August 28, 2022: Yes, a novel!

WHEN I started doing voluntary work in the offices of the charity War on Want in London in the 1990s, the manager thought I was out of earshot when she asked a valued senior volunteer what he thought of me. I froze behind my office divider, waiting. “She’s great,” I heard. “She doesn’t take herself too seriously.” I was so relieved. Not taking myself seriously has been a goal throughout my life, a theme echoing down the years. It’s only recently, probably way too late, that I think I should have done.

Now that I’ve finished the novel (arestaurantandanovel, see?), and it has met with silence from agents, I decided that the quicker route to getting it in front of the public before I die would be to throw it into the Amazon self-publishing cage. Well! I think to call it a jungle would be inappropriate. It seems more like a pet-shop window overfilled with creatures that don’t seem to notice they are sitting on each other, or sleeping with an appendage in a fellow creature’s mouth. All of them are wiggling towards the food bowls, mouths open. There’s something obscenely marvellous about it.

Of course not all the creatures are writing fiction, though it does seem to bulge in the teen vampire and cosy mystery genres. You can publish ANYTHING YOU WANT! Not guides to nasty and brutish behaviour, I hope – I think Amazon must employ thousands of trained arbiters (or perhaps bots) in every language to inspect your work before they allow it go “live”. One of the most popular genres seems to be how to publish your book on Amazon, followed (or perhaps preceded, I can’t count that high) by how to market your book on Amazon.

Stupidly, maybe innocently, I hadn’t really thought about that bit. I felt that simply choosing the “publish” option after creating an Amazon-digestible manuscript and a cover would give me a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. I would at last be able to say, yes, I wrote the book, it’s out there, you can read it. (And you can! Look, it’s right HERE.) I’d be liberated finally from the croaking, whispering inner nag, my constant companion, which asked, so where’s that damn book you always thought you would write, smarty-pants?

Writing it wasn’t enough. Now the nag is egged on by the squirming creatures who are all optimistically marketing their books. The first requirement seems to be, taking yourself seriously. I have to market it imaginatively, widely, confidently, aggressively and most of all, efficiently. This means a website, a dedicated Facebook page, a dedicated Instagram account, Twitter, BookTok, readings, bookfairs, promotions… I see why it would be nice to have a publisher with a team of ambitious young techies to do all this, and certainly without a self to say, Oh shite.

I could pay someone to do it, but first I’d need to believe I’d earn back the outlay. And second I’d need to believe that I wasn’t cheating by getting one of many eager companies to do it, which is how I actually feel. (We’re talking about self-publishing, right?) I’ve learned that it’s important to vaunt your NEXT book on your Amazon page. (Next! Next!) One of the many chirpy online guides to marketing your book suggests creating a cover and a blurb for a not-yet-extant second instalment in a series, and starting a pre-order campaign. Even Joel’s fluid definition of fair and honest was stretched on that one.

I thought that all I ever really wanted to do was get this book out of my mind, clear the “You should write a book” earwig from my brain, tick the box, and move on to other things. But now, my poor little book, I can’t just leave it lying there asleep in the pet-shop window. I’ll have to take myself a bit seriously for a while and find it a home.

A Table by the Window, available on Kindle and as a paperback

December 23: The 2021 end-of-year letter

I love the carefully selected jolliness of the round-robin letters we find stuffed into Christmas cards. Marvellous holidays, high-achieving children, personal bests, loving family gatherings, cakes that always rise… Usually I’ve already had news of the flight cancellations and endless rain, divorce proceedings, slipped discs, the storming out and the stomping off… I haven’t been able to produce my own jolly letter because they make life seem so absurdly edited. But I’ve just now received an alert from a French news service letting me know that the “lightning speed” of Omicron’s spread is causing fears of the “disorganisation of society from the beginning of January.

