Undercover Summer

The weather this summer is turning out to be just as miserable as last year. The other day it was reported that we can expect the same summer rain/wind/cold for future as we have supposedly entered a seven year crappy summer weather period. I had to turn the guy off since I did not want to know if he was a scientist or an overzealous evangelist about to threaten locusts. I would like to hope he was the latter.

To give you an idea of how crappy it is, below is a photo of a sunflower from my patio. Compare it to Cara’s sunflower photos from France in the preceding post. If my sunflower manages to fully bloom I am afraid it will be due to it having died and becoming a zombie.

 

 

Remember the world obesity research paper? Well guess what – they have done it again. I am never going to believe another study about worldwide anything ever again. Last week a study into nations’ cannabis habits was released and there Iceland was named the country where cannabis use is most widespread. Apparently over 20% of the population had been high in the past 12 months – surpassing Holland and even Jamaica. Again they got it wrong. No one knows from where they got this info and it is incorrect. Of course there is cannabis available here illegally but it is less widespread than in many places due to strict drug enforcement policies.

I should note I think people should have the right to smoke cannabis if they want to. I don’t, but that has nothing to do with anything – other than me not wanting you to think I am writing this stoned. I am sure the content and the disorganized set up of this post might raise such suspicions.

 

The inaugural Reykjavík music festival “Secret Solstice” was held the weekend June 20 to 22. As the weather forecast was actually good and it was known it would mainly be attended by young people, the police decided that it was sure to be some sort of Sodoma Gomorrah revival and sent in multitudes of undercover policemen, pretending to be hip and cool young fans of music. Apparently they fooled no one. They were too old, not at all cool and banally forgot to take off their police boots. Upset that they could not mingle with the young, they decided to do random body searches for drugs. Understandably this aggravated the guests to no end as the procedure used was the following: swarm the crowd, encircle someone and search them. No reading of rights or any such nonsense. This method sped up the process and they managed to search 100 guests in part of an evening.

 

 

Icelandic law is very clear about body searches. The constitution states that a body or property search cannot be conducted without a court order or search warrant. When police department officials were asked to explain themselves after the concert, they cited an article about being able to search those that have been arrested. Yet no one was arrested prior to these body searches. When this was pointed out they then quoted a law regarding being able to remove objects or valuables from persons that seem likely to damage or lose them. No one understood how that was supposed to make sense and the article was probably selected from the law book at random. Like the people chosen for body searches.

 

photo: thump.vice.com (Secret Solstice guests - definately not undercover cops)

The foreign media attended the festival and they reviews were highly positive. Here is one from Canada (The Province) that made me proud of the Icelandic youth and even more annoyed at the police methods used at the event:

Hard-drinking, loud-talking Viking descendants with a penchant for strips of dried-fish as a bar snack, the crowd at Secret Solstice was a joy.

By day two, it started to sink in that at a festival where people were getting their party on hard, not a fight or incident to be seen. Many were even taking the time to put their butt ends into a bin rather than grind them out on the grass grounds. This is a place where the entire prison population in 2013 was 197 (of whom 17% were foreigners).

All of which is to say that none of the yobbish behavior that so annoys at most Canadian event was evident. My female companion was reveling in the welcome absence of sexist chest-beating and general jock boorishness. Women appear to be at a level of equality here that will leave most foreigners baffled. They lead bands, match or exceed the lads brew for brew, elect lesbian single moms to run the place.

So if you are available in November, how about dropping over for Iceland Noir?

Yrsa - Wednesday

A goat summer or l'été with les chèvres

Somehow I've been spending a lot of time with goats. That's Marshall, the white one who I've misnamed in a previous post and Capucchino behind him who's the queen chèvre of the pen. 

Luxurious quarters that overlook sunflowers, fields of harvested hay for their fellow horses. These chèvres eat organic veggies and even branches from the rosebushes.

Sunflowers nod in the breeze and the bench invites a pause.

Even a deux chevaux and zinnia's nearby.

The day topped off with an apero nearby and I wanted to catch the light hitting a glass of white wine.  Like the French countryside.

But when I walked outside the bistro it felt like I'd stepped into a Spanish village. 

 The white stucco buildings.

 Tiled timeworn steps.

Where do you think this was?

Cara - Tuesday somewhere

Not Today...

I am falling down on the job.

