A Walk in the Hills

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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Once upon a time, there were six more or less middle-aged ladies who decided to go for a walk. They were from five different countries – the U.S., Israel, Scotland, Australia and Austria. They lived in five different countries (add Switzerland and Malaysia to the mix) and only one lived in the country of her original nationality. Most of them had never met before that week. And together they had another perfect day…
It was obvious from the first that the weather was going to be co-operative. The first pic was taken from the boat as they steamed up Lake Como…

To the town of Argenio…(second pic)
Where they took a cable car almost vertically up to a town called Pigra (third and fourth pix).

In Pigra those ladies looked into the distance at a town called San Fidele, nestling in a valley and surrounded by hills …

and decided to walk there.
They didn’t actually make it, but along the way were views to die for, and another delightful town called Blessagno…
where the pizza was delicious…
the red wine tangy…
and the home-made tiramisu melted on the tongue into a glorious mix of delicate flavours.

And because one of those ladies (me) is intrigued by the tiny, you also have photos of a few small things along the way…a religious statue set into the wall of a house, some old building techniques and


… the rare and protected Dark Columbine Aquilegia atrata.

And then we returned to Argenio to take the ferry back to our hotel near Como

…with lots of memories.

So, here’s to Doris (whose idea it was), Carter, Liz, Elena, Sandy … and thanks for a lovely day.

Amazon sanctions against authors…

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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I’ll take a brief break from Como news just to mention the following. If you haven’t read anything about this issue, you ought to, because we authors are among the victims here, as are independent booksellers and ultimately you, the reader. Sure, you can buy cheaper books in the short term, but in the long run the publishing industry suffers and so will you. (Most of this applies to Amazon.co.uk only, and not necessarily Amazon.com – although they have had their own run-ins with authors lately, over publish-on-demand titles…).

The Telegraph talks about Amazon.co.uk sanctions here, in an article published on 13 June 08, that starts like this:
Amazon, the online book seller, could face a strike by authors and publishers in an increasingly bitter battle over book profits. The UK’s biggest publisher, Hachette Livre UK, is leading the charge against Amazon, which it claims is squeezing the market and demanding too great a share of sales.

In a very public fallout Amazon stopped selling new copies of about 50 Hachette titles, including books by Kate Mosse, Alexander McCall Smith, James Patterson, Stephen King and Dan Cruickshank, on its British website.

People are still able to buy and sell the books second hand through Amazon but the publishers make no money out of those sales.

Here are some facts, supplied by my UK publisher, Hachette Livre:

  • Larger British book retailers already receive the most generous terms in the English-language world from publishers.
  • Major retailers, including Amazon, generally already receive on average well over 50% of the recommended retail price.
  • Amazon now makes some 16% of all book sales in Britain.
  • At its present rate of growth Amazon could be the largest bookseller in Britain in about three years.
  • Amazon seems each year to go from one publisher to another making increasing demands.

Hachette Livre has decided to make a stand and resist these demands, and I am right behind them all the way.

Meanwhile, should you have trouble buying any Hachette-Livre titles in UK, uncluding my own (Orbit) books, they are easily available online from, Waterstones.com, Play.com (UK) and other retailers, as well of course as from bookshops.

Como sights

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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Here’s some random pix (all mixed up) taken in Como town (first important in Roman times because of its strategic position, now having around 80,000 people).
§ A man scrubbing a window sill;
§ The Basilica of San Fidele, just a street or two away from the cathedral – started in the 6th century and redone in the 11th, and still, apparently not enough for this small town, as they then went on to build the cathedral.
§ A mime standing outside the old Town Hall
§ A shop window – the shop itself had enough different types of pasta to supply a different sort for every day of the year: coloured, plaited, round, flat, shell-shaped, thin, wide, twisted, patterned, long, short, curled, black, flavoured, plain, huge, tiny, utterly humongous – one piece enough for a one-person meal. You name it, they had it.
§ The place with the zig-zag brickwork, projecting out on huge hand-hewn wooden beams, didn’t even rate a mention in the main tourist brochure…



Duomo Como

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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I am pretty much ignoring emails and comments for the time being as the cost of internet connection is utterly outrageous, so it I owe you an email, don’t expect to hear from me!
In the meantime, here is the cathedral in Como – a huge edifice, considering how small the town is. The striped building next door is the old town hall, that dates back to 1214 and was partially demolished in 1477 to make way for the cathedral, which was started in 1397 and finished around 1740. So it started as medieval and ended up baroque. Dates like those are completely unreal to an Australian, as you can imagine.

