Tilting at windmills

A couple of weeks ago, we had a wonderful holiday in Norfolk. It's a place in England that neither my husband nor I have ever really visited and we were keen to see the famous Norfolk Broads. We pored over the map in our beautiful holiday cottage, locating the area dotted with huge blobs of water and labelled with various names ending with the legendary word 'broad'. We both had pretty similar preconceptions, that we'd round a corner in the car and there would be vast stretches of water shimmering all around us, the landscape dotted with old-fashioned windmills.

But as usual, our preconceptions didn't match with reality. It turned out the broads have to be explored by boat, not by car, that they're mainly inaccessible by road. So after several false attempts up roads that only yielded tantalising glimpses of the tops of cabin cruisers and the fleeting billow of yacht sails, we decided it was time for lunch in a local pub. And that was where our exploration got underway.

We sat at a table next to a family party, parents and grown-up offspring, and pricked up our ears at hearing the son ask his father how many pubs you could visit on a pub crawl round the broads. The elderly man immediately reeled off a list of pubs and their exact locations on the shores of the broads. "That's the man to ask," my husband whispered to me. And he was right. It turned out the pub expert had been a pilot on the broads for more than thirty years. He gave us exact directions to an old windmill we could get access to, a mediaeval bridge, impassable to river traffic after heavy rains, and to villages where we could stroll on the water's edge and enjoy the vistas we'd envisaged.

I had the feeling that friendly pilot had crossed our path for a reason. He transformed our day and spared us a lot of disappointment. The whole experience resonated for me in terms of writing and life. When I finished my first novel several years ago, euphoric with blind optimism, I sent it off to an agent and waited for the letter to say they wanted to take me on. My first rejection letter took me by surprise. It gave me my first inkling that maybe my preconceptions about getting published were misguided. Over the years, I've benefitted from the 'pilots' with experience of how the whole publishing industry works, and I've realised how naive my early preconceptions were.

One of my favourite Bible verses is Isaiah 42:16 - it's been a 'pilot' verse for me over the years: I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them...

How about you? Have you experienced any 'pilots' in your life, people who challenged your preconceptions and set you on the right path?

Audience is all

We've recently spent ten days on holiday in Norfolk and arrived back earlier this week with a hire car full of all the stuff we reckoned we needed for a stay in a self-catering holiday cottage. Incidentally, what's with the phrase 'everything but the kitchen sink'? Surely I can't be the only one who takes the kitchen sink with me.

Anyway, we arrived back in Edinburgh early evening last Monday, picked up an easy microwave supper from the local supermarket and made our weary way back to our flat. Now I need to give some backstory here, so bear with me. Because we split our time between Edinburgh and France, we rent out our flat through an agency for short-term business and holiday rentals when we're not there. I had noted that two tenants would be staying in our flat for one week while we were away. By my calculations that meant they were leaving two days before we were due to arrive back. So imagine our surprise (spot the cliche no self-respecting writer should ever use) when we turned the key in our flat door and found two very surprised people dishing up their curry supper - I'm just glad that's all they were doing!

Lucky for us, they turned out to be extremely good humoured about two strangers barging in on their holiday and after some friendly banter and profuse apolgies from us, we left them in peace to enjoy their curry. So there we were, 8pm, stranded in a hire car piled with suitcases and cardboard boxes and a bag full of dirty laundry, homeless and hungry...I think at this point I should run a contest for a suitable ending for this story. However, that wouldn't be quite fair as there is a deus ex machina I've been withholding. We have three grown-up sons who live in Edinburgh. We texted them all and ended up moving in with one of them for the rest of the week. He's a playwright and immediately posted on Facebook that his parents had turned up unexpectedly on a Monday evening and planned to stay for the rest of the week - was he in a Chekhov play?

So, in this context, picking our way round piles of random luggage in our son's spare room, trying to work out where we'd put our tooth brushes, I received an email entitled: One week to go before your trip - got your bags packed yet? No doubt a marketing team at the airline we're flying back to France with next week decided this kind of automated email would be an important aspect of customer relations; no doubt in many cases, it is. But for me, searching in vain for my tooth brush, I found it as irritating as being asked if I'd done my Christmas shopping yet in mid-October.

As a writer, that email set me thinking. Audience is all. No matter how lyrical my prose, if it doesn't take account of my audience, I may as well not bother.

Do you have any 'misjudging audience' stories? If you're a writer, do you have any tips for keeping your audience in mind?

Falling in love again

I'm feeling guilty that my last blog post was seventeen days ago. According to the writers' websites I subscribe to, I should be blogging at least twice a week, tweeting and facebooking several times a day, keeping a notebook of scenes and experiences and overheard snatches of conversation, clocking up a minimum of 1000 words per day on my fiction work-in-progress, getting up earlier to write, redeeming the time.... there are so many well-meaning words of counsel and advice on the subject, I can easily lose sight of some important central truths: I write because I love to write. I write because I'm fascinated by the extraordinary power of the written word.

In the centre of Edinburgh, cheek by jowl with its elegant eighteenth and nineteenth century neighbours, squats an ugly sixties office block. It would be a hideous eyesore apart from one important redeeming feature: some enlightened body has turned it into a wayside poetry hoarding. Every time you pass the corner of Jenners Dept Store where historically, Edinburgh ladies always congregated to take afternoon tea, you can look up and be inspired by words:

This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful, it breaks the heart again and again. Alexander McCall Smith

Dear Edinburgh, how I remember you, your winter cakes and tea, your bright red fire, your swirling cloaks and clouds. Ian Crichton Smith

And one by the incorrigible Oscar Wilde that makes me smile whenever I read it:

It is quite lovely, bits of it.