I could, very convincingly I might add, blame some of my blogmates for my near absence today.  After all, I have no vacations drinking Chassagne Montrachet to brag about.  And no family photos to display, showing grand babies who are so cute that my clothes seem to glow in the dark just because I am holding them.  (I do have fabulous grandchildren, but they are spending the summer in day camps of various sorts, since they lack a grandparent with permanent roots on a gorgeous Greek island.)

Or I could grouse about all the horror stories about British Air, which I will be flying on four flights next month on visits to Kenya and London.  The dire warnings presented here are second only to the ones offered by friends appalled that I am going to Kenya at all, given the fact that trouble there is headlining the news broadcasts in the USA.

None of that.

The paucity of this post actually has a joyful cause.  It is ThrillerFest week in New York City--always a fun-filled experience and one where I don't have to fly anywhere--on British or any other airline--in order to get there.  It takes place just ONE subway stop from where I live.

And this year, it brings me the precious week-long company of Stan Trollip, who is off today at NY FBI headquarters, with a bunch of other crime writers, learning the latest investigative techniques of G-Men.  Here he is in a noir-ish picture taken last night during an after dinner stroll around my neighborhood.

This evening, we are having dinner with Dr. Barbara Leavy and her delightful husband Peter.   Barbara is literary light who believes that crime novels are NOT negligible genre entertainment, but novels that should be treated as true literature.  What better company could I have?

As the week progresses, I will be seeing many, many of my crime writing colleagues.  The company I am keeping is so delightful that it erases the depressing nature of what I have been dealt in the past week in this space.  The women's words have been the exception, of course!

Annamaria - Monday

Whose Line is it Anyway?

Zoë Sharp

Last month I was invited to take party in several events in libraries around the UK in celebration of National Crime Reading Month. It always fascinates me, when I do these, the kind of questions that come up at the end. This time round it seemed to be one particular comment that sparked people’s curiosity.

I’d said, in a joky kind of way, that although one would expect that the author had absolute control over the world they create, in my experience that usually isn’t the case. Yes, I invent the framework, the location and the situation, but once I’ve put my characters down into those events, all bets are off. They have a tendency to take their own route and ignore whatever plans I might have had for them at the outset. And the more I try to force them into a preconceived course of action, the more uncooperative the character becomes — as anyone would if forced to do something they really didn’t want to do.

It’s normal, at this point, for me to see frowns among the audience, and it’s a tough one to explain. The only way I can do so is to liken it to sitting on a bus or a train and watching the other passengers. This is no hardship as people-watching tends to be a hobby for most writers, I think. If someone gets onto the bus/train and sits down near you, you instantly form an impression from their clothes, their manner, the way they move. There is a tendency among people asked to write a description of a character to attach hair and eye colour first, but unless someone has very startling or unusual eyes, I rarely notice that feature right away or even at all. Likewise, I’m more inclined to notice the cut rather than the colour of their hair, body type, and whether their shoes are polished.

But until they strike up a conversation, you only have a partial idea of who they are. I no longer try to write huge great character biographies for new characters, because I find that until they sit down next to me and utter that first sentence, we haven’t really been properly introduced.

This goes, too, for their backstory. Not only does it come out in their attitude, what they say, and how they say it, but also in what they share with you right from the off. If someone’s opening gambit is to tell you half the story of their life, you tend to edge away from them—make an excuse to get off at the next stop or take a trip to the buffet car and find a different seat on your return. Yet if they start slowly and make interesting conversation then you’re intrigued and that encourages you to find out more about them.

Of course, there are times when a character is not being forthcoming and then it’s handy to have some kind of mechanism for persuading them to talk. I came across this one recently, which is very useful. It involves the writer asking several questions of him or herself:

• What does your character do to show their personality?
• What does your character say to show their personality?
• What does your character look like on the outside, and how does this show their personality?
• How does the character change or what lessons do they learn?

Given a choice I would also add to this:

• What does your character want in the context of this story/scene and what’s preventing them from getting it?
• How do they set about getting it?
• How do they react to victory or defeat?

I’m still not sure if I managed to get this across to my audiences, but at least they waited politely until the end of the talk before they made their excuses and left. And many more stayed to ask further questions, which is always a good sign … I think. Either that or it shows I failed to explain myself to any degree whatsoever.

Now, where’s the buffet car …?

This week’s Word of the Week is proclitic, meaning a word pronounced with so little emphasis it becomes part of the following word, such as t’was, where the first word — it — has been swallowed up by the second. This originated in the mid 19th century, from modern Latin procliticus (from Greek proklinein 'lean forward'). Likewise, enclitic, meaning a word that follows on so closely it’s become part of the preceding word, such as not in can’t.

