mns  2008-05-10 13:22   

I seem to have driven to and from Ireland quite a lot in the last six weeks. The first trip was for the launch of An Angel at my Back together with the novellas by Chris Binchy, John Boyne, Sheila O’Flanagan, Peter Sheridan, and Kate Thompson. It was really good fun with a very relaxed atmosphere. It was wonderful seeing old friends and meeting new ones. I can never get over people's kindness, coming into town after a hard day's work, and giving their support.
Thank you.

We brought our ferry forward by a day because we were so concerned we might not get there in time as the seas were rough and there were warnings of cancellation.
For some reason we were upgraded and we got to sit in the lounge at the front of the ship. The sea was completely wild and the waves came up over the prow of the ship and crashed onto and over the window of the lounge, going right over the top and then pouring like a waterfall back down the glass.
Normally I would be as sick as a dog, but Travel Calm (BRILLIANT) and excitement at the sight of the waves combined to keep me completely well. The contradictory effects of the combination of the medication and the adrenalin made me feel much as I usually do.

A week later I was back in Ireland for a variety of interviews and meetings, after which my sister came back to Chester with me – her first trip here in a long time. In the early 80s she and I had gone to Greenham Common to protest – it seems a long time ago now, and on the way back we had stayed overnight in Chester in an inn, both having sworn never to stay in a tent again. In fact, the mere sight of a tent now makes my skin crawl. That winter – I’m not sure if it was ’82 or ’83 – was the coldest winter and it snowed heavily while we were in Greenham in our little tent. When we got to Chester we got into the bath and stayed there. It seemed to take forever to thaw out, and even now I still get pains in one of my feet – pains that started in the cold in Greenham.

JC, my sister and I went to Crosby Beach to see the sculptures. At first, as we approached the beach along the promenade, I truly thought there were people on the beach staring out at the sea and the wind farm. Even as we got closer I still thought some of the statues were real people. The fact that some were immersed in water up to their waists was the give-away about the others. I will try and put some of the photos onto this site, and if you happen to be near Crosby Beach, you really must go to see the sculptures. Anthony Gormley’s Iron Men are a sight to behold. The exhibition, if that is the right word, is known as Another Place. Can something be called an exhibition if it is permanently placed on a beach? Does the word ‘exhibition’ not have a transience about it? Never mind; I’m being pedantic. It is most definitely worth a visit.

Summer finally arrived in Chester after a weekend of thunder and lightning. These are sunny lovely days, much like when we moved here last year. My stress levels are rising as I prepare for the Derbyshire Literary Festival in June, followed immediately by a lecture in Germany. ‘Missing’ (my second novel) is on the university’s curriculum and I’ve been invited to go and talk. The funny (or perhaps odd) thing is that when I re-read ‘Missing’ last week, I was stunned at how it related to my life at the time I wrote it. I would have said, prior to the re-read, that it was a character driven novel telling the story of three sisters and how one of them disappeared. I would have said it dealt with survival in the face of loss.
All of this is true, except I had not seen that I was writing about my loss. I started writing it at the end of 2000 and finished in 2001. 2000 was the year I lost my husband and my mother, and hidden in the pages is that loss and how I survived.

mns  2008-03-11 11:06   

I have always thought that the standard of education in Ireland is very good, and I have always loved geography. However, the geography of England, in my day at any rate, was dealt with in a very cursory manner.
And so it came to pass that when JC and I decided to go to Harrogate for a bridge congress I was under the (mistaken) impression that Harrogate was on the east coast of England and I was looking forward to windswept walks along a sea front or maybe even on the beach, the smell of brine in the air, the crashing of waves…
I never thought of looking at a map so convinced I was of Harrogate’s position.
At large congresses you often end up having dinner with people you have never met before, and by way of conversation, on the first evening, I asked how far we were from the sea. I can usually smell the sea from just a couple of miles away, and I was puzzled that I couldn’t sense it at all.
The couple looked surprised at my query and said that if we set off early in the morning we just might get there and back in time for the bridge the following afternoon. A bridge diary was produced, within which a neat map of the British Isles was handed to me. To my disbelief I discovered that we were just about as far from the sea as we were from home in Chester. We were right plonk in the middle of England leaving me wondering why on earth I had thought that Harrogate was a port. It’s a bit like thinking you could take the ferry from Leitrim to Wales based on some obscure but very inaccurate piece of information formed in your brain in childhood.
I keep looking at the map now to try to get my English cities and towns in some kind of perspective.

