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<title>My RSS Feed</title><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/index.html</link><description>Subscribe to my blog</description><dc:language>en</dc:language><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:rights>&#xa9;Elizabeth Speller 2011 all rights reserved</dc:rights><dc:date>2013-05-13T15:47:44+01:00</dc:date><admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.realmacsoftware.com/" />
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<lastBuildDate>Tue, 21 Apr 2015 22:35:50 +0100</lastBuildDate><item><title>The Isle is Full of Noises</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2013-05-13T15:47:44+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/d65d239f112481279b58ebeee38eadb8-22.html#unique-entry-id-22</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/d65d239f112481279b58ebeee38eadb8-22.html#unique-entry-id-22</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I love the Scops owl; small enough to sit on a human hand - about 5&rdquo; high - with a hooked beak and expression of utmost ferocity, it clearly has no idea that it is not as impressively fierce or as romantically Gothic as its many cousins.  


...Meanwhile, Igor, the white dog next door on the goat-and-chicken smallholding (equally unaware of how small and, in his case, fluffily unimpressive, he is) opens up, newly surprised by it every night. 

...Just visible behind the spoil heaps of rubble, bags of cement turned into boulders by several long, wet Ionian winters, rotten floor boards, discarded white goods and bits of the last girlfriend but three&rsquo;s car that he cannot, yet, bear to part with, the house is nearing magnificence and &mdash; who knows? &mdash; completion. 


...But, he explains, the most recent girlfriend chose the colours and now &ndash; to live with the pain of memory or face the considerable labour of repainting the whole thing?


...My terrace garden &ndash; formerly a shady bower under the ancient olive and fragrant lemon trees, hidden from the world - is now a sunlit open space, overlooked by goats, Igor (yip) , my elderly neighbours (wave), and the young Albanian family who have set up an alfresco sitting room furnished with the ubiquitous white plastic chairs, on the hillside above me.   There they wave and, of an evening, roast lamb (or, I hope, goat) and, on special occasions, sing very long songs into the night.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Greece: On the Eve of What Next?</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2012-06-16T20:00:10+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/ca4f141d2f52f2d371bb352db05a22c9-21.html#unique-entry-id-21</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/ca4f141d2f52f2d371bb352db05a22c9-21.html#unique-entry-id-21</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The water is pumped from a sterna which collects the copious winter rains but now it&rsquo;s vibrating wildly and in the suspiciously hot smell  I envisage a disastrous island conflagration known to have started right here. 


...My British friend remarks, wryly, that it could be a metaphor for Greece but my Greek friend says if Greece is the pump &ndash; what and where is the brick that makes everything run smoothly?


...In ancient Greece water was collected in run-offs to underground flask-shaped storage to prevent evaporation in the searing heat of summer, but our island reservoir, heedless of millennia of experience,  is a vast, open, shallow bowl, offering the maximum surface to the sun.. 


...Currently I&rsquo;m enjoying the ritual by which the sterna - a system adequate since ancient times but unable to meet the demand for daily showers and a washing machine - is filled from the town water via a long and potentially lethal hose across the dusk courtyard.


...Every time I think (smugly) my rather basic Greek is catching some crucial political discussion on a bar television, the words winning, losing, former glory days, discipline and national respect, turn out to mean the boys in blue.


...Next door is the long derelict olive oil soap factory where the goddess of fertility, Ceres &ndash; here, a Ceres bearing a branch of olive leaves, not corn &ndash; still stands over the boarded doorway, looking calmly out to sea. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Greece: a Rock and a Hard Place</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2012-06-12T22:23:39+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/d8f4fe4ecd9f5395513a48e6c041807f-20.html#unique-entry-id-20</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/d8f4fe4ecd9f5395513a48e6c041807f-20.html#unique-entry-id-20</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[There are two things I get used to very fast when I return to Greece: the cocks crowing from 5.00am onwards  &ndash; the cock on my elderly neighbours small-holding seems to be the sentinel bird for the whole valley  &ndash; and the lighthouse; every couple of minutes its distinctive pattern of two long flashes and two short sweeps across my bedroom wall. 

