Mary's musings

A personal post

2010-04-26T10:18:00.005+01:00

In a period dominated by volcanic ash, when we thought youngest daughter would not be able to have the trip to Florence she was giving her partner as a birthday present and had booked months ago, there was another more poignant event.

In December, my cousin's wife Sylvia died after a long and painful illness but my sister and I couldn't make it to the funeral. Our cousins lived in San Diego and flights were booked up in the week before Christmas, plus the planned BA strike was playing havoc with the schedules. And you had to have a permit from the US embassy which had to relate to a specific booked flight and took a while to organise.

So when we heard that our cousin was bringing Sylvia's ashes to Hampshire for scattering at Southampton Crematorium, we were pleased to have another chance to say goodbye. The sun shone brightly and all Sylvia's siblings were there, three brothers and a sister. The volcano in Iceland had its effect - it took her husband 30 hours to get to the UK, via Paris, the Channel, Victoria and Henley. And their youngest daughter had been unable to get a flight, even though she works for an airline. But there must have been thirty or forty people there.

Her ashes were scattered in the Garden of Rest where her parents' had been years before. Henry read Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnet How Much do I love Thee? and there were tears shed. Sylvia's sister was comforted in a huddle of brothers. Then we moved to a hotel where a DVD played stills from her life. From an impossibly slim pretty teenager, to a beautiful bride, young mother, domestic goddess, glamorous mother of the bride and frail but luminously happy wife celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary in a gold dress.

When we had dispersed to our various homes, my sister rang to say she had got back safely. Gad to hear it for there will be no brothers to comfort me if she goes before I do. We were just sitting down to our dinner. "I'm going to get myself something to eat and watch TV," she said. "What programme?" I asked. "Ashes to Ashes," she said and we both had another little pang.

It all brought home how important it is to have rituals to mark these rights of passage; it almost doesn't matter what they are, as long as they are shared and leave everyone feeling that an important event has been suitably acknowledged. RIP, Cousin Sylvia, a lady who lit up the world and not just for her family.

All the fun of the Fair

2010-03-27T17:49:00.006Z

What a busy bee I've been this last month! There has been a lot more work on the website, which you should see the fruits of soon, more David, classes in Italian Literature and Art History, a book signing in Abingdon, an interview with a journalist about author support networks, a telephone interview to help a student with her dissertation, a Day School on Courtly Narratives of the Italian Renaissance and, Oh yes, a trip to the Bologna Book Fair!

Bologna began a day earlier for Rhiannon and me when we drove up to London to have lunch with our Japanese publisher from Shogakukan. We met Kyoko at last year's fair and have formed quite a friendship with her.

Then on Monday 22nd we launched with some trepidation on our journey. We'd known for a week that our BA flight had been cancelled, so were flying to Verona instead. At the far end we met two people from our literary agency, plus another agent, Sarah Molloy, and Rod Campbell, who had had their substitute Easyjet flights cancelled because of a baggage-handlers strike in Italy. We piled into two taxis to the station and travelled to Bologna together on the train. How glad we were that our hotel was right opposite Bologna station!

You can read all about the Fair on my Book Maven blog over on www.bookmavenmary.blogspot.com

I'm also writing it up for Armadillo and Carousel. But next week sees me off to London for the first two days: a meeting on Monday and a talk, with Rhiannon, on Tuesday at the Society of Authors on Social Networking for Authors.

Somewhere in the middle of all this Stravaganza: City of Ships was published in the UK!

Constructions

2010-02-24T20:22:00.004Z

I've been so busy with web material that only one chapter of David has been written; I hope to get back to it next week.

And we've celebrated two birthdays - a daughter of 33 and a "surrogate granddaughter(parents' own term) of 1. This was all done very thoroughly, with another trip to London involving furniture moving and visits to the dump in between.

Half term was delightfully full of visitors, writer friends, and long chats about books and writers and writing. More Nordic walking (I have my own poles now)and Italian literature. And I started a new short course on The virtù of six Renaissance masters.

We began with a big hero of mine, Filippo Brunelleschi, whose dome or cupola for the cathedral in Florence is above. I have loved this building, especially the dome, for 45 years. Ghiberti this week.

We saw Midsummer Night's Dream at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol - one of our favourite places for seeing Shakespeare. It was so good, with a really funny Wall. I read Snobs, by Julian Fellowes, with pleasure and great relief that I don't live in that world - or want to. Am now devouring Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scriptures - such a good book!Also read a short story by Beppe Fenoglio called Golia (Goliath) about a German soldiers captured by partisans.

And I've heard Suk's Asrael Symphony twice: am listening to it now. What a find!

Big changes on the way

2010-02-04T20:06:00.005Z

I have been talking to the Kimptons at Wordpool, who designed this site, about a brand new website. It's needed for early March when Stravaganza: City of Ships comes out, and Bloomsbury need me to update materials for the Stravaganza site too.

So busy, busy, and it all takes time away from the actual writing. But sometimes you have to put that on hold because the other things have a more pressing deadline.

Anyway one of the changes is that this blog will become more of a newsletter, every week or two and that people will be encouraged to comment and ask questions, which I can reply to. At the moment I answer fanmail every week or so and often spend a long time answering one whose writer has given the wrong email address. Then it bounces back and there's nothing more I can do. The disappointed reader just thinks I'm a mean author who didn't reply.

As well as working on website ideas I have written a piece for the Big Issue about "5 Books your child should read before they're 11" and a story in 247 words for World Book Day on the subject of Time Travel. That was really hard!

I've also been to London twice - once for the Costa award party, which you can read about on my other blog (at http://bookmavenmary.blogspot.com - scroll down because there are a couple of later posts) and once to see the RSc production of Twelfth Night at the Duke of York's. We absolutely loved it!

Some people say that Richard Wilson was born to play Malvolio but this production isn't built around him and he plays it very straight. The ensemble is terrific,with the twins sufficiently alike to carry it , a convincing Orsino and a lovely Andrew Aguecheek in James Fleet (The Vicar of Dibley and Old Mr Dorrit's much nicer musical brother).

We'd both had a hard-working week and it was lovely to sit back and be lavishly entertained for three hours, especially by a play we know so well.

I'm still reading Alan Bennett and will miss him when it's over.

A moving post

2010-01-22T15:09:00.006Z

Since my last entry, life has been very much dominated by daughter's move.The Sunday before last we went up to London to collect my car, see the flat and take the new home-owners for a pub lunch.

Then the whole of last weekend was spent packing up the rented flat and eventually making the final move on Monday. After that I drove back here in my car, which had done sterling service ferrying items to the dump, flatpacks from IKEA and generally making the move easier.

I do not want to see another cardboard box or any bubble-wrap again for a long time!

So not a great deal of work has been done, though I have written a little piece for The Big Issue on "5 books your child should read before they're 11." And I have been working on new material for the Stravaganza website to coincide with publication of City of Ships.

And, very excitingly, this website should have a whole new re-design by then.Busy, busy.

I've also been to one Nordic Walking class and given blood - but not on the same day!
I've read Alan Bennet's Writing Home and a lot of his Untold Stories. And since I've had a writer friend to stay while husband was away at a conference, I've seen things I never normally watch, like Silent Witness. We also watched Shooting the War on BBC4 - incredible and often harrowing footage of WW2 from both sides.

My Italian Literature Class has started again and we read a "bleeding" chunk from a novel by Alvise Corrado. I hate de-contextualised passages like that.Must get back to revising the adult novel now.

The weather outside is frightful

2010-01-09T19:49:00.004Z

Well, MOST things went according to plan. Everyone got here in the end and we had a wonderful Christmas. What didn't happen was our anniversary trip to London. The snow was bad there and we saw there had been accident on the M40. We've postponed seeing the play till February.

But that meant my car wasn't in London and husband heroically drove up on Christmas Eve to fetch one couple, while I, less heroically, fetched another from Oxford. The third couple and my sister had arrived on 23rd. So we dug in, with log fires and lots of lovely food and drink.The big carafe of cognac I won in, well, Cognac was very popular.

The big snow arrived last Tuesday and it already feels as if it has been here for ever.
This is a picture of it from my "magic" window.

I got a terrific haul of books and have read two of them: Leanne Shapton's Important artifacts ...etc, etc and Susan Hill's Howard's End is on the Landing. I hope to blog about them both over on the Book Maven (http://bookmavenmary.blogspot.com).

I've also seen quite a lot of TV, including Cranford and Dr Who (the latter was pretty dire). But what I enjoyed most was Avatar in 3D at our new local cinema. We can now do a 15 min drive, park for free and stroll across to the multiplex and see films in comfort. So much nicer than driving at least twice as far to Oxford and paying to park miles away from the cinema.

The story is pretty clunky but the visuals are spectacular.

We didn't stop entertaining till 29th and since then I've written two essays - one in English for Art History and one in Italian on Vitaliano Brancati. So I can start revising the adult novel next week.

Oh, and I didn't win the Costa; Patrick Ness did, with The Ask and the Answer. But I DO get to go to the presentation on 26th and to take a guest. Not a dinner this time, just a champagne reception, but how nice to go to something like that without feeling nervous about whether you might have won!

'Tis the season to be very jolly indeed

2009-12-21T17:24:00.007Z

This was our tree in 2007 - but it looks the same every year. None of this tasteful, colour-themed minimalist nonsense. The three daughters decorate it - this year on Christmas Eve - and throw everything we've got at it. And we have a LOT. Husband buys one new bauble in every shop we visit in the Christmas season and we have this year been given some as presents.

After feeling frighteningly behind with everything, I am now more ahead than I have ever been. Cards and parcels all got done on time in spite of fewer than half the cards we had ordered arriving. The crackers never did arrive but I got some more at M & S. And all the presents ordered on line will be here on time, except for one, which is for someone we aren't seeing anyway, so it can be posted on. Our Christmas shopping in London was very successful.We even managed a carol service with mulled wine afterwards.

I got that Grace picturebook written and both editor and agent like it, so that's a relief. Also wrote a Guardian review for January.

The most eventful day was 10th December, though this was a mixed blessing:I had my last Art History class of term, then a quick glass of champagne at one party and off to London for the Bloomsbury bash.Before the first party, there was a call from middlest daughter to say she and partner had exchanged contracts on their flat. (The offer had been accepted in September so that was a relief!)

The Bloomsbury party was fun and I basked in the congratulations on the Costa shortlist.It was a pleasure to meet up with old friends and put faces to new ones I'd met on Facebook (Gillian Philip, Chris Priestley). I was delighted to discover that Chris draws the Payne's Grey cartoon in the New Statesman, which is coming back! Seven of us went out for a Lebanese meal afterwards but I got a call in the middle of it to say my cousin had died in San Diego. This had been coming a while but was very upsetting, especially since my sister and I realised there was no way we could get to the funeral, which was on 19th.R.I.P Sylvia, a lovely lady taken too soon.

I stayed the night with a writer friend, who had invited someone to meet me at breakfast. We woke up 20 minutes before friend was due, thus giving support to the idea that all writers are a bit louche and disorganised.

Husband's work had two parties and my "office party", i.e. the local SAS Christmas lunch happened in Stroud. I drove there in powdery snow with another writer friend and we all signed our books in the children's bookshop next door to the bistrot

The weekend was spent cooking up a Christmas storm and there are many good things sitting in the freezer or fridge.

I saw the Turner and his masters exhibition at Tate Britain, with two friends. I like him much better when he stops being influenced by other people and develops that wonderful dissolving gold style.

And I watched the Cranford creative extension this Sunday. Some of it delightful but harsh in places.

I read Fontamara by Ignazio Silone, which is our set text and really enjoyed it, even though parts of it are grim.

Tomorrow is our wedding anniversary and we are off to London to do complicated car exchanges and see the matinee of The Habit of Art. So this evening will be spent wrapping presents and putting up more decorations. The time to be very jolly indeed!

Christmassy

2009-12-08T18:56:00.005Z

Well, the first draft of the adult novel is finished and I'm now writing the next Grace picturebook, which has to be delivered by Christmas. The chapterheads for City of Ships have been corrected and the sea-battle plan approved.

The Kids Lit Quiz Final was won in Oxford by a local team of four boys from Wheatley.It was quite different from the regional finals, with 30 teams all racing to press buzzers. One of the only two questions no-one knew the answers to related to JanMark, who died in 2006. So sad that 120 of the brightest readers in the country had never heard of this marvellous writer.

I have only one Art History class left this term and last Thursday's was a field trip to the National Gallery, so I've seen Titians and Bellinis, Leonardo and Michelangelo, Sebastiano del Piombo and Raphael.

The Italian Literature has already finished till January and I have to write an essay for both courses by 8th Jan.

I've read Ann Turnbull's Alice in Love and War, Neil Shusterman's Everlost and Pat Walsh's first novel, The Crowfield Curse, which I'm reviewing for the Guardian.

I've also been watching, with absurd enjoyment, the comedy series on TV called Miranda. Only one left to go next week and each one has made me laugh out loud.

We went to the annual turning on of the Christmas lights in Bourton-on-the-Water. We haven't managed this for the last three years. We didn't buy much but it always marks the beginning of Christmas. And tomorrow we go to Oxford Street to do our Christmas shopping. Publishers' party on Thursday and Carol Service at the weekend - if only the parcel that we think holds our cards hadn't gone missing, we'd be completely immersed in Christmassy activities.

Glittering prizes

2009-11-25T21:59:00.002Z

I can now reveal, after two weeks of keeping it to myself, that Troubadour has been shortlisted in the children category of the Costa Award. (Full details on News page). I don't think it will win but it's one of only four books chosen, so I'm honoured. I did enjoy winning that prize in France and wouldn't mind having that feeling again!

My team wasn't allowed to win a prize at the Kids' Lit Quiz Regional Final in Northants last Friday, but we did all get nice certificates. (It's for the children, really, you see). I'm going to the Final in Oxford along with about another 30 authors. Should be fun.

I've been busy Skyping - a new joy - and trying to use Google Wave.

Chapter 20 of the adult novel will be finished tomorrow.

I finished The Graveyard Book, which has just won the Booktrust Teenage Prize, and read The Traitor Game and shall blog about them both over at The Book Maven (www.bookmavenmary.blogspot.com).

And I read most of another long short story by Vitaliano Brancati, Il Vecchio con gli Stivali (The old man in boots)for our assessed discussion in Italian.

We've now finished watching all of The Return of the King, which we had to do in tranches, the last of which was last night. Now on to all the extras.

The jacket of City of Ships came today and looks very exciting. I'll try to post it on this website next month.

Memory Lane

2009-11-15T19:43:00.002Z

I've blogged about Remembrance Day and other memory-related things over at http://bookmavenmary.blogspot.com but here are some more personal ones. A visit from a dear friend from Germany, involving lots of chocolate, talking about his new dog (a whippet) and even watching a bit of the Two Towers in the extended director's version together. That's friendship.

Then on Sunday a visit from friends we have known since before we were married, though a link by marriage. They brought their middle son, who had himself got married in Mexico a few weeks ago. He is waiting for his wife to get her visa to come here. I remember when my wedding ring was that shiny.

I was in Cambridge overnight on Tuesday and made a little pilgrimage on Wednesday morning to St. Bene'ts church. We were married there by special licence nearly 37 years ago.

On Friday middle daughter arrived for a weekend of celebrating her and her father's birthdays. She was 30 on 2nd November but spent that week in Vienna with her partner. She was a deliberate Scorpio - my husband wanted another in the family. We were all gathered together, apart from youngest daughter, who is currently in Morocco. How intrepid they all are! They'll all be here, with partners, for Christmas.

I finished reading The Island of the Day Before at last, with little real pleasure. Am now reading Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book - much more fun.

Page proofs of City of Ships have gone off and Troubadour has been nominated for the Carnegie Medal and got a fabulous review in yesterday's Guardian. Chapter 18 of the adult book has been finished and I start 19 tomorrow. If I can waddle to my computer, after all the birthday feasting!

After the wallabies, the kangaroo!

2009-11-05T21:10:00.003Z

Not another dream, you'll be relieved to know! We were entertaining our niece from New York with her delightful two-month-old Juliet. For Halloween, Juliet had the sweetest kangaroo suit, complete with pouch and joey but actually found it too hot and got fretful.

She was otherwise very charming and smiley and we had lots of cuddles. She got bathed in the bidet and was very co-operative about it! Our two nephews came to meet their first cousin once removed and were very good with her.

They were less sensible about the cats and Lila managed to bite one and scratch the other. But they would not leave her alone - absolutely fascinated by her. Still, Freddie did tell me that "inside Lila's ear is like a bouncy castle."

Oh dear, one should never tell dreams or children's quaint remarks - I have broken two cardinal rules.

We dressed up a little bit for the boys' first Halloween party ourselves, wearing hats we bought one Hogmanay in Edinburgh - husband's even had lots of baubles attached to a battery, so that they could be made to flash on and off. But we didn't stay late, since it was the 40th anniversary of our first meeting, and went off for a curry à deux.

I've read the page proofs of City of Ships, nearly finished chapter 18 of the adult novel and continued to research the historical.But the November birthday + pre-Christmas entertaining is looming: two occasions this weekend, big family bash next etc. So there's a lot of cooking to be done.

I saw and greatly enjoyed the BBC1 Emma a bi to my surprise, since the casting wasn't promising. Some anachronistic language jarred but otherwise OK.

I'm still reading Eco's Island of the Day Before, which has its longeurs. But I read a really entertaining 20-page short story by Vitaliano Brancati for Italian class.

I saw the DVD of Under the Tuscan Sun. Beautiful to look at but, having decided to change the book drastically into a love story, the writer/director then lost the focus and had Frances Mayes ultimate partner not turn up till the very end!

John Hurt and his father's wallabies

2009-10-21T21:41:00.003+01:00

A bit like "Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis" this title comes from a recent dream. I don't know if Wendy Cope was on Melatonin but my treatment for insomnia, from a wonderful doctor who practises integrated medicine, has been giving me the craziest dreams.

In this one John Hurt was living in the flat that middle daughter and partner are buying, as their lodger because he was at odds with his father, a great landowner. But then Hurt Senior's wallabies turned on him and John inherited the whole caboodle and moved out.

It feels as if I have a head full of rubbish, which is being systematically emptied out and I'm getting far more of what the doctor calls "efficient sleep." We have yet to see what effect this has on the writing.

I've started back on my Italian Literature Class and a new course on High Renaissance Rivals. And it turned so cold I got out all my winter clothes and then immediately headed south to Cognac in France.

I'd been shortlisted for a prize - which I won! (See News page on the website for what it was).

I spoke French for 3 days including an acceptance speech and two radio interviews. Miss Yates would have been proud of me.

I read And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer, the commissioned sequel to Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and blogged about it as the Book Maven here: http://bookmavenmary.blogspot.com
Am also reading Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before. Also read two Pirandello short stories and a piece by Matilde Serao.

I heard Ravel's Quartet - twice! And I've been watching Emma on TV, in spite of being surprised by the casting. Also saw Juno for the first time and Stardust for the second. The star of Juno was very impressive but there was so much that was unfeasible in the story. Just like the wallabies.

Athenian matters

2009-10-02T15:25:00.002+01:00

Well, it's been a week of sights (and sites) to refresh the eyes. As planned, we used our week in Athens mainly to visit museums - the Cycladic, New Acropolis, Archaeological, Benaki and Byzantine. Sadly, the museum shops did not deliver the goods as we had hoped, in terms of catalogues (and in my case gold replica jewellery - perhaps just as well!). And often there were no postcards of the exhibits we liked best.

But there was an exhibition called Worshiping [sic] Women at the Archaeological Museum and I was able to get an English catalogue for that. The Parthenon itself was covered in scaffolding but I expect I will forget that when I look back on it. We could see it - just - from our hotel's roof terrace. I was a bit apprehensive about the walk up but there is a very gentle slope, taking us past such interesting things like Dionysius' amphitheatre, where the great Greek tragedies were first performed.

The new museum was a treat and would surely persuade any doubter that the British Museum should give the marbles back on permanent loan.

We got season tickets on the Athens Metro - all three lines of it! - and became expert at getting around that way.

I read Ruth Rendell's Portobello, which was atmospheric but a bit pointless, and Aravind Adiga's Between the Assassinations, which ditto, but differently. Am now reading Umberto Eco's Island of the Day Before.

Another literary week

2009-09-20T12:41:00.005+01:00

Well, I watched the men's singles final at the Us Open and didn't get to bed till 2am on Tuesday. But I'm glad I stayed up. Much as I admire the elegance of Roger Federer's play, I applaud Del Potro for the way he hung in and slogged it out to win decisively in the fifth set. But Federer will be back. Exciting times in tennis, men's and women's.

Later on Tuesday I went up to London, arriving in the pouring rain, in sandals, not having heard a weather forecast. It was Naomi Lewis's memorial event and the great and the good of the children's book world had turned out. Russell Hoban was there, looking incredibly frail and vulnerable, and Elaine Moss, who was always the softer critic compared with Naomi. And Brian Alderson, still going strong, who read Naomi's poem, Printemps, written earlier in 2009, her 98th year.

I got soaked again going home and shivered damply on the Oxford Tube. Back at 11.30, having to put all my clothes in the airing cupboard, and drink a hot posset.

Next day I had a running phone call with my new copy-editor at Bloomsbury going through the last (I hope) queries on City of Ships. We started at 10.30 am and finished at 3.30pm, with breaks for coffee, lunch and my paying the window-cleaner! But she was good -really good - and had brought herself up to speed on the series very quickly.

On Thursday I went to a Literary Quiz as part of the Woodstock Festival, with husband, oldest daughter and another writer friend. We all love quizzes and are quite competitive, so were pleased to come joint 3rd out of twelve teams. It was quite hard and we shall do even better next year! We called ourselves the Mything Link, which we thought was quite clever but the quizmaster (James Walton from Radio 4's The Write Stuff) kept pronouncing it to rhyme with "scything"!

Yesterday we had to send poems for a birthday album for a close friend whose birthday and party fall while we're away in Athens next week. I chose Louis MacNeice's Sunlight on the Garden and husband Waller's Go Lovely Rose, which was one of our courtship poems.

I finished The Book Thief and must own myself to be rather disappointed. It has such a huge reputation and has sold so many copies, that I expected better. It was very annoyingly written and I simply didn't believe in the character who was supposed to have survived 2 years in Dachau.

Am now reading Michelle Lovric's The Undrowned Child and then I will be into holiday reading. We're off to Athens on Tuesday for a week so I shall see lots of antiquities.

On matters non-literary, middle daughter and partner have had an offer accepted on a flat and are in the thick of all that goes with first-time-buying. Thank goodness for Phil and Kirsty's book, which we gave daughter years ago; she has been in training a long time!

All things Venetian

2009-09-14T18:26:00.004+01:00

Well, all my plans for getting six chapters written before Athens were thrown into confusion. Because of late arrival of review books I had only a week to read and review two books about Venice - around 550 pages together. It meant I had to spend five days just reading - which felt very odd and I had to keep telling myself I was actually working.

I've written only one more chapter and my hopes to complete two more will probably be scuppered by the "final" copyedits on City of Ships, which I won't get till after tomorrow.

Last Thursday I went to the launch of Michelle Lovric's The Undrowned Child at the Italian Bookshop. It is set in Venice, where Michelle lives when not in London. I now have the book and will look forward to reading it, since the extracts read by actors Claire Bloom and Geraldine Paige were very enticing.

There have been social occasions every weekend! Two family birthday celebrated with a feast at middle daughter's home in London and then the naming ceremony of my two little nephews the next week. Both very happy events.

And then this weekend we had a friend staying. We took her to Compton Verney,which is a real haven of civilisation, in Warwickshire. Among the pictures in its art gallery were several of Naples and Vesuvius which, despite being the wrong city also had a Venetian quality - or perhaps by then I was just obsessed.

There has been so much good TV - a lot of it clashing. Peter Ackroyd's Venice, Joanna Lumley Catwoman, Stephen Fry's Last Chance to See - even a new Miss Marple. But basically when not working I have been glued to the US Open tennis Grand Slam. The loss of Andy Murray now seems so last week, since we have had the rise of Del Potro, the victory of Kim Clijsters, the collapse of Nadal and the tantrum of Serena Williams. I am poised to stay up late to see the men's final, which I hope Federer will win, though I think Del Potro will give him a good run.

I didn't stay up for the semi-final last night and missed that phenomenal shot of Federer backwards through his legs at match point. But I've seen the clip. What a player!

I am now reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, which has been an unaccountable omission up till now.

A Writer's Week

2009-08-29T17:15:00.005+01:00

I checked the copy-edits on City of Ships in the first two days of this week, having had a scare that my copy-editor had taken them into the Labour Ward with her (she practically did!). As always, I had been working on another book since so it was strange to see it again. But satisfying.

On Wednesday I finished chapter 11 of the adult novel I'm currently writing and used Thursday and Friday for chapter 12. But I couldn't have done this without the planning work I did on the Oxford Tube on the way into London at the end of last week. I re-titled all the chapters and worked out how to distribute the plot over the second half of the book. I'm now in hope of writing six more chapters before we go to Athens in just over three weeks.

