Author: admin

Things have taken a somewhat dramatic turn here on my supposedly calm and productive writing retreat. Yesterday, Saturday, after a successful first week that got me pretty much to where I wanted to be with regard to progress on Midland, I spent the morning doing yoga and catching up on various bits of online admin. After lunch, the other writer here, Pierre, took off in his car to spend the afternoon looking round the nearly town of Arles, and I went to the supermarket to pick up some supplies (including a humane mousetrap for the pursuit and capture of Hunca), intending to come back and do a couple of hours writing before going over to my publisher’s house for dinner.

I knew something was wrong as soon as I unlocked the main door on the ground floor. The Au Diable headquarters does not generally smell of burning, nor is the hallway generally hazy with smoke. As the smoke wasn’t too thick nor the smell too strong, I went up the stairs to investigate, and discovered to my horror that the smoke was coming in a steady stream, almost like a waterfall, from the top of Pierre’s door. 

I tried the door, which was locked. There was a fire extinguisher on the wall behind me, so I lifted it down then unlocked my room and checked there was no fire in there – which there wasn’t – while I worked out what to do. 

As it happens, I had been in a near identical situation once before, when I was a student. I came back to my college room one night – located on the top floor top of the building it was in – to find smoke coming out from behind my neighbour’s door. I’d been out all night, it was about 5 a.m., and I wasn’t sure if she was in there, so I grabbed an extinguisher and shouldered the door open. She’d left her gas fire on with a 1970s super-fire-risk foam-cushioned easy chair placed strategically in front of it and then gone out for the night. By the time I got there the chair was merrily ablaze and I managed to get inside and feel on the bed to make sure she wasn’t in it before being forced back by the smoke and running off to raise the alarm. Just being exposed to the smoke for those few seconds gave me lung problems that lasted for weeks, and despite feeling quite heroic at the time I subsequently learned that what I had done was a bit dumb. Smashing open the door on a fire, as we all now know thanks to the movie Backdraft, can massively fuel a blaze with oxygen and make it much worse, much faster than it otherwise would have been – sometimes explosively so.

I thought about this as I looked at Pierre’s door. I had an extinguisher, and the smoke didn’t seem that bad just yet. I knew the room’s layout and knew therefore that I would be able to spray the kitchen area from the door, if indeed that was the source of the fire. So I chanced it, and tried to kick open the door. 

Perhaps luckily for me the door was tougher than the one on my student neighbour’s room, and try as I might I couldn’t smash it open. Thinking again about backdrafts I went into my room, grabbed the noticeboard with the various emergency numbers on it along with my computer and a bottle of water, and hustled outside so I wouldn’t get trapped if the fire did break out of Pierre’s door. 

I was shaking quite a bit by this point, and I found it quite hard to key in the numbers on iPhone keypad. Worse, when I did manage to make a call – first to Peggy, the manager of the Résidence, then to the fire brigade – the calls were connecting but I couldn’t hear the person on the other and I had to guess that they couldn’t hear me. Figuring that I was just going to have to deal with the situation myself I went back upstairs to try and smash the door down by using the fire extinguisher as a battering ram, but thick black smoke was now streaming out from all sides of the frame and it was obvious that the small window of opportunity I might possibly have had for one man action had by this firmly closed. Opening that door, especially since I knew for sure there was no one in there, would now be a crazy thing to do.

I went outside again and tried some other numbers with no more joy than previously. So with more shaking hands and lots of swearing at fricking predictive text algorithms I sent a text to my publisher to tell her what was happening in case that had a better chance of getting through.  Then, just as I was beginning to think that there was a real possibility that the whole building might burn down before I managed to summon help, a truck turned down the track towards me from the direction of the farmstead up the way.

I ran towards it and flagged it down and in my crappy French told the guy behind the wheel what was happening. He called the fire brigade then lent me his phone to call my publishers. Finally, thank god, help was on its way. Now, however, came the worst part. Standing outside the building not having any real idea about how bad the fire was and completely powerless to do anything about while wondering how busy the fire brigade was this Saturday, how far they had to come, and if they’d actual be able to find us anyway given that the nearest road with line markings on it was about three kilometres away was really not a whole bundle of fun.

