to tell them where they went wrong, how I think things could be improved. Then I have to go over it all again to check I haven’t committed the sin that uncaring editors do dozens of times a day: discouragement.
So if you got a long critique, it probably means you didn’t win. But that’s not the point. I just hope it was, at worst, positive and encouraging, and at best inspirational. And that you’ll try again next time.

I've been coming to France a fair number of years - a fair number of decades actually - but there's one habit I can't break. This is, before I go into a DIY shop, doctor's surgery, anywhere, I do a little check to see if I've got all the vocabulary I need. Wall plug - cheville - biopsy - biopsie - OK, let's go. It's silly I know. When the phone rings you can't race through the dictionary to check you know every word they may use. You just wing it. But I still do it.
The other day I wanted a jubilee clip. It wasn't in the dictionary so I had to wing it.
Me: (in French) "I'm looking for this ring-like thing that has little ridges on the outside that you tighten up with a screwdriver." As I go into my impersonation of Marcel Marceau with screwdriver, the man interrupts.
Man: "Juibeelee cleep?"

Equinoxial joy

2007-09-29T13:34:00.000+02:00

It is post number 201 – there's a harvest moon and it's a time to make some new-century resolutions. I will try to be more positive. Henceforth I will not get annoyed when my book’s release date is postponed yet again – this time to November 1. (After all, some people do buy Xmas presents in January.) Even when my expensive anti-itch cream – please don’t ask – lists among its side-effects ‘may cause itching’, I shall not rant.
Neither will I complain that today’s Times, (printed on toilet paper in Marseilles), and costing three times more than the London one for a shadow of the original, does not contain a word about England’s spectacular win last night against Tonga in the Rugby World Cup, thus proving not only that it is extortionately over-priced and abridged, but out of date.
I will look on the bright side: there is some good news. Manchester United lost 2-0 to lowly Coventry; a kind Mr. Song of Hong Kong (reminds me that I once had a friend called Morris Boris Dorris) has promised to send me $7 million and all I have to do is send him my bank details. Like Candide, I will believe that this is the best of all possible worlds. Last night I called into the boulangerie for a slice of a tasty Provençal delicacy called pissaladière – a kind of onion tart. Nothing unusual there – it goes very well with Jack Daniel’s and would be a knock-out in Kentucky. Not quite hearing what the salesperson said, (she was very busy at the time, telling her colleague about the previous night’s date), I glanced at the cash register. It read ‘Piss: 2 Euros’.
That’s what you get for being optimistic - no more Pollyanna – curmudgeondom calls.

Bicentennial Blues

2007-09-23T18:00:00.000+02:00

It’s great to be back (pic by the Mairie). Funny how, after only a few weeks away, you forget how much smaller things are in France. How, when you make coffee for two average-size Brits, you have to fill the machine up to the “6 cups” mark or you get short measure. And garages: how pleased we were when the car rental company gave us a free upgrade to an Espace, only to find that once it’s squeezed into the garage, you can’t get out of the car. Still, makes for an early start next morning.
This was to be the post of posts: the climax, the masterpiece – for this is Post No. 200. But I'm not making a fuss because what was to be the pride of posts was almost the post mortem. Not blogger’s block – I just got too busy, and the blog found itself at the back of the queue. But I've been stung into action by the DG posting...
Never think that once you’ve written a book you can re-sharpen your pencils – 2B or not 2B – and get on with the next. Hemingway did, John Grisham does, because publishers are waiting eagerly to grab their drafts and to set the vast marketing machine in motion. But like 97% of writers, I do my own PR, ads, promo etc. What Emerson said about “If a man write a better book…” and the world beating a path to his door, “tho’ he build his house in the woods”, is crap. The to-do list just gets longer, that's all. (Or maybe it isn't a "better book").
But for today, it has been turned upside down. Today’s priority list goes: 1. lunch on the terrace at Chez Michel, our favoritest restaurant in Villefranche – or anywhere - probably on Dorade Royale, (grilled sea bream); 2. Sunday Times – a Marseilles reprint that’s a shadow of the UK version at three times the price but still addictive; 3. a post-prandial nap; and 4. the post. It’s a little reward for 200 posts and 94,000 words. Coming, Michel.
Tomorrow it’s back to the to-do list and things like setting up a wireless router (called a “livebox” here because they don’t like “English”? words – “My computer” is Poste de travail) using a French instruction book. A great start for the 3rd century.

HTML Blues

2007-09-02T22:57:00.000+02:00

I thought it was about time I updated my web site. In a flush of independence, I thought I could do it without troubling my good friend Mike, who built it and has done all the previous updates. I must confess that I never managed to come to terms with ms/dos, and am far from comfortable with WORD, (how do you get rid of that stupid paper clip?), so to kid myself that I would be able to master web design was straining my nerd-dom beyond its limits. Still, ever the optimist, I bought Microsoft’s FrontPage because, according to the sales literature, a five-year-old with learning difficulties would get the hang of it in ten minutes. The name Microsoft should have been a warning. The job security of the Seattle billionaires depends on their ability to write instructional material using a vocabulary that the purchaser cannot possibly understand. (Yes, even if he/she hits the Help button, since it is equally incomprehensible. What I need is a Help button to the Help button.) So I bought a book called FrontPage 2003 for Absolute Beginners, but it might have been in Swahili for all the use it was. So then I bought FrontPage 2003 for Dummies - with the same result. A Dummie, it seems, is a hirsute, leather-elbowed goon with a PhD in Comp Sci. What I’m waiting for now is the one titled FrontPage 2003 for Dyslexic Gorillas who are Absolute Dummies. Meanwhile, the web site stays as it is.

