Daffodils

The daffodils are coming out in our garden. I love to see them. They make me feel that at last it’s spring.

I ought to take a photo of them to show you how lovely they are, but it’s night-time so I can’t. By tomorrow morning they’ll still be lovely, but I’ll be too busy.

Anyway, you don’t need a picture of daffodils, do you? All you have to do is think Wordsworth…

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of golden daffodils.
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

But I’ve a confession to make. When I think of W.W.’s poem, I can’t help remembering some other versions of it too. Sorry, Wordsworth…but  if your verses become that famous, they’re going to get parodied, aren’t they? For instance:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I met a crowd
Who pelted me with unpaid bills.
Who from? How much? I couldn’t tell.
I turned around and ran like hell.

My Uncle Max (a group captain in the RAF in World War 2) taught me a different take.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That on the rugged hillside sits,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of yellow Messerschmitts.
Now I’m interned for the duration.
I wish I’d never lost formation.

But my current favourite, and on the original floral subject too, is Roger McGough’s “downsized” version. I don’t know what Wordsworth would have thought of distilling his original four verses into six lines. I think it’s brilliant.

Wandering along the road
by the lake, I saw a load
of golden daffodils
Ten thousand, give or take.
Now and then
I think of them again.

Beware the Ides of March

…As the soothsayer said to Julius Caesar….or did he?

Yes, you say, everybody knows that. It’s one of the few Shakespeare quotes that pretty well everyone recognises…along with “Out, damned spot!” and “To be or not to be?”

But “Beware the Ides of March” is the version according to Shakespeare, and it’s a good example of poetry being catchier than straight history. Shakespeare took many of the details he dramatised in Julius Caesar from Plutarch’s Life of Caesar, an excellent ancient source of course, but the rendering of the famous warning is much less memorable:

“A soothsayer bade him prepare for some great danger on the Ides of March.”

Doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?

It would have been even less dramatic if the date of the assassination had been almost any other day in March. The Romans’ system of dating was odd, very odd, even after Caesar himself had reformed the calendar and got a month named after himself. His reforms were to do with making the calendar year the same length as the solar one (more or less) which, up to then, it hadn’t been, so the seasons tended to slip a bit, and extra days had to be inserted every now and then to put matters right.

But Caesar didn’t, probably didn’t dare, alter the way each month was structured. There were just three reference points for describing what day it was. The Kalends (first of the month,) the Nones (the fifth in most months, the seventh in a few including March,) and finally the Ides, which fell eight days after the Nones, so in March that meant the 15th.

Are you with me so far? Good. If you wanted to convene a Senate meeting, say, on the 14th day of March, you’d describe it as “the day before the Ides”. So was March 16th “the day after the Ides?” Oh dear no, nothing so simple.

You’d have to name it by association with the next upcoming reference point, which in this case would be the Kalends of April. If the Senate planned to meet on March 16th, (and they probably did sometimes,) they’d be telling everyone to appear on the 17th before the Kalends of April. (If you’re checking my arithmetic on your fingers, you’ll observe that you have to include the Kalends day itself as part of the sum.)

I can’t imagine any soothsayer, let alone any self-respecting playwright, uttering the immortal words, “Beware the seventeenth before the Kalends of April.”

But wait. If Caesar had heeded the original admonition, and the various other portents of disaster that the superstitious Romans thought heralded his death, he might have decided to skip the Senate meeting on the Ides, and go tomorrow instead. Then the assassination would have had to be re-scheduled…no, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Then again if he hadn’t visited the Senate as planned, the conspiracy might have fallen apart, and Caesar might have lived on as ruler of Rome to a ripe old age. Would that have made a difference to history? Yes. And, of course, to Shakespeare too.

Classic in the Barn

I’m delighted to welcome Amy Myers and her latest mystery, CLASSIC IN THE BARN, published by Severn House. It’s just out in the UK; publication in the USA, and paperback editions, will follow later this year. It features a car detective, Jack Colby, and it’s a first-time collaboration between Amy and her husband Jim. Amy has written a string of successful mysteries (if you need reminding, see my yesterday’s post.) So Amy, what made you embark on a new series, and a new way of working?

Jack Colby, car detective, burst into our lives about two years ago. I was prowling around the house in search of a new idea for a series of novels, and my husband Jim was prowling for a mission to replace the charity that he used to run, so it seemed a good idea to join forces.

Jim would pour his knowledge of classic cars into a new crime series which I would write. My name is attached to it, but as with babies this partnership took two. Rash for a hitherto happily married couple? Well, I’m glad to report that with one novel and one short story published, and a second novel nearing its conclusion, we are still happily married – at least I don’t think that was a huffy Jim storming off in his Karmann Ghia.

Jim has loved cars ever since he was four. I believe him, as our home is littered with car magazines and books, and small model cars adorn each spare inch. Each one of them, he assures me, is going to shoot up in value in the next three hundred years or so.

What fascinates him about cars? He says, ‘I don’t really know. But I loved cars before I could drive them and will certainly continue to love them when I can’t drive any longer. I don’t just like four or five makes or models of cars, but all of them, particularly American and European (oh, and some Japanese models). Maybe cars are in my genes. My grandfather was in the US 7^th Cavalry at Buffalo Bill time, so perhaps this is as near as I can get.’

I don’t share the same enthusiasm for cars, although I can see that some are nice to look at, and I can see that they can be useful – especially for transporting books, my little weakness.

