The Year of the Dugong (Das Jahr des Dugong): The Inside Story (31st May 2021)

 

This gorgeous cover-design is for my novella, ‘The Year of the Dugong’ (Das Jahr des Dugong)’ due to be published in German on October 26th by the amazing team at S Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt. So far, this is an exclusive deal and I don’t yet have (any may never have) an English language publisher for this story. All of which may sound a little odd, and it deserves an explanation.

Perhaps I should start with the story.

Early in 2020 my agent, Stan, called me for a conversation. Did I have another novel on the go? I told him I did. Sort of. Except it wasn’t strictly a novel. It was a collection of short stories. There was an uncomfortable silence on the phone. You never want your agent to go silent. And this was when I learned that short stories are not particularly popular with publishers. It may be my memory, but I seem to recall the expression, ‘career suicide’ being floated in the conversation. It wasn’t especially encouraging.

Anyway, I stubbornly persevered with the collection, and sure enough, just as everyone had predicted, the final set of stories was not really suitable for publication. Which is a shame, but I get it. I shelved the stories and started work on a novel instead.

But here comes the silver lining. There was one story in the collection I was reluctant to part with. It was a tale about climate change. Climate change is a tough subject for a fiction writer. It is a slow, unfolding catastrophe, and the time scales are generally too long to grapple with effectively – at least within the lifetime of a single protagonist. To get around this, I had the idea of a Rip-Van-Winkle character from 2019 who falls asleep and awakens a very long time in the future, only to find himself blamed for his part in the destruction of the planet. One day, in the spring of 2021, I mentioned the story on a zoom call with S Fischer Verlag. ‘The Whale at the End of the World, (Der Wal und Das Ende der Welt)’ had been in Der Spiegel’s Top 10 Paperback chart for 50 weeks, and we were exchanging ideas for the new novel. At one point I said, ‘this reminds me of a short story I’ve just written,’ and my editor in Frankfurt said, ‘send it to me.’  A day or so later she called back. Could they please publish it?

The story was The Year of the Dugong.

I am so excited that Fischer are publishing Dugong as a novella. I did wonder, for a while, if I ought to develop it into a full-length novel, but truthfully, the story felt complete;  I sensed that stretching it out, and introducing more characters would dilute the impact. I asked my editor at Fischer if she could time the publication to coincide with COP26, the UN Climate Conference planned for November 2021. She agreed. So it will hit the bookstands in Germany on 27^th October.

If no UK publisher picks up the story, I will post the English language original onto this blog as a PDF or Kindle file to coincide with the German publication. Or drop a comment into this blog and I will email it to you on 27^th October.  

And that’s it. That’s why I find myself in the very unusual position of having a book published exclusively in a language that I don’t speak. And it has a beautiful cover. Don’t you agree?

 Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

Tracing my Family Tree (6th May 2021)

 I’ve often been sniffy about people who obsess over their family tree. It always felt, to me, a rather pointless exercise to dust-off and parade your male ancestors from the last few generations when we are all pretty much related. I’ve blogged about this before, but it bears repeating. Every human who walked the earth ten thousand years ago is either a direct ancestor of everyone alive today, or else they are an ancestor of none of us. It’s true. Our most recent common ancestor, from whom everyone on the planet is descended, probably lived between 55 BC and 1,400 BC. We are all pretty close cousins. You and me and Kamala Harris and Xi Jinping and the Pope. We are none of us further apart than 27^th cousins, but we are almost certainly much closer than that. A shocking statistic for all those people who prefer to believe in racial purity or Brexit – but there we are. *

Anyway. This has always been my objection to family trees. Until I started to trace one. And almost immediately my opinion changed. Genealogy may still be wholly pointless as an exercise in understanding our biological origins. But as a way of uncovering some genuine family stories, it is extraordinarily fascinating. I’m a convert.

It started as a way to while away the long days during the first Covid lockdown. My wife, Sue, wanted to resolve a few puzzles in her family tree. So we started to dig. Ancestry.com proved to be really helpful. Expensive, but ultimately worth it. (We paid the subscriptions for about six months.)  I should warn that it all took rather longer than we anticipated. There is something of a learning curve you need to get past. And we made mistakes. We spent days unravelling the family of one Welsh ancestor who proved not to be an ancestor after all. Never mind. We did uncover a host of stories. Like Sue’s great-great-great-grandfather, born in 1801, who died of exhaustion on Christmas Eve 1869 walking with a heavy bag of Christmas provisions from Whitchurch in Shropshire to Handbridge in Chester, intending to stay with his son – a journey of around 30 miles. He collapsed and died less than a mile from The Old Red Lion in Handbridge – the pub where his son was the landlord. The pub is still there. Or the black sheep of Sue’s family who drifted from job to job in the 1800s, and was fined £10 for assault in 1882 after throwing a cup of tea over his wife. It is endlessly fascinating. We discovered the marriage bans of ancestors who signed the register with a cross. Neither of them could read.

