50 NOT OUT

 “What,” asked the young lady filling my champagne glass, “is it like to come back after so many years?”

So many years! So many, many years!

Last weekend was the 50^th anniversary celebration of the opening of our alma mater, York University, and we spent a long weekend resident on campus and participating in various bashes. To be honest, neither Margaret nor I had any great expectations of the event. Its predecessor, 5 years back, had never quite taken alight, and we knew that very few of our own immediate circle would be there. Some are dead, of course: some did not relish the idea at all: some booked, then lost their nerve and pulled out.

But we went, with, as I say, no expectations. We just felt that – well, the 50^th would only come round once, and it was rather special all those decades ago to be among the first of the few. There were only 216 of us, and the tudor Heslington Hall to put us in – and of course we all lived in digs. Having no tradition of student accommodation, York’s good burghers kindly opened their spare bedrooms and front parlours to us, for the huge sum of 63/- (that’s £3.15) a week, B&B and full board on Sundays.

So going back seemed – well, obligatory. And what a weekend it was! The sun shone on the lovely yew-tree lawns of the old Hall, for the Pioneers’ (intake of ’63, ’64 and ’65) event last Friday. The champagne flowed, and so did the conversation. And, of course, we sought out and caught up with many of our generation; but also, unexpected delight, we met many we’d never met before, including current students (see above) and we were enriched by the contagious affection and disparate memories of all those generations. 50 years is a long time.

 We all wore huge ID tags with our names and year writ large, and everyone coming near read these first, and faces second. Rapidly we who bore 66-plates (we were identified by the year of graduation) became kind of minor celebrities. “What was it like?” was the inevitable question; and we, liberated by champagne and our own celebrity, told them!

It was, of course, a marvelous time and place to have been alive, and no blog could possibly do justice to thrill of revisiting those unique, favoured, special memories. But take my word for it, York in ’63 was an astonishing, magical place to have been – life defining.

FOOD!

Among the very many excellent reasons for spending half our year in France, is the food. The French are very demanding about the quality of what they eat, so if you shop – as we do – in the huge Leclerc hypermarket in Fontenay, you just have to put up with the excellent range and quality of food the French demand.  Anything from bargains like fresh sardines, to luxury meats like veal or pintade, can be had pretty well year-round. And things are sold by their exact variety. In the UK we buy (and enjoy) venison – but in France you must specify the species and sex of the forest meat you’re buying: cerf, or biche, chevreuil … all are precisely named. And of course, different.

Similarly, the humble potato is never just ‘white’ or ‘red’ (as if it mattered what colour the skin was!) but Amandine or Noirmoutier.

Which brings me to strawberries. The hypermarket at the moment will sell you Charlottes or Gariguettes, of which the latter are the more richly nectared. And right now Margaret’s garden, over the road, is providing us with enormous quantities of the latter. They are crimson and luscious berries, that cry out for marinading in a little Pineau des Charentes (a sweet liqueur very popular hereabouts). We’ve eaten vast quantities for a week now, and yesterday, having picked 4kg, made outr first batch of jam of the season. Pleasure to come.

(And again, note, that the hypermarkets have put vast displays of jamming equipment on display at their entrances – beautiful jamming pans in copper or steel, assorted jars, labels, and an amazing range of devices for stirring, measuring, pulping etc. The French really do take food seriously!)

And no blog from here would be complete without a homage to our newly reopened restaurant next door but two. For the last dozen years it has limped on with a variety of proprietors (including, implausibly, a French-American family who couldn’t cook at all!). But this year, after a long period of closure, La Maison des Amis de la Foret is open again. The building is wooden, and built around an amazing, huge open hearth where logs blaze all winter. Its walls are festooned with ancient agricultural and forestry artefacts, and its bar is, amazingly, one rough-hewn horizontal oak-tree from the forest.

Today we fancied a meal there, and were treated to three courses. We started with a plate of charcuterie – six types of cold meats with a salad. Next was an enormous sweet-cured slice of Vendéen ham, served with a honeyed sauce and haricots verts. Then a slice of beautiful tarte au citron for dessert. Oh and the wine, of course- ½ litre of good red. The cost? Well, would you believe 11€? No – I mean for both of us? That’s £9.40!

I ought to confess that this was half-price, because they run a clever little loyalty card which gets you every fifth meal at half price, and every tenth , free. But that in itself is amazing.

Oh, and last Friday, when (as a concession to the English) they serve fish and chips (good stuff, too, I’m told) they recalled a chance comment of mine to the effect that I don’t eat fish ‘n chips – and insisted on serving me a whole duck breast, cooked ‘saignant’ as I like it, with haricots verts. Not on the menu – just offered for the same price!

You may imagine that we deeply hope these lovely people make a go of La Maison. They can certainly count on our custom!