I'm sure these snatches of poetry speak in diverse ways to every passer-by who takes time out from their iphone to raise their eyes and look up. Yesterday they were a demonstration to me of the sheer exultant power of words to conjure a feeling, an image, an atmosphere, a memory. They motivated me to keep writing when all the good advice on the internet was just making me feel inadequate.

Good advice certainly has its place but advice to writers can sometimes feel a bit like those self-help articles on fifty ways to improve your marriage. Sometimes all you have to remember is that you got married because you fell in love.

What motivates you in your work? What's your attitude to internet advice?

What's in a name?

Ryanair deposited us back in Edinburgh last Saturday, so the past few days have included ticking off items on the Edinburgh 'to do' list. One of these was follow-up surgery on my precious laptop. Last time we were back in Scotland, my laptop died on me. I remember the moment vividly. It was all so sudden, just two days before I was due to leave to go back to Lectoure. One minute, I was opening up my email, the next the screen went dark. It felt like my best friend had just keeled over with a heart attack - well maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but I'm a writer, I'm allowed a bit of hyperbole.

Thankfully, a computer doctor lives five minutes away. An Italian who speaks English with a Scottish accent, he admitted my comatose computer on a Monday morning and by Tuesday evening it was chirping its little 'dada-dada-dadaa' ditty like a machine half its age. But the sobering news was that it had been on the critical list. The computer doc had cleaned out two potentially fatal viruses and at least half a dozen worms. Dosed with an updated virus check, my laptop was finally allowed home. Next day I whisked it off to the South of France to convalesce in the sun. It moved slowly, but at least it was moving. The next stage of surgery would involve increasing its ram, which sounded very painful to me but the Scots/Italian was sanguine about the procedure. 'Once we install it, it will be like day and night' Hmmm??

So last Thursday, I wrapped the patient up in its padded case (we're enjoying typically bracing Scottish Spring weather at present) and took it back to the computer hospital up the road. The Scots/Italian greeted us politely, but he didn't recognise us. I explained my laptop's case history and he still looked blank. Panic began to rise. How can you entrust a best friend to someone who has no recollection of nursing them through a life threatening illness? Then I added a detail that rang a bell with him and his face cleared. 'Ah yes, Jacqueline isn't it?' Confidence flooded back. It was going to be all right. I could trust him after all. He remembered my name.

'Fear not:for I have redeemed you, I have called you by your name; you are mine.' Isaiah 43:1

Most of us go through life feeling pretty anonymous. When someone remembers our name, it gives us a boost; when God remembers it, we find our identity.

Can you think of experiences where someone using your name made a difference? Do you think faith plays an important part in a sense of identity and self worth?

Can snakes turn into fish?

On Sunday, from the safe distance of our first floor terrace, we spotted a sizeable snake in our garden. Yesterday morning, my husband had another sighting, two of them this time, getting amorous near the back gate. He threw a lump of rock at them (our builders had the foresight to leave us with plenty of ammunition) and they disappeared into the undergrowth. Snakes, the harmless grass variety or otherwise, are as welcome in my garden as plastic garden chairs (see previous post). I grew up in a London suburb; I'm a townie. For me snakes were always something you watched David Attenborough cope with, secured within the confines of the TV set in the corner of our living-room.

Our Australian friends, who spend half their year in SW France and the other half in Oz, regard my wildlife squeamishness with lofty amusement. An American friend who lives in Southern California sent me an email the other day. She mentioned that a notice had gone up in her condo block warning that rattlesnakes had been sighted in the area. So there are millions of people out there for whom a couple of lovelorn grass snakes are really no big deal. I know all this, but it doesn't help. On Sunday night I lay awake in the small hours and fretted about the unspeakable horrors that might lurk in my Mediterranean garden. I'd pictured a rose arbour, meandering paths, swathes of fragrant lavender. I'd even spent an enjoyable hour on Sunday afternoon sketching a planting plan. Naive as a latter day Eve in her Garden of Eden, I hadn't reckoned on snakes.

Thankfully God has a habit of taking even my most ridiculous fears seriously. On Monday morning my devotional reading included Luke 11:11. I laughed out loud when I read it. 'Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead?'

I thought about all the other worries and fears I lie awake fretting about, and it occurred to me that the Luke verse had a wider application than grass snakes. God my loving father, gives me fish, not snakes. One day, my garden will be as beautiful as I envisage it in my sketch pad. The snakes will turn out to be fish after all. Hmmm...where's that planting plan? An ornamental pond - now there's a thought.

Have you had any experience in your life of 'snakes' turning out to be 'fish'? How do you deal with the fears that keep you awake in the small hours?

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Living in peace with your garden furniture

We arrived back in Lectoure on Easter Saturday. The journey down had been great. We took our time, avoiding the autoroutes, building in a couple of overnight stops en route, exploring some places we hadn't visited before. The car-that-thinks-it's-a-van was packed to the roof as usual, any stray empty corners filled with tins of baked beans, jars of mint sauce and boxes of man-size Kleenex. No wonder the French think the Brits are eccentric!

Opening the front door after an absence of a couple of weeks is always a bit of a tense moment. What disasters might await? Will the hall be running with water or mice, or worse still both? Will the wallpaper we put up before we left have peeled off the walls and be lying in a damp heap on the floor? Will the livebox that powers our internet have been struck by lightening, leaving us with a very dead box that takes weeks to fix? As you may gather, I do tend to be a bit of a 'glass half empty' kind of girl.

