Something Weird In The Neighbourhood

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Bordeaux, zombies

Such a nice group of young people

The middle daughter took part in Bordeaux’s second Zombie Walk yesterday.  It’s a gloriously silly event where lots of the young, and not quite so young, splatter themselves liberally in fake blood and other gory acoutrements and gather in the Place de la Bourse, before lurching around the streets of Bordeaux hoping to scare the living daylights out of passers by, well give them a little bit of a frisson, as well as a giggle.  The walk had been quite well reported in advance this year so there weren’t a lot of people who were very surprised at seeing that the undead had invaded rue St Catherine.  Last year when it was just a Facebook event that took off the zombies apparently scored some real results especially when they surrounded a tram and started rapping on the windows.

It’s all fun and very good humoured, though the daughter said that the proprietor of the bar where she and a group of friends stopped off for a drink did seem a little worried that they might be driving away customers.  However the most surprising thing about the whole even is how many men tried to hit on my daughter; they were shoppers too, not fellow zombies.

Of course my daughter is beautiful, charming, witty etc and I’m never surprised when she attracts attention but even maternal prejudice has a limit.  I can see that there’s really a delightful girl here, but honestly if I had a son and he decided that this was his idea of a dream date I’d be more than a little worried.

The ideal daughter in law?

Books, books…

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Phoenix Book Sale

When we moved to France in 1993 my main worry about living in a foreign country was not, as perhaps it should have been, the fact that I couldn’t speak French but what I was going to do about a decent supply of books.  In London I was a six-books-a-week from the library girl as well as going into every charity shop I passed and haunting bookshops and I could see that book deprivation was going to be a serious problem

True, there was an English language bookshop in Bordeaux but it was for special occasions only as, not surprisingly, the books were marked up and in any case I read too much to be able to afford to buy all my books new.  The Good Book Guide sent a catalogue (which you had to subscribe to at quite a hefty price) every two months which had a well thought out, varied but limited selection of books and postage had to be paid on top. Otherwise I always asked for books for birthdays and Christmas  – my mother who was very glamorous was always wondering if I wouldn’t prefer a handbag or something nice to wear – and stocked up at charity shops whenever I went back to England.  I’d practically give myself a hernia lugging a previously empty suitcase stuffed to the brim with paperbacks back on the train.  It was fortunate that I’ve always enjoyed rereading books because I had to do a lot of it.

The internet transformed things of course, it became so easy to get books from Amazon France, The Book Depository and Awesome Books (which is probably single handedly responsible for the bookcase in my bedroom beginning to bow in the middle) and you get parcels in the post too.

But the  internet can’t replace physically browsing amongst books, picking up an author you’ve never heard of before, dipping in for a page or so and seeing if you fancy going on, re-discovering a writer you’d half forgotten about and having the person next to you turn around and say about the book you’re looking at, ‘That’s wonderful,’ or ‘I have to warn you it’s so violent it made me feel ill,’ as happened this morning at the Phoenix Association Euro Book Sale. (here)

A few of the books...

The Phoenix Association is a Dordogne based charity which helps to rehome dogs, cats and  horses.   Several years ago one of its members had the brilliant idea of a fundraiser with a second book sale of mainly English books, the twice yearly Phoenix book sale is now the largest of its  kind in France and regularly raises over 10,000 euros.  For a book junkie like myself it’s paradise,  there’s a salle de fetes packed to the gills with boxes of all sorts of books, fiction and non-fiction, and overspill tables all around the outside with the books that people coming to the sale have brought with them to donate.  And all the books cost a euro.

What’s not to like about all of that?

There’s no point going with a list of what to buy, there’s too much to look through and everything is donated so there’s no fixed stock, but that’s the joy of it.  You never know what you’re going to find.  The trick is to wander along picking up everything that looks interesting – and at a euro a book you can afford to – and if you’re lucky you’ll chance on something that you really want but hadn’t realised you did.  This morning I managed to replace my copy of 84 Charing Cross Road which went on walkabout a long time ago.  I havered over a pristine hardback of Michael Jenkins’ A House In Flanders which I wrote about last week and managed to restrain myself; no matter how beautiful it was we’ve got so many books we don’t need duplicates.  I told Christine who was taking my money that it was a must read, the next time I looked her place was empty so I do hope she snaffled it.

