The Olympic torch

It's travelled all around Britain for the last 70 days, in a relay involving 8000 torch-bearers, each one chosen for their inspirational contribution in some sphere of society. 

People have travelled for hours, camped and queued patiently for a glimpse of it. People other than me, that is. Yesterday as the torch arrived in London for its final leg before being deposited at the Olympic stadium, Younger Daughter and I literally drove right into its path quite by accident. 

Dropping her off to meet friends for a movie, we turned into a road lined with people waiting patiently, flags and cameras ready, and were brought to a halt  in the middle of the road here, in front of the BBC television studios ...

The torch was two minutes away, they said. Some people were being inventive in finding vantage points for a good view ...

This friendly bobby (below) laughed and shook his head at me through the car window, "You've chosen the worst possible time to come along this road!" Actually, I thought, for an idiot who hadn't thought to check the news or traffic reports, my timing was pretty perfect.

On cue, the advance escort came along, driving slowly ...

followed by the torch-bearer at a jog ...

I could have reached out to touch the torch, only this bloke had a don't-mess-with-me look on his face ...

and seconds later it was gone, smaller than I'd imagined, but a sleek, shiny , pretty thing nonetheless

And see how the sun was shining for a change! They say that this summer in Britain has been like the Olympic torch - it's visited each town in the country for about half an hour. (I hear the torch has been extinguished more often than one likes to admit during the ongoing downpours of the last couple of months).

How has Britain felt about hosting the games? This article in the New York Times made me laugh in recognition - an American view of the way Londoners are using the Olympics to indulge in "practising some of their own favourite sports: complaining, expecting the worst and cursing the authorities". Too true, though the atmosphere in these crowds yesterday told a more upbeat story.

I know I'm going to be glued to the telly tonight for what should be a spectacular opening ceremony. Happy games watching.

In the Marais: favourite Paris spaces

Red brick and stone, slate roofs, a square of perfect symmetry ... 

... it's Place des Vosges, home at various times to Cardinal Richelieu and Victor Hugo who had something like this view from no. 6 while he sat scribbling away at Les Misérables. Napoleon liked it so much he left it well alone while razing most of Paris …

... and so did these little Parisian poppets who came to splash in the fountain last week

(not much older, these girls already have French style down pat)

Much of the rest of the Marais is a glimpse of Paris pre-Haussmann – all narrow, curving cobbled lanes in contrast to wide boulevards and grand squares - and full of quirky, colourful shops and enticing places to eat.

(a little apartment here would be a dream) ...

It's Paris' Jewish quarter, and here in the Rue des Rosiers there are reminders everywhere of a painful history as well as a current thriving Jewish community ...

At night it heaves with life until the early hours ... 

Looking for a late dinner we found the Rue Vieille du Temple buzzing in overdrive with social networking of all kinds. We had un verre at La Belle Hortense below, at the suggestion of a waiter at Les Philosophes, just a little along from the equally jam-packed Au Petit Fer a Cheval (above) who promised to run across the road and let us know as soon as a table was freed up. He was as good as his word.

Lunch the next day was at an long-time favourite Marais restaurant, Le Grizzli, around the corner from the Beaubourg (for more of my ravings on this place see here) ...

A night at the tiny gem that is the Hotel Bourg Tibourg was a new experience and a treat this trip - all low-lighting, rich colours and exotic scents on a minute scale ...

                                  
But lest you believe Mr Cole Porter ... here's evidence that this summer in Paris is far from a sizzle ... 

... nor even a drizzle. This torrential downpour was worthy of the tropics.

For some it meant finding the nearest doorway to squeeze into, but a rabbi caught in the rain opted for a fallafel break, sensible man ...

Joyeux quatorze juillet!

Bastille day seems appropriate enough for posting some pics taken in Paris last week ...

where here in the gardens of the Palais du Luxembourg there were no signs at all of urgent calls aux armes citoyens. 

Au contraire, Parisians were taking advantage of a rare-for-this-summer sunny day to chillax (elegantly, of course) next to the Medici fountain and on the lawns ...

take a ride on the carousel

or enjoy a free concert at the bandstand.

Even les soldes were taken at a leisurely pace, with no crowds or queues. I certainly took advantage of them (though sadly not at Repetto, below, where even the sale prices were eye-watering) ...

with a stop or two on the side for roses and macarons ...

and afterwards took a well-deserved break (shopping parcels in tow) for some people-watching (at Les Deux Magots, where the waiters come direct from central casting).

Of course when people meet up on the streets of St Germain, it's also quite often dog-meeting time ...

Here Parisian dog with impeccable taste eyes elegant shoe appreciatively ...

Finally, in the spirit of Vive la France, and all that ...

... I leave you with my very favourite version of La Marseillaise - the reggae-styled, wryly-titled Aux Armes etcaetera by my very favourite Frenchman ...

Photo credit note: doggie shots in St Germain des Pres taken by Nicholas B. I must have been too busy eyeing the waiters.

What (who) I'm reading now

Richard Mason is an author whose dreams of being a famous writer came true unexpectedly early in life, proving both a burden and a blessing.