After the car idea came the ‘team’ led by Jack Colby. He lives not far from us near what is reputed to be the most haunted village in Kent. He owns a classic car restoration service run by the stalwart Len Vickers and sparky young Zoe Grant. Jack also does car detective work for the police, but murder is a new area for him. And of course there are women in his life. All this took some time to hammer out to the point where we now feel we are living with them.  (I merely do the cooking.)

I’m a Leo and tend to be a one woman show, so I had often wondered how such writing partnerships were achieved. I still do!  I would love to say that we sit with pens in hand scribbling creatively together, but the truth is that I write the draft novel leaving large gaps with ‘Jim – help’ or ‘fill this in’ typed in capitals. We do plot the novels together and that’s the fun part. We continually find ourselves shouting the other down, but it usually works out in the end. It’s just the journey to agreement that takes time and energy. Ah well, what marriage doesn’t?

Learn more about Amy and her books from  http://www.amymyers.net/ And Jack Colby has his own blog at http://jackcolby.co.uk/classiccars/ where Jim is occasionally allowed to get a word in edgeways

Meet Amy and Jim Myers here tomorrow

And you’ll also meet their new creation, car detective Jack Colby. Amy and Jim have combined their considerable skills to produce what sounds like a cracking good mystery, CLASSIC IN THE BARN, just published by Severn House.

The classic of the title isn’t a book or a piece of music, it’s this 1938 Lagonda V12, which Jim, who’s extremely knowledgeable about such things, describes as a “dream car”. It’s certainly desirable enough to be the trigger for a good crime novel, and like so many desirable items, causes more than its fair share of murder and mayhem…

Regular mystery lovers, not to mention regular visitors to this blog, will know already about Amy Myers’ various unputdownable mystery series: her sleuths include two very different Victorians, the society master chef Auguste Didier and the London chimney sweep Tom Wasp; there’s also the modern father-and-daughter team of Peter and Georgia Marsh, who specialise in tackling crimes that re-surface from the past.

And now there’s Jack Colby, whose adventures combine Amy’s mystery flair with Jim’s knowledge of cars. Amy will be telling us tomorrow how this all came about, and how she and Jim work together. I’m very much a loner as a writer, and I’m always fascinated by how people work happily in pairs, and remain happy – in this case happily married.

I’ve known Amy and Jim for years. We live at opposite ends of England so we tend to meet at crime and mystery conventions, and always enjoy time together over a drink, a meal, or maybe roaming round second-hand bookshops seeing what we can find. I’ve always known Amy has a passion for books; before she was a writer she was in publishing. But I never realised till recently that Jim had a passion for classic motors, which started when he was a child in America. His original home was in Buffalo, though he’s lived on this side of the Pond for many years now, in France and then in England. When he and Amy first met they lived on opposite sides of the English Channel, and for the first few years they had what Amy calls a “commuting marriage” between London and Paris. Sounds interesting, but quite hard work I imagine!

The story of how they actually met is a classic of another kind. It was through books, (no surprise there,) but in a way you’d never guess. In the 1970s Amy was director of a London publishing firm, and one of their titles, for which she handled the publicity, was the memoirs of the bullfighter Henry Higgins. Henry was a friend of Jim’s, indeed Jim’s cousin (another James Myers) was co-author of the book. So, with the kind of inevitability you expect from a good story, Amy and Jim met at the book’s launch party. Romantic, or what?

Enough for now – join us tomorrow.

Three cheers for World Book Day

Usually I’m underwhelmed  by artificially created “days” marking topics of commercial potential but general uninterest. They seem to crop up if not quite seven days every week, at least two or three. “Global Left-hand Glove Day”, “Universal Hug-a-slug Day”…do we really need them? Mostly, I think not.

But World Book Day is different. It’s something worth having. We need every chance we get to celebrate books, and we need a nudge to think how not everyone on the planet has books to celebrate, or could read them if they owned them.

It’s a UNESCO project, and involves publishers, booksellers, and what their website coyly calls “interested parties” – which means schools, libraries, charities, and…well really everyone who’s hooked on reading. In other words you and me.

More than a hundred countries take part in it now. Most of them, incidentally, have chosen April 23rd as their World Book Day. We Brits and Irish go for March 3rd. Not just out of contrariness (well not entirely, anyway)  but we want a date in term-time, so the schoolkids can make the most of it. That’s fine by me. The younger you can get children into the reading habit, the better.

I started reading when I was about three and a half. My mother taught me well before I went to school. So I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t read, and life without a book of some sort is unthinkable. Usually I have two or three fiction books on the go simultaneously, and then there are research books, of course.

There were plenty of books around at home as I grew up, including children’s titles. At birthdays or at Christmas, I liked receiving books and even better book tokens, so I could choose for myself. I remember Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan, the Jungle Book…and more modern ones, like the Biggles adventures, the Famous Five (Enid Blyton’s best series,) and the schoolboy Jennings.

The first mystery I ever read was THE RED CHIPMUNK MYSTERY, by Ellery Queen. This was set in the USA – which made it another first in my reading experience – and the hero was a boy called Djuna. Anyone else read it? And the first science fiction was RETURN TO THE RED PLANET by John Kier Cross; this was an eye-opener for me because the story was told in different chapters by half-a-dozen characters, from irreverent kids to serious scientists. The idea of narrative from completely different points of view is one I’d like to try myself some day.

I realise now how lucky I was to have a Mum who loved books. She passed on her enthusiasm to me as early as she could, and it never occurred to either of us that I wouldn’t share it.

And that’s why I say, three cheers for World Book Day. Whether you celebrate it in March or April, enjoy it, and make sure all the youngsters around you enjoy it too.

There’s heaps  more information about World Book Day at their website: http://www.worldbookday.com/