The Children of Lorenzo de’ Medici

I’ve often wanted but never dared to make a case for historical fiction being more dependable than modern history books. Once the fiction writer is steeped in her research material, she has to make it add up in what Hilary Mantel calls ‘author’s arithmetic’: the facts have to be coherent. In the matter of the Medici children, I’d often been confounded by the history books but by tracking my way using the letters of the time, mostly Poliziano’s, and drawing up chronologies of events, it finally all fell into place with that lovely sense of a jigsaw puzzle solved which I tend, perhaps erroneously, to equate with the truth.

That period between Christmas and New Year is a natural for decluttering and in amongst my listless efforts a box of antiquated computer discs was examined critically before being put back where I found it; likewise all my files, occupying precious shelf space. Should they go into store? Is it time to part from them? I think my Renaissance research is finished, its results dead and dust-gathering, but you never know, you never know, and the files remain on their shelves.

Then at the end of December a comment appeared on the ‘Books’ page of this blog from Judith Testa, an art historian in the States, asking for what information I might have about the birth dates of the children of Lorenzo de’ Medici because she couldn’t find anything but muddle in the history books.

I’d found the same when researching the subject and, with Judith, am surprised, very surprised, that there appears to be no official record of the offspring of a very famous man, some of whom were destined at birth to be famous themselves. As Judith said in our continuing correspondence over the past few days, we know the correct dates for Michelangelo and Raphael, whose future glory was not exactly obvious at their birth, so why not the Medici children? Presumably the records were kept by the Medici themselves and were lost in 1494, at the time the family was sent ignominiously into exile and  its libraries dispersed.

Although I keep a bibliographic record of research and give my notes code numbers so I can track their source, I’m not meticulous about it, and then my note-taking is particular to my story and not to the subject; that is to say, I don’t take notes about absolutely everything, only what’s relevant.

Worried now that I might have got my facts wrong, Judith’s enquiry sent me burrowing into my computer where I was forced to confront what I’d dimly realised before, that there’s stuff missing, early notes, early drafts. For some novels all I have is a pdf of the final typeset. I presumed stuff had been lost in crashes suffered over the years, but Judith pointed out that in fact it’s because of advances in technology. So one of the many resolutions for the New Year, and one I mean to do today, is to send off all those floppies and zip discs I’d found in a box to a conversion service and get everything on to CD.

Anyway, after much toing and froing between us, we assembled what we’d gathered over the years related to the birth dates, the actual number of children when modern historians obviously can’t count above the fingers on one hand, and most importantly, establishing which child was the last born and when (given that we’re often led to believe it was about five months after the previous one).

We’d got our bits and pieces into agreement by January 1st, then yesterday a slightly embarrassed message came through from Judith saying she’d thought to consult Ask.com. The answer given was full and very detailed and satisfies me even though there is no citation made for sources.

So, with grateful thanks to Judith Testa and to Ask.com, here are the facts that every modern historian of Lorenzo has ignored:

Clarice and Lorenzo had TEN children:

■            Lucrezia Maria Romola de’ Medici (Florence, 4 August 1470 – 15 November 1553); married 10 September 1486 Jacopo Salviati and had 10 children, including Cardinal Giovanni Salviati, Cardinal Bernardo Salviati, Maria Salviati (mother of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany), and Francesca Salviati (mother of Pope Leo XI)

■            Twins who died after birth (March 1471)

■            Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici (Florence, 15 February 1472 – Garigliano River, 28 December 1503), ruler of Florence after his father’s death, called “the Unfortunate”

■            Maria Maddalena Romola de’ Medici (Florence, 25 July 1473 – Rome, 2 December 1528), married 25 February 1487 Franceschetto Cybo (illegitimate son of Pope Innocent VIII) and had seven children

■            Contessina Beatrice de’ Medici (23 September 1474 – September 1474), died young

■            Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici (Florence, 11 December 1475 – Rome, 1 December 1521), ascended to the Papacy as Pope Leo X on 9 March 1513

■            Luisa de’ Medici (Florence, 25 January 1477 – July 1488), also called Luigia, was betrothed to Giovanni de’ Medici il Popolano but died young

■            Contessina Antonia Romola de’ Medici (Pistoia, 16 January 1478 – Rome, 29 June 1515); married 1494 Piero Ridolfi (1467 – 1525) and had five children, including Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi

■            Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Nemours (Florence, 12 March 1479 – Florence, 17 March 1516), created Duke of Nemours in 1515 by King Francis I of France

Raphael's portrait of Giuliano, son of Lorenzo de' Medici, who grew up to be the Duke of Nemours. He was conceived in the immediate aftermath of the conspiracy which had caused the death of Lorenzo's brother, Giuliano, and was born when Lorenzo's wife and children were living outside of Florence for their safety.

Because I can’t stop sleuthing now, I’ve tracked the source of Ask to Wikipedia, which is very much better with references. The source of the above seems to be the entry on Lorenzo himself, subsection ‘marriage and children’. When I checked references at the bottom, I found a section called ‘Further Reading’ listing all those historians who have failed with the facts. But underneath that is a section on historical fiction listing three novels, all mine, and obviously a much more dependable source of information, because I’d got it all right.

And now I’m curious about something else. The name ‘Romola’ which is unfamiliar to me in any context other than the eponymous title of George Eliot’s novel set in the Renaissance, occurs frequently among the Medici girls. Whatever the source of Wiki’s piece is (Encyclopedia Britannica?), I strongly suspect it was one or derived from one which Eliot used.