...This-morning small scuffles outside the front door turn out to be two cats and three kittens sitting round a propitiatory dead rat and below my house a young and smiley Albanian labourer is listening to a badly tuned radio. 

...Last year saw whole backstreets of shop closures in Corfu, taxi strikes, ferries suspended because of forged documentation, the occasional appearance of traffic wardens and their portable rules on my small island and the panic when the tax inspectors arrived, unheralded, from Corfu. 

...He hopes for a Syriza win as he fears otherwise Syriza as a potential miracle will always be a distraction, but he worries about reaction from the far right: "it could be worse than the civil war", he says. ...  A sociologist tells me that the Syriza bloc contains both candidates who have advocated armed protest in the past and those who are respected teachers/lecturers, idealistic and active in their local community, so represent the best and worst of political life. 


...A small building down the lane used to be the HQ of the communist party, with a shabby red flag and a painted sickle on the wall, but it was restored to a house last year, its past obliterated. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Vienna 2: What Lies Beneath...</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2012-01-26T13:04:00+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/c8d596f249b24b5c67b9f935bffe7126-19.html#unique-entry-id-19</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/c8d596f249b24b5c67b9f935bffe7126-19.html#unique-entry-id-19</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Nevertheless, walking down the apparently endless W&auml;hringerstrasse on a grey winter&rsquo;s day, past the neo-Gothic Votivkirche,  a massive Coca-Cola advertisement not so much not so much emblazoned on the porch as offering some sort of annunciation- past the dusty academic bookshops selling surgical texts and plastic skeletons, to (eventually) the Josephinum, was  something of an act of courage. 


...Not all their explorations were profound in concept but all made an impact: in Vienna poor Semmelweiss, later to die in an asylum, ironically of infection, introduced the simple idea of hand-washing in obstetric wards and cut death rates at a stroke. 


...I was riveted by a picture of the first ever gastrectomy, with a full audience: surgery as theatre, accompanied by the entire, immaculately stitched stomach, retrieved by the surgeon and preserved in formalin when his patient died three months later. 

...Created over two hundred years ago, here are the life size &eacute;corch&eacute;s - wax models - flayed or neatly eviscerated to reveal what were then the unfamiliar wonders of the human body to the public as well as medical students. 

...This is where my imagination wanted to linger-not in the monologues of the patients as they lay on Freud&rsquo;s couch, but of what they thought when they waited. 

...Just as the surgeons magnified, stretched and pierced the human body so that we might live infinitely safer lives today, so Freud, at his simplest, entered the human mind and left us with the idea that the motive for our thoughts and actions might be more complicated than we had believed and not always under our conscious control. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>December in Vienna: On Music&#x2c; Memory and the Basilisk</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2011-12-29T13:44:18+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/3ff3b264ab05c32f8e59e801246755cc-18.html#unique-entry-id-18</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/3ff3b264ab05c32f8e59e801246755cc-18.html#unique-entry-id-18</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[As with all places that I visit, I soon find my fantasy narrow street (the one where poor Schumann lived, and where, in 1212, they found the basilisk, which could kill with a look, biding its time in a well beneath an ordinary house), my fantasy apartment building, local coffee shop, small restaurant, second hand book shop and so on. 


...Soon this is extended to the relationships I shall have with figures who cross my path: the man with the coat as well-cut as his manners, the woman writing in a caf&eacute;, the friendly couple in the music shop. 

...But I feel at home, gazing out on an alley through curtains that have been cut instead of hemmed and appear to have been fraying  since the war, and surrounded by layers of ancient posters through which door knobs have torn their way out of the old paper.


...This was an opera I first heard in East Berlin when I was twenty and to go there through checkpoints bristling with dogs, guns, bored, cold soldiers, concrete, anti tank girders, mines and mutual suspicion, through unlit streets and thirty year-old war damage, was a journey in itself. 

...The door opened and there was the Gothic nave transformed into a place of soft and shifting shadows of colour from a lantern in the main door, the golden sunburst at highest point of the altar glittering in candle light, the side aisles in darkness and from the distant choir, one of the choruses of Bach&rsquo;s Christmas Oratorio being rehearsed for Christmas Eve.  


