Drive-by Sightseeing

Tags

Biarritz, new experiences, Pau

My two youngest daughters often give us Smartbox trips for Christmas where you get a voucher for a night’s stay in a hotel as they think that we, particularly their father, don’t go away enough.  Since my husband is very Scottish in some ways they know that one way of guaranteeing that he’ll leave the property is the thought that something might go to waste if he doesn’t.

So much happened last year, one way or the other, that we didn’t get to use Christmas 2010’s present.  Come January this year we realised that the voucher would run out soon so we had to get our skates on.  I suggested that we go to Biarritz, where I’d never been, which the other half reluctantly agreed to (he’d been round the outskirts of Biarritz and wasn’t impressed) and looking at out of the window at the rain sheeting down (this was mid January) said, ‘I’ll book it for early February, the weather should be better then…’

Ha, flaming ha.  It was minus 8 on the morning we were due to leave, the snow was making the roads around us, shall we say, interesting and the pipes had frozen.  We got them sorted satisfactorily quickly, though we had to give up on the washing machine whose inner workings had frozen solid. Fortunately we’re all well supplied with socks and knickers and I pointed out to the girls it is possible to wash things by hand.  They looked surprised at this news.  Surprisingly we left only half an hour later than planned.

We stopped for lunch in Pau, which is supposed to be lovely.  It was also very, very cold.  The sort of cold that makes you go straight into the nearest eaterie without even looking at the menu of the one two buildings away.  The sort of day which makes you decided to do most of your sightseeing through the car windows.  Not something I’d usually recommend but when there’s a severe risk of frostbite it has a lot to be said for it.

We took a nice circuitous route to Biarritz which was very enjoyable, the car has an excellent heater.  As we approached the sea the outside temperature actually rose to a plus figure.  Biarritz wasn’t precisely warm but at least we felt up to walking the five hundred metres or so from our wonderful little hotel to the restaurant the receptionist had suggested.  If it had been as cold as Pau I think we might have decided we weren’t very hungry.

I love seaside towns in winter and though perhaps I’d have enjoyed Biarritz a bit more if it had been a little warmer I still think it’s delightful.   It’s all hilly so there are loads of interesting vistas, it’s full of wonderful old houses and splendid old ladies done up to the nines, I saw more fur coats than I’ve seen for years.  The beaches are gorgeous, we didn’t feel like taking a brief walk along them though the surfers were out.  It was 2°.   Various words such as bonkers, stark and raving come to mind.  And I want to have a holiday flat here:

preferably in the tower.  It’s built right on the cliff edge high above the sea and has a view of the Rocher de la Vierge.  Admittedly it’s not very convenient for the shops (steep climb up a hill, then down another) but who cares.  If you can afford that place, you can afford someone to do the shopping for you.

Since we had to get out of the car sometime we went to the museum of chocolate where we were given a little bag of sample chocolates as we went in, and a cup of really delicious, artisanal hot chocolate as we left.  The exhibits were fun too.  We had a good lunch in a bar in the middle of town and my husband announced he’d changed his mind – not something that happens readily – and that Biarritz was a really nice place.  We should come back again, when the temperature is in double figures, he added quickly.

So we headed back home again, meeting the snow halfway there and being greeted with the news that not only was the washing machine still kaput but the central heating had broken down too.  At least we still had electricity…

New for 2012 – number 5 (and breaking some rules along the way)

Tags

new experiences, new year's resolutions, Paris

I’ve never been one of those people who reads all about a place before going somewhere new.  Of course I consult guidebooks – I’m not that much of a free spirit and anyway I’d feel remarkably stupid if I missed out on a treasure because I didn’t know about it or turned up on the one day it was closed.  But I don’t compile a reading list in advance though I’ll often read all about where I’ve been, getting even more pleasure from being able to place where the action was.  A horribly crowded flight from New York was transformed by the New Yorkers by Catherine Schine which I’d picked up the day before because I’d enjoyed a couple of her other books.  It was set two streets down on the Upper West Side and I spent a wonderful seven hours not feeling I’d left New York at all.