I’m not actually sure how long we stood there. Maybe twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, but then they showed up. And when they did they showed up in style: two fire engines, two support vehicles, two police cars, the works, riding in out of the sunset like the fricking cavalry. It was great.

Even better one of the firemen was actually a totally hot (geddit?) firelady, who put a ladder up against the side of the house then completely unnecessarily inched along the 12 inch wide parapet in order to climbed in through MY bedroom window, which gave me excellent insight into the reason women seem to go weak at the knees the moment some butch guy in a bright yellow helmet shows up with a really long hose.

Anyway, uniform fetishes aside, team fire instantly took charge of the situation, smashed down Pierre’s door in precisely the ruthless and efficient manner I’d completely failed to manage earlier, and pointed their spigots at the source of the problem: a short-circuting Nespresso machine, which because it had been sitting next to a toaster and on top of a microwave which in turn sat next to a hob built into sideboard over a fridge, had created a kind of Nespresso-toaster-microwave-oven-fridge monster of the kind that serves breakfast in hell.

Soon the fire was out and everything was under control. The monster had been dispatched back to the ninth circle of Hades, the fire was out, the cops were taking selfies, and it all looked like was going to be ok, if rather wet and very dirty.

Or as ok as it can be when a fire has just gutted the room next to yours in a building in the middle of nowhere. Which isn’t really that ok at all, especially when the one silver lining – my brief crush on hot firegirl – got stubbed out like a discarded Gauloise when I discovered that the reason she’d climbed in through my bedroom window had nothing at all to do with any desire she may or may not have had to give me a mild sexual frisson but was solely about being able to open my door from the inside so that she could turn my entire room into a chimney for the purposes of venting the foul, black, plasticky and no doubt highly carcinogenic smoke more quickly from the building’s interior, so sparing the lungs of her colleagues the kind of fate mine had suffered at college but in the process coating everything in my room, from my bedding to my bread basket to the bloody notes for my bloody book in a sticky black residue.

Huh! I mean how thoughtless can you get?

I got off lightly of course. Poor Pierre turned up at the moment of peak pompiers, got out of his car, turned white as a sheet at the sight of the smoke pouring out of his window, and stayed that way as he discovered that everything he’d brought with to the retreat, including his laptop, was now landfill.

And talking of landfill, the moral of the story is, don’t drink fucking Nespresso. I’ve always thought those shitty little machines with their horrible dried out barely-better-than-instant coffee and completely unnecessary throw-away one-time-only plastic cartridges designed for people who are two fucking lazy to put a spoonful of coffee into a fucking cafetiere or one of the million-and-one other perfectly excellent reusable coffee making solutions that have been on the market for decades (not to mention their nauseating ads by an actor who shall remain nameless – George Clooney – and who I’d otherwise generally rather admired), were the devil’s work, and now I’ve looked the devil they conjure in the eye I know it to be true. SO DO NOT USE THEM. (Actually, I think this particular one was a MagiMix brand, but those cartridge coffee machines are all as fucking evil as each other, as far as I’m concerned.)

Annnnnyway, there was clearly going to be no writing for Jim or Pierre that night, or the next day. The staff of Au Diable had by now descended from their various homes, and in between the gathering and consuming of a bottle of wine and a bottle of Ricard (to steady the nerves, you understand), plans were being hatched to find us poor homeless writers alternative accommodation for night, to get an electrician to isolate the circuits in Pierre’s room so that power could be returned to the rest of the building, and to get some kind of cleaning SWAT team onside asap.

After fortifying myself with Galician rosé I packed an overnight bag and did some damage limitation on the contents of my room, which included making a decision about what to do with Tom Thumb (remember him?) who was still being held captive in the plastic basket in my kitchenette. His digs were already pretty squalid and now, thanks to the smoke, were really not very nice at all. Feeling that it wasn’t very fair to leave him there while I waltzed off to more agreeable accommodations, and not wanting him to freak out any cleaners who might appear and discover him the next day, I picked him up by the scruff of the neck again – to much angry squeaking on his part – and let him go. Which he did, immediately vamoosing beneath the fridge presumably in search of Hunca Munca.