...I stood for a while,  invisible, lit a candle for my mother and my nephew, heard the conductor stop and start his musicians, as conductors must have done a thousand times, as they aimed for perfection on the day, and, finally, left.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>On Grief</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2011-11-17T11:04:51+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/f66baa0b43168e829d64c88da57e8d15-17.html#unique-entry-id-17</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/f66baa0b43168e829d64c88da57e8d15-17.html#unique-entry-id-17</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Some years ago I wrote a book called Sunlight on the Garden; it was a patchwork history of my family as it sometimes soared, sometimes staggered through the twentieth century, wrestling with wars, dislocation, the English class system, love and loss adventure and also, for some of them, depression. 

...But if one can, although with difficulty, accept that death may occur in the wrong order: the child before the parent from accident or illness (my mother died in her early 60&rsquo;s, my step-sister in her early 40&rsquo;s) it was unthinkable that any member, loved and important to the whole, would want to leave it. 

...The tracks were chosen by my nephew on a list left as part of his immaculate planning for death:   &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t make you love me&rdquo;, &ldquo;Hey there, Delilah&rdquo; - songs chosen, we saw, from a CD called &ldquo;The Very Best of Sad Songs&rdquo; - even at the darkest times there are fragments of humour. 

...In April this year, my brother, Barney&rsquo;s father, will give a talk at TedEx 2015 on adolescent mental health, challenges to how we handle it and something of his own journey through the last three and a half years, including his involvement in training others to put strategies in place to deal with mental illness. 

...But not all do and once a member of your family has killed himself you learn so much you never knew: you discover how many people in your circle have shared these experiences &ndash;there is still some stigma, it seems, in talking about it and then the statistics, particularly on male depression and suicide under the age of 25. ...  There is no other word for it &ndash; it is the principal cause of death in this age group - and society needs to look hard at why and how death seems so much easier than life for so many of our young men and how we can pre-empt their fatal decision. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Greece: Whose (De)Fault Is It Really?</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2011-09-19T11:15:19+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/d61519b985836bd608da2ab4bc30fe93-16.html#unique-entry-id-16</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/d61519b985836bd608da2ab4bc30fe93-16.html#unique-entry-id-16</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[They are not, as northern Europe would have it, idle &ndash;  those connected with tourism, work very long, hot days, seven days a week in uncomfortable conditions and in towns most of those in offices earn low wages, enterprising young companies start up but are often stifled by bureaucracy. 

...Whether this is the sort of long term stable democracy that should have been included in the Eurozone is a question I cannot answer, but perhaps Greece deserved some help to become the sort of productive, peaceful democracy it, and Europe, needed?


...But all the ordinary Greeks I have spoken to expect a default and casual talk is simply about timing, so the government is failing to convince its own citizens of its view of their interests or offer them a viable future.


...None of this theatre goes any way towards re-educating a country in the need to pay tax, nor in establishing a relationship of trust which encourages potential tax payers to believe their taxes will provide services not increase the prosperity of a rich minority. 

...The recent &lsquo;discovery&rsquo; that many Greek ferries had fake seaworthiness certificates (a sort of marine MOT) issued by a Russian &lsquo;business&rsquo; operating in Greece, which provided the paperwork without the financial cost and time of exhaustive safety checks: X raying hulls, lifting the boat out of the water and so on, has halted easy travel to the islands.  

...It is probably hard for a Greek to feel militant on an island in summer, part of an extended family and anchored to ancestral roots; the sea and sun are free; but once the city-livers return to Athens and Thessaloniki, to cramped apartments, restlessness and the winter, things will seem dark indeed.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Cockerels and Goats</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2011-07-10T17:35:21+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/328e268caecf71f97abff8873d9e9772-15.html#unique-entry-id-15</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/328e268caecf71f97abff8873d9e9772-15.html#unique-entry-id-15</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The air is cool and very still, the occasional cock crows, the hens and wild turkeys chatter on softly in the olive groves around  my house and the cicadas have yet to start that day long  thrill of sound which is so much the Mediterranean to us north Europeans who rarely hear so much as an unconvinced cricket. 