Q: Who led the Pedants' Revolt?* The question is prompted by the fact that the Times said someone's body "was laying on the ground". The pedants are revolting.

Talking about Seattle, I’ve had a lot of sleepless nights and the eyes are barely functioning. (Whatever its claims, Photoshop does not remove red-eye.) Blame Nice-but-Tim Henman. Having heard him say, after his great performance in beating Tersunov in the US Open, that if he played as well as he did in the first round, he would have no trouble against Tsonga in the second, we decided it would be worth staying up to watch. Well, he didn’t and it wasn’t, but by the time we knew that – New York being five hours behind - it was 1.30am. To be fair, Tim's opponent was irresistible. His second serve was faster than Tim’s first – not that we saw it very often: because at one stage Tsonga was getting 90% of his first serves in.
Watching Tim’s departure took me back to the time about ten years ago at the French Open, when we went to some remote back court to watch a skinny English kid get thrashed. And about five tears later, a bodyguard of the by then famous Tim pushed me roughly aside at the Monaco Open so that Mr Adidas could sail through the crowd unsullied by contact with the public who had paid to see him.
The only crumb of comfort is that this was Tim’s last Grand Slam, so no more red-eye.

Good news – Everton are second in the Premiership table.
Bad news – Liverpool are top.

* A: Which Tyler.

No comment

2007-08-25T21:12:00.000+02:00

Do you ever read a post that triggers an instant response in your mind - a comment that is witty, gritty and incisive, that you just can’t wait to post – and when you click Comments and read the others, find that every one is wittier, grittier and more incisive than yours, and end up not posting your comment? No, I bet you don’t. It’s a rare condition.
The disease is known in Blogdom as CCC – critically contagious commentophobia – a particularly virulent strain of which has already attacked the readers of this blog. It is significant – and worrying - that there have been only two comments on my last post (one of which was my own) whereas that of my spouse, which I’m sure she will agree was only slightly more comment-worthy than mine, attracted four. (No, I will not tell you which it is – find it yourself in the links.)
An unusual feature of this outbreak is that people in remoter regions seem to have genetic immunity. In west Texas, for example, people have been known to post nothing but comments, and no blog.
The condition has worried me for some time (ask ‘er indoors), but I have not spoken up earlier for fear that well-meaning readers might try to make me feel better by posting comments out of sympathy. You can imagine how embarrassing that would be.

Pub pretention One of Wiltshire's best features, that I regret not having sampled last time I lived here is its country pubs – but that was mmmm years ago when I was a young airman and didn't frequent such dens of vice. They’re picturesque: old, thatched, low-beamed, with names like The Millstream or The Wiltshire Yeoman. But a sad thing is happening to them – or those convenient to main roads.
They’re getting pretentious. Someone buys an old pub, does it up, and before you know it they’ve put in a chef, called it a pub/restaurant and the prices have trebled. Trouble is, they’re not what people come to the country for. We come to get away from pretention - we want yokels, fresh from a day’s honest toil, with straw in their hair, smoking clay pipes. At the above-mentioned Yeoman, the young local girls who deliver the food to the table aren’t allowed to say ‘chips’. They say ‘Ere, would you be wantin’ pommes frites with that’. Their ‘ploughman’s lunch’ is accompanied by marinated olives.
The pub we chanced upon yesterday had Liebestraum playing in the bar. There was no dartboard, no corduroyed farm labourers drinking scrumpy. No rotund, jovial mine host to greet us but a slim Zimbabwean telling us about the 'bidrums' he had put in – one called the Lion Room, with appropriate pictures and furnishings; the other is the Leopard Room, similar. We didn’t stay long enough to hear about the Health Centre. Fortunatley there are still enough traditional pubs if you know where to look, but it's a worrying trend.
It's the same in the fields: no weathered ploughman homeward plods his weary way. Oh yes, they’re out there all right, from dawn to dusk, sewing, reaping, gathering in the hay – but they do it sitting in air-conditioned Caterpillars and John Deeres – wearing shades.

Plus ça change…

2007-08-19T13:10:00.000+02:00

There’s a guy who appears in all the quotations dictionaries – but he’s there only once. His name is Alphonse Karr, a 19th century French author and journalist, and his famous quote was ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same’.
The phrase comes to mind during the second week of the football season as one listens to the post-match comments of football managers. Some have been relegated, some sacked – but the new guys are saying exactly the same things as the old ones did: ‘the lads showed a lot of character today’; ‘they gave me 120%’; and my favourite: ‘I don’t like to complain about refereeing decisions but…’.
They have a point. As the football world celebrated the retirement of ghastly Graham Poll, little did they know that deputies were waiting to don the mantle. Step up myopic Mike Riley, who managed to get three penalty decisions wrong in one match (I gave him the benefit of the doubt on the fourth.) and optically-challenged Rob Styles, who gave Chelsea a penalty when their man ran into a Liverpool player - when neither had the ball.
Mourinho said he didn't know if it should have been a penalty. And Liverpool coach Rafael Benitez said that Gerard has a sore toe and won’t be able to play for England on Wednesday – but he would be able to play for Liverpool today. Plus ça change indeed.

