Galician Weddings are Great

We travelled from our home in Aragon and back to England via a circuitous route crossing the border into Portugal then north into Galicia. The wedding was celebrated in the town of Ordes near Santiago de Compostela and afterwards we went on to Santander for the ferry. It rained.

On the wedding day the bride’s older sister picked us up at noon, as promised, and then collected another guest, Isabel, from a local hotel. Both women spoke some English, the latter much better than our Spanish. We drove to a place near Ordes and the sister showed us into the garage. This was the home of the bride’s Mum and Dad and we were there for aperitifs: the drinking had started. A large table was laid with plenty of nibbles and all sorts of drinks and was surrounded by a varied crowd of people dressed to the nines. Most impressive was the bride’s younger sister in a stunning green dress and her cousin in an even more stunning cerise number which was both long and body clinging. The bride’s mother wore mauve and was welcoming, but her father was rather reserved – probably he had no idea what to say to ‘los Ingles’. However, we quickly made friends with Isabel, whom we had met in the car, and Sindo, a lively man who had spent nearly twenty years living near London as a builder. I had a beer with him and found him very amusing. He told me that his wife did not like England. Her English was not good and she had been frightened to answer the phone. He had now returned to his native Galicia and told me that English weddings were boring and Galician weddings much more fun. I smiled and decided to wait and see. Patricia, the bride, appeared: she looked pale but lovely in a close fitting, white wedding dress.

We were driven back to Ordes by Patricia’s brother. The church was just around the corner from the bride and groom’s flat: we had noticed its lamp lit, modern, stained glass through the raindrops on the previous night.

We watched Patricia arriving in her car then entered the church. Jacobo, the groom, was already at the front dressed in a smart tailcoat. He had shaved off his short beard from the day before and looked very dashing. He is a tall man with a good mop of curly hair. He waved and seemed reasonably relaxed. There was some delay before Patricia entered the church on the arm of her father. Heart-stirring violin music accompanied their progress: music which I knew well and loved but could not readily identify. That walk must be a long one for any bride.

The priest was an elderly man with a pleasant voice. Dressed in white and gold he seated the wedding pair on a bench facing the altar with a parent-in-law on either side. The service was long and opaque. It was mercifully interrupted by more beautiful music from two musicians who were hidden from my view during the ceremony itself (I thought at first that the music was a very high quality recording) and by confident readings by the girls in the beautiful dresses. Most of the priest’s words were in Galician, I think. My mind wandered a little because I did not understand the content, but I admired the priest’s tendency to hold his hand far apart and look towards the heavens as if telling god about a very large fish that he had caught.

I examined the church. It was Romanic, fairly plain and, I guessed, fairly modern. Nice enough though and set off by a glorious golden rererdos which centred on a neat gold plated door set into a pillar. This was the place where the priest kept his wine. He removed it with great ceremony for the mass that terminated the service. At one stage there was a complex exchange of rings which we could not see. However, it was all recorded; the two female photographers seem to push their camera lenses right into to the hands of the betrothed. Then we were all shaking hands as one does in Roman Catholic services for some reason – a nice touch – and then outside for the rice throwing, which seemed quite painful for the recipients and fun for the kids. It began to rain, but the people of Galicia are unperturbed by a little rain, even on a wedding day.

The reception was held at a lovely location in the countryside. Some entrepreneur had erected a vast tent like building in the gardens of a fine old house. The roof of the building was canvas but the walls were mostly made of glass (except the toilets of course). A very large plastic pipe ran the length of the ‘tent’ and was, I conjectured, for the delivery of hot air on cold days. We did not need hot air, it was quite warm indoors. In the garden was a true Galician feature: a large ‘horreo’. These things are actually storage sheds for grain etc. and any self-respecting smallholding has one. They are thin and tall and can be quite ornate with at least one side shuttered to allow the entry of air. But the most remarkable feature of these structures is their base. Constructions vary but most consist of something like an inverted wine glass without the bowl and made of stone or concrete. Rats hate them since they are insurmountable and dry rot despairs of sending its destructive rhizomes down to the wet ground.

Next to the horreo (the biggest I have ever seen) was a lean-to which housed the smoking section. On the table were free cigars, cigarettes and matches. This luxury could have ended my twenty years of abstention, but I resisted.

