Yes, it’s a bit quiet

I’ve a stack of things I want to write about…

…little elf’s best friend a week

…dudelet’s James Bond habit and the perils of GameCube meltdowns

…the new Broooooce album (though I did tweet a song by song as-it-happens review earlier

…a large pile of books

…my struggle to translate and re-structure draft 3.5 of the work-in-progress via index cards

and so on and on.

But I have this ‘anti-job’ interview to get through and its swallowing up my processing capacity like a black hole swallows light and gravity (or a really beastly mixed metaphor swallows one’s will to live, come to think of it. Sorry about that).

Anyway, it’ll all be over by Thursday evening and normal service will be resumed.

Oh God, I don’t know…

Friend: Do you still listen to music the way you did when you were a teenager?

Me: Yes. Absolutely. More so.

Friend: How?

Me: I don’t know.

***

Dudelet: You aren’t an author. You write into a computer.

Me: I might not be an author but I’m a writer.

Dudelet: You aren’t a writer, you use a computer. That’s not writing.

Me: I pour words into blank white spaces, even on a computer.

Dudelet: You’re still not a writer.

***

[Dad Who Writes, alone in his office after a short, unofficial office party. He is listening to the Jim Carroll Band playing 'People Who Died']

Dad Who Writes: Time to go home.

[Hits publish. Switches off computer. Leaves.]

Notes from Florence

Yesterday.

I was in a tiny cafe in one of the arched stone niches housing the many tiny shops that surround San Lorenzo in the middle of Florence. Or Firenze. I was drinking coffee, eating a warm muffin and writing in a plain notebook with a black pen.*

Florence is beautiful, a little severe and mostly very elegant in a self-conscious sort of way. Like so many medieval towns, it seems to be made for getting creatively lost in. The streets are narrow and shadowed by the cliff-like facades of the many palazzos. The roads tend to weave and intersect sinuously rather than the jumble and tangle of Nice’s old city or the pre-Great Fire City of London (I remember it well).

It’s warm here, almost muggy, in fact. But the natives are swaddled in scarves and puffa jackets and I feel quite the barbarian Northerner.

I’ve visited a big city library, cunningly distributed over three floors of a rambling palazzo centred on a damp green courtyard filled with weathered sculptures and an old tall ash. Modernist doors and gates merge into the worn stones and yellow plaster seamlessly. On the wide roof terrace that occupies the whole right side of the building, students and workers are sitting out doors, reading, talking and smoking. Florence is a university town and a European University at that and the library corridors and hallways are full of many languages besides Italian.

The  Ponto Vecchio, an ancient Bridge linking the east and west halves of the city, is a bit more flash  than the elegant Renaissance matron the rest of the city ostensibly offers.  The bridge itself is like a medieval shopping mall built across a river, though instead of the original butchers, the modern day occupants of the shops and stalls sell gold and coral trinkets. One shop has probably denuded an entire barrier reef of red coral. Three tall archways in the centre provide spectacular views of the densely built-up river banks and of the River Arno, in full flood and brown with sediment washed down from the mountains. It’s crowded and full of courting couples asking you to take their picture. The city council might want to consider polite signs suggesting the Italian equivalent of “Get a room.”

A monastery, 800 years of crumbling accretion, has been reduced to a dark, lofty chapel attended by four worshippers and a lone Dominican nun. It is a Baroque space but the austere, Italian kind of Baroque depending on well timed, tasteful flourishes rather than to the garish architectural wedding cake the term evokes in English. Or do I mean its Classical and Classically beautiful?

The streets are crowded with school children, shoppers and bicycles and there are streets upon streets full of bookshops. I have yet to see a MacDonalds. This is a literate society that knows how to eat.

There are policemens with guns. This always makes a Brit jump.

I tried to visit the Uffizi but the staff are on strike. In fact, all the museums are shut due to strike action so after I finish my coffee I walk some more.

I am in Italy, off the map, off the Net and alone for two hours and I love it.

