Le Chat Noir

This is Paris, ancient and modern, an international city for jazz lovers. From l'Odéon Métro, we amble along narrow winding streets into the heart of the Montparnasse Latin Quarter, where the bygone street lamps are glowing orange halos. The warm August night has a mellow whispering people hum. The air suffused with the odours from Bistros, is a pungent mix of garlic, onions, and grilled steak. A vivid luminescence from the city lights tints the sky.

Le Chat Noir jazz club has plush gold and burgundy decor. On the walls gold framed photographs of the jazz luminaries: Brubeck, Coltrane, Davis, and others. At the long glass top mahogany bar, Moroccan waiters serve wine to fashionable French jazz fans. The small tables are occupied by excited American college students, loud gossiping Germans, and grinning Italian tourists pose as cameras click. A tenor sax, piano, and double bass, riff "Night and Day" to whistles and applause. Latecomers jostle for space, and beer spills on lacquered table-tops. Wine glasses clink as eyes touch, dancing couples smooch, the atmosphere in the club is jocular.

After an hour of Cole Porter jazz standards a buzz of anticipation rises. The star attraction is the aging high priestess of soul, Nina Simone. A long drum roll announces the Diva. Simone has rapturous applause, her plaintive, husky, "Ne me quitte pas," (Don't leave me) stills the captivated audience. When Simone completes her forty minute repertoire, she has a thrilled standing ovation with loud encores. Dedicated fans smother her piano with huge floral bouquets.

We exit merrily from the huddle in the club, for a stroll along the left bank to Pont Saint Michel, where the Seine writhes like a captive black snake. Below the bank at Notre Dame, the bright pearl moon illuminates the river with silver ripples. A fresh cooling breeze follows us to l'Odéon, where we use our return train tickets to Vavin Métro, on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. If the night has a thousand eyes, many in Paris are slow to shutter. Jazz in this city beats into the early hours, with irresistible, memorable, romantic tunes and lyrics.

In Search of England

Beyond Cromer, from Cley-next-the-sea – which Norfolk men pronounce Clye – the level salt marshes run for miles towards a thin ridge of yellow sand, beyond which is the ocean. The tide goes out for miles and returns at a canter. It is desolate. The wind whispers. The sea birds cry. No men but naturalists disturb the solitude of the salt marshes.

The wind blows through the miles of sea lavender, great lakes of pink and purple, and the gold clouds pile up over the edge of the sea and roll landwards like great galleons. The light, falling on this flat land squarely, intensifies with colour so that you cry out at sudden glories in the painful knowledge that nothing but water-colour can tell the story truly. The sea marshes are full of life. A blue grey-grey heron lifts noiselessly above the green reeds and sails away with a slow beat of great wings, his long legs held stiff behind him. He settles. With keen eyes you can see his head lifted to the level of the reeds watching you.

White gulls sit in rows in the shells of wrecked fishing boats. There is a sudden flurry of white and a great screaming! Up they go in the air, orange feet tucked into soft white undersides, wheeling, turning, poised in the air motionless, then down, down like white darts with a sudden outflinging of orange feet; for the tide is coming in, rushing in, swirling in up creeks and the twisty channels! One minute the oozy banks are dry; the next they are alive with a brown snake of water that writhes and bubbles, lapping the bright fringe of samphire at the edges.

And it is lonely, with the water lapping and the birds crying and the wind pressing the blue thrift backwards from the sea, for this is a strange No Man’s Land: it is not land and it is not water, but a queer beautiful region half land, half water; and it seems to you that the sea fights for it daily and the grass defends it. When you turn your back to the salt marshes you see, far away, flat meadows and green land and villages, clear-etched, and grey flint church towers rising above the trees. To the left and to the right a thin line of woodland is the colour of the bloom on a purple grape.

All along the coast at the edge of the great salt marsh are curious little villages which were once seaports. Huge flint churches in desolate meadows tell you that yesterday this coast was alive with men and commerce. There is Blakeney, whose church has an extra tower, once a lighthouse, now eloquently ruined; there is Cley; there is Salthouse; there is Weybourne, in whose ancient bay the wild-fowl nest; there is Wells-next-the-sea – all old seaports which the sea has deserted.

This is a curious part of the world. A region barely touched by tourists. A region rich in history and packed full of atmosphere. You can stand on the salt marshes towards the end of the day, with the sun mellow over the windy fields of sea lavender, and it takes little to imagine the Viking ships beaching on the distant strand - the big, red bearded men wading to shore, dragging their great double-bladed swords through the purple marshes, shading their eyes to the distant land.

There is a melancholy over the sea marshes quite impossible to describe. You feel that it is good to be alone here, good to wander over the featureless land, listening to the shrill crying of the birds and to the sound of the wind in the grass.

In 1926 a young journalist named H.V. Morton took a light-hearted motor-car journey around England. Setting off from London in his bull-nosed Morris, which he named Maud, he quickly became enchanted with the romance of the open road. He then wrote In Search of England, which describes his journey and became the best-loved UK travel book of the 20th century. (Cley Windmill)

The Memory Keeper's Daughter

One of Kim Edwards many strengths as a writer is her chacterizations. The novel is finely paced like a good tune and compelling. Edwards keeps the reader guessing, with her story of the gradual disintegration of a marriage after twin babies are born, a boy and girl. Their father a medic, who has to deliver the babies during a snowstorm, quickly recognises their daughter has Downs Syndrome. From the compelling first chapter it's obvious Dr David Henry is a perfectionist and controlling, who deeply loves his wife Norah. He's also a man holding secrets like lead weights, who never discusses his past. David makes the greatest mistake of his life by informing Norah, their daughter has died at birth. Caroline, the nurse present at the birth, becomes embroiled in his lie, which radically changes her life.