A Rainbow New Year

When the Chinese want to lay a curse on you they pray that you live in ‘interesting times’. Times could hardly be more interesting than they have been this year. Although astrologers have long been saying that the Age of Aquarius will be characterised by fluidity and the breakdown of rigid institutions, I never in my life expected to see Europe on a wobble, or  Japan being swallowed by a wave. But while the world reshapes itself around us, here on the ground things are interesting for a different reason, for they signify new life and a change in consciousness. While thousands risk their lives across the Middle East fighting for good government, I’m knitting jackets for battery hens. It’s all related somehow.

A really tough assignment: a jacket for a bald rescue hen

Whatever is happening in the present, the past is always so much more interesting. Things were more colourful then, more exciting. My interest in history switches off so violently with the twentieth century that I can’t even accept that that period is history. OK, some of it is to do with the media of historical record. If we contact the past through images then we are looking at paintings right up to the invention of photography when, suddenly, the past becomes black, white and shades of grey, so our perception of the period between the invention of photography and the invention of colour photography is decidedly colourless. I think this has an effect. But it is also true to say that we were more colourless, and still are despite the invention of computer-enhanced graphics and colour saturation. When did men stop dressing like peacocks? The Civil War? Isn’t it time to get over puritanism? We had a breakout in the 60s, which I am so utterly grateful to have been part of, but it was swiftly followed by the rise of the Goth, white faces and black lips.

It seems we are depressed as a society, that cynicism has robbed us of belief in humanity, in nation, in our selves. What writer doesn’t have to start each day psyching up against the idea that we’re being self-indulgent, that it’s all hopeless anyway and can never be published in today’s conditions. We have to grope through swirling fogs of negativity to get back to where we left off the day before. This is not personal. This is the age.

In the past they believed in something: the Virgin Mary, heaven and hell, the king, the country, virtue. There’s colour for you, and an enriched life.

Illumination by Meister des Hildegardis Codex

It’s odd but colourlessness seems to be a mark of wealth. Films about traditional India or Africa (I say ‘traditional’ advisedly, because a mark of a developing country is its loss of colour) shows you don’t have to be rich to be beautiful. All those saffrons, pinks, roses and golds of India, the baked-earth vibrancy of traditional African dress – that’s what it looks like to be natural, and it’s peculiar to neither male nor female. Everyone’s in on it, this celebration of life in colour. And everyone’s giving it up to be modern.

There are signs of change however. Perhaps because of the internet and social networks, we have better knowledge of each other and what I see and glory in is the creativity of friends and family. Is it growing or are we just noticing it more? The great baking revival in the UK is part of it, where you are no longer betraying your feminist principles if you make cupcakes. Handmade cards and crackers abounded this year. Personally I got caught up in the knitting revival and have had a wonderful time making such necessary items as a jacket for my Kindle and, now, jackets for featherless battery hens.

A great many crafts on the brink of extinction are being saved. On the allotments we are witnessing such a renaissance: old skills are being learnt just as they were about to be forgotten forever, and they are being mixed with new knowledge coming from science and experience, especially in the field of organics. When we started on the allotment, there were old codgers about as there always had been. Now we are the old codgers but the ones coming in are much, much younger than ever before. We’re not only learning to grow, we’re learning to cook and to preserve. And if we get stuck on how to do something, there’s always YouTube. Seriously, you’d be surprised how many old ladies are learning new knitting techniques sitting in front of their computers.

The Nectar Bar for bees on our allotment. Bees like colour. Be like the bees.

I got a sheep fleece for a fiver in the summer, washed it, tried carding it but didn’t like scraping my knuckles on hundreds of sharp pins. Then I discovered peg loom weaving where you don’t have to card the wool. Affordable rugs are on their way!

These are interesting times. It’s an age of transition from an unsustainable lifestyle to a sustainable one. I only hope we make it across and we aren’t tumbling to the cliff edge in one great romantic dream of self-sufficiency.

For the New Year I wish for Truth, Beauty, Goodness and Colour. For myself, I resolve to get out of the ‘flattering’ dowdies of blue, black and dark green. I would love to go swathed in a saffron sari, just love it, with a bright pink hat to match. Who knows what the year may bring?

Yellow nasturtium

Start now!

When I finished The Botticelli Trilogy, I had a few months worrying about what I was going to do next before the idea for a novel about Filippo Lippi and Cosimo de’ Medici was suggested to me. I thought it would be quick and short compared to the others, but it must be five years now since I started. About a year ago I thought I was close to finishing but then I decided to go the last inch, not realising how long an inch can take.

Last week the first fifth of the text went to the editor, which looks to me like closure, at least the first stage of it. And when she phoned the next day to put my mind at rest by telling me she was enjoying it, I thought – and please forgive the hubris – but I thought, ‘and why wouldn’t you?’ How’s that for arrogance? Except, when your self esteem has all the height and bounce of a flattened slug, that kind of thought is real gold because it is the voice of confidence. If I like my book, anyone else liking it is a bonus; that’s the stage I’ve come to and why I know I’ve just about finished. Something could happen (or not) in the last hundred pages I have to read through with my Best Beloved, but I feel confident about that too. I can smell the finish line.

Ah ha! A shelf on top of the shelves.

In the summer I read Steven Pressfield’s latest motivator for writers called Do the Work. I was mulling the next story but keeping a barge pole between me and it, not wishing to be distracted from the task in hand. I was also chary of what ‘research’ can do to your working space.  Before I took up the Lippi story I’d dipped into the 16th/17th century and I’d paddled in medieval France. Now just a gentle enquiry somehow spawns a shelf-load of books, but my shelves were full with the Renaissance. To accommodate the fruit of these two sorties, I’d created a row of books on top of the bookshelves, and a freestanding row behind the usual pile of pending paper and techno must-haves that somehow never get out of their box.