Regaled with more tasty aperitifs and with never ending glasses of sweet cava I quickly lost my appetite and became a little drunk. I was ready for dancing. But there was more consuming to be done. The one hundred and fifty or so guests were led to round tables where we all found a multi course menu and list of wines. We were proud to be seated at table two right next to the top table and I was placed next to the groom’s younger brother on a table which had plenty of English speakers on it. Beautifully laid out, there was a bread roll next to each place so large that it could easily be mistaken for a loaf.

Half a clawed lobster and one of it claws formed the first course and while I tackled the ticklish problem of extracting meat from these the waiters kept coming with more, and more, ignoring my cries of ‘suficiente’. Washed down with a sharper cava, this feast was quickly replaced by clams clamouring to be eaten and to be washed down by more cava and then replaced by a very decent plate of delicious sole – and more cava.

I survived the fish courses and though that was it. My stomach agreed, but viewed the mango sorbet with suspicion – rightfully. This was the precursor to the meat course! Full I truly was, but the meat was so tasty that I ate it and the vegetables and sampled the well-rounded red wine. Fortunately the sweet course was light and that (sigh of relief) was it. A truly sumptuous and memorable feast for one hundred and fifty people.

There were no speeches which was just as well since we would not have understood them, but every now and then a shout would go up, usually originated by a lively table of naughty ‘boys’ towards the back ( Jacobo’s high school friends I think) and then taken up by many others. I did not understand the words, but the meaning was clear: it was a call for the bride and groom to kiss. They pretended to resist, then succumbed to great applause. Then there were demands for the mothers and fathers-in-law to kiss. Then a general toast to the grandparents, to which everyone drank. Then whole tables rose to clink glasses and toast anything or anyone that came into their heads.

At some prearranged signal the bride and groom vanished and the music began – a ballroom piece of some sort then, through the doors that led to toilets, the bride and groom swept in dancing wonderfully in their perfect clothing. And, to my amazement, Jacobo suddenly swept his new wife from her feet and swirled her around. I thought this a dangerous move after all that food and drink, but all was well and the music was drowned in applause and cheering. The pair were joined on the floor by their parents-in-law and the next phase of the party had begun: drinking and dancing.

I tried, but I have to admit that I could not do it. Weighed down by so much food and wine my thin frame could only manage two dances (wimp) though I think that Margaret was game for more. We walked around the gardens and watched the rapidly more ecstatic dancing, mostly performed in groups and mostly centring on the naughty boys. The peak of that part of the evening was reached when the DJ played a popular nationalistic Galician song, something equivalent to Rule Britannia I think. It transformed the dancers into singers.

We retired from the floor spending some time talking to friends of the bride and groom who also came from Oxford. After that we could easily have slipped away into a deep sleep, but then I had an idea. Two rum-and-cokes later we were on the floor dancing with the best of them, two more and I had to order a coke without the rum for Margaret – she was becoming an unreliable dancing partner and needed a great deal of physical support. Meanwhile the naughty boys were getting naughtier, they were throwing themselves and the bride and groom into the air. The most dynamic, Pablo who worked in Italy, had removed his coat, tie and shirt and seemed to be wrestling rather than dancing. I danced with Sindo at one stage, ageing men aping the naughty boys.

During the night we found that we had a link with quite a few people at the wedding: people who we thought were complete strangers. Four years previously we had loaned our house in Oxford to Jacobo and Patricia whilst we were in Asia. Every now and then someone would approach us (including Pablo the wrestler), ask if we were Rob and Margaret and then tell us that they too had stayed in our house for a while. Many of them admired the downstairs toilet where I had installed a pub hand-pump to operate the toilet flush. All of them were disappointed that we had sold the place.

Jacobo and Patricia were perfect hosts, sometimes dancing energetically with the best of them, sometimes in the conga-like chains of dancers, sometimes asking us and other guests if we were OK – we always were. We enjoyed the whole day enormously but were glad when Jacobo found us a lift back to our camping van with a couple who were leaving early (at about 3 a.m.) I said goodbye to Sindo and admitted that Galician weddings were truly better than English ones.