I thought society was already disorganised. Seeing as it’s going to get worse, I decided to make my own absurdly skewed edit of 2021, and clicked through the year’s Google photos. Not having found any personal shots of Thwaite’s Glacier (yep, scare yourselves with that one if you don’t already know), plastic seas, rubber boats, or Boris Johnson, I feel ready to focus on my first ever round-robin Christmas photo essay. One month, one shot, one sentence.

January 7, Gloria Mansions, rue de France: A friend and I found our way inside Gloria Mansions, a beautiful art deco apartment building in Nice, and an idea for linocut printing on textiles, which has consumed me ever since, was born.

February 19, Colline du château: I’ve resented Nice for not being London ever since we arrived here 10 years ago, but I realised in this second Covid year that I’ve started to accept it at last.

March 6, Palais des Expositions: We had our first vaccinations, an enormous gift, achievement, relief, palaver and source of terror all combined with a strange feeling of community with the world.

April 6, rue de la Croix, Old Nice: We had some big plans to turn this agonisingly negotiated property into a craft store and tea shop, but just after the last minute, we decided it wasn’t the moment for people in their 60s to take expensive risks on new ventures, and although it cost us in money and lost sleep, we’re sure we were right.

May 29, the main post office, Nice: This art deco frieze on the outside of the building lit the taper for my linocut frenzy, inspiring a new project for me and Joel after the decision not to go ahead with rue de la Croix.

June 7, Marseille: I’ve foolishly spent so much time thinking that London is the only worthwhile destination on earth that we’ve lost precious time exploring what’s right next door.

Early July, the set of “Mascarade”: There are wannabe actresses in France who might kill for the role of “Penthouse neighbour with little dog”, but as it entailed me having to “act” with a famous French actor in French in front of a full filmset crew, I was traumatised for days and am still bemused as to how such a mistake could have happened.

August 20, Kingston: I won’t even try to describe the extent of my joy at being back in England and at the pub with my nephew Jack and my niece Caitlin (here with Jack’s girlfriend Shriya).

September 11, Avenue Piatti: I spend ages doodling, drawing, cutting, inking, and sewing while listening to the radio, the sort of life I pipe-dreamed about when I was working in London, proving that the coming true of dreams can sneak up on you.

October 15, a vide-grenier in Parc Chambrun: Since we’ve lived in Nice, I’ve consciously made a huge effort not to gather stuff, but stuff gathers around us, no matter what, and we have to come up with ways to get rid of it.

November 30, Avenue Piatti: I love it when I hear Joel scrabbling longer than usual in the kitchen drawers, as it means he’s looking for something we don’t use very often, like an oyster knife, and a treat is on the way.

December 3, Villeneuve Loubet: Joel’s mother and his aunt Suzanne are getting old, and everyone is considering the inevitable, but at least when we take my mother-in-law to see her sister, this is what we see on the way back.

Happy New Year

December 14: A few little truths

 

I fantasize about living in the mountains with big stinky dogs and maybe a donkey. It would be so easy, there are mountains right behind us, and we could easily buy a big, isolated place with lots of land, and a huge fireplace. But Joel says I’d panic without a cinema, a bakery and a pharmacy within walking distance, and I expect he’s right.

I’d love to never give a damn about what I look like. When we went to Italy last August I wore a little black dress with trainers because it was the coolest thing I had and it was terribly hot, we were doing a lot of walking in the heat, and I knew we were unlikely to bump into anyone we knew. If only I could feel like that all the time.

I like where we live. It’s really bright and quiet, we can see lots of sky, and there’s a park right next door. I even bought a little chair in a junk shop specially for sitting by the window and watching the sky and the park. I never get a chance to use it, because we work too much, but maybe one day…

Even things that make me happy simultaneously make me feel inadequate. There are so many beautiful doorways in Nice, so many little architectural details that I discover every day on routes I’ve been taking for a couple of years. When I see them, I love them, but then I think I should photograph them all, make a project of it, and share them. Damn Instagram, Facebook, WordPress… Why can’t I just look at things, love them, and pass on by?