As it turned out, the only disaster was the garden. We inherited a wilderness when we bought the house. After two months of warm spring weather and April showers the weeds were triffid size. My husband settled down to a couple of days of machete wielding and I lugged the garden furniture out of hibernation. I have a vision for our garden, one that doesn't include four grubby white plastic chairs, two equally grubby matching loungers and half a dozen assorted plastic flower troughs. But I'm stuck with them. The budget won't run to replacements at present. Blame the ailing pound and the flourishing euro. Blame anyone, even the man with the machete. I stomped up the road to buy bread. Never mind the glorious sunshine, the stunning hilltop view, I wanted new garden furniture - I did, I did, I did!

Then I turned the corner and there she was, sitting on a cheap folding chair in the lane outside her house, a very elderly lady with a serene face and a peaceful air, watching the world go by. Her house has no garden, weed-infested or otherwise, but she's found her place in the sun in spite of that, and discovered the perfect way to keep track on what her neighbours are up to into the bargain.

'I have learned the secret of being content' (Philippians 4:12) Something told me that elderly lady had learnt the secret too.

Do you think contentment's something we can learn? Does modern society encourage us to be content?

Black is not a Colour

We head back to Lectoure next week so I'm doing the usual scurry around Edinburgh shops to gather all the 'stuff' we need to load into our longsuffering car-that-thinks-it's-a-van before the return journey. Yesterday I was in a large DIY store buying paint. And yes, they do sell paint in France, but at such an exhorbitant price, I now understand why the majority of our French neighbours don't seem to use it very often.

Since economy was key and I do have several battleships to transform, I made a beeline for the aisle that advertised 'buy one, get one half price'. I selected two large tins of black gloss paint (don't ask!), together with a couple of smoke alarms (again, don't ask!) and trundled my trolley to the checkout.
"These are on special offer aren't they?" I said as the assistant put them through. Then followed one of those baffling conversations that I swear checkout assistants delight in as a way to pass the time.
"Nope. They're coming up full price."
"But there's a notice on that aisle over there."
"Not coming up on my till. Sorry."
Behind me, the queue was getting restive.
"Well could you check with someone?"
"Can't leave the till. Sorry."
Sorry was obviously shorthand for 'don't give a stuff'.
"Don't you have some way you could call the supervisor?"
From the pained look he gave me, you'd think I'd asked him to commune with the dead.
Then, by some paint purchasing miracle, a supervisor materialised.
"I'll go and find out for you," she said briskly.
Checkout assistant shunted me aside in favour of more docile customers, and I waited, and waited, and waited. But the wait turned out to be worth it, because I discovered something: BLACK IS NOT A COLOUR
The offer only applied to coloured paints, but 'as a goodwill gesture', (a patronising phrase, popular among retailers, to cover the fact that they've got it wrong), they would put my second tin through at half price.
I emerged from the skirmish as triumphant as if I'd just negotiated an international peace treaty, and armed with a brand new fact to impress people with at dinner parties: BLACK IS NOT A COLOUR

Later on in the day, reading another extract from my Lent book,(Barefoot Disciple by Stephen Cherry) I came across something that resonated with my 'new fact'.

'We can only ever expect to transcend our disappointments if we allow ourselves to really feel them....to accept the process, realise that hopes and aspirations have all too suddenly come to a halt and to hold the moment carefully, so that(it)...will become the energy with which one moves off in a different direction.'

Cherry seemed to be talking about an example of the black times that we all experience, that we choose either to shrug off and be stoical about, or own up to and really own, so that we can use them to move on. Black is so much more than a single colour. It's the shade(?)that works perfectly as a foil for most other colours, adding life, vibrancy and dramatic impact. One of my most vivid visual memories is of a take-off in a plane during a storm, seeing a vivid rainbow arc etched against black clouds.

'As they pass through the Valley of Baca (the Valley of Weeping - a black place)they make it a place of springs.' Psalm 84:6

Thank God for black, even if it isn't a colour!

Do you think the black times can be valuable? And on a more prosaic note, do you have any shopping frustrations you'd like to get off your chest!?

No renovation without disruption

Yesterday is known as Passion Sunday in the Christian calendar, but I didn’t feel a great deal of passion when I walked into the beautiful cathedral where we worship each week when we’re in Edinburgh. Normally there’s a magnificent vista along the nave, past the choir stalls, lit in the evening by candles, to the white altar with its intricately carved stonework, glowing columns of vivid stained glass beyond.

Yesterday the whole vista was marred. Stark scaffolding towered from floor to ceiling. The choir stalls, altar and stained glass could only be glimpsed through a criss-cross mess of iron struts and wooden planks. The struts were a haphazard patchwork of lurid yellow, pewter grey and rusty brown, their effect uniformly ugly.

Next to me, my husband’s expression mirrored my own. We slumped in our seats and prepared to endure a dismal service. But as the service got underway, the scaffolding was transformed for me into something of an object lesson, my own private sermon. Yes, it made a mess of the landscape, turning a serene space into a building site. But the disruption and ugliness were necessary, an unlovely means to an end. This time next Sunday, the minister assured us, the renovation work would be complete and the place would be even more beautiful than before. But you had to take that on trust.

I prefer life to proceed in ordered harmony, for circumstances to work out the way I want without disruption or disappointment, without frustrated hopes, financial worries or concerns about health or family. But I’m God’s renovation project, and renovation means scaffolding.

