Subtle Flavours at the Crispy Duck

This is not a food blog. I am almost the most non-foodie person I know. And yet. When in London I am always on a hungry high, waiting for the next plate of something I can't eat in Italy. Dim sum. Persian. Excellent Lebanese. A bottomless glass of ale. Not-too-bad coffee with an exciting view.

The last few days have been spent in London in the lead-up to my appearance at the Penzance Literary Festival, taking place this week. I have lazed in parks, had a beetroot margarita, bought more books and finally - in overheated agony - succumbed to a pair of flattish Campers on sale, which I tried on and my feet refused to allow me to remove. Bliss. No more elegant Italian heels but a pair of cutaway rose-coloured all-leather sandals. Feels like I am walking on cushions.

And Penzance. My first literary festival, where there will be some big names and some debut authors like myself. Flutter flutter! I've read books written by several of the other authors, two of which have given me a feel for a place I never imagined I would visit. Liz Fenwick's The Cornish House and Patrick Gale's A Perfectly Good Man. Great, enticing reads from a magical place I look forward to discovering.

Wish me luck! I'll be speaking with Liz Fenwick on Friday 25th at 2pm, the discussion will be moderated by author Sarah Duncan. I'll be the red-headed one staggering across the stage in a pair of python pumps..

Paris fix

We went to Paris. We were chic. Our dreams were sweet. Our meals were of the most nourishing calibre. At night we met old friends outside metro stops and wandered along footpaths bumping shoulders. We stole a taxi from an angry man. We had long baths. We walked out of a restaurant with too many guidebook stickers, too many foreigners talking about their European trips. We walked along the gutters. This was the city where we were once young, once so full of dreams we were blinded to most truths.

It was work of course. I was more of a mascot than anything else. The champagne tray gal. The gal who modelled the shoes. The chic skinny thing wearing Ale's dresses while buyers from Japan frowned and sketched and bowed. Many languages were spoken. There were stunning hats. And horses. The theme outside each pavillion was Hicksville and, coming from a country village where the hay lies strapped in massive bales on the clipped gold fields, this was odd, very odd.

We watched Italy lose the European Cup. Badly. We drank more champagne the day after. In the evenings as the light drew away people had picnic rugs in the parks and we saw bulls in the sky.

Fifty Shades of Red

While grey is the colour of the season's bondage bestseller, the colour of the hot sexy Italian summer has to be RED.



RED for my favourite Campari Spritz aperitivo (enjoyed with the lovely Sherry in Venice last week!)










RED is the colour of fresh tomato sauce for linguine, eaten in the shade of the portico in the afternoon.






 





 RED are the flowers in my favourite hidden villa garden.












 
 





RED is the colour of hot summer lips and a pair of savage Dolce e Gabbana stilettos that sink into the grass at steamy summer parties.















RED are flowers on Rosi's window sill, beneath stormy Monte Civetta.

 











ENJOY your summer days and nights! Here's what I've been doing: a day in Venice with American writer Sherry, with a stop at my favourite bar Il Cavatappo.




**PS. I have a new interview up at http://expatinterviews.com/italy/catinitaly.html
for those of you interested in living in Italy, cat-style.

A Glutton’s Guide to Cherry-Picking

It’s not over until the skinny lady screams. The last cherry tree is swaying with fruit. Not that the others were ever seriously emptied. The teenage manpower in this neck of the woods is studying for exams/sleeping off studying for exams/just sleeping off. I can’t tell you how many evenings I have sat pitting cherries, drinking beer, watching the massive poplar tree at the corner of the property which darkens and knots in the sunset. By that time I’m tossing cherry pits into the cherries and have brain surgeon’s hands…

At different times in my life I’ve been a city dweller, a suburbanite, a spoilt diplomat’s wife living in a gilded cage, a dependent living in a tiny room with a sweatshop underneath. In Mogadishu we lived near the National Theatre where singers sang long into the damp nights. In Milan our neighbours stared at my spiky blond hair. In Paris my employer made a mosaic of broken plates up the kitchen wall. In Accra I remember the three Rastafarian priests with high headdresses who walked like statues down the street – the same street American soldiers trained with their Hi-Ho-Sergeant-Major chants my kids used to ape in the yard.

But back to cherry-picking, a very pensive occupation, and the lifestyle that comes with it.

