Happy Birthday Dad. A roller coaster ride.

A few days ago I was talking with my father about the research he is doing for me.  I am writing a novel about the First World War and his father and father- in-law were both involved in this.  He has already found out lots of useful information and was very excited to be discussing this on the phone with me.  He lives in the south west of England.  My wife and I live on the French Riviera.  A thousand miles separate us but we keep in touch twice a week by phone.

My father is an old man yet his mental faculties are remarkable.  When we don’t have access to the internet and need to find a fact I will ring Dad and invariably he will know the answer.  I have come to think of him as WikiDaddy.

In this phone call, however, I began to get concerned.  My dad’s speech was slurred and he was losing the thread of his conversation.  I asked him if he was ok and he said he had blacked out and fallen down that morning, hitting his head in the process.

I phoned for help and within minutes the para-medics were at his house and he was whisked off to hospital.  I was so glad that my memory had failed the day previously and I had forgotten to call him.   If I had have done I wouldn’t have phoned on the day of his fall and would not have realised he had something wrong with him.

Something we found out was life-threatening.  His heart was working at a rate of only 30 beats a minute.

The next day, Friday, we discussed the possibility of him being fitted with a pacemaker.  The hospital said it was the only option for him.

On Monday night I was phoned by a distraught doctor to say that Dad had just had a cardiac arrest and the doctors were working on him.  They succeeded in restarting his heart but it had been very difficult.

We booked two seats on Easyjet at 2.00 in the morning and went to bed.  We didn’t sleep much that night.

Tuesday was Dad’s 89th birthday.  I rang the hospital early in the morning and was told that he had just had a second cardiac arrest.  The doctor said he was very poorly indeed.  When a man’s 89 and has had two heart attacks in quick succession that’s not too surprising.

My wife and I began to resign ourselves to the worst.  The question in my mind was whether we would be able to get to him in time.

So imagine our surprise when we were told later in the day that he’d been taken 50 miles in an ambulance to be fitted with a pace-maker.  The operation seems to have been a success.  What a fantastic birthday present for him.

Today I’ve been told he is sitting up in bed and enjoying a meal.  As my cousin says, he must be as tough as a horse.

I want to pay tribute to the ambulance service who have done so much to save his life, now and in the past.  And to the caring and professional medical staff at Weston Hospital and Bristol Heart Clinic who have worked all out to keep a frail old man alive.

It’s early days yet and we won’t be able to see him until tomorrow.  I just hope that the hospital staff don’t take it into their heads to give him the birthday bumps.

Happy birthday, Dad.

My Dad.

Near Perfect Writing Space

If you’ve followed any of this blog you will realise that I am fascinated with my writing space.

Not that I’m obsessive or pernickety (hum, don’t think I’ve ever written that word before).  It’s just that I always hanker after a garret in Paris, although having gone their a week ago and been frozen to my bones it would have to be a Parisian garret where I now live, on the French Riviera.

A garret like Gene Kelly had in ‘An American in Paris,’ with a bed he could suspend from the ceiling, table, chairs and even a jug of flowers hidden away in a cupboard, all to give him enough space to fulfil his passion of painting.

An American in Paris (1951) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have less need of space, just my trusty old laptop and the resources of the world upon the internet.

Now, at last, I have arrived at almost my perfect space (I won’t call it perfect, nothing is while I can still dream.)

Courtesy of two very simple technologies, an extension lead for my laptop and a blind to shade the screen from the sun I can now sit on my terrace overlooking the roofs of Menton and theMediterranean Sea and pound away to my heart’s content.

Incroyable as my French friends would say.

“It was a dark and stormy night.”

“It was a dark and stormy night.”

This was the now infamous opening of ‘Paul Clifford’ the 1830 by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton.  It is, by the way, the inspiration for a Purple Prose Literary competition.  http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

However, today I am more interested in the effect which the weather has on my writing.

Let me confess, I hate cold weather and especially the murky, rain-drenched skies of England.  So it’s no wonder that I have moved to the sunniest town of the French Riviera.

I like writing when the weather is foul and I can snuggle up with my characters and my keyboard.  So, it might seem to have been a bit of a mistake for me to have come to such a sunny and warm place.

Not so for I like to write in the fresh air, even in sunshine.  One of my lecturers at the University of East Anglia was Angus Wilson and he said that he loved to write in full sunshine; a statement which I can fully agree with.  (To my shame and regret I never went to any of his lectures which I later learned were superb.  He did bang into me and pour a cup of coffee over me once, however.)

So what’s to stop me writing in full sunshine? Two things. One, I can no longer read the scrawl which my hand-writing has degenerated into.  The second is that I much prefer to write on my lap-top and I cannot see the screen in sunlight.  Even with the blind down on the terrace it is virtually impossible to read.

I will have to come to some way of working in this wonderful climate.  Maybe I will have to get up in the small hours and pound away under the stars.  Now that sounds rather good.