Born in South Africa, he moved with his family as a young boy to England. At the age of 18, while still in his first year at Oxford university, he wrote his first novel, The Drowning People. Published the following year, it became a literary phenomenon, selling 5 million copies in 20 languages and putting Mason into the spotlight of media attention, both acclaiming and critical.

Image source: www.flavorwire.com

Not too surprisingly, the mix of hype and expectations that followed effectively paralysed him as a writer. He had used the money from The Drowning People to set up a foundation in South Africa to pay for gifted children from poor backgrounds to attend privileged private schools. The pressure to produce another novel successful enough to sustain their futures led him to clinical depression and a breakdown.

His second novel, Us, was written under this pressure, to suit a commercial market dictated by a highly commercial American publisher offering a stellar advance. He said later that it nearly tore the soul out of the book and the heart out of him, and that it took him a long time to rediscover the joy of telling a story. 

But rediscover it he did, with his third novel, The Lighted Rooms, which really got me interested in Mason as an author. In this he wrote with amazing compassion and insight about ageing and Alzheimer's (in the shape of an engagingly dotty elderly central character) in a story that shifted from nursing homes to cutting-edge scientific research in present day Europe to Boer War concentration camps (drawing angry parallels in the process between the US destruction of Iraq and British atrocities in South Africa a century earlier).

And this brings me to his fourth and latest novel, History of a Pleasure Seeker, which I recently finished ...

Image source: www.richardmason.org

Set in Amsterdam in the early 1900s, the protagonist and pleasure-seeker of the title is Piet Barol, an ambitious and charming young man "extremely attractive to most women and to many men". Born to poverty but usefully educated by his French mother in the arts of piano-playing, sketching and seduction, he secures a place for himself as tutor to the troubled young son of a wealthy family in one of the finest mansions on Amsterdam's Gilded Curve.

Maarten Vermeulen-Sickert, his employer, is a hotel magnate with an appreciation of culture and the arts; his family, while close, is fraught with repressed desires. Gifted at sensing and meeting other people's needs while fulfilling his own at the same time, Piet earns Maarten's respect and trust whilst doing a fine job of freeing the libido of his wife and becoming indispensable in various ways to his children.

There are rich descriptions of the Vermeulen-Sickert's Amsterdam home, art collection and gilded life-style, interwoven with real historical events such as the Wall Street crash of 1907 and the opening of New York's Plaza Hotel. But it's the dynamics and nuances of the family's life and Piet's insidious but indelible impact on it that are so well written. Some of the most memorable (and amusing) scenes are his seduction through music - the refined drawing-room concerts in which Piet makes finely-considered judgements on matters of which piano key offers the best means for negotiating his tightrope path between eroticism and deception, Bizet or Chopin over Bach.

It's a nicely-plotted, very sexy novel, full of vivid characters and rich period atmosphere, and also very funny in parts. And as events in Amsterdam's Grachtengordel come to a climax in more ways than one, Piet inevitably meets his downfall yet lands on his feet as we know he will, and the last section of the book sees him on an ocean liner headed for Cape Town, his sights on a new world. The book ends with the words "To be continued" (when last have you seen that in a modern novel?) and they made my day - I can't wait for the next round of adventures of this character - who a Guardian reviewer has dubbed a sort of 'highly cultivated, bisexual Flashman' of the pre-first world war era! The same critic, incidentally, feels that Richard Mason is properly repaying with this novel the faith his publishers placed on him at the age of eighteen ...

Photographs taken in Amsterdam in February 2011

What to wear to an English summer opera

No, I'm not turning my hand to fashion blogging; this was a question an invitation had me pondering last weekend.

The venue: a country estate on the border of Suffolk; the order of events: drinks in the manor house, then a picnic and opera performance in the gardens; the music: Mozart and Leoncavallo; the guests: sounded awfully posh. So floaty summer dresses, kitten heels and a ghastly hat? No. The weather forecast: pouring rain and high winds.

Fashion notes: 1) if you're over a certain age a sensible mac and umbrella are the only essential wardrobe items, no matter what the social event; 2) never pack away the wool scarves and boots - you will need them in mid-summer; 3) the boating blazer in deck-chair stripes is best left to the sort of Englishman bred on regattas and country home weekends for whom eccentric dress sense comes in the DNA.

Stanley Hall's Midsummer Opera Festival is in its 12th year now. It's not Glyndebourne, but it might be one day (see here). The venue is the gardens of an Elizabethan manor house, its owner turned impresario.

The present Hall was built in the early 1500s, but the gardens show traces of inhabitants going backwards through the Norman Conquest and medieval times to Roman occupation.

As the rain started  pelting down again we moved towards the marquees ...

dodging farm trucks and equipment

to find our seats on a floor of wood-chips where the orchestra was already assembled

and a set with a view to the gardens through rain-soaked sheeting

Pagliacco preparing his harlequin's make-up 

and with the wind shaking and rattling the tent roof and flaps they were off in full flight ...

All photos taken at  Stanley Hall Opera, Halstead, Essex, June 2012.