Obsessed, moi?

Over the last few days, I have been pestering members of my family to look for a particular very old photograph that used to belong to my paternal grandfather. I want the photograph because I'd like to blog about it - even if it never comes to light, I'll probably still blog about it, but it would naturally be much nicer if I  had the photo to share.

I have very few photographs of my grandparents before they became grandparents - really just this snap of my paternal grandmother as a young woman (left) and a posed wedding photograph of her and my grandfather. So the photograph I am looking for cannot be in my possession; there is nowhere for it to hide in a collection of two! I have therefore been badgering other people to look amongst their own things. So far nothing has come to light but I am still hoping.

Yesterday evening I was relating the progress (or lack of it) to date to my husband, who looked at me with a slightly quizzical expression and asked me why I was so obsessed with this particular photo - at least, I remember him as asking me why I was so "obsessed"; he remembers himself expressing it a bit more diplomatically - "delusionally fixated" perhaps, or something like that.

I'm not sure what I said at the time but I did think about this for a while after the conversation. I do have a bit of a habit of getting fixated on things. Before this photograph, it was the story of the local minister who was hanged in 1682 for infanticide (I have still not entirely finished being fixated with that but have been a bit sidetracked, not to mention ill last week). Before the minister, it was the Silver and then the Ruby Fairy Books. Hmmm, maybe my husband has a point...

To be honest, I don't really know why I want to lay hands on that photograph so very badly. But over the years I have learnt that these little obsessions always lead somewhere. Not necessarily to the place you thought they were going to take you, but always somewhere interesting.

For example, my lifelong "thing" about the ghost stories of M.R.James took an unexpected turn when we moved to Germany in 2001 and found ourselves living within close travelling distance of Steinfeld Abbey, scene of The Treasure of Abbot Thomas. Once I knew that Steinfeld was so close, I couldn't rest until I'd visited it. I wrote an article about it. And then another article. I researched the Steinfeld glass at the headquarters of the Eifel Club in Düren, poring over articles now nearly a century old, and printed in eye-watering Gothic type. I was, for a while, completely obsessed with the topic. Out of that obsession came the question, If it was possible for the Steinfeld glass to vanish for a century and be rediscovered, why shouldn't there be another set of fabulous and priceless mediaeval windows still out there, hidden somewhere? And that was where the idea for The Glass Demon came from.

Come to that, the idea for my very first novel, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, sprouted from a fascination with the folk legends of Bad Münstereifel, where we lived for seven years. When I first developed an interest in those stories, I had no idea of making them into a novel. I was just enthralled by the stories themselves.

I don't know what will come of any of my more recent fixations such as the photograph with which I began this post! Perhaps nothing; perhaps a blog post; perhaps something more. One thing is for certain, however; I couldn't possibly spend the amount of time I do researching obscure topics if I didn't have a passion for them. Some of those fixations have proved incredibly fruitful. I guess, as I told my husband, it's just the way I work! People quite often ask authors where they get their ideas; mine mostly seem to come from those funny little obsessions that nobody else quite understands!

Above: a previous fixation - Steinfeld Abbey! 

NB I will blog at some future point about the photograph - I'm still crossing my fingers that someone may find it! 

Death of a memory

This week, in spite of the deadline for my next book, The Demons of Ghent, looming large on the horizon, I have taken some time off to recover from last week's very nasty virus. This has meant that I have had a bit of time not only to rest and watch rubbishy horror films, but also to catch up with friends online and do a bit of blogging.

Even though my current work in progress is set in Flanders, I have spent much of this week thinking about my former home town of Bad Münstereifel in Germany. I have submitted a guest post about the town and its influence on my writing to another blog and I've recently exchanged emails with some of my friends there. I've also been watching a documentary about Bad Münstereifel by German channel WDR online this morning, with tears running down my face.

Here is a link to the programme on WDR's website: DieStory: Unsere Stadt soll Outlet werden. The programme is (naturally) in German but if you don't speak German there are still some wonderful shots of the town and there are several scenes in which the images speak for themselves even if you can't understand the dialogue; these include the opening aerial panorama of the town which shows the twin towers of the collegiate church and the famous red Rathaus (town hall).

The documentary is all about changes that are taking place in the town. Like many other towns in these difficult economic times, Bad Münstereifel has been struggling. It shares much in common with my current home town of Crieff, where the energetic Crieff Community Trust are currently working hard to find solutions to some major challenges. Both are historic tourist towns in rural areas, with a number of empty buildings, and businesses struggling to stay afloat.

