There’s always tomorrow…

Manana moments
Manana moments

Writers are notorious for coming up with extremely good reasons to procrastinate*.

The novella just had to be finished soon, or she would go mad. But events seemed to conspire against her. She had lost an entire day last week when a giant lizard ran amok in the study…”

“Finally she fell into bed exhausted after a long day in front of the computer. The words just didn’t seem to flow. If only she could get a good night’s sleep! Eight hours later she was back at her desk, hollow-eyed, having spent the entire night trying to escape from a dive-bombing bat which had somehow got into the bedroom.”

As a long, hot August draws to an end, another chapter comes to a close in the Tarn version of E. M. Delafield’s ‘Diary of a Provincial Lady’.

Jazz in the Tarn
Jazz in the Tarn

Guests have come and gone.

Concerts have been attended, classical and jazz.

The lavender has been cut back and peach jam has been made. Life has been good.

 

The Temple Ensemble Photo Michelle Feraud
The Temple Ensemble Photo Michelle Feraud

And that novella, the one that should have been out in June? Something about desire, and passages? So sweet of you to ask. Currently it is undergoing a full body lift after numerous nips and tucks. Yes, obviously it should now be up on Amazon with its beautiful new cover (more of that later).

But you know how it is, progress has been interrupted by the ‘inequalities of Fate’ as E. M. Delafield calls them in her wonderful book about life in a 1930s Devonshire village.

https://www.amazon.com/Diary-Provincial-Lady/dp/0897330536

This gently satirical, extremely funny, book recounts the everyday tribulations involved in running a middle class household, serving on the Women’s Institute, dealing with snobbish aristocrats, trying to get rid of The Vicar’s Wife, struggling to grow a pot of hyacinths and finding time to get on with her writing.

517iBnXTkPL._SX300_BO1,204,203,200_

Here is E. M. trying to concentrate on her latest literary project:

“June 3rd.–Astounding and enchanting change in the weather, which becomes warm. I carry chair, writing-materials, rug and cushion into the garden, but am called in to have a look at the Pantry Sink, please, as it seems to have blocked itself up.”

Ah, the famous Pantry Sink syndrome. It manifested itself here last week in different forms on two separate occasions. I had just been re-writing (again) a particularly tricky scene in ‘The Passage of Desire’ when I became conscious of an eerie, scrabbling sound in the region of the bookcase. Suddenly a long scaly creature shot across the study, underneath my desk (narrowly missing bare feet) and vanished behind a cupboard.

‘Help!’ I shrieked.

This was obviously a job for the Maître de Maison (MDM). We operate on a clear division of labour principle. He deals with spiders, crickets and other animal invaders, I make the lavender sachets.  This particular animal invader was a lizard. A big, bold Jurassic lizard. Not content with its beautiful home in the patio (why?) it had evidently decided on a move.

The lizards' lovely home
The lizards’ lovely home

One hour later all the furniture had been pulled away from the walls, the rugs had been removed and the bookshelves scoured. No lizard.

“Are you sure you saw one?’

Now, as any relationship counsellor will tell you, that is not a helpful question at times of stress. A terse Franco-Britannique exchange ensued, ending with the unsatisfying (to me) verdict:

“Well it must have got out again.’

The MDM began to put away his lizard-tackling equipment viz: two tea towels (best quality linen), the dustpan, and a high-beam Maglite. Suddenly (again) there was a scuttling noise overhead and we both shrieked as the wily reptile made a flying leap across our heads and out of the window.

Obviously I was too unnerved to do any more work that day, being forced to lie down on a sunbed with my copy of ‘Wuthering Heights’ (which actually figures in ‘The Passage of Desire’, so you could say I was doing research). Here’s the scene in which Mr Lockwood, forced to spend a night at the isolated snowbound house high on the moors, is woken by a noise at the window. He concludes it is ‘the branch of a fir-tree that touched my lattice, as the blast wailed by’, but finally, unable to sleep, he opens the window to ‘seize the importune branch’ but finds instead… ‘my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand!’

A couple of nights later that riveting scene conjured up by Emily’s wondrous pen was still playing in my mind as I drifted off to sleep.

Tap tap! Tap tap!

Something was trying to get in through the window. As I came out of the dream, I realised that something was trying to get in, through our window.

Horreur des horreurs!!!

Fortunately, the Maitre de Maison was on the case, Maglite in hand, reaching cautiously for the catch.

‘Help!!!’

This time the shriek did not come from me, and it was in French.

‘What is it, what is it, put the light on! Aargh!’

Something whistled past my head, narrowly missing my hair, good job I’d ditched the Kate Bush hairstyle many moons ago.