I’m going to Paris with one of my daughters at the end of the month which is in fact a trip inspired by a book.  I was reading The Private Lives of the Impressionists last year during a particularly tough time and when everything got on top of me I’d say to myself that when it was all over I’d go to Paris to the Musée Marmottan and see Monet’s pictures.  So I’m going at last and staying bang next door to Notre Dame (can you get a better location than that?) thanks to those internet coupons I bought.  I’m not going to read up all about Paris before I go – that smacks too much of homework, but I decided that on this trip I’d only take books that were about Paris or set there.  As there are just one Paris related book in my to-read bookcase this also gave me a convenient excuse to break the rule I imposed at the beginning of the year that until I managed to make a visible dent in the to-read pile the only books I’d buy were ones I needed for my bookclubs.  I have to confess here to a serious book-buying habit which has become worse since I discovered Awesome Books but at least I don’t have a tottering pile of to-use handbags.

I already had The Lost Mona Lisa by RA Scotti about the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911.  It wasn’t recovered until two years later by which time several near perfect copies had been made.  I’ve been fascinated by this story since I was about 8 and a friend of my parents, a delightful old picture restorer, told me of being a student in Paris before the theft and going to see the Mona Lisa nearly every week.  After it was retrieved he viewed it again – and said it wasn’t the same picture.  He believed the experts simply hadn’t been able to tell which was the original and which was the fake.  He added that he’d also heard that to make sure their judgement could never be questioned the experts had ordered that the picture they deemed a fake be destroyed.  Just the sort of story that would fascinate a child and I’m really looking forward to reading the book and seeing just how much of Mr Booker’s theory was based on fact.

I had a lovely morning looking up books about Paris before deciding that I’d buy myself Hemmingway’s A Moveable Feast, about Paris in the 1920’s, and Foreign Tongue by Vanina Marsot which everyone seems to love.  Three books seemed plenty for a four day trip and anyway the hotel is five minutes walk away from Shakespeare and co so if I get really desperate I can always nip over there.  Lets face it, I will anyway.

So feeling very virtuous that I was only going to buy two books I logged on.  And saw that Dancing To The Precipice about the life of Madame de la Tour du Pin, something I’ve wanted to read for ages was on Amazon at half price.  Of course it would have been silly not to buy it.  Then there was French Secrets by Roisin McAuley whom I met last summer and really liked.  At least it’s about France as is The Lantern by Deborah Lawrenson.

Oh well, what’s the point of making rules if you can’t break them?

New for 2012, Numbers 2 – 4

Tags

internet bargaains, lunch, new experiences, Paris, police

I’m lumping this together not just because I’m lazy but because they really aren’t that dramatic and certainly didn’t warrant a post each.

Number 2 – Cooking Jambonneau – ham knuckle.  I’ve often seen these in the supermarket but have never bestirred myself to see how they’re supposed to be cooked.  They were on special a couple of weeks ago so in the spirit of the family can eat something different for once I got one and looked up recipes when I got back home.  I braised it in cider and served it with leeks in white sauce for Sunday lunch and it was nice, not fantastic, but good.  However the pea soup made from the ham and cider stock the next day was delicious.

Number 3– Buying coupons from an internet discount site.  I’m going to Paris soon with my daughter and a friend put me onto a site where you’re offered discounts on hotels, flights, spa treatments, dinner deals etc – what you have to do is buy the coupon entitling you to X amount of nights and then contact the hotel to see if they can fit you in when you want to go.  So it’s a bit scary because paying for three

No room at the hotel...

nights in a hotel in the centre of Paris, even with a 45% discount, is quite a lot of money.  But the hotel is in the shadow of Notre Dame and I knew I’d kick myself if I passed it up so I went ahead and bought the coupons.  Then found the site refused my credit card because it’s English so my husband had to pay with his French one, which is what I suppose you’d call a satisfactory outcome.  For me, anyway.  Now all I have to do is nail the child down and get her to say which dates suit her and then I can have all the fun of seeing if the hotel has any spare rooms.