Sue was a Newnes and her mother was a Sargeant. We compiled all the stories we uncovered into a book (for family only of course). After this I had to do my tree too. More fascinating stories, and another book. My dad’s family were cockneys, living in the borough of Bow in the East End of London for five generations. They worked on the railways. I never knew. One of my ancestors, Robert Ironmonger, was indicted for ‘certain petty larcenies’ and transported to his majesties colonies in America in 1774, leaving his wife and baby son (my ancestor) in London. In 1776 the pesky colonists only went and started a revolutionary war and Robert was conscripted to fight for the British. Fascinating! I traced my father’s family line back to a gentleman fittingly called ‘End Ironmonger,’ who appears to have been born sometime around 1400 AD. Or thereabouts. And that’s as far as it goes.

So here I am with some new advice. Check out ancestry.com (they’re not paying me a commission). And have a root through your family stories. You might be surprised what you find.

And by the way ... if you happen to be an Ironmonger or a Newnes or a Sargeant or a Wilson, or if you think you might be related in any way ... drop your email address into the comment field and I'll send you the pdf of the book.

 *Humans Are All More Closely Related Than We Commonly Think - Scientific American

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (35): Lombardy (3rd May 2021)

 Lombardy is a huge piece of geography in the north of Italy and I can never do it justice with a single map pin. But, quite frankly, if you haven’t been to Lombardy yet, what’s keeping you? This is the home of the Italian Lakes. It needs to be on your bucket list. This isn’t a manufactured landscape like the English Lakes, this is Italy rough and raw from Milan to the Alps, from urban to wilderness, possessing some of the most glorious vistas imaginable. Hire a car (a little Fiat 500 is fine), book somewhere reasonably central to stay, and then get out there and explore for a week or so. As well as all the things you’ll discover on TripAdvisor (and there are lots) I’d recommend hiring bicycles to pedal around Lake Varese (it's about 28km all around so not too taxing – although we lost out way at one point and ended up going much further), visiting the Parco del Campo dei Fiori national park and the Santa Maria del Monte Trail, taking the cable car up Laveno Mombello on the edge of Lake Maggiore, and of course those lakes. Ahh, those lakes. Bella. Bella.

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3words: decorate.solves.building

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (34): Independence Day in Vilnius, Lithuania (23rd April 2021)

 On February 16^th every year, Lithuanians come together to celebrate their Independence Day. In Vilnius, celebrations begin around 5pm when it is already dark, with the lighting of thirty symbolic bonfires in the streets of the capital. Yes, you read that right. Massive bonfires in the city streets. How could that not be a good idea? But hey, it’s a party! A very jolly crowd in full independence-day-spirit trails around the city from one huge fire of logs to the next. Pretty well the whole city comes out for this. Alcohol is consumed, songs are sung, flags are waved. There are little stalls like the cabins from a Christmas market selling hot foods and mementos. It’s a night-out for all the family.

As it happens, I knew absolutely nothing about any of this when, in 2010, I drove into Vilnius (from Riga in Latvia via Kaunas) on, er, February 16th. I had no idea it was the National Day. I did know that it was brutally cold. Scarily cold. And there was a humongous bonfire right outside my hotel window. It crossed my mind that perhaps this was some odd Baltic approach to keeping the city warm at night. But any excuse for a party. I pulled on my coat and went off to mingle. More of an observer, really, than a party-goer. But I did manage about five bonfires, I drank some very quaffable beer, and ate some curious pastries, I discovered the old town, and I learned about the fierce independent spirit of the Lithuanians. So all good.