‘It is a bat!’

‘A bat?

Bats image Pixabay
Bats image Pixabay

One minute later and we’d have been full swing into the ‘moth/meuth’ routine from ‘A Shot in the Dark’. But we hardly had time to get going before the nocturnal Red Baron launched into the series of ultra-rapid, ultra-acrobatic dive- bombing manoeuvres so beloved of The Red Arrows and the Patrouille de France, resulting in the MDM racing out of the room (the reum) to get the long-handled cobweb brush and me pulling the sheet over my head, each of us wailing in different languages.

As I say, it’s been a long, hot August here in the country, with its fair share of Pantry Sinks.

I’d like to say a huge thank you to Denise Baer, a gracious and talented lady who kindly invited me on to her blog to talk about country matters and the joy of writing. She has just posted a tempting squash recipe for those in search of culinary inspiration:

http://baerbookspress.com/blog

New book cover
Beautiful new cover!

 

Another thank you, and WOW! to GX and Caroline at Graphicszxdesigns for the cover for ‘The Passage of Desire’.

http://graphiczxdesigns.zenfolio.com/

 

 

Now I just have to write those final words. Or stop writing those final words. And avoid the Pantry Sink.

  • Norah Deay’s blog post for procrastinating writers:

http://norahdeay.com/2016/04/15/information-overload-busy-reading-writing-actually-write/

The end of insouciance

 

The end of insouciance
Copyright Laurette Long 2016

What makes you fall in love with a country?

I had my first crush aged thirteen in a small village in the north of France, not far from Amiens. It was the end of a long journey for a group of excited grammar school girls from a working class town in the north of England. We were going on a ‘French exchange’. We were going ‘abroad’. Oh the resonance of that word. Abroad – different, exotic, possibly dangerous, and undeniably, 100%, ‘foreign’. It was heady. Some of us had never even been outside Yorkshire apart from the odd day trip to Blackpool, which in spite of the Tower and the funny accent, could hardly be called foreign.

I don’t remember much about our arrival. We were all tired and probably fell straight asleep in our foreign beds with their funny sausage-shaped pillows. But I do remember the first morning, awaking to an amazing smell. Downstairs in the kitchen  of my penfriend’s house I discovered my first ‘ficelle’, another sausage-shaped object, this one long, thin, crusty, golden and warm to the touch. Anne-Marie split it longways, slathered it with butter and jam from a jar labelled ‘confiture d’abricots’ and handed it over. I would later discover rows of similar jars lining the shelves of the ‘grenier’, the loft, along with boxes of apples in slatted wooden crates, and herbs hanging from the ceiling. The second morning was even more amazing. Anne-Marie and I were ordered by ‘Maman’ to go and buy the ficelles–still in our pyjamas and dressing gowns!

We stepped out into a hot summer’s morning, the dust rising from the village street beneath our slippers, and pushed open the door of the boulangerie. Inside were several ladies, also in nightwear, exchanging the latest news, speaking in high rapid voices with a lot of hand-waving and ‘dis-donc’s. Their hair was a gleaming confection of undulating waves and complicated curls, their eyebrows perfect,  glistening arcs, and waves of eau-de Cologne from their morning ‘toilette’ mingled with the smell of baking bread. It was dizzying and dazzling. Strangely, they were all wearing the same silky dressing gown, a navy blue model with white spots, belted neatly at the waist. (Several years later, watching a rerun of the classic horror film ‘Les Diaboliques’ I discovered Vera Clouzot wearing an identical version as she helped Simone Signoret drown her husband in the bath tub.)

Boat on the Somme, Aires Almeida http://www.flickr.com/photos/31212180@N08/6114055035, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24564968
Boat on the Somme, Aires Almeida
http://www.flickr.com/photos/31212180@N08/6114055035, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24564968

La joie de vivre. The joy of biting into that perfect ficelle, of lingering in the potager in the falling dusk, bats flitting and ‘Papa‘ watering the tomatoes, of being welcomed into the perfumed embrace of the glamourous ladies in the boulangerie every morning, of comparing bra sizes with Anne-Marie in the bathroom mirror (2 white egg cups, 2 pink egg cups), of hanging out of the bedroom window hoping to catch a glimpse of the tobacconist’s son (he of the convict-cropped hair and bold black eyes), of lying in a boat in the middle of a lake, catching the flash of a swooping kingfisher or the menacing shadow of a drifting pike. Taking the time to enjoy life’s pleasures, le temps de vivre. Freedom was a relatively new concept in a country which still remembered the wounds of a six-year Occupation.