An Angel at my Back is out and tomorrow we take the ferry (storms permitting) from Holyhead to Dublin for Thursday’s launch of the Open Door Series. Each of the books in the series is beautifully presented and Charlie Bird, one of my heroes, is doing the actual launch. I’m both excited and nervous about the trip. It will be lovely to see friends and family, to introduce JC to those who have not met him before, and to meet those with whom I’ve been working but have only communicated with on-line.
My nervousness comes from the fact that when I’m under pressure or surrounded by a lot of people I lose names. I can remember details about people under these circumstances, but I cannot dissemble the names in my head. I remember it happening at another launch, and a woman whom I knew very well asked me to sign a book for her.
‘Whose name will I put in it?’ I asked, playing for time.
‘Mine,’ she said.
Oh God, I thought. ‘How do you spell your name?’ I asked.
She looked at me in amazement and said, ‘R I T A.’
I nearly died of embarrassment. ‘I meant your surname,’ I said, trying to cover my tracks. I don’t know if she bought it. There is a limit to the amount of ways you can spell Jones.

I’m also excited about meeting some new friends. Because JC and I play bridge online we have made a lot of virtual friends, and some of these are trying to make it to the launch even though they have to travel quite some distance. One of them I suspect I may have met before as a child because my school occasionally played hockey matches against his school – Dundalk Grammar School. It was always a terrifying experience playing against a mixed school, both because the other team had dozens of boys screaming from the sidelines and also because the girls on the team practised against the boys and were really tough and hard-hitting with their sticks.
My mother, who used to coach us, tried to reassure us that skill would win out – as indeed it usually did – but it didn’t minimize the feelings of intimidation. When I think about it, I can still feel those butterflies of nervousness. Someone once told me that butterflies are good but that you need to get them to fly in formation. Well, we’ll see…
Then there are my school friends, and their support over the years and my excitement at seeing them again is really uplifting today as I begin to pack. My children, my siblings, my beloved cousins, maybe my uncles, my loving friends from Wexford, my wonderful bridge friends and the friends I have made through my children and their school days, and the whole buzz attached to a launch… it’s no wonder the butterflies are out in force today.

The ferry leaves tomorrow at lunchtime. The weather forecast seems to imply that the present storm may have abated at least a little.

mns  2008-01-30 14:25   

Love and happiness go hand in hand. On New Year’s Day my sister got married on a ship in the Antarctic; a Russian captain oversaw the event as they coursed between icebergs and wild seas.
Two weeks later, back in Dublin, my children, Steffen and Sophie, were the witnesses at the civil ceremony – a proud and wonderful moment for me, and I was so happy to be there both as a sister and as a mother.
It was such a great day, and I will long remember my sister walking down the aisle to the strains of Brown Eyed Girl and how I felt so proud of her.
Somewhere during the day I managed to lose my hat, an item of which I was particularly fond, though my brother did ask me if it used to be a peacock and had I shot it.
No, it was never a peacock and, no, I didn’t shoot it. Its synthetic feathers came from some factory – I assume. I think it may be floating somewhere on Leeson Street which is where I went to get the coach back to the airport. If you happen to find it – well, enjoy it.
Sadly, I doubt it survived the wind and the rain that evening.

From there it was a dash to London where I recorded An Angel at my Back (due out in February). I am so grateful to JC who drove me down as he kindly (and correctly) reasoned I would be exhausted if I took the train, the tube and the bus.
It took us a brutal five hours on the motorway, but was definitely better than the alternative.
The recording went smoothly and was also very interesting. It was in a different studio to previous recordings and it is amazing how similar and yet how different this can be.
In the past I had recorded without earphones, all communications from the engineer coming through a mike in the booth.
This time I had the choice of regular earphones or a violinist’s earphone. (This is a single one so that one ear is kept uncovered so that the musician can hold the violin.)
I hate earphones and have seldom used them for listening to anything as I feel blocked off from reality when they are on, but the truth is when needs must etc…
Initially it was slightly unnerving as everything I said I could hear coming back into my head, and, when something was being played back so that I could pick up the thread, I felt disconcerted when my voice began again. But of course you get used to it very quickly.
The recording went much faster than expected and, just as JC was commencing his tenth cup of coffee, I emerged and found him reading outside a lovely old pub.

Nothing compares with London’s traffic. It was so awful. I had forgotten what it was like, and while there are a couple of things I really miss about London, the truth is that not having to cope with London traffic is in itself a wonderful compensation.