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3words: passion.shop.shelter    

Photo from http://www.lithuanianstories.com/

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (33): Australia (posted April 2021)

 I have only been to Australia once. I went for eight days in 2001. It was a business trip, travelling on my own, with meetings in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Hobart. So quite a lot of hopping around, a map-pin in pretty much every state (except for Northern Territories and Western Australia), but tragically not much time for sightseeing. Three things stay in my memory. I did get a weekend where I took a hire-car and drove up the Gold Coast from Brisbane to a simply gorgeous seaside town called Noosa. That would be memory number one. The drive was lovely. I stopped off at Australia Zoo. I did a little bit of walking. It was fabulous. Memory number two would be the day I spent in Hobart where I drove up Mount Wellington (spectacular) and then went exploring little deserted coves in Hobart Bay. It was a tiny taste of Tasmania, but I loved it.  Final memory was a casino in Melbourne. I’m not a gambler, but on the flight from London I had read Bill Bryson’s ‘Australia,’ (it was research for the trip,) and he aroused my interest. Sure enough it was a jaw-dropper. Imagine a windowless warehouse, like an Ikea, packed out on floor after floor with bug-eyed people playing endless pokie games on glaring games machines. It was like that, but bigger.

I don’t have any photos of Australia because my camera was stolen a week or so later from the back of a car at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, and stupidly I hadn’t backed up any pictures. I don’t suppose I’ll ever go back, so I shall have to rely on these memories. The photo I’ve posted is the snapshot of my map pins from Google. (It isn’t difficult to build a travel map on Google Maps – I’d recommend giving it a try.) My what3words takes you to Mount Wellington.

One more memory. A business lunch in an al-fresco seafood restaurant on Sydney Harbour overlooking the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, watching commuters zipping back and forth in ferries. Damn but it’s a good lifestyle those Aussies have…   

 what3words: ponytails.carnations.combinations     

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (32): Casablanca (posted April 2021)

 The first time I visited Casablanca was in 1974 on an InterRail tour with my (then) girlfriend Sue (now my wife) and my mate Les Jessop (where are you now Les? Get in touch mate.) I guess we were wannabe-hippies then, sort-of, and Casablanca was on the hippy trail. We stayed in a cheap pension, we ate street food, and we explored the city on foot. One afternoon we paid a visit to the family of Khalid, a medical student we had met on the train coming through Spain. He had given us his address and had urged us to visit. The family lived in an apartment right in the medina. His mother laid on food for us, but none of the family could eat a mouthful because it was Ramadan. In our naiveté, we hadn’t realised. And none of the women could show their faces because our arrival had caught them unawares and they were now trapped in the kitchen without veils. Awkward. Doubly awkward. But humbling. It was an eye-opening trip for us in so many ways.

I revisited Casablanca with Mike Taylor on the Plymouth to Banjul Rally in 2008. I didn’t recognise a single sight from 1974. Three decades on, the city was a massive traffic jam. We didn’t stay to do any sightseeing. We found a cheap hotel, and parked on the street, our car stuffed with our kit. In the morning we discovered we had left the car doors unlocked. But nothing had been taken. It was 5:30 am. Tom Ibbotson in the car behind us, filmed our early morning exodus from the city, so instead of a What3Words for this post, here is our YouTube record of that drive south.

(527) Casablanca in 60 Seconds - YouTube

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (31): Parque Natural do Alvão, Portugal ((posted April 2021)

 You will need a car. Alvão Natural Park is the smallest national park in Portugal but it is a little off the beaten track. It is, however, quite close to the delightfully named, Nossa Senhora da Graca de Mondim de Basto – a sixteenth Century hilltop chapel which dominates the region and is well worth a visit once you’ve done the park. But let’s stick with the park for this map pin. It is a mountainous region, and it’s a time capsule. You will go back in time. This isn’t a gimmick. But the villages that have been enclosed within the park look as if they’ve been unchanged for a century. Farmers eke out a living among these inhospitable peaks. How they do it, heaven only knows. You’ll feel uncomfortable, like an intruder from the future as you glide past in your air conditioned car. There are plenty of walks. They are all pretty hilly. But the views are spectacular. We saw mountain goats. There they are in the photo taken on my mobile phone.

