Canary Island Novels - Coming Soon.

 

Miel de Palma from La Gomera

Unusually, I've been neglecting this blog. 

We had a small interruption from Storm Eowyn when we lost all power, including heating, for three chilly days, played a lot of Monopoly and Scrabble by candlelight but eventually had to take refuge in a hotel for one happy night. We stayed in a wonderful old hotel in Ayr called The Chestnuts, and I can recommend it if you're ever looking for somewhere to stay or just to eat. They were beyond welcoming - even putting an extra heater in the room to thaw us out. The bed was incredibly comfortable, the food was fabulous and the staff were kind and helpful. I wish we could have stayed on for a few more nights, but Scottish Power turned up and switched everything on again so we had to go home. 

Anyway, the knock on effect of that was a certain amount of delay with my latest project, which involves the first two novels in what I hope will be a trilogy of books set in the gorgeous Canary Isles, but especially on one of my favourite places of all time - La Gomera. 

There is a long and complicated story to these Canary Island novels, which I'll write about in a later post. We had a couple of blissful winters there when my husband was working as a yacht charter skipper. I've spent the past few months editing the first two books in the series. And then editing them again. And again. Ever more reluctant to let them go.

Essentially, it's the story of a cross-cultural relationship and I suppose one of the other inspirations behind it was my parents' own long and loving marriage. Mum was from a working class Leeds Irish family. Dad was a refugee from an aristocratic landowning Polish family. They met at the dancing in Leeds. And they never ever stopped loving each other. 

Much later, when I wanted to write about this kind of relationship, albeit in quite a different setting, I started on these books. It was a rocky road and it has taken years and several incarnations including a radio play.  Latterly, I think I just couldn't bear to leave the people and the setting, so because I too want to know what happens next, there will have to be a third novel.

In many ways it's a simple love story - but with inevitable complications. 

Anyway, now that the files are off to the designer, they'll be coming out soon as eBooks and paperbacks: Hera's Orchard and Bitter Oranges. Watch this space for more about them.

Good friends have just come back from La Gomera, and they brought us a bottle of Miel de Palma - palm honey, which is a sweet syrup produced from the sap of palm trees - and delicious. A very fitting taste of the island where we spent some of the happiest times of our life and where - in some alternate universe - we might still be living. 

 

It Never Rains: Innocent Times, Beautiful Song, Beautiful Performance

Me, in Wuthering Heights mode, with the lovely Andy 

The other week, I was driving along with BBC R2 playing in the background. My husband is addicted to the Popmaster Quiz, although he seldom gets more than three points. Neither do I, unless it's something from the late sixties or seventies. I don't often have Radio 2 on in the car but suddenly, Ken Bruce played this song, and I was transported back to my very early twenties, just finished university, with - theoretically anyway - the world at my feet. Anything seemed possible.

It was a very happy time. I was about to go off to work in Finland for a couple of years and this song, although in reality it's a rueful song about broken dreams, took me right back to that time and that feeling, as some songs do. Especially Albert Hammond's songs.

I suspect this video is from Top of the Pops or something like it. Look at the dancing girls, slightly shy, slightly awkward, aware of the cameras. These were more innocent times, but also dangerous times, mostly because of that very innocence. You can't watch this genuinely lovely performance without remembering that the programme - and the company - had also played host to one of the worst sexual predators the world has seen: Jimmy Saville of evil memory. 

Nevertheless, there's something happy about this unfussy performance, from the clever lyrics to the gentle way the singer engages with the youthful audience that makes you recall the best of that time. 

Watching it, I looked at the young girls dancing and thought back to myself at that age. The pressures on young women to conform to some hyper-sexualised image were there, but they were certainly fewer. Look at their not-terribly-glamorous clothes, look at the make-up or lack of it, look at their hair. We loved clothes and shopping and make-up just as much as girls do now, although most of us couldn't afford to spend too much on them. I remember wearing a long regency style Marks and Spencer's nightdress to a party, a party at which an older woman observed disapprovingly that some young women were wearing nightdresses at parties ...

 I was, however, lucky enough to have a mum who was a talented seamstress - her sisters had worked in tailoring - and she made me fashionable clothes from Vogue Paris Original patterns: a midi dress, a Jean Muir dress, a Doctor Zhivago coat in black wool, with fur around neck and cuffs. But nobody was posting endlessly doctored selfies online, few young women thought they needed plastic surgery to conform to some impossible standard of femininity, and magazines weren't posting pictures of female celebrities and slagging them off for looking anything but perfect. If we were bullied (as I was, mercilessly, in my early teens, moving to Scotland from England) we could at least escape once school was over, retreating into our own little bubble, with music for company. 

I've always had a soft spot for Hammond who is - incredibly - 78 now. Born in Gibraltar, a British national, he is one of our greatest singer songwriters and so often, when you love a song, you'll discover that he wrote it. Songs like Nothing's Gonna Stop Us, and 99 Miles From LA and Moonlight Lady. He's not always as appreciated as he should be, but then prophets have no honour in their own lands and all that. 

Nevertheless, thanks for playing It Never Rains, Ken. I could (and quite often do) listen to it over and over again.