Crimefest

This time last week I was living in the lap of luxury, eating an enormous four star breakfast in a four star hotel surrounded by people who wanted to talk about writing.  This week I’ve just had my usual two pieces of toast with Marmite, one of my titchy little tropical fish has died, Lucy is glued to the TV watching rugby and I’ve got to do the ironing.

This is called real life.  (*Sigh*)

Last week was, of course, one of the highlights of the year, the annual Crimefest held at the Bristol Marriot Hotel.  It’s the fourth time I’ve been to Crimefest and it just keeps getting better and better.  The best thing about it, from my point of view, is being able to talk about books and writing from a standing start.  Usually you have to edge into these conversations, but here they just happen.

John Curran, for example, who’s edited the monumental Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, a labour of love if there ever was one, will chat quite happily about the Queen of Crime and gave a fascinating short talk on Golden Age writers.  Deryn Lake recounted any historical writer’s dream job, where she was asked to research the history of Rawlings and found John Rawlings, her apothecary hero, in an 18^th Century newspaper.

This is in addition to catching up at length with old friends such as Suzette Hill, Jane Finnis, Rebecca Jenkins and Lyndon Stacey and, I’m glad to say, others such as Jennifer  Palmer and Frances Brody.

I suppose one of the biggest stars was Stella Rimington, ex-head of MI5.  I was lucky enough to be on a panel with Stella Rimington.  She, of course, writes the Liz Carlyle books (highly recommended) which give a real insiders’ account which certainly sounds plausible of how the Intelligence Services conduct an operation. As the Liz Carlyle books are, of course, fiction, she’s able to add the reasons why people do what they do and it’s a great mix.

Another real pleasure was meeting Carola Dunn.  Carola, the author of the much-loved Daisy Dalrymple series, has lived in America for many years but is (as her accent immediately reveals) English.  As we both write mysteries set in the 1920s, it was fascinating to compare notes.  I have her new book, Anthem For Doomed Youth, on my to-be-read pile.

Perhaps the nicest thing about Crimefest is the complete lack of them-and-us-ism.  I’ve come across this at other events, where some guests are treated like VIP’s and the rest of us are merely invited to marvel.  I’m not quite sure why this doesn’t happen at Crimefest, but it doesn’t.  It’s a terrifically friendly atmosphere, aided by excellent organisation in a very friendly hotel.

Now I suppose I’d better do the ironing!

The Last Post

The last veteran of World War One, Claude Choules, died this week at the grand old age of 111.  It’s very strange to feel that our last living link to the war has gone.  I was born 12 years after the end of the Second World War and, throughout all of my childhood, “The War” – there was only one – was always there.  (When I read Gone With The Wind many years later the constant references to “Before the war” struck a very familiar chord.)

The influence of Second World War was so persuasive that it was only by logical deduction I knew (this is as a kid, remember) that there must have been a first war for there to have been a second.  I came across my Grandfather’s medals in a long-unopened drawer and my mother reacted with a shuddering horror.  The first world war was a sort of “naughty” war, the one we didn’t speak about, so naturally, that was the one I was interested in!

Incidentally, my mother’s reaction was a classic case of distrusting remembered experience. By her account, my granddad, who together with a approximately 100,000 other Britons, volunteered as soon as war was declared, was stuck in a muddy trench for four years with no training, hardly any food, and no respite while idiotic generals blindly sent wave after wave of trusting Tommies off to die.  There wasn’t any point to the war which had been declared because of the incompetence, stupidity and sheer heartlessness of the upper classes.

That is, of course, a total myth.  The German Army of 1914 was very large, very well trained and very well equipped.  The German war aim was total domination of Europe.  The absolutely chilling plans, as detailed by the German Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg in September 1914, envisaged the whole of Europe as a puppet state.  Any neutral country would be allowed a figure-head of a leader but would be under German economic control.  France would be “Forced to her knees” which meant, with free access to the Channel ports, the Germans could “Impose their will on England”.

This was a very real threat.  The Germans could have won and for a long time it seemed very likely they would do just that.  They’d had a long time to prepare for the war, while Britain managed a huge Empire with a tiny army that was more akin to a police force. (Hitler could never understand how the British managed it.)  That tiny army had to expand (Hi, Granddad!) be equipped, meet, fight and defeat the enemy in France.  After all, the Germans had invaded France and Belgium and weren’t shifting unless forcibly removed.

In the end, Britain and the Allies won a stunning victory, but the human cost was frightful.  In the Depression of the Thirties, when the homes fit for heroes had failed to  materialize, “Before the war” was seen as a golden age.  What had the war been for?  No one was any better off as a result.  It had all been, so the myth ran, pointless…

But it wasn’t.  Thanks to men like Claude Choules, my granddad and thousands like them, we lived – freely – to fight another day.  Rest in peace.

What Else Is There To Write About?