Coming back home to the quietness of our courtyard, the red bricks of the buildings, the peace of home was joy. We curled up on the sofa with a bottle of wine and a salad we had picked up on the motorway, too tired to even speak.

mns  2007-11-28 10:38   

Happiness is driving 600 miles to be with friends. It is arriving and being surrounded with that wonderful feeling of relief and joy as smiling faces greet you. It is walking in the freezing cold in the market in Nogent le Retrou as the sun attempts to thaw the frost, wandering among the stalls, knowing that you will all meet up in the nearby bar and drink coffee and aperitifs. It is the comfort of being with good friends.

It is Anno Ronini 65. Yes, Ron Tacchi ages in time faster than the rest of us because of his restructured calendar, and so we gathered again for his New Year, slightly later than the due date because a third of the party was in Shanghai for the Bermuda Bowl, and slightly later than the due time because I took a wrong turning and found myself in the winding streets of Dreux. I think part of the problem may have been because JC and I spoke only French in the car together, and I’ve never been too good on left and right anyway, even in English, so when JC said, ‘Alors, à gauche, Marie,’ I had to think twice, and those short seconds were all that it took for me to get us lost.
Our problem was that our Sat Nav didn’t work for us in France. Anna Gudge and Mark Newton had foreseen that problem and had acquired a French one with an English accent, and it sounded like they spent the journey laughing and trying to identify what was being uttered. ‘Rudy Legless’ was probably the best of this, which turned out to be Rue de l’Église.
But we all did arrive, and then got lost in time. The days passed in a haze of happiness, laughter, conversation, wine and the best of food.

The publication of An Angel at my Back has been postponed to January and I’m busy trying to write a short biography which I’m finding very difficult as I don’t know how to compress my life into three or four sentences. I can never really work out what other people want to know about me, if indeed anything. I like the fact that I used to be afraid of bridges (up until a couple of months ago), but appear to have got over that fear through confrontation, but you can’t put that in a biog. I also like the fact that I was born in a Royal Air Force Hospital, because I imagine all these planes – possibly Spitfires – taking off as I emerged into the world; and I’m intrigued that my godparents never saw me because they had died the week I was born but my parents didn’t find out until later.
I used to wonder why they didn’t get me new godparents but I suppose they were too upset when they found out. My godparents had embarked on a ship in Trinidad to come to England, but when the ship docked they weren’t on it, and they were never found, so maybe my parents kept hoping they would turn up. But they didn’t.
One of my godchildren has forty godmothers, which might seem a bit excessive but always strikes me as being rather good fun. It does mean that an awful lot of people think about her on her birthday and at Christmas, and when you’re a child that counts.

When I first started writing I didn’t feel like I was a real author, not even after my third novel was published, and I didn’t put ‘author’ on forms for several years as I felt it would be fraudulent as I was really just me, Mary Stanley, who happened to have a few books published.
I sometimes still feel that way and then every so often something happens to reinforce the fact that I am a writer, and one of those things happened this last summer. Over the last few years several people have written their thesis on me, and in every case I have given what assistance I can, but this summer I was approached by a Spanish student – Paula Garuz – who was writing her Master’s thesis on my second novel ‘Missing’ and the theory of translation.
Translation has always intrigued me, especially since I worked with several different foreign translators who were translating my novels into their languages, and I became very aware of nuance and meaning and the incredible difficulty of capturing something and translating it accurately. I have always enjoyed that work, and explaining precisely what I meant in using a particular word or phrase.
Paula’s thesis outlines these difficulties so accurately, and explains the problems and how to overcome them. This was the first time I actually got to see the final thesis – in the past I never heard from the students after I had helped them. I was overjoyed, but not surprised, when Paula achieved an Honours Degree.
The other pleasure for me is that we are now friends.

mns  2007-09-24 16:29   

It’s autumn in Chester, our first autumn here, and while I hate letting go of the last days of summer, there is so much to be done in the next few months and so much to anticipate.
My novella ‘An Angel at my Back’ is due out in November, as is ‘Party Animal’, a collection of short stories by Irish writers (of whom I am one).
‘An Angel at my Back’ will be published by New Island Books as part of their Adult Literacy Programme, the Open Door Series.
I keep being asked if this is hard or soft porn – trust me, it is neither. The books are published in sets of six and are aimed specifically at people who are improving their reading skills, but clearly can be enjoyed by anyone. I feel very honoured to be included in the publications, and thoroughly enjoyed writing ‘An Angel at my Back’.
The same goes for the pleasure I had in writing my story ‘Rites of Passage’ for Party Animal, all proceeds from which go to the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