...It is wonderful to walk on these nearly forgotten paths, letting them determine your direction: although unless you watch turnings very carefully, faint memories of the Cretan labyrinth creep in as they fork and curve back on themselves and swiftly become indistinguishable one from another. 

...Pomegranate, cherry and fig trees hung over the walls from long forgotten orchards whose houses and memories are just a pile of rubble or a single carefully built stone gateway: &lsquo;nothing beyond remains&rsquo;. ...  The relentless winter rain here gives the island a wonderfully lush vista of 500 year old Venetian olive groves, woods of bracken and dog rose as green as Devon, and headlands with their melancholy sentinels of pines and cypresses, but on the west coast it turns to a cropped, thorny garrigue, smelling of oregano, myrtle and, often, goat. ...  The air is damp however hot the day, the breeze blows and the sea is piebald in shades of blue: the crystal turquoise of small coves almost iridescent in its brightness, the deep pewter-purple swell in fissures in the cliff so deep, that it is here where some Paxiots claim to have kept a submarine during the war to harass the German and Italian shipping fleet.


...My first, not entirely rational, thought was that it was a llama, the second, in common with my companions, was to climb over a high wall as the beast thudded towards us, gathering speed.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Flip-flops: a Cautionary Tale</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2011-06-25T21:33:43+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/3a0c4ce97f5350a1a6c51c151fd82790-14.html#unique-entry-id-14</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/3a0c4ce97f5350a1a6c51c151fd82790-14.html#unique-entry-id-14</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Now it was me, curled up on the back seat of an old taxi, drifting in and out of awareness as the driver travelled with infinite care down the bumpy tracks to the port. 


It was 1.00 am, but the port lights were on and a small boat was waiting, and so was a small crowd of onlookers - it was all in a evening&rsquo;s entertainment and Greeks have none of the reticence of the British when it comes to illness or, indeed, any form of privacy.   The captain had to be paid &euro;200, then I was lifted on to the back of the boat, followed by the GP who gave me an anti nausea injection in my bottom while the crowd sighed in sympathy.


...I was still in the teeshirt I&rsquo;d arrived in and sufficiently relieved to put on the red satin nightdress, fit for a 1960&rsquo;s honeymoon, which a friend eventually delivered.  


...A day or so later, driven half mad with vomiting and pain I was having fantasies about pulling myself to the sea shore and throwing myself into the cool water and ending it all. 

...I was so traumatised &ndash; by continual pain and fear - that I couldn&rsquo;t speak for two days but in fact with the right drugs, properly administered, it was only a week later that I left hospital, with dressings on the huge black blisters on my legs.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside...</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2011-05-24T17:00:32+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/117ddc1a0e1eb7d6d31151fd17391804-13.html#unique-entry-id-13</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/117ddc1a0e1eb7d6d31151fd17391804-13.html#unique-entry-id-13</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Daily life consists of erratic hours - in my case dawn starts - and uninhibitedly comfortable clothes &ndash; too many or too few according to season with annoying bits of hair pulled into a unflattering unicorn forehead bunch or with a pencil holding it all up (so incredibly chic on French models so, basically, sci-fi on the cheap, on me).   Stella Duffy and I did an event together at the recent du Maurier Festival and she pointed out that one of the reasons women actors don&rsquo;t like the word &lsquo;actresses&rsquo; is because it still carries overtones of 18th century  prostitution. 

...The siren call of cream fudge, or cream teas with scones, or simply cream, is followed by the virtually vertical ascent up narrow lanes between tiny cottages lived in by the part-time fisher-folk of north London. 

...But Fowey has the sort of bookshop writers like and hope they write for &ndash; Bookends  &ndash; one part hand-picked new books and another part old leather, dust and foxing, dealing in the irresistible randomness of the second  hand: the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, Pilgrim&rsquo;s Progress, a set of Reader&rsquo;s Digest Condensed Books, a dog-eared Peyton Place and The Shell Guide to Essex. 

...It was the best  sort of festival - combining real local flavour with smooth-running administration, a wonderful location at  the extraordinary Fowey Hall Hotel -  the ornate cliff-top house that was the inspiration for Toad Hall in The Wind in the Willows and, of course authors: I heard Linda Grant  speak on the continuing resonations of the Baby Boom and their astonishing trajectories from patchouli oil,  and finding profundity in the Desiderata (&ldquo;Go quietly amid the noise and haste&hellip;&rdquo;) to advertising and central London property ownership. 

