Mme de Sevigny and the nuclear powered wine

In Britain when there is an accident at a power station, we re-name the power stations, in France they do things differently.

Last Christmas we got a lovely case of wine from Polly & James and last week we were drinking a bottle of it.  It was a very nice fruity, southern number called Grignan les Adhemar .  I was particularly taken with it, because many of Mme de Sevigny's letters were addressed to her beloved daughter Mme La Marquise de Grignan.  I don't recall whether Adhemar was part of her title, it does ring a bell, so perhaps it was.  The Grignans, rather unusually, did not live at Versailles in the great rookery with the rest of the French aristocracy.  They lived on their estates in Southern France, much toMme de S's distress.  I did not know they had vineyards, or whether this wine came from their estate, but I thought I would order some more, if it wasn't too expensive, and went online.

I soon found that Grignan les Adhemar was a bit too expensive for ordinary drinking - but then I saw that ASDA has it on offer - half price, so I promptly bought half a dozen, thinking if it was only terribly ordinaire it wouldn't be bad at that price.  Actually, it was very good and so I've just bought another half dozen bottles, a snip at £4.37!

Then I saw another Google entry about the wine and discovered that it was not a new wine, or an undiscovered zone - "they" had decided to rename the area called "Coteaux de Tricastin".  So actually I was just drinking good old C d T under another name.   Why had they changed the name?  Why the urgent need to re-brand a perfectly respectable wine area.   Tricastin - true, I hadn't seen any for ages... and why did that name ring such a bell?.

I suddenly recalled when we were on holiday in the Lot in 2008, reading in one of the local papers all about a power station accident which had resulted in an undiscovered leak in the waste system for some months.  This was all the more distressing since the power station (or centre nucleaire) was on a river, in the South, in a wine-growing and agricultural area (yes, that could be almost anywhere in southern France) but this power station was called Tricastin.  Suddenly one just never saw the wine any more.  A NY Times article in 2011 (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/dining/26iht-wine26.html?_r=0) pointed out that Tricastin was not the only wine area affected, the power station was on the Rhone after all.  However, Tricastin was the only wine area that shared the power station name.   Sales crashed, and in 2011 the wine growers applied to change the name of their appellation (an appellation that had only existed since 1973 apparently) and after that, the rest was history.

I am assuming that all the wine has a geiger counter passed over it - and that the warm glow I feel when I drink it, doesn't owe too much to the plutonium.

And so, adiieu to Coteaux du Tricastin!  We shall not see its label again.

  

Bad things in 3s...

Several bad things have happened recently, so I want to know when they will stop.  The first one was the car failing its MoT test, since this is almost an annual event, it passed almost without comment, we sighed, and paid for it to be repaired (rust on the sill).   Then Finn got poor AS levels - which requires a re-think of the next year or so.  And I was ill - and continue to be.  So not all was hunky dory despite the very good news from Ireland (which is the topic of a post in another blog).  In fact it was all pretty shit, but I was coping - when the guest room ceiling collapsed.

We do not make an enormous amount out of AirBnB - but it does provide our "summer pocket money" i.e. enough so that we can go out and relax and drink and eat and enjoy ourselves at the many fabulous bars and restaurants of Ramsgate...now our most profitable room is out of use. Nevertheless, we still have someone coming tonight, for another room, and next week the other two rooms will be in use.  I thought of using Ned's room tonight, but the state of it was too much to bear.  Mark heroically cleared up the bulk of the plaster etc. but the whole place is such a mess!  I didn't get around to calling about the insurance, but I'm not sure if this sort of thing is covered by it.   Anyway, we will have to have it plastered and then have at least the ceiling decorated and we have also decided it is time to finally remove the reasonably disgusting carpet in there....we should be able to remove that fairly inexpensively I think.

Our house has had a lot of work and money lavished on it recently, but it continues to punish us!  And now we have the "haunted wardrobe" in our room - from which noises keep issuing.  There is nothing there - as far as I can tell, unless some entity has taken up residence in it (we had a haunted wardrobe in my childhood home which actually levitated once - yes, really.  No, I didn't - but 3 of my siblings did.  It was a 17thC French wardrobe, so no doubt it had plenty of history).   Last week the wardrobe door opened of its own accord, and then closed a little.  This wardrobe is a respectable Maples linen press c. 1920? Inlaid mahogany, and formerly owned by the Our Lady of Peace parochial house where it was used to store priestly vestments.   Clearly whatever spiritual protection it was under then has worn off after 12 years with us.