Can you identify the ‘scaffolding’ in your own life? Can you look back on difficult circumstances and see how they were used in renovation?

Bursting the Bubble

As I think I may already have mentioned, I’ve just become a granny for the first time. (Pause for exaggerated yawns) A couple of days ago, I went with my daughter-in-law and grandson for the weekly weigh-in at the local baby clinic. It’s nearly thirty years since I’ve set foot in a baby clinic and I was astonished at the sheer volume of everything: nifty light-weight prams as far as the eye could see; babies of all shapes and sizes in various stages of undress; young mums breast-feeding, bottle-feeding, changing nappies, logging down today’s weight and comparing anxiously with last week’s, asking advice of the professionals and exchanging baby chat with one another. A lot of these new mums had been holding their own in the workplace only a few weeks before, thinking they were hard pushed and stressed out. Now, plunged into the 24 hour demands of messy, exhausting, bewildering, full-on childcare, they realise life at the office was a doddle.

I’m a bit ashamed to admit that for the past thirty years, I haven’t taken much notice of the young mum brigade. Okay, I’ve stepped off the pavement for the occasional push-chair, quietly changed seats on a plane to avoid the toddler in the seat behind, and made the right noises at other peoples’ baby photos (oh the joy of finally getting my own back!). But now suddenly, a whole sector of the community is on my personal radar and it’s taken first-hand experience to put it there. And maybe that’s the way it works. Most of the time we float around in our own personal bubble. In some ways that’s inevitable. It takes God and life to prick the bubble occasionally, make us wise up to all those other bubbles out there in the ether. It took a brush with breast cancer to take me inside the cancer sufferers’ bubble, to put the oncology unit at my local hospital onto my radar and into my prayers. It took the mental health problems of a family member to make me similarly aware of the local psychiatric hospitals. And having a son who’s gay, took me inside a bubble that encompasses a world-wide community, many suffering terrible, violent prejudice and rejection, sometimes in the very places where you’d think they’d be most entitled to love and respect.

Yesterday evening, we went to a wonderful Haydn concert at St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh. The centrepiece of this concert was the choral work, ‘Seven Last Words from the Cross’. The audience was largely middle-aged and middle class, well-behaved and savvy about clapping in the right places. Near the end of the final piece, ‘Father into thy hands I commend my spirit’, a humble little statuette caught my eye, a mother holding a child, simply carved in unpretentious wood. The sight of it, combined with the equally simple words I was listening to, brought a lump to my throat. I prayed for my lovely daughter-in-law, at home in her flat, struggling to convince my fretful grandson that night-time is designed for sleeping. And then my prayer spread out to other young mums throughout the city, some of them bringing up children single-handed with inadequate resources and no support network.

For perfectly good reasons, no-one would have wanted a crowd of screaming babies and their harassed mothers at last night’s concert, but the quiet presence of that little statue, tucked away in a corner of the vast cathedral, was a reminder of all the people that need commending into a loving Father’s hands, those who might be disbarred from a concert but never from our lives.

Have you had any bubbles burst? How has it changed your outlook on life?

Getting mad at God

Course correction

I'm a book-a-holic and whether I'm in Lectoure or Edinburgh, in both places I love being a member of a Book Group. I'm a bit of an absentee member in Edinburgh as the meetings rarely coincide with our spells in Scotland, but I appreciate being kept up with the book choices by email and try to read along where I can. The most recent choice for the Edinburgh group, which is affiliated to St Mary's Anglican Cathedral, was the Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent book for 2011, 'Barefoot Disciple' by Stephen Cherry. It's a 'bite off in small chunks and digest slowly' kind of book, so over the past week I've been taking a small bite each morning. It's proving to be a real course correction exercise for me, helping me to face up to the fact that, increasingly, over the past few months, I've been getting mad with God.

A visit to the dentist

I don't mean mad about tsunamis and earthquakes, world hunger and terrible injustice. I get mad for different reasons about these things, but I don't necessarily lay the blame at God's door. But I realise I am resentful about what I perceive as God thwarting me in my attempts to achieve my writing goals. Written down, that looks incredibly lame and on the scale of world suffering it is, but it seems a writer needs an agent if they're to make real progress in their career and over the past few years, I've experienced the slow drip, drip discouragement of rejection from literary agents, or (and in some ways, this is worse) the excitement of an agent showing interest, the feeling of taxiing down the runway at last, only to have take-off aborted, followed by return to another long wait in the departure lounge. 'Tell me about it' will be the cry of so many fellow writers, 'been there, done that, got the tee-shirt', so I'm not pretending that my chapter of set-backs and disappointments is in any way unique, but it is unique to me. I've experienced far graver personal and family problems in my life and I'm thankful that God has faithfully brought me through them all, but this particular experience is like nagging tooth-ache; it's always there in the background, not life threatening but a niggling ache that wheedles its way into everything I do. So Stephen Cherry's book feels like a long-overdue visit to the dentist.

A tumble down the cellar stairs

His book is about humility and is based on the premise that if we seek humility, we've failed at the first hurdle, because to pride yourself on being humble is an obvious contradiction in terms. At the beginning of his book, he describes an accidental tumble down a cellar staircase, and the ensuing bruises to his body and his pride. He then goes on to say:

I suspect that most genuine growth in humility is not sought. Rather we find it coming to meet us as we discover that our preferred way (the way of self-confidence, self-achievement, self-justification, self-admiration, self-consciousness, in fact self-everything) starts to go wrong. Most people will be spared a tumble down a long staircase, but they will experience something like it. That is, they will not seek the lowest place, but they will find the lowest place coming to meet them with a wallop.