In my L-shaped room, I am stuffed. I am grid-locked by piles of who-knows-what and have to walk sideways to reach my desk. There is space for no more books and the teddies must surely go. How did I accumulate so many teddy bears? Why? Of course, when I say ‘go’, I mean to the attic. Big Ted is 60 years old and I’m putting him in the attic, wrapped in a plastic sack, only for his safety: here he just collects dust.

The teddies must go! Mustn't they?

Getting a Kindle has helped, and if I’m buying books and there is a reasonably priced Kindle edition (i.e. not something only 5op cheaper than the book), I’ll get it. I’m also getting back into the library habit, reading at the Sackler Classics Library rather than here, which I would do more often if the chairs weren’t crippling. (I shall do a piece soon on the dichotomy between interior and exterior architecture, how something that looks so fine on the outside is just horrible on the inside).

Nevertheless, the books are beginning to arrive for the new topic. For, in reading Pressfield’s book, I got to the main message fairly early on, which is START NOW. So I did, months before I’d finished on the Lippi. The trick worked and eagerness to get on with the new cut through the nervous procrastination, the fear of finishing the old.

No room for the next project. The library must be culled.

And so, for the fifth time in forty years, here we go again. It’s what idiots call ‘thinking up a story’. ‘How did you think that one up, then?’ Well, I didn’t. I tracked it, I quested for it, I followed its footprints through the forest, my ears growing ever more acute, listening for that whisper of an idea, interpreting it when it came. And then you glimpse the hart caught by a shaft of sunlight in the clearing; one step towards it and it’s gone. But at least you know it’s there, it exists.

Now I’m at that blissful stage where the universe becomes your puppy dog and presents you with gifts each bright morning. A trip into Gloucestershire to buy a cooker and ideas are springing up like mushrooms. A philosophical retreat ends up with quite a profound conversation with a tree, who was auditioning for a part as a character. A glimpse of someone limping as I passed through Moreton-in-the-Marsh in the car and my hero has his sidekick. And then salmon leaping suddenly, off every page of every book I browsed in the library on one particular morning.

How do stories form? It’s a great question, and I’ll hazard a guess next time. For now it’s back to John North’s hefty and wide-girthed Stonehenge – neolithic man and the cosmos. And no, I’m not going to be writing about Stonehenge.

Florence has to share her chair with some homeless directories.

Publish and be blessed

The first person I called when I heard that A Tabernacle for the Sun had been accepted by Allison and Busby was novelist Tim Pears, a good buddy who had helped me through the years of rejection. ‘Go buy yourself a present,’ he said. ‘Now! Something special which will always remind you of this moment.’

I’d been writing the novel for nearly twenty years, over and over again. The last draft benefitted from an award from the Arts Council (those were the days) and I went off to Tuscany to revisit all my locations with one aim, to find missing factor X, the thing my book lacked so far as publishers were concerned. It turned out to be those things which had not changed, things of today which my characters would have experienced five hundred years ago. I called it my Metaphor Hunt. The first one I found was in Volterra, where your shadow at sunset is incredibly elongated. My companion was Joanna Migdal, sundial maker. ‘Look!’ she said, ‘you could be your own gnomon and tell the time by your own shadow!’

As if to confirm the magic of this insight, in the local museum we saw that the Etruscans had had the same thought a couple of millennia before us, an elongated figurine called ‘Shadow of Evening’. Shadows went into my story, along with a real sense of place, and the book was ‘snapped up’ (ha ha) by the first publisher to see the revised version. And now the Ashmolean Museum had started stocking replicas of the statue. What could be more appropriate as a present for myself? I went off directly to the Ash and thereby maintained the tingle factor for the rest of the day.

This was great advice. It’s so important to mark those moments when we step beyond the limits we think we are bound by. Such moments are fleeting: one needs to peg them down with an object. Or an event.

Allison and Busby launched the book in their offices in New Cavendish Street. It was a sweet occasion surrounded by friends. The next event was more public, at Waterstones, and it was my first experience of the hot sweats of awkwardness, of ego struggle, of that voice that says, ‘C’mon, you know you’re enjoying all this flattery!’ and the other voice which wails, ‘I want to be at home with my slippers on!’ After that it was lit fests and other people’s launches and feeling itchy in my own skin.

Then Allison and Busby got sold, my agent retired, and I started doing my books myself. This is a very good way of keeping your slippers on. It may just have been me, getting out of it all, but it did seem that launch parties became a thing of the past, certainly as far as publishers were concerned (our own Godstow Press included). But in the midst of all this economic gloom which is sitting on us, there have been two recently which I’ve attended, and neither of them made me feel anything other than happy and content. Both were funded by the author.

The first was Keith Critchlow’s, for his book The Hidden Geometry of Flowers, in the very appropriate surroundings of the Royal Horticultural Society in Pimlico. After drinks with geometers, artists, writers and tutors from the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, we were ushered upstairs to a lecture hall where, with Warren Kenton presiding, we had talks about Islamic gardens, on flowers, and Keith himself on the geometry of flowers (with slide show). Despite the luminous nature of some of the guests, it seemed a refreshingly ego-less event.

The other was Jeremy Naydler’s launch of his Gardening as a Sacred Art,  held in the garden and meeting room of the Quakers in St Giles, Oxford. After cups of tea and slices of cake in the garden, the weather surprisingly warm and fine given it was the day the clocks went back, we went inside for a talk by Jeremy, spoken extempore without notes as ever, which entertained and inspired us all. After a long signing session, we went back outside, now dark, to launch a Chinese lantern. I knew what was in Jeremy’s mind as it finally rose into the air, ‘Oh good, another project finished.’ For that is what a good launch is, a farewell.

