BUG, BUM & BIBLE

To start at the end – what a bummer! First Anne, then Jackie, now me. Yes, you guessed it! A bug in the computer. My Outlook has blown a gasket and although I’m getting incoming emails my outgoing emails are sailing off into the great Cyperspace beyond … and disappearing. And with me going away this week, I can’t get the darned thing fixed till I get back. Aaaaargh! Particularly aaaaargh as Dave of Virtual Tales sent me the final pdf of The Moon’s Complexion to check through before the eBook goes live. I spent Sunday combing through it, and my corrections were done by the evening. But could I send them off to Dave? Uh-uh. In the end got Himself to send them from his computer, but this is a pain. Just what I can do without.

Could it be something to do with the invasion of literally dozens of emails (and getting more each day) offering to increase the size of my tool? Why me? Himself never gets them. I offered to forward mine to him, but he threatened divorce. I get these things landing in my inbox all the time. By now I could have had a tool nine miles long. The things we girls miss out on. It’s simply not fair. Anyway if any of you tool-stretchers are reading my blog, get this: I’M A FEMALE. So take your ruddy tools and stuff them in someone else’s inbox.

Before this disaster the weekend was going well. C & A from Mexico spent Saturday with us. We took them to Secretts Garden Centre. Confession. I’ve acquired a dangerous orchid habit. I used to be the kiss of death for orchids but for the first time ever, I’ve managed to coax a reject I bought last year to put out new flower shoots. I’m so excited that I’m now scooping up every rejected orchid I can lay my hands on (why pay for full-priced ones when rejects are crying out for homes?) I hadn’t intended to buy any more plants at Secretts, but I couldn’t resist those two poor orchids that had been relegated to the bargain basement. And I’d bought another sick orchid earlier in the week. So now I’ve got four. Plus the one Ant and Kay brought Himself ages ago – lovely purple leaves but refuses to put out flowers. So here’s part of my conservatory complete with orchids. I love it. Next best thing to being in the rainforest.



Sorry about the bittiness of this contribution but I’m trying to cram this in between meetings (Goldenford tonight), shopping and opera before lift-off to warmer climes later this week. After this you won’t be hearing from me until I get back. Leaving the house, plants, animals etc. in the capable hands of my voluntary house-sitter!

Oh yes – the opera. That was last night. Salome at Covent Garden.

Salome is the opera I would choose to take an opera-innocent to if I really wanted to freak them out (and have done so in the past, with interesting results). The opera, by Strauss – that’s Richard, not the schmaltzy Viennese lot – is totally based on the Oscar Wilde play. It is the most depraved piece of operatic theatre in existence, and I’m totally blown away by it every time I see it – which is now more times than I can remember. I’m an addict. The music rockets me into Cyperspace (along with my emails, presumably). It’s one hour 40 minutes long with no interval. One hour 40 minutes on the edge of your seat, building up to the most incredible high – forget crack. Try Salome.

Having said that, last night’s performance was a mixed bag. Joe came with me – a first time for her for Salome, though not, of course, for opera. It wasn’t the performance I’d have chosen to introduce her to Salome. Once again I’m on my hobby-horse. Why, oh why, do producers have to change things? This is a biblical story. What ever could have induced them to set it in a horrible white-tiled undercroft, a cross between a madhouse and a men's loo, with numerous weirdos and brown-uniformed centurions marching around in jackboots?

After we’d booked online the Royal Opera sent us a health warning: ‘This performance contains nudity and violence’. Duh… I’ve never seen a performance of Salome that didn’t contain nudity. The dance of the seven veils always ends in a nude Salome. Doesn’t it?

This dance was the biggest let-down of all. No veils. Simply a glide through various rooms trying on – get this - ball gowns over Salome’s very concealing underskirt. And dancing with Herod for heavens sake! More like a scene from Come Dancing or Nixon in China than from Salome. We all waited with bated breath for the final dramatic denouement. It didn’t happen. She never took off the underskirt.

And where was the violence? Only a demented centurion stabbing himself to death – par for the course in opera. We don’t usually get a health warning. He even turned his back on the audience when he did it. There was horror, yes, and this was well done. Although even John the Baptist’s severed head, brought to Salome in payment for her terrible dance, was quite sanitised – no dripping sinews hanging off it. But there was plenty of blood, which covered Salome’s underskirt as she fantasised and did her erotic thing with the head.

Ah, but I lie! There was nudity indeed. The centurion sent into the pits to behead J the B had to strip off first. Not sure why. Never happened before. But he did. With his back to the audience all the time. So no dangly bits. Perhaps he didn’t have much to dangle – possibly the tool-extenders should have sent him the emails instead of me.

So all we saw was his muscly bum. Joe thought it was tasty. Call me kinky, but I’d have preferred a glimpse of the naked Salome.

If you forgot the staging and used a bit of imagination, the music, as always was glorious. It’s still in my head this morning.

Verdict among the ladies in the Opera House loo after the performance? Much rather see a traditional performance. Hear, hear!