Bees and bonnets

My bonnet is fairly buzzing with bees at the moment - the most annoying one is the one that is disturbing me about my health...However there is a another one - I keep forgetting that this blog is not my diary, and I too frequently  allow myself to express personal frustrations here.  This has resulted on at least one occasion in a friendship being broken off, and I fear I may have done it again.  I am very sorry about this, but I doubt whether there is anything I can do, having previously blotted my copybook by having expressed my views on a topic too trenchantly.   I suppose I forget about other people's sensibilities, I expect greater resilience, which is clearly stupid of me.  My only defence I suppose, is that there is no criticism of others that I wouldn't make of myself.  Half the things that annoy me in others, are the classic projections: people who have the same bad habits as me, one's own "dark side" made uncomfortably visible, in Jungian terms.  It is difficult to bite one's lips and remain silent when one disagrees about something so as not to upset a friend, but when one manages it, it is clearly rather stupid to boast about it in one's blog.

Because the Google stats show an audience that is all over the world, I probably tend to forget that my most ardent and interested readership is probably in Ramsgate!  I managed a couple of years ago to stop writing about the LO, and clearly I should take a similar strategic decision to stop writing about Ramsgate... or perhaps just satisfy myself with telling you that we have an excellent Japanese restaurant here!

Cat days

I know they are called Dog Days because of the prominence of the Dog star in the night sky (presently I am too knackered to go out and admire Sirius, Lyra and Aquila and other summer stars), but when I see Bernard, our cat stretched out on the lawn, often on his back with his paws above his head, eyes closed, and just a glimpse of his tooth between his little black lips, I think cats are the real high summer animal.

I am having a jolly nice time just now.  Apart from a couple of mildly important domestic matters, I am largely free of any major tasks (I want to revise The Ash Grove, but that isn't urgent), so I have been seeing friends, which is always agreeable.  Actually, that isn't true - it can be exceptionally disagreeable to see a friend who has an idee fixe that one doesn't agree with - and I spent about 20 minutes this arvo remaining resolutely silent about a certain matter.  That aside, life has been very agreeable - I noticed today a Facebook post about "people interested in discussing political ideas" and realised that at present the last thing I want to do is discuss political ideas - maybe in September - but not now.   It's just over a year since I joined the LP and attended the first local SUTU meeting - I confess I haven't been doing much since the election, because I've been writing and it has been a blessed relief.

The writing has reached the unpleasant point where the euphoria of having finished the first draft has finished, and while feeling pleasantly undaunted by the prospect of revising and re-writing - one begins to wonder what will happen if it meets the same enthusiastic lack of interest the others have experienced, if it will ever get published, and all the fond hopes that one had had on completion of the work seem to be nothing but egotistical fantasy.  But this time I did feel I was beginning to get the hang of it all, the writing lark I mean.  It is far from being a work of "extraordinary genius" - it may be more commercial than literary - although I hope it has enough resonances to last a little longer than some of the books I've read recently.  I was introduced to the concept of "alterity" last night - or rather the word for it - I was aware of the idea, I just don't know what the current academic/theoretical names for things are.  Anyway, in literature it was described as being "magical realism lite" - which I rather liked.  I would hesitate to describe The Malice of Fairies as magical realism exactly. M has always snorted that there is too much "magical" stuff in my other works.  This is monstrously unfair - I wish it were so.

Anyway, on the whole I have been having a more interesting conversations than usual, and I have also been reading proper books: I just finished Station Eleven by Emily St John Mendel, and now I'm reading Half a Yellow Sun by Chimananda Og something - it's a slightly unusual Nigerian name which I didn't catch easily.  I am terribly tempted to just go and tear books out of the shelves and read them all day.  I wish I had an intellectual project to research - this often a good time of year to study something, but I don't.  So I will just continue this brief period of self-indulgence before the wrath of autumn falls on us.  That will be time enough to get started on something else - maybe time to start researching the non-fiction project.  It would make a nice change, and there is no real urge to write any more fiction at present - although I have plenty of ideas.
  

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!