My youngest daughter and I staggered out eventually when our carrier bags got too full to hold any more – in my defence half of my 32 books were for my husband, all her 29 were for herself.  Though she has said I can borrow some.

Just a bit to read and something for dinner.

And I won a bottle of wine in the tombola.  What an ending to a really good morning.

Dinner’s going to be nice too.

The lights are back on…

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computers

I have a new computer screen again and one that cost a mere 8 times what the

The computer technician pays a call.

computer is worth rather than the 20 times which was the price of a new one.

My daughter went at her medieval sword fighting group on Tuesday – I’m glad to say that they do staged performances rather than hack at each other for real with broadswords, though I do wonder what would happen if she was stopped by les flics and they happened to see the impressive armoury she carries around in her car with her, three long swords, two shorts swords and a dagger – and said she’d ask there if anyone knew where to get a secondhand computer screen.  She said that when she called out, ‘Are there any computer geeks here who know…’ it was like being at the stock exchange being mobbed by brokers trying to sell you cut-price shares, ‘Price Minister, Le Bon Coin, Easy Cash…’  It had never occurred to me before that a liking for chain mail and computers went together but then I’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons.

Our local branch of Easy Cash is guitar central, record player heaven and computer screen city according to my husband who was despatched to find the new screen.  Well he likes doing that sort of thing (he also came back with a new mobile for himself, there just “happened” to be a parking space outside France Telecom).  He chose his screen then caused great offence to the assistant by asking if it had all the requisite cables, a perfectly reasonable request in my view, especially as the assistant had to go into the back office to ask.

So now where there used to be a big, fat old screen I have a nice, new-to-me, slim one – sitting in an embarrassingly deep pile of dust.  I can’t think how that much dust accumulated underneath something that was never moved.

And The Lights Went Out…

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computers, writing

The screen on my writing computer died yesterday.

Simple you say, buy a new screen.  The only problem is that the computer dates back to 2001 and, even if I can find a screen that’s compatible with a venerable old warhorse, my Scottish ancestry is kicking in saying that spending a minimum of 90 euros on an accessory for a machine that is worth about 5 is madness.  So my daughter has been put on asking her geek friends to find Mum a secondhand screen duty and in the meantime progress on the book will be…zero.

The problem is I cannot write on a computer that’s connected to the internet.  I’m probably the most distractable person in the world, if I have access to the internet I’ll be stopping in mid flow and thinking, ‘Must just check that point’ instead of scribbling in a notebook for later, and while that’s reasonably legitimate even if not necessary, I’ll also be checking my emails, thinking I might just play a game of Spider Solitaire while I wait for inspiration to strike, visiting interesting blogs and no doubt, now this blog is up and running, obsessively checking how many visitors I’ve had.

My contact with the web is on the laptop downstairs in the kitchen  and when I’m going to write, I have to go through a couple of rooms, up stairs, down a passage and into my office, which also doubles as a library.  It makes the house sound huge which it isn’t but what it does mean is that even if I’m tempted to do a quick Wikipedia search it’s too much of a fag to go all the way downstairs again. Is there such a such a thing as a brief visit to Wikipedia, by the way?

The writing computer was spayed a long time ago, its modem transferred to another, now dead, machine, the games wiped off and all non-writing related files deleted.  A few photographs remain, I can’t bear to get rid of pictures of my previous dog who died three years ago or kitten photos of our now stately cat when she was still small enough to sit on only half the laptop keyboard.  There’s no telephone, only a CD player with various CD’s chosen for their ability to provide calming background music – this involved a certain amount of trial and error, everything written to Coldplay had to be deleted as my work in progress is supposed to be amusing not a long suicide note – so in theory I don’t have any distractions.

