Trendy But Casual

In Luxembourg

The tourist office used to call it the Green Heart of Europe, I think.

I’m here for the National Day celebrations, and the Fete de la Musique. On Sunday night, on the Place Guillaume II, the Philharmonic Orchestra plays (a pops concert): the square is packed, despite rain earlier in the day. All over town there are temporary stages, and outdoor bars. In the old town, people drink beer and eat sausages and listen to a band playing Beatles covers; in the Abbaye de Neumunster, late-afternoon sun streaming into its glass-roofed courtyard, a choral group called Voices International perform summer-themed songs; on the Place D’Armes , there are stoic brass players crammed into the bandstand. On Monday night, the dance music on multiple stages around the Golden Lady monument, on the Place de la Constitution, pounds until 3 AM.

Shop windows are decorated with flags, and with photographs of Grand-Duc Henri, Grande-Duchesse Maria Teresa (a Cuban-born American), sometimes pictured with their five children. Some of the photographs are old: all the children look young and toothy. Actually, the oldest son, Prince Guillaume, is almost 28, and son # 3, Prince Louis, got married when he was 20 and now has two children of his own. (One of the children was born before the wedding. European royalty has relaxed rules.)

On Monday night, after dark, the small city fills. There’s a candle-lit procession through the streets. In this photo it looks as though the villagers are rounding up a midnight posse to go and confront a witch or chase a wolf, but it’s really much more benign. 

 

The procession was explained to me beforehand: the participants all belonged to clubs. I had the New Orleans krewe model in mind, so I was thinking along secret-society lines. But really, they are just club members, adults and children: judo or tennis or flamenco-dancing club members, scouts and swimmers. Some wear the folk costumes of other confusing-to-identify European countries. (Bulgaria, someone speculates, as another band dance by.) Some wear sombreros. 

There’s a small windmill, and the local brewery’s cart is pulled by sturdy horses. A tractor-drawn float bears smiling little girls dressed as princesses: one presents a posy to the Grand-Duchess, seated on the viewing stand on the Place Guillaume. There are marching bands, and I could swear I hear bagpipes, though I never see them. It’s hard to see much, actually, in the tremendous crush of people.

Around midnight, there’s a spectacular fireworks display off the Pont Adolphe, over the Petrusse Valley. (Earlier I make the mistake of referring to this as a “gully”.) I watch them from a corner suite at the Grand Hotel Cravat, where I’m staying with my friend Sarah Ehrlich. Sarah is ill, and we open the shutters so she can watch the fireworks from her sick bed, like a long-suffering nineteenth-century heroine, or possibly Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I squeeze into the suite booked by my mother’s dear friend Cynthia, where everyone is drinking champagne and hanging out windows. In the first picture, it looks as though the city is being trashed by Visigoths: it's a waterfall of fireworks, poorly photographed by me.

When my mother lived in Luxembourg, back in the 50s, she came to the Hotel Cravat every Saturday for lunch. My sister, she says, was whisked away to the kitchen to be fussed over. On Tuesday, the national day itself, that first-floor dining room is set up for a white-cloth banquet, and all guests have to eat breakfast downstairs.

After breakfast we must quick-march to the train station before getting entangled in the big military parade, following the exodus of the well-dressed, royal, and embassy-related from the cathedral next-door. This morning all the stages and temporary bars across the street are gone. There’s no litter on the streets, though there were thousands out there drinking last night. It’s sunny, and people are already lining the barriers. Outside our hotel, embassy cars, with the CD license plates, roll up. Black cars, black drivers. Little flags, of confusing-to-identify countries, are affixed to the car bonnets. (Car hood, for those of you think a bonnet is only something worn by a damsel with ringlets and a crook.) As we board the train, big guns in the distance boom in a national-day salute. The guard says we’re being shot at and better leave town.

At the moment, T. Middy and I are in different parts of the globe. He is in New Orleans, and I am in London. We don't like being apart, because (after prolonged exposure) all other people find us unbearable. I don't know why: we are fun! But maybe more fun to each other, as it were. 

Anyway, TM is in NOLA, as I said, stuffing his face. Monday lunch: a po' boy at Frankie and Johnny's. Monday night: red beans and rice at our friend T.R.'s house. Tuesday night: "salad" at Giovanni's in the Quarter. Wednesday: lunch at Cochon. No wonder he is all sleepy.