Diligent authors will of course devote much time and energy after publication to promotion and sales, but even they will feel that their baby is in its coffin. They will be itching to get back into their slippers and turning their attention to the next one.

I’ve just read Steven Pressfield’s Do the Work  on my new Kindle. As always with Pressfield, it’s great stuff (highly recommended for all writers in the doldrums – is there any other place most of the time?). This is how it ends:

You have done what only mothers and gods do: you have created new life. Start again before you’re ready. Take the rest of the day off. Take your wife or husband out to dinner. Pop some champagne. Give yourself a standing ovation. Then get back to work. Begin the next one tomorrow.

I did not intend to give a launch party for Pallas and the Centaur, so Michael Shepherd stepped in and did it for me, treating about twenty Renaissance scholars to an exceptionally fine meal. It was incredibly generous of him, but it did wander a little into the hot, discomfort zone of being the centre of attention which, as all true authors will agree, is a place more rightfully assigned to the book, not the writer.  Arrange yourself a banquet, by all means, but put the book in the place of honour.

The Rebirth of Venus was a very simple, lovely affair; to celebrate the end of the entire trilogy, I planted a rose called ‘Renaissance’ in the garden and friends planted snowdrops all around it. So bang in the centre of the front garden, I have a living memory of a precious moment. I intend to launch the next one, should the day ever dawn when it is finished. Meanwhile I’ve already started the next because, as Pressfield says, ‘Start before you are ready.’

Of Cookers and Kings

It was a coincidence, that the cooker we want is made in the county that is revealing itself to be the locale of my next novel. It’s not any old cooker but one so eye-wateringly expensive that we felt we must go and see it before buying. A day out on location, then, and fully justified.

I can’t remember how we came across Everhot. I think I was googling for range cookers. Our old – in fact, not so old – Cannon – is the most hated object in the house with an ‘eye-level’ grill so low you can’t stir any pot beneath it. That was one reason; the other was that our savings are turning to dust in the bank and we thought we should turn them to things while we still can, things to make the future a little bit cheaper.

The Everhot is on all the time, like an Aga, but runs off a 13 amp plug and costs £10 a week. That means I can have loaves rising when I want, whistling kettles coming slowly to the boil for the next cup of tea, a casserole simmering all day and a potato baking, and whether or not I do these things, the running cost doesn’t change.

The cooker was invented by the owner of a water mill generating power that needed only to be harnessed. The company is still at the mill. The first cooker is still in use.

The directions to find the place assumed anyone with half a brain would be approaching via the M5. Naturally we came across country via the Bronze and Iron ages. The Cotswolds run from where we live in Oxfordshire to the Vale of Gloucester, ending with a high and dramatic escarpment with stunning views over the Severn valley.

Cam Long Down and site of Battle of Camlan?

It’s been a sacred place from the beginning and all along its length overlooking the Vale are barrows of high-borns, great Bronze and Iron Age chieftans and princesses buried in places that stood out on the skyline for the people living in the valley farms and villages. The mound in the picture is called Cam Long Down. There is a river Cam here, hence a nearby village called Cambridge (!); local legend, though, has it as the Cam, the Cam of Camelot and Camlan. According to the locals, this is where King Arthur fought his last battle with Mordred. I found this out whilst studying the panorama board at Coaley Peak. A man also studying it said, ‘This was the scene of the last battle of wozzisname, that king…’ ‘Alfred?’ ‘No, no,’ he pushed and pulled his right arm like a piston, ‘the one with the stone.’ Arthur!

You come shopping for cookers and bump into Arthur!

We came off the escarpment at Uley and crossed the battlefield to find Coaley Mill. The stream that runs beneath it and turns its wheels is the Cam (did the blood of Arthur’s knights flow past here once?).

Coaley Mill

Very shortly thereafter, we had put our name to a discounted demonstration model of the Everhot 60, the smallest in the series, but enough for us and our little kitchen.

The next stop was Gloucester. We began at the Cathedral and a Pilgrim’s Pie in the coffee shop and then went off to find the city museum where they have some interesting stuff bang in my period (first century AD). I asked several people the way; they all looked at me as if I were mugging them, said ‘Dunno!’ and hurried on. A plaque on the wall of the museum is a dedication by a wife to the memory of her husband, bestowing this grand hall on the people of Gloucester to inspire them with a sense of God, who ‘meditates in beauty and speaks in law’. Dear God, I hope she can’t see from heaven what’s become of her people. Gloucester is a depressed place, its high street thronged with introverts who don’t know where the museum is and don’t care. I was surprised that tumbleweed didn’t tumble past us on that windy street where the shops are beginning to be abandoned.

Reconstructed head of Celtic princess

Back to the Cathedral. You don’t get a visitor’s leaflet here about the history, or an audio guide, just numbers to phone on your mobile at each item and place of interest. Alas, we carry no mobile, so we did our best with what captions there were. And so I came face to face with the tomb of poor old King Edward II (who may not have died with a poker up his bum after all – if only I’d had a mobile, I could have found out) and next to him, Osric, King of the Hwicce (Anglo-Saxon name for  Gloucestershire) who founded the first abbey here in the 7th century. That’s two hundred years before Alfred and contemporary with the birth of Bede.

Alfred’s battles were not only against Vikings but against ignorance. The England he’d inherited was reduced to a bump in the Somerset levels. There were bishops but they were illiterate. The grand age of Bede, Cuthbert and pious kings like Osric was long gone and must have seemed to Alfred to have been an age of sweet but futile optimism, much as the Victorian plaque on the city museum did to me.