But the office is full of books and you’d be amazed at how many times you think you’d just like to familiarise yourself again with a piece of particularly good writing, half an hour later you realise you’ve read 50 pages.  Or there’s the thesaurus, I love it, I cross-reference words or sometimes just read a page for the sake of it.  And the dog, my writing companion, will turn around on her cushion and I’ll stop to talk to her for a moment. The only thing I don’t let disturb me, so I’ve been told, is the sound of my husband’s voice when he wants me to answer a question.  But then I wouldn’t know about that as of course I never hear him.

So for the meantime I’m free to muck around on the internet, play Spider Solitaire and generally do “research for background material ” aka reading anything, no matter how trashy it is, that fits in loosely with the subject of my book and of course I’m not enjoying it.  I’m prevented from writing so naturally I can’t wait to get back to my keyboard.  If this goes on for much longer frustration may well drive me to ignore my parsimony and buy a flipping new screen after all.

Names…

Is she Pierrette? Florence? Edith? Roshni?

One of the perennial writing questions is what comes first, characters or plot?   It’s supposed to define whether you’re a character driven novelist or a story-teller whose characters fit the story.  I haven’t got a clue what I am, sometimes I get a plot idea first, sometimes a personality leaps out at me; most times it’s a combination of both plot and characters but it doesn’t matter how strong my idea is, unless I know what they are called I can’t go on.

I have an idea – character based this time – which has been rolling around in my psyche for over four years but I can’t write it because I can’t find my main character’s name.  So far she’s been Jane, Jo, Josie and Louise – trying to get away from the Js there – but the impetus always peters out after a few thousand words because I feel as if I’m writing about someone anonymous.  Once I know what she’s called, I’ll know what she looks like, what she likes to read, whether she’s allergic to cats, if she’s keen on shopping and if she’s an adventurous cook.  I doubt any of that will play a part in the story but never mind.  However she’s still concealing her name and until I find it – it’ll probably be something highly unlikely like Madeleine or Pandora (maybe not) – her story is going to be untold.

I had no problems with the main character in my current book, she was Hebe, no question about it, she had named herself before I even knew that her name was perfect for the plot.  The story is set in France so as well as finding fitting names for my characters, they had to be easy to read on the page and preferably obviously French so I don’t have to keep on reminding my readers who’s French and who’s English.  So Christophe, Hervé, Alain, Cécile, Elodie, Virginie are possible, and Theophane, Thierry, Jordi, Thais, Taous, Berengere – which are all names on the popularity list for French children born in 2001 – are best avoided on the grounds that they’re both difficult to pronounce and sometimes hard to tell what sex they apply to.

There’s a wonderful site which list every name given to a child born in France since the 19th century with statistics for how popular that name was in any given year and also lists every surname in France in order of popularity. So if you need a really basic generic name for a forty-year old you can have Sebastien – the most popular boy’s name in 1980 – Martin – the most common French surname by far.

The other great source for finding names in use today are the “carnet de jour”s in the papers.  French death announcements will often list all the relations – children, in-laws, grand and great-grandchildren, uncles, aunts and cousins – so a ninety year old from a populous family can have a hundred or more relatives listed by name.  Birth notices can take up a fair amount of space too, it seems to be a French tradition for grandparents to make (and I suspect pay for ) birth announcements, and the thrifty ones will frequently group a parcel of new grandchildren together, not minding at all that the eldest can sometimes be as old as two before he or she finally gets a name in the paper.

My absolute favourite came from the Saturday edition of The Figaro, which is a fairly posh paper so some of the surnames go on for ever.  Under the births section the Comtesse de somebody de la something else had the happiness of announcing the births of her 39th, 40th, 41st, 42nd and 43rd greatgrandchildren – names duly followed – and the hundredth birthday of her husband the Comte.

I bet that was some birthday party.

A House in Flanders

In the early 1950’s a fourteen year old boy is sent to stay for an extended summer visit with a group of elderly relations in an old house in Flanders, near the Belgian border.  Michael Jenkins writes in a brief preface that the story was based on a real event in his childhood “but owes much to his imagination”, whichever way it doesn’t matter, what does is that this is a wonderful book.