Flying High...and Low.

I’m finally back at a keyboard! YAYYYY.  It’s been nearly three weeks of familial bliss amid my holidaying children and grandchildren here on Mykonos (for the wags among you, “nearly” modifies “three weeks,” not “bliss.”:)).

But bliss rhymes with abyss, and into the latter plunged my creative focus as my seven-, five-, and one-year-old grandkids raised my spirits to the heavens.  Their parents of course kept me grounded, reminding me that one of the primary purposes of their visit was to celebrate my birthday. And so we did.  Several times, assuring that everyone on the island now knows my age and henceforth and forever more shall begin every sentence addressed to me with, “For someone of your age…”

Papou is how old?

Rather than resist all of that, I think I’ll take it as leave to practice being a curmudgeon and flail away at the gods. In this instance, on behalf of my daughter and her family vis–a-vis British Airways.

That’s not to suggest British Airways is a god, only that it behaves as if it thinks it is.  It even abbreviates its name to “BA,” as in the Ancient Egyptian word for that part of God that incarnates and reincarnates, traveling between the worlds of the living and the dead, depicted in hieroglyphics as a human-headed bird hovering over the deceased. 

The other BA

Some might say in the case of British Airways that depiction more appropriately represents a vulture.  Others would undoubtedly disagree with me and argue that from their experiences BA represents the “ba” in “ba-humbug,” as in “who cares?”

For those of you familiar with the ways of mighty BA, what I have to say may seem just another ho-hum example of BA’s legendary dysfunctional relationship with baggage, but to others it might help explain why Harry Potter preferred walking through walls and zooming along on broomsticks to flying BA. 

Let’s start out with a little ditty to set the mood…

“Travelers Beware,

British Airways doesn’t care 

That once you’re out of the air

Your bags aren’t there.”

On the recommendation of a friend of mine with the Greek National Tourist Organization, my daughter, her husband, and their year-old baby girl booked to fly BA out of JFK to Heathrow and on BA again directly into Mykonos, rather than traveling on Delta non-stop to Athens and from there on to Mykonos.

They left JFK on Friday the 13^th of June—an auspicious beginning—to join me in celebration of Father’s Day and my birthday on Sunday.  The JFK leg took off two hours late, touching down in Heathrow twenty minutes before the scheduled Mykonos leg, but the JFK plane never reached the gate in time to make the Mykonos connection.

But this is not about BA’s apparent absence of effort at making that connection work.  Nor is it with BA re-booking them on a flight into Athens that kept the family sitting around Heathrow for ten hours, followed by several more hours in Athens waiting for a sunrise connecting flight into Mykonos.

No, the gripe runs to a deeper example of BA’s lack of consideration for its passengers. One would think that with ten hours to transfer the family’s luggage onto their re-booked Athens flight, BA could make that happen. Especially after my daughter asked a BA representative in Heathrow, “Is it necessary for us to claim our bags here and recheck them on to Athens?”

As if reassuring a child, BA’s representative told her that would not be necessary, because their bags would accompany them to their “final destination.”

Fourteen hours after arriving in Heathrow, the family arrived on Mykonos sans checked bags. Now the fun began.  Where were the bags?  In Athens?  Heathrow?  New York?  No one knew.  No one at the airport had an answer, BA’s automated missing baggage system yielded nothing, and no one could reach a live person at BA for help.

A full day went by with still no news from BA on the fate of their luggage.  Halfway into their second bagless day, I turned to my friend who’d suggested BA in the first place.

Even he couldn’t crack through BA’s automated system to find live help.  So, he went “out of system” and tracked down a living, breathing person who confirmed that indeed BA had located the bags.

They’d never left Heathrow! 

BA in its infinite wisdom had decided to hold onto the bags and send them on to Mykonos the following Tuesday aboard its next regularly scheduled flight to Mykonos—three days after the bags arrived in London and the family had departed for Athens.

How could BA do such a thing and compound it all by keeping the truth from its customers? Surely BA knew that missing luggage ruins a traveler’s holiday.  Costly unplanned expenses and anxieties over the fate of one’s belongings are the very least of what flow from such experiences. 

We’ll likely never know if what drove BA were cost saving considerations, ineptitude, or something else, because BA’s opaque baggage tracking practices give most passengers no access to the truth.