Sometimes Nice really does just take my breath away.

I wish everyone, everywhere, could spend a couple of years living in another country. I’ve lived as an adult in three countries now, and the French don’t realise how good they have it, the quality of life here, the health service, schools, the social protection in the form of pensions, benefits, unemployment insurance…I might be considered ungrateful saying so, but it’s true.

I drink too much. I don’t know whether that comes from being English at heart, or coming from a family of addicts. Both, I suppose. But I’ve noticed, even during prolonged sober phases, that people who don’t occasionally drink to excess just aren’t as endearing as those who do.

The death of my brother Nicholas earlier this year triggered a rapprochement between my sister-in-law Jan and me. Our friendship dates back to 1982. It makes me happier than I can possibly ever explain to be close to her again, and makes at least some sense of the confusion of time, age and mortality.

I wish I could have a picture like this, four generations, of my own family, but I’ll have to settle for one of Joel’s family instead.

I love this man.

I’m fed up with being unwell. I might have done them slowly, but  since we’ve been in Nice I’ve run two semi marathons and several 10kms, and I also taught myself to do a creditable crawl swimming across the bay of Villefranche.  That’s all over now. The only reason I’ve found the time to update this blog is because I’ve just spent 48 hours on my back after an epidural injection with a 5-inch needle into my spine, for a herniated disc. I hope it means I can get back to being healthy again. Meanwhile, I’ve been going twice weekly to a physical therapist with the swankiest­­­­ waiting room, with rams in her ceiling rose.

I’m a fibber, because I told my friend Mary Zawalick that I wouldn’t put this photo anywhere online, because we had both just woken up and didn’t look our best. But I made a special trip to London this summer to see her, and some of her kids, and her sister, when they came from Virginia and rented  a house on my old street.  I love the Zawalick family, they’re all beautiful, and that’s all there is to it.

There are lots of good people in Nice. I complain all the time, but I shouldn’t. I’ve been part of a charity for a few years now, we befriend elderly people in precarious positions. I did something similar in London, and it’s just as rewarding here, and in fact it’s much more sociable. We’re always going out for teas or dinners. This was at a tea  when we made slightly dubious table decorations for the Christmas eve dinner. I won’t be there as I’ll be in London, but I know lots of people will be very happy.

This will be the second year I haven’t sent Christmas cards that I’ve made myself…which, hmmm, coincides with how long we’ve had the restaurant. I’ve started making them though – a linocut this year. Idea, execution, production, completion. So far still only on phase two.

 

September 22: an uneven year

My candle burns at both ends;

   It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

   It gives a lovely light!

 

 

November 5: life after Ted

Always there somewhere, and then, not.

 

Thank god I had this view. It stopped me from going insane

Ted sleeping

Ted’s hairy foot

Ted refuses to even look at Nice Matin now

…but he decided he preferred the sunset from the other balcony. This picture makes me smile like a fool, because we put poor Ted through so much, and he’s been (as much as a cat can be) a trooper.

Ted doesn’t care about being an IronCat – he just wants my mango

Ted is helping me making bunting for Bastille Day at the restaurant

Ted is hot.

Ted on the chair Toni gave us, which she found on the street

July 7: 40 years later

 

On July 7, 1977, 77 WABC radio in New York was a music station that played an endless round of Top 20 hits. I was a 20-year-old driving my parents’ blue Chevy Impala to pick up my 14-year-old sister Lucy, who was helping out at a dusty riding stables not far from our house in Rockland County, NY. Because the date was 7/7/77, 77 WABC had been giving out prizes of 77 dollars throughout the day to callers who answered questions I can no longer remember. It was a beautiful day, and the wild, tall, orange tiger lilies that grew abundantly in every roadside ditch in Rockland County were particularly lovely in the late afternoon sun.