What3words: reordering.cherries.nitrogen  

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (30): The Paris Catacombs (19th April 2021)

 Have you ever visited the catacombs in Paris? No? Then I humbly suggest you add them to your bucket list. Really. Skip the enormous queues at the Eiffel Tower, or the crush around the Mona Lisa, and head underground. Also, if you have read and enjoyed  ‘Pure,’ by Andrew Miller (an extraordinary and brilliant novel set among the bones and stinking corpses of Le Cimitiére des Innocents in 1785) then you absolutely have to visit the catacombs.  To explain: the ossuaries and cemeteries of Paris were overflowing with corpses in the 1780s, and the stench had become unbearable. To resolve the problem, the bones of six million people were relocated into empty mine tunnels underneath the city. You can walk through the tunnels and see the bones. That is pretty much it, and in itself should make the catacombs worth a visit, but the story gets more macabre. Each cemetery was allocated a room – or a space within the tunnels. Some simply dumped their bones in massive heap. But other took a more artistic approach. They created walls out of skulls, and crafted elaborate patterns with the bones.  You will never see anything more ghoulish or gruesome yet simultaneously charming. Beautiful patterns constructed out of dead people. It is morbid, but oddly it isn’t spooky. The walk around the tunnels is about a mile, and then you find yourself disgorged onto an unfamiliar street, nowhere near where you went in. Give it a go. You will never look at a skeleton in the same way again.

What3words: piston.prompting.among

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (29): New York City (posted April 2021)

My map pin posts are about stories as well as places. And here is a story about my first ever visit to New York City. I remember just how excited I was; excited but irritated. This was a business trip, and an annoyingly brief one. I wouldn’t have any time to explore. Damn! I was on a flight from Atlanta, due into La Guardia around nine o’clock at night. I had a meeting at Mount Sinai Hospital at ten thirty the next morning, and I’d need to rush away from that to get to JFK for my flight back to London. I was resigned to seeing next to nothing of the city. But I had a stroke of luck. I struck up a conversation on the plane with the man in the seat next to mine. He was a New Yorker, now living in Atlanta. I told him about my disappointment, not being able to explore. ‘To hell with that,’ he said. ‘Did you never hear about the city that never sleeps?’ He wrote down his name and the address of his hotel. He was staying (can you believe this?) at the Waldorf Astoria on Central Park. ‘Come and find me there at 11 o’clock tonight,’ he told me. ‘I’ll be waiting in reception. You have the rest of your life to catch up on the sleep.’

What could I do? I barely had time to check into my hotel and then I went to find him. (His name was Charles, by the way.) He took me on a walking tour. We did Times Square, and Broadway, and 7^th Avenue, and 42^nd Street. He showed me the Empire State and Macy’s, and the Flatiron Building, and Madison Square Gardens. And so much more. We walked all the way up to Greenwich Village, and Soho, and we dropped into Grand Central Station. Wow! We walked the leather off our shoes, but there was no stopping this guy. He was loving this as much as I was. We had a swift beer in a little speakeasy, and off we went again. There was something on almost every corner we had to see. Theatres. Skyscrapers. The PanAm building. FAO Schwarz. All the shops were closed, but what the heck. ‘They’re way cheaper at night,’ he said. I told him I was a huge fan of Damon Runyon so he pointed out Mindy’s for me. We walked past the UN, back to Central Park, up by the Guggenheim museum, and he still wasn’t done. He showed me the Dakota Building and Strawberry Fields, and the Natural History Museum, and a load of his favourite parts of the park. ‘Isn’t it dangerous walking in Central Park at night?’ I asked him. ‘Not for two six-foot guys,’ he said.

I got back to my hotel at three forty five am. We had been walking for more than four hours. I’m guessing we had walked maybe ten miles. The next morning, following Charles’ instructions, I took a yellow cab to the World Trade Centre and an elevator to the top, and I got to see the whole city emerging from an early morning mist. And I still made my meeting.

I never kept Charles’ contact details. Which is a shame. Because I owe him. Big time.

The photos are from a trip with my family a year or so later. We did the World Trade Centre again. That’s me and Jon in the pictures. That was a great trip too.

The What3Words is Times Square. It’s as good a place as any to start.

What3words: café.ahead.intelligible

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (28): Dublin, Ireland (posted April 2021)

 

I’ve been to Dublin so many times I can just about find my way around. (Isn’t it good when you reach this stage in your relationship with a place?) It is one of my favourite cities. It doesn’t have a stack of attractions. I’ve just looked up the top ten things to do in Dublin on Trip Advisor and realised I haven’t done any of them. But they sound dull. They are all museums and galleries and churches. The magic of Dublin is in the streets and the bars and the nightlife. Nowhere buzzes quite like Dublin at night when the Guinness is flowing and the fiddles are fiddling and the feet are tapping. My favourite trip was a family weekend in July 2011. Prince was playing at Malahide Castle and we had tickets. We warmed up with a day and night in Dublin, and we ate out at a boxty restaurant (look it up) and did a pub crawl, and heard ‘Whiskey in the Jar-o’ played three different times by three different bands, and we watched some Irish dancing, and we all got very drunk. And the next day the sun shone like blazes, and we fought our way close to the stage to watch Prince play a concert of his greatest hits, and it felt as if this was the world’s best musician playing his finest tracks at the peak of his career in a city of music lovers, and I wondered if it could ever get any better than this.