The period of the novel spans 1964 to 1989. Norah's grief and David's guilt is a double edged sword in their relationship. One the reader becomes embroiled with. What we have here, is the life journey of David, Norah, and Caroline the nurse, who remains central throughout. Love, tragedy, the burden of deceit, infidelity, courage and redemption, are key features. A superbly crafted novel, one which progresses each of the characters life transitions with some surprises.

The iPod Touch

Wheee....! In recent weeks I downloaded 109 free podcasts from iTunes. Those are mostly authors discussing their books such as: Alice Walker, Garrison Keillor, Geraldine Brooks, and Carol Shields. When purchasing the ipod Touch, I really wasn’t sure that I would use it as much as I have. I’m over the moon with it. I’m glad now, I lashed out the cash for one with 32GB. The New Yorker short stories are a feast. Well, every podcast I have is a feast. I also have audio books in the ipod. Last night I listened to some of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone stories. He has a delightful humour and a lovely warm voice.

I don’t think audio books will take over from printed, anymore than those in devices like the Kindle are likely to. Carol Shields, who won the Pulitzer for The Stone Dairies, made this comment some years ago: “Twenty five years from now I predict a rediscovery of the book as we know it. Suddenly people will be saying of books: how portable, how compact, how direct, how cost-effective, how intimate, how blessedly silent, how vivid, how enduring, how interactive, how revolutionary! Quote from the Vancouver Village.

I’m currently dipping into My Mistress Sparrow Is Dead: Love Stories from Chekov to Munro, edited by Jeffrey Eugenides. Spring in Fialta by Vladimir Nabokov has turned out to be a delightful surprise, particularly, as many years ago I read and loathed Lolita. I never rated that novel as worthy of the many accolades that it had. It's not the quality of Nabokov's writing that I have issues with. It's the objectification of Lolita and her seduction, which justifies rape.

There are many, many, writers work I enjoy immensely. One such is Sue Monk Kidd, her Dance of the Dissident Daughter is a memoir I cherish. I loved reading her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees. This UTube video is superb. SMK is an excellent speaker and she doesn’t aggravatingly um, eh or ah, to any extent. People do that when nervous, it is very distracting if it’s excessive. Mostly, she discusses her more recent novel The Mermaid Chair.

Things Pending

Apart from revising my short stories, I'm doing reading prep for the Oxford writing seminars, hence, I feel like a novice again. Some trepidation, which I have, is not usual when there are blank spaces to be filled. My days now consist of writing in the mornings, the usual home tasks have the afternoons, and evenings are taken up with academic reading. Before sleep claims me, I allocate two hours to read in bed for pleasure. This pattern of working is bringing structure into my life again. Something I need and had missed near the end of last year.

The thrill of easing into early retirement has gone now. Think it was essential to be a sloth for a while, to just drift like flotsam. Have reading binges, and fritter my days away. But in doing too much of that I was becoming aimless - and - a stranger to myself. Last night, I met up with friends at the Red Lion pub. We talked about how teaching melds with our identity perceptions. Saying goodbye to a professional life never felt like a loss. I see now, that it can be. That void has to be filled with something more purposeful. We're on the threshold of carving new pathways for ourselves.

The winter months are confining. The daylight hours pass swiftly; the dark evenings are long shadows. Winter has never been my best season. Even so, I shouldn't spurn this natural cycle. Hidden in the settled loam, are the roots of life. It's heartening to see fresh shoots popping up here and there in the garden. A garden that otherwise, has a forlorn stillness. The birds are busy surviving. They have few songs to sing, not until spring is awake for their tunes. The old walnut tree is spindly, looking quite fragile. That tree fools me every year. It has a sudden surge, which turns it into a dancing green giant.

This morning, I spied a robin red breast. He caught my gaze, and quickly flew away. Before the afternoon swiftly vanishes, I'm off to Blue Barn Farm for cat food. Purrz......:)

Manger Square

Until 1995, a feature of Bethlehem's Manger Square was the Israeli police station, a constant reminder of the occupation. Tour buses came and went decanting pilgrims to visit the Nativity Church. The square was also a car parking area, where small mop headed boys managed to extract shekels from me to guard the car.

One child named Ibrahim, a persuasive entrepreneur, who was no more than eight or nine years of age, inevitably succeeded in charming ten shekels from me. Even though the regular price was no more than one or two, I always succumbed. Thinking that perhaps his family were poor and the money would at least buy some bread and milk. It is just as likely that was spent on or some other item. It mattered not, the urchin had charm.

We always haggled, and Ibrahim faithfully protected the car, even though I was sure that was never really necessary. Ours was a game that we played out, and Ibrahim had the dignity of earning his shekels. From a cafeteria vantage point next to the Tabash brothers shop, I observed Ibrahim ply his trade, with great success. On one occasion, I offered him twenty shekels, a gift for the Eid feast. Ibrahim refused, saying it was too much. We eventually settled on fifteen. Ibrahim will be a young man now imprisoned behind a wall - Israel's propaganda security barrier.