Even when we left Bad Münstereifel in 2008, there were a few empty buildings on the main shopping streets, and since then the situation has worsened. Clearly, the town needed a boost. Now a possible solution has appeared in the form of investors who have put together a plan to turn the town into "City Outlet Bad Münstereifel", an outlet centre selling designer clothes. The programme follows the investors, the town's mayor, the civil servants in charge of liaising with the public, the existing traders who are affected by the changes, and also those who object to or are concerned about the proposals. Some of the issues raised are practical ones: where will all the new shoppers park? where will the school buses park if the parking places are needed for shoppers? One resident who moved to the town specifically because of its wonderful atmosphere is afraid that it will be irrevocably changed.

I can't say what is right or wrong in this situation. I have not lived in Bad Münstereifel for five years, and so I feel I have forfeited my right to pontificate about what ought to happen there. I love the town very much; every time I visit, it still feels like home. But I don't live there any more, so I don't have to live with the consequences of developing or not developing the town centre. It is depressing living somewhere where shops are closing and buildings are derelict; that is why the Community Trust in my new home town are working hard to solve the issues here. An outsider feeling (perhaps sentimentally) that nothing should ever change shouldn't carry any weight.

All the same, I was terribly sad seeing footage of my very favourite bakery-cum-cafe, the Erft-Cafe, closing down. The landlord decided to sell the property to the outlet investors and therefore the Cafe closed last winter. The documentary follows Herr and Frau Nipp, who ran the bakery and cafe, through the last day of opening to the closure of the Erft-Cafe and the dismantling and removal of all the fittings.   (If you want a quick peep rather than watching the whole film, you can meet Herr Nipp and his wife at 7:20 in the video.)

I know Herr and Frau Nipp personally. When we first moved to Bad Münstereifel, the children were very young and their behaviour in polite settings was always a bit unpredictable. The Erft-Cafe was one place where we were always sure of a welcome regardless. On several occasions one of the children dropped a glass on the tiles or actually broke an ornament, but the staff were always understanding.

When I came to research my third novel, Wish me dead, which has a baker's daughter as a heroine, Herr Nipp was one of the people who advised me about the background details for the novel. If you turn to the acknowledgements page at the back of the book, it reads, "Special thanks are due to...Herr Nipp and the team at the Erft-Cafe and the Cafe am Salzmarkt in Bad Münstereifel, for their advice about the running of a German bakery and German bakery products." The Nipps (and also the Quastens at the Bäckerei Cafe Quasten in Kommern) kindly allowed me behind the scenes in the bakery and answered all my probing questions about murder methods in a bakery kitchen with perfect Teutonic composure.

It makes me very sad to think that the Erft-Cafe no longer exists; it feels as though a part of the children's childhood has been rooted up and thrown away. By the end of the documentary I was watching through tears. Of course, change has to happen; nothing can remain the same forever. Herr and Frau Nipp were as philosophical as possible, as were some of the other traders in the town; some of those who are hanging onto their existing businesses are hoping that the increased footfall the outlet will bring will boost their own sales. I wish them all well. We are not able to visit Bad Münstereifel this summer, but I hope to go over next year again; I hope it will still feel like home.

Tell me a story, Dad!

It's Fathers' Story Week, a time to celebrate and support Dads reading with their kids.

I am (self-evidently) a Mum, not a Dad, but I love the whole idea of Dads reading to their kids (for starters, it saves us mothers reading Where's Spot? 350 times). After perusing the Fathers' Story Week website I started to think about the part that Dads-reading-to-kids has played in my own life.

Both my husband Gordon and I have read a lot to our kids over the years - in fact, I still do, although very soon both of them will be teenagers and they have been able to read for themselves perfectly well for years and years already. I love reading aloud and now that the children are old enough to appreciate the classics I have read my way through such treasures as The Hound of the Baskervilles and King Solomon's Mines (I flatter myself that my dramatic interpretation of Gagool out of the latter book was genuinely nasty...).

Nowadays, reading to the kids is for fun; when they were tiny it was much more purposeful. When my daughter was a baby she was extremely wakeful. Seemingly it was her aim, having made it safely into the world, to stay awake 100% of the time in order not to miss anything, even when she was so tired that she was screeching with exhaustion. If I carried her around the flat or fed her, she would often fall asleep, but the minute I put her into her cradle she would generally bounce back into a state of red-alertness. A very vocal state of red-alertness. In the event that I managed to get her into the cradle without waking her up, the merest creak of a floorboard as I attempted to slink out of the room and get myself a much-needed cup of tea would generally have those baby-blues wide open and unblinking within a nano-second.

Eventually - in desperation - we worked out that the best way to get her to go to sleep was to read to her. The aim was not to perk her up, so this did not mean sitting her on someone's lap and showing her cheerful and stimulating board books. Instead, we read out books that we enjoyed ourselves, so that she could listen to the reassuring cadence of her Dad's (or Mum's) voice, and we wouldn't die of boredom in the process.* I can still remember the "breakthrough" books (no, not the ones that gave her a lifelong love of literature; the ones that got her off to sleep so I could finally, finally have that cup of tea). I read her Captain Corelli's Mandolin and my husband read her Heinrich Harrer's mountaineering classic The White Spider. Twenty to thirty minutes of either of those generally did the trick.

