German Creechers

A huge envelope full of books arrived not long after we came back from Greece - seven copies of the German edition of Mister Creecher.

The movie versions have been obsessed with the Germanic quality of the name Frankenstein, but as I have mentioned before, Victor Frankenstein - despite the name - was not German, but Swiss (albeit he was actually born in Naples).  He lived in the French-speaking city of Geneva.

Mary Shelley, like all writers, was making use of her personal knowledge, and she had been staying in a house in the grounds of Byron's Villa Diodati, on the shores of Lake Geneva, when she had the nightmare that would spawn her famous novel.

She also, with the poet Percy Shelley (Mary was still Mary Godwin then), would have sailed past Castle Frankenstein on the Rhine.  It is from this castle that Victor probably gets his German name.

But the name has been responsible for all those Germanic castles and villages that appear in the early movies - hilariously spoofed in Young Frankenstein (or should that be Fronkensteen?)

The Germanic connection is not completely spurious though.  Victor trains at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria and it is here that he develops his theories and creates his 'monster'.  But when the creature runs away after Victor rejects him, he flees to the forest and learns to speak (somewhat unbelievably) from French refugees - the De Laceys - in an isolated cottage.  By this stroke of good fortune, the creature learns the same language as his creator, and is therefore able to converse with him at length when they next meet.

Ingolstadt is sometimes described as the setting for Frankenstein, but it occupies a relatively small part of the book.  It is the setting for the creation, but the rest of the book employs Switzerland, England, Scotland and the Orkneys, as well as the Arctic as settings.  It uses the kind of big, bold, Romantic locations that Turner and Friedrich were painting at the same time.

My family and other animals

My son was reading Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals while we were in Greece - a perfect choice, I think.

I loved the book when I did it at school - because of the charm and humour of the writing, but also because it seemed very evocative of my early life, in Gibraltar.  My family were nowhere near as eccentric as Durrell's, of course, and our lives were not as chaotic.  My father was a serving soldier and was stationed there in the mid-1960s and we went with him - my mother, my two brothers, my sister and me.

I spent a good deal of the time, like the young Gerald (though with not nearly so much intensity or rigour) staring at lines of ants, watching mantids hunting, following octopus underwater, studying rock pools.  And in Greece, I felt myself going back to that world so easily.

Greece was a bug-fest.  There was lots of other wildlife too - tortoises, birds and lizards and so on - but it was the insect life that seemed most to the fore.  The cicadas - tzitzikas in Greek - made their presence felt with their incredibly loud chirping, trying to bashfully hide when spotted.  There were several species of wasps and bees, some enormous.  Hornets were very common and thrummed past with their incredible machine-like throb.  There were so many crickets and grasshopper, both in number and species.  They hopped about on the hot tarmac of the roads and among the shrubs and trees.  There were lots of butterflies too - many very large and beautiful (most of those larger ones swallowtails).  There were millipedes in the house and very large and aggressive centipedes we were warned not to handle.  And of course there were ants: long lines of them on the march, cohorts of larger ones dragging impossible loads, massive-headed soldier ants scurrying around on the hot stones.

We were not as bothered by flies as we have been in other hot places (or even in the UK) but we were bitten.  Some were no doubt mosquitos but probably not all, as the reactions seemed to differ.  Some of the bites were very painful, it has to be said.  No paradise without the snake...

And talking of snakes, we saw a couple of those too.  I saw a very fast small green snake, that shot away as I approached as we walked through the acropolis near our house in the olive farm, and we saw a pretty large one on the way back.  It was equally keen to escape.

Birdlife was the most disappointing.  We saw lots of swallows, swifts and martins.  We saw buzzards and falcons and lots of hooded crows and jays.  We saw goldfinches, greenfinches and lots of sparrows.  We even saw a little owl sitting on a roof.  But we didn't see hoopoes or bee-eaters or rollers and I was really hoping we'd see at least one of those.

Too hot, I think.  Maybe next time.

Greece

I've been away.  I have recently just returned from my first visit to Greece.  I went to the Peloponnese with my wife and son, staying near the coast in two separate locations.  None of us had been to the country before.

In the first week we stayed on an Olive Farm north of Zachora.  We stayed in a lovely house surrounded by olive trees, with cicadas chirping loudly all day - you can do the same if you like the look of it and follow the link.  We are not usually beach people, but we had decided to have a change and spent a lot of our holiday in the sea or on sun loungers.  I am now a bit closer to the colour I feel I'm meant to be.  The local beach was nice, but so was the beach at Kakovatos where there was a taverna and bar on the beach.

In this first week we were close to Olympia and visited on a very, very hot day.  We had been warned it might be very crowded at the time of year (and day) we went, but it was almost deserted.  It is a beautiful, evocative site with a very good museum (although don't make the mistake of going to the adjoining rip-off cafe).

We went into the mountains on a long drive to Dimitsana, Andritsana and Stemnitsa.  The mountain villages are lovely, studded with churches and chapels, many of them very old (most sadly locked).  The roads in the mountains are not for the faint-hearted.  I suffer from vertigo and my wife suffers from a phobia about being driven off the side of a ravine, so my son was the only one looking at the view.  It is an earthquake zone, too, so the road has a tendency to be eaten away by slips and peppered with huge buildings that look like they have all-too-recently fallen from above.