Michael has heard of these relations but never met them and is not surprisingly a little apprehensive, ‘But as I passed through the brick gateway…I believe I had some premonition  that a new life was about to unfold.  And if after only a day the world I had left behind seemed already remote, within a week I no longer knew which was reality, the coldness and austerity of my existence in post-war England, or the dense fabric of extended family by which I was embraced, and within whose lives I had become entwined.’

The boy’s new family consists of six elderly aunts and a war damaged uncle who is constantly trying to escape to the village for a drink, as well as various cousins, one who becomes the boy’s first love.   The boy gets to know his new ‘relations’ one by one, starting with the warm and wise doyenne of the family Tante Yvonne, and as he does he also learns more about the house, the past, the people around them – and why he was sent to stay there.

A House in Flanders is a very short book, a scant 157 pages with quite large type in my edition, but it evokes more of a sense of time, of place and of character than many a book three times its length. It’s beautifully written without a wasted word and one of those rare books where you slow down your reading pace because you’re both savouring every word and don’t want to have to leave this little world.  Dirk Bogarde described it in a review when it first came out in 1992 as ‘this is perfect, simple prose at its best…a radiant book’.  The Sunday Telegraph says it was ‘A little gem of a book.’

They’re both right.

Grapes and Vendanging

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Dalmatians, grape harvest, Vendange

One of the things that really appealed to me about our house when we first saw what the estate agent called ‘a house needing some renovation’ – ie a complete conversion job – was its setting.  The house is down a track in the vines, well off the road so it’s pretty animal safe (neither of our cats is in to running marathons) and the wood in front of the house is securely fenced which meant that we weren’t going to be plagued by visiting hunters believing that they have the right to blast small birds wherever they like.  The other priority was being able to walk the dogs, we’ve got Dalmatians and they need a lot of exercise.  There’s practically no livestock around here, it’s nearly all vineyards or woodland so the thought of being able to walk straight out of the door on a walk where the dogs don’t have to be on the lead was a huge plus point.

For ten months of the year we have wonderful long walks all around here, the people around here are friendly, like a pretty dog when they see one and unlike when we lived on the other side of the river the hunters don’t shout at me because they think that the dogs may be disturbing some non-existent game.  They’re more inclined to ask me if Dalmatians are hunting dogs as I think they really fancy having a striking retriever.

Then the grapes start to ripen.   Desi, the younger of the dogs, loves fruit.  I’ve had to enclose the tomato patch, otherwise she’s down there every morning sucking off newly ripe cherry tomatoes, she practically lives under the fig tree when it’s in season and we always know when they will start to pick grapes soon because Desi goes down the rows sniffing at the bunches and, if she can get away with it, having a nibble or two.  She knows that she’s absolutely not allowed to tear at bunches of grapes, Dalmatian popularity locally would go down rapidly if she did, but once the grapes have been picked she reckons that the bunches and odd grapes left on the vines are hers by right.

So at this time of year our walks become me striding on ahead while two dogs stuff themselves in the vines, only reluctantly moving forwards to another patch of succulent fodder when they can tell that I’m really beginning to get cross.  Grapes aren’t good for many dogs but luckily my two seem to be unaffected by them but what is suffering is their figures.  Instead of spending forty minutes or so every afternoon charging around, they’re barely moving while ingesting numbers of calories.  The results are inevitable.  Desi’s now been nicknamed Tubby.

Hunting for grapes

Rain, what rain?

It’s been so dry here this year that though we’re well into October we’re still having to water the garden and when I take the dogs out for their first thing in the morning walk I’ve been wearing canvas shoes most days as the grass is bone dry due to no dew whatsoever.

We were promised rain last week.  Nada.  Then we were promised it for yesterday.  Again nada.  Today we were due to have lunch with friends and pick walnuts.  Typically when we woke up it was tipping down, so our friend rang and suggested we come later in  the week.  Lunch was duely cancelled.  By ten it had slackened, by eleven the sky was largely blue.

I must ask my daughter what the French for Sod’s Law is…