Seeing is Believing

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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.