Creativity and Rolling Stones

What is creativity? John Fowles believed that men wrote books in order to extend their lives beyond their lifetimes whereas women’s lives were extended by creating children. But women write and the likes of Jane Austen still live on through their books. Writing books is an acknowledged form of creativity, though I notice a great disappointment, even within the Writers in Oxford club, if it turns out that an author only writes non-fiction: the novel’s the thing, the true creation.

Writing books, painting, composing music, producing poetry, making movies, staining glass, potting, candle making: all of these are clearly creative. Carpentry, blacksmithing, sewing, science, gardening, cooking, photography, pornography: all of these are clearly not – or are they. There is a fine line somewhere here. A candle produced simply to give light is surely not creative, a candle wax creation of a pornographic scene may be.

Me, I roll stones. Some of the stones I use are so heavy that there is no possibility that I can lift them – so I roll them. My friendly adviser who occasionally pounces on my stoney creation, sorry building, saying “incorrecto” or “feo” (wrong or ugly), tells me that Spanish women used to roll the stones to the men who then did the tricky bit of fitting them into a wall. Sounds crazy, but it does take more strength to place a stone in a precise location than to roll it from one location to another.

My woman does not roll stones so I do both: the rolling and the fitting. Is it creative? I’m not sure. My wall is much admired, particularly since it mirrors an existing one and by that measure it is hardly creative. I know of its flaws so am not moved by the plaudits it receives. But the question still intrigues me: am I creating something?

Certainly there is something there now when before there was nothing. That’s true of any building work, yet the average builder is clearly not in the same league as a popular novelist and the builder’s creation is, perhaps, only the implementation of the architect’s conception. I am both architect and builder so I win, or lose, both ways. I have, through this experience, learned how difficult it is to plan a building in three-dimensional detail and how frustrating it is when the plans are just not practical.

When I am writing a novel I do turn my imagination free and follow its inventions, selectively. When I am searching for a particular stone I am thinking only of the hoped for dimensions and shape, though some imagination is needed - particularly how an odd shaped stone might be knocked into shape. When I roll a heavy stone down for an ‘audition’ in my wall my mind is entirely full of the sheer effort of moving and controlling it, a little like the single mindedness of a mountaineer, I believe.

My summit is the arrival of the stone in the right place (often by rolling it up strong planks of wood or stepping it up temporary staircases made of blocks), shaping it, then finally standing back to make sure that it looks right. I then move on to the next. At times I stand looking at my creation (sorry building) planning what to now next and how and what materials I will need. When my mind is not engaged with stone then I sometimes sing. ‘Right said Fred’ fits the bill, but for some reason ‘Winter Wonderland’ and that awful unicorn song take over. Fortunately a song by my friend, Pete Madams is also getting a look in, the chorus goes like this, ‘I’m the man, the man of the moment.’

Is any of this creative? I’m sure that Pete’s song is.

Glamour Girls and Charity Chicks

In Spain one of the words for girl is chica and my Spanish son-in-law (sort of) often called our daughter “the chick of his life”, though sadly that turned out not to be. If he had married her he would have called her my woman (mi mujer) which is normal usage here and not at all offensive to the wives, as far as I can tell.

Most of the women in our tiny village are somebody’s woman and most are not spring chickens. They do have a lot of go though, and keep the heart of the community beating whilst beating up their men if they are not home for dinner at nine: you ought to see the bar empty as the dinner hour nears.

On Sunday last we returned to La Fresneda after a weekend of wine, wandering and song in another village and felt too lazy to go to our own local espectaculo (variety show). But we did, and it was good.

It started late, surprise, surprise. Still, that gave me a chance to talk to our sadly deposed mayor and tell him that I hoped that he would soon be back. He beamed, either because he did not understand my stuttering Spanish or because he was pleased.

The show started with a beautiful young Mexican woman playing the violin beautifully: a hard act to follow. Later an old man played the piano accordion badly, and thought that the laughter was a sign of encouragement to continue. Our best friend, Dolores, led a troupe who recited, sang and told jokes that I had no hope of understanding.