We wended our weary way home, back over the Cotswolds along the high ridge above the Windrush Valley, now called the A40. Some years ago, someone began a development of new-builds in old stone next to the road a few miles west of Burford. As we approached, I thought they looked deserted. When we passed them, we saw all windows smashed and roofs robbed of their tiles. As I keep muttering to myself more and more these days, here begins the new Dark Age.

Gloucester was a frontier post for the Roman Empire. Artist's reconstruction, Gloucester City Museum.

By the time we got home, my imagination was so stimulated that I was itching to write, only too tired for it. And now, faced with the prospect of completely revamping the kitchen to accommodate the Everhot, and doing it quickly, I’m wondering when I’ll ever get the time to write in the foreseeable future. Lots of early rising on dark mornings ahead, if there’s any chance in getting the current book finished and off to press.

Where on Earth…?

At school I never quite ‘got’ geography. What possible use could it be to an aspiring adult to know the capitals and flags of all the world’s countries, the age of a river or where tea grows? It’s the stuff of quizz buffs and of no use other than providing a lot of hard info one has to memorise.  What on earth is a geographer, anyway? According to the dictionary, geography is the study of the physical features of the earth and human activities related to these. So there we have it. My problem with geography is that it is hardcore reality. Ethnography or anthropology, which include study of myth and folklore,  have their appeal: geography none. But then I grew up.

It was when I began writing fiction that I got into maps. Historical fiction has the value of being based in reality, using people who lived in places that exist. I had to find those places and discover how long it took to get from one to another, by foot, by boat, on horseback. I had to know the mountain ranges and the valleys, and how life and people were different depending on where they were.

Today we have satnav to tell us where we are; before that we had maps, if we were lucky. In the UK we are thoroughly spoiled by having institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society and Ordnance Survey and take accurate mapping completely for granted. It was only when I was in Greece once and found that the local maps didn’t ‘work’ that I realised how lucky we are. Before maps there were itineraries – a list of directions, often written on a roll that you would unravel as you go, a verbal map, as it were, of one road. Before those, before roads – what did they do?

It’s my current quest to find out and suddenly I’m finding the subject of surveying completely sexy. Give me a man with a groma. Even better, give me one without a groma, some native Briton sniffing out a track like an Indian guide, following the spoor of animals who always head for water. You see, I’m getting into pregeography (I just coined that – nifty, huh?), the time when men found their way by being in touch with nature; a time when instinct still operated in us before information-knowledge drowned it out.

How was it then, to stand in a strange landscape and get from A to B without any clue as to where or even what B was? There must always have been scouts, those who lived on the periphery of the clan, solitaries who liked to wander and to find out things and gain knowledge of the land. They would have led all migrations.

And of course, wayfinders used waymarkers and built cairns of rocks. Ways became tracks became roads.

To my amazement I am enjoying a book called The Road by Hillaire Belloc (as rare as dragon’s teeth these days) full of enthusiastic observation and speculation on the origin of the British road. I’m also revisiting John Michell’s The View Over Atlantis, which has a lot to say about geomancy (the siting of settlements and temples). There’s nothing feminine in this, getting excited about metalling and routes, looking at the road I live on and realising that it began as a causeway. I’m becoming a bloke. Or at least, I’m understanding their enthusiasms better. (Thought: how many lady geographers have there been? Do travel writers count?)

(And a further aside: my bloke spotted a bucket in a skip yesterday and positively trilled. A man can never have too many buckets, have you noticed? And they mock our insatiable need for bags!)

The other book I’m reading is Tristram Gooley’s Natural Navigation. It’s become the basis for a TV programme where three celebrities have to find their way from A to B. The book, of course, is far, far better than the programme. It puts you back into pregeography and finding your way using nature as your guide.

I have a friend who is a geographer. I still have no idea what he means by that, but understand it involves attending meetings at the RGS and sometimes going off and doing something necessary for the sake of all mankind in Outer Mongolia. But recently, when we were in Wiltshire, he told me that the phrase, ‘as different as chalk and cheese’ originated in that county, which is divided between high chalk downland and  fertile clay pasture where cows graze.

When he showed me this on a map, for a moment, just a moment, I saw the world through a geographer’s eyes, and it was a very broad view. Belloc, for example, shows with a few lines how Salisbury Plain (and therefore Stonehenge and Avebury) is a natural hub for six major ridgeways: Cotswolds, Chilterns, North Downs, South Downs, Dorset Down and Mendips. These ranges of hills form a whorl emanating from Britain’s most sacred landscape.

So geography can lead us to a better understanding of the past. If only I’d known that at school, where they made me do geography instead of history for the sole reason that I was insisting on doing art.

Proserpina Underground

I used to live the life of Proserpina, writing in the winter and doing everything else in the summer. Writing is such an eater of time and makes me believe I can’t possibly do anything else, such as meet a friend or make jam. The annual routine worked beautifully. I didn’t exactly stop writing in the summer, just changed the activity into reading and research and pondering; sometimes on August afternoons in the summerhouse (renamed the Plutonium – an initiatory chamber for deep dwelling) I napped and dreamed. It did work very well. Apart from anything else, it gave me deadlines to aim for, which always kicks the work up a gear.

This year however, the final edit on my novel about Fra Filippo Lippi was not finished by the spring equinox, and publication was planned to be in time for Christmas, so I worked on. I did take some time out to discover – in that boss-eyed, half-blind kind of way – the plot of my next book; that led me to reading up on Roman Britain, but there were no sultry naps in the Plutonium. It wasn’t really that kind of summer. After a very hot spring, it all settled down to cool and cloudy.