Gordon would sit by the cradle and read something like this: "Fritz led off into the traverse with that tremendous skill of his, fighting for his balance on smooth holdless film, winning his way, inch by inch, yard by yard, across that difficult and treacherous cliff. In places he had to knock away snow or a crust of ice from the rock with his ice-hammer; the ice-splinters swept down the slabs with a high whirring sound, to disappear into the abyss..."

So far as I know, a baby of a couple of months only recognises a very few words, such as its own name, and certainly has no concept of traverses, ice-hammers and abysses. Still, you do wonder whether some of it "went in" somehow. (The "baby" has certainly grown up with a sense of adventure; several years ago she and her father did a via ferrata climb in the French Jura together of which the photographs alone made me feel positively vertiginous. And she has still not stopped complaining that he refused to take her up a more exposed bit.) At the time, however, the main thing was that the baby finally went to sleep, without screaming the place down. I'd say that was a fairly major win for Dads-reading-to-kids.

When I was a child myself, my own father sometimes read to me, and he would also (if sufficiently nagged) re-tell the ghost stories of the great M.R.James for us during long walks and boring journeys. This has been extremely influential on my writing career. It led to a life-long love of M.R.James' ghost stories and my first published material was a series of articles in the M.R.James Ghosts and Scholars Newsletter including one about Steinfeld Abbey, scene of MRJ's tale The Treasure of Abbot Thomas. 

The real-life history of the Steinfeld Abbey stained glass also inspired my second novel, The Glass Demon, which features a fictional series of stained glass windows made by the same master craftsman who worked on the Steinfeld ones. All this sprang from listening to my father re-telling stories (I say "re-telling"; from what I remember, he had the best bits off by heart).

The other memory I have is of my father stopping part of the way through reading out The Hound of the Baskervilles because I was doing head-stands on the picnic rug and he wasn't convinced I was listening. I had to read the book myself later on because he refused to continue, but I guess it taught me a valuable lesson about Respecting Literature...

My latest book, Silent Saturday, is dedicated to my father in recognition of the influence he has had on my love of books and of a certain type of book in particular. He is the only person I know whose bookshelves include The Fireside Book of Death and E.S.Turner's Boys will be boys alongside the works of M.R.James, L.T.C.Rolt and Sheridan Le Fanu. Growing up with all those within reach, I was never going to write sweet romantic comedies myself!

Three cheers for Dads, and the books they introduce us to!

Above: a photograph of St. Bertrand de Comminges, taken by my father to accompany one of my articles about the ghost stories of M.R.James. As well as introducing me to MRJ's stories, he provided a lot of the pictures to go with my articles about them.



* This is a real danger with Beast Quest, for which my son had an unreasonable passion some years ago. There seem to be about 7,000 volumes and he made me read them all.

Love writing, hate editing

I should not be blogging. I should be working at this moment. I recently received the editorial letter* for my upcoming book The Demons of Ghent, sequel to Silent Saturday and second book in my Forbidden Spaces trilogy. There is quite a bit of work to do - and no, before you ask, they didn't say "your characters are rubbish" or "you can't spell for toffee". It's mainly about simplifying and streamlining a very complex plot. And it has to be done by July. Late July, admittedly, but still July, plus there is the complicating factor that after the end of June both my children will be at home for the holidays, so I shall be working half-days (the half being their lie-ins; the second half of the day will either be taken up with outings or there will be the merry sound of Mario Kart echoing through the house; for this reason, as mums go, I am at the very indulgent end of the spectrum when it comes to teens sleeping all morning).

So, as you can see, I really should be working away like a demon, hacking out those unfeasible bits of prose that have sprung up like weeds and planting new lovely bits that will blossom like literary roses. Or something. Anyway, my response to all this time pressure has been a familiar one. On Tuesday evening I had a sore throat and by Wednesday evening I was starting to feel very seriously unwell. On Thursday I stayed in bed and Friday was a bit of a blur. You probably could have fried an egg on my forehead at that point. People fondly imagine that it must be lovely having a hyperactive authorly imagination but on Friday it was very unpleasant. Since childhood, whenever I have had a high fever I start seeing patterns and shapes in things around me and this time was no different. A sock lying on the bedroom floor morphed into an Easter Island stone head. A piece of material sticking out of a drawer turned into a cartoon duck. I even had to call my daughter to remove a camera bag from the room because it kept turning into a cyborg with a fish's head.

Above: the zoo could have saved money by putting these meerkats next to me on Friday. 