In common with most of the human race, I would never aspire to the lowest place and I'm certainly not advocating lack of ambition. But I'm beginning to see the frustrations of the past few years from a different perspective, as a means of giving me something far more valuable than a publisher's contract (although that would also be nice!).
'And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.' Luke 7:23

Are you offended with God for some reason? Do you see life in those terms or do you approach setbacks differently?

There will be no miracles here

St Bernard's Well

On Saturday we took an afternoon walk by Edinburgh’s Water of Leith, from Stockbridge to the Dean Art Gallery. A network of these walkways criss-crosses the city, accessed from the bustling city streets by steep stone stairways or narrow lanes. Just a few yards and you’ve left the crowds and the traffic behind. The only noise is the tumult of birdsong and the sound of the waters, in places flowing gently, in others crashing over weirs and cascading over rocks. The place is a popular haunt for walkers, cyclists, parents pushing prams, people exercising dogs, anyone who seeks a break from the city streets and a brief urban taste of the countryside. The only hazard is the occasional kamikaze cyclist!

An Ancient Well

All along your route, whichever path you take, there are excuses to pause, get your breath back and study something interesting. Our first halt was St Bernard’s Well, discovered, according to legend, by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, founder of the Cistercian Order, in the 12th Century. Afflicted with sickness, he went to live in a cave near the Water of Leith. He noticed birds drinking from a spring, followed their example and regained his strength. An unlikely health cure, but a charming legend. However, there must have been something in it, because in the late 18th century, the well became a popular place for ‘taking the waters.’ Thomas Nelson Publishers even bought the well at one point, so they must have considered it a canny acquisition! A Doric rotunda was added and a fetching marble statue of Hygieia, Goddess of Health was installed. Sadly, these days, Hygieia is decorative but redundant. People are more likely to sign up at the gym to get fit.

A Bold Statement

Our destination, Dean Gallery, housed in an imposing former Victorian orphanage, is surrounded by parkland. On our way up the path to the main entrance, we stopped short to look at an arresting installation on the wide lawn in front of the house, erected by 2007 Turner prize nominated artist Nathan Coley on a length of towering scaffolding. In letters a couple of feet high, we read the bold statement ‘THERE WILL BE NO MIRACLES HERE', words borrowed from a royal 17th century edict in the French village of Modseine, when its residents were fed up with sensation-seeking sightseers.

Framed against a 21st century Edinburgh cityscape, even the backdrop to the installation belied the message: glimpses of trees, the towers and turrets of ancient buildings and monuments, an historic well where many sought healing, the rich architectural heritage of Edinburgh with the Water of Leith flowing at its heart. Maybe no-one takes the waters from St Bernard’s Well any more, but there’s a sense in which every walker and pram pusher (yes, and even kamikaze cyclist) expresses the need for those miraculous, restorative waters to flow through their lives, the sense of being ‘led beside the still waters’ (Psalm 23) in the midst of the stresses and pressures we all cope with every day.

Gazing at Nathan Coley’s massive installation, I was impressed by the artistic statement, but unconvinced by the message. I thought of the miracle of more than £74 million, raised in recession hit Britain last Friday evening in response to a Comic Relief Gift Aid appeal; the miracle of the Japanese doctor I saw interviewed on TV, working 24 hours at a stretch on only a few handfuls of rice, to help relieve the unimaginable suffering of his people.

Yes, there ARE miracles here.

What's your take on miracles?

Beware of talking to your toothbrush

Your i-phone is not a person

This morning I woke to the sound of a beep-beep warning signal from my husband's i-phone. He'd had to park outside a resident's permit zone the night before and didn't want to forget he needed to move the car. Edinburgh's parking regulations are draconian. Only yesterday I watched a car being craned away from outside our flat like a prize toy in a funfair slot machine. Good spectator sport if you don't happen to be the motorist who's trangressed, but a sober reminder that you don't mess with the traffic wardens in these parts.

"Okay, okay, I know, I'm going," my husband said to his phone.
"Your phone is not a person," I told him.
Then I had to confess that only the other day I'd apologised to my sonic toothbrush. It had flashed up the low battery signal three days running and I'd been in too much of a rush to re-charge it. On the third day, when it gave its mournful beep, I heard myself say, "I'm sorry, I'll do it, okay?"

Laptop seduction

We laughed about it, but it set me thinking. I have a morning tussle with myself these days. I like to begin the day with a time of quiet meditation and prayer. It's always a rewarding start, especially when life is hectic - so why am I always prey to something else jostling it out? Lately, the 'something else' has been social networking. I sit down with my Bible and notebook and my laptop immediately starts its seduction tactics.
"You should check your emails. You never know, you might have something from an agent."
"You didn't get round to tweeting much yesterday. You only get as much out of it as you put in. Your followers will start to lose interest."
"You didn't follow up a Facebook message last night. You should check it out this morning."
I've now started leaving my laptop in the drawer until I'm ready for it. That way, at least its come-ons are muffled!

Don't get me wrong, I think social networking is great, but let's face it, my twitter followers, Facebook friends and authors of the junk that clutters up my spam box, are not falling over themselves to spend time with me, any more than my toothbrush is sulking in the bathroom cabinet because I haven't got round to re-charging it.

A lovely paraphrase of Psalm 54:4 says, 'God is my helper. He is a friend of mine!'
Not a fickle twitter follower or a 'forgot to post today' Facebook' friend, but a faithful, 'never let you down', 'there for you through thick and thin' friend.
"So belt up, laptop. I am NOT listening"
Oh no, I'm at it again!