There won't be much time to work on the weekends as tomorrow we have a family birthday get-together and next Sunday a naming ceremony for my two little nephews. And last week my niece in New Yor had a baby girl, making me a Great Aunt for the first time; that sounds extremely dignified and grown-up. I hope I can live up to it.

Among the fanmails I answered this week was one from a woman in America whose brother I had dedicated a book to once and who was now about to become a father! I remembered him well.

Troubadour got a nice review in the Times from Amanda Craig today. So, editing one book, writing another, reading reviews of a third and answering e-mails about others - that's a writer's life.

I've been reading a book on the credit crunch and read the text of Jerusalem but must now do reviews for the Guardian of three books in two weeks and they haven't arrived yet!

2 Phaedras ( or possibly three)

2009-08-23T11:19:00.004+01:00

Well, I went to Jerusalem and Phèdre on successive days and have been thinking of both of them ever since.

Jez Butterworth's play was a revelation - the first thing I've seen for ages that was totally unpredictable and unusual. I would go further and say it was the Look Back in Anger for the 21st Century, only much better written and with a far more sympathetic protagonist. The combination of Butterworth's exuberant, Joycean turn of language with the absolutely staggering performance of Mark Rylance as Johnny "Rooster" Byron, would have made it unmissable even without the very strong ensemble from a cast that included Mackenzie Crook as Ginger, the aspirant DJ.

Byron is an immensely charismatic figure, Falstaffian, a lord of misrule, whose tall tales are completely believable as they are told, even to a sceptical audience of mainly young punters who come to him for cheap or free booze and drugs. As my companion and I agreed, he would be a nightmare as a neighbour, but as a character he was mesmerising. And not amoral; he had his own standards and was actually hiding fifteen-year-old Phaedra Cox to protect her from an almost certainly abusive stepfather.

Johnny is about to be evicted by Kennet and Avon Council, from the copse in Rooster's Wood where he has illegally lived in his run-down old caravan for years. Somewhere along the way he (now fifty) has fathered a six-year-old son and by his own boasts, shagged most of the local female population. Byron, like his namesake, is a celebrity and a "legend in his own lunchtime."

He used to be a daredevil stuntman, jumping his bike over lines of buses, until the day he "died." The Flintock Fair in Wiltshire was his favourite showcase and it's Fair Day again today, St George's Day, during this play, which observes the classical unities of time and space.

But no summary of the plot conveys the importance of Jerusalem. The virtuosity of the language soars above the low mimetic vehicle chosen. Byron is the one in touch with legendary England, who can make you believe in heroic ancestors and long-forgotten giants. But that flag of St George on the curtain makes you uneasy. One of Byron's young followers, who works in an abattoir, killing 200 cows a morning before lunch, feels uncomfortable the minute his bike takes him over the border into Berkshire and is quite happy to hear that an old woman has been kicked to death for her scratchcard once he realises she's "not local" but from Wales.

Dave's kind of chauvinism would almost certainly lead him to vote BNP - if he could be arsed to vote at all. And Byron simply doesn't recognise politics and rules. I do hope the play gets a West End revival so that more people can see it; trust me - it and Rylance are going to win prizes, shinier than a fairground goldfish in a bag.

So Monsieur Racine had a lot to live up to. I'd read Phèdre at university and remembered the line that everyone does - "C'est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée" which is rendered in the Ted Hughes translation as "Venus has fastened on me like a tiger." I suppose Hughes should know. But I felt the whole production suffered under Nick Hytner's direction from not deciding whether the acting was going to be naturalistic or more stylised and declamatory.

Helen Mirren in the title role had opted for the latter - with much clutching of the stomach and hair - while her husband Theseus when he showed up, for the former. This was reflected in the dress, which was just about modern for the women in a sort of floaty Hampstead Bazaar/Sahara kind of way but put the men into contemporary battle fatigues.

There were some problems with the for the most part exemplary translation, which I haven't discovered whether to attribute to Hughes or Racine himself. Hippolytus's Amazonian late mother is referred to as both Antiope and the more familiar Hippolyta - which is just muddly - and Phèdre describes Medea as her sister. Her sister? Phaedra was the daughter of Minos and Pasiphae; Medea the daughter of the King of Colchis.

But when Theseus says that calling upon Poseidon to destroy his son was an "error of judgment" the jarring management-speak has to be Hughes' own. And why is it "Phèdre" "Theramène," "Ismène" but Hippolytus, Theseus and not "Hippolyte," "Thesée"? Some scansion issue?

It seemed so narrow - "the tedious old baggage banging on about fancying her stepson" as I felt when I came out, even though Mirren gave a performance which has been much admired. I missed the richness and variety of Shakespeare, even of Jez Butterworth. I looked at my watch a few times in the two hours that the tragedy ran continuously and never for a moment believed in the characters - unlike at the Royal Court.

In the cast list was an ad for Hans Werner Henze's new opera "Phaedra" in January so maybe I'll run round this story one more time.

All other news must wait till next week.

Jam and (almost) Jerusalem

2009-08-15T21:48:00.002+01:00

Last Sunday we harvested many kilos of plums from our fruitful tree and yesterday I managed to turn about half of them into jam before they all fermented. But there are more to come. Nature is either prodigal or very stingy. And we can't tell which it's going to be. As with writers - are you going to be in the Joseph Heller, Harper Lee, J D Salinger league or more like Anthony Trollope? (I shan't mention Barbara Cartland).

I'm definitely more of a Trollope (we are talking quantity, not quality, you understand, so I'm not trying to compare myself with one of my favourite novelists. Perhaps I should just say I'm a plum tree rather than a damson or wisteria, as far as analogies with our garden are concerned) I've been saying I've written "over 90" books for some time now but I must keep an eye on it, lest I pass my century without noticing.

The thing is: some of themwere quite short.

I'm thrilled that through the machinations of middle daughter I have tickets next Friday for Jerusalem at the Royal Court and will report on it next week.

Also thrilled to discover an Internet site where I can watch the Palio live. I saw the Prova Generale tonight and it was just like being back in the Campo. Lupa won without its ruder (="scosso") who had been chucked off, along with Pantera's jockey, right at the start. I like it that it's the horse who wins, not the rider.

I've been reading YA novels for my other blog but have also started a book on the credit crunch (research for adult novel) and The Unicorn Road.

And I herad Stravinsky's Apollo from the Proms. I wish it was still called Apollon Musagete but it was still divine.

Tweet-tweets of a techno-mum.

2009-08-08T20:26:00.006+01:00

I am at last a signed-up member of Twitter, where I am @MARYMHOFFMAN. I couldn't be @maryhoffman because someone had taken that label. Guess what her name was? So at least she had some excuse, unlike the person who took the User Name maryhoffman over on Facebook. She had a COMPLETELY different name, not even beginning with the same initials. I sent her a private message asking why she had chosen to use my name rather than hers but she didn't reply.

So I complained to Facebook, and much to my surprise, I am now allowed my own name!

Very confusing this cyberlife of mine.

I am going to blog about Tender Morsels as the Book Maven, over on http://bookmavenmary.blogspot.com

You might notice this is a slightly different address from the one I was using before; that's because my techno-daughter took me in hand and transferred all the past posts and comments over (the old address was confusing) and put an automatic redirect on. I had to do the links again by hand - all 20 of them.

But I joined Twitter all on my own and when I told same daughter, she offered to set up an automatic feed for my Tweets to appear in my Facebook status. "Done." I boasted. "And set them up to appear on the Book Maven blog too."

"Then I have nothing more to teach you, Young Jedi," said she. "You are officially a techno-mum"!

I am halfway through chapter 9 of the adult novel and it's really beginning to feel like a book. But the City of Ships final copyedits will come at the end of next week and pull me off it again.

I've seen all the episodes so far of the new season of Midsomer Murders - and they are hilarious! Two hours of very slow storytelling each Wednesday. Actually this week's was quite good and even a bit nasty, to vary the pace. Last week's I think was all cricket and the first one all golf but this was about art forgeries, varieties of pig and fly-fishing. Absolutely addictive and I love the theramin in the theme music.

Publication Day!

2009-08-03T18:49:00.010+01:00

This post is going to be mainly about the production of As You Like It at Stratford, but I couldn't let today pass - 3rd August 2009 - without mentioning that it is publication day for Troubadour! UK jacket shown on left, It comes out in the US in a couple of weeks with a different look.

If you aren't a writer reading this, you probably think publication days are full of flowers and parties but it isn't like that. I did whinge a bit on Facebook and then got sent lots of congratulatory messages and even an electronic card with virtual champagne and balloons but the day itself has been much like any other.

I have wasted too much time on Social Networking sites, tried to dislodge cats from my lap and reinstate the laptop, written and received e-mails and done the shopping. Oh and I had a swim first thing but that's a Monday morning ritual not a publication day one. My lovely agent DID remember and send an e-mail though, as did one of my dedicatees.

It's funny: you have this date in your mind for so long, in relation to edits, copy edits, blurbs, press releases etc and then, by the time it actually comes along, you can't believe that no-one but you, your family, agent and publisher, have seen it till now. And by then you have written another book - two in my case - and are working on yet another.

Now, As You Like It. We went to the RSC production at Stratford, directed by Michael Boyd, who is RSC Director and mastermind of the marvellous Histories that domianted last year and much of the year before. Katy Stephens was a very good Rosalind, especially as Ganymede, and Richard Katz (Touchstone) and Forbes Masson (Jacques) were ourstanding in parts that often suffer from our over-familiarity with them.

Masson in particularly, who made quite an impression on us in the Histories, proved able to sing in an eery falsetto. But JonJo O'Neill was very disappointing as Orlando (and he's a great actor) and the production itself was distracting and annoying.

They started off in Elizabethan dress - puzzingly in inky black at the court, since no-one had died - then transmuted to more and more modern clothes in the "Forest" of Arden, ending up with Audrey in a white mini-skirt and four inch heels for her wedding. There was not a twig or leaf to suggest Arden - only an incongruous heap of straw.

I had been warned about the rabbit-skinning and -beheading business between Corin and Touchstone at the beginning of the second half, so used the handy A4 sized programme to hide behind.

But what was really disappointing was that Boyd seemed to equate pastoral with jolly idyllic romps and had determined to discover the "dark side" of the play by setting it in the bleak mid-winter. Couldn't he trust his source a bit more than that? Long-headed fellow that W. Shakespeare.

Talking of the dark side, I've started reading Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels. And have just finished Guantanamo Boy, which I'm reviewing for Armadillo.

Kill them all

2009-07-26T19:11:00.005+01:00

I have blogged about what happened in this cathedral 800 years ago on my Book Maven blog: wwwbookmaven.blogspot.com (no dot after www)

That was 22nd July, in the middle of last week.So I thought about it as I went round Sainsbury's.

The day before I had been talking about my books with a group of 20-something American students in London. Three hours flew by for me; I don't know if they did for them but one has become a Facebook friend and another wrote me an e-mail. We talked a bit about Twilight.

It came as a shock to realise that they would have been in High School for 9/11.

On the other days I managed to write a chapter and a bit of the new adult novel.

On Friday I was back in London again to look at Flats with middle daughter - what a hard time it is for young professionals. The housing market turns out to be pretty buoyant just in that pocket where she and her partner are looking.

I read Julian Barnes' Nothing to be Frightened of - an extended essay on his fear of death, beautifully written. It was sad to think that since he wrote it in 2006, his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, had developed a brain tumour and died in months. I can't help thinking about how it affected his own fears.

Barnes is a great Francophile - I wonder if he thought about Béziers this week?

Retreat and advance

2009-07-17T16:00:00.009+01:00

I didn't mean to imply in my last post that I hadn't seen more in Siena than the Palio and a swimming pool. e went, as always, to see the Duomo and Duccio's Maestà.This time, too, we revisited the Simones and Ambrogio Lorenzettis in the Palazzo Pubblico, using our new binoculars and my notes from Serena Quartermaine's fresco course. Brilliant!

Since we've been back, I've done all the edits on City of Ships and been to a writer's retreat at Charney Manor - my 7th I think. If the photo has come out above, the credit is to Karen Ball, a new young writer who was there too. Thanks Karen.

I finished Pascal Mercier's Night Train to Lisbon (got the title wrong last time). It was outstandingly good, although even this ended rather unsatisfactorily.

And while we are on the subject of unsatisfactory endings, I allowed Russell T Davies to wring me out with the Torchwood miniseries, Children of Earth. The first 4 were brilliant though the 4th heartbreaking, but the 5th was just too bleak and compromised the main character horribly.But I have had endless Facebook conversations public and private with friends about this so will not go on about it here.

We went to see The Apple Cart by GBS in Bath and it was excellent. Such a clever, witty play and so well done. It was a very wet Saturday afternoon (we went to the matinee) but cheered up by a fabulous dinner at Demuth's, the vegetarian restaurant.

But the most exciting thing to happen since my last post is that youngest daughter has got a job! She describes it as the only job in architecture going in London for a new graduate so we are more than thrilled for her. So tough to be an Arts graduate, as the Guardian has been saying all week, and the architects have been among the worst hit. Very sorry for all this young talent that will have to compete for jobs with another batch next year and the next.

But for now very happy for this one talented young person.

Marmite summer

2009-07-06T20:19:00.004+01:00

Well, we are officially empty-nesters now! Youngest has gone off, with another First Class degree, to seek her fortune in London (are the streets paved with gold in Shoreditch?) We haven't had long to miss her since we left for Siena a week later.

My editor from Frances Lincoln came for lunch and we went through the last of the art for The Great Big Book of Families. we've got publishers in the US, Denmark, Finland and Germany already, with more to come.

The day before we left I went back up to town for the Carnegie/Greenaway announcement party, which I blogged about on wwwbookmavenblogspot.com

And then we were off, leaving the house to oldest daughter and nine friends! We got to Santa Chiara just in time to go out for dinner with middle daughter and partner, who had come to join us after a week in Rome. So lovely to be back in the Italian city that, with Florence, most feels like home.We did serious Palio work all week, with the TV, Internet, daily purchases of Il Corriere di Siena,text updates and of course seeing some things live in the Campo, including the race itself!

I was so nervous that it would be postponed a day because of thunderstorms (which we had pretty much every day) since I was leaving on the morning of the following day. The nervousness was enhanced by being given a free ticket to see it from a stand in the campo.

And indeed the day before, when we went to the open air dinner in our contrada, we sat down to it two hours late, because of storms.

But it all worked out in the end. Not for Civettra (=Owl) whose horse had to be scratched because of injury the night before the race, or for us, in that Montone didn't win. But a part of me will always be in the Campo watching the Corteo Storico go by and hearing the wonderfully Charles Ives effect of the campanile bell tolling against the drumming of each comparsa and the brass band playing the Palio march!

The Blessing of the horse in the early afternoon is still the best bit for me.

When we weren't Palio-ing, we had hot hours by the pool and swimming. I read John Grisham's latest effort, The Appeal, which was quite poor. The baddies won! And, since one doesn't read him for style or profound insights that was disappointing, to say the least. 500 pages and the good guys got shafted.

But I also started and am still reading Pascal Mercier's wonderful Last Train to Lisbon, bought on a hunch. This is the real stuff.

Two days after we returned I saw the Federer/Roddick final. What an indulgence, to spend ALL Sunday afternoon on! But we were away in Siena last year for the other 5-set final, when Federer lost to Nadal so I felt I'd sort of earned it.

The first copy of Troubadour has arrived!

And this week I'm editing City of Ships.

I got only three mosquito bites in Italy, so I think the Marmite-eating as repellent is working! We'll see when I go to Athens in September; that will be a good test.

Seeing is Believing

2009-06-13T21:59:00.002+01:00

It's been a busy couple of weeks! Two birthday parties - one for a 50th, one for our youngest nephew, who was two. Equally enjoyable, both of them.

There have been alternating hot and cold weeks: in the last hot one I spent four hours planting hanging baskets and urns and pots and troughs. Three days of watering in the intense heat and then it was time for another cold and wet week. The plants seem to thrive better in this odd weather than people do.

On the last of the glorious days my agent came out here for lunch and we had a good talk about future plans. Watch this space.

Then two visits to London: the first to see Sickerts in Dulwich (see below), the second to celebrate the 21st birthday of Kaye Umansky's Pongwiffy. There was a lovely party at her agent's - Caroline Sheldon - in her delicious house behind Notting Hill tube.

By the weekend it was so wintry that we practically had to light a fire. Instead we laid on a classic cream tea for two visitors.

Then back to London for the announcement of the new Children's Laureate - the wonderful Anthony Browne - and a meeting on Mike Rosen's Just Read campaign.

I've just had a visit from my old Florentine friend, Carla, and the sun shone for us. We had a lovely trip to Jaffe and Neale's bookshop in Chipping Norton - they don't have independent bookshops in Italy.

And then to Compton Verney in Warwickshire which is a beautifully run house and garden with an exhibition of portraits called Seeing is Believing including a couple of Holbeins, Cranachs and Reynolds.

I haven't spent much time at all on the novel.

I was very disappointed by the Sickerts, which were painted in Venice. Just perverse to go to a place characterised by the quality of the light and then make the paintings dull and dark. But it was worth it to see the Rembrandts in the permanent collection.

I read A.S.Byatt's The Children's Book - 600 or so pages.It's almost a masterpiece but she needs a strong editor or maybe she needs to listen to the one she has. There's a party near the beginning where we are told not only the names of everyone attending and how they are related to one another but also every detail about what every guest is wearing!

Since then I've read Penelope Lively's Making it Up, which is a sort of imaginary autobiography - a companion piece to Oleander, Jacaranda - which doesn't quite work.

Bill Nighy, Margaret Thatcher, my mother

2009-05-29T10:40:00.009+01:00

And now possibly me. All with a condition where the middle fingers curl towards the palm. Maggie and my mum had operations, privately in the former case, on the NHS in the latter. Bill Nighy hasn't. I will like a shot if I'm right and the condition really sets in. It's annoyingly in my right hand. Oh to be ambidextrous - or at least to touch type!

I'm back from Italy, covered in mosquito bites. On the Trieste coast, it was hotter than it had been in any May "since records began." I was writing my adult novel, proofreading my daughter's latest and generally having good bookchats with two writer friends.

Last year we were making hot water bottles at night; this time it was so hot and airless even a cotton sheet was too much.

Before I left I went to a booklaunch for Leslie Wilson's Saving Rafael, where there were several friends from the "other" SAS. I met a splendid teenager who was doing her GCSEs but had also taken part in a NaNoWriMo. Quite an achievement for a full-time school student.

I also went to the SCBWI retreat in Staffordshire to give two talks - one on writing across the age range and one on how to manage a writing career. Funnily enough the two editors who were offering critiques to would-be-published children's writers were both ones I had some knowledge of, one them my daughter's new editor.

As a wise friend of mine said, "When you start in this business, the editors seem like your mothers; then time passes and they are your contemporaries;finally they are the same age as your grown-up daughters!" And I suppose you could add grand-daughters if, like me, you are a writer who will never retire.

SCBWI has a good track record for its members becoming published; I met one who had been given a three-book deal with my own publisher.

On the subject of which, I forgot to say that my editor loves City of Ships. Careless of me. Her edits will come any day and have to be done by the end of June so I shall be busy. And I have a nice Dutch offer for Troubadour and an invitation to speak at some schools in Paris next term.

In Italy I read Kate Atkinson's When will there be good news? which was so compelling that I stayed up till 2am one night to finish it and then handed it to one of my friends because I was so desperate to discuss the ending with someone! I didn't feel the ending was completely incredible as with One Good Turn but I DID want to know HOW what happened had happened.

I also semi-read Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, but there was a bit too much about salmon for me.

Since being back I've finished Somewhere towards the end, Diana Athill's prize-winning memoir of old age. I liked it much better than Stet.

I saw with a terrible feeling of imminent deprivation, the last episode of ER last night. It does feel like parting with dear friends, even though I didn't much like some of them.

In Italy we went to see the lovely little castle at Duino, where Rilke wrote at least two of the Elegies. He had his own terrace, two in fact, where he wrote, looking out over the sea and the cliff with the ruined castle where the White Lady rock commemorates a woman who was thrown over the cliff by a jealous husband. She was turned mid-air into the rock and resumed human shape at night to visit her child.

The world needs lerts

2009-05-11T18:48:00.004+01:00

Busy week: Two trips to London, two to Birmingham, two to Witney, one to Essex and one to Hampshire. And yes that's eight in seven days so Saturday was London and Birmingham!

The first London trip was to see the film of Coraline, which I blogged about at wwwbookmaven.blogspot.com (no dot after www). Essex and the other London trips were all part of helping youngest daughter complete and hand in her final Architecture portfolio, which happened this morning - hooray!

Hampshire was for a Big birthday party for my cousin, who is the oldest left alive of our generation in the family (myself being the youngest). His brother and sister in law were over from San Diego which was a big plus. The youngest person there was aged four.

And Birmingham was to hear the last two concerts in the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's "Igorfest" - four years of performing Stravinsky's entire output. Wednesday's was rarely performed Biblical works like Threni (based on the Lamentations of Jeremiah) and a Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer. There was the most GORGEOUS counter-tenor, Christopher Field. He had the most thrilling voice of that kind that I've heard since James Bowman.

Saturday's had Fireworks (composed when Stravinsky was 17), Mavra, The King of Stars ( 5 minutes of blissfully mysterious music) and finished with a bang, literally in The Rite of Spring. Absolutely terrific.

I also heard a lot of Mendelssohn in the car on Saturday morning and he really means very little to me.

I read Katherine Langrish's Dark Angels, which I've also blogged about - it was very good. And finished Georgette Heyer's My Lord John. Am now reading The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's History Plays.

On recommendation, I signed up to Google Alerts for my name and Stravaganza: I've had some very peculiar notifications but did find one genuine review. I was put in mind of Posy Simmonds when she collected her honorary Doctorate from Brighton. She ended her talk: "Be alert - the world needs lerts."

The books we write and the books we meant to write

2009-05-03T16:35:00.005+01:00

City of Ships is now with my editor, my agent having read it as quickly as usual and giving the thumbs up. So that's the first hurdle passed. I've also written a Banana book for Egmont. It's years since I did that but I wrote three back in the day. And this one came very easily, since I'd been thinking about it for a while.

I have a writer friend staying and we've had good talks about our work and others'.

On Saturday we went to see the modern mosaic exhibition in Cirencester, which Robert Field curated. My four Elements mosaic prints are now up in place in my study. So I forbore to buy more. Actually, apart from Bob's, the only one I really liked was the most costly in the exhibition.

So we looked at the Roman ones in the museum instead, which just made me want a Roman villa with a mosaic pavement in my dining-room and an atrium garden.

Last Saturday, we were at a day school in Oxford on Medieval Italian cities, which was lovely. A very high academic standard and good handouts and bibliographies.

On Wednesday i went to a local school (I mean in my road!) to give an assembly associated with the Times Books for Schools promotion, which has my Encore, Grace! in it.In spite of their projector's turning my PowerPoint green and the showcard's not having arrived, it was good.

This week I've read a book by a friend and a very old book by Georgette Heyer, which a friend lent me, called My Lord John. The John concerned was Henry V's younger brother, the one that Shakespeare gives such a bad press to, and the book was first in a projected trilogy set 1395-1435, but she kept being given contracts for more Regency novels and died before she could complete her Plantagenet project. It stops in mid-sentence; so sad.

She was a victim of her own success and even then the public and the publishers wanted "more of the same."So, even though she wrote some thirty historical novels, she couldn't complete the project closest to her heart. She gets rather a bad press nowadays but The Devil's Cub was one of my all time favourite books when I was a teenager - I knew it by heart. And she wrote some pretty fine detective stories too.

Happy birthday, Shakespeare!

2009-04-23T18:51:00.004+01:00

Well, City of Ships is "finished." That is to say I have a 84K+ word document which I have now finished checking. But there are a few scenes I want to add before sending it off.

I also wrote my essay on Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini - the difference between the book and the film. Most of the in-between has been spent celebrating my birthday and enjoying the sunshine.

I share it with Hitler, which irked me for many years. Why couldn't my mother have hung on a few days and let me be born the same day as Shakespeare? But then I wouldn't have been an Aries. And I am.(Actually I think that he was too. At least not a Taurus).

I've nearly finished reading the fascinating Peter Ackroyd Shakespeare book, which has had to languish while I read several novels by people I knew and a book I'm reviewing. And I also read The White Tiger.It was OK but not really so remarkable as to win the Booker.

And I had to laugh at the blurb, which said that Adiga was giving us a rare view of India's dark underbelly, or some such. Every single book set in India that I have read has shown me nothing but that underbelly! Rushdie, Desai, Mistry, Roy - when do they ever do anything else?

I would have seen the film, In the Loop, but couldn't face going into a dark cinema to listen to someone swearing like Alastair Campbell, while the sun was shining so temptingly outside.

I saw the last episode of Lewis and still didn't spot the scene I saw being filmed in St. Giles last year.