Block – Unblock

I guess everyone who has ever had a go at writing continuously and at length knows that feeling that, somehow, you can’t get going again. There’s that last page, staring at you, and for whatever reason, you can’t seem to start the next. If you write as I do, following the story where it leads you rather than planning the narrative out in detail before you start, then the block can be particularly intractable.
Some time in the late 1970’s I wrote a kind of adventure story, The Boy and the Mountain, which pleased me greatly at the time (but didn’t attract the interest of any publisher!) In fact it pleased so much that I started a sequel – but after 19,000 words, I laid it aside. I was busy being a husband, father to a growing family,  and heading up a teaching department of thirteen at the time – and it seemed to me that the camel’s back might give way entirely if I stole several hours a week for writing as well. So I laid it aside.
I’ll come back to it sometime, I thought. Later. Later …
So later, I came back to it.  Thirty-several years later, to be exact! Margaret nobly rendered both the finished and the partial book into Word documents (the originals were, of course, typed clunkily on an Olympus typewriter, vintage 1963: no word-processing in those days) and after a lot of stuttering false starts, the time has finally come when I can declare the book finished.
La Palma, the western-most of the Canaries, is a wonderfully tranquil place – and we have found the perfect idyll there. Visit www.costaparaiso-lapalma.com if you want to see it – highly recommended for total, beautiful, chilling out. And in that wonderfully restful and uncluttered place, I managed to knock out the remaining 40,000 words of The Boy Among the Islands.
Finished! After a third of a century gestating! Is this a record?
Getting both books ready to become  Kindle e-books, now – watch this space!

Testing, testing, testing ...

... so finally the blog renews itself - after much less than a century. Watch this space!

... and then, suddenly, very quick ...

Did I say that “Slow Furies” was to be published on 23rd September? It seems that Amazon know better! Though Waterstones website is “taking advance orders”, Amazon is assuring visitors that they can have the book by next day delivery - and several good friends have already placed their orders.

Wow!

In addition (by an irony that anyone who reads the book will discover!) the local daily paper, The Doncaster Star, has rushed out to take my pic - with the book, of course - and should print it tomorrow. Waterstones in Doncaster (yes, these days Doncaster has a real bookshop) have indicated that they’ll carry it, and happily accepted a poster - as has my dear old Foulstone School, where a former colleague is networking news of its arrival around all the other former colleagues still in post, or in touch. And The excellent Jim, self-appointed liaison officer for the class of ’66 at York University, has patched an email about it around his circulation list. Oh, and the Alumni website is already featuring it.

A positive welter of publicity!

Bound to be in the bestseller list soon!

 

(Oh, and Amazon are advertising the book at £6.29 instead of £6.99 - how do they do that?)

Very, Very Slow

... in fact so slow, you can’t detect any motion at all. An observation which might be applied to many things. A dead sheep for example ...

 

(This old lady hasn’t moved for two years, since I first saw her in a pine wood on Alonissos)

 

... or a dead Blog (this one hasn’t moved for 18 months, I’m afraid: ain’t been a lot to say, perhaps)

 

... or a book.

 

Ah, yes - a book. A book with a very slow title. Slow Furies, which I wrote originally four years ago, and have revised at intervals ever since - most recently inspired by the lovely online writing community called Youwriteon - finally found a publisher last October; and now a mere 11 months later, is about to burst upon the world. Which, by comparison with my blog (not to mention the dead sheep) is remarkably swift.

 

I am, of course, terribly excited. I have pre-production copies already, and they look, with Patrick’s really elegant cover design and a generally very professional job by Olympia Publishers, tremendous. Now I have to hope that they sell. Not that I’m bothered about the income (always nice, though!) - but like everyone else who ever wrote a book, I want it to be read. And appreciated.

 

Launch date is 23rd September - so watch this space!

Winter Things

I imagine that four months’ silence is long enough for any reasonable person to have supposed that this Blog is dead - but just in case anyone is still curious enough to look ... another entry.

Winter - always bad, but this year intolerable. I suspect that, like many people, I quasi-hibernate as a means of getting through the short, dark, cold, wet days - and the long nights. Suspended animation. System just ticking over. Waiting for sun and spring. There are, of course, those wonderful days when the sun shines and the grass looks almost green, and the catkins hang like coloured ribbons on the hazel branches, promises of good times coming. Then the spirits lift again. But then winter bites again. Brrrrh!

We’re just back from a couple of weeks in France - sandwiched between a fortnight on Fuerteventura and a fortnight (still to come - hurray) on Lanzarote. France was - as ever - lovely of course. But it’s still northern Europe - and the snow in Brittany made every effort to prevent our reaching our wee house, which when we miraculously arrived was deep in fresh snow, too. The moorhen whose passing left these tracks had been usurped by a frozen pond, and later on I watched as a big, black-bottomed, white-whiskered Coypu skated desperately over its frozen lake. Ice and snow are rare enough in the southern Vendee for both these animals never to have experience it before. Wonder what they thought?

We solved the winter by nipping out for une petite Balade whenever weather allowed - and staying indoors by a log fire for the rest. Nice. Cosy. Oh - and twice in the past week the blessed sunshine warmed our courtyard up for us to lunch en plein air. So perhaps this interminable winter will eventually lose its grip. Can hope.

Oh - and for the first time in some months I see that my book has had a sale! See, Alan, the future is full of hope whichever way you look.