Scotland the brave - or braving Scotland

No distractions

Scotland is a better milieu for writers than SW France - official. Why is this, you may ask? Is it the rich cultural heritage: Walter Scott, RL Stevenson, Robbie Burns, not to mention JK Rowling? (Incidentally, if anyone else says to me by way of encouragement, 'You know, she had several rejections before she was published', so help me I'll club them with the nearest set of bagpipes.) Is it the availability of first class libraries, inspirational writers' groups, numerous Starbucks? Well no, actually, it's the diabolical weather. I haven't been out for three days. Well no, I tell a lie. My daughter-in-law washed up (literally- she was absolutely soaked) on my doorstep yesterday afternoon with my beautiful howling grandson. Scottish infants grow up hardy. After a cup of tea for her and a nappy change for him, I helped her struggle home in a deluge. It was gruesome out there. But daytime television being what it is, the weather helps me write. It's no hardship to spend days on end at my laptop when the only view from the window is horizontal rain and driving sleet.

When is final final?

Today I completed yet another final edit on a novel. My Documents file has at least half a dozen versions of this novel, produced over the past year and all optimistically labelled 'final edit'. Only the date shows me which is the most recent. Tomorrow I shall do an 'out loud' or more accurately a whispered read through of this latest version. My husband is a longsuffering man but he too works from home and hearing a novel declaimed from the room next door can prove distracting. Reading out loud always throws up further glitches, and you guessed it, another final edit. When is a final edit final, I ask myself? Maybe when it stops raining in Scotland.

Grannying and Writing

How did they survive?

I'm back in Edinburgh having fun for a few weeks, learning to be a first-time granny. I've brought up three sons and now realise it's a miracle they all survived, because apparently, thirty years ago, I was doing everything WRONG! New babies lie on their backs now, not their fronts; they must never be exposed to a room temperature above 18C; they must never be left in their cribs to cry, even for an instant, because they'll feel rejected, and as for the dreaded nappy bucket, which by a piece of fancy footwork on my part was always my husband's job to empty, well it doesn't exist anymore. It's been replaced by an extremely clever object that not only swallows the disposable nappy but wraps it up hygienically into the bargain. Don't ask me HOW - I'm only a rookie granny.

Nappy changing lesson

So the other day, sporting my L plates, I had to suffer the ultimate ignominy of having my eldest son and now very proud dad, give me a demonstration of how to change my grandson's nappy. I watched very attentively - this is a serious business after all - but inside I couldn't resist a grin. How many of my teacher's nappies had I changed in his lifetime? - far too many to count. But that was a long time ago. Memory fades and things have moved on since then. I needed to be open to a granny refresher course. But I also needed to remind myself that I'd learnt a few things over the years as well, that I have the wisdom of experience to pass on to these wonderful new parents.

Keep the faith

As with grannying, so with writing. As a writer, seeking publication, you get used to being 'ever so 'umble'. You steel yourself for rejection, over and over again; you consider any and every suggestion that anyone makes about your work; you draft and re-draft until you're worn out and cross-eyed and no longer know whether the end result is a load of rubbish or a work of genius. But somehow you have to retain your self-esteem, to believe that you have a gift worth exercising. You have to expose yourself to the input of others, to learn and accept criticism without losing faith in yourself.

'Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young (or not so young, come to that!)....Do not neglect your gift.'
(I Timothy 5:12-14)

The Great Trek North

Travel incompatible

Last week I did the great trek North from Lectoure to Edinburgh to meet my first ever grandchild, Felix James. These journeys are always preceded by a morning on the internet checking out travel options. Since there are no direct flights during the winter months from SW France to Scotland, planning the journey involves juggling with flight or train connections, and invariably none of them join up. Picture the scene, me and husband on separate laptops, panning for travel gold. Cries of 'Here we are, I've found something, I think this would work' invariably followed by 'Oh no, we'd have to be in Pau at three in the morning' or 'I don't believe it, 600 euros for the two of us, and that's single. They've got to be kidding.' Anyway, this time, for various reasons, I opted for the train and my husband went by car. Unless we're flying, Colin and I are travel incompatible. His idea of driving the length of France and England is to do it in the fastest possible time with minimum stops, apart from one overnight in a budget hotel. I on the other hand like coffee stops and lunch stops and the odd detour from the autoroute to admire the view. As for budget hotels, well to me that's just a contradiction in terms. If you're going to splash out on a hotel, you don't want nasty little words like 'budget' creeping into the equation.
So he dropped me at the station in our longsuffering Renault Scenic. The poor thing suffers from an identity crisis (the car that is, not my husband). It has seats that can be removed to give more space for loading assorted junk in the back. Our car spends so much time without passenger seats, it's now convinced it's a van.

Travel heaven

I knew I'd drawn the travel long straw from the moment the TGV, bound for Lille, glided into the station. I love train travel and the Train Grande Vitesse is a class act, the very Rolls Royce of trains. It makes its entrance like a diva, to a flurry of whistle-tooting anticipation on the platform. Passengers have already taken up their places in the chorus line, taking their cue from the platform plan which indicates the exact position where they should stand according to their carriage number - because the TGV doesn't suffer fools gladly. It keeps to a tight schedule and woe betide any unrehearsed extras still bumbling around on the platform when the train is ready to depart. Its doors spring shut with an elegant hiss and what must be one of the smoothest 250 km an hour rides in the world gets underway. A good book, a breakfast cup of coffee and croissant from the buffet, a comfortable window seat with occasional glimpses of turreted chateaux, acres of twisty vines and wide, slow-moving rivers. I still have a long journey ahead of me but already I've arrived in travel heaven.