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A Simple Life – Lived Richly

At the beginning of the film of The Fellowship of the Rings, Bilbo Baggins says that it is no bad thing to be able to celebrate a simple life.  I agree whole-heartedly with the idea of living a simple life.  However, I have altered this slightly to Living a Simple Life Richly.  This is my aim.

We now live in the Riviera.  If this gives you an idea that I have struck it rich then it couldn’t be more wrong.  We have rented out our house in England and rent a tiny apartment here.  It is, believe me, tiny.  One little room, one dinky bedroom, a bathroom with a shower and toilet (and bizarrely, the biggest wash-basin I have ever seen outside of a hotel.)  The total surface area is about 30 square metres.  However, it does have a 10 metre square terrace.  I am sitting on this now, typing out these words.

We would never be able to afford a house on the Cote d’Azur as big as the one we own in England.  Unless someone like Steven Spielberg asks me for the rights to one of my novels.  (Come on Steven, how about it?)  We can, however, live here if we live a simple life richly.

I keep constant, neurotic track of our spending.  Even though every day is different our spending is stubbornly sticking at about the same amount, 32 Euros a day. Yet, boy, does my life feel rich now.  I glance above the laptop and can see the Mediterranean Sea.  I have made lots of new friends.

Why didn’t I do this years ago, I ask myself.  Oh well, I didn’t.  But I have now.

Where I Write Now

I have now moved to the Cote d’Azur and my space has changed fundamentally.  My wife and I are renting a small apartment on the seventh floor of a block which overlooks the roofs of the town across to the Mediterranean Sea.  The light is wonderful and I can well understand why so many artists were drawn to live and work in this area.

Our apartment is very small, only 30 metres square.  The living room has a kitchen area to one side, a small sofa and two comfortable arm-chairs.  Close to the kitchen is a large table at which I work.  In front is a wall of glass, the French windows which lead out to a terrace almost as big as the living room.  A large wooden table and chairs sits on one side, green plastic ones to the other.  Empty flower-pots hang upon the rail, awaiting the plants we will shortly buy.  Despite moving here on the 1 December I have spent some time on the terrace on most days.

In front of the apartment is the railway with trains streaming between France and Italy.  Occasionally a TGV sweeps through with a majestic disdain.  I can see over the railway to a road which will soon be filled with sculptures made up of Lemons and Oranges, the high point of the Festival du Citron.  Beyond that is a large crane, which reminds me of my childhood in London.  Beyond this is the Mediterranean Sea, the very same on which I sat and dreamed of ancient Greek triremes sailing westward in search of trade or land.

On Sunday I sat on the terrace and read a short biography of George Simenon, French English Dictionary in hand.  My school-boy French is better at reading than speaking so I managed to understand more of the book than the conversation I have to undertake in the shops.

Unfortunately, the terrace is too bright for a laptop but I am able to think about my work, to plan and plot it and to revise.  For writing I come back inside the apartment.  The light washes over me like a stream.  It is what I craved so much in my old room back in England.

The one thing I miss here is access to the internet which we can’t get in our flat as yet.  It means that research is almost impossible, testament, I suppose, to how the web has changed our lives.  However, the good thing about this is that I have more time to write.  Except that the weather is so lovely, the town is so ripe for exploration and I am enjoying myself so much that I don’t write as much as I plan.  Never mind, my latest book ‘Artful’ is in the process of its third revision and I hope to publish it soon.

In fact, I’m going to get back to work shortly.

When Cultures Collide

I was inches away from death yesterday and didn’t realise it until moments afterwards.

My wife and I have moved from England to the South of France, to Menton on the Riviera. It is the last French town on the coast, a frontier town, wedged between Monaco to the west and Italy to the east. For centuries it had seesawed between one or other of the Italian dukedoms, France, the Principality of Monaco and, between 1848 and 1860 became a tiny, independent city-state like medieval Florence.

I love the idea of borders, margins and frontiers so it is little wonder that I have been so attracted to the town, holidaying here several times each year. Now, at last, my dream has come true and my wife and I live here. Yet my dream nearly proved the end of me.

Menton is a sedate and calm town, clean and well-ordered, with friendly and polite people. It is a French town yet many of its inhabitants illustrate the town’s roller-coaster history, bearing French first names and Italian surnames. Many people slip from French and Italian with ease and the town, although French, has many Italian influences in its architecture, its cultural interests and its food. The border between the two nations is now permeable, the austere border and customs posts decaying and forgotten. At weekends in particular, the town fills up with Italian families who own second homes here. Menton can feel both international and uniquely Mentonaisse at one and the same time.

This makes it easy for an English ex-pat to begin to assimilate, particularly given the long association between Menton and Britain. In the nineteenth century wealthy Britons flocked to the town to escape the cold of winter and it was a favoured place for those suffering with weak chests and consumption. Sadly, it did not prove a cure and many died here.

In the month since moving to the town my wife and I have twice attempted to travel to Ventimiglia, the nearest town on the Italian side of the border. We were thwarted by strikes on the railways, one French, one Italian. Yesterday, we were successful and took the fifteen minute train journey across the border.