Arts and Crafts

2009-04-13T19:39:00.004+01:00

I have now finished chapter 23 of a 21 Chapter novel! Another chapter and epilogue should do it. The dining room is festooned with pictures of galleons, galleys, galliots and galleasses.

But I took a break to come away to the Lake District for Easter, where I haven't cooked a meal, apart from soup, for four days. We provided the ingredients and two brothers of the younger generation, plus Rhiannon and her partner, have basically cooked fabulous food every day.

We have eaten far too much and drunk a lot of wine and played silly games and had good conversations. It has been a really good house party in a wonderful house, owned by a friend who is away.

And the sun has shone really hotly. We haven't done the walks we planned but we did visit a glorious Arts and Crafts house this afternoon, by Baillie Scott and were the only people there. I so wanted to live in that hall with the peacock frieze!

I saw Antony and Cleopatra at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol and it was great, as good as their Julius Caesar.The current company is really strong.

I also saw a really good episode of ER and two of Lewis. I had to watch the first one on i-Player, which can be terrible on a Mac! But I've seen three episodes now and though I love the corny old things it has such screamingly obvious plot anomalies and discontinuity points, I'm thinking of offering myself as script editor!

I've started to read The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Reserving judgment, except to say it's very readable.

Bolognese

2009-04-02T20:41:00.006+01:00

I have written about the Bologna Book Fair in two other places - a report for Armadillo, of which I am no longer editor, and a post on my new Book Maven blog, whose address is here: wwwbookmaven.blogspot.com (no dot after www).

But these are both more public items.

Rhiannon and I had a great fair, so productive and useful that I think I might have to start going every year instead of alternate ones.

A highlight for both of us was meeting our Japanese editor, since coincidentally we are published by the same firm there. But also fun for me was meeting two charming Italian men at the Liber stand.

Not just randomly, you understand. I am on an international committee for Liber, an Italian children's books review journal and had written them a long article about British children's books which my friend Carla had translated. It was in the current issue on their stand.

I was waiting to introduce myself to them when they saw my name badge and fell on me with cries of Mary Hoffman! That was very nice. And they asked me to write more articles for them.

We bumped into several old friends, like Fiona Kenshole and Ed Zaghini but perhaps not as many as in some years. There were definitely fewer American editors than usual. The Great Big Book of Families was very well received and I met lots of my colleagues at Frances Lincoln and Bloomsbury as well as my German and Dutch editors.

And on our last day at the hotel, when we were waiting for my husband to join us, we had a lovely visit from Australian fantasy writer Isabelle Carmody, who is a friend of a friend. That was lovely, sitting in the garden drinking coffee and Campari in the sunshine and just having a good old writers' talk.

Then we were off to Florence and back in the flat I was in last July with another writer friend. The landlord as charming as before and such a good central flat.

We saw the Uffizi, so I was able to spend time again with my favourite painting ever - Simone Martini's annunciation. Then we went to San Lorenzo market - come sempre - and had a perfect pizza, salad and beer lunch in the open air. We might have walked up to San Miniato al Monte but in fact all three fell into an exhausted siesta, a post travelling tiredness hit like a wave.

And then dinner at my favourite Florentine restaurant.

Next morning Stevie and I visited our favourite Bargello and I saw the Donatello David restored which I had seen Dottoressa Ludovica Nicolai working on last July. Magnificent. I was also able to pay my respects to the little Michelangelo "Apollo-David" which is my favourite piece of sculpture, so very happy.

We tried to get into the Baptistery but were thwarted by a huge student party.In the afternoon we went Oltr'arno to see the Masaccios and succeeded. Though Santo Spirio was closed; it almost always is. And got into the Baptistery on our way back though by then I'd had my purse stolen on the bus, losing about €60. Still, they didn't get my credit cards.

We were having dinner with Carla, which was the usual eight course marathon - very nice - and that cheered me up.

I read Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor, which I enjoyed after a sticky start. And it had a very weak ending with a huge plot glitch. Will for the deed again. And then Magdalen Nabb's first detective story set in Florence, Death of an Englishman. This was because we discovered the Anglo-American bookshop, Paperback Exchange. It's been there 30 years - they were having a birthday party when we went in. I've never known about it before.

Am now reading Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue, which is very readable but unreliable and full of errors; he should have got a linguist to check it for him.

Sisterhood

2009-03-21T22:11:00.005Z

Well at last I know exactly what I have left to write in City of Ships - not only the last few chapters but the missing earlier scenes. I've done very good planning, received two books from the London Library and help from a friend and have been using the dining table to set up a (dry) sea battle!

It has to go on hold for a week though, as I'm off to Bologna tomorrow.

Coventry was great - very stimulating as always and great to see so many friends.

I saw the Byzantium exhibition at the Royal Academy and bought the catalogue and a gold torque. But I didn't find it quite such a sparker of ideas as the Babylon one.

Last night we saw Doctor Atomic by John Adams, which had some great music but absolutely atrocious libretto by Peter Sellars. A young ?Swedish couple in front of us did not return after he interval, they found the whole thing too embarrassing.

I wish that John Adams had been separated from Peter Sellars at birth - then his work would have been even better.

I've taken a break from Shakespeare to read Kevin Crossley-Holland's autobiography. What a strong sense of place he had from a young age. And his workroom in today's Guardian is the first one I've felt at all attracted to.

Also read First among Sequels, the 5th Thursday Next novel, which was slow going in the first half.

And this blog, which just maunders on about my daily life has been given the Sisterhood Award by TWO DIFFERENT BLOGGERS! There are Fiona Dunbar and the Bookwitch. I am humbled and honoured. Must get to bed now as I have not yet packed for Italy.

Elementary

2009-03-08T10:34:00.003Z

It's lovely when a school visit goes well. My trip to the Abbey School in Reading (girls' independent) was one such. It was a day early for World Book Day and everything went as it should, from the moment I saw the parking sign saying "Reserved for Mary Hoffman" till I left, bearing chocolates, flowers and wine. Even the PowerPoint worked! And the IT guy stayed through all three sessions, just to be helpful.

Only about a handful of the hundreds of school visits I've done in my life have been like that. If there were more, I'd be more willing to do them.

I took delivery of my four mosaic prints by Robert Field this week. Bob was organising an exhibition in Cirencester and came over for dinner with a friend.

We're not sure quite where to hang them yet but it must be somewhere good. They are quite stunning. We couldn't make it to the private view of this new exhibition but we'll have till May.

The details of the Mexican wedding we've been invited to in October just came. It sounds very exciting - in Tampico.

But now I realise that I'm leaving for the Bologna book fair a fortnight today and the weekend in between is the SAS conference in Coventry. But the book is going much better.

We went to see Julius Caesar in Bristol yesterday. It was very good and so much better than the one we saw at the RSC in Stratford two years ago or so. And it made me feel that it was a much better play than I had given it credit for.

We've seen the first segment of the film of The Garden of the Finzi-Contini in Italian class. I've seen it before but was struck by how strong the adaptation was. Bassani hated it and there are some bits towards the end where I'd agree with him. But I did enjoy it.

I'm now reading Peter Ackroyd's biography of Shakespeare and loving it.

Plain sailing?

2009-03-01T18:29:00.005Z

I've had a bit of a breakthrough with City of Ships this week, as well as getting another extension. So I hope to be sleeping better.

Jess is feeling better and made pancakes for us all on Tuesday. I'm giving up chocolate, wine and cake for Lent, not that I eat much of that. Still we had a trip to Worcester to see the cathedral yesterday and successfully eschewed cake with mid-morning coffee, pudding after lunch and stuck to just a cup of tea in the afternoon even though a friend was treating us.

I had a successful meeting with my Frances Lincoln editor about the Great Big Book of Families and we started plotting for the 20th anniversary celebrations of Grace.

We saw the RSC's Othello in Oxford which I pretty much hated. It was the direction, not the acting, I had a quarrel with. Patrice Maianbana was more than adequate in the main role and we knew him from the RSC Histories.The Cassio turned out to be an old friend of middle daughter's from the Guildhall. (This happens more and more often these days)

But we had a jazz band (OK), a clown in blackface, a golliwog, a Desdemona doll whose private parts were groped on two separate occasions, performances of You made me love you etc etc. The dress was '40s/'50s so Othello's wonderful line "Put up your bright swords or the dew will rust 'em" was delivered to soldiers wielding pistols.

We had to have a semi-naked Desdemona miming sex with Othello in the background in the early Cyprus scenes and - worst of all - the tender willow song scene between Desdemona and Emilia had Emilia's lines given to an incongruous apparition of Brabantio that turns up in D's bedroom.

The director who perpetrated all this was Kathryn Hunter. Beware!

Worcester cathedral next day was balm to the soul, with its Norman crypt, lady chapel and decagonal Chapter House.

I've at last finished The Audacity of Hope, which was good but much less readable than Dreams from my Father. And since then I've re-read Susan Price's two Sterkarm books because I had to write a review of the marvellous The Sterkarm Handshake for a book. And a book I'm reviewing for the Guardian.

World Book Day next week and I'm off to a school in Reading. I do hope the PowerPoint works!

Green shoots

2009-02-22T20:05:00.004Z

Sorry for the silence. Everything seems to have been HARD and slow. First the big snow and all the attendant travel problems. Then youngest daughter's car being smashed into while stationary outside her boyfriend's house. (It was technically a write-off but is now being repaired). Of course the perpetrator left no details.

Then, much worse, she slipped on the ice, broke some ribs and got a chest infection.

I had to do another round of Troubadour edits on the page proofs. Self, husband, copy editor and proof reader all picked up different things. Thank goodness for having several sets of eyes on it.

And the London Library came up trumps with a new book on the Occitan War, which I'm working my way through.

My Ships are sailing slowly into port.

I had a writer friend to stay for a while in half term and we worked on our laptops and had coffee breaks together. We also went to the Ultimate Book Guide party at the Groucho Club where I met lots of old friends I hadn't seen for a while, like Kaye Umansky and Jan Pienkowski.

Then to Zilli's Bar, where Aldo Zilli was INCREDIBLY loud and intrusive with his wife and friends.

There have been some good things to set against the woes - baby Viola was born on February 5th, our surrogate granddaughter and we saw her a week later. She is so tiny and perfect (born 2 weeks early by Ceasarean). And we celebrated oldest daughter's birthday today, with Bellinis and a home-made Middle Eastern meal, which middle daughter helped to cook.

I went to a Italian Day School yesterday on literature and culture and rather wished I hadn't. Too many of the lecturers thought they would just give a gallop through a long list of books (or films) and illustrate each with a sentence or two.

I heard the Diabelli Variations and Opus 127 (the first of the late quartets) last week when Beethoven was Composer of the Week - a very good alternative to You and Yours. It's been Bartok this week, also a good swap.

Am still reading off and on The Audacity of Hope but must admit to skipping some bits. And we are continuing to read The Garden of the the Finzi-Continis in Italian. But I've also read Mary Ann Schaffer's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which I loved. Her only book, published last year when she was 74, and then she died. Sad for her family but I don't think se would have written another; this was it.

My insomnia has been horrible of late but I'm cheered by all the snowdrops, crocuses and primroses in the garden now the snow has retreated. I shall try to get lots of sunshine into my head and improve my circadian rhythms.

Snow

2009-02-02T17:59:00.003Z

I'm glad I made it to Newcastle and back before the snow hit; it was still pretty cold. I didn't win the North East Teenage Book Award - Jenny Valentine did with Broken Soup.

I stayed at the Malmaison hotel which had a French-speaking lift! "Quatrième étage," it said. "Rez-de-Chaussée". I thought the second lift should have spoken in Geordie - Fooerworth Floower - but it didn't. It was a bit out of keeping to have Radio 2 piped into the public areas!

Got lots of writing done on the train in both directions.I'm now reading The Audacity of Hope, which is not such a beguiling read as the autobiography but still thoughtful and intelligent.The only other thing I read was a short story in Italian called Malinconia by Goffredo Parise. It was from one of his two "Primers" or ABCs, which produce short stories as definitions. He stopped when he got to Solitudine and then added Zero!

Youngest daughter delivered her dissertation on Thursday and we indulged in the treat of a massage - bliss!

And of course today the great news has been the snow. We haven't had it as badly in Oxfordshire as in London but both daughter and I had skids and visits to the garage. I made it to swimming this morning but won't try tomorrow.

A man for this season

2009-01-24T21:04:00.003Z

Well, it was one man's week, really. I dashed back from Italian on Tuesday to watch the inauguration and the three of us sat rapt, once Aretha Franklin was over. How the mighty are fallen! I mean, great hat, but terrible performance. And who would have thought Joe Biden would have had a better swearing-in than Obama? But it seems the great orator was thrown by the Chief Justice's Bushisms.

Dubya himself sat there up close and personal throughout a speech that should have stung but he is probably too unimaginative to realise just how bad it made him seem. Anyway, we loved it all - except for the poem - and cracked open the champagne a bit later.

I send some American friends the You Tube link to "There's no-one as Irish as Barack Obama" and in return they sent photos of the scene in Washington; they had travelled there with their three teenage daughters from Massachusetts. What a day for them to remember!

Oratory isn't everything but it was a joy to hear someone deliver a cogent and coherent speech without notes, after what we have been through the last 8 years. Just my luck to be invited to meet the last president and not this one! Still, Laura is and was a gracious and intelligent woman, as is Michelle Obama.

I've now read through the bound proof of Troubadour and found it pretty clean with just a few continuity points and repetitions to tidy up. And I THINK I'm still pleased with it.I've started picking up appointments in Bologna with European pubishers - I hope that will help it on its way.

Only one and a bit chapters of Ships this week because of the proof-reading but it's OK. And I had two more swims.On Wednesday I went to the Babylon exhibition at the British Museum. Some people have expressed disappointment but i loved it. And it got me thinking about so many things. The lions from the processional way were my favourite thing - just imagine them replicated over and over! But I also loved the portable ivory calendar calculator from the 16th century; I'm going to give Doctor Dethridge one of those.

I saw Andy Murray beat Jurgen Melzer in straight sets at the very civilised time of breakfast this morning. Usually such things happen overnight at the Autralian Open and I miss them.

And the episode of ER in which Abby left, which I found much more moving than the death of Greg Pratt.

I heard Niccolò Ammaniti talking about his latest book to be translated into English, on Open Book.I don't think I'm going to like it much (but will read it in Italian). Still, he did give me food for thought on my next adult book.

Also heard some of radio 4's adaptation of A Prayer for Owen Meany, but was put off by Toby Jones' vocal interpretation of Owen as Marge Simpson. And today, Stephen Kovacevich playing the Diabelli variations - but husband says we already have three recordings.

I've read a bit more of Dreams from my father and LOTS of newspapers.

Back in the swim

2009-01-18T19:33:00.004Z

I've finished that essay on the Scapigliatura, which means something like "dishevelment." I managed to find 7 books I wanted in the Taylorian and was able to take 5 of them out. That was Saturday's task, to finish the essay I started on Tuesday, and today's was making marmalade. 10 jars of dark gold now await labels.

I've been discussing both projects with a couple of friends on Facebook, which is about as close to "Spinoza and the smell of cooking" as you can get.

But I've also managed two swims and written two chapters of City of Ships, so am feeling more positive about meeting my (extended) deadline. And I've booked three trips to Italy: Bologna for the fair, with Rhiannon, followed by 3 nights in Florence at the flat I stayed in last July, joined again by husband; Trieste in May for another "triangle" and Siena in late June for a week. I'll be able to see the Palio again! Though it isn't certain that my contrada will run.

Our plans to go to the US in the autumn might be modified by an invitation to a wedding in Mexico in October. We might cut out the east coast this year and just go to California and the wedding and make it a shorter trip.

I've seen the first two episodes of the new ER, the last ever series. And the DVD of Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, which I enjoyed for its narrative quirks but thought it was a bit of a stretch to make Robert Downey Jr a contemporary of his co-star Michelle Monaghan (in fact he is 11 years older than her though looks more).

I heard a whole CD of Joe Cutler, which I got for Christmas. He is one to follow. I'd heard the Music for Cello and Strings on Radio 3 and knew I liked that but Sal's Sax was great too and the piano pieces.

Haven't got far with reading Dreams from my Father because of all the Italian critical books but loved the Guardian supplement on the Bush years. And found out Dubya did do one good thing - increased money to Africa for treating AIDS. But I'll still have the bunting out on Tuesday!

Starry

2009-01-12T21:29:00.003Z

I've been off the scene with the winter illness - the coldy one, not the other one, thank goodness.

But I worked out that I've hosted 34 out of the last 35 Christmasses and this is only the second time I've been ill on the day itself, so that's not bad going.

I got all the fanmail answered before and then a fan wrote to me on Christmas Day! I've just done it again, because I am trying to clear everything out of the way that isn't City of Ships. I have to do a brief critique of a friend's novel and write an Italian essay but apart from that I think it can be just me and the laptop and the mindmap.

There have been a lot of jollifications in spite of illness. We had a very traditional Christmas with lots of family visits and I think the only things that didn't happen was the special pudding I was planning for Boxing Day and for me church on Christmas morning.

We [a;yed Boggle and Articulate and a new game Rhiannon was given, called Bookchase, which was like a cross between Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly. We saw the TV programme about Paul Schofield - lovely man - as well as the Doctor Who Christmas Special ( a bit meh) and Wallace and Gromit's A Matter of Loaf and Death, which didn't quite live up to its title.

I got lots of books, including the 2 Barack Obamas, which I'm looking forward to.And Cds and DVds, only one of which I've heard/seen so far.

This was Mamma Mia, which we watched with mulled wine on New Year's Eve. Really it needs more alcohol to cope with Pierce Brosnan's singing!

WE've been to Rugby, where we had lunch in a very interesting vegetarian restaurant, which also sold pretty things. And bought new binoculars.

Then for the first weekend of the year we went to Durham and York, where we saw Durham cathedral (using the binoculars) but not the Minster because we had been there the year before. And went to a said mass in York in a medieval church.

I finished the Well of Lost Plots and am now reading Something Rotten. Only one Thursday Next left after this. The Lodger continued to be magnificent. Also read Them by Jon Ronson and A Good Plain Cook, whose author I have forgotten. That was quite gripping, but ended very weakly - just petered out in fact.

Am now immersed in books about "La Scapigliatura" (Italian version of Bohemianism).

But far and away the cultural event of the season was seeing Toby Sharp in The Woman in Black, which happened on Saturday. Toby is middle daughter's partner and has been understudying the role since September but was scheduled to take over while his principal was on holiday for a week in January, so he has done eight performances.

30 of us gathered in an Italian restaurant for lunch then went to the matinee which was full of teenage girls who screamed their heads of at every spooky moment, of which there were many. There were screams in the production too, so it was sometimes hard to know who was making the noise!

I had read the book, which fortified me against being scared. And I was so impressed by Toby; it's one thing to have a friend who's an actor - quite another to see him in cation on a West End Stage. I foretell a starry career

Tennant and the Lodger

2008-12-23T12:52:00.004Z

There's been so much social and cultural activity since my last blog.

Christmas began with the SAS "Office party" at a good bistrot in Stroud - a very happy occasion, especially since I'd finished all the Troubadour edits. I liked Stroud too - such an attractive town, with independent shops.

Christmas continued with Saturday and Sunday - two special meals and present exchanges with youngest daughter and partner and then the bit of family that has 2 little boys. Lots of nice food and presents. Freddie (3) played a game with me that one of our sofas was a boat and the carpet a crocodile-infested sea. George (one and a half) is a fluent speaker if only we knew in what language.

We had a very full day in London planned for our anniversary yesterday. We saw the 21- foot painting by Burne-Jones called Arthur sleeps in Avalon (Tate Britain), visited Southwark cathedral, had an Indian meal and saw Hamlet at the Novello. We WOULD have gone on the Golden Hinde too but it was unaccountably closed - v. annoying as it was City of Ships related.

I heard Poulenc's Gloria, Messaien's l'Ascension and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms repeatedly on a CD in my car. And Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle, as ! wanted to check something. Marcus de Sautoy asked for the opening of the fourth door on Desert Island discs and they played the Fifth, which is much finer, but still.

The Burne-Jones was very fine too,if you can suspend disbelief and enter that sort of Peter Jackson/Lothlorien world, which I can.

Hamlet was without the planned Prince of Denmark, David Tennant having had to have a back operation. I wondered what all the teenage girls in our row would make of it without him. The understudy, Edward Bennett, was adequate, but lacking in charisma. Patrick Stewart was more disappointing, fluffing his lines. I thought he should have been a great Claudius but he wasn't.

Gertrude was excellent and even the Ophelia OK (such an unrewarding a difficult role). Still I always sigh when the actor's clothes come off - it seems such a failure of imagination on the director's part. My husband assures me she kept bra and pants on but they were flesh-coloured and fairly revealing.

I'm reading The Lodger by Charles Mitchell about Shakespeare's years in Silver Street; it is absolutely excellent so far.

I hope enough of us are well enough to have a Christmas; Rhiannon has flu, I have a cough and have lost my voice - we just wait to see what the others bring with them today!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Bath in Bath

2008-12-15T10:48:00.003Z

Well, it was a bit of an underestimate that the "copyedits" for Troubadour would take a "bit of time". It was a second full=scale edit, more extensive than the one two months ago and arriving three weeks before Christmas, with a two-week deadline! And that six months after submission!

I was so angry and poor City of Ships had to go n ice but, by dint of cancelling all social engagements and working every hour including weekends that wasn't already committed, I have done it. And feel a real sense of achievement, even though it's only got me back to square one.

We had a hugely useful meeting at Frances Lincoln on the big book I'm doing with Ros Asquith. And then a team from Coventry education authority came to film me answering questions from children. The cameraman fell in love with the cats and sent lots of pictures to me.

And we had a wonderful visit to the mosaicist Robert Field in Dorset. And I bought far too much of his work, not in terms of regret (since they are all lovely) but space, since we are running out of walls!

This week I've spent useful time in the Bodleian and taylorian libraries - what wonderful resources! I feel lucky to live near Oxford.

I saw Otello in Oxford but felt all the time how inferior it was to Shakespeare's.It seemed to me that Verdi had taken a tragedy and turned it into a melodrama. And the singer who layed the title role was so short and tubby it was hard to believe in him; Desdemona was lovely though.

We also saw a new play "Carthage must be Destroyed" back in Bath (can't keep away). It was about real subjects like political power and war as a way of manipulating markets and public opinion and took place in Rome. The violence in the second half was hard to take and I don't think it was a total success but it was always interesting and intelligent. The first half was set in a bath-house and all four actors - one old, one middle-aged, two young - got naked at some point. And one of the young ones was very beautiful.

We watched the last omnibus edition of Little Dorrit last night and thought Andrew Davies had been very muddly about the denouement; it didn't help that much of the exposition was given to Andy Serkis' incomprehensible Rigaud. It is much clearer in the book!I'd better make it the next thing I read.

I finished The Well of Lost Plots and read Twilight by Stephenie [sic] Meyer, to see what all the fuss was about.I found it surprisingly accomplished though I don't want to read any more of them.Good on her for coming up with a really strong USP and then delivering on it.

Adventitious

2008-12-02T20:38:00.005Z

Because we can't get to the Bourton-on-the-Water turning on of the lights for the third year running, we tried Woodstock, which was terrible! Ghastly Frank Sinatra (or was it Bing Crosby? anyway a 50s crooner) on tape and then a live rendition of Hark the Herald Angels Sing by a young woman with a strong voice and Pop Idol style, who couldn't fit the words to the tune, making a real muck of "Hail th'incarnate deity" and singing "rysen with healing in his wings".

And the tree had just one blue star at the top and light blue strings of them in its branches. Pathetic.

We had been Christmas shopping in Oxford Street the day before (which also had poor lights - is the credit crunch already creating an austerity Christmas?) so were quite tired and wished we hadn't turned out again.

But all was redeemed by the Bath Abbey Advent service by candlelight on Sunday. A wonderful choir washed our ears out with lovely motets and we sang lustily O Come, O Come Emmanuel, Hail to the Lord's Anointed and Lo, he comes with Clouds Descending. And went out into the frosty night carrying our candles.

Then hot cinnamon-spiced pear cider at the vegetarian restaurant where we had dinner. And now we have an Advent calendar and candle, so if we don't feel Christmassy after all that, there is no hope for us.

I'm seven chapters into City of Ships and getting into the rhythm of a new Stravaganza but the copy-edits for Troubadour came today, which will take up quite a bit of time. And I have a meeting at my picturebook publishers in London on Thursday, which ditto.

We had a lovely family gathering to celebrate the November birthdays the previous weekend and just-back-from-New-York daughter had brought all the US papers celebrating Obama's victory, since she woke up there on 5th November. Also a baseball cap and badges for me, so I could feel part of it.

I've read Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde and am now reading The Well of Lost Plots. I rather feel that by the third one he is stretching the idea a bit. He seems to have run out of plot himself, paradoxically and be caught up in just inventing things.

We also had an assessed discussion in Italian Literature about a short story by Verga called l'Amante di Gramigna, which some of us have read before. It's a nasty ittle piece - how I dislike "verismo".