JC and I are back from a week in Rome, Florence and Pisa. Part of this holiday was a trip down memory lane for me as I used to live in Florence. Strangely though, I couldn’t find the street I used to live on, let alone the apartment.
I really hope I didn’t imagine that period so long ago.
Everything else was at it should be, the Ponte Vecchio, the River Arno (looking strangely green), the Duomo, the Uffizi, the Academia, but buy your tickets online, as we did, to avoid the horrifying queues.
(A tip: if you have bought your Uffizi tickets online, make sure to have your voucher changed for real tickets straight across the road from the main Uffizi entrance before joining any queues.)
And then there is the Italian food – oh the wonderful, wonderful Italian food – not to mention the equally wonderful Italian wine.
The advantage of no longer being a student is that this time I could afford to have coffee in the Piazza della Signoria, which I did every day, just sitting and gazing at Neptune and David and the throngs of tourists. Years ago I used to look at people having a drink there, and I wondered what that would be like.
It’s great.

We met the wittiest couple in the Uffizi, and Florence, being the way it is, (small and compact) we bumped into them again the following day in the Academia. We then had coffee with them in Piazza San Marco, and on our last night in Florence, the four of us had dinner in La Reggia, up in Fiesole.
A quick visit to the Roman Amphitheatre in Fiesole was followed by this horrifying walk (yes, I know it was a bare ten minutes) up the steepest incline to the restaurant. I had to stop at least three times on the climb and at one point I nearly gave up except that I couldn’t bear the idea of letting everyone else down, and arrived red-faced and panting at our destination.
It was worth every pant and gasp. We had dinner outside with a wonderful view of the hills and Florence below, and promises of a return visit, only next time for longer.

I have been trying to think what exactly were the highlights of the holiday for me, but the problem is that just about every moment of the trip was a highlight, and all I can do is enumerate them: staying with my cousin Pamela in Rome, the guided tour of the Colosseum, the incredibly long and fascinating guided tour of the Palatine Hill, lunch in Piazza Navona, a quick re-visit to the Pantheon. The weather in Rome was a lot cooler than last year, averaging about 26 degrees compared with last year when it was in the 30s. So although it was hot, we did not wilt quite as fast as a year ago.
Florence is a feast of Renaissance art, and I find myself thinking about it every day, and also making plans to go back again.

Last week I gave a radio interview on ‘Women lying about their age’, a topic I find faintly amusing as I consider age, like one’s income or one’s weight, to be a private matter. You can sort of roughly guess someone’s age, weight and income by looking at them, but do we have the right to ask? I don’t think so. I think it’s pretty rude actually, and I believe it is an area where women get a rawer deal than men.
Men are allowed to let their hair go white and age with ease, whereas women have to adhere to unwritten rules about how they can grow old. Women get their hair ‘done’, they put on make-up, they try to smooth the wrinkles from their skin – all of which behaviour is re-enforced by advertising and marketing.
You don’t catch many men doing any of that. They can grow wild white bushy mops on their heads, or go bald; they pay a pittance for an occasional haircut, and we say their faces have added character when they get wrinkles.
When a woman lets herself go like that, we suspect she is a bit batty.
Shame really.

mns  2007-08-08 12:55   

I am, what I consider to be, mildly claustrophobic. I like doors and windows open, I sleep with my feet outside the quilt, and I’m not keen on small enclosed spaces. Last winter I was forced to confront this phobia when I went to record Searching for Home. The recording booth was so small that, once inside it, there was no possibility for movement. It was airless and tiny.
At the time, my immediate thought was, what on earth am I going to do? I was about to say to the sound technician would it be possible to leave the door open, when he suddenly said, ‘Of course this is sound proof,’ and I realised there was nothing I could do except get on with it. To have pulled out would have messed up a whole lot of people, their time, their money, and of course my own integrity. And so I got on with it and did it, and will be doing the same again in two weeks time when I record The Lost Garden.

JC is aware of my slight claustrophobic tendencies, but was not aware that I am also afraid of suspension bridges. This is not necessarily the kind of information that you share with your partner, partly because I don’t like to appear as a bundle of strange neuroses, but also because there was no cause to mention it.
Until last week.
JC drove us through England to the ferry. I drove us from the ferry through France to play bridge in Deauville.
Coming out of Le Havre I did see this big suspension bridge, and I thought to myself ‘Thank goodness we’re not going on that.’ And then, horror of horrors, one moment we were on a normal road and the next, I was on the bridge.
There was no way back.
There was no question of stopping. I had no choice but to proceed. If you have ever seen a picture of the Pont du Normandie and if you have a bridge phobia you will understand that this was completely terrifying. I was about to say to J that I had a problem, when my mobile rang and he spent the next few minutes talking to one of our teammates on it, while I progressed up and up and up this bridge. I had to drive with my right hand covering the view on the right hand side, and when we eventually got to the other side I discovered I was crying. And shaking. And swearing that we would have to circumnavigate France to get back to Le Havre because I was never driving across that ‘thing’ again.
JC said there would be no circumnavigation of France and that he would drive back.