Number 4 – Taking a man out for lunch.  It’s really strange to think that I’ve never done this before, I’ve shared the bill of course and I was in PR and advertising for some years so I used to entertain clients and journalists but for some reason it was always women.  When I first started going out with my husband I wanted to take him out on his birthday but he refused, saying loftily he’d never allowed a girl to pay for him and he wasn’t about to start now.  His noble attitude was a flipping nuisance as I had a pretty hectic job and would far rather have gone out than have to rush home to whip up a birthday dinner.  A few months later we married and spent the first night of our honeymoon at Claridges on the correct assumption that we’d never be able to afford to go there again. After all the bowing and ‘Congratulations Sir, Congratulations, Madam,’ when we checked in there was the inevitable, ‘And how will you be paying, Sir?’  ‘American Express.’  ‘I’m afraid we don’t take American Express, Sir.’  My brand new husband turned to me, ‘You’ve got your Barclaycard, haven’t you?’ and informed the desk that ‘the wife will pay.’  To be fair he then discovered he had his company petrol card on him so the surprised accountant at the firm he worked for got a bill from a five star hotel rather than the normal local Shell garage in Battersea.

The importance of checking facts: gendarme uniforms have been updated.

So last week for the first time ever I took a man out to lunch, a policeman no less,who is helping me with the research for my book.  I’m not writing a crime novel as such but there is a French detective in it and though I looked stuff up on the net the French policing system is so incredibly complicated that I wasn’t left much wiser.  The only thing I did gather was that the two arms of law enforcement, the gendarmes (military) and police (civilian) don’t always get on very well.  Fortunately my daughter came with us to help with translation for, though his English is quite good and my French is passable, the way crimes are investigated in France is so different to the English system that it’s near impossible to find the words to describe it unless you’re completely bilingual.

It was a good lunch, he’s a nice man and I really enjoyed myself.  What he told me is incredibly useful too.  I’m going to have to re-write a couple of scenes in the book and got one section completely wrong but I was spot-on with one element at least.  There really is a considerable degree of- ahem – rivalry between the gendarmes and the police.

New Experiences 2012, number 1…

Tags

new experiences, writers forums, writing

I’ve put a section of the book I’m currently writing up on an online writers’ forum.

So what?  I hear a resounding cry.  People do that all the time.  They might, but though I’ve participated in several online writers’ groups over the years, reading other writers’ work, making comments, chatting on the general forums, answering queries as best I could, been encouraging, kept a discrete silence, gently suggested that boning up on correct punctuation would be a good thing, ditto grammar and doing at least a  bit of research when writing a historical novel ect,  I’ve never, ever put up anything of mine for inspection.  Until now.

One of the forum's most prolific contributors

There are two main reasons.  Firstly, I keep my work in progress very close to my chest.  I don’t like discussing it with anyone until it’s finished, the closest that even my family get to knowing what it’s about is if I need help on a specific plot point and then it’s only done on a need-to-know basis.  I’m not obsessively secretive it’s just that I feel that if I started talking about what I was writing to everyone I might talk it out and lose the impetus to go on and write the thing.  Also people cannot help advising you on what they think are improvements to the plot, I’m afraid I’ve done it myself, it’s confidence sapping and you end up feeling that it’s not really your story any longer.

The other reason is that I’m not sure how helpful posting work on internet forums is for someone who is beyond the rank novice stage of need help in differentiating between there, they’re and their (you’d be amazed how many would-be writers do).  Writers are usually very kind to beginners.

Forums by their very nature attract a huge range of people trying to write in wildly different areas and a critique on a young adult novel from John who wants to be the next Lee Child may not be very helpful if he doesn’t have a clue what twelve year old girls like to read.  While he can make some useful comments on sentence structure or that this bit or other simply doesn’t make sense, his comments may well lack depth because he doesn’t know the genre.  And if you’re on the receiving end of his criticism it’s terribly difficult to distance yourself and say, ‘Well he’s got a point there but there he simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’

More importantly you normally only put up a small fragment of your novel up for criticism, usually somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 words.  A chapter, a scene, even a single paragraph of a novel are parts of the whole and I can’t see how you can properly judge a passage of writing out of context.  What might seen dreamily poetic gets downright boring when there’s too much of it, ditto action scenes when you aren’t allowed a break between the flash, bang, wallops, and how can you tell if a love scene is convincing if you don’t know whether the rest of the novel tends towards the Austenesque or is channelling Lynda La Plante.

Even opening chapters need to be read in context.  Initially I opened Something Stupid with my heroine being followed as she walked home from a party.  It was a cracking good scene, if I say so myself, very tight and tense.  I gave the manuscript to my husband to read and once he’d got over his unflattering surprise that I could write something readable he said flatly, ‘The first five pages don’t fit the tone of the rest of the book.’  Once I’d sulked for a couple for days I realised he was right, a real woman-in-danger scene, which this was, didn’t belong in romantic comedy.