We've continued to watch Little Dorritt, in which Claire Foy is luminously beautiful. I wish I could like Eddie Marsan's Pancks better. He was wonderful in God on Trial and everyone else likes him but I find his snot-snorting mannerism revolting and it's hard to believe he is the fine character that Pancks is.

We also saw Andrew Graham-Dixon oiling himself round the subject of Vasari and the same tantalising glimpse of the Corridor. If only someone - not him! - would make a full length programme about it. You can't even get a book that tells you all the paintings that are in it.Ah well, maybe I'll get inside it one day.

The Round and the Square

2008-11-17T14:22:00.005Z

I had fun being part of the Author Team at the Central England finals of the Kids' Lit Quiz in Oundle earlier this month. I was with Lucy Coats, Pippa Goodhart, Julia Jarman and Mark Robson. We did very well and I even won a £5 book token for knowing that Roald Dahl's first wife was Patricia Neal.

I had to write a survey of the state of children's books in the UK for the Italian journal LIBER, whose "comitato scientifico" I am on. It's the first thing I've had to do for them.

And I've just finished editing my last edition of Armadillo, the magazine I founded ten years ago. That makes 40 and I'm very glad to hand it over.

I saw Table Manners, one of the three Alan Ayckbourn Norman Conquest plays at the Old Vic. The theatre has been transformed into an In-the-Round space. And it was very accomplished, though the actor playing Sarah drove me mad with her fussy gestures. Stephen Mangan was very funny.

We went to see Love's Labour's Lost in Stratford last Friday, with David Tennant as Berowne. I can't imagine it better done, even if I did find DT a bit too in love with himself. The set and costumes were gorgeous and I do love the thrust stage at The Courtyard. Theatre-in-the-square, for all that Max Bialystock says "nobody gets a good view!" is very satisfying.

The very next day we were in Covent Garden for Elektra. It was superb! I am obsessed with the House of Atreus and have always found this version of it particularly compelling. Susan Bullock was thrilling in the main part and the Clytemnestra and Chrysothemis were equally good; the men are almost cyphers.

I saw the last two episodes of Simon Schama's American series and am watching Little Dorrit. Andrew Davies has done largely a good job, apart from ridiculously giving Flora Finching, a middle-aged, middle-class widow the line "What about the Chinese women? I hear they are different 'down below' but you wouldn't know that would you, being a bachelor?" Outrageous, as well as cheap and nasty. And I hate the fact the director has cast a black actor as Tattycoram, which slews the whole nature of her position in the household. (It doesn't help that she can't act). But Tom Courtenay and the others are magnificent.

I finished reading War and Peace after four weeks. It was a great translation but I was just as cross with Tolstoy and Natasha at the end as when I read it decades ago. She doesn't care about anything but her husband and children.

Since then I've read If No-one Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor, which was OK and very interesting structurally, but a bit slight. Then Robin Hobbs' Assassin's Apprentice, which is the first of a nine-book fantasy sequence. But I think I'm going to stop there. It's a bit too gloomy for me.

Am now reading The Garden of the Finzi-Continis for the third time (in Italian).

They will not grow old

2008-11-11T11:11:00.002Z

I've just seen the four World War 1 veterans being helped to lay their poppy wreaths at the cenotaph and had to turn it off in order to write something. Yesterday was the 799th anniversary of the death in a wretched dungeon in his home at Carcassonne of Raimon-Roger Trencavel, Viscount of Béziers, Albi and Carcassonne and a great hero of mine.

In 1209 when Pope Innocent lll's "crusade" against the Cathars (who were not called that then but just Believers or True Christians) was launched by the noblemen of the north, Trencavel was only 24, married (to Agnes) and with a little son. The crusade was supposed to attack his uncle, the Count of Toulouse (Raimon Vl), who was believed to have sanctioned if not ordered the murder of the Pope's legate, Peter of Castelnau, the year before.

But Raimon did penance and even eventually joined the crusade himself. So the French, who had been promised they could keep any heretic land and property they took, if they served in the army for forty days, turned on Raimon-Roger, the next wealthiest victim they could find. He probably wasn't a Cathar himself though he was a sympathiser.

When he saw the way the wind was blowing, he rode to the very well-fortified city of Béziers and got out all the Jews and took them to Carcassonne with him. Béziers should not have fallen but it did and the French killed everyone inside, orthodox and heretic alike, men women and children, as many as 20,000 people who had sheltered in the cathedral and other main church. No-one was spared

The authorisation for this war crime came from Arnaud-Aimery, Abbot of Citeaux, who headed the army. He then marched on to Carcassonne, which fell less than a month later. The inhabitants were allowed to leave taking only what they were wearing. Trencavel was still alive in his own dungeon when the French assigned his lands and titles to Simon de Montfort (not the one the University is named after).

And then, on November 10th 1209, Raimon-Roger's death was announced "from dysentery". This brave young man would have been an embarrassment if he had lived and I simply do not believe that his death was an accident. I wrote about him and all this in Troubadour, which comes out next year.

So I wanted to honour him along with the other fallen of the many horrible wars that have happened since then (and before). Raimon-Roger Trencavel, hero and martyr, who did not grow old.

Shipping News

2008-10-19T11:30:00.002+01:00

Well, the books on ships have arrived and I've -sort of - started. I've made mind maps and timelines and even a retrospective Stravaganza scrapbook, covering all four titles so far. It was the perfect use of a beautiful marbled A4 book I bought in Florence or Siena years ago and it got me well back into Talia. I've even started to write the prologue - just a tiny bit.

Also Daniel Defoe's book on pirates has arrived - hooray!

I got a message on the Chronicles Network this week telling me about how the reader screamed when she read the Stravaganza books so I got her to tell me exactly at what points - very useful!

It's been another of those "revolt of the machines" periods when car, computer, fridge and washing machine all needed attention. All fixed now but at a cost in time and gold bars.

I have commissioned my last issue of Armadillo magazine! So only one more to edit and then I am a free woman. I am starting a children's bookblog, of which you will read more here and on the News section of the website. I'll write it seriously in the New Year.

Meanwhile I've been editing books for friends and am just into a full length adult novel from a Ty Newydd student - very promising.

I heard Brahms third symphony in the recording by Claudio Abbado, which was the one recomended by CD review on Radio 3. It's very fine and authoritatively written - though I found the coda at the end of the first movement rather weak.

I saw two episodes of Simon Schama's America programme. His manner as a presenter is pretty maddening and there aren't many ideas per episode but it's still interesting and I think I'll stick it out.

I am still reading War and Peace - about half way through its 1215 pages and loving it. The only other thing I've been able to read, apart from friends' texts and the newspaper, is a "short" story for Italian. 27 pages by Percoto - story called "Il Licof" which is a Friulian word meaning the dinner given by landowners at the end of a harvest to the workers. But boy was it short of ideas in relation to its length. I'm seriously thinking of chucking this term's course because it's all these 19th century stories until about the last week when it's Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini, which I've read (and seen the film). Great stuff but can I really afford the time to read these long turgid stories all term when I should be writing City of Ships?

Fire and Hemlock and explosions

2008-10-05T22:07:00.003+01:00

I did my panel event in Bath with Diana Wynne Jones and Sarah Prineas and it was good. This in spite of an explosion in a parallel road just before (not sinister). While we were waiting in the Green Room I asked Diana to sign Fire and Hemlock for me and she volunteered that she had just read and enjoyed The Falconer's Knot. And she told me there was a monastery where I had invented one!

I had an enormous French meal with the Quercus gang afterwards and stayed in an eccentric hotel in a room up many flights of stairs.

I enjoyed this year's Guardian Award party much more than last year's and was able to tell Frank Cottrell Boyce how stunning I thought his Auschwitz play was.

I've managed to finish the first round of Troubadour edits and have also proofread the re-issue of Special Powers. Books have arrived from the London Library so I must start serious City of Ships research next week.

Just before I went to Wales we had all three daughters plus partners for all or part of the weekend, culminating in Sunday lunch for all 8 of us. And one of the few sunny days, so we could be in the garden afterwards.

Then on Monday I drove over 200 miles to Ty Newydd, where I was teaching a course with Celia Rees. It was brilliant but exhausting. It was the house Lloyd George owned and indeed died in - in the room we used for evening meetings. Marcus Sedgwick was our visiting speaker midweek and sat in the death spot - with no ill effects..

Much too much good food and wine and only one walk - down to the sea where we saw nine swans.

I re-read Fire and Hemlock, loving it as much as ever. Am now reading the new translation of War and Peace, so that will keep me busy for a while. Oh, and I've joined Facebook, which is another good displacement activity.

In honour of Dante

2008-09-19T20:43:00.002+01:00

I signed books at Witney Waterstone's with Rhiannon, Mark Robson and Sarah Singleton, whom I hadn't met before. It was quite fun, even the moment when I asked an obviously teenage boy if he was interested in teenage books and he said no thank you very vehemently!

The edits for Troubadour arrived today and I must be pretty nippy in the turnaround, since I'm teaching in Wales at the end of the month and need to start City of Ships on my return. With that in mind I spent three days in Ravenna, of which more below.

I heard/saw a concert performance of Messiaen's opera St Francis at the Proms. It wasn't really an opera at all, ore of an oratorio, with some very good moments. I'm glad to have done it but it hasn't realy permeated.

I saw the US Open final between Roger Federer and Andy Murray, paying a month's sunscription to Sky Sports for the privilege but it was a bit of a let down and I wish I had done it a few days earlier to see Murray beat Nadal.

I also saw mosaics at San Vitale, Galla Placidia, Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, Sant'Apollinare in Classe and the Arian and Neonian Baptisteries in Ravenna. I was particularly knocked out by the baptisteries and Galla Placidia because there are no ghastly baroque additions - just gorgeous early, early self-contained little treasure-houses.

And I saw someone demonstrating mosaic techniques and bought loads of books and CD-Roms.

We also saw, most movingly, the annual Florentine tribute of oil to keep the lamp burning above Dante's tomb, last Sunday, which was the anniversary of his death. The Florentines treated him abominably while he was alive and will have to keep doing this for many more centuries to wipe out that shame. They asked the Ravennans for the body back and they said the Italian equivalent of "on yer bike!"

Which reminds me, the "pedestrian centre" of Ravenna is awash with bikes, which are as perilous and annoying as the scooters of Florence or Rome.

Blood and Thunder

2008-09-05T21:45:00.003+01:00

I had a very good meeting with my illustrator in London, with whom I'm collaborating on a big picturebook.

And heard that I am definitely going to be writing a sixth Stravaganza novel. Woohoo!

The garden party went very well - the only fine Sunday we've had in this ghastly wet August/September. Freddie (aged two and dressed as a pirate) said my gazebo was a pirate ship. And I went to Aiyana's first birthday party, complete with piniata.

All last weekend I was at the Children's Writers and Illustrators Conference in Cambridge. There was wonderful sunshine on the Saturday afternoon and I had tea with a schoolfriend I hadn't seen since we walked out of the school gates more years ago than I care to remember. We recognised each other instantly, on the wall outside Kings.

It's all changed a lot since I was there: lots of new buildings where there were gaps before.

And the conference was great. I gave one workshop and chaired another and there was an electric speech by Philip Pullman on the subject of age-banding. A great barn-storming performance in the manner, ironically enough, of a hellfire preacher.

I saw Wyndham Lewis's Portraits and the BP Portraits at the NPG - both very good. And then the Hadrian exhibition at the British Museum. That was lovely too; what an epicene young man his Antinoous was! The most beautiful exhibit though was a pair of gilded peacocks from his Mausoleum at Tivoli.

I heard the Berlin Philharmonic at the proms, playing Wagner's Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and then Messiaen's Turangalila. I mean I was there. The orchestra was magnificent and I disagreed with the Guardian review that said Rattle was passionless or too cool in the Wagner; I think Tristan needs to be handled a bit coolly. The same reviewer suggested that Turangalila was not well constructed!

I saw two television plays. One was Fiona's Story about a woman who discovered her husband had been downloading child porn. It was very poorly constructed and written. On the other hand, God on Trial by Frank Cottrell Boyce, was absolutely stunning.

I read, sort of by accident, Peter Ackroyd's The Lambs of London, about Mary and Charles Lamb. She killed her mother and attacked her father (which last bit Ackroyd didn't mention) and that was the climax of the book.But there was such an unsatisfactory note at the beginning, in which he said vaguely that some bits were fact and some made up - that's no way to explain a historical novel!

We also watched the first programme in his Thames series, which is being repeated on Sky Arts. Television takes such a long time to say anything and feels it has to say the same thing over and over again.

I'm now reading Diana Wynne Jones' book, The Game, because I'm on a panel with her and one other at the Bath Festival in a couple of weeks.

Oh, and The Falconer's Knot has been shortlisted for another prize - The North East Book Award.

The gazebo has landed!

2008-08-17T12:34:00.002+01:00

It does sound so dreadfully like a kind of antelope, but at last my gazebo has arrived and been constructed from a heap of bits of wood by two men who scratched their heads a lot! I have even had a first cup of coffee in it with a writer friend staying for the weekend. And the cats are very intrigued, especially the new pale ginger cat on the block, who was chased off by Lila.

I had a very exciting trip up to Edinburgh to see the musical Only the Brave, which was playing at the fringe. My daughter is one of two Associate Producers on it. It was very strong and memorable with some excellent singers. But the friend I went with and I were both emotionally wrung out at the end and had to fortify ourselves with a very good vegetarian meal at David Bann where I was taken by my publishers a couple of years ago.

So I was also able to go to my friend's launch party two days later. She has written a book called Writing for Children which I and other members of the SAS had given suggestions for. It was a great launch (I had make a cake for the iced cover picture to sit on), followed by an Italian meal for 17, so it was a bit of a high calorie trip all round.

I had a day in a health spa, using vouchers my oldest daughter had given me for Mother's Day. It involved a full body massage, swimming, lunch and steam room and jacuzzi. And I even got some work done!

Excitingly, my husband's half-brother is over from Mexico with his partner and baby girl, who is not quite one. She is quite enchanting. Next weekend we'll have them all plus my husband's half-sister and her partner and two little boys aged one and two. We are praying for sunny weather so it can be a picnic!

I've not written much of the new adult novel since getting back from Edinburgh but have been writing proposals etc. The Centre for Cathar Studies in Carcassonne has agreed to read Troubadour! I hope they don't find any howlers. My consultant on women troubadours has been very helpful about names and Occitan spellings.

We have been watching the DVD of the BBC programmes called "Tiger - Spy in the Jungle", the ones where the cameras were carried by elephants. The two girl cats have watched it all with us, transfixed.

I read Philip Reeve's Here Lies Arthur, which has just won the Carnegie Medal and was a tad disappointed. For a version of the "real" Arthur, I much prefer Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset.

Transfiguration and taxes

2008-07-31T11:29:00.002+01:00

We went to my sister's Big Birthday party in London and ran into no problems. It was a grand reunion as our youngest daughter was just back from Japan and Australia.

London again for a successful meeting with twelve YLG librarians about Stravaganza. Bloomsbury had decorated the boardroom with posters and postcards. It was a very hot day but we had the windows open on to Soho Square.

On 26th the Times published the interview I did with Amanda Craig before leaving for Florence. It was a very flattering piece and a nice photo but the sub-editor had given it the headline "Veteran in her Prime"! I can only think this was revenge for my having asked them not to use Tales of Hoffman yet again. If you read it on line, there is no such backhanded compliment: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/children/article4397362.ece

Then we had to spend all Saturday afternoon doing my tax. It was just dreadful but at least it's done.

We had to spend all Sunday having fun in order to make up for it.

I heard Messaien's Transfiguration at the Prom on Sunday. Some people left after only five sections - no stamina! But I think it's a bad idea to follow the text; you should
really read it and then just close your eyes and listen. Because the pace is VERY expansive. But wonderful gongs.

In a traffic jam on the way up we also heard on Radio 3 Joe Cutler's Music for Cello and Strings which was very good. Must follow him up.

I saw two episodes of Can't Read, Can't Write. It's compelling stuff though I don't admire the teacher. It is so clear that phonics just doesn't work - you notice Kelly had to phone up to find out what "touched" was - because you can't make "ch" by blending "c" and "h" and the strategy they'd learned for vowel digraphs - "When two vowels go out walking the first one does the talking and says its name" simply doesn't fit so many words.

I also saw the John Barrowman edition of The Making of Me, about his homosexuality. I liked his dry, English partner and loved the way he became Scottish every time he talked to his parents.

Tried The Culture Show on BBC2 because they had advertised a piece on the Vasari corridor. That wasn't there but we got Cy Twombly's exhibition - ghastly- and Paul Weller, who couldn't be separated from his shades or beer bottle. He played a very ordinary though not unpleasant song with one idea in the lyric and perhaps two and a half in the melody.

The piece with theatre director Katie Mitchell (Traces of Her) was quite interesting, because she seemed really intelligent but the whole presentation of the programme was SO puerile that it did make me despair if that was BBC2's idea of culture.(the Corridor next week, I am promised).

I finished reading Un Italiano in America and have started Racconti della Resistenza.I've been working on my workshops for the CWIG conference and the teaching week |I'm doing at Ty Newydd with Celia Rees. She came over for lunch and we had a brainstorm (sorry - "thoughtshower").Must get on with my next novel really but am so trying to have an easy summer.

How Nelson Mnadela spoilt my birthday party

2008-07-18T17:20:00.003+01:00

Actually it wasn't mine but I was organising it for my daughters. Because their birthdays fall in February, June and November, and 2 of them never had good weather, we tried for a couple of years to have a joint summer one in July.

It worked fine in 1987, when there was a Pink Picnic in Highgate Woods, even though my half brother-in-law had turned up to stay unexpectedly and, at 18, was not keen on wearing a pink shirt!

So the next year, when the girls were 11, nearly 9 and 6 respectively, we booked a big swimming party for their three groups of friends at the Hornsey Road Pools, followed by a tea party on three floors at our house with three separate cakes.Money was a bit of an issue 20 years ago so this was a considerable outlay for us.

We set off in the car, plus my sister, in good time, and then ran into a traffic standstill. The minutes ticked by and after a lot of stress, we realised we were never going to make it to the pool before the end of the booked session and turned back. This was pre-mobile phones of course.

One or two guests made it to the pool and most got to the house at some point.

The reason for the delay? Nelson Mandela's 70th birthday. He was still in prison and there was a big demo in London. I think there was a concert in Wembley too but maybe earlier.

It was difficult to explain to three bitterly disappointed little girls who this man was and why his birthday party had taken place at the expense of theirs. It's hard to take the long view when you are six.

But as time went by they did understand. Only we never had another "joint birthday" party after that.

Happy 90th from us all, Nelson Mandela. And I hope nothing happens to disrupt your celebrations.

Stendhal syndrome

2008-07-17T09:55:00.002+01:00

This condition was named after the great writer of Le Rouge e le Noir and means something like "an overactively nervous state of being overwhelmed by the city of Florence" so I thought it appropriate for this post.

I stayed for over a week in a very good apartment in Santa Croce and would go there again. I've always been a bit against it because I dislike that church so much but it's OK from the outside and the smart money is on it is a district. It's a bit like Hampstead. And it's where Sarah Dunant has her flkat though we didn't see her.

But we did find an English bookshop just round the corner from us, where City of Secrets had just arrived, so I did some signing. I was there for publication day. And before I left, I heard that my editor loves Troubadour too, so travelled with a light heart.

Also because I managed to solve one of the worst e-mail problems I had ever had - no thanks to BT who rang from Bangalore and spent an hour and a half giving me wrong information. In the end I had to delete 25,000 e-mails from my Inbox on the BT website, which could be done only 200 at a time. But it worked.

In the end I took William Boyd's restless to Florence because I'd started it and it was so gripping. And then bought and read Beppe Severgnini's La Bella Figura which, in spite of its title, is in English. But I am also reading his "Un italiano in America" which genuinely is in Italian.

I saw the Fra Angelicos at San Marco,the Pieve churches in Borgo San Lorenzo and Scarperia, the Bargello, where I talked to the restorer of Donatello's David about a piece I'm writing for Italy magazine, and the Benozzo Gozzoli chapel in the Medici Palace. We also spent a lot of time in the Piazza della Signoria and the Piazza Duomo as well as Oltrarno.

But we also had a lot of days outside Florence - Borgo San Lorenzo, the Mugello, Forli and Villagrappa and a memorable last day by the sea in Viareggio. We visited a castle at Castrocaro, so named "expensive camp" after Galla Placidia had visited there and found the cost of lamb too high!

Since coming back I have seen an open air production of The Winter's Tale, which was better directed than acted. The director had the idea of acting it out as a told story, among and by a group of gypsies. This worked better than expected, apart from the storyteller saying at the end "and they all lived happily ever after" which Shakespeare is very careful NOT to suggest. Hermione addresses not one word to Leontes.

It always makes me laugh when the king sees the statue and says that his queen looks so much more aged and wrinkled than he remembers her. How ungallant! But even more amazing were the number of white heads in the audience (it was Senior concession night) who did not know the story!

I heard the demo tape of the new musical Only the Brave, which my daughter is going to Edinburgh with as Associate Producer. It will be a big hit, I'm sure.

Home Sweet Siena

2008-06-30T19:00:00.002+01:00

I can't believe I haven't blogged for a month!

My agent is crazy about Troubadour - still waiting for Bloomsbury's response. And the stravaganza website has had its re-vamp.

Am just back from my two weeks in Siena, which feels more like home every time - this is our fifth. Unfortunately not there for the Palio but I'm going to Florence on Thursday for another trip and will make it over to Siena again. I saw my Contrada friend from Valdimontone and there were lots of occasions of drinking prosecco in the Campo, or eating ice-cream and watching contrade practise their flag-work.

Before we went, I saw the Brilliant Women exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. And on the way into it admired Paula Rego's painting of Germaine Greer.

In Siena I saw the Duomo, Duccio's Maestà and loads of good stuff in the Pinacoteca, including three Simones!Also went into the Duomo and Sant'Agostino in San Gimignano.

I read all those books I bought to take on holiday. The Anne Enright was pretty good and the Florentine Death was terrible! Bill Bryson on Shakespeare was REALLy good - just very plain and clear. It was good preparation for reading The Shgakespeare Secret by J.L.Carrell. The scholarship in that was all good but the plot hopelessly sub-Dan Brown hokum.

I also read The Resurrection of the Body by Maggie Hamand, which was pretty disappointing,The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, which was highly amusing but had that old howler "flaunt" for "flout" again. Also Dissolution by C.J.Sansom. This was very readable - and reminded me of The Falconer's Knot - but I didn't absolutely love it, which I was hoping for.

Since coming back, I've finished reading Meerkat Manor - those adorable little mongooses can be really vicious. The females kill and eat other females' babies!

I'm going to take only Italaian books to Florence as I've had my assessment from my tutor and I need to keep up the good work.

Demob happy

2008-05-29T17:49:00.002+01:00

Troubadour went off electronically last night. Just as well, since my non-colour printer has decided to go on strike. It will limp through 30 or so pages then halt and say "no job printing" which is pretty insulting.

I have been working flat out to finish,so have not done much else. But I've learned a new skill - how to use Document Map - which is so fantastically useful I shall never write or submit in any other form.

I read four books published in the US by Penguin - Peeled by Joan Bauer, who is a great favourite of mine, Savvy, which is a first book by a new writer, and one called Antsy does time and another called Paper Towns. It was a relief to read something I didn't have to judge for a change! And I enjoyed all these.

Today I've bought some holiday reading - Dissolution by C.J. Sansom, who is an author Adele Geras is always urging me to try, Bill Bryson on Shakespeare, Anne Enright's The Gathering and A Florentine Death by the man who used to be head of police in Florence. (I should really be reading that one in Italian).

I heard Turangalila by Messaien in Birmingham, played by the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Ivan Volkov. It was the day I finished Troubadour (though it's taken a further week to revise)so perfect. And a stunning performance, badly attended. It was our first trip to Birmingham's Symphony Hall and we were very impressed by the acoustics. There'll be another Turangalila at the proms and 2 more Messaien concerts there too.

I'm now really looking forward to the holiday - Siena, here I come!

Georgia on my mind

2008-05-20T17:36:00.005+01:00

I've been back from Atlanta for nearly two weeks and walked straight into having to help organise another trip to Italy, in July. We'll only just be back from Siena and five days later I'll be setting off to Florence again.It's a tough job but someone has to do it.

Then it was Guardian judging and it took a while to get back into Troubadour. But I'm now half-way through the last chapter and it's looking promising for submission at the end of next week.

Everything went well at IRA and I signed lots of books and traded on the novelty of my English accent. It was very good to meet my new editor at Penguin and spend some time with her; she came to the two schools with me, which were way out in the countryside. They were very clean and attractively decorated State schools, with extremely polite and well-behaved children. One little boy wanted his poster of Princess Grace signed, even though it was all pink and girly!

I found it a strange city - very spread out without any coherent centre. Everyone was in a car (the public transport is sketchy) and I had to go everywhere by taxi. I did visit its Aquarium and admired the two Beluga whales. But I think Atlanta must have a huge carbon footprint.