This summary (extracted from Ted Jones’s The French Riviera: A Literary Guide for Travellers - you may have heard of it) is for my loyal but mysterious reader in Auckland, New Zealand:

The New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) came to the Côte d’Azur in 1915 and stayed first in Bandol, at the western end of the Riviera, where she was grieving the death of her brother on the Western Front. The Villa Pauline, where she wrote Prelude, still stands, overlooking the Renecros beach. She chose Bandol in the misguided belief that the climate would be beneficial for her respiratory complaints. In fact, like her friend D. H. Lawrence a decade later, it was in Bandol that she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and, again like Lawrence, was to travel the entire length of the Côte d’Azur in a futile quest for relief.
She had left Wellington for London at the age of 19 with the ambition of becoming a professional musician, but the nearest she came to achieving her musical goal was a hasty and brief marriage to her cello teacher, George Bowden. It wasn’t so much a love match as a means of avoiding being in a state of unmarried pregnancy when her posh parents arrived from New Zealand. As soon as their ship sailed for home, she left Bowden and sold her cello.
But the bourgeois Mansfields had seen enough. Although the pregnancy miscarried, Mrs M., shocked by what she had seen as her daughter's Bohemian lifestyle, promptly cut Katherine out of her will.
Mansfield’s writing success began with her acceptance by the literary magazine, Rhythm. Her later marriage to its editor, John Middleton Murry, although punctuated by numerous infidelities by both partners, lasted for the rest of her life.
In 1920, she moved to Menton, at the eastern end of the Riviera, where, on the leafy hillside of Garavan, within coughing distance of the Italian border, she discovered the Villa Isola Bella, There, despite her deteriorating health, she enjoyed one of her most productive periods, publishing collections of short stories, book reviews, articles, and translations. She wrote from there that, when she died, ‘you will find ISOLA BELLA in poker work on my heart’.
Two years later, Mansfield went for a course to the pretentiously-titled Institute for the Harmonious Development of the Mind, in an old monastery at Fontainebleau, near Paris, but the northern winter proved less than harmonious with her body and she died there of tuberculosis in January, 1923, aged 34.
Her gravestone in a nearby village bears the quotation from Shakespeare’s Henry IV that she chose as the epigraph for her book of stories that she completed in Menton and dedicated to Murry: ‘Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety’. The village is aptly named Avon.
In Mansfield’s memory, the New Zealand government awards an annual bursary to a young indigenous writer allowing them to spend a year in Isola Bella, in the now renamed avenue Katherine Mansfield, but, with its faded sign and overgrown garden, the Isola is bella no longer.

Take a good look

2007-08-15T00:10:00.000+02:00

This is the top level of the Premier League on August 14, 2007, courtesy of the BBC, after two matches played:

Barclays Premier League : Table
14 Aug 21:53

Team Played Won Points
1 Everton 2 1 6
2 Newcastle 1 1 3
3 Man City 1 1 3
4 Chelsea 1 1 3
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5 Arsenal 1 1 3
6 Blackburn 1 1 3

Pardon me if I gloat - it may not last very long and we have to make the most of it.

The law is a ass

2007-08-12T11:53:00.000+02:00

There’s a village not far from here called Urchfont. It’s a picturesque chocolate-box English village with manicured green, Tudor thatched cottages, a little pond complete with ducks, and a Manor. In the middle of the village is a signpost, around the base of which a local resident, 79-year-old Mrs June Turnbull, has built a tiny alpine garden, which she tends with love. That was until last week, when a man from the County Council spotted her giving it its daily TLC. They have now threatened to prosecute her for not observing safety regulations. She must, they said, wear a high-visibility jacket, have at least three of these signs,
ensure that the Council have certified that there are no underground wires or pipes - and employ a second person for ‘Health & Safety’ reasons.
In the true bulldog spirit that has made England what it is today, Mrs T., disabled with polio since youth, has said hollyhocks to the Council. ‘I’ll carry on gardening until they jail me’, she says. Pity they aren’t so conscientious about collecting the rubbish.

For those whose friends think they’re weird because they collect train numbers or Dewey decimal classifications, there’s hope. You are not alone. I confess to a more than passing interest in car registration numbers. (If you’re a regular reader you will already have had your suspicions about this aberration.) I read every one I see, check that it’s using the official Charles Wright font, note where first registered and when, and – what must be infuriating to the person I’m with - make some puerile comment, usually preceded by a pensive ‘Mmm’ – as in ‘Mmm, he’s a long way from home’, or ‘Mmm, that’s the third Devon registration I’ve seen today’ – which can be pretty unremarkable, especially if you happen to be in Devon at the time. But I have to admit I find them endlessly fascinating.
‘OK, but what use is it?’ I hear you say. Well first, everything doesn’t have to have a use, but suppose you’re on the M25, confused about which is the best exit for the north-west. There in front of you is a Mini with the unmistakable letters ‘ME’ in its registration. ‘Ah! Merseyside’, you say - 'we just follow him and we can’t go wrong. Unless of course the driver bought the car when he was at John Moores University and now lives in Swindon.
Or say you’re sitting watching Crime Watch one evening and Fiona Bruce says, ‘The gang made off in a yellow BMW believed to have been stolen in Bristol. Then you ring up and say ‘I saw a yellow BMW with a WM registration outside Woolworths in Staines at 11.23 on Saturday morning’, and they’ll say ‘We’d like to applaud the sharp-eyed Mr. Thingy for his public-spirited action’ and you’ll be on national television and probably get a medal – perhaps pinned on you by the fabulous Fiona. That is, unless the gang catches up with you first.