All of this was a mere starter for the main act. This was a play which involved at least ten of the local ladies and two or three men who may have been ladies dressed up. The scene was a beach somewhere and the plot was clearly conceived to allow our local ladies to display. I lost the plot quite early but Margaret (my woman) seemed to understand some of it. Anyway, the couple who started the sketch were joined in the second act by most of the women of the village outrageously dressed and dripping with jewellery and glamour. I barely recognised the friendly lady from the bread shop as she swaggered onto the stage dragging a dog (toy one) on a leash and twirling an umbrella. I certainly did not recognise the lady in the brown dress, a dress so tight that she could not sit down on one seat and had to be offered another. They gushed, simpered, and really enjoyed their own performance as did the audience, their men amongst them.

The plot involved a parrot, but was not the dead parrot sketch from Monty Python. I think it may have been based on that funny story where a couple are distraught when their dog turns up with the neighbour’s pet rabbit in its mouth – dirty and dead. They clean it up and surreptitiously return it to its hutch. Next day their neighbours tell them of their weird experience: their rabbit had died and they had buried the poor thing in the garden. A few days later the thing had appeared in its hutch still dead, but very clean.

The ladies arranged the show in order to raise money for a Spanish charity operating in Africa. We saw a long video on the treatment of aids, tuberculosis and leprosy in that country and I felt that my five-euro entrance fee might help, a bit. I hope it does.

Prostitutes, oranges and burning babies.

I must confess that I did not see the baby burn; I was probably in the bar at the time drinking fizzy beer and sheltering from acoustic overload.

The event that brought together prostitutes, oranges and burning babies is a Falla. This is a Spanish tradition peculiar to the province of Valencia. Terry, who runs the pizzeria in the next village to ours, had told us that he was going to the Fallas at Benicarlo and we decided to go too.

It was a nice journey through our area of Spain, the Mataraña of Aragon, through a pleasant slice of Cataluña and finally into Valencia. For a while we followed the River Ebro and it is here that we saw orange groves and beside the roads sacks of oranges patiently waiting. Later, as we neared Benicarlo, we saw seated ladies beside the road also patiently waiting.

The ladies and the oranges have something in common: they are patiently waiting for clients. The farmers place the oranges there to make a few extra euros by cutting out the middleman. The pimp who, in a sense, is the middleman places the ladies there, though he may, or may not handle the goods. The oranges are a pleasant sight, the ladies slightly disturbing. However, back to the burning babies.

Terry had told us that Fallas are an annual event where Valencian townsfolk build castles and then burn them to the ground, the whole thing accompanied by lashings of fireworks. But we found no castles in Benicarlo. There they celebrate the feast day of Saint Jose by burning people.

Over the year each area of the town constructs complex sets of cartoon-like figures. The figures are very well made and very colourful. They seemed to be made of expanded polystyrene, but how they achieved such a smooth finish I do not know.

My favourite was a Chinese themed display which centred on a beautiful woman (top half only, yet extending to at least the fourth floor of the (very) nearby flats). Her hands seemed to rise from the ground and encircled a pudgy baby that she looked down upon with great love. The baby was unmistakeably a boy, of course. Arranged around her was a series of larger than life figures including a poor coolie dragging a cart loaded with boxes. Each box had a label: Armani, Gucci, Prado, etc. Behind the central figure, a Chinaman was holding a cat in one hand and machete in the other: dinner.

I did not see the Chinese baby burn. In the confusion I missed that particular conflagration, but I did see others which included babies. I also inhaled the black smoke that rose and fell from the burning ensembles and was deafened both by the firecrackers that ignited the figures, and by the fireworks that were stuck into holes unceremoniously hacked into them just before the off.

It was an intriguing spectacle but the real children of Benicarlo also fascinated me. Most of them carried a small box attached to a strap across their shoulders. Every now and then they felt inside the box, extracted a firework, lit it from a wick or gas lighter and threw it into the street, or down a drain, or down some stairs to get an echoing affect. Most of the fireworks were bangers, though not all. The kids ranged from early teens down to four years or so! Spain can be a bureaucratic country, but the stultifying hand of Health and Safety has fortunately not yet reached its heart. 

Almond Blossom

I am now in Spain. The overloaded trailer and the van made it, though there were a few problems: one of the ratchet belts holding down the motorbike broke and the cover disintegrated as the wind and rain in England, then the wind alone in Spain.

We spent the first night in a town called Jaca (pronounced Haca) and the second in Solsona. Both towns are in the foothills of the Pyrenees and both are very cold at night for the poor folks sleeping in unheated motor caravans.