I spent the next four days (when I wasn’t either playing bridge or eating) thinking about the bridge and fear and facing one’s demons. I have no idea where this particular fear emanated, all I know is that it is very real. But I decided that I had to deal with it – a bit like the recording booth.
That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
And so I did the drive back over the bridge, right hand blocking the view, in the fast lane so that I wouldn’t be near the edge, (and so that I would be off the bridge quicker) and we arrived at the other side and I wasn’t crying, and not really shaking, and feeling almost triumphant.

Deauville is wonderful, and so is its neighbouring town, Trouville. They lie each side of the river. We played in the Casino in Deauville, which is like a palace, with plush red curtains, brocaded chairs, thick carpets and fantastic chandeliers. I believe it was the setting for the original Casino Royale. For the most part we ate in Trouville, wandering down little narrow streets, or along the port, where restaurants were in abundance, as were the moules. Seafood paradise. We did not shine, rolling in 29th out of 70+, but it was great fun and the weather was wonderful, warm sunny days, the smell of the sea, and making new friends as I had not met our teammates before.
They were camping in tents. Last time I stayed in a tent was in Greenham Common in the Eighties, and I swore then that I would not stay in a tent ever again. So JC and I were ensconced in a local hotel on the marina.
We put the car in the hotel’s underground carpark, though several times I thought maybe I should put it across the road on the marina which seemed perfectly safe and was a lot cheaper.
However I didn’t, and am very glad I didn’t.
On the last night, tossing and turning and worrying about the bridge (the Pont du Normandie, I mean), I heard quite a racket outside, and getting up I looked out of our 3rd floor window, to see a group of youths systematically breaking off the wing mirrors on all the cars parked across the road, before bouncing up and down on a small car until it broke. It seemed to collapse under them, and then shouting and screaming at their pathetic and destructive success, they ran off down the road.
I’m not sure what the moral of that story is, except that the underground carpark was worth every last cent. And what we saved on the potential repair of our car we were able to spend in a French supermarket, a boot full of du vin et des fromages accompanied us home.

mns  2007-07-01 11:45   

In a brief lull in the almost continuous rain, we went down to the River Dee to check on the wildlife, armed with a bag of bread.
The river was swollen and flowing over the promenade. It was brown and faster flowing that usual, and the weir was bereft of the usual hundreds of seagulls that gather on it.
The ducks saw us coming and headed in their dozens towards us, swiftly outflanked by a mob of swans. I use the word ‘mob’ advisedly, because until now I had always seen swans as beautiful and aloof, but this time was different. Eight of them came, hopping on to the land, and then heading towards us, with their enormous webbed feet splashing in the water on the pavement.
What started as a gentle game of throwing bread to the different ducks, swans and pigeons, quickly descended into mob-rule.
One swan grabbed a pigeon. The pigeon, when he managed to free himself, landed on my head. The swan headed for me. I threw bread frantically at him as I tried to dislodge the pigeon which was holding on for dear life. All the swans came running at me, and as fast as I threw the bread they ate it and started grabbing it from my hand.
The pigeon flew off as one swan grabbed me and there was the noise like two blocks of wood being crashed together as this evil brute clamped my fingers and then let go in annoyance as he realised he couldn’t actually eat my fingers.
I retreated very hurriedly up the steps and took photos of J who was now feeding all of them straight from his hand. They seemed to have more respect for him even though one swan stretched right up so that his face was almost at J’s. I have never seen anything like it.

I love birds, and in fact as a birthday present J gave me a day’s falconry which I have been really looking forward to – but I am now not quite so confident about how this will turn out.

It seems that the weather is affecting the bird population just as it affects us. Yesterday evening when I went to put the rubbish out, down came our resident pigeon from his tree and he approached me. This pigeon is completely territorial and chases any bird, pigeon or otherwise, that goes near his tree, and he has never even come into the courtyard before. He hopped around in front of me, clearly hoping for food.