Guardian judging was fun and it's a pity I can't say anything about it,except that it was good to meet Mal Peet and Jenny Valentine, the other two judges. Jenny's book Finding Violet Park, won the award last year and I had just read it and thought it very good.

I spent the weekend writing new material for the re-vamped Stravaganza website; it's so peculiar to keep wrenching one's head round from one book to another.

We went to a party in London on Sunday. Only one "You could be the next J.K.Rowling" - must be losing my touch. I heard lots of Chopin, though I did NOT like the box piano or even Chopin's own. I think he would be very happy to hear his works played on a modern instrument.

I saw Midsomer Murders on TV, which I quite enjoy - especially the theramin - but I don't think it's any good. John Nettles and his screen wife look as if they've both been Botoxed and the plot lines are absurd. But I've given up Doctor Who and ER so occasionally want something distracting.

Enchanted April

2008-05-03T17:09:00.001+01:00

Well, I’m the far side of the study floor repair and Troubadour progresses apace though I’ve dropped a chapter here and there. My study has never looked so organised. But I’m not in it at present; I’m writing this in a living room in Italy overlooking the sea. The balcony has been closed to us today, as it rained in the night and has been wet all day but just yesterday afternoon we were sunning ourselves in the heat there.

I’m here with two writer friends but the one whose apartment it is has succumbed to a virus and there’s been a problem understanding the central heating, so we’ve built huge log fires and bought hot water bottles and boiled kettles to wash up with.

Just as the weather turned wintry today, after three days of glorious sunshine, we cracked the heating controls and have made big pots of soup and ratatouille so that we don’t have to go out.

Later

In spite of the gloomy forecast my husband read to me from the Internet over the phone, that was the only wet day we had and there was lots more sunning ourselves on the balcony. Apparently one visitor there for only three days saw dolphins but that was in July. I longed for dolphins but there were none.

I have now finished chapter eighteen of Troubadour, which means only three and the epilogue to go. I hope it doesn’t behave like City of Secrets and spawn four extra chapters as that would unblance th elegant three-part structure.

Before I left I had a terrific publicity meeting with Bloomsbury and my agent about City of Secrets. Funny to think by the time it’s out Troubadour will be a completed book.

I still can’t say anything about what I’m reading since they’re all potential Guardian longlist books but I’ve played hookey to read Enchanted April by Elizabth von Arnim. I’d seen the film but never read the book before, which was published in 1922. I simply couldn’t resist since I left for Italy at the end of April and the place I’m in is full of wistaria, Judas-trees, irises and tamarisks – just like the castle of San Salvatore in the book.

Before leaving England, I saw/heard Harrison Birtwistle’s new opera The Minotaur at its première in the Royal Opera House. The first half was terrific but the second was a disappointment, far too repetitive, especially in David Harsent’s libretto. The real star of the show was not, surprisingly, John Tomlinson’s hairy-chested bull-headed monster but Ariadne, who manipulated the action.

We ran into old friends in the interval and the man said, “But it’s so NASTY!” and I couldn’t help replying, “well it’s a nasty story!” Surely, it’s impossible for an educated person to go to something like that and not know the plot?

Still, if I ever come across a sympathetic Theseus, I’ll eat my hat.

I also heard my old choir, the Crouch End Festival Chorus singing, among other pieces Spem in Alium, Thomas Tallis’ 40-part motet, in a church in Highgate. We drove up the day after my birthday and after the concert had supper with old friends round the corner from the house we left seven years ago. Two of the people were, like me, founder-singers in the chorus and there are now just them and one other left from that first concert in 1984 when we formed to sing the Verdi Requiem.

I was a second soprano in those days but developed into a second alto after sixteen years. I would have ended up with the men if I’d continued, like one of my friends, who sings tenor.

What remains in my head though from that concert are the three songs by Philip Glass, which I’ve twice sung myself with that choir. “There are some men who should have mountains to bear their names to time,” reminded me unbearably of Douglas Hill, inappropriately since it says the dead man “left no book, son or lover to mourn” and Douglas had all three.

I am off to Atlanta, Georgia, on Sunday to the International Reading Association congress. On one day I’ll do 2 signings, 2 talks, an authors’ reception and a publishers’ dinner. Then 2 schools the next day before taking the red-eye home at 10.30pm.

So that’s what my next blog will be about.

Completely floored

2008-04-14T20:32:00.002+01:00

I've been back nearly two weeks and Troubadour is growing apace. Am now halfway through chapter 14 and will be two-thirds the way through the book when that is done.I've been in touch with the Centre for Ctahr Studies in Carcassonne too, who are being very helpful.

Did the final final corrections to City of Secrets so that's it now - all ready for publication in July.

Today was the big study floor replacement event and it went so smoothly I feel ashamed of my earlier prophecies of doom.It was hard work taking everything out and it's not all put back yet but a wonderful opportunity to throw stuff out.

Did a bookshop signing on Saturday. Only one "Where do you get your ideas from?" And I sold a lot of other people's books as well as my own, even signing a copy of a Horrid Henry for a most insistent child. I'm sure Francesca wouldn't mind.

Am not allowed to say anything about what I'm reading as it's all books now for the Guardian Prize. But I saw Speed-the-Plow at the Old Vic. Two bravura performances from Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum (the latter better than the former) and a play about a really important subject - commercial versus aesthetic criteria in artistic creation. But I thought it was a really poor play. David Mamet could have done so much more with those ideas than he did.

Also saw From Russia at the Royal Academy and was disappointed with that too. The Matisse dancers really are a knockout but I found it very unmemorable. The painting of Anna Akhmatova was striking but I can't even remember who it was by. It was that sort of exhibition and very crowded.

Where "oc" meant "yes"

2008-04-07T20:50:00.002+01:00

The early start from St Pancras meant I stayed in London evernight on Wednesday, in Muswell Hill, with my friend Ann. But even at 7.15 am the traffic was appalling and I didn’t get to the station till after 8. But Eurostar is nothing like an airport journey; you don’t check in as such – just go through security and passport control then wait to hear your train called.

Mine was the one for Disneyland so the terminal was full of excited children. I was pretty excited myself to find coffee and a croissant! There are 49 people on this tour and I am the only singleton, so sat next to our guide Norman on the trains – at least when he sat anywhere.

We changed at Lille, by which time my laptop battery needed re-charging, but you don’t get electric points on a T.G.V. except in first class! It made me feel quite nostalgic for Virgin trains. Thank goodness I had the latest Terry Pratchett with me.

Our hotel in Montpellier is only five minutes’ walk from the station and is very comfortable and ornate, with marble bathrooms etc. Just getting a little faded but I quite like that. The first night I went out and hunted down the one vegetarian restaurant I’d found on the net. It was more of a café really and the waitress, clad in a sari, was English. The food wasn’t Indian though the café was inspired by a pacifist guru.

We were supposed to go to Carcassonne and Narbonne on Friday but Norman had heard a weather forecast that made him decide to switch excursions. So we went to Pézenas and Sète instead. Pézenas had nothing really old enough to interest me from a research point of view but I bought a couple of guidebooks and had coffee sitting outside in the sun.

On to Sète, which I didn’t really see the point of. We were driven up Mont Saint-Clair to see a panoramic view of ... a building site! Sète is really not a pretty place but once we were down in town, there were pleasant restaurants along the canal and I discovered Picpoul de Pinet – a very dry white wine, which was lovely served ice-cold on a warm day. The one thing it does have going for it is the “Cimetière marin” which features in Paul Valéry’s poem, but I didn’t see it.

I had decided to branch out on my own after lunch and take a train to Béziers instead of going back on the coach. Once there, I found my way to the Cathedral of Saint-Nazaire, where 7,000 Bitterrois were massacred on 22nd July 1209, in the course of the sack of Béziers by the Cistercian Abbot Arnaud-Aimery, in which all the citizens were killed indiscriminately and the city burned.

It had an incredible atmosphere, the building having been restored after the roof fell in during the fire, and I found it very moving.

Unlike the trains. I had unwittingly picked a day of rail strikes and there was only one train back to Montpellier, so I got back too late to explore. But it had been worth the detour and delays.

I had an absolutely delicious three-course meal in the Vietnamese restaurant right opposite the hotel and an early night. We set off at 9am today for Narbonne. It is a very handsome city and, though the spectacular medieval cathedral and archbishop’s palace are too late for my purposes – end of rather than beginning of 13th century – I also saw the old palace from the outside and found a plaque in a courtyard dedicated to Viscountess Ermengarde of Narbonne and some troubadours, which made me happy.

As did the bookshop, where I bought a LOT of books and 2 issues of a new magazine about Cathar history. Back on the coach and on to Carcassonne for lunch. It IS over-restored, no doubt, and the double curtain wall was added after the siege in August 1209, but the Cité is still spectacular. I felt nothing in the basilique Saint-Nazaire, except mild outrage at seeing Simon de Montfort’s funeral slab of pink-veined marble near the high altar. (The body had to be moved by his son; the locals just couldn’t stomach its being there, even though he had been given the title of Viscount of Albi, Béziers and Carcassonne).

The real Viscount, my hero Raimon-Roger Trencavel, was bumped off or “died of dysentery” in his own dungeon in November 1209. I bought a very expensive book, in French, about vassalage and lordship in the Languedoc.

Tomorrow we have to put the clocks forward an hour and still meet at 9am – we are going to the Haut-Languedoc to see Norman Foster’s viaduct and then St. Guilhem-le-Desert.

Sunday evening
Well, we made it on time and saw the viaduct at Millau – indeed our coach drove across it. The twenty minute film about it at the visitors’ centre was not only atrociously written but managed to leave out the fact that it had been designed by an Englishman!

I did see two pairs of vultures, birds which have been recently introduced into the area.

Much more interesting to me was the afternoon visit to Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert, which is officially one of the “100 most beautiful villages of France.” Do we have that in the UK? I suppose Shilton might be one.

Anyway St. G-le-D has an 11th century abbey built by the saint who was a 9th century mate of Charlemagne and features in a Chanson de Geste. We saw the Pont du Diable from which he apparently threw Satan into the river. There is not much left of the cloister of this fabulous little abbey because it is in New York!

Yes, the famous Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum in the north of Manhattan, where the unicorn tapestries are housed, are from this very church. I’m very glad to have seen what was left though.

Dinner tonight was at another Thai restaurant with lots of tofu. When I left it was pouring with rain – real flash flood stuff. I ran back to the hotel with my head down under my umbrella and got lost! Very glad to be back in my room and drying out. Typed up what I’d written on the coach and saw a bit of A Room with a View in French. It seems incredibly slow if you don’t know exactly what’s going on!

Monday’s expedition was initially to Nimes, where we had nearly three hours, which was about two hours too long. It might be better on other days but a lot of places were closed and it had a desolate air. Still, I had a coffee and croissant in a croissanterie, which was rather satisfying, though I later saw a briocherie – what a useful suffix!

We skirted Saint-Gilles, which was a bit frustrating since that’s where a lot happens in my book. But it was good to see the landscape round there. Marshes, salt-flats and lots of birds – egrets, herons, swans, ducks and – surprisingly, flamingoes. I’m guessing the last are a recent addition, as is the rice crop.

We did see some of the white horses of the Camargue, though not running wild, and some of the small black bulls they use for “Tauromachie” in the amphitheatre in Nimes. It’s more like the Cretan bull court than the Spanish corrida, since the bulls aren’t killed. The fighters, male and female, have to snatch tokens from between the bulls’ horns.

On to Aigues-Mortes, a port built by Louis lX, the one who became a saint, and who launched two crusades from there (6th and 7th). It’s a perfectly complete late 13th century fortified town, full of souvenir shops and cafés, so like a little Carcossonne, but near the sea.

So this is the last night and the end of my trip. I’m all packed and have to meet our guide at the station at 8am. (we are travelling on the upper deck of the T.G.V. to Lille tomorrow).

So just time to type up today’s output, putting chapter nine to bed – and then me.

I was able to write half of chapter ten on the TGV before my battery ran out and have since finished it, and eleven and am halfway through twelve. So I am now going to be 2 chapters behind on the schedule I had worked out. Never mind; the trip was worth it. Oc, indeed.

Snow on Easter Sunday!

2008-03-23T13:09:00.002Z

Woke up and looked out of our 'magic window" around 8am and there was a soft covering of snow on the pond and fountain. It was still falling and the cats couldn't go out, to their disgust. But they were very good and let us have another hour in bed. We hadn't got back from Bristol till 1am.

Hamlet at the Tobacco Factory was directed by Jonatahn Miller and was exceptionally clear and good in ensemble. The Hamlet himself was fine but not remarkable in the way Jonathan Slinger was at Stratford in the Histories. But the text was so clear throughout that it was possible, even after all this time and so many readings and viewings to have some new thoughts.

I agree with Yeats that Ophelia's mad scenes are actually unstageable. The actor, from Oxford School of Drama, made a good fist of it but the flowers were imaginary and Laertes' remark about how she turned all to prettiness was not applicable.

I made an Easter egg hunt before going to church and finished trimming the simnel cake when we got back, since Jess and James were cooking the lunch.

I haven't managed much Troubadour this week so shall try to catch up this afternoon.

I read a short story by Ceare Pavese and wrote an essay about Leonardo Sciascia. I heard Biber's Rosary sonatas, written for among other instruments, violins re-strung for each movement. I saw the last of the current episodes of Lewis, with Oxford looking beautiful; wish I'd seen the real thing in the snow.

Plantagenets

2008-03-17T16:59:00.004Z

We had our third SAS get-together in Coventry, where the hotel no longer feels as if run by a group of children. My "room" was a huge suite with a kitchen area with a coffee machine so I took advantage of our late start on Sunday to use it and do some Armadillo editing on my laptop.

It was good to see everyone - about 25 of us including some new members.Our outside speaker was an inspirational web designer who made me feel very inadequate - must make better use of this blog!

OK, so in relation to work, I've finished proofreading City of Secrets, which will go off for final printing tomorrow, and the first section (a third) of Troubadour. The details of my Languedoc trip have arrived, where I shall visit Nimes, Carcassonne and Montpellier - all cities that have scenes in the book, though in 1208. On the one free morning I might get to Béziers as well.

Reading has been dominated by Shakespeare's Histories as has the rest of my life.We had our "Glorious Moment" over the weekend - many moments actually. It consis
Toted of 8 plays performed on 4 days thus: 1 + 3 + 3 + 1. But on day 4 we also had a brunch, a talk from the director and a reception to meet the actors.

Day 2 was toughest, with bad back-ache, but our posture must have improved by day 3 when we also had 3 plays and didn't suffer - perhaps we were just in training by then? We had seen all the productiions before and they were even better than first time round. Stand-out performances from Jonathan Slinger as Richard 11 and 111 (and the Bastard of Orleans and Fluellen); Clive Wood as Bolingbroke, Henry 1V and Edmund of York, Katy Stephens as Joan of Arc and Margaret of Anjou, and John McKay as the Dauphin and Jack Cade.

But the whole ensemble were marvellous. And the production is so exciting. I do find the Eastcheap scenes tedious but they did them asd well as they could be done. They'll be in London at the Roundhouse from 1st April.

Today we got up and thought "no drive to Stratford" and "no Shakespeare"! But we're going to Hamlet in Bristol next Saturday so that will help with the withdrawal problem.

Westron wind

2008-03-01T16:30:00.003Z

Well, the frescoes are all over now and I shall miss them.We ended with Altichiero in Padua - a fine cycle. But it will be good to get Thursday mornings back - I have so much to do!

Finished covers have arrived for City of Secrets and finished copies of Kings and Queens of the Bible (due out in May). Secrets proofs should have come but now won't till Monday and I'll have only 10 days to turn them round. It all takes away from Troubadour but it certainly makes me feel like a writer. (Actually this is true all the time now).

The Falconer's Knot has been nominated for a prize in the States. I'd love to win this one because I could then say I had a "Malice Domestic Agatha Award"! That would certainly be worth having.

I had to drive over to a Gloucestershire village to meet an artist last week and would have been lost without Tim - lots of leafy lanes and muddy roads. As is his wont, he said confidently "you have reached your destination," at a point where there were no street names. I parked on the green and wandered up a street with no house names when a man carrying the Guardian passed by and said "Are you looking for X?" Obviously you can take the girl out of North London but not vice versa.

I read Stardust and actually thought the film was better, in terms of a more coherent plot, though it's possibly a bit overbalanced by Robert de Niro's camp pirate captain, which wasn't even suggested in the book.

Am now re-reading John Julius Norwich's Shakespeare's Kings, in preparation for The Glorious Moment, which is happening the week after next.

I heard lots of versions of Poulenc's Gloria on CD Review and felt nostalgic because my London choir sang it at least once. Also heard Melvyn's Bragg's In Our Time on King Lear, where Jonathan Bate said, incredibly, that Cordelia "couldn't think of anything to say" in the first scene, showing that even Shakespeare scholars can be downright daft, And the three experts agreed that the storm scene was like The Waste Land. I think Becket would be the better comparison.

I saw far too much television! Torchwood, ER, Life in Cold Blood and Lewis. This last was a scream, especially the producer's idea of a typical student house in Oxford - red brick double-fronted, lovely big living-room with tastefully chosen furniture and no dirty dishes etc. etc. Eat your heart out, People's Republic of East Oxford!

I didn't feel the earthquake but was kept awake most of last night by the hurricane - why wasn't that on the news?

Snowdrops

2008-02-21T19:23:00.002Z

More domestic problems - drains and the dishwasher this time and I've been tearing my hair because of all the disruption.

But we've been going out a lot to compensate. The daughters all got together with us to celebrate Rhiannon's birthday at a Lebanese restaurant in Oxford and on the Sunday afternoon we went with Bex to Burford Priory Snowdrop Day, which is always wonderful and finishes with tea and home-made cake by a log fire.

Troubadour is rumbling on - I had to excommunicate someone this week! And the publicity material comes thick and fast for City of Secrets; thank goodness for the colour printer I bought last year.

I went with another writer friend to hear Sarah Dunant talking about her books at a Writers in Oxford meeting.She talked about adoring reading historical novels as a child and teenager and then reading History at Cambridge. In her earlier phase she thought that you could always enter the mind of people who lived even centuries ago, because of our shared humanity. But lately she has come to doubt this: something to ponder on.

We saw the Kenneth Branagh film of As You Like It, which was very intelligently acted. Incongruously set in 19th century Japan, which added nothing to the play apart from some attractive background and a sumo wrestling match. The best Jacques I've ever seen turned out to be Kevin Kline!

A few days later we were back to see The Seventh Seal by the late Ingmar Bergman which was a HUGE disappointment. The initial image of the returning Crusader Knight playing chess with Death is so good that no-one remembers it has no plot worth speaking of and no story to live up to the image. Its simply incoherent.

Not so Neil Gaiman's Stardust, the third film we saw in less than a week. This is as good as, say, Willow, and a very good evening's entertainment. I hadn't read the book and didn't have very high expectations but found it charming, funny, and with a cracking good fairy-tale story. A magic snowdrop protects the hero from spells.

We heard a London Sinfonietta concert of Boulez and Messaien which was lovely and jangly. I couldn't follow the Boulez as well as Stevie but I always feel at home with Messaien and always have from the first piece of his I ever heard.

I read an astonishing first novel by Diane Setterfield called The Thirteenth Tale and Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. A minor character from Cloud Atlas pops up rather incongruously in the middle but I enjoyed it.

I saw three more magnificent fresco cycles at my lectures - the Cione brothers and Bonaiuto in Santa Maria Novella and the st Martion cycle in the Montefiore Chapel in Assisi by Simaone Martini - which features in The Falconer's Knot.

Floors and walls

2008-02-08T22:08:00.000Z

It hasn't been as productive as I'd hoped, because of a whole heap of domestic problems involving floors! Indian ink on a cream carpet (ouch) and water damage to a wooden floor. Alas, that is in my study and I have to have the whole floor replaced. So a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth and more interruption to work.

On the plus side, I have done all the copy-edits for City of Secrets, written some extra scenes, commented on another round of jacket designs and written suggestions for 27 chapter-head illustrations.

And I've now read all the rest of my Christmas books: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell - so much better than After You'd Gone,One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson and Instances of the Number Three by Sally Vickers, which was better than the over-rated Miss Garnett's Angel but still containing characters one can't believe in, like the Shakespeare-quoting chimney sweep who is an ex English HMI.

And I've had two more fresco classes _ Ambrogio Lorenzetti's The Effects of Good Government and Mantegna's work in the palce at Mantua. Apparently it had 700 rooms and 15 courtyards!

I listened to a CD of the stage shows of The Boyfriend and Salad Days. The latter has the weirdest plot ever. Can you imagine anyone pitching it today: "Well, there are these privileged Oxbridge types who have just left university and don't really want jobs and two of them find a magic piano that makes people dance and then they get married and lose the piano and it's all right because a flying saucer comes along so they see where the piano has got to ..."

I've listened toa lot of music by Osvaldo Golijov (sp?) who was Composer of the Week on Radio 3. This comes on at the same time as You and Yours on Radio 4, which I never have to put up with any more now that I have a remote controlled digital radio. This composer is a Jew whose family came from somewhere in Eastern Europe but got out in time and emigrated to South America. The vocal music was sometimes banal but the instrumental pieces were sublime. One to explore further.

But by far the most exciting cultural event was Othello at the Donamr. Clever theatre daughter somehow got hold of tickets and we went on Wednesday. Chiwetel Ejiofor was a mesmerising moor and amazingly the Roderigo and Cassio were specially good. Euan McGregor was OK, but I didn't go for his sake.

Didn't get home till the early hours because of some Football Match clogging up the roads but it was well worth it. It was so soothing to see a production in 16th century dress and I liked the water sluicing over the stage at the beginning - McGregor had a good old slosh in it like Gene Kelly. I played Emilia in a student production at UCL in a proper theatre, and the lines came back.The Bianca travelled back on the same tube afterwards, which was a homely touch.

Here we go, slithering and squelching

2008-01-29T21:11:00.000Z

I've been living a bit like an amoeba as in the ISB's "A cellular Song" on The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, which I've now heard a couple more times. I'm supposed to be haed down on Troubadour and have indeed finished Chapter One but now the copy-edited text of City of Secrets has arrived and will take some days of work.

But I have no engagements other than my classes and domestic stuff for several weeks, so no excuse not to progress further with the new book.

I read Desmond Seward's Richard the Third: the Black Legend and found it utterly convincing. I hadn't realised that the Lovell in "The Cat , the Rat and Lovell our dog/ Rule all England under the Hog" was the owner of Old Minster Lovell Hall which, now beautiful ruins, is very near us and a favourite haunt for walks and picnics. (The Cat was Catesby and the Rat Ratcliff. Lovell's crest had a dog on it and of course Richard was the Hog - his symbol being the white boar).

The poor man who stuck that couplet on a church door was horribly executed, his pains not really worth the immortality of that one squib.

Also read a dreadful "novella" - very short - by Pirandello called The Crow of Mìzzaro. I didn't like it at all.

I heard, apart from the Incredible String Band, a David Munrow CD from the 60s of music from the Middle Ages. There's a second disc in the set of Renaissance muisc which I haven't tried yet.I needed to stay in the world of Estampies.

And I had my first fresco class, on Simone Martini's Maestà and Guidoriccio in the Palzzo Pubblico in Siena. The lecturer was brilliant and it's going to be a terrific course.We've booked our holiday to Siena in June so I shall be able to spot all the points she gave us.

Have also booked a short trip to the Languedoc, to do some field work for Troubadour. There's not much left to see at Béziers and Carcassonne is a sort of theme park but nothing beats standing in the right landscape.

Mrs Thompson gave me a bear

2008-01-20T13:06:00.000Z

I've started writing Troubadour! Only the Prologue and half of chapter one but it's good to have got going. Eerily, i wrote in the prologue about Peter of Castelnau's murder - which sparked the Albigensian Crusade - and was doing it EXACTLY 800 years after it happened - 15th January 1208.

I saw Notes on a Scandal (on DVD) having missed it in the cinema. Two very strong central performances but I kept thinking "why isn't the boy prettier?" So I read Zoe Heller's novel, on which it was based. And she said that the boy wasn't all that attractive; the teacher's desire for him was based on his pursuit of her (she hadn't been pursued by anyone for years) plus a sort of animal response to his young body.

I also read Sarah Dunant's The Birth of Venus, which was pretty good. A few mistakes, lke "flaunt" for "flout" in one of Savonarola's sermons. She's coming to talk to Writers in Oxford next month.

I saw both Torchwood and `ER as well as the final episode of Sense and Sensibility. It's a problem having both my favourite shows back at the same time. I heard The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter CD by The Incredible String Band; it will take a long time till I know it as well as the 5,000 Spirits. I looked them up on the Internet and found they had both become Scientologists!

Jess thinks they were on acid when they wrote their songs but I still find their lyrics and their voices do something that no other group can. They can conjure up being a small child or a sexy teenager in a phrase.