There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow

2007-08-07T11:13:00.000+02:00

Chronologically, summer is half over, but meteorologically it started only last weekend. With the lambs having departed several weeks ago to rendezvous with some mint sauce and Beaujolais, the grass has grown nearly chest-high. So it’s mini-Harvest Time in Wiltshire, as the farmers happily (or is that an oxymoron) spent the weekend cutting, bailing and stacking the winter feed. We’re hoping that even our treacherous weather is going to ease up for what’s left of summer 2007. (Quote from this morning’s BBC weather forecast: ‘There’ll be dry periods between the showers’! What else would there be?)

Four legs bad I hope they didn’t eat all the lamb, because there could be a shortage of beef this year – you see they have these research laboratories in Surrey that were supposed to help us eradicate foot and mouth disease. But, rather than being the solution, it seems the labs are the problem, as the only outbreak has been in the vicinity of the laboratory. They’re pulling out all the stops, and hope to tell whether or not we’re facing national disaster ‘within the next 48 hours’.
Meanwhile there’s a total exclusion of movement of livestock, and people have to wash their boots and cars when entering and leaving farm areas – but the public footpath that runs through the exclusion area (including the infected farm) is open. 'We don't want to give the impression that the countryside is closed', said the ministers in charge this morning.

Funny you should mention that If you’ve got a copy of the original hard cover edition of my book - remember that? - hang on to it. You could get seriously rich. It is now officially out of print and is being paid Amazon’s highest accolade: they’re selling new copies at above full list price. But worry not – The French Riviera Literary Guide will be available in paperback next month (price $11.99 or $15.95) and can be ordered NOW. And I promise I won’t mention it again – for at least a week.

Exploring Wells

2007-08-03T15:34:00.000+02:00

If you thought that publishers supported vast marketing operations so that authors, once they’ve finished one book, will be free to get on with the next, you can think again. You may also think that it’s a bizarre business concept to ask the creators of one's product to stop producing and put creativity on hold while they involve themselves full-time in the task of flogging said product – and you would be right. But that is indeed what happens.
Being a naïve sort of person, it took me some time to work out why this happens, and then it dawned on me: you have to pay marketeers, but writers come free.
I’m telling you all this because I think those few readers who have missed the blog deserve to know that I’ve been so busy with the preparation for the launch of the paperback that I haven’t had much chance to think about blogging – or anything else. Thus although I’ve no wish to commercialise my blog by plugging The French Riviera: A Literary Guide for Travellers (which, since you ask, is out next month, only £11.99), I'll just have to do it in the interest of art.

Here’s another story adapted from the aforementioned Literary Guide:
It took me more than a year to find Lou Pidou, one of the several Riviera love-nests of the English novelist and journalist Herbert George (H. G.) Wells (1866-1946). Wells, whose long association with the Côte d’Azur centred mostly in the countryside around Grasse between the Wars, was best known for science fiction novels such as The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds, and for his many social novels like Kipps and The History of Mr Polly. In fact I didn’t find his house until after the book had gone to press. It was on my third pilgrimage into the foothills of the Alpes Maritimes that, lost in the maze of leafy lanes of Magnosc, I asked a postman for directions. He was so helpful that I decided to ask him if he knew where Wells had lived. He was not only friendly, but literate: ‘Ah oui, l’écrivain anglais!’, he said, and took me to the house and introduced me to the concierge.

A serial womaniser, Wells left his wife Catherine and their two sons for long periods while keeping a constant string of mistresses. His autobiographical H. G. Wells in Love barely mentions love: it is a catalogue of his extra-marital dalliances, beginning with ‘a certain little Miss Kingsmill’ shortly after his first son was born in 1901.

While remaining married, he replaced his foreground lovers in ten-year cycles. His most famous was the English novelist Rebecca West - who wrote that the Riviera was ‘the nearest thing to paradise’. In 1923 he began the affair with an Austrian writer which he later called ‘the vociferous transit of Odette Keun’, and in 1933 Keun was discarded for a Russian Baroness, Moura Budberg, formerly – and sometimes concurrently - mistress of the Russian poet Gorky.

All this was against a background of transient lovers who included the wife of a New Zealand High Commissioner; the Irish writer Elizabeth Beauchamp; an anonymous American widow who lived in the Hôtel Negresco in Nice; and the trivial pursuit of what he called ‘women I had only a brief and simple use for’.

His succession of love-nests on the Grasse verges began in Magagnosc, followed by Lou Bastidon and the villa that he and Keun built to their own design. They called it ‘Lou Pidou’, Provençal for ‘The Treasure’, and above the fireplace they carved the words ‘Two lovers built this house’. Lou Pidou still stands, remote and hidden behind tall hedges: a plaque bearing these words is also built into its terrace.

Wells’s Riviera dream was to have, ‘hidden away in the sunshine, a home to which I could retreat and work in peace. I wanted a mistress to tranquillise me.’ But life at Lou Pidou was anything but tranquil: Wells said that Keun was ‘addicted to every extremity of emotional exaggeration’. A former Jesuit nurse, she was able to slash her wrists without doing permanent harm, and would make use of this unusual skill when thwarted.

His many works written at Lou Pidou included The Shape of Things to Come and The Book of Catherine Wells, a eulogy of his neglected wife. He based his novel Meanwhile in Hanbury Gardens at La Mortola, just across the Italian border.

He also found time to socialise with contemporary Azuréen writers, both at Lou Pidou, where he hosted novelists Aldous Huxley and Arnold Bennett; and as a guest of Somerset Maugham on Cap Ferrat In 1930 he visited D. H. Lawrence as he lay dying in hospital in Vence.