Having said that, I did come across an article published on July 3^rd captioned “Baggage chaos continues for British Airways.”  The article reported, “British Airways is warning customers it could take days before they are reunited with their bags following four days of technical issues with conveyor belts at Heathrow Terminal 5. Intermittent problems from Thursday to Sunday meant some bags had to be processed manually and led to many passengers arriving at their destinations without their luggage.”

That sounds like a reasonable explanation for what happened to its passengers’ bags between June 26 and June 29, but what’s BA’s excuse for what happened two weeks before then? And again on June 21 when more travelers flying to Mykonos on BA out of Heathrow arrived without their luggage. Or does BA regard that sort of episode as business as usual, unworthy of an explanation?

“To Fly. To serve” is British Airway’s slogan.  Frankly, I think there’s a better one:  “This is a helluva way to run a railroad.”

Bet Harry Potter would agree…even at his age.

Jeff—Saturday

Weegies V Burgers or how the West was Won.

Forget Frasier V Ali.

Forget McEnroe V Borg

Forget Tom V Jerry

This was the big one

The Beasts from the East  V The Best from the West

                                      

                 Keeping  in our corners- Frank, Neil, Doug, Craig (In charge ha!) Me, Matt, Douglas

Knowledgeable Neil Broadfoot

                                                             Fruity Frank Muir

Deputy Doug.

Capt Caro  (girlie swot)

Mad Matt Bendoris

                                                              Dazzling Douglas Skelton

We are very lucky in Glasgow to have two great Waterstones shops – one of which is a converted cinema!

They are located in Sauchiehall Street and Argyle Street. The managers of each are very keen to do the one thing that Amazon can’t do; that personal touch. Or in our case – get authors to verbally abuse each other or the audience. Or indeed anybody not there to defend themselves.
It was great fun, very  funny. The audience were in hoots.

It was part of the Crime in the City series of events to celebrate crime fiction. The finale was this panel event - 'the beasts from the east v the best from the west. Or as it was known even before kick off, the losers v the winners.

The natural charm, eloquence and threatening demeanor of the Glaswegian would always see us through.
  

We had 3 authors from the west (hurrah!) – 3 from the east (boo!) and our very biased ‘chair’ – who gave me 30 points simply for introducing myself because he is ‘scared of me’. Although Craig lives in Stirling, (central) is a westie – you can tell that by his high IQ, his good looks, his charm and the fact I am keeping in with him as there is going to be a rematch and we want the ref on our side.
                                                           

Craig started off by giving us one  fact about each author:

One wrote to the Scottish Parliament to complain about there being no broadband in his house

One was once a lumberjack

One wrote the book because of a promise to his granny

One wrote his entire book by Blackberry

One was voted in the top twenty sexiest crime writers

One has a Phd in nuclear physics

And so the well organised quiz started and it was polite and lovely for all of ten  minutes. Then it turned into a good old rammy. Our team was somewhat impeded on the cultural front by the  writer Matt Bendoris who wrote a self help book for serial killers called Killing with Confidence. He is also a tabloid journalist.

                                       
                                                         Is this Matt at his work?
                                                            (photo from the Sun)

So to sum up, Glasgow is the industrial heartland full of honest heart working folk who tell you what they
think. Edinburgh sees itself as full of culture and it has a castle. And that's about it.

 We are Billy Connolly. Face like we found a fiver.
                                     

 They are Miss Jean Brodie.  Face like a bitter lemon
                                    
There is a saying that you get more fun at a Glasgow stabbing than an Edinburgh wedding.

We are McIlvanney.
                                         
 They are Rankin.
                                         
 Here we say ‘Do you want a cup of tea’? Over there they say, ‘You’ll have already had your tea then?’

In Edinburgh sex is something the coal comes in. Glaswegians (Weegies) eat chips with their fingers. Edinburgh folk ( Burgers) eat with a daft wee forky thing.

Then Glasgow became The European City of Culture and Irvine Welsh wrote Trainspotting. And things began to change.

But it was always the Weegies V The Burgers.
Here are the jokes..

Why do Edinburgers walk so lopsided?

Because of the chip on their shoulder.

An old drunk, Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and an intelligent Glaswegian are walking down the street. They see a fifty pound note. Who picks it up?

The drunk of course as the other three are fictional. ( I only put that in to appear unbiased )

What do you call an burger with a sense of humour. A tourist.