It was the final edit and, once it was finished, all I had to do was to read it out loud to David to make sure there were no plot holes, untied ends, glaring errors or howlers. Small hope. Almost at once he found a grievous error which required pulling out the viscera, doing a gastric bypass and putting it all back with no scars. It should have resulted in a leaner, sleeker book but didn’t. Lippi is still overweight, but I believe the problem is solved and the book much improved. I’m still working on the scars, though, and thoughts of it all being over by Christmas are abandoned.

As if I were programmed to follow my usual annual pattern and not write, I pulled a muscle in July, or so I thought, which prevented me sitting at the computer any longer than 15 minutes a time. I’ve found out since that it was sciatica but two months were knocked out, in which I practised extreme knitting in a comfy chair.

Inspired by Alison Ellen, I've been experimenting with two-colour entrelac, slip stitching and knitting braid. A raw beginner in extreme knitting.

Unable to drive and developing trench fever, I invested in a rail card and became quite adventurous, especially as there are some pretty good deals around if you don’t go via London. On my first trip out, I met Helen Hollick for the first time at a great lunch put on by the Harrisons, a trio of historians and re-enactors (to limit them to only two activities), and we spent a heady afternoon discussing things historical and musical. Inspiring…

Now, today, it is the Autumn Equinox. The meadow is under a duvet of mist and the dawn sky is opalescent. Moving with more ease thanks to a physiotherapist friend and her exercises, I’ve been working hard this past week to put the allotment to bed. Still much to do, but Equinox is never neat, more the apex of a time of transition. But my Proserpina self has changed allegiance. I woke in the dark today, determined to write, determined to start with a blog posting before the lovely autumn weather draws us back to the plot for more digging and manuring.

All the images of Proserpina show her being raped by Pluto, snatched from Ceres, or flying out of hell in the spring to return to her mother. I love winter and summer equally. Writing can be painful and frustrating, but so is growing vegetables, so I look on the darkening evenings with enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of a fresh start, even if I have been cheating all summer. I return to Pluto, his deep thinking and powerful insights feeling neither snatched nor raped, just grateful for the wonderful variety of life.

The freezer is stuffed. I wish it was stuffed with some ‘ready’ meals all cooked up with our own veg so that there would be no need to think about food over the winter, but I never achieve that ambition. Apart from some soup and a couple of veg curries, it’s all cooked beans and raw raspberries. But, as Marie Antoinette might have said, Let them eat jam!

I entered some of our jams in the village show last week but to no avail. I discovered that that class is dominated by men who take their jams as seriously as their home brews, even adding (adulterating them with) port. I had to content myself with Firsts for knitting, small onions and strawberries.

Sun, oh Sun, enjoy your time in the south but don’t bake them too hard. Visit us often, peeping over the horizon to melt our frosts and snows.

I end with a seasonal one-liner:

A skein of geese skims the meadow squawking.

Cat skins and Marbles

Once when I was staying with a friend in downtown Athens, her mother decided to confront me about the Elgin Marbles, the sculptures from the Parthenon ‘stolen’ by Lord Elgin and a bone of contention between the Greeks and Brits ever since. When, she wanted to know, were we going to give them back? (Wikipedia has a very good article on the Elgin marbles and the dispute: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_marbles).

No rational argument had any sway, especially against a stoat-faced woman who had her back to the front door so that I could not escape. So I resorted to the irrational. Listen, I said, Just let me out and I’ll go home and speak to the Prime Minister. Yes, yes, I know him personally. I will tell him that the British Museum must return the Marbles at once. But there’s a condition.

She raised one eyebrow. A condition?

Yes, she had to go to her Prime Minister and persuade him to erect a memorial to Socrates in the Agora, close to the place where the Athenians condemned him to death.

You are mad, she spat. Mad, bad and pagan (she was Greek Orthodox). But she let me out.

Yesterday I had one of my days in London with my astrologer friend, Darby Costello. We meet about four times a year, always at a museum, and spend more time in the cafe talking about the secrets of the soul than we do looking at exhibits.

Darby has a special interest in the cycles of history and can put everything into chronological context. I can only do that with the fifteenth century – what they use to call at school ‘knowing your dates’ but is more an instinct of what comes before and what after any given date. Darby can do it over millennia and yesterday I learnt that Sappho may have been almost contemporary with Homer and Hesiod and was a friend of Aesop, and all of them were to Plato as the Renaissance is to us (i.e. five hundred years earlier, more or less).

So there we were, up to the gills with tea and needing to see something. I’d spent the morning alone in the British gallery of the British Museum (which is misnamed and should be The World Museum of Britain) high up on the remote top floor, ogling heavy gold torcs and the tortured, leathery corpse of Lindow Man. That was my research indulged. Now I was free to go wherever on a whim. I lead Darby to a floor plan with her eyes closed and, with my eyes closed, together we put her finger on Rooms 7 and 8. Assyrian Nimrud.

The thing about the British Museum is that so little of it is British. A walk through these galleries is a walk through humankind in all its glory. I was reading Timaeus on the train, about how human craftsmanship begins in the world of Being and drags the divine down into the world of Becoming. All craftsmen of all ages and cultures are united in the same activity. The only differences are in the world of Becoming: the styles, the content, the purpose of each artifact. So, a little more tolerant than usual of the hated Assyrians, I stood and admired the flower-bracelets on the wrists of the guardian angels of King Ashurnasipal. Then I staggered backwards when, having counted the petals on one of them realised it was equally divided into fifteen. (I’m going to try and work that one out today). Others had twelve or sixteen petals, much easier to do, and perhaps symbolic. Perhaps that 15 petalled one was just a sculptor showing off. They had so little opportunity for display of individual skill in a culture where artistic style and content were laid down by traditional forms.