At the front of the building, from the study window, I watch the antics of another pigeon which spends its day patrolling a wooden gate. It is there most of the daylight hours, and again it allows nothing else to land on the gate.
But yesterday things took a turn there too. A slightly smaller pigeon ventured on to the gate, and instead of chasing it away, Mr Pigeon started to dance. He stretched his neck. He preened his chest, he groomed his feathers. The smaller pigeon imitated him down to the last detail as they danced closer and closer. They rubbed chests, their necks met and their heads bobbed up and down against each other.
Foreplay over he hopped on her back, there was a slight fluttering of feathers, and then she flew off.
‘It’ only took about three or four seconds, but I do hope the fence moved for her.

mns  2007-05-09 12:47   

Last month, I went to Dublin for a meeting, and while there, arranged to take a look at my house. It is rented to five young men. Everyone I know said I was mad to take five young men in; but I had a feeling that they would be the perfect tenants.

I wanted someone to really enjoy the house and garden, to lie out on the hammock between the trees at the end of the grass, to read the books I’d left on the shelves and drink the drinks I had left in the cupboards.
Any other tenants would have asked me to clear the place out, remove my pictures and books and all the bits of my past life. But these five were happy to take it as it was. A win win situation, I would say.

Anyway, I was right. My tenants are five of the nicest men you could hope to meet. The five of them had taken the day off work, and had tea and biscuits laid out; it was all incredibly reassuring as I had – I must admit – been a little nervous.

I did however get one surprise, and that was when I took a look in my old bedroom. It is, to all intents and purposes, still the same. Except for one small addition – no, no, I think I mean two LARGE additions. Lucy and Gabriel are living in my bedroom.

Lucy and Gabriel are two long, long, yellow snakes who are going to breed (in my bedroom!!!). I find myself laughing every time I think of that moment when I looked at my old shoe cabinet and thought, ‘What is that on top of it?’ I peered a little closer, and then a little closer and then I nearly jumped out of my skin.

The problem is, these men are so nice, with their kind welcome, their tea and biscuits, and next thing I knew I was stroking Lucy and chatting to Gabriel as he wound his way around my neck with his little tongue flicking in and out. I had handled a snake once as a child, but I had forgotten how they feel. They are so cold. Their scales are smooth in an odd way, their texture weird; they have a strange dryness to them, and I have to say that despite my initial shock/horror/terror I really like them. I keep thinking about them and their undulating coils, and their strange corn yellow colour, and the cold cold coldness of them as they moved across my arm.

My fourth book, Searching for Home, is out on CD and on audio cassette and available from libraries. It arrived in the post this morning – beautifully packaged with a lovely wistful cover. I have never been too keen on my own voice so have not yet tried listening to it. But, regardless, Oakhill Publishing has done a wonderful job with it.

Last weekend JC and I went to play bridge in the Cwmbran Congress (in Wales), teaming up with friends I had originally met in Malta. One of them, Stephen Cashmore, lives in Scotland and the other, Simon Gottschalk, in Wales – so the four of us were like a very united British Isles. We came second after a close battle at the end. A great weekend – so much so that we have lined up others.

mns  2007-03-26 18:18   

In January, having gone through my first ever audition, I got job I wanted - to read my novel Searching for Home for CD. My other novels are all available on audio but JC, (Renaissance Man incarnate) suggested I put myself forward to read this. I did the audition just before Christmas, absolutely sure I would be rejected, but to my amazement they said ‘Yes’. And not only yes to Searching for Home but also for The Lost Garden.
So, every day for a week I trekked by foot and train for an hour and a half to south-west London and I recorded and recorded.
Day One, I thought I would die of exhaustion on the way home. Three hours travelling and six hours recording and I was fit for nothing. I don’t really know how I walked the last mile home, but somehow I did; and there was JC waiting with a hot bath and a pie – yes, he made a pie, beef and ale and homemade pastry – and then I collapsed into bed.
Day Two I cried on the train on my way to the studio. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to get through the day, how my voice would hold up, how I had managed to bluff my way into this situation which I did not seem capable of handling. And then, lo and behold, it all fell into place. It became a strange and fascinating experience and I began to thrive on it. One of the strangest things about it was that I found myself back where I had been several years ago when I actually wrote the book. I wrote it at a time of great loss – the end of my marriage, the onset of a legal separation, the death of my mother… and while the book doesn’t deal with any of those topics, it most definitely deals with loss in general and survival in particular.
The next few days flew past and I felt stronger and really delighted in the work I was doing – and I know my mother would have been so pleased.