Richards

2008-01-08T20:23:00.000Z

Well, a lot of Shakespeare has flowed under the bridge since my last post. Richard ll, Henry lV parts 1 and 2 and Henry V in two days. Perhaps just not QUITE as exciting as the first tetralogy but wonderful all the same and Jonathan Slinger just as good as Richard ll as he was as Richard lll - quite an achievement when you think how different the parts are.Agincourt was a marvel of streamers representing English arrows.

Life shows signs of going back to normal or will do from tomorrow. We've had the last of the Christmas get-togethers and written the last thank-you letters. The Magi have arrived at the stable and been put back in their box along with the ox and ass and camel. And we carried the tree down to a local car park on Sunday where it would be re-cycled into mulch.

I am reading a book by Francine Prose called Reading like a Writer, which is something I suppose I do. It's fascinating and I intend to follow up her reading recommendations. But she makes some awful howlers: "we" the third person plural? What was her editor doing?

Italian Literature has started again and I've nearly finished reading the excellent essay at the end of La Scomparsa di Majorana. I think it's actually better than the book and I might want to write an essay inspired by it.Today we read and talked about a (very) short story by Gabriele d'Annunzio called L'eroe (= the hero) but no-one liked it much and nor did anyone find it very heroic. I preferred Beppe Severgnini's article on the subjunctive!

We went to Bennett and Kerr's annual twelfth night open day and came aaway with a heap of books, including one on Richard lll, which supports Thomas More's view of him and another book on Gothic Architecture. That may be the last mulled wine we have for some time.

I saw the second episode of Sense and Sensibility and enjoyed it though it can't surpass the Ang Lee film for me. The Marianne is played by someone my daughter knew at Oxford School of Drama. She also knows the young woman playing the maid in the production of The Country Wife, which we saw last night. It's very silly, bawdy and kind of pointless but we had a good time.

Afterwards we went round to the stage door and had a drink with Catherine in her (shared) dressing room, which is where all the younger members of the cast hang out. I remember Catherine from Saturday classes at the Guildhall and it's lovely to see her on the West End stage.

Earlier I had been to see the Millais exhibition at Tate Britain. It's a real knockout and I hadn't realised was a great portraitist he was. Lots of old friends - Isabella and her brothers, Ferdinand and Ariel, Ophelia, Mariana in the moated grange easing the pain in her back - which I've always imagined to be menstrual.

But Disraeli, Carlyle and the amazing Louise Jopling among others, were a surprise. Oh, and the Princes in the Tower, talking of Richard lll. That's one of the few involving children where Millais doesn't lose his head - unlike the ghastly Bubbles, Cherry Ripe and even Christ in his Father's Workshop, where the boy is simpering and sickly. Still, you must judge any artist by his best not his worst work and there was plenty to admire.

I walked from Millbank to Haymarket in the frosty night air, revelling in London seen as by a visitor. I love being so familiar with it without having to live there any more.

I saw the new year (almost) in with Jean Marais as a friend and I watched my old video of La Belle et la Bete. It still stands up marvellously well after all this time with special effects more specially effective than CGI could achieve. I think Cocteau was wrong to double up Marais as Belle's human lover but i think he just wanted to include the naked torso wood-chopping scene!

Zen

2007-12-27T19:52:00.000Z

The whole of December seemed to be spent organising Christmas - and it's still going on! I had very little time to work on Troubadour research and thus might have been getting in a state about starting to write it late, but I took a conscious decision to stay very Zen about the whole shopping, wrapping, card-writing, entertaining, cooking thing.

We had an officially Zen Christmas once - even had a former Zen monk to it - but all I can remember being different about it is that we bought cranberry sauce instead of making it. Everything home-made this year but only 5 of us on the actual day. We have seven or eight tomorrow and six on Sunday and just one extra on New Year's Eve. Not huge gatherings, any of them, but we are making completely different meals each time.

And I had a reminder of the dangers of stress before Christmas, when I heard that a friend's wife had killed herself, leaving him and their four-year-old daughter.That certainly puts a bit of work delay and hospitality into proportion.

I saw the last episode of Cranford and the TV dramatisation of Ballet Shoes - both the work of Heidi Thomas, who is now a name to look out for. Also the Doctor Who Christmas Special, which was a bit w***y.

I also saw the film of The Golden Compass, which I've reviewed for Armadillo but the latest issue hasn't gone up yet. We went to the Siena exhibition at the National Gallery, which was a disappointment - everything at least 100 years too late to be really good. The best item was a bronze Donatello relief of the deposition , so not Sienese at all. I also liked the Griselda panels, but it's SUCH a hateful story.

We watched the rest of the documentaries about the British monarchy; Prince Andrew is really a nasty-tempered piece of work. Charles seems much more harmless if a bit goofy.

I read Alan Bennett's the Uncommon Reader - if only the Queen really read all those books and wanted to write like Proust!This was a Christmas present but I've been given lots more books so look forward to catching up in 2008.

I listened to LOTS of carols.

We went up to York for a family party, which coincided with a big wedding anniversary of ours. So saw the inside of York Minster (and quite a lot of the outside since our hotel was opposite it) and also the inside of Betty's Tea Rooms quite a lot.

This was the first of our cathedrals in the project to visit all 17 extant medieval cathedrals, inspired by Jon Cannon, whose book was published and pounced on in October.

Monarchs

2007-12-04T20:53:00.000Z

Well, I finished Shakespeare's Kings, which was very good. And I read Leonardo Sciascia's "La Scomparsa di Majorana" (The disappearance of Majorana). We had a class on it today and our teacher got very upset with people who pronounced the "j" as in English, because that sounds like "maggiorana" which = Marjoram, rather than with a "y" sound as in mayonnnaise. Ettore Majorana was a Sicilian physicist who disappeared or committed suicide in 1938, having seen two lots of writing on the wall, as it were, the persecution of the Jews - he was Jewish - and the development of the atom bomb. The Italian racial laws came out six months after his possibly faked death (no body was ever found) and he had met Heisenberg and Nils Bohr, as well as being a genius in his own right.

I saw Cranford, which is getting sadder and sadder and the middle episode of The Blair Years, which is beyond sad. It kept me awake fuming and grieving. There is nothing that man can do or say to make reparation for what he did and I'm glad he has become a Catholic; he can explain it all to his Maker in due course and be judged by Someone we hope he will take notice of at last.

Also saw lots of TV about the Queen - she is very moody, isn't she? Sometimes a delightful smile, others in a right old grump. But I don't blame her being acid with Annie Liebovitz - the woman tried to patronise her. And Her Maj (or Mayesty) must be the last person on earth drinking gin and Dubonnet! It's like asking for port and lemon or Babycham. Not that she asks, of course. Her sommelier just pours one out for her and she knocks it back - maybe she went off it years ago and doesn't like to say - but she doesn't seem the type to hang back. I saw the documentary about her marriage to Philip too (much too much TV this week) and she just about ordered up that delicacy the way she does her tipple. "I'll have that Greek prince with a touch of German."
Maybe she went off him years ago too but doesn't like to say...

Patrons of the Arts

2007-11-23T20:44:00.000Z

We went to a day school on Fra Angelico at San Marco, in Oxford. That was an appropriate venue since the last two panels of the San Marco altarpiece (probably) were found in a spare bedroom of a retired museum curator in the city last year.The best speaker was a Dominican friar and we learned a lot about how what great patrons the Dominicans and Franciscans were.

The mysterious owner of the house in Poliakoff's Capturing Mary was a patron too, in a way. It was the same house as in Joe's Palace and the same main character as in the monologue, A Real Summer, performed so well by Ruth Wilson. But none of it was really any good. There just isn't enough STORY.

I saw Elizabeth: the Golden Age and got very nervous about the late arrival at the Armada Ball of Francis Drake. Was Ralegh going to defeat the Spanish single-handed? Actually he sort of did. Cate Blanchett - not my favourite actor - was terrific in her role and I liked the Mary Queen of Scots and Bess Throckmorden too. But Clive Owen just has too modern a face.Had to hide my face in Stevie during the torture. No shortage of story there.

I've been reading John Julius Norwich's book Shakespeare's Kings , in opreparation for more Stratford plays next month. Stayed awake late one night thinking that Henry Todor really didn't have much claim to the throne at all and we have been reigned over by the wrong lot for hundreds of years. (Realised this was a bit Adrian Moleish). I've also been reading my way through Mark Robson's Dreamweaver Legacy quartet and Celia Rees's extraordinary novel The Stone Testament, which I'm reviewing for the Guardian. Not such a contrast really - all about power and domination.

i wrote and gave a "presentazione" on Elsa Morante's La Storia. And read a short story called "Fortezza" by Edmund de Amicis. It is about heroism rather than strength and I wasn't able to avoid torture after all. I heard Beppe Severgnini lecture on the Italian language in Oxford yesterday. He was utterly charming and very amusing but not profound and I didn't share his attitiudes towards feminism and language (surprise, surprise!). He is also much too interested in football for my taste but then most people are.

We had a huge banquet on Sunday to celebrate husband's and middle daughter's birthdays. And played "Articulate!" - a very noisy board game. And on Wednesday it was the Frances Lincoln 30th birthday party - a real scrum in a deconsecrated church with candles, magic, very loud music and too many people.

Two puzzling fanmails this week - one from a Finnish girl who said several times that she "presuated" me and one, sent on VERY late by Bloomsbury USA from a boy who wanted to know why I "gave Felix a winged horse" in City of Stars. The trouble is, there ISN'T a Felix in that book and no-one was given the flying horse. Now 3 German girls have sent me a plot for a 4th Stravaganza book called City of Ships. But I've written a fourth book and the plot for the fifth, City of Ships, is already sketched out.

Dressing up

2007-11-06T18:06:00.000Z

Well I DID make jam - eight jars of bramble jelly - and then in the afternoon we went for a two-hour walk on the Ridgeway, visiting Wayland's Smithy and Uffington Castle, which is a windswept Iron Age hill fort. It was a golden day and the view spectacular. It was my first use of my poles, given by Stevie. They are terrific - like having 2 extra legs! I wish I'd had them in the Samaria Gorge in 2005.

I did some more serious lunching - Jules Cashford, my mythological friend (which is different from an imaginary one) in London and Gill Vickery in Oxford. Jules had done the Samaria Gorge without poles or proper shoes too and took almost as long as we did!

My next London event was at Stratford Circus, where I read Princess Grace to 30 children, some of them dressed up as princes and princesses. Then back to Oxford for another birthday party - I find my family members embrace big birthdays very enthusiastically! - with food and more barn-dancing. After all that I was rather relieved that one of the friends I was going to London with to see the Millais exhibition had to cancel so it was put off.

So only one trip to London this week. It was rather tiring, signing large numbers of Grace books at Frances Lincoln and then helping a friend prepare food for 150 people for yet another party, in memory of a mutual friend who died earlier this year. But we had a very leisurely breakfast in Cafe Mozart next morning, with more autumn sunshine pouring through the window.

I've finished City of Secrets corrections and sent them to Bloomsbury. Now have to tackle the two big heaps of Troubadour research books.

I read "Il tramonto di Venere" (= "Love's sunset") by Giovanni Verga, the prime exponent of the 19th century Italian style known as "verismo." It dealt with the parabola of a love affair between a prima ballerina and her toyboy. Very miserable - the veristi do nothing for me. But Verga had described the nasty lover - Bibi - putting pomade on his moustaches and being "in ghingheri" which means something like "all gussied up" and is a phrase used almost exclusively of women.

I read The English Patient at last and really enjoyed it, apart from the two love stories, which is what you are supposed to like most. All that animal rending and tearing. What I liked was the structure.

I saw "joe's Palace" by Stephen Poliakoff on TV - brilliantly acted and produced but curiously incomplete as a story. I heard Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique on the radio. And most of a programme about the film of The Boyfriend. It came out in Febraury 1972 but i already knew this because Stevie and I went to see it on the 29th, after proposing to each other!

Ladies who lunch

2007-10-19T20:56:00.000+01:00

It was another weekend of parties, taking two daughters and their men out to dinner on Friday then going to a black tie do for the birthday of a member of our extended family (loosely speaking) on Saturday. He's a doctor so there were lots of medics, which made a change from all those literary parties. How often do I find myself socialising with a nice othodontist?

Then there was vigorous square-dancing before driving back late at night. I was the designated driver and therefore sober; everyone else fell asleep. How thankful I was for the company of Tim the voice of SatNav!

We got back after 1am but I had to be up and doing next morning for a radio interview on Five Live. My princess article had been published in the Guardian on Friday and I was asked to do this thing - then the interviewer was fantastically hostile and I wondered why I bothered. But Amanda Craig gave Princess Grace a lovely review in the Times on Saturday too.

On Monday I met Celia Rees for lunch in Oxford and we set the children's book world to rights. Then on to Rhiannon's for tea and more plotting. Wednesday it was lunch with Cindy Jefferies and Katherine Roberts in Witney - I could get used to this.

I've started researching Troubadour but will have to stop to do City of Secrets corrections - however the edits have arrived and are much lighter than usual, so it shouldn't take long.

The school visit to Milan is making progress - I hope they won't mind that there is no Stravaganza book planned for that city!

I saw - and wished I hadn't - the Dispatches programme on Channel 4 about Madeleine McCann. They had sent five experts to Portugal - ex-policemen, forensic psychiatrists etc. and they had no more idea than 5 people plucked off the street would have done. It was narrated by Juliet Stevenson - but an appalling waste of money. Also saw the second half of the Tristan + Isolde film on TV with Rufus Sewell as King Mark, which made adultery seem very unlikely.

Better was the DVD a writer friend lent me of Vittorio da Sica's film of Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini by Giorgio Bassani. The film-maker made explicit what the book did not - the brutal arrest and deportation of the rich Jewish family of F-Cs, showing that privilege bought nothing from the fascists.

I read The Tenderness of Wolves by Steph Penney, which is currently being dramatised on the radio. Not as wonderfully well-written as the Costa judges said - "nauseous" for example? But not bad. I wouldn't rave about it.

My event in London tomorrow has been cancelled "because of the rugby." Don't mind at all; I shall make jam!

History

2007-10-08T19:26:00.000+01:00

My Italian class started up again this week - we have THIRTEEN members. unfortunately we are doing more 19th century stories which are LONG.

We had the launch party for Princess Grace in a downstairs room at a restaurant in Soho serving Italian tapas - very nice. I was staying at a weird hotel on Gower Street where lots of things were got wrong and I was on the very top floor - no lift. Must have been good for my heart, especially when I chose the wrong staircase (there were 5) after the Grace party!

Then to a wonderful prep school in Dulwich early next morning, where the IT didn't work properly but the boys were lovely. They are obviouslt taught history well well and got the di Chimici/de' Medici parallel straightaway.Then on to the Guardian award party, where I didn't get the prize but there were only four books on the shortlist. And I had a huge group of supporters from Bloomsbury, bless them.

Sunday was the Cheltenham Festival and a panel on historical fiction with Sally Gardner and Julia Golding. The very good green room provioded not only tea and scones before but a proper hot meal afterwards.

I saw the film of Atonement with two friends, since Stevie didn't want to go. It was a pretty faithful rendering of the book - which I did not particularly admire - and visually exquisite. Wonderful performances by James McEvoy and, briefly, Vanessa Redgrave. Even old Keira Knightly wasn't too bad. One of my friends had been to drama school with Benedict Cumberbatch, who played the villain. But the trouble with McEwan is that he isn't complicated enough for me - the plots always hinge on one event. And I simply didn't believe in the switched letters or the crudely expressed one.

I at last finished La Storia, which was both impressive and depressing. Reading the introduction afterwards I found that La Morante invented the whole thing as back story from a newspaper cutting. Also read L'Assedip di Tortona (The siege of Tortona) by Niccolo Tommaseo, this week's 19th century story. Only it wasn't a story really - more of a historical account of a terrible piece of cruelty by Frederick Barbarossa.

Partying

2007-09-29T10:33:00.000+01:00

To London two evenings running, the first to celebrate publication of Helen Ward's Wonderful Life for Templar, which is a gorgeous picture book. My wonderful SatNav (known as Tim) got me there, evn though it involved three different motorways. He says, so calmly "Take the exit, then take the motorway" that I just do it.

I was a bit late and missed the drinks before but met several old friends and sat next to Helen whose work I'm a great fan of. Then back to London the next day, this time by coach, for Shirley Hughes' 80th birthdya party. She doesn't look or seem a day older than when it was her 70th and gave us a nice slide show.

I spent the night with a writer friend and next day met an independent publicist, who might be able to do some work for me.

I've spent a lot of time since I last blogged writing a piece for the Guardian Women's editor on why I hate princesses, fairies, mermaids and all things pink and girly in children's books. It had to be done in a hurry to coincide with the publication of Princess Grace (which attempts to subvert the genre) next week.

Then to the Bloomsbury 21st Birthday Party, which had over a thousand people! I thought I'd never find anyone I knew but actually managed to meet lots. Four of us went out for a quick plate of pasta and conversation that didn't have to be bellowed in one another's ears. And I met my editor, copy editor and even Nigel Newton on leaving. He still remembers my tour of Bellezza, which I did in Venice at the 2002 sales conference! They had a wonderful living statue representing their Diana logo - the only publishing house to use a weapon of war as its logo, as Nigel pointed out menacingly in his speech.

I didn't get back home till 1.30am , carrying my balloon on the Oxford Tube.

Through a series of mishaps involving e-mail, I hadn't received my editor's rave about City of Secrets, so it's a great relief to have discovered last week that she loves it. Phew! On to the next book.

I'm STILL reading La Storia - it has 650 pages! - but nearly finished now. I broke off to read Sheila Hancock's The Two of Us, which I picked up at the party. Very moving, intelligent and well-written.

I heard Colin Davis conduct his 80th birthday concert on the radio last night - Sibelius' Fifth Symphony. It's lovely to feel in such a safe pair of hands - like Shirley. These are my kind of octegenarian. I wonder if I'll get the chance to be the same?

That be cat!

2007-09-16T13:27:00.000+01:00

We had a lovely visit from Stevie's half sister, her partner and two little boys, under two. The weather allowed it to be a picnic in the garden. Freddie was running around and speaking in phrases if not in tongues. "That be cat!" he said accurately, if in Mummerset, whenever he spotted one. But he learned Lila's name and bent down to talk to her under the table, saying "Ullo, Lila!" in a very convincing Northern accent. He also got that Lonza was both "Chocolate cat" and "mummy cat" - how confusing!

He was very nice to his brother, sayimg "Hello, baby George" and "I love baby George" most charmingly. They are wonderful grandchildren-substitutes.

My writer friend brought lots of jamjars, so we coped with the blackberries and a surfeit of greengages which a colleague of Stevie's produced. Also got a lot of work done on her novel. I must do this again - it's great having another writer here because you can just talk in shorthand.

I went to the YLG conference in Hertfordshire to give a talk about Princess Grace. This was great fun, because, unusually, the technology worked and I could use my PowerPoint. I spent the night with old friends in St Alban's. Their two cats were very suspicious of the smell of my luggage - obviously it had been inspected by my lot.

I am still reading La Storia, about halfway through - it's a long book - but had to stop to read review books for Armadillo - Wonderful Life (picture book), the new edition of Pippi Longstocking, the amazing Mythology from Templar and The Tar Man - the sequel to Gideon the Cutpurse. I saw, I am ashamed to say Ten Years Younger on TV (this is the second time!). Must not make a habit of it.

Driving back from Hertfordshire I heard cello sonatas by Schumann and Beethoven. And a radio programme on the centenary of the birth of Louis MacNeice - possibly my favourite poet, certainly one of them.

Blackberries

2007-09-08T16:39:00.000+01:00

I had a proper weekend last week, with middle daughter and boyfriend here to visit and oldest daughter and boyfriend joining us for lunch on the Sunday. Steve is very fond of pie, famously so, so I made one using the apples and blackberries from our own garden. But during the week I went blackberrying with Stevie (husband) at Old Minster Lovell and came home with two bags. Now I need to make lots of bramble jelly!

Youngest daughter, back from Thailand is now with her boyfriend in London till the start of term, so the great tidy up here post book has continued unhindered. I have reorganised my archive so that there is more cupboard space in the study, done all my filing and answered two months' worth of fanmail.

My agent was here on Friday and loves City of Secrets as, so far, does my English editor; she hasn't finished yet but I hope to hear next week. I heard this week that The Falconer's Knot is on the Guardian short-list, announced today, which is very pleasing. Just to be in this place is good.

I also wrote a book proposal which has been "pending" for too long for a publisher who has been offering me a contract for ages.

And I renewed my passport, which took a record TWO working days! So I can now accept the surprise offer of a school visit to Milan. Honestly, you never know what the e-mail or post will contain.

And today I did an almost impromptu signing at the local Waterstone's with Mark Robson and Jo Kenrick. I met an Australian academic who is writing a paper on neo-mediaevalism and sold him a copy of The Falconer's Knot! Driving there and back I saw the same tiny bird of prey hovering in the air over the verge. Could it have been a Merlin?

I saw two films on TV which I had already seen in the cinema. One was The Queen, which is quite fascinating, although I still hated the hypocrisy of everything to do with the stag. The other was The Full Monty, which impressed me this time by how excellently well-crafted it is. So many high spots. I am reading Elsa Morante's La Storia, which is very compelling. My literature class starts up again at the beginning of October and I hadn't read any novel in Italian since we stopped in April so I felt the need to catch up.

Also read the manuscript of a friend's novel, set in Italy, who is coming to stay next week. We'll work companionably together, I hope.

On the radio I heard Peter Maxwell Davies play on the piano his hauntingly beautiful Farewell to Stromness this morning. It is his 73rd birthday. It is what you should play to anyone who says they don't like modern classical music - short, comprehensible and with a memorable tune. And in the car I listened to the Beatles' Love CD again. So many good songs in so few years. So sad to hear George in While my guitar gently weeps. But I remember clearly the weekend when the Hey Jude single came out with the raucous Revolution on the B side. Still just as exhilarating.

Past the finishing post!

2007-08-30T11:49:00.000+01:00

Well, City of Secrets made 25 chapters, plus prologue and epilogue, instead of the planned 21. By dint of working till 10.30pm on Bank Holiday Monday (early for me), I got it off to agent and publisher and it has also gone to my US editor. Phew!

Now I have to hope that everyone likes it. But I have the luxury of being able to do some quite important other things like getting my passport renewed and answering fanmail and doing a year's worth of filing! Also to have some quality time with friends and family. Which has a new member! My husband's half-brother (23 years younger) became a father for the first time two days ago, to a little girl, born early at full moon. She is as yet without a name but we spent a lot of yesterday organising presents for her. The family live in Mexico so I suppose she won't be exactly a "kissing cousin" for my daughters but it's nice to know she's there!

And youngest daughter is back from Thailand, briefly, in a flurry of suntan, laundry, jetlag and appointments here before going off to London for three weeks. She has been looking after elephants, trekking, jetskiing, snorkelling, seawater kayaking in caves, white water rafting and waterfall jumping - so I think we can say she is definitively better from her CFS.

The one day off at the weekend was spent visiting old friends in London, a publisher and an artist. The artist gave us (GAVE us!) a painting he had done in 1980 of The Rollright Stones - specifically the Kings' Men - which we had been to visit a week or so ago for the first time. We already have his painting of the Sarsen Stone at Avebury so this will make a handsome partner.

I saw The Bourne Identity and the Bourne Supremacy on TV in case I wanted to go and see the new one in the cinema. Not really my kind of film and [SPOILER} a very bad decision to kill off the girlfriend at the beginning of the second film (though it was a given as soon as we saw her) because it gave the hero no-one to talk to about his situation.

Also saw the film of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in the cinema. Not at all bad considering how poor the book was. But real Potter fans are incensed at so much being left out! It was still two and a half hours so I did not feel short-changed.

I heard the amazingly wonderful Simon Bolivar orchestra at the Proms playing Shostakovitch's 10th symphony. These are street kids without prospects rescued by classical music. And they play with as much accuracy and skill as passion, which they had in bucketloads - electrifying!

I read Nicci Gerrard's Things we Thought we Knew, which has some passing similaritiues to my adult novel. And for sheer pleasure re-read Kate Atkinson's Emotionally Weird, an exceptionally funny book.

The Never-ending Story

2007-08-18T18:16:00.000+01:00

i finished chapter twenty-one of City of Secrets yesterday, which was supposed to be the last, but there's a whole lot more plot to come so I'm supposed to be spending this weekend writing the extra chapter 22. The last two novels I've written have had twenty-one chapters, which sort of feels right but the last time I ran over that (City of Stars) I ended up having to write THREE more. Hope that doesn't happen this time.

The German edition of The Falconer's Knot came this week - it's called Die Farben des Teufels, which means The Colours of the Devil, and has a completely different sort of cover: just a painting of a very handsome young cowled friar, by candlelight, with a big dagger for the T of Teufels. It's very striking.

Rhiannon's new book Bad Blood was launched on 8th with a nice little party at our agent's in London. The table was covered in black crow feathers and red flower petals - very spooky. Amanda Craig gave it a good review in the Times this morning.