...Books, fudge, nesting ravens, shrieking gulls (try sleeping in Fowey to understand exactly where du Maurier got her inspiration from) friendly and engaged audiences, fresh crab, and, tucked down a side street, a gallery of bird photographs by Ian McCarthy, as dramatic and beautiful as any I have seen.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>New beginnings (2)</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2011-05-19T14:46:09+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/ce292431b8d943f76342dc36c0da96ff-12.html#unique-entry-id-12</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/ce292431b8d943f76342dc36c0da96ff-12.html#unique-entry-id-12</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Dr Johnson, it&rsquo;s said, was once come upon unexpectedly by the mistress of the house while kissing the maidservant.


...I wrote about my next novel, The First of July, here and a little about a research trip to the Somme (where the book is set) here. ...  Obviously I&rsquo;ve been thinking, in that loose free-floating way you do at the beginning of a project, for much longer. ...  astonished? . . .  to find that the opening scene, with two brand-new (to me) characters, came almost fully-formed into my mind a couple of days ago.


...They came fully-formed onto the page: an odd experience but one which most writers are familiar, although it usually doesn&rsquo;t happen until further into a story.


...So much so that I&rsquo;ve not only put up a paragraph about the odd ways beginnings get begun here, but the whole sequence here.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Blood&#x2c; Books and Birthdays</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2011-05-06T09:54:08+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/4f82f767ff89524071c5d05ed9f3be98-11.html#unique-entry-id-11</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/4f82f767ff89524071c5d05ed9f3be98-11.html#unique-entry-id-11</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[It was my first day back at university as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, it was my younger daughter&rsquo;s birthday and it was publication day for my second novel, The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton - a tale of loss, choice, secrets, old churches, garden mazes and early hydro-electricity.  


...A few weeks from finals yet many more students said it was all coming together&mdash;sometimes with electric connections&mdash;than were shuddering on the edge of pre-exam angst. 

...When I am in my final hours, characters from Beowulf to Sapper, Ang&eacute;lique to Mr Rochester, Mrs Dalloway, Count Fosco, Sydney Carton and Lord Peter Wimsey and, yes Captain Emmett and Kitty Easton will cluster, vaporously, around my bed.


...When my publishers and I came up with the titles of my novels, which had resonances of contemporary titles of the 1920&rsquo;s, we didn&rsquo;t have Twitter in mind and I can hardly assume the world will recognise TROCJE or TSFOKE.  


So yesterday, after too much celebrating, too many essays, and too much blaming of the Royal Mail, I proudly announced my new novel on Facebook: The Strange Return of Captain Kitty Lytton.  ...  The sharp-eyed will spot that it was a confused amalgam of  The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton and its predecessor The Return of Captain John Emmett.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Sex: It&#x27;s the Detail that Counts</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2011-05-02T20:08:32+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/19975fd380ae062c9c9f69bb3bf57a2c-10.html#unique-entry-id-10</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/19975fd380ae062c9c9f69bb3bf57a2c-10.html#unique-entry-id-10</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[When I wrote The Return of Captain John Emmett, partly set in WWI, I was well aware that a woman with no experience of military service might have committed several strategic blunders. 


...But finally he said my account of men waiting to go into action was psychologically spot on, and I felt reprieved.


But he was also a warm and humorous man who, having revealed my novelist&rsquo;s ineptitude in matters of fighting, sent me a brilliantly funny spoof sex scene from the sort of novel a military historian, oblivious to any other narrative considerations in his desire to get the details right, might write.