What3words: dream.legal.scam what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (27): Lake Victoria (posted April 2021)

When I was eleven years old, I took a holiday with my mother on Lake Victoria. It was a sort of cruise, although the ship, the SS Usoga, was not, by any stretch of imagination, a cruise liner; it was a smelly, oily merchant ship on an endless tour around the lake. It did, however, have two passenger cabins. My mother and I had one. The other was occupied by a honeymooning couple from Ireland called Lynam. According to the East African Railways website - on Sundays the Usoga sailed clockwise from Kisumu: on Wednesdays, anti-clockwise. The overnight passage from Kisumu to Port Bell took twelve hours. After a two to three hour stop for cargo handling, the ship left Port Bell for the two hour passage to Entebbe. Entebbe was a short (one hour) stop, and from there it was an eight and a half hour passage to Bukoba in Tanzania. From Bukoba the ship sailed overnight to Mwanza where it arrived around dawn. Leaving Mwanza at 1030, Musoma was reached at 1900 from where, after a two hour stop, the final night passage brought the ship back to Kisumu at 0700. We must have sailed on a Sunday because we set sail from Kisumu and sailed the other way around.

In a perfect world Lake Victoria would be one of the great holiday destinations on the planet. The PR men would need no imagination. It’s a huge body of freshwater - the size of Ireland. When you’re sailing you spend much of the time out of sight of land. It’s an ocean really; a freshwater ocean. It heaves and groans like an ocean. Yet all around are the dark mysterious hills and jungles of Livingstone’s Africa. There’s a hint of the unexplored - the unexplorable - about the place. Ancient peoples live all around it; people who have made their living from the great beneficent lake for countless generations. Our most ancient ancestors of all probably hung out here for a few millennia, feeding off the very fine fish, luxuriating beneath the cool forest trees that overhang the bank, wading in the thousand little bays and eddies. Lake Victoria is as African as it gets. Wildlife abounds. Hippos swim languidly. Crocodiles bask menacingly. Antelope come fleetingly down to the shores to drink. Great birds flock. Tiny birds flick over the water seeking flies. Insects throng and swarm and buzz incessantly.

Halfway through the cruise, my mother fell ill.  She was pregnant at the time (with my sister, Sally). When we got to Bukoba she was taken off the Usoga to a hospital in the town. I wasn’t allowed to go along. But I escaped the ship. I scrambled down a mooring rope and found my way to the hospital. I still feel quite proud of this feat, all these years later.

I wrote about this trip in my first published novel, ‘The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder.’ In the novel, Max and his friend Adam, travel on the Usoga with Max’s mother O. In Bukoba O falls ill and is taken to hospital. Max escapes the Usoga by sliding down a mooring rope, concealed within a cloud of lake flies.

I have no photographs of the trip. The photos are of my  visit with my son Jon at the dockside in Ggaba near Kampala in 2011.  The What3words will take you here.

What3words: kite.amphibian.liquids

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (26): Ojców National Park, Krakow, Poland (Posted March 2021)

 

So there we were in Krakow, in March 2020, when the country went into the first Coronavirus lockdown. There had been fourteen confirmed cases and panic had set in. (The UK would not announce its own lockdown until eleven days later.)  We had one day left of our city break and it looked as if it might be a rather bleak day. All visitor-attractions were closing. All of the delightful bars and brasseries in the city, all museums and galleries, churches and castles. The salt mine was closed. Wartime memorial sites were closed. Oscar Schindler’s factory was closed. We had already done the city walking tour (recommended). What to do? We consulted a map and popped a random metaphorical pin into this place – Ojcówski Narodwy park, and the four of us set off there in a taxi that could comfortably have taken three. Ojcow is pretty small for a national park.  But there is a charming riverside walk through the gorge, and it is really rather lovely. Halfway along the trail, the river diverts through a trout farm with its own restaurant selling freshly caught trout. Hand on heart, it is the tastiest trout I’ve ever eaten. All in all we felt the lockdown had done us a favour. Check it out if ever you’re in Krakow.