The palazzo – them again – may present a stern face to the world but each one is built slightly differently, reflecting hundreds of years of palace dwellers and changing fashions in palaces. It could be the details of the windows, the shading of the plaster on the facade, the size and pitch of the eaves or the coats of arms discreetly embedded here and there. They are coloured for August, not for the grey muddled sky of today. Huge arches open into their depths like massive caves. I claim the privilege of the ignorant tourist and wander into a few. I find myself in banks, more libraries, residences and building sites. Behind the facades, there are gardens and jumbles of improvised buildings, terraces and roof gardens, and yet more improvising. It looks like the underside of Florence has been a work-in-progress for eight hundred years. It’s where people actually live. The other main buildings are churches. Church and monastery building was a kind of competitive sport in medieval times.

Women police officers in long black coats and white helmets shaped like old-fashioned firemen’s helmets. Newspaper stands, a square full of scooters. Streets of shoemakers, leather shops and toy shops signalled by Pinocchio and (in one case) a full-sized wooden model of a motorcycle. The narrow side streets are packed with artisans, tiny boutiques, carpenters and paper makers.

No-one rocks white dreads and piercings like an Italian girl in green shot-silk leggings.

I get lost, resort to Google Maps and find my way back to our hotel, eight guest rooms on the first floor of a 19th century office block. The staircases seem to float in mid-air from the side-on perspective of the next flight down. It’s homely and welcoming, barring the enormous ceilings, plaster mouldings and massively dignified furniture of dark wood. I text supermum and tell her I want us to live here. She agrees. This is probably impractical for the the school run.

Today, I’ve been working and this evening, Italian colleagues will take us to dinner.

Tomorrow, I’m back in London.

I do so love an adventure.

*You’re right. I probably was feeling very pleased with myself. Well, that doesn’t happen very often.

Hadrian’s Walk #2: Archaeology

I’m up and blogging at 5am after waking up with a sore shoulder in a roomful of other men (I sleep awkwardly in new places). No-one was snoring but I was petrified of turning over noisily and waking someone. So I got up. We’re staying at the North Farm Bunkhouse and it’s quiet. Which at 5am kind of figures.

So, Day 1. Fifteen or sixteen miles from Wallsend to Heddon-On-The-Wall. We started off in a huge gang of 35 and the first few hundred yards felt like an invading army swamping the cycle path. The cyclists sharing the Hadrian’s Path were surprisingly relaxed (London cyclists would have simply mown us down) but everyone soon started to spread out into little groups of two, four or six depending on pace and level of acquaintance. Everybody seemed to be getting along tremendously well. Actually, everyone was getting along tremendously well. One of the many amazing things about this whole business has been the ongoing way it demonstrates the tendency of strangers to be well, excellent to each other. The other interesting thing has been how nobody so far seems to have felt the need to authenticate the ongoing excellence of everything by Twittering or blogging about it (I’m always a bit sceptical about events so good that everyone has to constantly stream how good they actually are to the outside world. Though I suppose I’m doing just that, technically).

I initially formed a group by myself. Basically, I was a little intimidated and needed to listen to some music and find a way into the whole thing. Meanwhile, I watched Tyneside passing and played spot-the-major-parent-blogger. So far I’ve seen Jo Beaufoix and Single Parent Dad. I haven’t actually spoken to them yet – it feels a bit too strange or difficult. Apart from Dan, every time I’ve met an actual blogger I’ve been hopeless – talking to much, interrupting, the full nervous over-compensator thing*. I just don’t come across well. I’ve spoken to some of the American bloggers, who are friendly and tremendously brave  (travelling thousands and thousands of miles to hang out for a week with complete strangers – talk about virtual bungee jumping!) but not in the context of being a blogger. I’d also probably do a lot better if I could only remember all these names.**

This section of the walk was interesting but not pretty. The Tyne must be one of the most historically industrialised stretches of river this side of the Eastern Thames or the Mersey. And that industry is dead. We walked past shuttered warehouses, grimy light industry estates, long demolished docks and truncated streets with barricaded corner shops. The shipbuilders of the Tyne were gone. Things changed has we reached the city centre and the regeneration centre pieces of the Science Centre, an extraordinary, shimmering, fluid body of of glass undulating like the waves it reflected, and the mighty Baltic Centre. Bridges, old and new, spanned the Tyne in a cavalcade of engineering and architectural savvy, from Victorian ironwork to the steel half loop of the new footbridge. Two tall ships were at anchor with their young crews spread out along the main yardarms learning the drill to unfurl the mainsails.

