I've finished the novel!

Just in time for the school holidays - so tonight we can relax and go out and enjoy ourselves and possibly even celebrate...

Next on the agenda - re-write of the Ash Grove.... a bit of a slog, but I guess I've learned a lot now.

We aren't going away - Greece is still filling my mind, and we have yet to earn significant amounts of money - but we can relax.Maybe have a few outings and day trips somewhere.  Most of the short term work on the house is finished too - so things are looking up.

A strange incident

I've been reading a memoir by my cousin Moyra Caldecott,  Her book Multi-Dimensional Life is a fascinating account of how a great many unexplained phenomena have helped and inspired her writing and given her a deeper spiritual awareness.  In particular when she was writing about the Egyptians, notably Akhenaten, all sorts of weird events occurred - not least her trip to Egypt with Tina Turner - as well as others of a rather more terrifying nature.

Cover by Olly Caldecott

I veer and struggle between a fairly rational approach to things, and a belief in the psychic/spiritual which some people would laugh at.  I take most accounts of irrational phenomena with a big spadeful of salt - but I am always open to hear personal experiences which don't rely too much on coincidence and credulity.

As I re-read the book, I recognised a lot of things I had in common with her (well, I knew this anyway), telepathy, a sense of the eerie, occasionally a sense of evil presences and I have also experienced those sequences of significant events occurring in a short time (Jung's Synchronicity) which seemed to have a meaning (although I am wary of attaching meaning to something which may just be coincidental).

The sort of events Moyra described are also familiar to Christians who "live by faith": phone calls from strangers who have to give you important news, a cheque arriving for exactly the right money at the right time, healing, finding exactly the right book you need for your research, a book falling open at a significant passage.  All these were things that occurred to progress her writing, deepen her sense of the interconnectedness of things.

Since I've been writing The Malice of Fairies I have had one or two similar experiences - one friend has brought me almost magically relevant books, and I have had moments of wild inspiration - common to most writers I think - when the book just writes itself.   Two of these moments came while I was in Cardiff visiting my mother in law (I write better when I'm angry).  Since May I've been wondering what the hell has happened to what I wrote then - two scenes from the last third of the novel. I have been looking in all my notebooks but none of them contained the pages I'd written.   A lost notebook that I'd pinned my hopes on, proved not to have them when I found it.  These few hundred words began to seem crucial to the successful completion of TMOF .  I was really annoyed as I had invented a whole group of new characters and felt re-constructing them would be stiff and stilted.  Also I have now reached the point in the novel where I needed to incorporate them.

Last night, sitting at my desk I saw a small ring-bound A6 notebook to the right of my laptop.  It wasn't there before - I don't know how it got there.  It was folded open and I flipped through it to see what was in it. There were the scribbled pages I'd written on a Welsh bridge on Easter Sunday, and in the Cardiff Museum the following day. There is probably a rational explanation for its sudden appearance, but the fact that it was sitting next to my laptop, just where it was needed, the night before it was needed, having been lost for 3 months, does seem like a miracle. The fact that I'd been feeling such a connection with Moyra through re-reading her book (available on Kindle) encouraged me feel (as she might have) that I was getting help from some greater power - perhaps via Thoth, Hermes or one of the Muses, or maybe Moyra's already found a new role in the Life Beyond.

Bucket Lists

The temple of Poseidon at Sounion - ought to be on everyone's bucket list!

I suppose that 1,000000000 things to do before you die meme has been going for a while, in fact it's so popular it's endlessly referred to as "my bucket list".  I just heard a woman on the radio saying "well, I wanted to do it - it was on my bucket list."   She was talking about the fact that she had stood outside the Sandringham parish church to see the latest princess go to be christened, as a result she got to see the nation's favourite nuclear family all together.  The reverential treatment suggested that this was a rare and cherishable opportunity which would seldom be repeated since the royal parents wanted to guard their children's privacy.  Which leads me to a detour - whatever happened to the Wessex children?  I don't read the celebrity press, but one never hears them mentioned - which has always made me wonder if there's something wrong with them - but, enough of this prurient speculation.