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location 

What3words: strategic.idiomatic.wound

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (25): Nouakchott, Mauritania (Posted March 2021)

Here's a quiz question for you. Can you name the capital of Mauritania? OK, perhaps you can because it happens to be the title of this Map-Pin post. But that's cheating. I bet you didn't know it before. Nouakchott is not a well known destination. It's a Saharan town.  A poor town in one of the poorest nations on earth. Brutally hot. I read in a travel guide that the city is subject to sandstorms on 200 days of the year. This isn't hard to believe. Everything about this city creates the impression that it is clinging onto life at the very fringes of habitability. We were there for just one night, driving through. We found a cheap hotel that put us up in a tent on the roof. 

In the morning, driving south on the long road towards Senegal, we witnessed a daily ritual that keeps the city alive. A tanker filled with freshwater had docked at the port, and now hundreds of donkeys were delivering water around the city. A standpipe at a crossroads was filling barrels and assorted containers, and a huge queue of donkeys and their drivers were lining up for their ration. What other city has a dependency on an army of donkeys for its water supply? We were quickly gone, leaving the city and its donkeys behind us, but I would like to have stayed longer. It felt as if there was a lot to explore here, and we missed it. It felt like a secret city, like Timbuktu, or something from the Arabian Nights. I often think about Nouakchott. This unlikely city in the sand. I don't suppose I shall ever go back. I feel quite sad about that. 

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3Words: rinse.claw.reheat

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (24): Llyn Elsi, Snowdonia, Wales (Posted March 2021)

The trail to Llyn Elsi, one thousand feet above the town of Betws-y-coed in Snowdonia, is one of our favourite walks. Pick a fine day to do it. Take a picnic. Park up behind St Mary's Church. Lace up your boots, and off you go.  It isn't a long walk. It's around four miles. But the first mile is pretty brutal - this is where you do most of the uphill stuff. When you reach the top, there's a surprise. A twisty-turny lake with a trail all the way around it. So basically, you climb the hill, you walk half way around the lake, you pick a spot with an amazing view for lunch, then in a more leisurely fashion you complete the circuit of the lake and you descend to Betws for a coffee or something stronger. Honestly you won't find many better walks than this. You can thank me when you've done it. 

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

 What3Words: ranks.doses.parrot

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (23): Skara Brae, Orkney (Posted March 2021)

 

Skara Brae is Europe’s most complete Neolithic village. It is older than Stonehenge or the Pyramids and was occupied for about seven centuries which is quite a humbling fact. It was built around 3,100 BC - so if you trace your ancestors back for 200 generations the chances are pretty good that someone in your family line helped build it. Why would Neolithic people choose to live in this windswept bleak corner of the British Isles? Why wouldn't they just set off south and make a home in Cornwall? Who knows? But it is truly an amazing place. I’d recommend a visit. It is a fair old journey to get there mind. We drove to Thurso on the very north tip of the Scottish mainland, and took the ferry. We might have seen an orca. Some passengers did. But what we saw might just have been a wave. Never mind. We always need to remember, as TS Eliot said, ‘It is the journey, not the arrival that matters.’ That is especially true of Orkney, but mainly because the journey there is so beautiful. If you’ve never been to Orkney, add it to your wish list. 

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3Words: calendars.handwriting.rotation

Please check out my website to learn more about my books:  https://www.johnironmonger.com

My Map Pins (22): Gole Alcantara, Sicily (Posted March 2021)

 

I’m not quite sure how, or why we ended up at Alcantara Gorge. I suspect we had exhausted the charms of Taormina and we were looking for a way to fill an hour or so, and there was a throwaway line in a guide book that made it sound interesting. There were six of us, but that was OK; we had a big car. The approach to the gorge isn’t auspicious. It’s like a low budget theme park with a rather empty car park and turnstiles. But the gorge itself was a surprise. Sue is a geologist so she loved it. I can’t remember the technical explanation behind the curious rocks. It has to do with the volcano (the gorge is on the foothills of Etna). I don't need to know. But it is pretty spectacular. Worth the trip if you’re visiting Taormina.  