Jaca was pleasant. Its older parts have quite narrow streets and smart building with good shops (I’m told). The first bar we visited was the Old Station. Big and busy it was noisy, had a bar lined with people drinking and chatting and the barmaid gave me free crisps with my fizzy beer. It felt good to be back in our adopted second country. In the morning, out running in the cold sunshine and shorts, I saw the groups of skiers on their way to the pistes swaddled in their puffy anoraks. They mostly looked miserable and askance.

Solsona is not so attractive but, like Jaca, is framed in the distance by the towering Pyrenees so all is forgiven. Besides, we were there to visit relatives especially our middle grandson who talks to us constantly in Spanish which is hard work, but he is a nice lad. That night we took him and the rest of our complex family (don’t ask) to a restaurant of his choice. It was good and we were in our cold bed by midnight. In the morning when we called to say goodbye he was still asleep. He had been out again with friends until three in the morning. Oh to be seventeen.

The last leg of our journey took us through the lakeland of arid Aragon - miles of piercingly green water formed mostly by dams. We stopped at one of the lakes for lunch and there I met a man fishing: he had a copy of the Richard Dawkins’ Blind Watchmaker beside him and came from Pershore. In England we are near neighbours. Interesting to talk to he was, like me, dithering over the next generation of motorcars: hydrogen, electric, etc.

And then we were at last in our own region: the Mataranya. We had seen blossom along the way, but nothing beats the almond blossom of the Mataranya. It seems to float above the dry fields in clouds of pink and white. Hundreds of trees meet the eye, offset a little by the milky green of the interspersed olive trees. The economy is shot, fifty percent of the young are unemployed, the Rumanians are still here, but it looks like being a bumper year for almonds.

It was good to be back. I drove straight to the huerto and uncoupled the trailer. We then stared wistfully at our own almond tree. We only have one and we thought that it was dying. But there it was in full blossom. Lovely.

Last day in UK

It’s about 11 pm and after two well deserved Belgian beers, I am relaxing. I had planned a last pint or two of real English ale, but it was not to be: things closed in.

During the past week I have bought: a motorbike, a trailer to transport it in, a rotavator (biggish one), a cement mixer, a tow bar to pull the trailer, and chains, locks and cables to secure the stuff against thieves.

The trailer is quite low and the motorbike quite high so I couldn’t get the thing into the trailer with the cement mixer, rotavator and so on. I called a friend and he agreed to come around to help at midday. In the morning the fireplace man came to view the blackened, ugly, bricky hole that for some time has been awaiting the stone fireplace that he offered us at a special price. He outlined the problems: the ‘cheeks’ of the fire area project a little too far, also the cheeks are too high and the uprights shouldn’t really sit on a floorboard.

I want to fit the fireplace myself but I sometimes think that the fireplace man really wants to do it. He told me that I would need a ‘throat lintel’, yes a throat lintel, don’t you know what a throat lintel is? I certainly did not, but he told me that most builders’ merchants stock them, though they are often known by another name. Also, I would have to cut off the top of the cheeks with an angle grinder. And I should replace the cracked back plate and I might as well replace the whole fire back while I am at it. I finally announced that I would remove the fire back and then decide what to do next and he nodded – a wise decision, I think. And so the new fireplace becomes a thing of the distant future and our lounge a sooty, no-go area.

I asked the fireplace man if he liked motorcycles, he looked the type. He did and he had sons that did. I asked him if he would help me load my bike onto the trailer. He was more than willing and, while I ponced around deciding how we should do it, he pushed the thing onto the trailer on his own! I felt an idiot, but this man does spend his time lifting fireplaces and dealing with throat lintels, and even his sons ride motorcycles.

I cancelled my friend and continued with the preparations: securing the bike, chaining up the rotavator and mixer, loading in other essential stuff: a curtain rail, a sunbed, flowerpots. By this time the four tyres of the trailer looked quite flat so I had to take it to the garage to pump them up. On the way I noticed that the indicators on the trailer no longer worked. They had done, you get a pleasant beeping from the back which is supposed to reassure that the trailer is still there. However, there was no beeping so I had to spend the rest of the night sorting out the wiring. No beeping, no beer. Hence a late night with an Angel or two – it’s a type of Belgian beer.