 I was thinking about to what extent I have a bucket list.   Mostly I think it would consist of places I would like to visit.  But I'm also aware that it's a shrinking list, there are plenty of places I don't think I really want to visit...I have slightly gone off the Amazon and Machu Picu, and I've never been bothered about going to Australia.   I have seen the Taj Mahal and Venice and the Acropolis and the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
I would still like to go to Granada, to Egypt of course, and impossible North African and Near Eastern places like Petra, Damascus and Leptis Magna... and an awful lot more of Greece.  I'd like to go back to some of the Greek cities in Turkey too.  And see more of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and I still haven't had that honeymoon on the houseboat in Kashmir yet  - I wouldn't mind seeing the Hyrcanian forest either.

The Hyrcanian forest - temperate rain forest - rather like Glengariff - once had its own tiger species.  Sadly became extinct in 20thC (?).











Not a terribly unfeasible bucket list - and a lot of this can be done by train too.  Then there are experiences I might like: I would like to go up in a hot air balloon - but then again, what if I got vertigo?  Humiliating.   More rail journeys would be nice - across Europe I think.  And I would like to see more architecture and more art galleries.  And?  Er, well, I can't think of anything else really, which shows what a predictable person I am.  What else is there?  I don't want to take up extreme sports and do adrenalin surging activities.   I would like to try scuba diving though... that's quite appealing... although a bit of a risk of claustrophobia in the mask.  Never got on with snorkelling. I'd quite like to have a short visit to a desert - and well, perhaps I'd like to have a little project - something like 27 things to do before I die, rather than 1,000.

I have always remembered the man I met who was travelling around to see all the sites where English Kings and Queens were buried - I thought that was a good idea (I've seen quite a few without trying,Windsor and Westminster Abbey provide a good range for a start, add in Fontrevault and the Roman tombs of the Stuarts and I must be halfway there).  I could create a little project like that - perhaps visiting all the museums that own paintings by Bosch or Giorgione.  But that probably wouldn't take long.  Is there any real problem about travelling aimlessly?  If you have an agenda doesn't it make it more stressful?  Doesn't it just become box ticking?

Then there are the books - I have been slightly influenced by Alan Bloom's The Western Canon but I've hardly been systematically reading through his list.  I just try not to read really dim books, unless I'm ill. There are a limited number of books I can read, so they might as well be good ones.  I should try and read the rest of Dostoievsky and Proust before I go, and perhaps go to the opera more often. And perhaps more live classical music - although that is tremendously difficult if one doesn't live in a city.  Perhaps "get a flat in London" should be on the list... I doubt whether that is remotely feasible - but I do love the idea of having a teeny bolt hole so I could go and do things.  But that isn't exactly bucket list - that's wildest dreams/aspirations territory.

The other problem with bucket lists, is that everyone else is racing around to fulfill their lists - so when you do get to the Taj Mahal or wherever you find 10,000 other people there.  I have been lucky that I managed to travel a reasonable amount before mass global travel was so intense.  I saw lions and elephants in the wild before one had to line up along with a dozen other jeeps to photograph them - and I've wandered around the Roman forum when it was almost as empty and atmospheric as it was in Gibbon's time.  Now, or at least last time we were there, there were elements of the moronic inferno about it.  Would I really be happier watching it all on tv?  Perhaps the solution is to go to quieter, less over-hyped places - those small towns that have wonderful atmosphere, even if they don't have the greatest "sights" - places like Brescia or Toledo or Vezelay...no, Vezelay is v.v. touristique... At the moment the desire is to go to more of Greece, now that I have conquered the work kolokothukeftedes it is essential that we return to use it as often as possible.

Courgette fritters - sigh!

356 days of food

Due to my lack of interest in blogging at the moment, I am forcing myself into regular habits with a food blog - over at Food Odyssey http://thanetfoododyssey.blogspot.co.uk/  I have begun posting 365 days of food.  This is largely for my own amusement and information, and to encourage myself to cook a wider variety of things.   I tend to cook my regular 25 dishes and get a bit annoyed with myself.  On the other hand, due to the limited preferences of the household I am a bit stymied - plus it's quite difficult to get good fresh red mullet around here.

Anyway, the idea is to provide a record of what we're eating and to see if we really do exist on meat balls and spag bol.  Actually, we don't, but it sometimes feels like it.  There is a lot of stuffed pasta kept in the fridge for emergencies, and in real times of crisis the husboid is capable of making French toast and spaghetti carbonara.   So all is well.


I tend to eat differently from them when I can get away with it.  So it's also a record of what I'm eating, versus what they're having.   But if you fancy some decent, basic recipies - head over there!