Slowness is good. Having a temperamental apricot tree is good. Playing Scarlatti at midnight with no complaining neighbours is good. Eating – afternoon after afternoon – more cherries than most digestive systems can cope with, is good. I don’t want to complain. You don’t know how many people wander through the gates and say You are living the dream! Ahh! While I stand there thinking – and the mowing? The weeding? The uninvited guests who turn up on empty Sundays when you’d love to read under a tree? How it’s time to paint the downstairs rooms again, plus the tree-trimming, the window-cleaning, oh and worst of all the endless, endless driving.

Now after quite a few years in the country it’s not the first time I am yearning for a turnaround. When I came here my kids were small and needed unity and serenity. (Or I did, to tell the truth.) We needed to be on our own, not tossed into another city web. The idea of parking and food shopping and traffic in a big city did my head in. I don’t know how women rush from here to there back to here again. I did it for a while and more than once found myself parked in front of the school, alone, wondering why the kids weren’t coming outside. They have long school days and short ones in Italian schools – who was I to know what day of the week it was?

But now, teens and adults, we are in that heft before big change again, when the city appeals, the country lags, and sometimes, just sometimes, this skinny lady yearns to live above a busy Parisian street, pop downstairs for a kir royale, go to the cinema without it being an expedition or a long tricky drive home. Can you have your cherry-garnished life without having to pick them?


* On Friday I have an interview up on the Romantic Novelist’s Association Blog, which ranges from ironing to character invention and back, with some pretty interesting photographs!


* Oh and here is last year’s cherry-picking post http://peltandotherstories.blogspot.com

Milano! Milano!

I went to Milan. Big gritty sexy glamorous Milan. The city that I say on the back of book is 'as unfeeling as a Prada bag'.

Well it's not, always. It was a warmish, windy-ish day and as the train pulled into the iron-girdered cavern of the Stazione Centrale my stomach was writhing with hunger. I had forgotten the novel I am reading and stubbornly refused to buy a useless magazine, so I had been sitting for over two hours trying to furl away my brain, watching the fields, watching co-travellers, enjoying non-thought.

Loverly. Next, I tucked into Milan. There is a scene in DLC where Marilyn walks into the Duomo, walks across part of the Piazza del Duomo, then walks into the chic Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele. It's been a while since I did that. Most of my expeditions to Milan now involve passport renewal at the Consulate, shopping trips or catching up with friends who have escaped the slower provincial life. But today I wanted to see the city - at least part of it - through Marilyn's eyes.

'...I ascended the steps of the Duomo station and came out along the pale flank of the cathedral dusted in fumy morning light. The stonework stretched upward in tiers of ever-tightening pinnacles, that made one want to weep with their divine force. I thought of the construction: men on ladders tied together with rope; men with chisels. I thought of women in strange head garments looking up at the fandangled building at the end of the street. Wispy stone spans bounced between the spires, and the spires themselves looked plastic...'

'...To the right was the spectacular Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele, a luxury shopping arcade funnelling through to the famous opera theatre, La Scala. I walked under the high glass vault criss-crossed with iron girders, pausing beneath the opaque dome with its wintry light. A shiny black Porsche was cordoned off on a pedestal and a girl in gold hot pants handed out brochures with a high octane smile. Pedestrian traffic meandered in every direction... Despite an undercurrent of vendors with football scarves and the unsightly presence of a McDonalds on a corner, all actors were meticulously rehearsed and I was grateful Fiona had pooh-poohed my old jeans..'

It was childishly sweet, standing there in the crowd, amongst the tourists holding cameras and Ipads above them, filming girls posing before the sanctuaries of Prada and Louis Vuitton, to think that Marilyn could have been standing to one side watching too, feeling out of place, wondering how to understand this city. I looked out for her, rather sillily. I think I almost did.

The big HUGE thrill of the day is that the book is now on sale at the AMERICAN BOOKSTORE in central Milan (Via Camperio 16, Largo Cairoli), an elegant stroll away from where I imagine Marilyn was standing.

And the Earth Moved

Some time after my eldest son drove in early Sunday morning my bed started shaking violently. And it wasn’t my secret lover trying his moves. The shaking went on. And on. It took quite a few seconds for me to realise.. Earthquake!

I ran upstairs to check the eldest in the attic who sleeps under the beams of the house. All intact. And saw youngest sitting up sitting up in his bed saying ‘That was an earthquake, Mum. Did you feel it?’

Heart-thumping terror. The siren in the villa above us continued to waa-waa-waa. And then nothing.

There was another strong tremor an hour later. Hours afterwards, I heard that friends in town had gone down into the street barely dressed. My daughter huddled under her cousin’s bed. I knew the epicentre was far away from us (around eighty kilometres it turned out) and that this area lies on a bed of water (la pianura padana) rather than more jolting bedrock, and yet many houses like ours are built with heavy beams and thick, tumbledown walls of stone and mortar, that have weathered centuries of icy winters and baking summers. Even the ancient beams of our house have slooped with age.