Ferry to Spain tomorrow. More adventures, perhaps.

What makes you choose a book?

Buying a book is a bit like buying an orange. You don’t really know what’s in it until you get it home and peel off the cover. You can see the skin of course and, in this creaky analogy, that includes the blurb on the back of the book. And you can sample a book if you are standing in that threatened establishment – the bookshop - or even download a sample chapter if you are considering an eBook. Nonetheless, you have to burrow pretty deeply into a book before you’re sure of it. Like an orange with a rotten segment - a bad ending could spoil the experience.

I was a science fiction fan as a teenager and peaked at a book a day until I moved on (that’s peaked with an ‘a’ by the way). I can’t remember, but I guess I started with the big names: Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, and then branched out. I soon had a favourite publisher – Gollanz. How I loved those bright yellow covers and, you know, they never, ever had a picture on them. I mostly borrowed books from the library though I did buy some. Finding new authors was easy: I simply went to the SF section and leafed through the selection.

Now my fiction reading is less specific: I like a good novel. My favourite writers from past and present include: Graham Greene, George Orwell, John Fowles and Douglas Kennedy. However, I know that there are good authors out there who are not necessarily being pushed by the big publishers. So how do I find them?

Buying a book is a two-pronged investment: first you have to buy it, and then you have to spend a lot of time reading it – even if it turns out to be a dud. I suppose most readers are conservative: only reading authors they have heard of, or books from the Booker shortlist, or stuff reviewed in the Times. Perhaps the most powerful route is through recommendations from a friend or colleague.

I bought a Kindle book by accident recently. Pressed the ‘Buy now with I-click’ rather than the title and ended up with Nuptials for Sale by someone called Virginia Jewel. Not my sort of thing, but it was all right – a bit raw perhaps. It only cost me £2.50 so no great loss. And you never know – a random click of the ‘buy it now’ button might lead to an undiscovered work of genius, or not.

‘Course I am biased in this. All authors want readers to choose their books and most are in a state of depression because no one does. Nonetheless, I am really interested: how do you choose the books that you read?

Tourism, Ants and Hellstrom's Hive

Do you like ants? My father did. He spent a period making little plaster containers with sliding glass tops. In these he encouraged ants to go about their business and watched them at it. My mother raised her eyes a lot during this time: indulgent but slightly embarrassed and slightly concerned, I think. Anyway, the fad declined and he went on to bees.

A few weeks ago I attended a lecture by Tim King. I have his card in front of me as I type. It’s a plain visiting card except for one thing: a very realistic picture of a brown ant alongside his address. He gave a fascinating lecture in which he points out that ants have been about for a long time – much longer than us. He also claims that they, as a community, are highly intelligent (though I wasn’t entirely convinced by this).

Whilst travelling in Turkey I became interested in ants. They have big ones and small ones there and they worked together in teams to clear up the crumbs that fell as I ate my lunch in lonely, forgotten places. This, and the strange underground cities that exist in that country, moved me to write a short story called The Tourist Touch. It’s about the corrupting effect of tourism on a village that lies above an underground city and is paralleled by observation of the cold reaction within a nearby ant colony. It is part of my collection of stories called Turkey Trove.

At the end of Tim King’s talk I went to the front and told him about my story since it seemed relevant to his lecture. We exchanged cards and later I emailed the story to him. He liked it and suggested a few, mostly welcomed, changes. He also recommended that I read Hellstrom’s Hive by Frank Herbert (you remember him, he wrote all those Dune books). So I downloaded it onto my Kindle for £4.99 (more expensive than the paperback!)

 

I enjoyed it. Frank Herbert is a well-respected sci-fi writer and it shows. The book was a bit slow to start - scene setting perhaps - then becomes rather exciting. The plot is simple. For years a group of people in America have been living like ants. Hellstrom is their current leader and they have created a wondrous secret hive that extends some mile or so below ground and contains thousands of specialised people: workers, breeders, thinkers, organisers and so on. Like the insect colonies that they admire they have evolved a community where loyalty to the hive transcends individualism. In the story snoopers from a US government agency discover them and the whole thing unwinds from there. I will say no more because you may want to read it sometime and I could spoil the experience.