There doesn’t seem much else to write about other than The Wedding.  What with the weather and the friendly crowds and everyone exuding good cheer and happiness, it was a brilliant day, wasn’t it?  I watched it on the telly with enough family around to make it feel a bit like a party and the nice thing about watching it in the comfort of one’s own home, is that a) you can put the kettle on as and when b) you can make all the comments that you want to make in church but are constrained by the social decencies from voicing.  Like, isn’t Kate’s dress gorgeous and thank God it’s not a meringue crossed with a circus tent and isn’t she beautiful?  And will her poor father ever get the circulation back in his hand? (Never did a bride grip her Dad’s hand more tightly).  And didn’t the trees in the church look good?  And what on Earth were Eugenie and Beatrice wearing on their heads? And isn’t William handsome? And, come to that, Harry isn’t half bad either.  And aren’t the titchy bridesmaids wonderful, especially the little one, firmly shepherded by the lovely Phillipa Middleton, who kept one hand on her head with an iron grip on her wreath?



London in party mood is a great place.  I was there for the Jubilee and the whole city becomes one happy place where complete strangers talk, don’t push, make friends and are simply glad to be there.  It’s great to stand on Westminster Bridge with no traffic, to have people from all over Britain and all over the world chilling out and being nice, picnicking on the grass and – on occasion – bursting into song.  I don’t know why it’s so great to stand by the Victoria Memorial with thousands of other people, singing their hearts out, but it is.  And there’s another Jubilee next year…

Take the Pascal Moon away from the first moon you thought of…

Hasn’t the weather been wonderful?  I’m only hoping it lasts until Easter Sunday, as we’ve got eight for lunch plus a few more relatives in the afternoon. As Easter is very much a Movable Feast, I hope we can get out in the garden!

Easter is, of course, the season of new life.  The name is the last remnant of the worship of the Anglo-Saxon goddess of the Spring, Estre or Oestre.  As to when Easter should be celebrated (here comes the movable feast bit) we celebrate it on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox, where the day and night are of equal length, causing, if you believe the archeological programmes on the telly, a lot of people long ago to build stone circles and chant a lot.

Now, I must admit, should anyone think I've got this sort of information at my fingertips, I looked it up, but this is where it gets confusing.

The spring equinox – pay attention at the back there! - is fixed for this purpose as March 21 and the "full moon" is actually the paschal moon, which is based on 84-year "paschal cycles" established in the sixth century, would you believe. It rarely corresponds to the astronomical or actual full moon.  Just to make life even more interesting, the Eastern churches, such as the Greek and Russian orthodox, count it up the same way, but use the Julian calendar (on which March 21 is April 3) and a 19-year paschal cycle.

I think I’ll just check the calendar same as usual and celebrate at the same time as everyone else.

The new life bit is absolutely unmissable though. The garden’s gone mental.  Only a few weeks ago, there were bare patches on the so-called lawn and now it looks (from a distance) green.  All over. Mostly.

Mind you, I did help it along. To the intense amusement of my Other Half, I bough a pair of rigid plastic sandals with huge spikes sticking out the bottom and walked around the grass, aerating the lawn.  Apparently grass-roots like a bit of fresh air, which makes you wonder why it grows underground.

I mean, if  the roots likes air that much, why not stick them above ground to take a breather now and again, rather than waiting for someone with huge spikes sticking out of the soles of their feet to come and give it a dose of the much needed?  It seems like a rum state of affairs to me and one that might have given Darwin a bit of pause for thought.  It’s hardly survival of the fittest, is it?  Although, by the time two dogs and various humans have romped over it, it’s more a case of the survival of the flattest.

Happy Easter everyone!  I hope you get lots of eggs.

Simple machines

It was my birthday yesterday (21 again!) and my lovely Other Half bought me a new sewing machine.

New to me, that is, as it’s actually one of the last made by the Glasgow factory in 1934.  The thing is, it’s so wonderfully simple.  Lucy loves it because it looks like something out of Sylvanian Families (you know, those cute toy dressed rabbits and squirrels and so on that come with little houses and lots of stuff for children to collect) but it’s actually a very solid, beautifully made machine that works.

I’ve had an electric sewing machine before and the principle is more or less the same as a hand operated machine, but the damn thing goes so fast that when you make a bish of things (and as a very plain sewer, that’s what I tend to do) it very soon becomes an inextricable mix of knots and problems.  This goes at my pace (slow) but it works.

Understandable mechanical stuff is one of life’s more simple pleasures. Don’t get me wrong, electronic stuff is great – I’m typing this on a computer, I’ll watch a DVD on the TV later today and I love my ipod but you can’t see how those things work, can you?  You can’t lift the lid and see cogs connected to wheels powered by springs or whatever. Being able to see how things work puts us in control in a way that pushing a button simply can’t.  I think that’s why understandable machines, such as steam engines, old aeroplanes, vintage cars and stonking great big engines in old cotton mills or historic ships generate such great affection.

Oh, and I’ve made a tea towel!

Spring Forward

I made a garden gate this week.  Not that, you understand, the Gordon-Smith garden has been hitherto open to the public to wander in at will.  No, this is an additional gate to stop the ruddy dog howling at the bottom of the garden.

Lucky, the aforesaid Ruddy Dog, only has three legs.  We got him from the dogs’ home in this tripoded condition (I imagine his card was marked as soon as he was called “Lucky” by his previous owner).  He lost his leg by taking issue with a lorry. Despite making a fair old bit of it, the Dumb Chum hates noise.