I’d probably been driving to pick up my sister many times that summer, but I don’t have a marker for any other day than July 7, 1977. I remember the dog/perfume/hot-plastic-seat smell of the car, the texture of the steering wheel, swathes of tiger lilies on my right. I had already finished two years at Sarah Lawrence College, and was going to Paris (Paris!) in September for my junior year abroad. I was stupidly in love with a boy called John. I knew all the refrains to the songs on the radio. I had probably been working that day at the college mail center, really abusing their mail trucks because I didn’t know any better, because in those days of economic crisis, it was the only summer job I could get. I was happy.

Almost every year since, I’ve vaguely noted July 7, and how many years have slipped in between then and now. Whenever I see tiger lilies in bloom, or even photos of them, I can feel myself being that 20-year-old, singing in a hot car.

Well, suddenly that was 40 years ago.

There’s been a fashion recently in the media for famous people to address their young selves. It’s a pretty pointless exercise, I think, because only young people could possibly benefit from it, but they certainly don’t listen. I wouldn’t have done, driving along South Pasack Road toward the Diamond E stables, toward the future.

There’s no point in fortune-telling. My tiger-lily self wouldn’t have believed that my father would soon be dead, that I would fall totally out of love with John, that I would leave the U.S. and never return, that the meanest time of my future nights would torture me with the memory of Lucy in her coffin, that my hair would eventually turn gray, and that I would like it.

I probably wouldn’t have heeded the practical advice: buy shares in Apple! Stop going on diets! Learn how to write computer code!

And my tiger-lily self wouldn’t have understood the most important advice I can offer now, either. That is, to try to understand, and bite your tongue. I would tell my young self that you can make dreadful mistakes of all kinds that will sooner or later right themselves, but you will never stop regretting the pain you cause with words. I’d say, don’t snap in judgment, in envy, in fear, in spite, in anger, and out of pride. My young self was too uncomplicated to understand all that, or to foresee how often she might wound. Imagine a life where you’ve never said anything you regret! To never have to reproach yourself for the expressions of hurt or disappointment you cause.

When I “graduated” from 6^th grade, at about 12 years old, and went on to junior high school, the thing was to have a little autograph book for friends to write stuff in. Most people wrote “Luv ya!” or similar, but my mother, who thought that sort of thing was sentimental rubbish, wrote “The future lies before you like a field of driven snow, be careful how you tread it, for every mark will show.”

Boy, how right was she? I guess, with that, advice from the future had already been given to me, and I just thought it was very curious indeed.

 

 

 

February 22: Behind the bar

There’s an Edith Piaf song that goes, “Moi, j’essuie les verres au fond du café, j’ai bien trop à faire, pour pouvoir rêver”, which roughly translates as, “I’m drying glasses at the back of the café, I’ve got so much to do there’s no time to dream…” When I sing these lines, drying glasses behind the bar at 7 Villermont, it’s guaranteed to make Joel smirk. When he met me in London, I was an exotic young American with an expense account and a company American Express card. Now, I spend a lot of time drying glasses behind a bar in the South of France, but at least I can ironically reference French cultural giants for his amusement while I’m doing it.

Behind the bar is a good place to be. The view is unfettered, except by the odd bunch of ranunculus or anemones. A whole world happens out there on Avenue Villermont. Let me just say before I begin that Joel and I go out of our way every single day to be kind to most people in our quartier, and that compassion for others has always been (to use a cold but apt term) one of our “shared values”. But sometimes we can be a bit … well… snide.

Our actual customers – the people who come to eat  – represent a small percentage of the interactions we have every day. We are beginning to know the names of people who pass on the street now, but we still, between ourselves, call them by the names we started with, before we really knew them. There’s the Massacreur, a Romanian bus driver who lives two doors down. We call him that because one of the first things he told me, as I was tending the flowerboxes that edge our terrace, was that he was going to massacre the group of kids who had stolen the chairs from his little yard. He adores his wife and six-year-old princess, so much so that he asked Joel to come and admire his tiny apartment after he’d repainted it while Wife and Princess were in Romania on holiday. It was so small and simple, and the Massacreur was so proud, that Joel cried (to me, not the Massacreur), and vowed ever after to appreciate all he has.  We leave our empty wine bottles in the Massacreur’s yard, as he shares two rows of grape vines in Ramatuelle with a friend and is aging his own wine in the bus garage.