In an untypically chivalrous gesture, Wells decreed that his account of his voracious love life should not be seen until the last of his lovers was dead. It was not published until 1984. Before the postman left, he asked me not to tell anyone where the house was, lest the owner be pestered by tourists.

Old Father Thames

2007-07-21T15:56:00.000+02:00

Taking the plunge My wife and I have separated. The logic behind the annual return to UK in early July is that in July and August, England’s weather is at its (unreliable) best. Bah humbug - last month was the wettest June on record, and since in one day - yesterday, July 20 - we had more than twice the average monthly precipitation, July looks like doing the same. So we are separated - by water. I came to Wiltshire earlier this week to do some work, the plan being for the DG to join me on Friday. I even prepared my speciality, a Chicken Cacciatore (it is also the only thing I can cook) and put a bottle of something fizzy in the fridge. But she is still in Windsor because the Thames Valley is awash. If she doesn’t arrive soon I too will be awash – with Chicken Cacciatore and fizzy.
Taking another plunge A strange epidemic is affecting the nation, the most worrying aspect of which is that it seems to afflict only women, with teenagers and the post-menopausal being especially susceptible.
It is called ME - mammaritis exhibitus. Its early symptom is an uncontrollable desire to expose portions of the mammary glands formerly concealed. The phenomenon was first observed in Roman times, when St. Agatha was reputed to have displayed her attributes on a silver platter. It was last prevalent in this country following the Napoleonic wars, but was completely eradicated during the Victorian era. Psychologists cleave to the view that the disease is delusional, since those with the least desirable appendages seem to be the most eager to flaunt them.
So far our new Home Secretary holds the booby prize: when making her inaugural appearance in the House of Commons as a Cabinet Minister, she decided to make a clean breast of the matter - which is more than her predecessor ever did.
It is feared that the disease has already infected the USA: Victoria Beckham, arriving in LA, stressed two points: that her appearance owed much to sartorial engineering, and that WYS was definitely not WYG. But whether or not the disease could flourish on the beaches of Florida is contentious: a scan of American women has revealed a divided front on the matter.

Riviera Writer's cramp Watching the shots in London last night of people who’ve been queuing three days for the privilege of buying the latest – I don’t believe it’s the last – Harry Potter book, I had to smile ruefully . The ‘rue’ is because I’ve finally got a date for my paperback. You’ll be excited to learn that it’s due out on September 26. Applause! To date, Harry Potter has sold 325 million copies. It’s an indication of my publisher’s confidence that they are printing 2,000. If you intend to queue don't bother with the umbrella - it won't take that long.
As a special treat for faithful readers and those too poor - or chintzy - to pay £11.99 ($24), I’m going to drop in brief excerpts from the book from time to time. Here’s a bit on D. H. Lawrence:

