Knocked down by a feather

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Hairdressers

 

I had my hair cut today at a hairdressers I’ve only been to a couple of times.

It started in the usual way, ‘How long is it since you last had your hair cut, Madame Corby?’  Holding up of one tress and examining the ends.

‘Four months.’

‘You should have your hair cut more often.’  Shaking of head over state of hair.

‘I know, but I keep forgetting to make the appointment.’

That is not a proper excuse.  (Not said out loud but hanging palpably in the air.)

It is considering what they charge to trim a shoulder length bob.

I was spared ‘Who did you let cut your hair last time?’ She probably remembered just in time she’d done it herself.

We then move on to the inadequacies of my shampoo which apparently leaves a residue on my scalp (only at the back strangely enough where I can’t see) and how I should have a special shampoo from the salon which costs about as much as the weekly shop.  Of course I ought to have the matching conditioner to go with it as well.

At last my hair was cut, blown dry, polished and the cut hair was being swept off.  The owner of the salon passed by, ‘Do you colour your hair yourself, Madame Corby?’

‘Yes, with henna.’  I braced myself.

‘It’s very pretty.’ 

I nearly fell off my chair.

Plant porn

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gardens, plants, Roses

It’s that time of year.  Nearly every day when I go to the post box there’s either a plant catalogue or publicité from Jardiland or Villa Verde or one of the local pepineries with the most enticing pictures imaginable in it. They promise that with just a few more rose bushes or a barrow load of pansies the field that currently passes for a lawn will be magically transformed.

Do I fall for it?  You bet I do.  I’d love to have a spectacular garden in exactly the same way I’d love to have a tidy house.

Not our garden, sadly.

And I have about the same amount of expectation that I’ll achieve my objective too.  The people I know with wonderful gardens either have gardeners or spend a massive amount of time weeding and tidying, and rise at sparrow’s f in the summer  to do garden work before it gets too hot. Frankly, I’ve got better things to do at six o clock on a June morning than grub around pulling up weeds.

Being idle doesn’t stop me from slavering over the catalogues.  Jaques Briant which has handy little drawings showing you which plants you need for a scented hedge or a border with colour, Williamsen with pages of fruit trees – we’ve really got to get around to planting an orchard, the local pepinerie with the pictures of tomato plants laden so heavily with fruit they’re bending over, even if the dog didn’t pick tomatoes on a regular basis my ones wouldn’t be like that.

We can’t say we weren’t warned…  Desi and her sister in therii breeder’s vegetable patch.

But the granddaddy of plant porn, the one that should come with a warning sticker on it is the David Austin Rose’s catalogue.  It’s a hundred pages of roses, climbers, old fashioned English, ramblers, hybrids, rea roses, miniatures, luscious, seductive, desirable… the scent almost comes of the pages as you turn them.  At the end of this top shelf, hard core, Rose Porn are the bouquets, the coup de grace that send you spiralling into a quivering need for a rose fix.

I want, I want, I WANT.

Oh to live in England and be rich, then I could order myself one of those bouquets every week.

There’s something about roses.  They’re comparatively easy to grow, especially in the soil around here, which suits lazy gardeners like myself, they smell wonderful and they have names.  No matter how lovely it is the peony stays the peony, the lavender the lavender.  But we have Madame Alfred Carriere, white and vigorous, growing up the back of the lean-to, Ena Harkness is round the corner from  Alister Stella Grey, the Comte de Champagne next to the back fence and Paul Bocuse in a menage a trois with Gene Tierney and the exquisite Eliane Gillet.  We also  have Elvis next to the table where we eat outside.  Who could resist a rose called Elvis?

There’s the Smee rose, named after my sister in law who rescued a sad specimen that had been planted still in its pot by the previous owner and Jezzie’s rose, planted in memory of our dog who had her last happy summer nosing around the vines here.  It was the closest we could get to spots.

Jezzie’s rose, it doesn’t smell sadly – which is more than could be said of dear Jez on occasion.

But the wisteria we planted in memory of our cat who died around the same time is just ‘the wisteria’.

And yes, I succumbed to the catalogues.  We now have Lili Marlene, low growing, deep sultry red, is going to spread herself on the slope by the pool, Heritage, pink with wonderful bowl-shaped blooms which is, fittingly, next to Jubilee Celebration named for the Queen’s last jubilee, and Pierre de Ronsard, pink,  fragrant and very beautiful, has taken up residence on the edge of where we park the cars.

The plant fairs start next week.  My husband keeps telling me we don’t have any more room for climbing roses.  We’ll see.

Covers, covers

Tags

book covers, cover design, e-book, writing

I’ve done the initial edit for the ebook edition of Something Stupid  – a lot of exclamation marks and qualifiers have hit the dust and I expect more will go on a second read through.  Now I’m handing it over to the copy editors (daughter and husband) to check for basic mistakes and inconsistencies.  I’m never sure whether to put the names of books and publications in italics or not, I think it’s largely a matter of personal taste now, but one thing I do know is that you’ve got to be consistent.  I’m pretty sure that the Daily Mail, which gets mentioned a surprising amount of times I realised, wavers from normal type to italics and back again on successive pages like bulrushes in a light breeze.