Then there’s Madame Chapeau (“Mrs Hat”), a woman from Luxembourg who changes her clothes and hats at least twice a day. People need to pass the restaurant to get to the fruit and veg market at Liberation, as well as to the tram stop. Madame Chapeau seems to wear one hat to go to the boulangerie, another to go to the bank, and a third to go to the traiteur. She stops at us once in a while for a “colonel”, which is a lemon sorbet with a double shot of vodka. She needs it: her husband has a form of dementia that means he refuses to be seen with her, wanders off and gets lost. He now wears a GPS bracelet, so that if he wanders out of his zone, alarm bells ring at the right places, and he’s netted. When we see him pass, several times a day, one of us always says, “Where’s he gone­­­­­­­­?”  There but for the grace of …

Then there’s The Lion King, a tiny, wiry dancer who had a spell as a choreographer in London working on… yes, The Lion King.  He’s opened a bizarre “ghost” jazz bar in the street next door, where every day he puts out in the street, as his terrace, an array of completely different furniture; deco chairs, old café tables, 1920s upholstered bar stools, potted palms… Every morning it’s as if he’s reached into his Mary Poppins carpet bag and pulled out a whole new decorating theme. We’ve never actually seen this bar with any customers, but the Lion King and his team are always there. And every day one or the other of them walks past several times with a handful of little fluffy dogs. We kiss, coo at the dogs, discuss how good business is, and say au revoir. And then we scuttle back into the restaurant and behind the bar to say, “What the f….?”

There are many more: the Wierdos, two middle-aged women who used to come to the restaurant every day, and then… stopped. We wondered what on earth we’d done until we heard from here and there that that’s what they’d done to every restaurant in the quartier. Every day they totter past and back again at least three times in high heels, both perfectly done up, according to the season in white linen, suede or fur. The fat blonde is always a few steps in front, the skinny blonde trailing behind.  We see the first one pass, and we both say, “Here she comes!”, and she always does, the second one hoves into view.

There are plenty more. In the big apartment building across the street there are Big Bear and Little Bear, the art restorers (we want to hug them: when they come to eat with us on Friday nights, Little Bear belts out Hungarian love songs); Genius Child and his hairy parents, The Happy Family…

Avenue Villermont is mostly residential, but there are several businesses hidden in the courtyards.  In our very own building there’s a sort of stable for cycle rikshaws, which advertise businesses as well as act as three-wheeled taxis for tourists in the centre of town. The other day six or eight of them trundled out decorated like swans. Then there’s the French Sign Language School, which teaches signing for the deaf. The other day a deaf woman from Sweden came for lunch with a deaf French woman, both of them at the school learning sign language. I could see that the French woman was mistakenly trying to explain to the Swedish woman that our tourte aux poireaux (leek tart) was beef, because the sign for beef is also, I believe, the international sign for bullshit (the only sign I know – a favourite of Joel’s).

Other businesses nearby include the Medical Hypnotists school (where people learn how to hypnotise to reduce pain, and who sometimes come to the restaurant in groups of eight and, we observe, are partial to our “Full 7” burger and mousse au chocolat), and the monthly Sunday chanting group. Some of the chanters come for brunch after three hours of chanting “Ommmmmm” next door, which apparently creates a happy local vortex of some kind in which the restaurant in included.

I wish I could provide photographs of all these characters, but it wouldn’t be very ethical, would it? Or kind. They are in fact just ordinary people going about their harmless business. Their only mistake is to be visible to Joel and to me.