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3words: Unpaged.skaters.operational

Please check out my website to learn more about my books:  https://www.johnironmonger.com

A Farewell to Barbara Whitnell (17th March 2021)

 

My aunt, Ann Hutton, was the novelist Barbara Whitnell - (a name she took from her own grandmother). She was, I believe, the author of 14 published novels, and she made the Times Bestseller list. She died this week just short of her 92nd birthday. Ann was a big inspiration to me and encouraged me to write. I owe her a great deal. She was a larger than life character. She was just ten when the war broke out, and sixteen when it ended, but it often felt to me as if she was more at ease with the post war generation. She was more of a 1950s-breakout-woman, than a 1940s-war-girl; always slightly rebellious, a rule breaker, a risk taker. She lived a glamorous life - living in places like Kenya and the Turks and Caicos Islands, but it was to Cornwall, the county of her childhood, that she so often returned, and about which she would write many of her stories. She and her husband Bill retired to Fowey, a little fishing village on the Cornish coast, and is was from here that Ann wrote many of her books.

I can reveal now that Ann was the inspiration behind the character of Demelza Trevarrick in my novel, 'Not Forgetting the Whale.' (The Whale at the End of the World). One clue, for anyone with a memory long enough, was the name of Ann's house in St Austell in the 1960s - 'Trevarrick'. There wasn't much similarity between Ann's life and Demelza's (beyond the fact that both were romantic novelists living in Cornish seaside villages), but all the same it was Ann's voice that I could hear in my head whenever Demelza spoke. She had a knowing way of talking, with the allure of someone who knows everything and has seen everything. I remember Ann in the 1960s used to smoke cigarettes in a holder like Audrey Hepburn, and that too, for some reason, became an image I attached to Demelza.

It occurs to me now, as I write this, that there is a coincidence I can relate. Sometime in the 1990s (I shall guess at 1996) I was boarding a flight at Heathrow bound for Johannesburg. It was a business trip. I heard a voice calling my name. There was Ann. I hadn't met or spoken to her for several years. But by an extraordinary twist of fate she was on the same flight, off on a book tour of South Africa. She and Bill were in First Class. I was in steerage. Nonetheless, when we were in the air, she came and sat in the seat next to me and we gossiped for much of the journey. We talked a lot about writing. About the discipline, and the mechanics, and the preparation. I had written a non fiction book at this stage (The Good Zoo Guide) but I wanted to write fiction. She gave me some advice that I have often passed onto others as if the wisdom was my own. 'Just write it,' she told me. 'It may not be a masterpiece. Your first novel rarely is. But writing is a craft, and you will get better.'

Ann leaves behind her four lovely children, my cousins Lindsay, Judi, Chis and Tim - and of course her grandchildren and great grandchildren. She also leaves those books.

Please check out my website to learn more about my books:  https://www.johnironmonger.com

My Map Pins (21): Fuveau, Provence, A very French Book Festival (Posted March 2021)

 

Every autumn the lovely, hilltop village of Fuveau, in Provence, hosts a three day book festival.  And what a festival! Book lovers come from all over France. There are also a couple of hundred authors, all with books to promote. (I am shamelessly guessing that number. Maybe someone will tell me the real figure some day and I can correct it). The writers all sit behind tables in the main town square, with heaps of their books on display. It is like a huge flea-market for books. Visitors browse around and look at the books, and chat, and occasionally they will buy one and the author will sign it, and it is all enormously convivial and very French. 

The festival is organised by Les Ecrivains en Provence. Each year they invite four guest writers from another country, and for these fortunate authors they put on a generous display of Provencal hospitality, and as you might expect, there is music and frivolity, and a great deal of wine is drunk, and food consumed. In 2016 Britain was the featured country and I was hugely privileged to be one of the four British writers invited to be there (the others were Stuart Neville, Amanda Hodgkinson, and the brilliantly entertaining Peter Guttridge.)   If you happen to be in the South of France in the autumn, check their website.  (https://www.fuveau.com/SSL.htm) – you might just catch the festival. You don’t have to be French to enjoy it. And Fuveau itself is a charming place.    

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3words: Showy.tearooms.joggers

Please check out my website to learn more about my books:  https://www.johnironmonger.com

My Map Pins (20): Nyhavn, Copenhagen (Tattoo Ole's) (Posted March 2021)

 

Sometimes you come across a place in a novel and you really want to visit. There’s a tattoo parlour that features in John Irving’s novel, ‘Until I Find You,’ called Tattoo Ole’s. It might help to know that the novel unfolds within the rather curious subculture of European nautical tattoo shops, and Tattoo Ole’s is one of these. (Great novel by the way – although it is 824 pages long and I did regret taking it on holiday; it was like carrying around a brick.) Irving describes the location of the tattoo shop in Nyhavn, Copenhagen, and I was left wondering if this was a place Irving had invented (perfectly allowable) or if, perhaps, it was real. Well it turns out that Irving does his research. Tattoo Ole’s is said to be the oldest tattoo shop in the world. I wasn’t even looking for it, I was just mooching (again – see my map pins no.18) but when I discovered it here on the waterfront. I was strangely delighted. What’s more it was exactly how I’d imagined it. Books can do that.