The perils of making cream sauce

Friendship means food

As you'll gather from a previous post, one of the features of ex-pat life here in SW France is getting together for meals. Before I had a home here, I was a bit snooty about Brits who choose to live abroad and then huddle together in ghettos when they get there, having no real contact with the natives. I still hold that view, but living here has also made me value a strong friendship network with people who literally 'speak my language'. And friendship involves food.
If you're the host, that means planning food, preparing food, serving food - and repairing to the kitchen every now and then for a quiet nervous breakdown. Incidentally, I never want a kitchen cum dining-room. My nervous breakdowns are strictly private affairs.

Feeding the kitchen sink

So, last Friday, it was my turn to host. I scoured the cookery books. The key is courses you can prepare ahead. What the recipe called luxury lasagne appeared to fit that bill. But luxury lasagne means cream sauce and that's where things began to unravel. I was supposed to keep stirring, not multi-tasking. A subtle burnt milk aroma reminded me that rinsing a casserole dish at the sink was not part of the recommended process for making cream sauce. I grabbed the pan from the hob and tasted a spoonful, then another. I needed a second opinion. Now my husband has learnt a few things in 36 years of marriage; one of them is: avoid post dinner party post mortems at all costs. You know the kind of thing:
"That went well didn't it?" (says he innocently)
"Mmmm. The lasagne was a flop though."
"I thought it was fine." (Fine? Fine! Whoever invented the word 'fine'?)
"It wasn't fine. The sauce was burnt. How can you say it was fine?"
Etc, etc -I'm sure you can supply your own variations on the script.
So my husband has come up with an avoidance strategy: brutal honesty while there's still time to change things is better than a painful post mortem when it's way too late.
"You can't use that, it's burnt," he said, after one sip from the spoon.
It was true, but not what I wanted to hear. I wanted to be told it tasted all right to him, or maybe a hint of something, but you'd never notice when it was mixed with other stuff, or a bit more nutmeg will mask it - but no, I got it between the eyes. It's burnt, throw it away, start again. So I poured it down the sink and started again. Back to square one, I thought, thumping pans around.

Novels and cream sauce

Later, when the second attempt had worked and my luxury lasagne was smugly luxuriating in its dish, it occurred to me that the process of making cream sauce could teach me a thing or two about the process of producing a novel. You spend time and effort. You graft away and try to make it perfect, but something's not quite right. You desperately want a second opinion, but you don't want to be told to pour it down the sink and start again. You couldn't stand going back to square one and re-drafting, so let's just get it out there to agents and publishers, and hope none of them notice the acrid flavour of burnt milk. I know, I've done it. And the truth is, nobody goes back to square one the second time around. When I made my second batch of cream sauce, I chose a pan with a more solid base; I was in less of a hurry to add the milk; I added it gradually; I kept the heat much lower and I didn't stop stirring for a second. I'd learnt all that from making mistakes the first time. And the second time around, the sauce was destined for the table, not the sink.

No Ordinary Child | Wild Goose Publications

Postscript

I wrote my meditation NO ORDINARY CHILD more than ten years ago, not long after one of my sons had 'come out'. I didn't write it with a view to publication. It was my personal account of the journey God was taking me on regarding my attitude to homosexuality. I felt prompted to seek publication when someone suggested it might help other parents in a similar situation, but it was by no means the end of my story. Only recently I came across an Amazon reader review of my book, written several years back, which I'd somehow missed at the time. This reader commented that they weren't convinced by the final chapter, one where I spoke of embracing my son's sexuality with joy. They felt I had a way to go to get to that point. I think maybe that was fair comment. So from my present perspective, I'd like to add a brief postscript to the book. Ten years down the line, I've seen a lot of prayers answered for my son, not least in the provision of a wonderful partner who, in spite of no formal ceremony, feels like my son-in-law. I treasure my relationship with both of them. I don't pretend to have all the answers and accept that everyone is at a different stage of their own personal journey, but it's important to keep travelling. 'Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.' (Psalm 30 v 5) Working through the deep issues of life often involves tears, but, as I'm sure many of you can testify, if you 'hang in there' the outcome is frequently joy.

No Ordinary Child Wild Goose Publications.

My favourite way to shop

Friday morning is market day in Lectoure. Any of you who know and love France will probably count the weekly market as one of your favourite features of this diverse country. The Lectoure market stretches the length of the high street. It's not just a place to buy local goods and produce, it's a weekly meeting place, a place to catch up on news and gossip. Halfway up the steep lane that leads from our house into town, I can hear the buzz of chatter, long before the market stalls come into view. The atmosphere is convivial; you never know what you'll find or who you'll meet; it's fun and relaxing to shop there. I tend to postpone supermarket shopping for days, until the fridge is almost empty and I've run out of ingenious ways to rustle up supper from an egg, a lump of cheese and half a cucumber, but the Friday morning market is a shopping expedition I relish.