Now I’ve got to tackle the cover design.  The original cover designs, even if I had a right to use them which I doubt I do, are over ten years old and tastes have changed.  Something Stupid did stand out from others of its type when it was first published;

most similar books had covers in bright colours and with photographs of a face, or hands or legs.  I always thought the cover made it look like it was aimed at teenagers, it was an unabashed light read but actually appealed to a wide age range.

Then they came up with the cover for Seven Week Itch;which stood out for different reasons.  A friend told me she was embarrassed to be seen reading it on the tube.  Not surprisingly I asked for something different for Up To No Good;this was very of its time but it bugs me because my heroine had blonde hair, not dark.

It’s good fun having a free hand to create a theme for the covers of three books.  It’s also extremely alarming, because to start with I’m no expert in what makes a cover work; for instance I loved Katie fforde’s original covers such as a painting of a woman with a cup of tea done by a really good artist, they made you enjoy looking at the book as well as reading it.  Her recent covers are pastels with line drawings of women lying in the grass or racing across the page, I don’t like them anything as much, but apparently they’ve increased her sales a lot.

I’m pushing the knotty question of whether I can trust my own taste to one side for the moment and concentrating on how I’m going to get the cover designed.  Do we try and do it ourselves?  Technically it’s not that difficult if you have the right programme and are reasonably computer literate – which counts me out.  There are stock sites on the net to search for illustrations which are either free or shouldn’t cost too much.  After four days my eyes are spinning in their sockets and I’ve only found one drawing which is even a possible.

Do we pay a professional?  Even though a recent article I read about ebook publishing said it was worth the money, I’d rather not.  It gets expensive and in my opinion the examples of really good design that were used to illustrate the article were c**p.  But then that might be because I can’t recognise a good cover when it hits me in the face.

And in any case all this deliberation about who does the cover is pretty redundant when I can’t even decide what sort of cover I want; photograph, drawing, graphics, figures, landscapes, animals, cartoons, brights, pastels…  I trawl endlessly through book sites on the net looking for ideas, my eyes are spinning again, and nothing seems quite right.

It’ll get sorted eventually.  In the meantime it gives me something to bore the family with over dinner, and at least it makes a change from the rugby.

 

Failing to get up the Eiffel Tower

Tags

Eiffel Tower, Monet, Paris, Rodin

One of the new experiences on my to-do list for 2012 was go right to the top of the Eiffel Tower, I’ve stood at the bottom looking up on several occasions but have always wimped out.  I was in Paris last week and still have not been to the top of the Eiffel Tower, though I did stand underneath it.

This failure isn’t entirely my fault.  On Wednesday the top was closed and as they’d also closed three out of four of the lifts as well we’d have had to queue for an hour or so just to get the second floor (I damn well wasn’t using the stairs).  So we went to the Musée Marmottan instead which, all things considered, was a much, much more rewarding thing to do.

The Musée Marmottan is now one of my favourite museums in the world.  It’s a former hunting lodge and it’s full of Impressionist paintings, including the Monet of Le Havre which was called ‘Impression’ and gave its name to the movement.  The original part of the house is furnished and you wander through elegant rooms gawping at what’s hung on the walls, next to mirrors, above tables, in corners – wonderful things by Monet, Caillebotte, Pissaro, Renoir…  One or two of the rooms literally took my breath away.  And there’s an extension with the pictures that are too big to hang in a normal house, I have a feeling that as Monet got better known and could afford more paint and bigger canvases his horizons expanded, several of his waterlilies, the Japanese bridge at Giverny, landscapes.

Last, but not least, the Marmottan also has a great gift shop, (the Louvre didn’t even have an adequate range of postcards), full of inexpensive fun things to take back as small presents.  For instance I bought my husband a Monet pencil and Monet himself to rub out any mistakes.

We knew the top of the Eiffel Tower would be open on Thursday, our last day, so we headed back there.  I doubt we’d have had any problems with the queues on account of this:

The Tower is there,  behind the building on the right…

We decided to go to the Musée Rodin instead which turned out not to be a particularly good move.  We knew that most of the garden was closed as there was a big sign outside but didn’t realise until I’d bought our quite expensive entrance tickets that the Hotel Biron which has the majority of Rodin’s sculptures in it was also shut for renovation.  The temporary exhibition of Rodin’s drawings was not an adequate consolation prize.

Rodin’s sculptures thrill me to the core and I’d really wanted my daughter to see them and understand what I get so excited about.  I was in danger of becoming seriously grumpy until she bought me a present,saying that perhaps we could use it in book group meetings to aid intelligent discussion.  Le Penseur was one of the few things we actually managed to see.  In fact she’d seen enough to put going back to the Musée Rodin on the top of her list when she goes back to Paris (in equal place with going back to the Monet’s at the Muséé Marmottan).

And I didn’t get to see the Berthe Morrisot’s at the Musée Marmottan either, which we also on my to-see list, as they’d been closed off to prepare for an exhibition.  Three failures in a three day trip is quite some strike rate…but that’s what you get for going when (most) of the tourists aren’t there.  It was a fabulous stay though, full of super things, and the three misses have given us an excellent excuse to go back again.