Last year I wrote an article entitled Smacking and the Nanny State in the Irish Daily Mail in which I claimed (and still claim) that good and loving parents sometimes need to give their child a smack – call it the Last Resort Slap – and that they should have that right, and that no E.U. Law, imposed by politicians who should limit themselves to measuring the curvature of bananas, should be brought in. Out of the blue The Late Late Show contacted me and asked me if I would defend the article on the show if they flew me to Dublin and put me up.
So I did. (see The Late Late Show, 2nd of February 2007)
Certainly it was a night to remember, and despite huge and terrifying nerves on my part beforehand, it was incredibly good fun and stimulating. Apart from the show itself, there was the excitement of a chauffeur-driven limousine (a complete first for both me and JC), the pleasure of meeting Jermaine Jackson, the reassurance of seeing in the audience a woman I know from the world of bridge (her presence gave me the feeling there was someone on my side, and that was very nice indeed), and then dinner with my children.

Some time ago JC and I had talked about moving out of London. We both work from home and we had the idea that we should move before summer so that we would have more air, easier access to outside, a smaller city… this was an idea, no more than that. But then we were up in Nantwich in Cheshire, and on a day trip to Chester we saw an apartment – and yes, four weeks later, we left London and are now unpacking the cases and boxes as we settle in just inside the old Roman walls that surround this amazing city. One minute’s walk up the road, just beyond the walls, a Roman amphitheatre is still being excavated. Standing on the wall looking down it is like looking into another era. A minute’s walk in the other direction, the River Dee washes past and a lone heron stands on the banks.

Before we left London last week, we saw John Mortimer in Mortimer’s Miscellany in The King’s Head Theatre in Islington. Of all the things I will miss about London, The King’s Head tops the list. We saw every play, every performance there over the last twenty-one months. My favourite had been Sartre’s Huis Clos – that is until I saw Mortimer’s Miscellany. It was wonderfully entertaining, hysterically funny, totally absorbing – the man is a genius.

Over the last couple of months I have done about a dozen radio interviews. The oddest one was about three weeks ago when we were staying with JC’s parents and the only quiet place I could find in the house to do the interview, was in bed. (JC has a dog with long claws that clatter on the wooden floorboards downstairs – and while I truly love this dog, I cannot trust her to sit in her basket while I’m on the air.) I usually pace when I’m doing radio interviews – I set up the room beforehand so that I have notes on the table in case I need mental refreshing, I have water to hand in case the mouth dries up, and a chair in case I find I need to sit. But generally speaking, I pace – I walk up and down the rug in our living room which silences my footsteps. However this wasn’t an option on the wooden floors in Nantwich, and so I took to the bed in desperation. I was afraid I’d feel the urge to pace and that the creaking of the bed would give away my whereabouts, but amazingly I felt no urge at all. I lay on the pillows like some dowager duchess – and all I can say is, that is the only place to do an interview.

Sometime in the late Nineties, the publisher, Edwin Higel, passed me a manuscript entitled ‘It Means Mischief’ and asked me for my opinion. It was written by the actress Kate Thompson and it was her first novel. She and I had briefly overlapped in Trinity College and I read it with interest as you can imagine. I hadn’t really known her at all back in Trinity days, but she and I had walked the same cobblestones, read in the same library, borrowed the same books – and so I read it with heightened curiosity. I returned it to Edwin giving it a full and enthusiastic endorsement. It was well written; it was funny; it was sexy; it had a good plot and interesting characters. He published it. It was a brilliant success, and nine novels later so is Kate. We both had stories in the collection Moments, published in aid of the Tsunami victims.

Now she has come up with a new publishing idea for her tenth novel Love Lies Bleeding, and I encourage you to visit her site for a look.

mns  2006-12-29 15:54   

I am living in the year 64 A.R. (Anno Ronini – pronounced to rhyme with Anno Domini.)

Our ‘New Year’ was celebrated in November, on the 25th to be precise. This came about because our friend, Ron Tacchi (well known in bridge playing circles as the World Bridge Federation photographer), was unable to host his regular New Year’s Eve bash on the traditional date, due to force majeur. Being the man he is, Ron simply formulated a new calendar – the Rononian Calendar.

The Rononian calendar is, as yet anyway, little known. It is based upon a year of 47 weeks of 7 days each, and boasts a subtle numerology consisting solely of prime numbers – 11 months, each being of either 3 or 5 weeks. There are four three-week months and seven five-week months, a reference in itself to the 47 week year.