We sat at the café opposite (see second last pic) and had a lunch and gelato, while devouring (in a different fashion) the confectionary decorating the façade…

And I have decided that the way to cope with prices is to look at the price on the menu and decide they are actually talking about Malaysian ringgit, not Euros.

The last pic of the cathedral from above was taken from the funicular railway above the town.


The Perfect Day

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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There are times in life when you think you have been touched by the ultimate – the dew-drenched petals of a rose, the diamond sparkles on a spider’s web after rain, the joyous smile of happy child, the exuberance of health after an illness.

And then, just occasionally, you find you can seize in your hands the preciousness of the perfect day before it slips into memory; a time of glorious weather, good friends, a beautiful place, a day when yesterday’s worries or tomorrow’s pain – or the next work deadline! – seems as distant as the moon.

Yesterday was one such.

Two old friends and a new friend, one of the world’s loveliest lakes, heavenly food, good wine, warmth and sunshine, a long walk…ah.

We took a tiny ferry from Cernobbio, near where we are staying, to Como where we bought boat tickets to another town up the lake, Bellagio.

While we waited for the departure time, we strolled around the Piazza Duomo and admired the cathedral and listened to the ringing from the bell tower. Then the glorious ferry ride up the lake, a walk through the grounds of the Villa Melzi to the Loppia fishing harbour where we ate* by the boats under a canopy of grape vines).

Were I to die tomorrow, I would still count myself the luckiest of women.

Pix 1-3: in Bellagio town
Pix 4-6: in the grounds of the Villa Melzi
Pix 7: strolling towards the restaurant under the grape vines
Pix 8-10: view from the restaurant
Pix 11: An afternoon shower of rain
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*Jo: Lake fish anti-pasta, grilled vegetables with melted Camembert, fresh bread rolls and red wine…all at the marvellous ristorante Alle Darsene di Loppia**.**Donna: they had a pin-up calendar of George in the loo. I thought of you…


Italian interlude

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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Buon giorno!
I am in Como, Italy.
And these are the views from our balcony/hotel window.
And we didn’t get noramlyed once on the way, either.
Of course, I am hugely hungover with jetlag, my pocket has a large hole in it, and internet connection at the hotel costs 5* Euros for half an hour, but…I am in Italy!
Va bene, grazie – er, um – per favore potrebbe parlare piu lentamente? Or something.
________________
*that’s 25 RM !!

Gingers in my garden

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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Well, I call it my garden, but it’s not really. It belongs to my husband, in that he’s usually the one who plants things. And he’s a ginger aficionado.

The yellow and white delicate flowers belong to a rare ginger found only in Terengganu, Globba nawawii. The bunch of bright yellow flower petals is also a Globba species.





The bright pink-red is Etlingera elatior and the yellow pine cone is a Zingiber sp.

Airplane reading

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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I have a flight to Amsterdam and then on to Milan coming up, most of which will be spent chasing night around the world – which means no glorious vistas out of the plane window at 30,000′.

So I will do some writing till the battery on the laptop runs out, sleep, see if there is anything worth looking at on the video – and read. And as I find planes about as comfortable as sleeping in a tent on tree roots after my air mattress springs a leak, I need an extra good book that will make me forget the discomfort.

I have just finished Suite Francaise* by Irene Nemirovsky, otherwise that might have fitted the needs of this imprisoned passenger. One of the most interesting books I’ve read this year, unfinished by the author, alas, but brilliant for all that. Remarkable not least because she planned a five part book, but had no idea how it would end, as she had no idea how the war and the occupation of France was going to play out. She was writing a novel set in the “now” – occupied France of the 1940s.

On the 11th July 1942 she wrote in her note book: The pine trees all around me. I am sitting on my blue cardigan in the middle of an ocean of leaves, wet and rotting from last night’s storm, as if I were on a raft… That same day, she wrote to her editor: My dear friend … think of me sometimes. I have done a lot of writing. I suppose they will be posthumous works, but it helps to pass the time.

Two days later, she disappeared into the maws of the concentration camps of Europe, and within a month she was dead. The notebook with its draft novel was saved by her 14-year-old daughter – who spend the remaining war years fleeing with her little sister one step ahead of the Nazis.