This was all familiar territory because I took several of my O'levels in a similar state and was also ill during my university entrance exams. I'd suspect myself of malingering but the thermometer said otherwise. Anyway, the long and the short of it is, I am having a couple of days off before I get back to work. I promise to feel guilty about this when I am less exhausted and can summon up the energy. 

Hopefully the whole thing will have a kind of "reboot" effect on my brain and by this Friday I shall be zooming through the edits at top speed, fuelled by bursts of hitherto unseen brilliance (cough). 

In the meantime I thought I'd do a little light blogging, faff about on Twitter, and make even more cups of strong sweet tea for myself than I normally do. I could also toy with my VAT return but we shall see how it goes...

* Editorial letters are received with great excitement and joy by authors, much as the black spot is received by Billy Bones in Treasure Island. 

Seventeenth and eighteenth century memes

As I was saying in my last post, yesterday I went over to Innerpeffray Library to show the Bookwitch around, and whilst I was there I had a bit of a poke about for anything that might interest the readers of this blog.

Apart from the gripping first hand account of torture at the hands of the Inquisition, I also had a look at a gentler book - the fabulous Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes. I think if I were allowed to have one single book from the library for my very own, it would be this one. It is an alphabetical encyclopaedia of animals - most of them real ones but some mythical ones such as satyrs and sphinxes have crept in too! Also one has to suspect that the illustrator had not actually seen all of the creatures he depicted; there is an otter who looks more like some kind of very grumpy small lion!

One of my very favourite entries is all about the Cat (left). Underneath this lovely picture the author remarks, "Once cattes were all wilde, but afterwards they retyred to houses, wherefore there are plenty of them in all countries." There is a great deal more text, far more than I could transcribe in a short visit, but it was so good that I have promised myself that I will copy it all down at a future date and post it here. I feel Seventeenth Century LOLcats have definite blog post potential!

The other book I looked at was A COLLECTION AND ABRIDGEMENT OF CELEBRATED CRIMINAL TRIALS IN SCOTLAND From A.D. 1536, to 1784 WITH HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL REMARKS BY HUGO ARNOT, Esq. ADVOCATE.

This book was published in 1785. I mainly picked it up because I still have a bee in my bonnet about the case of the Reverend Richard Duncan, minister of Kinkell and Trinity Gask, who was hanged at Crieff in 1682 for infanticide. Sadly, somewhat as suspected, the case was not notorious enough to find a place in Arnot's book. I did however come across another case that I thought was worthy of a mention here - because it's all about writers!

Yes, dear reader, I am shocked to say that in days gone by, writers were not always the respectable, placid and clean-living individuals who appear today at signings and book festivals. Back in the lawless eighteenth century, they were no strangers to bad language and brawling! Tsk.

Hence the sobering tale of "George Cumming, Writer", who, together with another writer, John Hall, got himself into a nasty brawl in Edinburgh one September night in the early 1700s. The book describes the incident as follows:

"The indictment set forth, that the prisoner, being upon the street of Portsburgh, a suburb of Edinburgh, on the 5^th of the preceding month of September, between nine and ten at night, the deceased Patrick Falconer, and other two soldiers of Lord Lindesay’s regiment, walked peaceably by him in the way to their quarters; when the prisoner gave the soldiers opprobrious language, and, without any just provocation, drew his sword, with which he maliciously run the deceased through the body, of which he died within twenty-four hours. 

The parties were pretty much agreed as to the facts which gave rise to this prosecution: That the prisoner, entertaining a notion that the soldiers had made a rude answer to his companions, who enquired of them what o’clock it was, gave the soldiers abusive language, upon which they went up to him, and attacked him with their drawn bayonets: That the prisoner received them with a drawn sword, and, after some skirmishing, killed the deceased."

The case seems mainly to have turned on who started the fight - whether "George Cummings, Writer" had been the first to insult the soldiers or whether they had started it by being rude to him. Cummings' goose was unfortunately cooked by the testimony of a local apothecary:

"James Porteous, apothecary in Edinburgh, deposed, that, in the beginning of September last, he was one evening in the street of Portsburgh, between nine and ten o’clock, in company with three other persons, of whom the prisoner was one. The prisoner went to a house to call for his cloak, and the deceased, with two other soldiers, came up with the deponent and his companions, who asked at them, ‘what o’clock it was?’ He cannot be positive what answer they made; but the prisoner, who was a little way behind them, called the soldiers sons of whores and sons of bitches. The soldiers asked what he said, and he repeated the words, calling, at the same time, to his companions to beat the soldiers. The soldiers then drew their bayonets, passed by the deponent and his companions, and went up to the prisoner, who advanced to them, and, when he was within sword’s length of them, drew it; and within a quarter of an hour, the deponent heard one cry, Murder!"

The court sentenced the prisoner to be hanged, and his personal estate to be forfeited. Writers, beware...