And so it came to pass that on the day before the day before our ‘New Year’, Renaissance Man (JC) and I commenced our journey towards Vaupillon (a tiny village between Chartres and Le Mans, south west of Paris), sampling the rush hour delights of the Eurostar Waterloo terminal en route. Last year our French let us down and we became grounded in Gare Montparnasse not realising that Paris was snowed in and the trains were not running. We had transferred from the Gare du Nord by Metro and had no concept of the prevailing weather conditions. This year we had a somewhat smoother run.

One of the advantages, you might think, of having a younger partner (and yes, Renaissance man falls into that category) is that he will stay awake when you nod off.
Not so.
We both fell into something akin to a coma once we were on the train, and it was by complete chance that I woke a couple of hours later, to find the previously full compartment empty, JC out for the count, and the train pulling into our station.
Fortuitous? Yes. But also a quirkily providential instinct that I occasionally possess for timing. So, some nine hours after leaving home our train arrived at La Loupe and the festivities began.

Our party consisted of the Tacchis (our hosts, photographer and artist respectively), Bernie and Carolyn Jones (English emigrants now settled in France not far from Vaupillon), Anna Gudge and Mark Newton (both of ECats fame in the world of bridge), and JC and me.

The morning of New Year’s Eve dawned, a crisp bright day, and we set off for the local market on what has become an annual treat. It’s one of those exhilarating French markets where everything imaginable is available. From denizens of the deep to the wildest of game, the stalls are replete. Cheeses and vegetables abound. We completed the shopping for our celebratory dinner and then repaired to our now regular local for coffee and pick-me-ups.

Nothing can surpass being among friends, feeling safe, being comfortable – and for me, with the nightmare of the last year’s divorce and the endless sense of betrayal hopefully now behind me, there was a feeling of great comfort and relaxation. Sipping coffee, talking, planning, remembering a last-minute item to be bought from the stalls outside the café (garlic), nipping back out to the cold clean air, returning to the warmth, the air of expectancy about the evening, another coffee on the table, and the knowledge we had all travelled to be at this place for this event – a New Year unique to ourselves.

All of this was magical.

At seven-thirty the table was laid and the combatants (as Ron Tacchi refers to us) were gathered. We began with champagne and amuse bouches, lovingly prepared by our host. The menu that followed was truly unsurpassable. His Roquefort and walnut soufflé rose with aplomb, his lemongrass and pomegranate sorbet tingled on the palate, the pheasant cooked in two different ways with a port and cassis jus, the cheese board, the assortiment des desserts – and each course with its own carefully selected wine – what can I say? It was the most wonderful dinner.

And so the midnight hour approached and the crackers were pulled, the jokes read out, and the hats put on our heads. Mark had somehow persuaded the computer to chime like Big Ben on the hour, and at the stroke of twelve we popped our party poppers and sang Auld Lang Syne, and the year of Our Ron 64 had begun.

It may seem unbelievable, but I had never popped a party popper in my life before, and I popped it the wrong way. It exploded into my hand where little bits of plastic could be seen nestling in my skin. Serendipitously, the quantity of wine that I had imbibed acted as an effective analgesic, and I remained pain-free for several days, but not without puzzlement that a popper would explode from the base. Why aren’t they designed to open like the bottles they represent in miniature – from the top? The rest of the combatants found all of this very amusing. Sometime in the early hours we abandoned the debris and crawled to our beds.

But the party was not over – we simply continued on the next day.

There is something wonderfully exciting about the Tacchi’s home. It is an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere with a studio where Jane paints. (Think Jean de Florette and you have the picture.) The only noise is from a donkey in a nearby field that brays whenever anyone approaches. The garden is full of Jane’s art with ceramic owls up in the trees, and a stork in their pond and birds, both real and handmade, hiding in the rafters. Their kitchen displays the produce of the vegetable garden with chillies drying, and herbs in abundance, and always the smell of fresh coffee. At night the real owls can be heard hooting and the bats gather in clusters in the dusk.

We left two days later, making our rather tired way back to Paris by train, then from the Gare Montparnasse to the Gare du Nord and on to the Eurostar and back to London.

If there is a drawback about a 47-week year, it is that one ages rather faster than if you abide by the Gregorian calendar; so the women in the party agreed that we would birthday in the Gregorian manner but celebrate the New Year in the Rononian. Renaissance man seems to think we should age in the Rononian calendar because then people would say we were looking increasingly good for our years. But I’m not so sure about that.

However, the definite advantage of the Rononian calendar is quite clearly that we only have to wait forty-seven weeks to do it all again. Next year it will be in October. I can't wait.