I heard John Adams' new opera A Flowering Tree at the Barbican - great music but the libretto and story diabolically bad. Also Gotterdammerung from the Proms on Radio 3 - orchestra terrific but Siegfried missed his high note on the hunting call. I saw two programmes about Elvis and tried to record a third, which seems to have wrecked the DVD player. One was Young Elvis in Colour, which was an irrestibly accurate title. They might as well have called it Sex on a Stick. How absolutely drop dead gorgeous he was!

I read the last Harry Potter which was much more readable than expected, and two books by mates - Adele Geras' A Hidden Life (Orion), which is her best adult novel yet, I think, and A Note of Madness by Tabitha Suzuma, which was very grim in its subject matter and utterly convincing.

Nature's bounty

2007-08-05T14:44:00.001+01:00

Everything back to normal after the floods, at least in this bit of West Oxfordshire - many other people not so lucky, I know. I have been head down, writing away all week or re-reading and plotting. Apart from one trip to London - see below.

But it's hard now that summer has at last arrived; there is a strong pull towards the garden swing seat, which must be resisted. I can't work out of doors because I can't see the screen on my laptop properly. Today, Sunday, it is gloriously hot and we've been harvesting plums from our little orchard. Seventeen pounds of them so far and it's only one tree - help! There are a lot motre to come. So, plum crumble, pie, jam etc. And we have a lot of damsons which look as if they'll be ripe to pick next weekend.

We mustn't hang about as we did with the cherries. We have one tree which we thought was another apple, which surprised us all in July by being hung with dark red, almost black, morello-type cherries. We didn't pick them one weekend, being preoccupied with blackcurrants and raspberries, but by the next weekend, when I was in Florence, they they all gone, every single one. Birds are suspected, which I would rather believe than marauding locals.

I saw Italian paintings of the Renaissance and Baroque at the Queen's Gallery by Buckingham Palace. Actually, the best piece by far and an old friend to greet with cries of delight was the exquisite little wooden triptych, which I saw (twice) at the Duccio exhibition in Siena 2003/2004. So neither renaissance nor Baroque. But it was also good to see the Artemisia Gentilleschi self-portrait while painting and compare it with a piece by her father Orazio, which was quite competent but no more. Apart from these, it was very much the B list, we thought. Still the Duccio is worth the admission price.

I finished reading Rose Tremain's Restoration and really enjoyed it. I didn't really understand the ending, after two reads but it did seem redemptive and her prose was always interesting. It was a bold choice to have a hero who was not at all physically or morally attractive.

I read the prize-winning Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld, which has Sigmund Freud involved (marginally) in a murder investigation on his one trip to the US in 1909. It purports to explain why Freud never returned and throws in his realtionship with Jung, the Oedipus complex and Shakespeare scholarship. But what a farrago of far-fetchedness! And all for far-fetchedness' sake, it seemed to me.

High water rather than hell

2007-07-28T20:11:00.000+01:00

Everyone has their own flood story this summer; this is mine. On Friday we were due to drive up to Shreswbury for a cousin's wedding the next day. My sister, whose birthday it was, was coming from Eastbourne but was delayed by floods at Harywards Heath, a landslide at East Croydon and another flood on the way into London. Since her journey was taking all day, we decided to pick her up in Oxford.

But the roads round here in West Oxfordshire were impassable or impossible in many places and the Brize Norton roundabout full of cars abandoned in the water. We did eventually get to Oxford but by then decided it would be foolish to attempt the drive north and booked into a hotel. Good thing we did or, instead of having a drink in the bar and a nice Italain meal in Summertown, we would have been in one of those cars stranded on the M5 without food, drink or loos and no chance of sleeping.

The wedding was fine - only a few guests didn't make it but there were over 200 guests, each with a story.

On the Sunday we had to get to West Sussex from Shrewsbury after not much sleep. But that ended up like a proper summer Sunday, drinking tea in the sun after a lovely Sunday lunch.

On Monday I was due to go to Charney Bassett for our annual SAS retreat. The radio actually mentioned Charney as one of the places due to flood (overflowing River Ock). Floods at Ducklington and Standlake too, they said, which are on my normal route. So I set off for Faringdon and was turned back at Alvescot. In the end I got there by the usual route, late and quite exhausted, greeted by concerned fellow-writers telling me how terrible I looked.

It was wonderful, as always. The house, a gem of an Elizabethan manor, had been refurbished since our last retreat and all the rooms now have bathrooms. I had a gorgeous one with stone-framed windows overlooking the gardens. We had inspiring sessions on book promotion, writing for adults, and so on and a hysterical quiz night on which the team I was in - the Litchicks - had a convincing win. We won far too much chocolate for our own good.

I forgot to take a book! But someone had discarded Rose Tremain's Restoration which I fell upon. Enjoying it hugely so far.

Yesterday I got an advance copy of the UK and US editions of Princess Grace. They do both look wonderful and the UK one has the title in silver foil, which I always wanted.

Breakfast at the Savoy.

2007-07-19T18:49:00.000+01:00

I've just come back from a week in Florence, visiting old favourites and discovering new ones. After the restoration of Verocchio's David at the Bargello in 2003, they are now doing the same to Donatello's bronze of the same subject. The difference being, it is happening in full view of all visitors. David lies on his back in a cradle while a restorer works on fine detail and a microscope relays it to a TV screen.

We visited Michelangelo's statue in the Accademia too. It is so different in that setting from seeing the copies in the Piazza della Signoria and Piazzale Michelangelo. But it always makes me despair the way visitors make a beeline for him, ignoring the prisoners and St Matthew and the pieta. Not to mention the 14th century paintings.

We had no English news at all except what La Repubblica gave us, though that was full of Harry Potter and Princess Diana. I was researching two books that can't be talked about but one involved having breakfsat at the Savoy in the Piazza della Repubblica. We'd booked it for 8.30am and sat outside (our flat was only just round the corner in Via della Condotta). It was very good - freshly squeezed grapefruit juice, good coffee, scrambled eggs, wholemeal toast and even a wholemeal croissant. Jess managed smoked salmon and chocolate croissant too. This is the kind of thing that gives research a good name.

I saw Pygmalion in Bath with Tim Piggott-Smith as Higgins and Michelle Dockery as Eliza. It was a very traditional production and we all enjoyed it. But the actor playing Alfred Dolittle dried spectacularly in the first Middle Class Morality speech and had to ask for his line. The Prompt was so quiet and ineffective he had to go off stage and consult the script!

I heard a concert in Florence of countertenor, violinist and organist, playing/singing Bach, Vivaldi, Pergolesi, Pagannini and Schubert. The countertenor looked like a navvy, in a black T-shirt and jeans, but had the most eerily powerful voice.

I read The Bull from the Sea by Mary Renault, the sequel to The King Must Die. Just as in the first book the section on the Bull Court in Crete was best, so in this one the whole section of the story on Theseus's love for Hippolyta and their son Hippolytus stands out. Also Ascanio Condivi's Life of Michelangelo, an account by a younger contemporary, written in response to Vasari.

I saw the Cezanne in Florence exhibition and Michelangelo the Archtiect, Also visited the Bargello, San Lorenzo, the Medici Chapels and Laurentian Library, Santa Maria Novella, Santa Felicita, San Miniato al Monte, Orsanmichele, Museum of Florence as it used to be.

A Lovely Man

2007-07-06T21:20:00.000+01:00

This will be all about my dear friend, Douglas Hill, who was killed by a bus, on a zebra crossing on 21st June.

We were expecting him here for lunch on 27th, to celebrate Jess's birthday. She chose him to be her godfather when she was fifteen and, although neither of them believed in God, they had a perfect relationship for ten years. We heard on Sunday morning and the shock reverberated for days. Surely we would see him on Wednesday - hadn't we got the menu all planned?

Douglas was the person who read Rhiannon's first full-length novel, Hex and wrote to Marion Lloyd at Macmillan saying you have to read this. Macmillan published it and its two sequels, giving her a two-book contract while she was still at university, aged 19. Both Marion and Rhiannon were at Douglas's funeral on Friday. Jess read Louis MacNeice's Sunlight on the Garden. And Bex also came, ewvn though she had got back from St Petersburg only at 11pm the night before and didn't know he had died till then.

He was as kind to my three daughters as he was to everyone. The chapel at the crematorium was full of family and friends, some very young, who all wanted to say a proper goodbye, And then there was a wake at a Turkish restaurant belonging to a family member. Douglas had left instructions that he didn't want his funeral to be a mournful occasion, rather "a booze-up."

He had more or less finished his new trilogy for Macmillan, which had given him so much pleasure and satisfaction and was poised for a bit of a comeback, as M.J.Mourne. If only he would come back, as M.J. or anything else. We will miss his outrageous compliments, his soft Canadian accent, the wicked twinkle in his eye, his love of good coffee, chocolate, dragons, cats. I'm so sorry he didn't meet our three new Burmeses - he would have loved them and they him.
If there is any form of afterlife I hope he and Kate Petty are having a good time there, over a glass or two of nectar.

Glimpses of Butrint

2007-06-17T20:21:00.000+01:00

We had two glorious weeks in Corfu - with all three daughters - in a villa with a lovely terrace, swimming pool and views over Kalami Bay. In the distance you could see blue mountains that turned out to be Albania! The villa book said on a clear day we could expect to see Butrint, which is an archaeological site connected with Aeneas. I bet it's just what Eddie Izzard says all such sites are - "a series of small walls."

Corfu seems very light on antiquities so it wasn't that kind of holiday - unlkie Crete last year. What it does have is pebbly beaches with incredibly clear turquoise water, very buoyant. I bought waterproof beach shoes and swam in them - an odd feeling - but the serious 20-minute swims were all done in the pool. The only drawback was the mosquitoes - three of us had to have medical treatment. We were up on the NE coast, which the doctor cheerfully told us had the most road accidents on the island - one fatality every summer. Not surprised; the road was precipitous, bendy and unpredictable and the Corfiot driving reckless. Though at least they don't honk their horns all the time like Cretans and Italians.

We came back brown and relaxed, which was just as well, since we have currently five different kinds of insurance claim on the go. One of them is for the little cat, who is now out of her cage and must live in my study for a couple of weeks. She'll have to have another operation in two or three months, to take the screws and plate out of her leg.

I read Ann Tyler's Digging to America, Ruth Rendell's The Water's Lovely, Mary Renault's The King Must Die, Labyrinth by Kate Mosse and Arundati Roy's The God of Small Things. I love reading Ann Tyler but was disappointed that her new book went off track from the different lives of two adopted Korean babies and became a sad story about love between widowed seniors. The Ruth Rendell was better than the last but a bit predictable. Not even someone as in love with Theseus as Renault was could make a passable excuse for his behaviour to Ariadne. Labyrinth was dire, dire, dire! Spectacularly bad: the religious bits all tosh, the characters stereotyped, the plot hackneyed thriller stuff. People always being clubbed on the head and never knowing where they were when they woke up in the morning, the sex embarrassing... And it was as if she'd been given a large crate of cliches with a sell-by date of the end of the novel and just had to use every single one. Number One bestseller - phooey! What a relief to read the Roy afterwards. I think it could have done with a bit more editing on the verbal fireworks but it was pretty good.

I saw my new nephew, George Garcia, born while we were away: totally delightful and yet quite unlkie his brother Freddie, now one and a half. We had great fun choosing a water play present for Freddie, who loves pouring, splashing and measuring.

I saw Hay Fever in Bath, with Stephanie Beacham as Judith Bliss. She was splendid, though she did adopt a new voice, very deep and affected, for the role.

I saw the latest Doctor Who, with John Barrowman - much better than the earlier episodes. I was going to giove up on it after the ghastly Shakespeare one, complete with homage to J K Rowling. I ask you!

This is my 100th blog.

We picked up a Times as we got off the plane that told us George Bush was being rapturously received in Albania. Maybe that accounts for the forked lightning we saw over the mountains. The old gods are not quite dead. Only ten days before Blair goes - "Blow winds and crack your cheeks, ye hurricanoes!"

Saying no to chocolate

2007-05-25T18:22:00.000+01:00

I was in Antwerp the weekend before last, mainly to see a wooden printing press operated at the Plantin-Moretus museum there. Never been to Belgium before or on the Eurostar so these were new experiences enjoyed with Jess. She wanted to eat Belgian the first night, which resulted in a HUGE pot of mussels for her (and this was a half order) followed by steak. The vegetarian options were a Japanese soup and then lasagne with ratatouille and polenta - hardly redolent of the lowlands. The next night we went Thai and we had one Italian lunch but we could have had Chinese, Indian, Lebanese, Mexican- all within a couple of streets.

She went off to photograph Art Nouveau buildings while I did my museum - very useful for City of Secrets - and we both went to the Acquarium and two art galleries. I was disappointed in the main collection BUT they had a Simone Martini! Four little panels actually, which made it worthwhile.

Antwerp also has "chocolate cafes" - purgatory for someone on a pre-summer-holiday diet. I chastely drank black coffee. I was amazed at what a melting-pot culture it is - equivalent to London for BEM population. We had a Rastafarian taxi driver who was so very much to type he even played Bob Marley's One Love on his stereo system!

I've done the Frances Lincoln sales conference, an appearance at the Kingston Festival - in a lovely RC Girls' Secondary School where one of the most avid readers and intelligent listeners was a Muslim girl - and last night had a launch of The Falconer's Knot shared with two other writers of historical fiction - Viv Richardson and Linda Press Wulf.

And now I'm whacked and ready for my holiday.

I saw the judging bit of the Eurovision Song contest on our hotel TV. And the DVD of The History Boys - twice. I found it fascinating - a plot about real things for a change. Also saw an amateur production of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, which I had never seen before. I was very disappointed in it as a play, although the central idea must have been very striking in 1921. It's really 6 characters in search of an Ending, since they all have a story and are looking for a way out of it.It's his best known play and I'm amazed that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I finished reading Carolyne Larrington's Arthur's Enchantresses, which is really a very good exploration of all the matter of Britain has to say about Morgan and her sisters and the Lady of the Lake.

Puss in Boot

2007-05-06T21:12:00.000+01:00

It's been a busy couple of weeks. The day after my birthday the girls and my sister assembled here and they made a superb Italian banquet. This served as training for Bologna where I wnet two days later.

Rhiannon and I both had a successfully fair, being feasted by Frances Lincoln, our (joint) agents and (joint) German publishers. We also met the Japanese and I the Dutch and Danish publishers of The Falconer's Knot. Philip Pullman was giving a talk but we didn't see him.

The fair was depressingly full of fairies and princesses and pink and glitter. Also examples of the higher tosh order of fantasy. But the weather was spectacular - sunny with clear blue skies the whole time. I met three Italian friends/contacts - four if you count Ed Zaghini but he's lived over here so long I don't know if you can.

One was the woman who is helping set up a European library in Rome. We have been trying to be in touch for a long time and spent an hour and a half drinking coffee in the sunshine while I tried to fill her in on the British scene.

On Thursday evening Stevie came out to join us and we went to Florence by train. Our apartment there was right on the Borgo San Lorenzo, with cafe tables right outside the front door. Literally - we had to wheel our suitcases round them! Then there were 72 steps up to the flat. But it was a little marvel when we'd got there, with one window looking towards San Lorenzo and another towards Brunelleschi's Dome.

We mixed culture, ice-cream and social life for two and a half days, having dinner with my dear friend Carla on the last night. I lost count of the courses but I bet she has been living on leftovers for a week. I half-expected to bump into Adele Geras who was in the city at the smae time but in fact it was Philip and Jude Pullman we met on the train back to Bologna - they had done the same as us and tacked on three days after the end of the fair.

We got back to find, which Stevie had warned me about, one of the cats with her leg in a sort of cast. She had broken four tiny bones in her ankle while I was away and had to have a spectacularly fiddly and expensive operation in Solihull. Jess had done all the driving and paying and set up a holding cage which the poor animal has to spend six weeks in - the equivalent of bedrest for someone with a badly broken leg. She yells to be taken out for cuddles and her sister thinks she's a fake and hisses at her.

I read Sarah Waters' Night Watch, which I did find compelling but don't think that the much-vaunted reverse construction made it a better book. It meant it couldn't have a proper ending. I saw an exhibition of Desiderio da Settignano's sculptures at the Bargello and thought him very inferior to Donatello, or even Giambologna. But I also saw the much-loved favourites by Michelangelo - Brutus, Bacchus and the wonderful little Apollo-David. And the Benozzo Gozzoli Journey of the Magi again in the Medici Palace, of which I never tire. And we got into Orsanmichele, which has been "in restauro' for years - a real treat. The Boboli gardens were much more vertical than I had remembered.

Since being back, for contrast, I have also seen Spiderman 3, which is a good candidate for "worse film ever made."

Perfect day

2007-04-20T22:03:00.000+01:00

We had our Easter picnic in the ruins of old Minster Lovell Hall - very picturesque and the four of us had a huge spread. I used my new SatNav to get us to friends in Bristol on Easter Monday (cheating really, since we knew the way). I chose the voice of Tim - very patient - and Stevie is already jealous of my unquestioning obedience to this new man in my life.

I felt as if I were in a film about a writer last Saturday. First we heard my radio interview on One Word radio and then someone came to interview me for a PhD dissertation and the Times carried a favourable review of The Falconer's Knot. But the real stuff was going up to the St Bride's print library in London and seeing a real wooden press and the type. Brilliant! This is all research for City of Secrets.

The next day I met my script conmsultant/writer friend in Oxford and as well as doing a cafe crawl, we went to the Botanical Gardens. I've lived here six years and not been in them before. They are TINY compared with Cambridge's but have a very nice hothouse, where we saw the sort of plants that grow in her garden in Australia.

i was giving a talk to librarians in Birmingham the next day and really had to wrench myself off the swingseat in the sun but enjoyed it when I got there. The NEC makes the Bologna Book Fair, where I'm going on Monday, look quite small.

Today is my birthday and it began before breakfast with an hour long telephone interview, in Italian, with a young journalist on a newspaper in Gubbio. We ended up talking about Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell! I then finished an essay for my Italian class and went with husband and youngest daughter to The Trout near Oxford (star of many an Inspector Morse episode) for lunch. Two beautiful peacocks displayed for me, one on the roof, and the manager gave us free glasses of champagne. The sun shone, the weir rushed, the peacocks screamed and it was wonderful.

Last week I saw the Canaletto in England exhibition in Dulwich. It is quite extraordinary how he made the Thames look like the Grand Canal! There was a beautiful view showing about three dozen spires on Wren churches, most of which were destroyed or damaged by bombs in WW2. He is a great virtuoso of detail but he doesn't move me.

And at last saw "The Queen" in the theatre in Chipping Norton (no popcorn). Terrific performances but I HATED the stuff about the stag - so sentimental and so hypoctitical. She isn't against hunting in general is she? And the portrayal of the Blairs as lower middle class was farcical - their home and her poor domestic skills (burnt fish fingers, I ask you!) I did enjoy it but it wasn't really a story - we knew the dramatic high points and all the stuff in between was speculative and not all of it convincing. (Though I bet Alistair Campbell was just like that).

Nothing stranger than fiction

2007-04-06T18:58:00.000+01:00

The Falconer's Knot has been published and I've been doing more radio interviews and signing books in London. We started at Harrods where I was alarmed to discover that the children's buyer was a falconer in her spare time! Fortunately she liked the book.

We had a planning lunch at Chipping Norton for the annual SAS retreat at Charney in July. Six of us drinking coffee all afternoon and at least two of us couldn't sleep afterwards. It was absolutely freezing - cold enogh for snow. And yet today, Good Friday, we've been sunbathing in the garden, making sun tea and planning a picnic for Sunday.

I saw Ian McKellen as King Lear at Stratford. He was as splendid as you mind expect but the women were dreadful, even the lovely Romola Garai as Cordelia, And Sylvester McCoy - Doctor Who, I ask you! - was the Fool. But the hanging of him on stage was effective. Talking of Doctor Who, I saw the first episode of the new series with the new companion, Martha. It was terrific.

We also saw the DVD of Stranger than Fiction, a film with Emma Thompson, Will Farrell, Dustin Hoffman and Maggie Gyllenhall. The conceit was that the Will Farrell character found himself a character in a novel being written by Emma Thomspson, in which he was going to die. The trouble was that this book was supposed to be a masterpiece and every bit of it that we heard was completely banal. But it was redeemed by all the performances, which also included the magnificent Queen Latifah as "an assistant sent to the writer by the publisher to help her finish the book"! It also drives me mad that writers in films are STILL shown using typewriters!

But that's partly because we are seen as extremely eccentric - weird even. I have no argument with that except that it's the wrong kind of weird that is shown.

I read Primo Levi's "The Black Hole of Auschwitz" a collection of essays, forewords from Holocaust books etc. Inevitably repetitive but what he had to tell us can't be said too often. Also Skulduggery Pleasant, a new children's book for which its author, Derek Landy, is reputed to have been paid a seven figure advance. Yes, SEVEN, that means a cool million. But it's another one of those " a string of violent incidents and adventures makes a plot" books. And it begins with a reading of a will and a child being left a house by her uncle, which is just so OLD.

Having said that, some of it is good. But the villains are all just villains, sheer wicked heaps of villainy. It's as if someone has taken a decison that young readers can't cope with nuance.

History and a bit of geography

2007-03-23T18:55:00.000Z

The SAS conference in Coventry was stimulating and helpful as ever.It was good to know that other writers get fanmail in which the e-mailers ask what's in the FAQs too! And it was a real eye-opener to hear how thoroughly some people plan a novel before they start writing. Back on the Sunday to Mother's Day cards and presents and supper cooked for me - bliss.

Monday was all preparation for the "presentazione" on Tuesday based on Dacia Maraini's new book.

Then I was off to London for a publicity and marketing meeting on Princess Grace, whose stunning artwork was just in. On Thursday I was at Broadcasting House recording an interview for Open Book (Radio 4) in which I had a conversation with Caroline Lawrence (Roman Mysteries) about writing historical fiction. We were just getting into our stride when it was all over!

Caroline and I have some points in common - we both went to Newnham College Cambridge and then University College London for postgrad work. And we both studied Classics, though she took it too a higher level than I did.

I've booked a weekend in Antwerp to visit the printing museum. It'll be my first visit to Belgium and I'm taking Jess. We're travelling by Eurostar and staying in a hotel with an acquarium next door.

This week I read Julie Bertagna's Exodus and Zenith (reviewing the latter) and Caroline Lawrence's The Slave Girl from Jerusalem (a Roman Mystery). Also Lene Kaaberbohl's Silverhorse. That's another "first of a trilogy", by a Danish writer I met in Iceland. I hope to get back to adult books next week!

I listened to Messaien's Turangalila-Symphonie at full volume in my new car and haven't been able to get it out of my head since. (This happens every time)

Total Eclipse

2007-03-13T19:14:00.000Z

We celebrated Rhiannon's 30th birthday on 3rd, nearly a month late, but it coincided with a completely clear night sky and a total eclipse of the moon. Even I could see it - and the stars were magnificent. We are so lucky to have escaped the light pollution of the city.

I am now well stuck in to City of Secrets, the fourth Stravaganza novel. So I might be going into a sort of eclipse myself. Between now and going on holiday in late May, I plan to be eyes down. But the SAS are meeting in Coventry this weekend so I have have that one off.

I saw The Science of Sleep, a quite charming if not totally successful film by Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Ienjoyed hugely, mainly because it's the first film I've seen for ages where I haven't known what was going to happen next. Also Pan's Labyrinth, with intolerable torture scenes and a failure to mesh the reality of the partisans in 1944 Spain with the fairytale. Some nice CGI, though and an interesting idea.

In the theatre I saw a preview of The Entertainer at the Old Vic. Robert Lindsay was wonderful as Archie Rice although perhaps just a bit too likeable a person to be believable in the role. But it isn't really a very good play and now seems a dated period piece. Osborne just wasn't sufficiently interested in women or didn't understand them (married 5 times but not by then) to be convincing about Phoebe, Archie's second wife. Once the news has come of her 19-year-old son's death in Suez, she is allowed no reaction. That is reserved for the father "who can't feel."

I read Il Gioco del Universo by Dacia Maraini (bought on the day of its publication, in Padua). Its her attempt to put her father's notebooks and diaries into some sort of order but is interesting more for the light it casts on their relationship than anything else.

I listened to Benjamin Britten's Nocturne and Les Illuminations and Stravinsky's Cantata on Old English texts and Mass. All these are old favourites and I wanted to contrast the way they both set the Lyke Wake Dirge. I was in bed with a sore throat so this was perfect.

Honey cats

2007-02-25T18:00:00.000Z

Well, Padua was an eye-opener. It's called the city that has "a saint without a name, a cafe without a door and a field without grass." The saint without a name is actually Antony, because the huge domed Basilica, with the saint's completely over the top tomb (almost as bad as St Peter's in Rome), is known laways as the Basilica del Santo. Padua is odd in having a Duomo as well as a Basilica.

The cafe without a door is Pedrocchi's, an 18th century building which looks like a Greek temple and has glass between the pillars (this does include a door of course). The field without grass is Prato della Valle in the south of the city - a HUGE oval piazza based on the outline of a Roman amphitheatre.