And, at the bottom of the garden is a street with children racing up and down with roller skates, skateboards, little prams, bikes and all sorts of things with incredibly noisy wheels.  Lucky, taking this as a personal affront, goes and howls through the gate at them.  And, by the way, when I say “howl” I mean it.  It’s not a polite little wuff.  The animal stands there simply baying; take a line through the hound of the Baskervilles in the big scene when it comes tearing out of the Dartmoor mist and you’ll get the idea.

So I made another gate to enclose the area that leads to gate proper, if you see what I mean, solely to baffle the dog.  And, when working on the gate, it was totally weird how quickly the light went once the sun went down.  Yes, yes, yes, I know, night is a well-observed phenomena and has been with us on a fairly regular basis for some time, but we’re so used to having light literally at the click of a switch, it’s strange to have to stop work just because it’s dark.

Next week, after the clocks have Sprung Forward an hour, I’d have another hour of daylight to work in and that extra hour is why, during the First World War, British Summer Time was introduced.  Although the idea was first proposed by an Englishman, William Willett, an early-bird type, in 1907, it took until 21^st May 1916 for the government to be convinced.  Germany and Austria had introduced Daylight Saving Time on 30^th April of that year and that seemed, to some parliamentarians, a good reason why we shouldn’t have it in Britain.   Lord Balfour, obviously a man who wanted to be prepared for every eventuality, asked his fellow peers to consider the plight of twins born during the change of the clock, with the result that the second-born might be held to have been born earlier than the first-born and thus mess up the first-born’s inheritance.  Wow.

Anyway, we got BST and in the Second World War there was double Summer Time.  There’s a story of an American GI out with a girl and looking for some privacy.  When moved on by a policeman, he said in disgust, “Say, doesn’t it ever dark in this country?”  Poor guy.

Don’t forget to put your clocks forward!

This blog is not about a bus with a gas-bag on the roof

We’ve all met gas-bags on the top of buses. The woman who won’t stop talking, the man on his mobile phone… Here’s a picture of one in real life

I’ve put the picture in because my pal, Jane Finnis, was astounded that such things could be, and it does look a bit odd, I must say.  It should really have gone with the last blog but better late than never, as they say.  Jane voices her incredulity in the comments.  Mind you, Jane’s last post on her blog, (have a look at it on http://janefinnisblog.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/beware-the-ides-of-march/) left me scratching my head a bit.

It’s about how the Romans dated things.  You know, as in, “Shall we meet up on the 19^th?” “No, make it the twentieth, instead.”  You couldn’t have this conversation in Ancient Rome.  They had a peculiar system, involving counting backwards and forwards and probably turning round three times, crossing your fingers and making a wish.   Considering how we’ve all been told that the Romans were a red-hot superpower, with efficiency as their middle name, the truly bizarre way they worked out their calendar does make you think a bit.  Jane and myself once did a talk at the library together which more or less turned into a debate on which of us had the best historical period to work with.  Jane loves her Romans dearly and was a persuasive speaker, but I think I’ll stick to my Agatha Christie-like 1920’s.  At least you can get the date right to actually turn up at the talk without mental gymnastics and possible recourse to black magic.

Talking about Agatha Christie-ish stuff, there’s been a dickens of a fuss this week caused by the remarks of Brian True-May, the executive producer of Midsomer Murders. Mr True-May said that the success of the programme is down to – get this -  “The lack of black and Asian faces.” He told the Radio Times, the official magazine of the BBC, “that the programme “wouldn’t work” if there was any racial diversity in the village life.
“We are,” said Mr True-May, “the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it like that.”

I loved the response of David Edwards, a café manager in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, the real-life setting of the fictional Midsomer.  Mr Edwards is black, and he reckons that Midsomer is the safest place in Britain to be black, granted that every one of the victims of the 272 murders to date have been white.

True-May’s comments, apart from being offensive, are nonsense, of course.  The murderous English village, in all its fascinating glory, is associated indelibly with Agatha Christie, and her villages are very diverse indeed.

Mysterious foreigners?  They turn up by the bucketload.   Not black or Asians, particularly – this is pre-War Britain, after all – but Greeks, Italians, French, Eastern Europeans etc., etc.  Poirot himself is Belgian, of course, and often travels to fairly exotic locations.  “Englishness” is a subject which often comes up.  Take this, for example, from Murder On The Orient Express. The very English Colonel Arbuthnot comes to the defence of the very English Mary Debenham.

“About Miss Debenham,” he   said rather awkwardly. “You can take it from me that she’s all right. She’s a pukka sahib.”

Flushing a little, he withdrew.

“What,” said Dr. Constantine with interest, “does a pukka sahib mean?” (He’s Greek, you’ll notice.)

“It means,” said Poirot, “that Miss Debenham’s father and brothers were at the same kind of school as Colonel Arbuthnot.”

Time and again Agatha Christie punctures that pompous idea of “Englishness” with that most English weapon, humour.  Dave Edwards, the café manager, was pictured grinning his head off.  So who’s got the last laugh now?