...Then he slowly unbuttoned his tunic, with the 1881 pattern bronzed officers' field-service buttons, with their Hampshire tigers, rasping against his finger- nails.   He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and was pleased to see why he had always preferred a sturdy whipcord to the dark barathea worn by most of this brother officers, especially if the tunic was cut loose, with a Viyella lining and two inside pockets. ...  He had just begun to undo the waistband of his putty-coloured breeches, and was reflecting on the fact that their doeskin strappings needed some attention, when there was a quiet voice from the bed. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Greek Cottage Madness 2: Elementary Greek</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2011-04-30T11:41:57+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/74f5b3d9fe33f620eb7ba80854391383-9.html#unique-entry-id-9</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/74f5b3d9fe33f620eb7ba80854391383-9.html#unique-entry-id-9</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I&rsquo;d actually read Classics at university, and  although my Ancient Greek was even more limited than my modern, and there would be little call for loosing my oxen from the stall or any mangling with a burning spear, the classical texts had left me with the word for sea &ndash; thalassa &ndash; and death &ndash; th&aacute;natos. 

...Though the other was a possibility if I ever touched the green&ndash;brown liquid, with its tiny whip&ndash;like water&ndash;life, which trickled from the taps, or trod on one of the needles that lay around the place formerly called garden. 


...I will need to dig at least one trench twenty metres in length across your terrace if we are to find your septic tank which is backing up and causing the very bad smell. 

...But before I&rsquo;d left an old Greek friend had arranged for every broken window to be mended and the inside of entire house to be whitewashed top to bottom. 

...Eleven olive trees of great age, two orange trees with fruit the consistency of loofahs and three plum trees, one of which fell over in the third winter and revealed the septic tank. 


...The next time I returned they had been trimmed and there to my astonishment was a view &ndash; of silver green olive groves and the sea stretching away as far as the tip of Corfu. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>New Beginnings (1)</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2011-04-28T17:12:48+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/07d2e3c018bf749e48f68214a0f067c1-8.html#unique-entry-id-8</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/07d2e3c018bf749e48f68214a0f067c1-8.html#unique-entry-id-8</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[But now, as I embark on a third novel, and my seventh book, I&rsquo;m in the slightly bizarre situation where my first novel, The Return of Captain John Emmett, is just out in paperback and is Orange new writers book of the month, my second, The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton comes out next week and I&rsquo;m doing various talks about that, and yet it is the ideas and characters for the third that are shouting for attention. 

...There are those who plan out a book, more or less chapter by chapter, at the start (among them, those who do this for their publishers, in the hope of an advance, then write something quite different and hope the publishers will either have forgotten, or embrace the brilliance of this alternative idea two years down the road). 


There are those who carefully jot the history and idiosyncrasies of each character on a card or in a file; the most extreme even know minor  facts about the characters, which they don&rsquo;t intend to use: the newspaper he reads, her old school, his interest in German literature, the party she voted for.  


...Those who have a strong beginning and often an end, but let the story and its characters find the path between the two; and then there are those who have a predicament, a setting or an event in mind, and have to think how to tell the story around this. 


...I am wary of saying that characters make their own relationships with each other and the circumstances of the story, just as they would in life&mdash;it sounds pretentious&mdash;but it is one of the startling and thrilling things about writing fiction.


My current book is set on one day&mdash;that day, and its effect on individuals and on society ,was my central idea&mdash;and with flashbacks, so I&rsquo;m determined to have a proper, hourly, timeline. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Greek Cottage Madness&#x2c; 1: Trashed</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2011-04-28T08:51:10+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/ef7f4ebb3da7aacb52a5b360480b8667-6.html#unique-entry-id-6</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/ef7f4ebb3da7aacb52a5b360480b8667-6.html#unique-entry-id-6</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I&rsquo;ve always been something of an impulsive shopper, my urges only tempered by an ability to create online fantasy shopping lists on days when the writing&rsquo;s going badly.

...I was offered it out of the blue, it was very, very cheap (for some unexplained reason the rather edgy owner needed to leave the island in a hurry) and the sun was shining.  

...Until then it was, obviously, so remote and simple that I would inevitably be productive: long days uninterrupted by visitors so that I would soon be doubling my earnings and halving my outgoings as a writer. 

...Inside, doors had been smashed, fittings ripped out, although an ancient, and, I later discovered, immovable piano, with a disc on it indicating it had come from Alexandria, stood against a wall. 

...Even now if I use a local taxi or explain to a bar owner where I live, they shake their heads with an expression of either amusement (youngish men) &ldquo;That Ioannis. 