Vence is a small cathedral town - that is, a town with a small cathedral. Its eleventh-century church is among the smallest in France. The old town is a vaguely concentric maze of narrow streets protected on one side by monumental gates and on the other by medieval ramparts. Elegant, urn-shaped fountains play in sheltered squares, of which one served as the Romans' forum, and another housed the town guillotine in Revolutionary times. The beauty of the old town is now the traveller's reward for having negotiated the suppuration of hotels and ugly apartment blocks that surround it.
Vence stands almost a thousand feet up in the hills, about ten miles inland: two features that, in January 1930, caused the English novelist and travel and short-story writer David Herbert (D.H.) Lawrence to move there. In coastal Bandol, he had been examined by Dr Moreland, an English chest specialist on holiday in the area, who had told him that he should move to a higher altitude, away from the coast.
Lawrence finally, and belatedly, accepted Dr Morland's diagnosis: that he had had tuberculosis for many years. As Katherine Mansfield had done 13 years earlier, he left coastal Bandol for the last time.
He had hoped that his ranch in Taos, New Mexico, might better meet the doctor's requirements, but, apart from his visa problems, the doctor was sure that Lawrence was in no condition for such a long journey.
So he moved into what he called 'a sort of sanatorium' in Vence. When he got there he weighed just six stone - 84 pounds - and was close to death. The building had formerly been the home of a local astronomer, and both its name, Ad Astra (To the Stars), and its location - just across the road from the cemetery - now took on a grisly significance. Lawrence’s wife Frieda checked into the nearby Hôtel Nouvel.
It was not really a sanatorium. As Lawrence wrote on a postcard to Aldoux Huxley's wife Maria, it was just 'an hotel where a nurse takes your temperature and two doctors look after you once a week'. H.G. Wells, who was living near Grasse at the time, came to see him there, as did the Aga Khan. On 27 February, 1930, after only two weeks, he wrote to the Huxleys again; this time with a P.S. 'This place no good.'
The next day Frieda took him away from the home to a villa she had rented: the Villa Rochermond (later the Villa Aurelia) near the great 2,400-foot cylindrical rock of St. Jeannet.
Optimistically, she took a six- month lease starting on 1 March, and moved her bed into his room because he wanted to be able to see her. He was writing a book review when the Huxleys arrived, and he grasped Maria Huxley's hands and said, 'Maria, don't let me die.'
At 9 pm the next day, a doctor came from the 'sanatorium' and gave Lawrence morphine for his pain. He said, 'I am better now', and fell asleep. He died at 10.15 pm.
Lawrence was buried beside a south-facing wall in the Vence cemetery. In addition to Frieda and Barby, her daughter by her previous marriage, the small group of mourners included the Huxleys and their friend Robert Nichols, and English poet living in Villefranche.
At the time, no one thought that, exactly five years later, another small group would gather in carré 7 of Vence cemetery to witness Lawrence's exhumation.
In the time between burial and disinterment, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, on their way home from a holiday in Italy, had made a side trip to Vence to visit the grave - and, it being 1933, had found him in. In the meantime, the grief-stricken Frieda had been comforted by a number of lovers, at least two of whom had shared her with Lawrence while he was still alive.
One was John Middleton Murry, with whom she had had a passionate affair immediately following the death of his wife Katherine Mansfield in 1923. By the time Lawrence died, Murry had acquired another consumptive wife, whom he left with their children in his haste to fulfil his urgent mission to Vence to fill the void left by Lawrence's death.
It is uncertain who comforted whom: Frieda at 50 was still alluring enough for him to write later, 'You don't know what you did for me in Vence … you recreated me.'
The next to console her was Angelo Ravagli, the Fascist Italian army officer who had served as her occasional extra-curricular lover during her marriage, and was the reason for her late arrival at Port Cros some years earlier. By 1935, he and Frieda had moved to Taos. He had built a small mausoleum chapel there - a friend called it a 'station toilet' - in Lawrence's memory, and had been charged with exhuming Lawrence's remains in Vence and shipping them to Taos to complete the shrine.
Deterred by French bureaucracy from exporting a long-dead body, Ravagli had the remains burned and urned in preparation for their 5,000-mile journey. At the docks in New York, the ashes suffered - just as the living Lawrence had done - immigration difficulties, but they were finally accepted as unlikely to have subversive intent or communist sympathies, and were permitted to board the train to New Mexico.
The anarchic Lawrence would probably have enjoyed the rest of the story, as researched by his biographer Brenda Maddox. Distracted by the enthusiasm of Frieda's welcome, Ravagli left the urn and its incinerated contents on the train, after which their fate becomes confused. Either Ravagli went back to the railway station and collected them, or he was unable to find them at the station and bought another urn, which he filled with similar substance.
The disposal of the ashes has raised even more conspiracy theories. Some, including Maria Huxley, believe that the anti-Ravagli school suspected that he had built the Lawrence mausoleum in Taos with a view to charging admission to tourists, and they planned to thwart him by stealing the ashes and casting them to the desert winds. Frieda, hearing of this plan, tipped them into the mixer that was making the concrete altar stone for the chapel.
Twenty years later, a drunken Ravagli revealed that, immediately after the cremation of Lawrence's body in 1935, afraid of hassles with the French authorities over the export of the remains, he had tipped the original ashes out in Vence and replaced them with cindered wood.
Although this contradicted his earlier, already conflicting, statements, it seems to leave only three possible fates for the true ashes: they are either somewhere in Vence, or in a block of concrete in Taos, or in a left luggage office somewhere in New Mexico. And the one true tomb of David Herbert Lawrence is the one in Carré 7 in Vence cemetery, over which a plaque reads, 'David Herbert Lawrence reposed here from March 1930 to March 1935'.
Murry (without mentioning his relationship to Frieda) swore on oath that he had seen a will in which Lawrence bequeathed all his rights in his works to her, and none to his family, (which included a destitute sister) and Frieda and Angelo lived on in New Mexico, getting ever richer on Lawrence’s royalties. They married there in 1950, his Italian wife having given her consent for them to marry.
It was convenient that Italian law had not recognized Angelo's American divorce and marriage, because after Frieda died in New Mexico, Ravagli's wife was able to accept him back as her legal husband without further ceremony.
©2007

Sue us, Canal

2007-07-17T18:48:00.000+02:00

For anyone still not bored into indifference by the subject, we have – if not exactly won the Great Canal War – won the latest battle. In my hysterical call (34cents a minute) to the laughingly-named ‘Help’ line, I at last heard them say ‘go to your Canal dealer and have them replace your decoder’. Not having a Canal dealer in our town meant a bus ride to Nice and an argument with a dealer who insisted there was nothing wrong with the decoder. I would have to buy a new TV because, he said ‘the solder in one of the connections must have come loose’. ‘Solder’? (I should add that our TV, if not exactly plasma technology, is only about four years old – so definitely post-Flintstones.) So I took it to another dealer, jolly-good-old-British-owned Darty - failing to mention my experience with the first dealer. Darty, without even testing it, gave me a new decoder.
I fit it with trembling fingers, fearful lest dealer #1 be right and the box be broke. And – joy unconfined! – we get the rest of the Wimbledon Finals in peace and can watch Swiss, French, Spanish, Serbians and Americans battling for the British title when the last Brit candidate went out in round two. And the tennis was great - not just the power game now, but power plus guile.

Garbage wars In the current controversy about whether councils should collect rubbish weekly or fortnightly, it’s worth mentioning that in Villefranche they take it away every night. Our garbage gatherers in Wiltshire, the Kennett Council, are much more sniffy. They collect fortnightly, and although they supply ‘recycle bins’, they will not accept cardboard, plastic bottles or anything with plastic attached, ie. most packaging. The bin men sort out the garbage at your doorstep and leave behind what they don’t want – which you then have to take to the council tip five miles away. As you can imagine, all these enforced tip trips cause increased use of petrol, greater CO2 production, and considerable traffic congestion – especially at weekends – so much so that they have to employ extra staff, not to mention a traffic controller. But they still boast a 50% recycle rate.