Meanwhile, I am paddling - being paddled - up a river in Sussex, while drinking wine. Eating like a bird, of course, as ever. Wondering when TM will get himself over here so we can play.

Thanks to my good friend, Sarah Rayner, and her iPhone, for the photo. And to her long-suffering boyfriend, Tom Bicat, who did all the paddling.

It’s the third week of June, so I must be in West Wickham, Kent, and the weather must be incredibly sunny and warm one minute and overcast/breezy the next.

Although the postcode here is Kent, this is an outer suburb of south-east London. And it’s serenely suburban here in this quiet street of homes built in the 30s. The house in which I’m staying was built in 1936, and has been in the same family ever since: it has its original oak doors, fire places, and paneling; a hatch between the kitchen and dining room; an outhouse that still (apparently) functions, though the indoor bathroom and loo were original features as well. The garden is long, broad for an English garden. Its centerpiece is a large oak tree, reaching towards neighboring gardens on both sides.

I know I should be using English spelling, by the way, given that I’m in Kent, AKA The Garden of England, but I’m out of the habit.

I’ve been sleeping well because of the utter quiet of the street. During the day I set up for work at the kitchen table, occasionally wandering out into the garden, or walking down to the local newsagent to get a paper. At least four London taxi drivers appear to live in this stretch of the road. (I see the parked cabs. Great powers of deduction: I will become a detective when the writing thing palls.)

The West Wickham shops are a twenty-minute walk to the south-west; the Bromley shops, bigger and brasher, are twenty minutes to the north-east. From Bromley South I can get a non-stop train to Victoria: it takes 17 minutes. It’s a good thing the shops are a decent walk away, so I’m not tempted to fritter away my days trying on clothes in Zara and lolling around outside the Slug and Lettuce, or – worse – nipping into central London on some research-gathering pretext.

On Friday afternoon I rewarded myself – for a) surviving my course and b) managing to trek from Beaconsfield to Bromley during a tube strike – by traveling into the West End to see a movie (In the Loop). The cinema was the Odeon in Panton Street, one of the places I used to frequent. Sometimes I think that my entire 20s was spent reading The Guardian and going to the movies. Hannah and Her Sisters in Leicester Square; The Double Life of Veronique in Mayfair; Unforgiven on The Haymarket; Cry-Baby in Notting Hill; Meet Me in St Louis at the NFT; Touch of Evil at the ICA; A Short Film About Killing up near the British Library; The Doors at Marble Arch; The Dead on … Charing Cross Road? St Martin’s Lane? I don’t know if that cinema is still there anymore.

Having felt the familiar exhilaration of London the day before, when I caught a taxi from Marylebone to Victoria, on Friday I got to experience the familiar exhausting crush of it all.  After the movie, I marched along Piccadilly en route to Hatchards. Someone was shouting from an upstairs window, and I couldn’t make out what he was saying: something about a bike. What bike? The bike a guy was tugging loose from its lock and pulling off the railings; he grabbed it and ran down one of the arcades. All over, just like that.

In Hatchards, a publishing company rep was carrying around a proof of a new William Trevor book. I asked the clerk upstairs when the book was coming out. He told me he’d never heard of William Trevor before, and hadn’t believed the rep when she said he was a major writer. I did my best to persuade him.

Aside from seeing movies and crime, I’ve been lying low. No social events at all,  with the exception of a lovely wedding in Buckinghamshire last weekend (which meant cramming all that weekend’s screenwriting homework into Sunday). My course at the NFTS was brilliant, but it involved a lot of late nights writing and thinking and scribbling and messing with software I’d never used before. On Thursday I felt a terrible withdrawal from the people I’d been spending long days with in the workshop. I miss my new friends! Now I want to press on with my screenplay, given that I have a semi-clue about how to proceed, but there are so many other projects in the queue, as ever – applications and proposals, chapters and research, synopses and revisions, books to finish, blah blah blah. When will I get my shopping done?

Today: onwards to Brighton, where my friend Sarah Rayner (fellow authoress) lives, for a two-night furlough. I can work anywhere, after all. 

Worlds Apart

At the moment, T. Middy and I are in different parts of the globe. He is in New Orleans, and I am in London. We don't like being apart, because (after prolonged exposure) all other people find us unbearable. I don't know why: we are fun! But maybe more fun to each other, as it were. 