...In my winter dreams I had thought I&rsquo;d come over, move in and work on the house by day and my novel by night. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The poetics of death</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2011-04-17T11:08:33+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/a80a493d26f1d2aa727be3ce56a3c805-4.html#unique-entry-id-4</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/a80a493d26f1d2aa727be3ce56a3c805-4.html#unique-entry-id-4</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Seeing these military cemeteries, I thought of Charles Causeley&rsquo;s strange and evocative poem At the British War Cemetery Bayeux:

I walked where in their talking graves

...&lsquo;I am Christ&rsquo;s boy&rsquo;, I cried, &lsquo;I bear

...I hang with honey and with rose

...&lsquo;What gift,&rsquo; I asked, &lsquo;shall I bring now

...Take, they replied, the oak and laurel,]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>A mark of honour</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2011-04-16T14:31:46+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/0668be65eeb3276309d77534153b321e-3.html#unique-entry-id-3</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/0668be65eeb3276309d77534153b321e-3.html#unique-entry-id-3</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[You can just see the row of pebbles on the top of Lance-Corporal Harris&rsquo;s gravestone at Tyne Cot.   This is an ancient Jewish custom; instead of flowers, visitors leave a stone on the grave, in memory of the original cairns and as a record that someone came to pay their respects to the dead.    And if more than one visited, as they turned away they would offer each other the traditional Jewish funeral valediction: &ldquo;Long life.&rdquo;
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Research: travelling to the Somme</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2011-04-16T14:04:19+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/6ae990c572875369705915e74780f6ca-1.html#unique-entry-id-1</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/6ae990c572875369705915e74780f6ca-1.html#unique-entry-id-1</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The tiny cluster of graves in woodland where a single company fell and were buried in their own trench, the vast avenues of pristine stone, softened by the heather, roses, tulips of an English country garden. 

...And they might well weep: when the crater was blown the thuds and cries of Germans trapped in their trenches went on for three days. 

...Now I passed slowly by the memorials: Newfoundlanders and Indians, South Africans in their peaceful wood of ash and hornbeam, the floor a haze of bluebells  where once battle raged for 5 days, and Australians remembered at a ruined windmill, in the taking of which they lost nearly as many men as at Gallipoli. 


...The idea, the ideal which brought men from the colonies&mdash;from sheep farms, from Canadian logging stations, from the Punjab and Madras, from Cape Town and the West Indies&mdash;is as hard to imagine as the fact that this war took 10 million soldiers&rsquo; lives, and that behind every soldier were parents, grandparents, wives, sweethearts, children, siblings, friends: a vale of tears so deep it is, yet again, as unimaginable as everything about this war.  


...The Great War took writers, musicians, doctors, scholars, actors, politicians and teachers, just as it took miners, shipbuilders, publicans, farriers, shop-assistants and builders&rsquo; labourers. 


...It is one the reasons I, and others of course, return to write fiction set in the period: to try to impose a painful humanity on unspeakable statistics, and to question what now seems like a monumental and unforgivable folly. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>My next novel</title><dc:creator>user@domain.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Notebook</dc:subject><dc:date>2011-04-16T13:53:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/dfafde3057d54dc9930206b2c6e611da-0.html#unique-entry-id-0</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.elizabethspeller.com/pages/notebook_files/dfafde3057d54dc9930206b2c6e611da-0.html#unique-entry-id-0</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[My memoir, Sunlight on the Garden, ends on the battlefields of the Somme, in my search to find a lost great-uncle. 


My novel The Return of Captain John Emmett, although set in 1921, has a plot which looks back to events of the Great War; its sequel, The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton, is only located six years after the armistice.


Now I am beginning to write my third novel, The First of July, which will be centred on four lives crossing on a single day in 1916 &mdash; the opening day of the Battle of the Somme.


On that day alone, the British sustained nearly 60,000 casualties.   It was the worst-ever day for military losses, and a turning point not only in the lives of tens of thousands of people  but in the way war would be seen, as the horror of modern warfare stood revealed.


The First of July was the day glory died forever. ]]></content:encoded></item></channel>
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