The seed of love had been planted that year and it continued to grow, nurtured through successive holidays. A summer in Brittany as a camp counsellor, herding singing crocodiles of little French girls in plimsolls and cotton hats through the country lanes leading to the beach. The beach itself, all fine white sand, swimming lessons where you hung on to the fillettes by the straps of their woollen swimsuits hoping they didn’t stretch far enough for them to plunge to the seabed and drown. Rockpools, starfish, picnic lunches of cold omelettes and Breton pancakes. At nightfall, a return trip for the older girls to lie on the sand and contemplate a million stars or gaze out at an ocean shimmering with phosphorescence.

Seaside idyll
Au bord de la mer

Later, other beaches, further south approached through pine forests echoing with the strident vibrato of cicadas. The crash of the surf, rows of burnished women in bikinis and ankle chains stretched out like cats on sunbeds, the tap of balls hitting wooden rackets. The palm-fringed beach, a salty breeze coming in across the blue yacht-studded water, wafts of Ambre Solaire and the smell of beignets and chouchous. And it would be on these summer holidays, spreading the towels and putting up the beach umbrella for the first time, that I would listen out for that most beautiful and evocative of sounds, the laughter of children. Racing in terror from the waves, splashing each other in mock fights, digging holes in the sand, wriggling out of the grasp of suncream-bearing parents, launching themselves onto rubber rings. The embodiment of what it is to be joyful and carefree, to be insouciant. La joie de vivre. Le temps de vivre.

The seaside, post-Nice
The seaside, post-Nice

On July 14th this year, day of the Fête Nationale, an Islamic terrorist killed 85 people who were out enjoying the firework display in Nice. 307 others were injured. The following week, in a small church in Normandy, an 85-year-old priest was forced to his knees to have his throat cut. It was the 11th attack in 18 months by Islamic terrorists, starting with the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre. Bombings, stabbings, shootings, beheadings and vehicle rammings. This year, in the second half of July, children playing on the beaches of France saw a new and terrible sight, soldiers and police patrolling with machine guns.

‘…le passé, peut-il renaître?’ ‘Can the past live again?’ asks Yvonne de Galais, heroine of ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’, that most devastating of novels about adolescent friendship and the quest for ideal happiness. And Meaulnes himself tells his friend François Seurel that, when he found the mysterious Domain where Yvonne lived, ‘I had reached a height, a degree of perfection and purity that I will never reach again’, adding ‘Dans la mort seulement…je retrouverai peut-être la beauté de ces jours-là…’  ‘Only in death, perhaps, will I find the beauty of those days once again.’

Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier
Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier

Packing up our suitcases I realise that this is the end of a French idyll. Those summer holidays with their carefree children are gone. For many of us, who knew what it was like before, we shall look back on how it was and mourn the end of insouciance.

 

POSTSCRIPT

It was good to rediscover Kamel Daoud’s voice once more in a recent article in The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/opinion/paradise-the-new-muslim-utopia.html?_r=0

In the spring of 2016 the talented Algerian author of prize-winning novel ‘The Meursault Investigation’* had announced he was giving up journalism after his article about the New Year’s Eve attacks in Cologne had provoked a torrent of violent recriminations from a group of 19 French academics in Le Monde.

http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2016/02/11/les-fantasmes-de-kamel-daoud_4863096_3232

Accused of  ‘pathetic clichés’, ‘colonialist paternalism,’ ‘anti-humanism’, racism and Islamophobia, Daoud replied that he found their reaction ‘immoral’: ‘They don’t live in my flesh nor in my land and I find it illegitimate, scandalous even, that I am accused of Islamophobia by certain people sitting in the safety and comfort of their western cafés. All dished up like a Stalinist trial…’

For 20 years Daoud, writing in the newspaper Le Quotidien d’Oran, had adressed such controversial issues as religious freedom and women’s rights. ‘Women’s freedom is my freedom,’ he said at a literary festival in Germany. A fatwah calling for his execution was announced in 2014 by a salafist imam.

Kamel Daouad's prize-winning novel
Kamel Daouad’s prize-winning novel

Ironically, (and happily), two months after the media controversy,  Daoud was awarded the Prix Jean-Luc Lagardère for Journalist of the Year. Denis Olivenne, presenting the prize, spoke of ‘his courage as a journalist…in the tradition of great writer/journalists such as Camus and Mauriac.’ French Prime Minister Manuel Valls congratulated ‘a brave journalist who refused to be cowed’, adding ‘Freedom to inform is also the right to blaspheme and be irreverent, a fundamental principle that France will defend to the last.’

*‘Meursault, contre-enquête’ by Kamel Daoud, Goncourt du 1er roman 2015

https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B00JQ7JJ8C.