Anyway, TM is in NOLA, as I said, stuffing his face. Monday lunch: a po' boy at Frankie and Johnny's. Monday night: red beans and rice at our friend T.R.'s house. Tuesday night: "salad" at Giovanni's in the Quarter. Wednesday: lunch at Cochon. No wonder he is all sleepy.

Meanwhile, I am paddling - being paddled - up a river in Sussex, while drinking wine. Eating like a bird, of course, as ever. Wondering when TM will get himself over here so we can play.

Thanks to my good friend, Sarah Rayner, and her iPhone, for the photo. And to her long-suffering boyfriend, Tom Bicat, who did all the paddling.

In The Garden of England

It’s the third week of June, so I must be in West Wickham, Kent, and the weather must be incredibly sunny and warm one minute and overcast/breezy the next.

Although the postcode here is Kent, this is an outer suburb of south-east London. And it’s serenely suburban here in this quiet street of homes built in the 30s. The house in which I’m staying was built in 1936, and has been in the same family ever since: it has its original oak doors, fire places, and paneling; a hatch between the kitchen and dining room; an outhouse that still (apparently) functions, though the indoor bathroom and loo were original features as well. The garden is long, broad for an English garden. Its centerpiece is a large oak tree, reaching towards neighboring gardens on both sides.

I know I should be using English spelling, by the way, given that I’m in Kent, AKA The Garden of England, but I’m out of the habit.

I’ve been sleeping well because of the utter quiet of the street. During the day I set up for work at the kitchen table, occasionally wandering out into the garden, or walking down to the local newsagent to get a paper. At least four London taxi drivers appear to live in this stretch of the road. (I see the parked cabs. Great powers of deduction: I will become a detective when the writing thing palls.)

The West Wickham shops are a twenty-minute walk to the south-west; the Bromley shops, bigger and brasher, are twenty minutes to the north-east. From Bromley South I can get a non-stop train to Victoria: it takes 17 minutes. It’s a good thing the shops are a decent walk away, so I’m not tempted to fritter away my days trying on clothes in Zara and lolling around outside the Slug and Lettuce, or – worse – nipping into central London on some research-gathering pretext.

On Friday afternoon I rewarded myself – for a) surviving my course and b) managing to trek from Beaconsfield to Bromley during a tube strike – by traveling into the West End to see a movie (In the Loop). The cinema was the Odeon in Panton Street, one of the places I used to frequent. Sometimes I think that my entire 20s was spent reading The Guardian and going to the movies. Hannah and Her Sisters in Leicester Square; The Double Life of Veronique in Mayfair; Unforgiven on The Haymarket; Cry-Baby in Notting Hill; Meet Me in St Louis at the NFT; Touch of Evil at the ICA; A Short Film About Killing up near the British Library; The Doors at Marble Arch; The Dead on … Charing Cross Road? St Martin’s Lane? I don’t know if that cinema is still there anymore.

Having felt the familiar exhilaration of London the day before, when I caught a taxi from Marylebone to Victoria, on Friday I got to experience the familiar exhausting crush of it all.  After the movie, I marched along Piccadilly en route to Hatchards. Someone was shouting from an upstairs window, and I couldn’t make out what he was saying: something about a bike. What bike? The bike a guy was tugging loose from its lock and pulling off the railings; he grabbed it and ran down one of the arcades. All over, just like that.

In Hatchards, a publishing company rep was carrying around a proof of a new William Trevor book. I asked the clerk upstairs when the book was coming out. He told me he’d never heard of William Trevor before, and hadn’t believed the rep when she said he was a major writer. I did my best to persuade him.

Aside from seeing movies and crime, I’ve been lying low. No social events at all,  with the exception of a lovely wedding in Buckinghamshire last weekend (which meant cramming all that weekend’s screenwriting homework into Sunday). My course at the NFTS was brilliant, but it involved a lot of late nights writing and thinking and scribbling and messing with software I’d never used before. On Thursday I felt a terrible withdrawal from the people I’d been spending long days with in the workshop. I miss my new friends! Now I want to press on with my screenplay, given that I have a semi-clue about how to proceed, but there are so many other projects in the queue, as ever – applications and proposals, chapters and research, synopses and revisions, books to finish, blah blah blah. When will I get my shopping done?

Today: onwards to Brighton, where my friend Sarah Rayner (fellow authoress) lives, for a two-night furlough. I can work anywhere, after all.