Minuty on the Bounty One of the great things about shopping in France is the food shops. OK, there are supermarkets like anywhere else, where you buy your toothpaste, beer and washing-up liquid, but the little food shops that specialise in different food and wines – that we in UK banished long ago – still seem to thrive there, as do the street markets, boulangières, fromagiers etc. On the other hand, we in the UK do have greater choice in wine: in the supermarket, in addition to the usual French, Italian, Spanish, etc., there’ll be departments for most wine-producing countries – Oz, Enzed, South Africa, California, Argentina and so on. But in France and Italy, under the heading ‘Foreign’, you won’t find much more than Ernest and Julio Gallo and Rioja. The wines of Provence are still the best-kept secret: Bandol might be getting a little over-exposed and over-priced, but our favourites are still good value - like Château Roquefeuille (only available in restaurants) and Château Minuty. As this is an anagram of ‘mutiny’ I can't supress a mental image of Charles Laughton wiping his lips – the original cinematographic ‘wipe’ – and saying ‘Minuty’s an ugly word, Mr Christian’.

Absinthe makes the heart go Before we leave, a last 45-minuty drive to San Remo in Italy for a seafood lunch and a farewell shop to top up on the Parmigiano, Olio Extra Virgine (truly Italian oil, not Algerian), pasta, shirts and booze. For this, the last stop is at the supermarket in Latte, a mile before the border, where Jack Daniel’s is 34 Euros (£22) for a 1½ litres and the Amarone de Valpolicellas and Barolos are less than 20 (£14). Most of the cars in the car park have French number plates: come to load up with (French) Pastis.
Then back to Windsor to watch the rain fall and wonder when the grass will be dry enough to mow. Oh yes, and we missed garbage day – guess we’ll have to take it home with us… That'll raise a few eyebrows in Security.
Talking about security, I just found out what's been happening to my lemons:
I'd know that arm anywhere.

Sunblog

2007-07-06T08:35:00.000+02:00

Heathrow bristled with cops, the departures lane was blocked by a Police 4x4 and the Fast Bag Drop was a misnomer, but we were delayed mainly because our plane was – as our captain put it – ‘broke’, and they had to ‘go and find another’. How do you find a B737? How do you lose one? – (To lose one 737, Mr Worthing, is a tragedy…) This put us late enough to have a prandial drink and observe the changing faces of BA flight attendants. Smile as you board – glued-on; smile as they serve first drink – always just as you’re finishing your meal - cursory; smile if you dare order a second – snooty (DG was so intimidated that she said ‘We’re sharing it’); smile when they’re selling the (so-called) duty-frees - expansive; and ‘thank-yous’ as you leave - glued-back-on.
But it’s nice to be back in the sun after the wettest June since Noah docked. Or it was until a person very dear to me who shall be nameless so no one gets hurt especially me is complaining about the heat and can’t wait for the cool 19º promised for tonight.
They’ve done a naff but cute thing in Villefranche: in the more picturesque spots, they’ve put up paintings of it by local artists. This is the Place de la Fontaine.

Canal Minus Watching the news on TV is like still being at home: it’s all about England. The 104th Tour de France bike race starts tomorrow in London for the first time, and, what with our new prime minister, the weather, the floods, the terrorists, Alan Johnson’s release and a wet Wimbledon, (now that France has 12 men in the top 100 they’ve started showing Wimbledon. Britain got one man past the first round), French Schadenfreude is rampant. But don’t get me started on French TV. (Warning: the rest of this paragraph is so boring it could damage your health.) The only remotely watchable channel, unless you like quizzes and 1960s reruns, is an encrypted one called Canal Plus, for which you pay 30 Euros (£20) a month - but for six weeks it has remained stubbornly crypté. You ring the techies (45 cents a minute – average wait time 12 minutes), and Presto! It works - for an hour. Next night you have to ring again. I wrote cancelling the contract last month, and guess what? It started working! They wrote apologising and offered me a new contract at 22 Euros (£14) a month. Foolishly, I accepted, and promised the DG she’d have Wimbledon in French. You can guess the rest: it’s crapté again. Last night’s call was 17 minutes – can’t wait for tonight’s. Remember the name – Canal + or Canal Plus.
But it’s nice to be RW again after a frenetic few weeks, to have your meals outside, exhume the tube of sunblock that’s long past its squeeze-by date, and go for a walk without an umbrella.

Brown sauce Say what you like about Brown – please – but you’ve got to agree he’s lucky. In his first week as PM he saved Scotland from terrorism, freed Alan Johnston and stopped dropping his jaw between sentences. No wonder his ratings are soaring.

Carbon dating Went to a sensational party before we left. It was an eightieth birthday party. But no Zimmer-shuffle this: the music was blue-grass and the dancing square. The hostess is one of our group of travelling companions who’ve been visiting European cities together for eleven years, (this year we’re off to Naples). Two days after we get home from Naples, the said octogenarian is off up the Amazon – by canoe I wouldn’t wonder. (More later on this wonderful group of Nomads whose collective age looks like a telephone number.) Happy birthday Maggie!

Writers' block

2007-06-24T10:18:00.000+02:00

An item on this morning’s news said that the creative industries – arts, showbiz etc. - make a bigger contribution to the UK economy than the financial ones. I fear this will only perpetuate the myth that writers are rolling in it. A survey by the ALCS of 25,000 authors found that their average salary was 30% lower than the national average wage. Take your Dan Browns out of the mix and it’s a sorry scene.
A publisher I met at Hay told me that even if an author sells out a complete print run of 2000 hardbacks and 5,000 paperbacks he is unlikely to cover his advance. I’m not half-way towards mine yet – which means I worked three years at less than a pound a day. So you have to wonder who gets it - do publishers put their kids through college and pay off their mortgage on a quid a day? Fortunately, as the DG never fails to remind me, we don’t do it for the money.