Just did a last-minute shop. Have been told that the devastation caused by Hurricane Ivan in 2005 has still left Grenada short of children’s things – clothes, books, games and so on. So I’ve been stocking up (within the luggage limitations). You’d be surprised how hard it is to find children’s book that aren’t Eurocentric. Well, not surprising, come to think of it – we are in Europe after all (yes, we are – whatever some people might choose to believe). Though we are also bombarded with things American, so I don’t see why a few Eurocentric items to Grenada will do any harm. Quite the contrary. But my ‘research’ has shown very few ‘ethnic minority’ faces appearing in children’s literature. I had to hunt hard.

Struggling back to the car with my purchases I did a double-take when a great army armoured vehicle (with L plates) thundered along Epsom Road at a rate of NOTS (ie NOT keeping to the 30 mph speed limit) towards the town centre. Have we been invaded? Is Guildford under siege? Better check the BBC news website.

So signing off now. Think of me under palm trees in the hot sun…

Amazing Eyes, Woolly Hats and Curly Pigs

The reaction to the book cover for Darshan, that cover artist Nell Grey is designing, has been interesting. Some of my friends have interpreted the picture of the Hindu god that I sent Nell to work with as "scary" or "animal like". Nell, on the other hand, was smitten from the start with those "amazing eyes" – or, as she also put it " the god is back/side lit, yet the flash flare is coming from the front, making it appear that he has his own inner light". This is exactly the effect I wanted and it doesn't surprise me that Nell, being an artist, saw it immediately.


Art historians talk about something called the "period eye", which roughly means interpreting something in the context of the time and place and purpose for which it was created. The problem that Europeans have when looking at mediaeval Eastern art is that they are viewing it from a modern, western perspective. The problem therefore that I have with my book cover is whether to stick to my principles and risk scaring buyers, or whether to ask Nell to create a cover more "accessible" to Western readers. But if I do that I think I'll be cheating myself and creating a false impression of the novel. So, in the end, I’m afraid the reader will have to come to terms with the scary, animalistic, wonderful cover!


Now I've made it sound as though the novel is very esoteric and inaccessible. It isn't! It is about a young woman’s journey through a morass of unsuitable relationships, involving betrayal, danger and heartbreak, in her search for her father and her cultural identity (and for love). It's a journey that takes her from India to Britain to America and back to India. The mystical nature of the Indian part of the book is simply a reflection of that wonderful, maddening country.
Anyway, it's given me a lot to think about, particularly the assumptions we make about the way that others perceive things, based our own personal experience.

Away from the book scene, it's been a heart-warming week, with a visit to the pre-auction sale room at Tring on Friday (chaos because ‘Flog It’ was filming the auction next day, so there were crowds of people viewing), lunch with SIL and BIL and then on to Oxford for the weekend to see Ant, Kay and Little Miss T.

Not a cloud to be seen all weekend and glorious blue sky.

But, oh my goodness, was it cold! I actually had to do the unthinkable and buy a woolly hat. The only one I could get is pink, so I felt a bit… well, pink. But, goodness, what a difference it makes to have a warm head!

The weekend was an orgy of eating, starting with the Dong Dong (yes, really) Noodle Bar in Headington on Friday night, and megasized bowls of steaming noodle soup.

On Saturday we went to Millets Farm Centre, where there is a super restaurant, serving fresh, home-made delicious lunches, a marvellous farm shop, a large garden centre with unusual plants, and some totally mind-blowing animals on their rare breeds farm. Of course they had alpacas, which I can never resist.

There were woolly pygmy goats, plenty of water birds on their lake and best of all these totally bizarre red curly-coated Mangalitza pigs. Hungarian apparently. Aren’t they darling?

At the farm shop I bagged the last couple of home-made veggie quiches. We had one for dinner – totally scrumptious with one of Kay’s remarkable salads that she manages to whip up in no time without you realising it. (accompanied by elderberry vinegar and olive oil dressing.)

Plus a bottle of outstanding Rioja.

Before we left on Sunday we had lunch at the Merry Miller in Sandford. A whopper of a meal, and yummy too. The village is very pretty as well.

Then we drove home via SIL and BIL’s to pick up our Tring winnings – some bamboo plant stands, a box of assorted eBay stuff and a couple of Indian lamps/censers. Plus some wallflowers that SIL had grown, plus a couple of plants from her conservatory! The car was loaded.

PS Ant has emailed to say he thinks the Darshan cover is great. so both men in my family approve. Praise indeed. And Joe has now also given her verdict on the cover - 'loved it!' And she's even harder to please than the fellas.

A SAD TAIL OF SWOLLEN EXTREMITIES

So I’ve found the culprit! Yes, after a month of medically ordained ‘experimentation’ to identify the allergy-inducing antibiotic from the cocktail of drugs I was given before Christmas, I finally struck gold this week. The villain is Metronidazole. According to my doctor it’s very unusual to be allergic to it. But when I staggered into the surgery with my bare, sandal-clad feet, one look at my ten beetroot-red sausage-toes left her in no doubt.