I’m not dissing online writers’ communities, I think they’re great, writing is very lonely and it’s lovely to have others who are enthusiastic about the things that you are.  Writers also incredibly helpful about sharing information, whether it’s research help, submitting work, potential markets or a myriad of other things and the critiques can be very helpful indeed.  But just as you’d find it very hard to judge the artistic qualities of a left eyebrow if you hadn’t seen it in situ above the Mona Lisa’s left eye I still think it’s difficult to make a valid criticism of a 2,000 word passage from an 85,000 word novel.

New year, new experiences…

Tags

new experiences, new year's resolutions, Paris, Sicily

Catherine Fox, who wrote the wonderful Angels and Men, was coming up to a serious birthday last year and decided to ward off any suggestions that she might be becoming a stick-in-the-mud by making a resolution to try to do one new thing every week.  As she’s a black belt at karate I doubt anyone sensible would call her a stick in the mud but I’ve had a nagging feeling recently that I might be slipping into a rut and perhaps it’s time to do something about it before said rut becomes a trench.

I’ll have to play  fair of course and try to do things that are really new or stretching my own boundaries.  So reading 52 new books this in 2012 would definitely be cheating as would trying out a whole load of different  recipes as I’ll be doing both of those anyway.  Though I might try making choux pastry, I’m no baker and when I get a new cook book usually don’t bother to even glance through the cake section.

Even if you’ve led a pretty adventurous life you tend to find that by the time you’ve reached fifty or so you’ve actually done quite a lot (even if you can’t always remember doing it.  I had put ‘visit a volcano’ on my to-do list for this year and then realised we visited a little one on our honeymoon ).  There aren’t many classic authors I haven’t at least tried, even for the sake of rut-busting I don’t think I’m prepared to tackle Ulysses, I’ve bottle fed a lion cub and a badger, made a tiger cub purr, driven a steam engine – albeit a half-size perfect replica, appeared on television, walked around the Statue of Liberty, climbed the highest sand dune in Europe, cuddled a Koala and seen a Duck-Billed Platypus (much smaller than I’d imagined).  I’m an adventurous eater so there aren’t many normal foods I haven’t at least tried.  I admit I haven’t ever knowingly had dog, cat, horse, monkey’s

Not today, thank you.

brains, shark’s fin, anything that slithers, insects, eyes or private parts and orifices from any species and I don’t intend to start now.  I’m not keen on feet either.  I’ve never eaten ostrich or kangaroo though…

I’m not interested in new experiences gained from hallucinogenic drugs or cocaine either, I don’t think I’m up to the pilgrimage walk to St Jacques de Compostela  and as I don’t have an unlimited budget, or much of a budget at all, I can’t go to India, go up in a helicopter, have a balloon ride, buy myself a serious piece of jewellery or go down to the bottom of the ocean where it’s so deep the light doesn’t penetrate and it’s very, very strange, something I’ve wanted to do since I was about twelve.  But I am going to Sicily, where I’ve never been, to see my daughter and though I’m not sure I’ll be able to do one new thing a week like Catherine, I’m going to try for 52 new things over the year so at least it averages out.

So far my initial list of possibilities goes like this:

• Going to the top of the Eiffel Tower in the elevator (something I’ve always been too chicken to do).
• Visiting one museum in Paris which is completely different to my normal taste.
• Drive my husband’s 4 x 4 (the thing terrifies me).
• Mow the lawn which means using the tractor mower on quite a steep slope.
  

  I'm sure this will count as "doing the mowing".

  (Fear isn’t involved here, it’s blind terror.)

• Make profiteroles.
• Cook scallops – I’ve always been frightened of bogging it up and wasting rather a lot of money.
• Visit the caves at Lascaux
• Go to one of the places that’s marked on our map as being ‘of interest’ without looking it up to see if it’s worth it first.
• Plant three apple trees.
• Make regular detours to follow those signs that direct you to a tenth century church, a medieval château or a ‘point de vue’.
• Go to the Musée des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux

There’ll be more added as things occur to me but any suggestions (reasonable ones, children) will be most welcome.