Into each reign some life must fall. It’s the interregnum: the Gordon and Tony show. Tony, who, having taken the nation into two wars, committed it, on his last day in office, to serve the Euro-bureaucrats in Brussels – presumably with the intention of becoming one of them - and then went off to see the pope, seeking either absolution or sainthood. He should be in The Hague explaining himself to the International Criminal Court: 'well... y'know... I mean...' And, fresh from charm school, Gordon - our incoming PM, who, having devolved even more powers to Scotland, now wants to colonise England.

A market update item from Travelwriter Marketletter: 'Success magazine has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization'.
You just can't depend on anything any more.

Take the A train

2007-06-21T09:04:00.000+02:00

The mantelpiece won’t look the same this Christmas. The only head of state with whom I exchanged cards died last week. You remember the Waldheims – he was Sec-Gen of the UN, then president of Austria. Like Richard Nixon, he absentmindedly lost a piece of his life, but whereas Trickie Dickie lost only 18 minutes, Kurt lost 18 months. When his memoirs claimed that he was in Vienna studying for his law doctorate, he was in Croatia helping the Fascists to line them all up. He wasn’t tried for war crimes, but then the prosecuting authority was the UN. No wonder he wasn’t there to meet us in Vienna.

For a train freak, it’s the ultimate self-indulgence – or the penultimate if you dream of taking the Trans-Siberian Express. As Noel, our dinner companion, said, it’s something you have to do once in your life. Not wanting to leave it too late - and fast approaching the age when More Than, my travel insurance company, will drop me for a younger model after happily accepting my premium for 50 years, we decided that this was that moment. Our flimsy justification was that it was both our wedding anniversary and our joint birthday gift to each other (I actually owed her two).
Instead of the two-hour trip out, the ride home took 28 – lunch in Austria, dinner in Germany, breakfast in France and brunch in England. The train is a French-polisher’s nightmare, its vintage coaches dripping with royal blue and brass. Liveried flunkies in light blue and gold anticipate your every wish, for – as the receptionist at the Vienna Hauptbahnhof put it - ‘From here on we do not schlep’.
It’s priced accordingly: when I selected the cheapest item on the wine list – a Sancerre at £44 – the Maitre d’ suggested ‘a much superior wine that is only slightly more expensive’ – at £79. The Sancerre was delicious.
The train itself is gobsmacking. Our coach was built in 1922: on the corridor walls are polished brass light fittings – to hold the gas lamps – and beside the beds are brass hooks so that the gentlemen can hang their fob watch and chain within easy reach (a little fur-lined pad below it prevents scratching of the woodwork). The Orient Express can take you almost anywhere in Europe - Vienna, Milan, Rome, Bucharest, Venice – and never stops anywhere for more than a couple of hours, so the crew don’t get home much during its travel season. Steve, our steward, lives in the Dolomites and is a ski instructor during the winter.
The train doesn’t go to London. At Folkstone a Dixieland band plays you aboard the Pullman for the last lap, a lap of luxury. Our coach, says the plaque, is used regularly by the Queen and was a favourite of the previous one. General de Gaulle left no comment.
Suddenly it’s all over. It’s raining as we schlep our luggage out of Victoria station, pondering the thought of take-away Chinese for the next month.

It’s good having visitors – instead of chasing around to new places, you get to see your own country. It’s like never seeing French people up the Eiffel Tower. Our guest from New York this week wanted to see Stonehenge. (Des. Res., Grade I listed, construct. approx. 4,000BC, full air cond. lintels needing attention.) Missed the solstice by a couple of days, but it’s easier to see when it’s less crowded. She also introduced us to Windsor Castle. Next time she comes she’s going to show us London.

Trapp shooting

2007-06-11T14:03:00.000+02:00

This is Salzburg – the original Salt Lake City – and the hills are alive with the Sound of Mozart. If it isn't Mozart it's Julie Andrews.
As we’re walking (yes, walking) by the Fuschlsee, (no, that’s as in ‘foosh’), a bus passes bearing, in two-storey-high letters, the words ‘The Sound of Music Tour’. We are in deepest SoM country.
To promote this piece of naffdom, the Tourist Board produce a brochure which includes a factual history of the von Trapp family, the words of all those unforgettable SoM songs (including such gems as ‘Me, a name I call myself’, ‘La, a note to follow So’, and ‘Edelweiss, Edelweiss, you look happy to meet me’), and contains pictures of the garden gates of some of the actual castles seen in the movie. But apparently the climax of the tour - the pièce de resistance - is when, at the end of the tour, every passenger receives, completely free, a packet of Edelweiss seeds.

We stay at Hof – resisting the temptation to precede it with another monosyllable – in the Salzkammergut mountains. We take the cable car up the Zwölfterhorn, where the air is as intoxicating as the beer and there’s an amazing 360-degree view of mountains and lakes: Fuschlsee, Wolfgangsee and at least three other -sees.
Austrians look and sound German, but they’re smiley and friendly - everyone talks to you. And funny: when I ring for an early call the man says they have a special offer: if you request a call before 5am, they’ll give you another at 5.30 for free. Everyone says Grüss Gott, unless you say it first, then they say Guten Tag, unless you say that first, in which case they say Grüss Gott.
I’m afraid there’ll probably be lots more Austria later, but I have to go now. Got to plant my Edelweiss seeds.