Well I’m glad I got to the root of it but jeesh – what a thing to have to put myself through. Another week of agony – the only way I could get to sleep at night was by taking a combination of piriton, paracetamol and ibuprofen. Oh yes, and by hanging my feet out of the bed. Not as easy as it sounds. This entailed locking the cat out of the bedroom (he likes biting feet). Which in turn meant he spent the night screeching his claws along the bedroom door. Not a pleasant sound. Oh yes, and digging up the carpet.

Talking of which – I won’t go into details but recently I’ve had reason to suspect that His Catship has piles (incidentally - why do domestic cats walk around with their tails up? You wouldn’t catch a self-respecting lion doing that).

As I was busy being allergic last week Himself took the afflicted feline to the vet. Of course on that particular day, wouldn’t you know it, H C was a picture of health with no symptoms on display.

Jo, the vet had a suggestion. ‘If it happens again bring in a photo,’ she tells Himself.
To which Himself replies. ‘My wife will take one. She can put it on her blog!’

Well, sorry to disappoint everyone, but I have no intention of photographing the cat’s nether regions. In anycase he seems to have cured himself. Perhaps it was the indignity of having his privates prodded by a female vet.

Instead I’ll post this photo of the back of the garden on Saturday – wasn’t the weather glorious?

I actually did a spot more gardening – instead of waiting till the Flowerpot Men come next week, I planted out the alpines I bought last week in my scree and rock garden. They’re a bit weeny but they’ll be fine when they spread.

A nice end to the week – a great end to the week in fact – the monumentally talented artist Penelope Cline, aka Nell Grey, has, in record time, sent me the ‘mock-up’ of the cover for Darshan. It’s totally wonderful. Himself thinks so too which is amazing! Goldenford is so lucky to have found such marvellous cover artists as Nell, who has also done Anne Brooke’s Thorn in the Flesh (publication date the end of February 2008) and Jan, who did the delightful cover for Jackie Luben’s The Tainted Tree (publication date early May 2008). Not forgetting Craig Jennion who did the wonderful Virtual Tales cover for The Moon’s Complexion, so very different from, but equally evocative as the Goldenford cover. Darshan is due to be published later this year, after Jay Margrave’s Luther’s Ambassadors. It’s all hotting up. What a list of great books Goldenford is acquiring.

PS Yes, I DID mean TAIL and not TALE...

A Storm in a Vomit Pot

Monday – Himself’s Birthday. He got books from YT – The Kite Runner and Three Cups of Tea (it’s about Pakistan and looks good. ). Well, he’d been hinting all week. Ant bought him A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini’s next book. And Joe got him The Bourne Trilogy on DVD.

We drove up to Watlington to peruse the auction. Nothing worth leaving bids on again – plenty of things I liked, but nothing that would make a profit on eBay. It’s getting harder and harder. People seem to want something for nothing. At this rate I won’t be bothering much longer.

We had a birthday lunch with SIL and BIL at the Blue Flag in Cadmore End. I even managed to stick to my diet. SIL gave Himself what every man should have – Anne, you’ll love this - an 18th Century Chinese Vomit Pot. Yes, Honestly!

Finally finished proofreading Darshan and with a click of the mouse, sent it off on its way to Goldenford. Once the girls have got their breath back after Anne’s Thorn in the Flesh, Jackie’s Tainted Tree and Jay Margrave’s Luther’s Ambassadors they will hopefully start sorting out the rough bits of Darshan. Hopefully not too many, but of course as soon as I’d sent it off I found at least three other errant commas. C’est la writer’s vie.

The Goldenford meeting on Tuesday was good. A lot got done and plans for the future are exciting. Goldenford is on the up, and this year’s books are very tasty. So watch this space.

Finally caught up with my postponed lunch with Jackie, so we put the world to rights over smoked salmon and tea. That was Thursday. Who could forget Thursday? It started off with such goddammed awful weather that I didn’t think I’d be going anywhere for most of the morning. I was even moved to video it through the back window. This is my first experiment at putting a video on my blog. Will it work? Let’s see…

I actually went to a boot fair on Sunday. Haven’t done this for ages. Picked up a number of interesting things. Best were these two: The first is a fabulous 19th century (or earlier – still waiting for the final word on this) cloisonné Chinese box. What a gem. It’s only 2 ½ inches tall.

And the second is this amazing this. It’s from Peru, apparently. Only 8 inches tall - a piece of bamboo hollowed out and turned into 8 little scenes from Peruvian life – mainly shops and farming. Isn’t it something?



After last week’s anti-Monty-Don tirade, I’ve got to confess that this week’s offering was a distinct improvement. The gardens of the antipodes were lovely. It was nice to see Melbourne again. I spent a year there in my long lost youth, and some of it was very familiar though it’s changed a lot. Never been to New Zealand, but boy, those gardens look impressive. Monty Don actually sounded marginally more thought-provoking this time. So there’s hope after all.

Little Miss T drew a portrait of me. She (or more precisely, Daddy) sent me a picture of it via his mobile. It’s somewhat pixilated I’m afraid. But flattering, don’t you think?