Then we saw the real damage on the television. People in small towns like ours, scattered along the plains south of the Po River. Wreckage, toppled buildings, despair. It turned into one of those odd, still days, where you feel you should be doing something, but what?

We eventually carried out our plans to go to the annual flower festival at a nearby Palladian villa that stands in a massive rock amphitheatre at the edge of the hills. It was raining and the mood was subdued. People moved from stand to stand in the noble setting. You could hear a continual murmur: about apartment buildings swaying, dogs howling, people in the streets. It made for a strange cohesion.

On an incline, the grounds of the villa have central tiered stone steps with a low wall marking off each terrace looking over the conglomeration of constructions on the plains below. Ugly houses, pre-fabricated factories. I wonder did the architect foresee this? How modernity would sully the zone and how from behind the scrolled iron entrance gates the brooding walker should be enticed on with a reward. For as one ascends, each level presents a more detached and ephemeral view, and on a clear day one could perhaps see all the way to the spires of Venice. Or at least imagine this to be the case.

Each low wall is lined with a row of Palladian statues. That each statue is so perfectly composed (rumoured to be cleaned with oxidised water and a toothbrush by the scruffily dressed count) makes me think of what will last. This exquisite corner of land, sheltered by the rockface, with some of the austere village houses even dug from its flanks; the yellow calla lilies in a plastic bag in my hand, which will most probably not survive my random plant care this winter; my friends waving me over for a drop of villa vine with their deaf shepherd dog and a batch of umbrellas.

*

On an entirely frivolous note I would like to invite you to read my guest post with the fantastic (and wildly successful) crime writer Mel Sherratt www.highheelsandbookdeals.com. Thanks for having me Mel and do check out some items from my Italian shoes collection!

Teaching English the Kate Moss Way

If Kate Moss were to rock over to Milan and start teaching English she’d be apples. But then again, so would Madonna. Or la Signora Beckham. Italians love a foreign star and a foreign star speaking Italian with an accent will soon have a string of television commercials and a talk show. (If I hear George Clooney-in-a-cable-knit say ‘Immagina’ one more time on the Fastweb ad I will die.)

When I was a young thing living in Milano with barely a handle on this vocal language, I had to earn my keep. I set out to teach English. The institute where I worked was on a dodgy street where gorgeous Brazilian transsexuals were earning their keep too. My students included bored bankers and insolent teenagers. A big plus was my boss’s insistence that I speak exclusively in English – what else would I have spoken anyway? And luckily, our textbook was little more than a comic strip with characters buying vegetables and asking for the nearest underground stop. I persevered. I made friends with my colleagues, a Canadian woman whose Sicilian boyfriend beat her up and an upper class Somali girl who had flitted about the world.

In my novel my heroine has moved to Milano and needs a decent job. She turns to the second oldest profession in the book – English teaching. This is where Kate Moss steps in. Marilyn Wade has never taught verbs and participles in her life (like most of us pretenders). Immediately after her interview her boss asks her to step in for Stephen, and tells her the class is on page 27 of the Ranger Series.

‘..you’ll find one on the desk. If not just do conversation. Talk about pop stars and Kate Moss, anyone you can think of.’

Marilyn confronts her first class:

‘As I looked over them I realised they were frightfully different from English adolescents. They had not been raised on chips and Tesco Indian dishes and soggy shepherd’s pie. Rather, they ate risotto while sipping merlot and weren’t afraid of carpaccio sitting half alive on their plates. They had probably learnt how to make coffee at the age of five.

The class continued staring until a boy at the back made a comment and they burst out laughing. I stood there detesting every one of them, about to crumble, wishing I had my riding crop in my hand. I took a deep breath and considered walking out the door and never coming back. I still had a job as Brett’s unlikely leather model for the Japanese and Norwegian buyers passing through town. But my children were coming out for Christmas, so I had only a few short weeks left to cobble a life together and look normality in the eye.

As they laughed, I walked around the desk and sat down, closing the textbook and giving it a shove onto the floor. They became silent. I figured I had about thirty seconds to contain their interest.

‘Anybody heard of la mia nipotina Kate Moss?’


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THANKS TO VANESSA GEBBIE FOR HOSTING ME ON HER SITE. CHECK OUT MY INTERVIEW ON www.morenewsfromvg.blogspot.com