Satisfied that I’d done the right thing I spent the night at my publishers and came back the next morning to try and make things a bit more shipshape. Around midday a husband and wife dynamic cleaning duo duly arrived and performed the most astonishing cleanup operation I’ve ever seen. They came in, surveyed the scene, went outside, donned white disposal protective overalls of the kind that would be handy during an Ebola outbreak, then proceeded to clean, not my room or Pierre’s room or the trashed hallway, but the picnic table in the garden.

This they then set with the most wonderful array of breads, meats, wines and cheeses, including smoked duck rillettes, raw milk chevre, and a pâtê the name of which I was told I must never forget but which I’ve already forgotten, and invited us all to lunch. Not a squirt of Cif was dispensed, not a surface wiped, until we had all enjoyed an excellent and restorative repas in the warm February sunshine. When we’d finished they sent me away to go do some sightseeing in nearby Aïgues-Mortes (about which more in a later post) while they got on with the job in hand. I returned at about five p.m. after a very relaxing afternoon doing not very much to find the cleaners gone and Peggy just about to lock the place up.

“Perfect timing!” she said. She took me up to my room and it was transformed. Absolutely immaculate, fresh linen on the bed, kitchen sparkling, the whole place literally spotless and two pots of homemade jam placed as a gift for me in the fridge. How they’d done it I really don’t know, as the smoke residue was really hard to clean off. But they had and so, here I am, back at my desk after dinner, computer set up, Internet on, and ready to get back to work in the morning. Forget German efficiency. If this is French efficiency then this is the version I want.

Which leaves just one loose end to tidy up. Because I suddenly thought, as I set up the humane mousetrap this evening having seen that Tom Thumb was already back on pasta patrol, if I was a mouse, i.e. Hunca, and my husband, i.e. Tom, was being held captive, what would I do, little mouse that I am, to create a turmoil big enough to ensure that Tom got released?

And I thought, well, little mouse that I am, I could do a lot worse than short-circuit the wires on some crappy coffee machine when everyone had gone out for the afternoon…

Shhhheeeitt?!?!?! Have I just been completely outplayed by a fricking field mouse? I don’t know, but as I was writing this one of them set off my trap and somehow got the cheese out without getting caught inside.

I could be in the presence of some kind of higher state of rodent consciousness here. Be afraid. Be very afraid…

There have been important developments in my relationship with the mice here in the Au Diable Vauvert writers’ Résidence, after I was woken (again) a couple of nights ago by the bizarrely loud sound of Tom Thumb trying to gnaw his way into a bag of pasta. 

I got up to investigate and when I switched the light on and removed said bag from its shelf, instead of running away Tom sat there absolutely stock still, either because he:

1. Was frozen with fear

2. Was hoping that by staying very still I wouldn’t see him (not a bad strategy with many predators, whose eyes are often tuned to movement rather than subtle variations in colour)

3. Wanted to be caught!

The result of this strategy was that I did indeed catch him. Just picked him up by the scruff of the neck and popped him in to the plastic basket used for the recycling:

That, as I say, was a couple of days ago. I’ve put an empty cardboard box, some food and water, and some rolled up bits of paper in there for him to make a bit of a nest out of and he seems ok, though clearly he’d quite like to get out (he does periodically try and leap up the side of the basket, but it’s just a few centimetres too high for him to scale).

But I’m now in a quandary. The plan is to catch Hunca too, reunite them, and put them out in the garden together. But of course I can’t catch Hunca (humane mousetraps have yet to be located in the local town). I’ve set up a kind of trap (a tipped over bucket with some cheese at the bottom, the idea being I’ll be around when she’s in there and so able to scoop her up), but she keeps nicking the cheese when my back’s turned.

And as a result I’m starting to feel bad about keeping Tom in captivity. What if:

1. I can’t catch Hunca. I don’t want to split them up and release Tom to the garden alone. Should I just let him go and wait for humane mousetraps?

2. Tom is actually Hunca, and there’s a nest of mouse babies in the wall space (I’ve pulled the fridge out, cleaned up the astonishing mess they’ve made behind it, and found the Tom & Jerry style hole they have indeed carved in the skirting board), and the babies are slowly starving to death because she’s not there to feed them?