Bex and I visited all three - the Basilica is particularly fine from the outside and has the famous bronze equestrian statue by Donatello of the mercenary Gattamelata (honey-cat). It was the first successful such casting since the Marcus Aurelius we saw in Rome in November.

Pedrocchi's is 2 centuries too late for the book I was supposed to be researching but that didn't stop us going there for coffee and pasticcerie on our last morning. Thr waiters were FANTASTICALLY snooty and insisted on being paid at the table, as if we were going to run away, but the goodies were very good. It was one of the university's graduation days and we saw a young (-ish) man with a laurel-wreath round his neck (Italian for graduated = "laureato"), being toasted in champagne by a large family group. And it was only 11am.

And we had dinner with an Italiian family in a beautiful apartment with a balcony overlooking the vast Prato della Valle. They were so hospitable and interested in everything we did and thought. "Is Tony Blair liked in Britain?" "Is it true you have many many words for toilet?" etc etc. They were fascinated that I was writing a book sort of set in their city. It was a large family group - nine with us - and there were many courses. They were lawyers, teachers, critics and one Art Historian, And they had a honey-cat of their own - a very friendly ginger called Arturo.

This week I re-read Katherine Roberts' absolutely marvellous "I am the Great Horse" - the story of Alexander the Great told through the eyes of his warhorse, Bucephalas. Also la Repubblica. What a great newspaper it is - lots of Arts coverage, great political stuff (Romano Prodi resigned while we were there) and good solid social and think pieces. There was a piece about the Joyce Hatto CD forgeries and one about Ken Livingstone getting cheap petrol; from Venezuela, so i felt quite up to date when I returned home!

I saw lots of frescoes - the previously unknown to me Giusto de Menabuoi, whose cycle completely covers the Baptistery of the Duomo in Padua. And the fabulous 700 year old cycle of Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel, which has been completely restored since I was last there. You now have to wait in a glass room for 15 mins to get yourself physically acclimatised before you get your 15 mins in the chapel. There was a de Chrico exhibition on in Padua but I simply couldn't wrench my sensibilities round to that after Giotto.

Stop some of the clocks

2007-02-18T16:54:00.000Z

It's six years since we left London and I've never for a moment regretted it. I did fear that it might be a wrench leaving the house in which our children had grown up. But two have been back to live with us and the oldest has fond false memories of having grown up in this house, with her hammock slung between apple trees in the little orchard.

And we do go up to London on average at least once a week, most recently for me to meet independent children's booksellers and both of us to see Antony and Cleopatra. I like knowing how the city works and being able to find my way about it. But anything that has been intoduced since we left - Oyster cards for example - seem very alien.

And of course I've written 5 long novels, one picturebook, one set of re-tellings and at least one junior title since being here, so I feel productive in my green study.

Stevie was away at a conference for Valentine's Day. So Jess and I had a date - dinner at Ha Ha's! and the DVD of Little Miss Sunshine.

I'm off to Padua tomorrow, researching Stravaganza 4, which is set in the Talian equivalent.

Since my last blog, I've read Richard lll to clarify my mind about the performance we saw. Also lots of books to review for Armadillo - Troll Blood, Red Tears, and a huge long fantasy in proof, called City of Bones. This was written by Cassandra Clare, who cut her teeth on fan fiction and the hilarious Secret Diaries of the Lord of the Rings characters ("Still not king"). It's not often that fan fiction leads to publication but there seems to be a trend that way.

I saw The Devil wears Prada and thought Meryl Streep deserved her Oscar nomination. But it's an essentially weak premise; no-one as bright as Andie would have put up with her boss's nonsense for five minutes. There's a similar weakness in Little Miss Sunshine, in that Olive had already come second in the regional finals, with presumably the same routine that so scandalised the judges in California.

We also saw Antony and Cleopatra with Patrick Stewart and Harriet Walter - both superb. The "set" was appalling, just splodges of paint on a backdrop. Any sixth form production would have been ashamed to mount such scenery. A big contrast with the production I saw at the National, with Alan Rickman and Helen Mirren. The critics hated it but it used the stage much more imaginatively than the RSC at the Novello.

We didn't agree with the interpretation of Octavius - nervous, compulsive, verging on madness - but for the rest it was very memorable.

I have heard wall-to-wall Auden today, because of his centenary; with both Radio 3 and 4 putting on programmes it was sometimes like an echo: Stop all the clocks ... Stop all the clocks. What a brilliant poet he was and how memorable: "Out on the lawn I lie in bed, Vega conspicuous overhead," "We must love one another and die," Plunge your hands in the basin/ Plunge them in up to the wrist/Stare, stare in the mirror/And see what you have missed." On and on - marvellous, accurate, as fastidious about language as he was careless about personal hygiene. And the radio played lots of Britten settings of Auden's words, like Our Hunting Fathers. An artistic marriage made in heaven, even though the men were so different.

Glass Bead Game

2007-02-05T21:18:00.000Z

(I did post last week but it ended up in the ether)

A week and a half ago I took my youngest daughter to see Thomas Heatherwick's Bleigiessen sculpture in London. It's in the Wellcome Trust building at the top of Gower Street and they let the public in for a tour on the last Friday of the month. It won a competition to fit a sculpture into a thirty metre high space, with the stipulation that it would have to get through the door, as the building was finished. Heatherwick went one further and used components small enough to fit through the letterbox.

His mother ran the Bead Company and he remembered her making bead curtains when he was small, so he basically designed a thirty-metre 3D bead curtian. The sculpture is made up of large round glass beads strung on steel wires. The shape was determined by dropping molten metal into spinning water - a divination technique practised in Germany and called Bleigiessen, like tea-leaf reading.

The planning needed was mind-boggling. Jess took millions of photos from different floors and we staggered out reeling.

Since my last post, I read Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise, a Christmas present from another writer. It's one of the great unfinished works of the 20th century, only two parts written out of four or five because she was taken to Auschwitz in 1942; her husband followed a month later. Their two little girls were saved by their child-minder and survived. The older one has kept this leather-bound notebook of her mother's but never read it, thinking it was a journal and might be too painful, but it turned out to be this complete MS of parts one and two plus notes for the rest. She was working on it up to the last minute. So one of those cases where the context and history of the book is a parallel story of equal interest to the book itself. I had to brace myself to read it, fearing horrors, but it was just about copable with.

I saw a DVD about Jan van Eyck the fifteenth century Flemish painter, made by a friend. He was superb and a true inheritor of the spiritual depth of the Sienese painters of a century earlier. I really only knew the Arnolfini Wedding but there is masses of work extant.

We saw Richard lll at Stratford, completing the first tetralogy. Jonathan Slinger was absolutely amazing as Richard and the three and a half hours flew by. Can't wait for the second lot - it was such a good idea to keep the original cast as a repertory ensemble through eight plays.

Also watched the DVD of Thank you for Smoking, which had a really good script - so rare in Hollywood movies. But I dipped out of The Last King of Scotland, which the others went to. I knew I wouldn't be able to handle the brutality. My brother-in-law was in Uganda at the time of the expulsion of the Asians and helped a few of them - one came to live with my mother-in-law and became a family member, her first social occasion in England being our wedding.

Blustery

2007-01-22T17:30:00.000Z

If the winds of the week before were bad, it was nothing to Thursday's storms. Unfortunately, I had to travel to London that day. A couple of small trees had fallen on to roads between here and Oxford station but didn't obstruct the way. Hower, in the car park, a people carrier had slewed across the access route and wedged itself on the nose of another car.

The trains were all delayed or cancelled and couldn't travel at more than 55 mph. I had to stand all the way from Reading to Paddington and was very late for my meeting. On the way back I caught one of the last trains before the stations were closed and counted myself lucky. Back in the car park, I chanced on a very puzzled owner pushing his people carrier away from its embrace with the other car. When I told him I'd seen it like that in the morning, he said he'd parked in a bay shortly after seven and was "sure the brake was on."

But the problems of travel were all worth it, because I had a very good publicity planning meeting for The Falconer's Knot, full of interesting ideas. There's a big 2-page spread in the Bloomsbury April/May catalogue and it has had its first review - very positive - in Publishing News.

And I had lunch (very late) with Bex, who was on her penultimate day at Cameron Mackintosh. She started at the Old Vic today, with a "meet and greet" for cast and crew of The Entertainer - way to go.

This week I finished the Ya-Ya binge by re-reading Ya-Yas in Bloom. But I'm now reading Suite Francaise, which of course is much better written. but it's dreadfully upsetting. The idea of taking what you could carry and running away from your city while a foreign power invaded, without knowing how far their occupation would spread, as happened in the exodus from Paris in 1941, is deeply disturbing.

I saw many episodes of a UK History channel series about the Sixties, called The Beatles Decade. I remember it very well, since it covered the ages 15-25 in my life. But it looked so sort of frowsty and old - even seeing Mick Jagger in his little dress releasing the white butterflies at the Brian Jones memorial concert in the park looked just quaint. And the prime ministers! Macmillan, Alec Douglas -Hume, Harold Wilson and Edward Heath looked positively moribund.

Glasgow in the rain

2007-01-14T20:04:00.000Z

I spent all Wednesday and Thursday travelling to and from Glasgow in order to give one hour-long session with 6-7-year-olds. It was part of Small Island Read, a project to commemorate the 200 years since the beginning of the end of slavery with Wilberforce's Bill going through Parliament. There were events in Bristol;, Hull and Liverpool as well. Adults are reading Andrea Levy's Small Island and older children are getting Refugee Boy by Benjamin Zephaniah but the littlees are having my Amazing Grace.

There were 173 of them, with tiny breathy little voices, sounding like little James McEvoys, asking lovely questions like "What is your favourite dressing up outfit?" We had our photos taken by a nice young man from the Glasgow Herald and talked to an equally nice reporter.

Oh but it was wet! My publicist had a worse journey back than I did, since her 2pm train was cancelled and she didn't get back to London till 10.30pm. But we were both affected by floods, "debris on the line" (a false alarm) and signal failures. I didn't get home till 9pm myself and the blustery weather had knocked down half of one of our ancient apple trees. I don't think anything can be done except turn it into logs.

This week I re-read Little Altars Everywhere and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells (train journeys). All the stuff about the friendship of the four women in Louisiana is wonderful, even though the main one is a monster, but the stuff set in contemporary New York with the thaetre director daughter is excriciating - especially the sex scenes!

I saw five episodes back to back, while cooking, of a UK History channel documentary series called Sex, Love and War. Full of lovely womenh in their 80s recalling their exploits in WW2. Rebecca Wells would have benefitted.

The martyr and the knight

2007-01-08T17:21:00.000Z

New Year' Day brought the sickening picture of Saddam, hanged, on the front page of the Guardian. Apparently they received only 200 letters of complaint, including mine. But the readers' editor today said that a majority of Guardian journalists thought it was the wrong decision. And John Scarlett got a knighthood! This is sheer farce. The fact that Tony Blair refuses to comment on the execution, though he is happy to talk about the complete non-story of an ex-Secretary for Education sending her dyslexic child to a private school, is almont irrelevant, as he is. But knighting John Scarlett is just putting two fingers up to the public.

I seem to have committed myself to a lot of festivals, meetings and events this year. It will be probably be a repeat of 2005, when I said yes to almost everything, ran round ther coutry a lot, got exhausted and probably didn't sell many extra copies of my books. But with The Falconer's Lnot out in April, Princess Grace out in the autumn and Kings and Queens of the Bible somewhere along the way, I have to make myself available.

I finished reading, at last, the ghastly Una Donna by Sibilla Aleramo. It has taken ages because it is turgidly written, short of characters, dialogue and incidents, and lacking in any grace or wit. It was published in 1906 and I think our teacher thought we should read it but I'm thinking of leading a revolution in the tea-break tomorrow to see if we could be let off discussing it for weeks on end. No-one else I've spoken to thought it worthwhile either. And I have a pile of more interesting books - The Penelopiad, Suite Francaise, Screenwriting Updated - which I would rather have been reading.

I heard the CD of Spamalot, which Jess gave me at Christmas and it is very fine. We saw the DVD, not of Casablanca, which she also gave me, but the accompagnying one of extras, including a charming documentary on the Bogart/Bacall marriage. He did the right thing at the time of the McCarthy witch-hunts and spoke out against them. Good man. I also saw the final double bill of Torchwood, which was fantastic till the last, bonkers, quarter of an hour. And the first episode of the new sedries of ER, which put its fans through the wringer.

Small cat diary

2006-12-31T12:29:00.000Z

Christmas began properly with all six of us gathering in the New Theatre in Oxford for a performance of Cats. It's the fourth or fifth time I've seen it over the years since the girls were small and, although I enjoyed it, I always have the same sense of dissatisfaction with the absence of plot. And what plot there is is either sickeningly sentimental (Grizabella) or meaningless (Old Deutoronomy has the right to choose one cat to start a new life - why?).

The individual numbers are great (apart from the ghastly "Memory") and the dancing great fun, and of course the lyrics much improved by being based on the words of a real poet, but really it could have been SO much better with another real writer to give it a proper book.

Still, we were in a mood to enjoy ourselves and did. Having Christmas on a Monday felt like having an extra day in which to make preparations for the meal, wrap presents and get the tree decorated by all three girls. This year we have a big one in the living room and had to spend a lot of time batting cats off it, as they tried to catch baubles or bite light bulbs. So far no major disasters though.

And we managed all the planned Christmas Eve things - log fire, mince pies, roasted chestnuts, mulled wine and carols - before Midnight Mass. It was a classic, really. I gave Stevie an Armillary sphere and he gave me two walking poles, both equally romantic. I didn't take the poles on the Boxing Day walk, because it was on the flat. The radio told me there were three traditional ways of dealing with Boxing Day blues - a walk, a board game and planning a summer holiday. Well, we did all those, although no-one was feeling blue.

The holiday planning took hours, because the one we'd booked, as far back as last August - to the place in Campania where we had 3 memorable holidays when the girls were small, beginning 20 years ago - fell apart just before Christmas. The apartments in the 17th century palazzo have been upgraded to be 5-star accommodation - which means removing all the kitchens! So we decided to go back to the beginning and it's now looking like Corfu.

The most popular board game was Articulate, at which Bex is specially good. Her acting training is not wasted. She has a wonderful new job as Theatre Administrator at the Old Vic, so I'm looking forward to a lot more plays in 2007.

I read the new translation, by Simon Armitage, of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It's a strange exercise. A simply beautifully produced book by Faber. The version most in the high style but every now and again an odd colloquialism like "Arthur kept his cool". I imagine Armitage is trying tro mirror something in the original but it's something I don't remember from reading the original at university 40 years ago.

I heard the Beatles "Love!" album, with songs re-mixed by George Martin and son. It was a Christmas present from Bex and I'm delighted to have it but it will take some getting used to.

I saw the Doctor Who Christmas special; didn't he get over Rose a bit too quickly? Even Owen in Torchwood stayed miserable for one whole episode. I also saw the Holbein exhibition, which was wonderful. What a first-rate painter and draughtsman he was! As good as Rembrandt. And it is astonishing how he formed our mental image of the Tudor court.

Berries and Blooms

2006-12-19T11:52:00.000Z

The Novel has gone to its first publisher and my agent is now in Antarctica, so news will be on hold till after Christmas. But it's good to know that she loves it and so do two others at the agency. Phew!

And last week we agreed content on the next two Stravaganzas and the next historical novel for Bloomsbury so all I have to do is keep my head down and get on with it. I've booked a swift trip to Padua in Febnruary as essential research. The Bloomsbury Christmas party was last week too and the sales director greeted myself, Celia Rees and Nicky Browne as "Bloomsberries," which I rather like, conveying as it does both freshness and maturity.

So many people are considering writing or have written adult novels that I'm starting a little sub-group of the SAS to get us all together.

Christmas has definitely arrived here, with tree, mistletoe, wreath and a plethora of cards. We've had the first two visits, plus Stevie's work Christmas dinner, which happened at his boss's house in Oxford, where there was much talk of the appointment of the new bishop - I felt as if I were living in a updated version of Barchester Towers!

Christmas begins at home

2006-12-10T18:11:00.000Z

We set off to go to the Bourton-on-the-Water turning on of the Christmas lights on December 1st. We go every year and all the shops are open late, with staff in Victorian costume, handing out thimblefuls of mulled wine and bites of mince pie. It's an invalyuable source of stocking fillers and we always enjoy seeing the baby reindeer.

Anyway, this year it was raining and we just couldn't get into either of the carparks, so sadly turned round and came home. But we'd rung Jess to say it was a washout and when we got back to our house, were greeted by a hall full of tea-lights and incense, a Christmas garland and, in the kitchen, a plate of mince pies and glasses of sherry and port already poured. It was such a sweet thing for her to have done - she'd dashed to the supermarket and got the pies and garland and rummaged through the CDs to find Christmassy music.

So our evening was rescued, even if we couldn't buy any stocking fillers and the cats had to be substitute reindeer.

The next day we went to London to see the At Home in Renaissance Italy with Bex. It was the second time for me but the first for her and Stevie. It stood up well to a second viewing, as did the new V and A restaurant in the William Morris room. When we came out it was dark and people were skiting on the ice-rink outside the natural History Museum. It was like a Breughel.

This week I saw Ferris Bueller's Day Off and School of Rock, both on Film Four. These had been gaps in my education for a long time. I liked FB somewhat better - it's amazing how fresh-faced Matthew Broderick still looks 20 years later, playing Bloom in the film version of The Producers. Such a shame he married Sarah-Jessica Parker. Tony Bradman told me School of Rock was the best film he had ever seen and it wasn't quite that for me. I didn't find Jack Black quite likeable enough - he's like that big, embarrassing friend you had when you were a teenager, who always took things a bit too far.

I read and am still reading Sibilla Aleramo's Una Donna, which is our set book for Italian. It was first published in 1906 and is heavily autobiographical. Since she had a supremely miserable life, in spite of being very beautiful and intelligent, it should be heavy-going, but it is a very easy read. I listened to the two CDs I bought at the At Home in Renaissance Italy exhibition - perfect for background music while writing Christmas cards.

Looking on the bright side

2006-11-30T18:43:00.000Z

The die is cast and the novel revised and sent to my agent. I shall be far too busy to worry about what is happening to it, what with finishing the December edition of Armadillo, researching the next Stravaganza and organising family Christmas.

There was a piece of "fanmail" this week from France, asking for anything promotional with my name on it and saying that the autrhor's 19 year old son was a "huge fan" of mine. I passed it on to my publisher but then found, through the SAS, that lots of other people had had it too, even those who have had no books published in France or who write for under tens. I felt really cheated to realise this was a mass mailing.

This kind of thing is on the increase. I also had one from America asking if I could supply hundreds of copies of my book [sic] at a special rate. And the book report and dissertation writers continue to send in their questions. There's obviously a set form for students to fill in, since one said "I can find only seven significant life events in your website biography and I need ten!"

On Monday, after a morning spent printing out, I went to London and saw Spamalot with Bex. We agreed it was the silliest thing we had ever seen on stage and it was just exactly what we both needed. Tim Curry made a great King Arthur (silly variety) but the rest of the cast was very strong too. The audience knew Monty Python and the Holy Grail very well, even the Americans sitting behind and beside us. There was a spontaneous standing ovation at the end and everyone joined in "Always look on the bright side of life.".

I read An Unquiet Mind by Kay Jamison - a much praised account of bi-polar disorder by a sufferer, who is also a psychiatrist. I found her writing style quite maddening; far from being "beautifully written" as the review quotations on the back say, she even writes "like I" - twice! But it was extremely readable, as perhaps all personal accounts of unusual lives are.

A load of bunko

2006-11-22T18:05:00.001Z

Well, part of the plan worked; I've done the line edits but not yet written the new material as I had to stop and read The Falconer's Knot proofs for I hope the last time. These were the revises of the revises and I've lost count of how many stages there have been. It should be the cleanest text in the world by the time it's published next April.

But at the same time, the bound proofs came, looking very handsome, with a bundle of matching bookmarks. And it has found another foreign edition. I had a e-mail yesterday about Japanese editions of Stravaganza. They want to bring out paperbacks while the hardbacks are still in print. The strange thing was that this was described as a "bunko" edition and neither I, my agent, editor or indeed the rights editor passing on the message had any idea what this was!

Well apparently it's a sort of small paperback like a Penguin. Perhaps the Japanese would be equally puzzled by our casual references to these birds. Anyway we've said yes to the bunkos.

A group of SAS members got together for lunch in Oxford on Saturday to welcome Dennis Hamley to our midst. Oxford that is, not the SAS - he has just moved here from Hertford. We were ten in all (another meal for ten in an Italian restaurant in Oxford - this is getting to be a habit) and had a good time swapping book news and eating interesting choices of food. It's nice to be offered a vegetarian option without goat cheese!

This week I saw At Home in Renaissance Italy at the V and A and was enchanted by the split open pomander and the jewelled pine marten mask. I read City of Falling Angels by John Berendt, whose Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was such a fascinating book. This, though eminently readable, isn't quite as remarkable. Though full of obvious Venetian "characters" there's no-one as striking as the Lady Chablis and no murder. There is arson - the burning down of the Fenice in 1996 - and all the machinations and convolutions that had to be gone through before a conviction. And in vain, since one of the two arsonists is still at large (he jumped bail) and they were probably pawns anyway.

Where have all the flowers gone?

2006-11-12T18:13:00.000Z

It's Remembrance Sunday today and we observed the silence in the kitchen, stopping in the middle of preparing for a family birthday lunch. I know I was thinking of the sixty British service-people dead in the last year, as well as the fallen of 14-18 and 39-45. And within a few hours it was sixty-four.

I've been astonished by the virulently negative response to an item on the Today programme about white poppies. "Now I know the meaning of poppycock," blustered one e-mail from some Colonel Blimp in Tunbridge Wells. My response was to order 20 from the Peace Pledge Union website and we all wore them at the birthday meal out in Oxford last night.

That was a happy occasion, at which ten of us celebrated Stevie's big birthday and Bex's 27th. It was a very good meal at Oxford's best Italian. And this in spite of three of us having the worst colds we can remember, including the birthday "boy."

I am planning a week of complete withdrawal freom public life - cancelling Italian, swimming and a nice party in London, in order to a/ really shake the cold off and b/ do the necessary work on the novel.

I read The Blood Stone by Jamila Gavin because we were to be "in conversation" about our historical novels set in Venice at the IBBY conference on Saturday; Odin's Queen by Susan Price and half of Maddigan's Fantasia by Margaret Mahy. I saw Torchwood, episode four, about the Cyberwoman, and found it really frightening!

I've just heard on the radio Guy Browning's spoof of Donald Rumsfeld's letters applying for new jobs. Yes, it was funny but I think we have been wrong to find him funny in a sort of cuddly uncle way. I don't think those sixty-four families are laughing.

The road has led there at last

2006-11-08T09:18:00.000Z

We're back from Rome, heads buzzing after three full days. The classical day was amazing and I was specially moved by the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. The skill was there for this anonymous artist to cast the huge figure of the emperor and his horse but another 1300 years or so passed before it was done again, by Donatello with his statue of "Gattamellata' in Padua. And the tiresome Leonardo still couldn't do it.

We didn't manage to get into the Vatican museum but did see St Peter's very thoroughly. Quite by mistake, we found ourselves in a queue to see the tombs of Popes in the crypt. There was no turning back and we realised that there were serious pilgrims in front of us, coming to see the burial place of John Paul ll.

To the extent that I'm any kind of Christian at all, I would describe myself as Anglo-Catholic and I find Protestantism instinctively repellent but I felt a twinge of sympathy for the Anti-Papist viewpoint during our time in Rome. Calendars and postacards of John Paull ll and Benedict XVl abound (and even bizarrely one calendar of handsome Roman priests, intended for the gay market, apparently, and posibly posed by models). It's not just respect but veneration, confusing the office with the holder (which is a heresy - Donatism I think) reminiscent of what many Americans feel for their president.

Though Dubya must have made it hard for American donatists (vide the mid-term results).

Back to Rome. The Early Christian mosaics were fantastic and one church, San Clemente, was built over a Mithraic temple. But most churches, apart from Santa Maria sopra Minerva, which is pure Gothic, had been vandalised by the Mannerists and Baroque artists who are so repugnant to me.

We made the special trip to see Saint Teresa and, if I hadn't been shown it by Simon Schama, I would have made nothing of it. It is almost impossible to see for the elaborate setting.

So, Rome is never going to mean to me what Florence and Siena do, but it is full of wonders and we will definitely be back.

Incidentally, I don't know why the previous post appeared so often; when I tried to send it, the message came back that there were problems and it couldn't be done.

This week I read 1599 by James Shapiro, a really good and thought-provoking book about a year in which Shakespeare wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet. Also, by contrast, Terry Pratchett's Wintersmith, which I have to review. I saw no TV programme at all but heard the deeply disappointing 15,000th episode of The Archers. Of course Ruth wasn't going to go through with her night of passion with Sam, otherwise there would have been no story. Dur.