We went on to the Lion Hunt of King Assurbanipal of Nineveh. Two hundred years later and the art style has barely changed, except it is less mystical (no angels) and more realistic in the perfect depiction of a lion hunt (most of the animals dying horribly by the hand of fearsome kings only ever seen in profile).

Lion Hunt of King Assurbanipal

From there it was a short wander into Hellenic Roman sculpture, trying to work out how you always know it’s a Roman copy and not authentic Greek, and in passing we came across a Roman copy of something Greek that was so great it rooted us.

We’d been rooted once before, standing before Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne at the National Gallery. Now it was before Two Satyrs and a Maenad from the Villa Quintilliana on the Appian Way. A bas relief, with the central figure, dressed in flowing cat skins and playing double pipes, and the leading maenad, with her head flat backwards, her face to the sky, in her ecstasy.

Dionysiac procession from Villa Quintilliana, Rome

I got a tingling certainty that, once upon a time, Donatello had stood looking at this sculpture and had a vision of an organ loft… So I’m wondering now about the Villa Quintilliana, when it was excavated and the provenance of this work ever since. (Wiki has the answer, as always: apparently it was discovered in the 18th century, so, OK, Donatello saw something just like it).

The next room was discreetly called ‘Parthenon Sculpture’. It was full of foreign school boys, at least one of whom was eating a hot curried pizza, given the olefactory assault as we went in. We hurried past the Nereids and then, there we were, in amongst the Elgin Marbles. Most of them have their heads missing. During Ottoman rule, the Parthenon was a munitions dump and was ignited by Venetian artillery. Truth is, they are in a sorry state and you can barely make them out, but at least one was draped in a cat skin, and cat skins were fast becoming a theme of our visit.

The British Museum is a World Museum. Here you can wander in the halls of history and get a sense of the world as a whole. Do the Greeks not wish to be represented? I have every sympathy with them having the Marbles back. In truth, they are broken things and not worth squabbling over. I would rather the Greeks had something of ours of equal value (such as what? the Albert Memorial?) but they are not interested in the world, only in Greece, which is why their museums pall so quickly, as ours would, if the British Museum contained only torcs, bog bodies and gold hordes.

When I got home later, it was to be greeted by Florence. She stretches her paws into claws as I scribble her under the chin, and they are the same claws I had seen earlier in cat skins and dying lions. She survives my ruminations, is not about to become a stole across my Maenad shoulders but is sleeping on my study chair.

[With thanks to Yair Haklai who took the picture of the Dionysiac procession and put it on Wiki commons. Next time I'll remember my camera.]

Midsummer scrivenings

Let’s clear something up straight away. Today is the summer solstice, the longest day when the sun stands still awhile in a reflective pause. On Friday it is St John’s Day, which is the Christian festival most closely associated with solstice. Either today, or Friday, or anywhere in between or all of it is called ‘midsummer’, depending on your culture.

It is a mirror image of winter solstice (21st to 25th December being ‘midwinter’) and shares many of its attributes: the sense of hanging fire, pausing, holding the breath before the great cycle continues, the sense of nothing happening.

In the garden, the spring flowers have gone and the early summer poppies and buttercups are dying. Suddenly this week some yellow things appeared in my ‘nectar bed’ on the allotment, challenging those gurus who say that nothing in nature clashes. Put a marigold, a nasturtium with a face painted in Brahmin colours, an evening primrose and a buttery escholzia (spelling?) in a bed of blowsy scarlet poppies and sweet williams the colour of Indian restaurants and ‘clash’ is too sweet a word for the eye-popping effect.

Mullein on our neighbour's allotment

Sweet Williams

The yellow and the orange are the season’s markers, everywhere the yellow mullein like gothic spires attracting the bees.

Solstice was a major festival in the old days when every settlement had its stone circle the way every parish has its church. It was a day when people came together to mark time: the rest of the year they were probably a bit woolly as to whether it was Woden’s day or Thor’s day (or Celtic equivalents) except a village elder probably had the duty of keeping track. But when the sun rose or set at midsummer or midwinter, aligning with your stone clock, then for that moment you all came together, drawing disparate lives back into unity, and paused with the sun to take stock, either literally counting the cattle or metaphorically working out where your life stands.

Serpents and circles at Avebury by William Stukeley

After the horrors of last week, I’ve abandoned my Lippi book. Pamela Tudor Craig did send a postcard saying that the new version was wonderful. I read it once and didn’t think about it again. Isn’t it always like that? Praise evaporates while criticism sticks like tar. We almost prefer the criticism – the old black dog is a familar companion we’re quite fond of. But I got hauled out of it by Steven Pressfield’s new book, ‘Do the Work’ (highly recommended), and turned to my next project. ‘Don’t set yourself a start date,’ he advised, just as I was thinking, ‘Hmmm, I’ll read all summer and start at the equinox.’ ‘Start now,’ he said. So I did.

I am growing old. My powers are in decline. I don’t have the wherewithal to write another dense and complex trilogy – I simply can’t remember things well enough. My note taking these days is like that of the Sibyl of Cumaea, who wrote her wisdom down on tissue-thin leaves. Whenever anyone came to consult her and opened the door to her cave, the leaves whirled up into the air and came down in no order at all. My brain is the Cumaean cave when anyone says, ‘Got a minute?’, or when the phone rings. After any interruption, I can’t get the leaves to make sense again.