 

 

 

December 31: the Christmas card apologist

 

 For the past 15 years at least, maybe even 20, I’ve been hand-making the Christmas cards that Joel and I send out. On the whole, I really love doing it, though it’s a project with many parts. I often make 60 or more cards, so the first criteria has to be simply whether or not it’s feasible without being a factory. Joel used to help me with the simplest bits, such as the preparation of folding the card (usually A5 220gm Daler Rowney cartridge pads) and sharpening the crease with the swish of a ruler. Or colouring within lines or circles with felt-tips (Staedtler Polycolor, Edding or even sometimes just Caran d’Ache Super-Fibre). Sometimes he even dotted the i’s of our “made in Chiswick” or, latterly, “made in Nice” credit on the back of the cards using a Pilot gold or silver metallic marker.

But over the years he became more and more unnerved by what he perceived as my disapproving glances, and the increasing height of the reject pile. What was, early on in my card-making career, a companionable seasonal tradition became a lone pursuit. I didn’t really mind. It just meant that I had to start earlier in the year.

Finding inspiration is a constant. I don’t look for it; it’s just there. I usually have a notebook with me. (Those little grey lined “Moleskine” ones are my favourite because they’re tough and survive months rattling around in a knapsack. Some years I’m partial to the tiny squares of “Rhodia” notebooks, but they’re too ephemeral and I just get frustrated.) I don’t always use them to make the notes; this year in my diary (Filofax pocket-size, week-on-one-page), the entry for Monday November 21 is “Don’t forget NY Public Library Digital Collection for Xmas card ideas.” But in the scruffy Moleskine notebook, in amongst notes reminding me of the times of the Nice Centre du Patrimoine’s walking tours, the model number of a light bulb that needs replacing, and the colour of 7 Villermont’s awning, are scribbles that might be sketches of fabric designs, friezes on buildings I’ve noticed while cycling past, or just a really bad imitation of a pretty card I’ve seen in a shop. All things that might be easy to do in parts for Christmas cards.

I don’t have much talent as an artist, nor skill as a draughtsperson, nor patience, and all those factors need to be considered. Once the card is bought, removed from its pad, folded and creased (perhaps 90 minutes, depending on whether I do it while listening to BBC Radio 4 – faster ; or watching TV – slower), the real work begins. Sometimes the work begins well in advance of the card: one year I did my own linocut of a reindeer, ink-stamped it onto the card, and then coloured in baubles hanging from the antlers (30 hours at least). I bought the linocut tools at a shop in Tokyo called Tokyu Hands, pretty much the best shop in the world for people like me whose favourite pastime is “looking at stuff”. Another year I embossed a Christmas tree onto the card and coloured in the baubles with Eddings and Pilot gold marker. I actually developed blisters on my left index finger from embossing about 30 circles on each card: 30 x 60 = 1,800 (40 hours, minimum). I bought the embossing kit at Hobbycraft in Greenford, a western suburb of London. Despite Hobbycraft being the most physically soulless craft superstore in the universe, my heart used to beat faster each time I turned into a new aisle. The best thing I ever bought there was pewter craft paper, which I used to pinprick a shade for a tea light holder, which I sent as a card with instructions on how to fold, and included the tea light itself (50 hours, plus band-aids). Sometimes I send myself a test card, to see if the construction will hold up to the postal system – this was the beginning of that practice.

The simplest ideas can turn out to be the most time-consuming. One card had a gold three-piece puzzle on the front, with one obviously missing piece. Inside the card I glued the missing piece, always “H”-shaped, as the start of “Happy Christmas”. The problem there was that before I could spray-paint the puzzles in gold to use on the card, I had to fit them together on the kitchen table, the desk and the living room floor. I bought a batch of puzzles from charity shops, and while it started out well (Joel helped doing the puzzles), it ended with spray-painted gold patches all over the patio and glue all over the kitchen table. (100 hours, at least.) That card was perhaps my most un-favourite of all.