3. I catch both of them, put them in the garden, there are babies and they slowly etc.?

I don’t see a win here. I’m beginning to think I should just let Tom go and leave it to the publishers to sort out when I’m gone. Which will probably involve calling the local pest controller who will put poison down. And then there will be no romantic way out for Tom and Hunca and any babies they may or may not have.

Of course, I may be completely wrong about this. There may be many more than two mice. The whole damn place might be infested with the little varmints (I have heard a worrying amount of behind-skirting-board scurrying), and it’s just that I’ve only ever seen two at once. In which poisoning would too good for the little horrors.

Arrgh. What should I do? Please advise.

Oh, by the way, in the midst of all this I have been getting on quite well with the book…

Right, so here I am on day three of my retreat, and it turns out I have a little more company than I’d expected. In the next room there is the very affable Pierre, whom I’ve just got to know a little over a couple of beers. But my own room has other residents as well, in the shape of two little field mice who have somehow found their way inside and set up shop behind my fridge, where they’ve clearly been doing well enough to have also been able to establish a second home in a discarded tube of Christmas wrapping paper on the floor behind my writing desk.

The mice seem to be more or less nocturnal and thus I became aware of their existence on my first night here, when they woke up me up three times with by making an incredible amount of noise as they tried to chew their way into a bag of pasta the previous (human) resident had left behind. I thought they must be rats to begin with and only on night two, when I snuck out of bed at 3 am with sufficient stealth to pinpoint the source of the noise, did I find out that they were indeed mice, very small mice at that, and that very small mice having a very serious go at the thick stiff plastic bag surrounding half a kilo of fuselli equals a very loud racket.

After a Facetime consultation with my children, I am naming them, naturally enough, Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca.

Despite the fact that the kitchenette stinks of their droppings and will have to be semi-dismantled and professionally cleaned, and that I’ve had to wash every piece of cookware that was stored in the cupboard behind which they’re living because of the extended party they’ve been having in it, soft-hearted animal lover that I am I’ve started feeding them.

To begin with I tempted them out from hiding with a couple of cashew nuts, and my generosity was rewarded with a tiny insight into some really smart – and rather touching – animal behaviour.

They didn’t take the cashews right away. Oh no. Tom – or maybe it was Hunca – emerged to check out the cashews. He (or she) lifted one up as if to make off with it, but she was just testing its weight (given it was almost as large as she was, it wasn’t a given she’d be able to carry it). She also had a bit of a nibble, to check it tasted as good as it smelled, which it clearly did. Then she put it back again and disappeared back beneath my desk.

Only later, almost exactly at sundown, did she emerge and carry one of the cashews back to the roll of wrapping paper. A little later, both the mice reappeared and headed for cashew number two. Intriguingly they worked together to carry this, not to the writing desk, which was only half a metre away, but the four metres across the room to their main home behind the fridge, a distance so far that neither of them could manage the nut alone but had to do it together. The transit was achieved with much hilarity, the mouse-nut-mouse assemblage careering across the floor like a rolling, squeaking ball. And Hunca and Tom now had enough grub in both camps to last them at least a couple of days.

After that, all hell broke loose. I’m not sure these mice can actually conceive of me as a coherent other being, but in the manner of a Tom and Jerry cartoon my feet certainly held some kind of existential quality for them – and by the look of it a friendly one, given their association with the food that, cargo-cult fashion, has started appearing from nowhere whenever they’re around. So now Tom and Hunca’s favourite game is to hop up onto my slippers and run up my trouser leg when I’m working. Which is very cute, very ticklish and very distracting, to the point that I’ve had to start tucking my jeans into my socks when I’m sitting at my desk.

Tomorrow, in theory, we’re getting some humane traps so I can catch them and return them to the garden. I’ll let you know how it goes. If we succeed I already know that I’m going to miss them.

Hi everyone.

Thank you for being my first group of funders and for getting behind Midland with such generosity and enthusiasm. As of today your pledges have put me at the 7% mark. The campaign has now been going for seven days, and as I’ve been told by Unbound that 1% a day is a good target to aim for, this means WE’RE ON TARGET!