The Cumaean Sibyl, by the way, was an old crone, not the sexy young thing depicted by Renaissance painters. My mother’s name was Sybil. She came to me in a dream last night, aged about 75 and looking quite recovered from her death at 93. I do believe our ancestors get younger in the afterlife, and come to a rest around their prime (my father always appears in his 40s or 50s).

In the face of my own impending crone-hood, my plan is to write a book set in my locality, more or less, to cut down on travel. No more trips to Italy, then (sob). I also plan to write for young adults, aiming at simplicity and pace, hoping to surrender complexity for depth. I am not going my old route of writing first and structuring later. This time I’m structuring first, and I’m on day two of a trial of Scrivener.

Anyone else using this programme? It takes a lot of learning but so far I have hope that it will provide what I need: an external brain not susceptible to sudden gusts of wind, a programme which will keep all notes in one place, all web-snatches, post-its, midnight thoughts, character pages, plot ideas; then, having worked scene by scene to fill out my bare-bones structure, Scrivener will finally run it all together as a novel. Whoooooo! (Why do I doubt this is going to work?)

So almost all planting is now done in the garden and allotment. By the end of this week, the brassicas and leeks will be in, and winter crops sown. I read recently that local festivals coincide with the dragon force (fertility) in those particular areas. Our village festival is going on right now. I also read, on Facebook of all places, that broad beans grow from the seed of dismembered Osiris, hence the ‘agricultural embarrassment’ of their shape. I remembered all this as I picked our supper yesterday afternoon, crawling round the phallic beans thinking of Osiris and dragons.

All these things will be forgotten if we don’t keep memory alive. That’s what makes the job of the historical novelist a service to all mankind. That’s what I’m thinking, anyway, as I eat a bowl of cherries.

Happy summer everyone.

A New Beginning

My very long stint using Editor finished two days ago and coincided with my friend Dr Pamela Tudor Craig coming to stay for a night so that she could attend Jay Wilson’s funeral. A time of endings, then. Pamela is an art historian and has helped and encouraged me for years. She speaks as she finds and if she becomes rapturous about your work, she means it. This is tempered by her speaking the truth equally forcefully when she is not enraptured.

‘Where’s your Lippi book?’ she demanded as I brought her some coffee and said I was just off to make supper. She can be more imperious than the Queen (when she’s not being Dr Tudor Craig, she’s being Pamela Lady Wedgwood).  An hour later, when I returned with a dish of quiche, she pronounced in a doomy voice that I’d lost my touch, this was just the bare bones, it lacked all atmosphere and if you’re going to have a rogue as a hero, make him lovable. She repeated herself several times over supper.

I went to bed depressed, of course, compounded by having been charged £62 ‘no show’ fee at a bed and breakfast I’d cancelled two months ago. And then, whoopee, the next day dawned and we had a funeral to go to. I hardly knew Jay but had liked him a lot and he was a fan of the trilogy. As a minister at St Mary Magdalene in the centre of Oxford, he got a full requiem mass. This jolly, rotund neo-platonic septuagenarian was sent off with Bob Dylan and Mozart. The times they are a-changing…

His friend Colin Dexter gave a little speech from the pulpit. Now Colin is famous and presumes everyone knows it and plays to the spotlight, so the talk was very entertaining, but afterwards people – cultured intellectuals but from London, not Oxford, where Colin is infamous – were asking ‘Who was that man?’ and I went amongst them saying, ‘He wrote Inspector Morse.’

I know most people are oblivious to the authors of the books they are reading (and enjoying) but I thought everyone knew Colin Dexter and they don’t – how depressing is that? Authors overshadowed by the characters they’ve created – there’s a thesis in that. And so cast down with post-funeral blues and this opening chasm where yesterday my confidence had been, we came home, and on the bus Pamela wondered out loud (very loud) how my novel could be improved, and even if it can be. Are my powers spent? Is it one trilogy and out? After all, it was true of Tolkien and looks to be true of Philip Pullman (both Oxford men) so to live around here and write a trilogy, well… ‘Be content with what you have done and between now and your own funeral  just concentrate on some little things, like Lyra’s Oxford, or Leaf by Niggle.’

I went to bed last night feeling sick with the glums. But I’d got the seed of an idea during the funeral, and this morning I tried it on paper and wrote a new first chapter. It took five hours. It was the best writing I’ve done for years. It was certainly the longest stint at one sitting. There’s nothing like being beaten up to put the fight back in you.

I printed it out and gave it to David when he went for his afternoon nap. When I passed by (OK, looked in hopefully) five minutes later, he had that look on his face, that ‘Oh, really!’ look of the offended critic. ‘To start a novel with the word He is such a cliche.’ Damned on the first word?! I staggered away trying to laugh it off. A few minutes later he called out, ‘There are ten hes in the first paragraph! Such a cliche! All bad books start that way! Why are you withholding his name?’ If it then went quiet it was because he’d fallen asleep.

But I know in the pit of me that I’ve answered all Pamela’s justified complaints about the first chapter and that the book, which I was never quite sure of, no matter how often I edited it, is now fine.

There are three validations. Third party validation is the one we all crave, where the world shouts ‘hosanna!’ at our work (and a week later crucifies us); second party is our friends and family, who usually say only good things, and therefore can’t be relied upon (unlike my dear husband, who is nothing if not reliable). But the real validation, the only one of worth, is first party, when we know in the pit of ourselves, ‘this is fine’.

I’ve got there, I know I have, but I just need to read through now and make sure the edifice sits well on the new foundation… And I suppose I should send a copy to Pamela. And then of course I have to change the first word.

It’s a true friend who tells you the truth.