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3Words: squeezed.lamps.outreach

Please check out my website to learn more about my books:  https://www.johnironmonger.com

My Map Pins (19): The Pyramids at Saqqara and Abusir (Posted March 2021)

 So I read about this in 'The Rough Guide to Egypt' and really wanted to do it. You hire camels at Giza, and then you ride across the desert to the pyramids at Abusir, and onwards to the pyramid field at Saqqara. It is about fifteen kilometres to Abusir, and another three or four kilometres to Saqqara. So it is perfectly do-able. The trick, apparently, is to get a taxi to Giza quite early in the morning and ask around for anyone who rents out camels and a guide. And that turned out to be easy. But it is, nonetheless, a pretty tough ride. It takes around four or five hours, there is no shade at all, and it gets hot. Ridiculously hot. We had two guides, two camels, and a stallion. Sue preferred the stallion to the camels. I stuck to my camel. 

One of the best things is watching the great pyramids getting smaller and smaller on the distant horizon.  And then at last you get to Abusir and Saqqara and you have these extraordinary historical sites to yourself. All the crowds are at Giza. I don't think many people do this desert trip. At one point a police Landcruiser came racing towards us over the sand. They had never seen tourists this far out in the desert. Perhaps we were being abducted. 

 I would so recommend this adventure. In fact I would do it all again in a heartbeat.

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3words: fresh.masters.destroyer 

Please check out my website to learn more about my books:  https://www.johnironmonger.com

My Map Pins (18): Pioneer Plaza, Dallas (Posted March 2021)

 It’s good to be surprised when you travel. Most of the time, as tourists, we get directed or transported to all the significant places, or we use TripAdvisor, or a city guide, and we set off to see the sights with a sense of purpose. So when you just chance upon something amazing it can be oddly moving. It happened to me in Dallas when I was simply mooching along a sidewalk minding my own business. This cattle drive at a road junction turns out to be the biggest bronze artwork in the world. I had never heard of it! It commemorates a nineteenth century cattle drive that took place along the Shawnee Trail, and it consists of 49 larger-than life cattle and three mounted cowboys. It is quite an astonishing piece of work in an otherwise fairly dull city.  Mooching can pay off.  You heard it here.

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3Words: shadow.burn.jelly

Please check out my website to learn more about my books:  https://www.johnironmonger.com

My Map Pins (17): The Great Wall of China at Mutianyu (Posted March 2021)

 

It was a pretty muggy day when we got to the wall. A lot of days are muggy in Beijing. Not great for photographs, but no matter. The Great Wall really is everything you want it to be. It is a mind boggling construction that just goes on and on. Very few adjectives really do it justice. 'Awesome' barely hints at the colossal scale of the thing.

 Mutianyu is probably the most popular place to see the wall. It is an easy ride from Beijing, it is well provided with coach parks and restaurants, and it is absolutely heaving with visitors. This, by the way, should not come as a surprise. Most (almost all) the visitors are Chinese tourists visiting the wall themselves for the very first time. The wall is a marvel to them just as much as it is for us. Of course it is. So for the foreign visitor I have a very valuable tip. Don't take a coach trip to the wall. Don't take an organised tour from your hotel. Take a taxi. The reason for this became very clear to us after a while. The coaches and tours allow their parties an hour to explore the wall before they bundle everyone back onto the bus to take them off to a jade museum or a silk factory or whatever. So the vast crowds amble along the wall for half an hour, and then, reluctantly, they turn back. They don't want to miss their bus. But if you get there by cab, you have no such time cap. You can wander on. Suddenly you break free of the crowd. You climb a hill, and oh my god, you have the Great Wall of China to yourselves. Almost. We kept on going until our legs instructed us to turn around (and it can be very tiring in places).  Honestly, you could stay there all day. 

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3words: zebra.pressed.disarming

Please check out my website to learn more about my books:  https://www.johnironmonger.com