I can’t honestly remember all the cards I’ve made. When you have to make 60+, each one is valuable, so I don’t tend to keep any myself and I forget them from year to year. Sometimes, however, I find an inky, smudged, botched test or template when I’m rooting in my Toybox for a pen or some gift-tying ribbon. And with each one, I think about how I could have done it quicker, or better, or cheaper.

The best part, of course, is when there’s a whole pile of finished cards next to me, and I write them out, and copy the addresses from my address book, and think of the people who make me happy. Then I divide up the envelopes into piles for posting to different countries. It’s like being Bing Crosby in Holiday Inn… I like having the piles sit somewhere nearby for a couple of days before posting, all that crisp paper whiteness, all those softly even edges.

But this year, I didn’t do any of that. It’s been difficult in Nice anyway. The world’s single most amazingly wonderful incredible art shop (Turnham Green Arts and Crafts in Chiswick), supplier of my card paper, is far, far away now. The world’s other single most deliciously papery paper shop (Paperchase in Tottenham Court Road) is also far, far away. There is, I have to admit, a friendly pen shop in Nice (Geant in rue Gubernatis), but in Nice art shops are for Capital-A Artists, not for people who just like a crafty splurge at Christmastime. (Crafty splurges are for children, and extra-curricular at that.) And of course we went to London for 10 days! We closed the restaurant (until 3 January) because it’s a quiet time and boy, did we need a rest. Our stay was so fabulous I can only just offer a few pictures instead of a thousand words: a very frosty morning in Battersea Park, my niece and nephew, mince pies.

Joel with our nephew Jack and niece Caitlin outside Bar Italia in Soho.

 

So, sorry. I even found the inspiration in that New York Public Library Digital Collection: a Victorian set of snowflake stencils, which I was going to simplify, copy, pencil in, template, re-copy and re-arrange in between strips of red velvet ribbon… But I think the whole process would have taken a lifetime. Right now, we don’t have a lifetime, we just have our restaurant.

In my 2017 diary, I’ve made a note to start thinking about Christmas cards in June.

Happy New Year, with happiness, energy, and plenty of time.

October 26: still here

Joel at the till, with the credit card machine

Our new restaurant has been open for 12 full weeks now, and so far I’ve only really, really, really wanted to slap Joel in the face once. That’s probably pretty good going, don’t you think? It was when I dropped the credit card machine in the middle of our first very busy lunchtime, and it fell apart. I was too horrified to touch it again. Joel put it back together quite quickly, but that didn’t stop him from hissing and spitting at me behind the bar, telling me how clumsy I was in the nastiest way he’s ever spoken to me. I ignored it until I got back home, threw myself on the bed and wept bitterly about the dreadful mistake we’d made opening a restaurant together at this stage in our lives. Long, happy marriages can fall apart under this sort of pressure. You get to a point where circumstances reveal a facet of the person you thought you knew, and you don’t like what you see.

 

 

Well, we haven’t got there yet. It was just stress, and heat, and me not knowing anything about actually working in a restaurant. For the first six weeks it was rarely under 30degC/85degF outside, and while the main room has aircon, the kitchen doesn’t, and the terrace, even in the shade of the awning, was blistering. Behind the bar, the overwhelming blast from the coffee machine and glass-washer didn’t help. Getting home to a dark room and a cold shower meant a 15-minute uphill bicycle ride first. ­Now that the weather is cooler, everything seems easy and entertaining.

And of course now we’re used to the neighbourhood, and – we think – it’s used to us. I have lots of dog friends, whose owners walk them past us several times a day.  I have lots of horticultural consultants, too: passersby who can’t resist commenting and advising on the containers that line our terrace. My first effort with geraniums ended in failure, due to some local infestation that everyone knew about except me. I admitted defeat when someone found one of the little butterflies flapping in his Salade César, and sent it back in horror. (I think that was overreacting – but the customer is always right.) I’ve replaced everything with lavenders. I also have coffee acquaintances – people who regularly stop in for un café in the mornings. We even have two 7 Villermont babies, whose mothers first came to us while pregnant. The babies were born within a week of each other, and their parents come back regularly.  A third is on the way!