Here’s one for Everett to try his accent....,

A Glaswegian lady goes to the dentist and she wriggles about in his chair.

'Comfy?' he asks

'Glasgow,' she answered.

What do guys from Edinburgh use as contraception?

Their personalities.

You only have to look at the coastlines to  see the difference.  Sailing out of the west every kind of nook and cranny, island and sea loch.

                              

Edinburgh has this. One rock, that's yer lot

                              

Then I realised, as I sat on the panel that Doug is a Westie, Neil is from the central belt and Frank  is a Weegie through and through – he just writes about St Andrews.

So basically there were no real Burgers brave enough to make the 35 mile trip. Probably scared we would force feed them chips. Without forks.

So the west won 460-310.
We retired respectfully as all Scots do, to the pub to catch the end of the World Cup game. The honours on our own field of play already decided.

                                
Frank leaving early for the pub to get his  round in, proving he's a Glasgow boy

Caro   04 07 2014
Ps, Douglas was the broadband, Neil wrote the book for his granny, Matt wrote his on his Blackberry, Frank was a lumberjack and Doug has a PhD.  So now you know....

Food and Wine

Burgundy wine country. Photo Jill Wilson

With a title picture like that, there are no prizes for guessing that I’m in France this week visiting a few of my favorite areas with wine-loving friends from Australia. I’m not going to bore you with a list of restaurants visited, meals eaten, and wines quaffed, but on Monday we had a different and interesting visit to a Burgundy wine négociant - Olivier Leflaive. They feel that most wine is drunk with food, and yet most tasting is done in a fairly rushed environment of one wine after another with no opportunity for comparison and certainly no wine and food pairing beyond, perhaps, a crust of bread and a swig of water to clear the palate before the next wine.  In an attempt to move beyond that, they cleared their tasting room, added a number of tables, hired a chef, and set up a food and wine pairing to show off their wines.  The food is good regional cuisine – nothing fancy – and it is chosen to work with the wines available for tasting.  The five course lunch is 25 euros and you can use it as a backdrop to 5, 7 or 9 wines.  Needless to say we chose the last option.

I know a few other wineries attempt something similar.  Rockford in South Australia, for example, has wine lunches.  But there the focus is on the food and company with the wine to complement; at Leflaive it’s the other way around.

Leflaive is in Puligny-Montrachet, one of the great white wine areas of Burgundy so Chardonnay is the main focus.  However, they also make fine reds (pinot noir, of course) from the regions of Volnay and Pommard a little to the north.  Unfortunately, when we fetched our friends at the railway station on Saturday, we were caught in a vicious thunderstorm which peppered the car with hail. That hail wreaked havoc on those red wine grapes, so 2014 is going to be a sad vintage there.

Olivier Leflaive

But back to Olivier Leflaive.  Olivier himself was something of a prodigal son.  He studied business in Paris, but then became an entertainer and subsequently an agent for preforming artists, turning his back on the wine business (except for drinking it, I would guess).  However, in 1981 he returned to take over the business and it went from strength to strength.  He retired in 2010, handing over the reins to the next generation.

The tasting starts with an ordinary chardonnay – cheap and cheerful.  But with a small cheese puff, it suddenly has more richness and flavor.  As sommelier Régis put it – the wine is alive not only because it is changing in the bottle over time, but also because you are changing – your mood, your age, what you are eating, who you are with.  You will enjoy the expensive wines not only because they are better, but because you know they are special.  On the other hand, the cheap and cheerful will work with good company and food and can still be memorable.  With a chuckle, he suggested at least a case of each wine in the cellar to be tried from time to time, not so much to see how the wine has changed, but to see how you have changed.  And, of course, to try with various foods.

Régis indicating the different wine regions during the tasting

We went on to a parallel tasting of three 2010 whites, one each from Meersault, Chassagne-Montrachet and Puligny-Montrachet.  Some of us found our favorite one changed with the seafood pâté. Then the same flight with premier crus (one step up) from 2009 with, and without, chicken with morel mushrooms.  Then reds with, and without, cheese and as expected a huge taste change with the food.

Dessert and coffee were necessary punctuation points, but one’s mind remained fixed on the wines and the extraordinary diversity they had exhibited in terms of vintage, area, food pairing.  It’s all summed up by a French saying we saw at the restaurant we ate at last night: “Je boirai du lait le jour où les vaches mangeront du raison!” That is: “I’ll drink milk the day cows eat grapes!” 

Santé!

Michael - Thursday