We reached a toilet and a number of us had a 20 minute toilet break enforced by the automatic cleaning cycle of the lavatory (tip for visiitng Newcastle – bring change. It’s only a cash free economy in the most basic of ways). We were all very intrigued as to what was actually going on in there (the cleaning was evidently machine heavy and noisy)  but nobody volunteered to stay inside the booth and film it. I fell in with three of Dan’s friends who’s names I’ve shamefully forgotten (Richard? Ian? A woman who writes with Richard who’s a poet? As I said, if I was better at remembering names I’d be so much better at this unstructured conversation thing) and they were great company. Woman-who’s-a-poet leant me a stick – they were all striding along with those ski type walking sticks and I was feeling left out – and we began to make good time.

The other side of Gateshead, we began to encounter the ghosts of regenerations past. It began to get more rural, though the path ran parallel to motorways and electricity pylons squatted astride the path like giant lunar landers. Modern ruins of factories and ‘Enterprize Centres’ loomed up on either side of the path, embedded in fast-growing shrubs and creepers like Mayan temples. One seemed to be an abandoned multi-story carpark. Another was a large barn built out of red planks, many of which seemed to have fallen.

Eventually, pylons, concrete ruins and motorways disappeared and we found the river. For a moment, it looked like the Rhine – church towers, high sloping banks of woodland and a broad, fast flow. Then we turned away up a steep, slope and did the first tough climb of the walk so far. Thankfully it was the last stretch of the day and we emerged out of a maze of bridle paths and golf course access roads into the middle of the new build estates attached to Heddon Village.

As ever, a word to our sponsor, or rather sponsored. Dan’s Herculean efforts to marshall all these walkers and bloggers are in aid of the Joseph Salmon Trust and you can always chip in via my own Just Giving page.

*I talk to much and I talk about the wrong things. I fall into lecture mode too easily and constantly find people listening to me politely as I rabbit on and on. Poor Dan, another friend of his and his father-in-law joined me for breakfast yesterday morning and I somehow got the conversation onto concentration camps and the British expertise in same. I mean, hello? What was I thinking? But that always happens. I probably need lessons of something. God, how I envy other people’s talent for being likeable. I’m reasonably likeable provided you can keep me contained within the persona expressed on this blog. But meet me in a real world context and it’s horrid!

**The other thing I should mention is how sensitive people are in this group. Everyone goes to a lot of trouble to make sure I or the other slightly shyer members are included without being in the least all Hemulen and overwhelming about it. I should especially note Dan’s wonderful father-in-law.

Writing/Why it’s quiet around here

Unfortunately, I have to sleep. That’s the key problem. If I could drop the sleeping, I could do everything. Though I’d probably end up over-committing the additional 6 or 7 hours I’d clawed back through adopting a non-somniac lifestyle and I’d be back where I started.

Either way, my poor blog is being neglected, bloggers I love aren’t being read and my whole position vis à vis the blogosphere is seriously in doubt.

It’s Writing’s fault.

I’m Writing again at the moment and “Writing” tends to get in the way of any other kind of “writing”. Do you find that, sole-surviving, patient, beloved reader? I’ve committed to the 500 words a day programme ( a kind of reverse twelve step for writers previously in recovery), am doing a creative writing group for people with a substantial Work-In-Progress (or WIP as we Writers like to say) and am generally doing my best to address the nom de blog of Dad Who Writes.

Face it, “Dad Who Doesn’t Write” is nowhere near as snappy.

Oh, and I’ve still got two small children, a full-time job and an ongoing search for the perfect new post that’ll move all of us out of London.

So I’m hardly blogging at the moment and am likely to be very sporadic until I’ve finished the second “reading” draft of what I’m working on in about two months time. I’m still very much about on twitter and you’ll find me on Litopia as well but blogging needs to take a back seat for now. Writing is a core part of the ongoing conversation with myself about who I am and blogging is currently writing deferred.

This will change! So do check in every now and then.

P.S. What am I writing? I’ve shelved the other two novels (one finished but not very good, the other derailed by doing a part-time masters through 06-08) and am powering through a middle grade/young adult novel with a parallel world/magic/science fantasy sort of context. I’m excited about it. I’m pretty clear about what the next two or three following novels could be about and I’m enjoying working on it tremendously. It’s both a big departure from my previous work and a return to what I originally loved best as a reader many years ago. So now you know.