When Joel and the chef, Michel, have… ahem… different ways of approaching the same end, I find that very stressful, to say the least. In normal times, when Joel has been irritated or angry or upset, it’s usually been with his laptop, or the tax office, or Manchester United, and I’ve been able to ignore it.  Now if he and Michel are … ahem… discussing something, it’s part of my life too. It’s rare, but running in to the kitchen and whispering shut up works. They think someone’s in the restaurant, and lower their voices, so there we all are whispering away furiously when not a soul can hear us anyway.

Joel complains that I push him too often. The coffee machine, ice machine, beer machine and sink are on the far side of the cash register, so if he’s faffing by the till, and I need to get by, I just give him a shove. What else would I do? I don’t really understand his complaint. When the restaurant is busy and customers are burbling away happily, cutlery chinking, we don’t have time to interact in any other way. Except to say to each other under our breath as we push each other out of the way, look, they think it’s a restaurant! I can’t quite believe it myself, but I guess it is.

Ted doesn’t realise we have a restaurant, he just thinks we’re out buying Whiskas.

September 12: Facebook, a memento mori

Before my mother married my father, she worked as a model and journalist, and for a company that handled public relations.  From the few photographs that exist of her post-Second World War London youth, it was a time filled with parties, frocks, handsome men and sunny days. Sometimes she’d come across one of these photographs while searching for something else, and after telling the story of so-and-so and what they got up to, she’d sigh and shrug, and say, “Well, I expect he’s dead by now.” The picture, and the memory, went back in the box, its characters consigned to her own history, where she seemed happy for them to remain.

If one of those characters had then turned up at her door, gray, fat, and trailing some lumpen wife, my mother would probably have slammed it shut in horror.

Until very recently I didn’t do Facebook. I’d felt uncomfortable about it, thinking alternately that my life was a) too uneventful to merit a regular status report, b) too complex to sum up in a few sentences or photographs, c) too short to spend wrestling with technology, and d) that Facebook reeked too rankly of Big Brotherness. Then, because I wanted to create an instant online presence for our new restaurant, there didn’t seem to be a choice. I tried at first to be anonymous, but Facebook won’t allow that. In order to create a business page, you have to create your own honest profile first.  So I did.

I’m still reeling. I’m in the early stages, where names that seem vaguely familiar keep popping up on my screen, accompanied by photographs I rarely recognise. When I can’t resist that click, I’m confronted by time warp after time warp. High school friends I last saw as skinny teenagers on a yellow school bus, or even dancing in some suburban bar to Thin Lizzy’s The Boys are Back in Town, are now smiling out at me from another world. They’re larger, wrinkled, accompanied by an older man or woman, and often encircled by younger people who resemble the people I remember. It’s a strange sort of dream. Sometimes, amongst the shots of smiling, endlessly smiling snaps (doesn’t anyone ever just look calmly at the camera for Facebook?), I find a picture of me. Someone’s has posted their “memories”, and there I am, 15 or 16 years old, cutting a cake, or squinting into the sun. At least the captions say it’s me; I usually have no recollection of the moment, though of course I remember the people. My friends, my classmates. Some of the names and faces make me immediately happy, others less so.

Perhaps if I’d discovered Facebook gradually, earlier, it wouldn’t have the ability to fold time into such sharp-edged accordion pleats. Perhaps if I’d remained in the U.S., I would’ve seen people balding gradually, or I would’ve bumped into their growing children at regular intervals, or been to their bridal showers or divorce celebrations.

In The Sea, one of the Irish writer John Banville’s characters says, “The Past beats inside me like a second heart.” I don’t need to expect, like my mother, that anyone’s dead, but I think that I understand her contentedness at being able to put the past back in its box.  My recent Facebook experience has been a memento mori. I’d like the past to remain inside me, and not to leap out reminding me so rudely that time simply flies.