I saw we, not me, because we’re in this together. Unbound doesn’t keep your money and you don’t get your books if we don’t reach 100%, so it’s in all of our interests to get to the finish line. And in this 21st century variety of art-based spectator sport, you get to watch as I try to steer us across it. If you can help at any point by telling your friends the fun of watching me toil they’re missing out on by not having pledged, please do.

As you’re probably aware, Midland isn’t actually finished yet. Ten years of spare-time toil hasn’t quite been enough to knock the thing on the head. It still needs an ending and an overall polish, and although I know what I want to write, knowing it and doing are two different things.

In order to get the required focus to put thought into action I’m leaving on Monday for a small town called Vauvert situated almost exactly halfway between Montpellier and Nîmes (should I use the circumflex here?  I’m no longer sure).

Outside this town is a farmhouse, and this farmhouse is the headquarters of my French publisher, the appropriately named  Au Diable Vauvert. The company takes its name from a slang phrase that has little to do with the town but rather translates as “miles from anywhere” with slight overtones of the English “beyond the Pale”, though without the political connotations of troublesome Irish insurgency.

Au Diable is (sort of) the French version of Canongate. It has published me since Habitus and done a very fine job of it too.

Its offices are on the ground floor of the aforementioned farmhouse, to which its founder – shock-haired enfant terrible Marion Mazauric – moved them as a sort statement about Au Diable’s intention to forge itself an identity independent of the cosy world of the Parisian publishing establishment (well, that and the much lower house prices and much improved commute). Here’s a pic of Marion in her offices talking to the incomparable  Christophe Claro, one of France’s foremost writers and translators, who introduced me to Au Diable after reading Habitus – and went on to translate the book as well. It was largely thanks to his passion and enthusiasm that I was ever published in France at all. 

So, on the ground floor are the offices, and on the first floor are two studio flats which are offered gratis to writers who need time and space to put their feet up, ahem, I mean work really hard on their books.

I’ve stayed at the Résidence, as it’s called, on a couple of previous occasions. This shot was taken through my window the last time I was there way back in 2003. I wrote a big chunk of The Book of Ash there (or Electrons Libres, as it was called in translation, a title I’ve always thought rather better than my English original).

This is the exterior of the building. You can tell it’s 2003 because I was still shooting on film, hence the large diagonal smudge on the negative.

It’s a lovely place, but the Cote D’Azur it is not (I’m now really confused about this circumflex business. Côte or Cote?). Between Vauvert and the coast lie the famous marshes of the Camargue, and as you write you get to gaze out of your window over this landscape of rushes and reeds, largely featureless save for the flocks of flamingoes that periodically swing in to feed.

That’s to the south of the Résidence. To the north, east and west are almost equally featureless fields of vines, source of a wine that’s about as flat and hard as the environment from which it’s extracted. Besides the farmhouse, and the small hamlet it is part of, there are almost no other houses as far as the eye can see. I remember describing the experience of staying there to someone back home after returning from my first visit as like spending two weeks sitting on a sheet of graph paper. And that’s pretty much how it is. Although no account would be complete without mention of the real rulers of the marshes, the mosquitoes, which travel in roving swarms and will drain you dry if you to crack from the isolation and attempt the 7km stumble to the nearest café-bar.

The mosquitoes are loved by the locals, however, as they keep the tourists away, making sure the area remains slightly out of time, like the France I visited with my parents as a child. And it is a timeless place, where different eras seem to coexist. The nearest towns are the aforementioned Nîmes, whose Roman amphitheatre is still used for bullfights; the medieval walled wonder of Aigues-Mortes, situated at the confluence of some extraordinary industrial canals; Vauvert itself, a peculiar microcosm of the cultural tensions so present right now in the France as a whole; and the lovely Arles, crucible of Impressionism and site of Van Gogh and Gauguin’s Yellow House. There’s a reason those artists were drawn to this area. There is definitely something about it. Although the main thing was probably the light.

Fortunately I’ve done the tourist thing there previously as I doubt I’ll be getting out and about much on this trip – I’ve got too much work to do and not much time in which to do it. But I’ll try and write a couple of posts about some aspects of the place while I’m there, to give you a better flavour of what it’s like.

Ok, enough chatter. Time to pack…