For our second week we travelled south to a small village called Pyrgos set into the hills above Stoupa. Here we stayed in a nice house with a little terrace with a view over the rooftops to the sea and the sunset.  The next village down the switchback-laden road was Neohori which had a nice taverna with spectacular views.  Pyrgos was a lovely little village full of churches hidden in the maze of alleyways.

We had quite a few beaches to choose from, but the beach at Stoupa was our favourite.  We bought face masks and snorkels and spent many an hour watching the fish swimming in the crystal clear water and looking for octopus (which we never did find).

We also went into the mountains from here and if I went back I would do more exploring, but possibly spring is the time for that.  We did a bit of a loop and went to Kastania, Saidona, Exohori and Proastio (the latter of which we particularly liked).  We saw some lovely frescos in some of the churches, but most were frustratingly closed (particularly frustrating as we knew from our guides what treasures they contained)

There were many reasons to come back.  I was particularly disappointed not to see Mystra and Monemvasia looks amazing.  But to be honest, we passed so many places that looked incredible and just going back and trying a bit harder to get into those churches would be worth doing.  I hope I go back.  I think we all do.

Search engine

I have been trying to sort out my studio over the last couple of days.  I have so much stuff hoarded away in there and no efficient way of finding anything.

I am a long way away from resolving this and I suppose it must be true of anyone who has had a long creative career.  How much of what we produce to we keep?

I have a small sample archive of the work I created as an illustrator and cartoonist for The Economist and the F T and the Independent and so on, as well as work done for design groups and magazines.  I have a fair bit of work done for children's publishing - both for my books and the books of others.

But I also have shelf-loads of sketchbooks and scrapbooks and I have folios and plan chest draws full of artwork of various kinds.  I have stacks of canvases and boards, some with paintings on, some primed and waiting.

But added to all this, I am a writer.  In fact I am first and foremost a writer now, in terms of income, and many of the people I work with are fairly oblivious to my other life as a visual artist.

So as well as all those sketchbooks, I have notebooks - some going back thirty years.  I toy with the idea of typing them up in the times when I have nothing better to do, but that's probably not going to happen.

And of course that leads on to that other great store of stuff - my computer(s).  I have file after file after folder of stuff going right back to when I first started, still in the default type on Word - New Roman was it?

That stuff doesn't take up as much space, but it bothers me for the same reasons - it is a great lumber room of half-forgotten things with no clear way to see what's in there.

So I am trying to open the odd notebook and open the odd folder to try and see what I have there.  There are stories I came up with that stalled because I couldn't resolve them or knew they weren't what my publisher might have wanted.  I want to look at all that stuff again and see it afresh.

Who knows what I might find?

Reading aloud

I have discovered that I can email my books to my Kindle.  I realise I am probably the last person on earth to know this was possible, but I was still very excited about it all the same.

I was given a Kindle for Christmas and I have read a few things on it - although I can't say I am in love with it.  Being able to send my documents to it does make it seem more useful though.  And whilst the experience of reading on the Kindle is not the same as reading a book, it is better than reading on a computer screen somehow.

So, instead of printing out Marley's Ghost, I loaded it onto my Kindle and read aloud from there, sitting alone in my studio.

And I have to say it read pretty well...

Humbug!

I managed to finish the first draft of my new book yesterday.  It is called Marley's Ghost and is the third of my books (along with Mister Creecher and The Dead Men Stood Together) to be linked to the work of another writer.

As with Frankenstein and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, A Christmas Carol had a huge impact on me when I first encountered it and in writing my book, I want to try and channel that enthusiasm into a new work but also, importantly, to be true to the original and send my readers to the source of my inspiration.

I remember finding A Christmas Carol dream-like when I first heard it.  It would have been my first encounter with Dickens and possibly my first experience of that kind of confident authorial voice.  Dickens is there all the way through, standing with Scrooge and the Spirits and standing with us - a point he actually makes, wonderfully, in the book, saying that he - Dickens - stands beside us as we read.  And so he does.

As with Frankenstein, A Christmas Carol is a story most people know - or think they know - even if they have not read the book.  But the book is much odder than most would imagine.  A lot darker too.

I will be talking more about that nearer to publication.

Ghostly infestation

An avenue of trees on Jesus Green has been taken over by caterpillars - caterpillars of the ermine moth. This is the second time this has happened, although this year it is even more extensive.  A couple of the trees did not fully recover from last year's attack and given that the caterpillars have stripped every tree of every leaf, it will be interesting to see if the trees can survive.

It is a weird sight, with the trees looking as though they have been in a sharp frost.  There is a ghostly white bloom to the branches and trunks with the webs extending out across the grass.  There are countless caterpillars, some in great knots beneath the (surprisingly tough) silk blanket, whilst others rush up and down the tree trunks.  Given that it is spring and the area is full of nesting birds, the caterpillars must taste particularly bad for them to be so ignored.