Satsumas with a bitter taste

Numerous stalls sell fruit and veg. You're spoilt for choice. But I've learnt which ones to make a beeline for and which to avoid. Two recent incidents biassed me and left me pondering how easy it is to alienate or attract without even being aware we've done it. First the negative. I stopped at a laden stall and selected a few satsumas and a couple of curly hot green peppers. I handed over my ten euro note. The stallholder gave me change of five. I pointed out his mistake and he immediately handed over the other five without even checking his cash box, always a suspicious sign. He apologised, I said 'Pas de probleme'. But I lied. He'd lost a customer for life. Maybe he mistook me for a tourist, a stupid Brit (can't hold that against him I guess) who not only spoke with a foreign accent but didn't know how to add up. Whatever the reason, he short-changed me and left me with a sour taste that even his sweet, juicy satsumas couldn't rectify.

Compassion sells cauliflowers

I wandered on up the street to another fruit and veg seller who has his pitch in front of the cathedral square. His is a popular stall and I joined the queue. At that moment, a young man came storming down the street, waving a mobile phone, shouting incoherently. Everyone turned to look at him. Anyone in his path drew back to let him pass. 'He's in a temper today,' a customer in front of me in the queue observed to the stallholder. 'He's okay,' the man observed, 'he doesn't do anyone any harm.'

Now I know compassion as opposed to dishonesty won't necessarily produce a better salad, but no prizes for guessing where I go to buy my fruit and veg.

Two and a half cheers for St Valentine

I'm ambivalent about Valentine's Day, never sure if it's a wonderful opportunity to celebrate romantic love or a celebration to be shunned, on the grounds that it's just another opportunity for card companies to rip us off. But yesterday's Valentine's Day was a bit different. I'm married to a journalist who's good at thinking up innovative and usually hilarious ways to send me a Valentine message. This year he acknowledged my probably unhealthy obsession to gather six Louis Ghost chairs for our dining-room and made a donation to the chair fund. (So far, I have two, and if anyone out there is about to throw four in a skip, please contact immediately.) Anyway by 6pm we had a bottle of champagne on ice and were planning a quiet dinner 'a deux' when the phone rang - dear friends who live up the road from us in Lectoure were giving a Valentine's dinner party and two of their four guests had cancelled. Could we step into the breach? Now Lucy is quite possibly the best cook in at least the Northern Hemisphere and their company is always delightful, so we left the champagne on ice and accepted. And what an evening it turned out to be. Everything, from the canapes, through the five courses that followed, was pink and heart-shaped, and before I hear you go 'yuk' it was all absolutely delicious. The table was scattered with pink rose petals. Even the candles were heart-shaped. Elaborate, time consuming and demanding to prepare - I'd have died in the attempt. But Lucy was exercising a gift, and she used it to communicate love.



Out of the blue

Yesterday morning, unaware of the lovely surprise in store in the evening, I'd been reading the New Testament Gospel of Matthew, chapter 28, and thinking about all the ways that chapter demonstrates God manifesting himself in the lives of the earliest disciples. Verse 9 says, 'Suddenly Jesus met them'. Out of the blue, without warning, God sends us a message of love. Perhaps in a thought, something we see or notice, through a book or a film, the word of a friend or even a stranger, in a last minute invitation to a very special dinner - suddenly Jesus meets us.

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about Valentines Day. And I'd love to know if God sent you a valentine!

Jackie x

So what's this blog about?

Perhaps I should start by telling you what this blog is not. Despite its title, it's not any kind of online SatNav. My sense of direction is non-existent. Neither does it have anything to do with the State of Israel or organised excursions to the Holy Land.

It does however take inspiration from the biblical Promised Land, the land 'flowing with milk and honey.' (The honey I'm okay with; the milk would have to be soya.) I've been a Christian for forty one years, albeit one who shouted at the radio this morning when I heard the news item about planned legislation allowing gay couples to get married in church. Apparently the Anglican church plans to keep its doors firmly shut against such enlightenment. Once I've finished this blog post, I'm planning a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury. 'Dear Rowan, how do you square homophobia with the inclusive love of Christ?....something along those lines.

But stay with me. This blog isn't going to be a non-stop tirade about what's wrong with the established church - although that might crop up from time to time. Rather, I want to share the week in, week out flavour of what it's like to live half the year in a beautiful town called Lectoure in South West France and the other half in the equally beautiful city of Edinburgh, the place where I got married, raised three amazing sons and which still takes my breath away when I turn into Princes Street and see the castle silhouetted high up on its volcanic crag. Which place is my physical promised land? Probably both and neither, because whenever I'm in one of them, I'm homesick for the other.

The hide & seek promised land

I also plan to weave in anecdotes about my journey to my spiritual promised land, a journey in which I'm often baffled, perplexed and asking 'which way?', but one that I persevere with. Lectoure is an ancient town, perched high up on a hill, visible from miles around. From the terrace of our house on the town's stone ramparts, we have a jaw-dropping view of the surrounding countryside. Along the horizon stretches the jagged, distant outline of the Pyrenees. For a good percentage of the time, you wouldn't know that mountain range was there. It's invisible, cloaked by cloud. But then, for no apparent reason, it appears, sometimes so clearly defined you can see each snow-capped peak and steep, precipitous gully glistening in the sun.
That's why I doggedly keep going to my spiritual promised land - I know it's out there, even when I have to take that on trust.

Does seeking a promised land ruin your life?

My day job is writing and like many writers, I'm also persevering with the often weary journey of securing an agent and getting published. It's a promised land that unlike, the Pyrenees, may be nothing more than a mirage, shimmering on the horizon of all my hopes and dreams. I love to write, can't imagine the euphoria of someone actually paying me to do it, but if that never happens, have I wasted a good chunk of my life? Can the vision of the promised land keep you from enjoying the more mundane landscape that surrounds you every day?

What do you think?