The world that Frank Herbert created in the hive is interesting and thought provoking. I found my sympathies edging towards its inhabitants rather than the agents and this may be deliberate since the author portrays the agency as a community torn by ambition, suspicion and intrigue. Still it made me think and that’s one of the things I want from a good book.

Startling eBook Success Story

I now have seven eBooks up on Amazon's Kindle store and one has “sold” 230 copies in five days! I’m rich!

Not really. The novel that has done so well is ‘Lost Youth’. I wrote it a while ago as an exercise in grief dispersion following the death of our oldest daughter. However, as is generally my experience, the story and the characters took on a life of their own and any connection with Sheena’s life is solely in the title.

In ‘Lost Youth’ a young man called Mike enters university after a sheltered life with loving parents. The experience is debilitating and throws him into deep depression: he is friendless and neglected. The only relief in his dark life are dreams of a long dead sister and a strange friendship with a drug dealer who haunts the grounds of the university. It is this man who transforms Mike’s life by converting him into an anti-capitalist activist.

Mike leaves university and lives briefly with a revolutionary group in Germany. These are the most splendid days of Mike’s young life. Meanwhile his parents have discovered that he has abandoned his studies and so the father sets off on a search for their lost son, a search that has surprising, and then shocking, consequences for Mike’s family.

I could not get the book published and put it to one side. Now it is published: on Amazon in the kindle bookstore. Well, anyone can do that, but just how do I get anyone to read it? The answer is to give it away! That’s why I wrote “sold“ 230 copies above, I placed it on special offer for five days (i.e. free).

Of course there is a flaw here: two in fact. First, I don’t get any money for the work I put into writing and editing the book, and second my readers may not value the book since they got it for nothing. Ah but, now I am a writer in waiting. My hope is that some of my readers will like the book, will tell Kindle-owning friends about it, and will write astounding reviews about it. Then others will buy it for a mere £1.98 ($2.99) and like it and so move on to my other novel, “Shaken by China” which is up there waiting in the Kindle store. I should be so lucky.

That’s the plan and, as Mark Twain reminds me regularly, ‘the harder I work, the luckier I get’. So here’s hoping.

If you would like to read ‘Lost Youth’ I can still slip you one for free to view on your PC, reader or whatever. I can explain how to do it if you don’t already know – it’s not difficult. All I would like in return are a few comments, suggested corrections and/or reviews. Just click to email me.

Writing about China

Wise travellers say that someone who spends a week or so in China quickly gains a good overview of the entire place and its people; those who spend a month there begin to have their doubts; and those who spend a year or more in this vast country realise that the place is quite beyond comprehension.

I spent just eight months there in two tranches and still have moments of complete understanding – very, very brief moments. Part of the puzzle is that the country is both old and new: an ancient society with a history that predates that of the West, yet a youthful society which traces its roots to the social revolution of Mao Zedong and the financial redirection of Deng Xiaoping - the latter blossoming into the establishment of the first McDonald’s in Beijing in 1991.

I feel a little involved in China’s history, just a little. Happenstance found me taking a post as a teacher in the remote city of Yan’an where Mao’s Long March ended and the revolution began. No one outside of China is likely to have heard of Yan’an, but, to the majority of Chinese, it is the equivalent of Mecca to the Muslims.

That visit left me with a big heap of notes, blogs and emails written whilst teaching and travelling. It also gave me the urge to write more and, after many false starts, it resulted in the novel Shaken by China which I have recently launched on Amazon’s Kindle and Smashwords as an eBook.

Though Shaken by China is a work of fiction it does rest heavily on my time spent in Yan’an. It is not by any means an attempt to encapsulate China – not at all. But it does, I hope, convey a tangential view of the Republic through the experiences of a young teacher. It allowed me to explore the culture a little: a culture that surprised me in its loyalty to family on the one hand; its degree of corruption on the other; and a culture which to the innocent traveller seems quite open yet is capable of cover-ups on a massive scale.

I am inclined to bring all of my notes together into a book entitled something like “101 reasons not to teach in China”, but I could also entitle it 101 reasons to do so. My recollections of those two periods are sharp and deep. The high point of the second visit was a brief return to Yan’an to marvel at the changes which had taken place in just four years. The low was the abysmal conditions in which the majority of people still live.

Highs and lows aside it all amounted to a great experience which I owe to Margaret, the real teacher of the pair of us.