Ventimiglia is a mere seven kilometres from France yet it might as well be seventy or seven hundred. Where Menton is open to the influence of Italy, Ventimiglia seems resolutely closed to any influence from France. Italy is, as I once remarked, a different country. By this I mean that the differences are startling in two towns so close together, the cultures so very different. In Menton the two different cultures inter-mingle, in Ventimiglia they collide or are ignored.

The noise level is louder in the Italian town, people speaking at higher decibels in conversation, yelling loud and lengthy calls across the street to friends, all accompanied with more vivid and flamboyant body language. The French have their Gallic shrug, the Italians have a vast and operatic repertoire of sign and gesture.

The coffee tastes different, the wine tastes different and the cuisine, which looks similar, proves different in the mouth. The two languages, estranged siblings from the parent Latin root, are articulated in very different ways so that a word which looks almost the same on paper can sound utterly unlike when spoken. The public buildings in Ventimiglia are more unkempt than those in Menton, the people more stylishly dressed.

My Lost King novels are set in the transitional time of the Norman Conquest when the English and the Norman cultures collided catastrophically. Crossing from France to Italy today must be similar to the experiences of our ancestors in 1066. Different outlook, different language, different expectations, different laws.

Different ways of crossing the road.

Yesterday, in Ventimiglia, I waited at a crossing in the centre of the town. It was after lunch and the roads had quietened. The symbol to wait changed to the symbol to cross and, along with the rest of the pedestrians I stepped out onto the crossing. I would do this in England with absolute safety and the same in France. Not, it seemed, in Italy.

A motor-bike appeared from nowhere, raced past me inches away and was gone. If my stride had been longer or his speed a little faster he would have hit me. I would have been killed or, at best, seriously injured.

It happened so fast that I was barely aware of it. It was only when my wife cried out and the bike flashed across my vision that I fully realised what had happened.

A middle-aged woman walked across the road towards me. Her look was concerned, sympathetic. Yet, at the same time, her look of pity was tinged with an expression which hinted that the incident was perhaps my own fault, that I should be aware that tearaways hurtle through pedestrians on a crossing in such a reckless, though thankfully, skilful, fashion.

Who was at fault? The speeding cyclist? The dawdling English pedestrian? Or was it rather that neither of us was at fault, both merely following our own cultural conditioning, he driving with skill and bravado, me trusting to the green man symbol to protect me as I crossed.

When cultures collide, indeed. When motor-bikes and I almost did as well.

On our way to the Cote d’ Azur

Nine or ten years ago I decided to take a week’s holiday in Liguria, Northern Italy.  I flew from Bristol airport to Nice arriving late in the evening.  Because of the late hour of my arrival I had already booked a hotel from England.  When I told the bus driver where I wanted to get off he gave a shrug which I could not fathom.

When I got off I began to understand.  The district I had arrived at was something like the Vienna of Carol Reed‘s film, ‘The Third Man.’

The streets were dark and had an atmosphere of mystery and threat.  People hurried past in buttoned up clothes, avoiding the gaze of others.  Any moment I expected to hear the sound of a zither and Orsen Welles lurking in an alley.  I hurried on myself, keen to find my hotel.

In fact it seemed less of a hotel and more a venue for petty criminals and ladies of the night.  I felt distinctly uncomfortable, reminded of my stay in the less salubrious quarters ofNaples.

Still, I had only booked for one night.

My plan was to head across the border to San Remo so the following day I caught a train from the central station in Nice.  A lovely older lady, as fragile as a china doll, apologised for the state of the train.  ‘It is not a good advert for the Cote d’Azur,’ she explained.  It may not have been, but the journey certainly was.  I split my time between talking with her and gazing out at the scenery with excitement.  There was something truly fascinating and beguiling about the coast.

The lady left the train at Monaco and I travelled on.  By the time I had reached the last town on the French border, I had made up my mind.  I would postpone my journey to Italy by a day and see what the French Riviera and this border town had to offer.  I hopped off the train.

I did not know it but I had arrived at the town of Menton.

I walked down from the station, loving the warmth of the air and the calm and attractive buildings.  I went into the first hotel I saw, the Hotel Moderne, and was surprised to see a virtual double of a friend on the Reception desk.  ‘We have a room with a balcony but for one night only,’ the Receptionist said. ‘It overlooks the church so you’ll hear the bells.’

I snapped up the room there and then, threw my bag on the bed, and went off to explore the town.

I was entranced by everything I saw.  I eventually ended up in an old square with a strange statue staring down upon me and ate at one of the lively restaurants which crammed around it.  As I sat there, I felt a warm sense of peace inveigle itself into me.

Then I strolled back along the Promenade to my hotel.

It was as I walked along that the magic happened.

Four beautiful young black women strode out into the busy road and halted the traffic.  They then began a lively and good-humoured dance.  They were replaced immediately by two young men who made the road an arena for their athletic and daring display.  Any town that allows this to happen must be something special, I thought.  Talk about life-enhancing.

I had fallen in love with Menton.

Now, after many years of visiting the town with my wife Janine, we are on the count-down to moving there.  Only five weeks to go.