It is incredible that someone in such a situation could write so brilliantly, and so without rancour, of the world falling apart around her, knowing all the while that the chances that she would survive were slim. A cutting humour, yes; devastatingly perceptive definitely, yet always entertaining, a tale peopled with memorable French and German characters interacting against a sketchy backdrop of looming horror – detail in the foreground, the larger canvas or a brutal war always present, yet blurred. That she never finished the book, never polished it, is a tremendous loss to French literature. That she died the way she did is a loss to humanity.

Or I could take Anne Tambour’s novel, The Spotted Lily. I was so taken with her short stories, I am looking forward to having the time to read her novel. But that’s a hardback, not easily stuffed into my belt pouch for airport and plane reading. It will have to wait, like the promise of a delicious dessert when one is just beginning the soup…

I am just finishing Marcus Herniman’s The Siege of Arrandin, so I could take Book 2, The Treason of Dortrean. But no. Herniman’s style has the same effect as Russell Kirkpatrick’s on me – best taken in small doses, its gourmet richness savoured a little at a time, enjoyed, and then put down and thought about before being picked up again to taste some more.

Never mind, I have just the books. Books 2 & 3 of Jennifer Fallon’s The Tide Lords quartet. If anyone can make me forget the discomforts of plane travel, it will be Jenny. After all, she usually manages to make me stay up all night to finish a book anyway, even without a plane.
_______________________
* sorry, don’t know the html for French accents

Another Song of the Shiver Barrens Review

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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This one comes from SFX online, where you can read the whole thing.

“In the end, the main questions are: is it enjoyable? Do you care about the characters? Is it well-written? The answer to all these is yes.

“In the final book in the Mirage Makers trilogy, Mirager-heir Arrant takes centre stage. Most of the action is seen from his perspective, as the scheming in Tyr becomes sidelined and the real threat that has been building throughout the trilogy emerges: the malevolent Ravage threatening to destroy the Mirage, and with it the ability of Arrant’s people to use magic.

“As in the previous novels, this is a story of emotions and politics rather than bloody war, and Larke tells it well. You struggle with Arrant as he’s humiliated and manipulated, and are genuinely uncertain as to whether he’ll endure and what his fate will be.”

Well, they did spoil it a bit by saying at the top of the review that the author was David Gunn, but never mind. I hope David doesn’t mind either…

My insane life

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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I’m going to Como, Italy, for a week.
Don’t ask. I don’t believe it either. And I can’t justify it.

My husband is going there for work, and I have other reasons, more pleasant, the main one revolving around a person I haven’t seen in 15 or more years and would very much like to see again. I know I have been there before, but I can’t remember a thing about it.

So a moment ago I dug into my old letters. Yeah – you know, those things we used to write on paper and stick in an envelope with a stamp on front. This one was written back in 1982, to my mother who was then aged 79 or so.

And I read:

Locarno, March 26th.

We* left Venice under beautiful blue skies and a low haze that obscured everything, and we arrived in Locarno in exactly the same conditions. It’s warm and sunny but one can’t see the scenery!

We stopped for a few hours in Milan to see the Last Supper, which was a great disappointment. I would suggest that people confine themselves to reproductions in art books, which show more detail and colour than we could see! There was enough to show a hint of genius in the drawing and composition – but none whatsoever of the colour, as it is uniformly dull. One third of it was under restoration.

We then caught the underground to see the Cathedral – a magnificently over-decorated pile of stone set in a square layered with pigeons. It has everything a cathedral should: towers and tracery, statues galore, flying buttresses, bronze doors – the whole works. And why not; they’ve been at it since 1385 and the finishing touches were made only a few years ago. We went up a lift to the roof and walked all over in a forest of statues and gargoyles and tracery, actually strolling down the centre of the nave, which is roofed with stone.

Afterwards we took a train to Locarno, passing through Como and Lugano on the way. The haze continued so we didn’t see that much of the Italian lake district. Como, surrounded by steep slopes, was mainly memorable for its profusion of chimney pots; Lugano was prettier with water as still as painted glass, rippling only where ducks and swans broke the surface and marred the reflections…

Right. Now I know why I don’t remember much.

————
*The “we” is my sister and myself on what was to be (we thought) our sole “Grand Tour” of Europe. Little did I know I would go back there to live one day.