On top of the Eggli. No skis.

As I tell kids when I visit schools, the Eggli mountain near the Swiss town of Gstaad is where I broke my leg skiing, the ‘lucky break’ which gave me the time and mental space to start my writing career.

I hadn’t been back – until today! Visiting my brother Michael and his family, I joined them at the top of the mountain. In fact I’m writing this post whilst sitting on a deck chair, facing the sun and a gorgeous view of gleaming snowy mountains. In fact…is that a tinge of tanning I can feel on my face?

Michael has given me his iPod with his playlist of Ed Reardon’s Week. Essential listening for writers, I’m assured. It’s probably because I insisted that we check to see if the airport WHSmith’s had my books. All authors torture themselves like this. Luckily I left happy – they had ZERO MOMENT.

My tiny, three year old nephew and niece are schussing around the piste as if the skis were extensions of their legs.

I’m in the middle of a bunch of author visits – last week with kids from St Edmund’s in Hindhead, Bampton Primary, Cheney School Oxford, and St Bartholomews, Newbury. Next week – College du Leman in Geneva. Photos and a big round-up to follow.

Coming soon: On March 10th Children’s author Katherine Langrish and I swap blogs for the day! Two teenage readers, Libby and Patrick Caffrey have read West of the Moon, a new abridged version of Katherine’s Troll Fell trilogy, and also The Joshua Files. They’ve put together some questions for Katherine and I – we’ll be answering on 10^th March. It’s all part of Katherine’s West of the Moon blog tour.

I’ve been reading WEST OF THE MOON and telling a very simplified version to my three-year old niece and nephew. Trolls stealing young children, evil Uncles Baldur and Grim, it’s going down a storm! I overheard my nephew playing a game later which featured Uncle Baldur as the villain…

Ah. The shiny shiny snow beckons. Maybe I should take a little walk around the top of the mountain.

Cake Frenzy in the Birthday Week

Originally uploaded by mgharris

It’s a week of birthdays in my brother’s family. Michael, his wife and twin children all have birthdays in the last week of August.
And me too!
It’s been a week of cake. If you read this blog you’ll know how fond I am of me cake.
I type this on my BlackBerry with delicious red nails, fresh from a birthday manicure. One gift was a recipe book from the Hummingbird Bakery, source of London’s finest cup cakes.
Between trampolining sessions (see above) mountain strolls, and multiple birthday celebrations I have found a few minutes to spend alone with the ms of Joshua 4. And now I think I really am ready to hand it over to someone to read.
I know I’ve said this before but this time I think I mean it…
Meanwhile we continue to tweak the jacket of Zero Moment. Sneak preview soon I promise!
With Joshua 4 handed over, ZM in its very final form, could it finally be time to turn my attention to Quite Secret New Thing…?

MG Harris

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MG and baby broOriginally uploaded by mgharris

Yes, yes, I’m fully narcissistic with all these photos of me-n-someone else but COME ON!

What cooler way to navigate the mountains of Switzerland than in a Porsche?

R kid is driving, Michael who lives in Switzerland with wife and kids.

Today we did birthday celebrations (including mine!) with cousins and all. Two of the boy cousins, Max and Cyrus, are 14, the same age as Josh Garcia in books 2 & 3. Watching them play like daredevils in the playground I wondered how they’d fare if plunged into the same kinds of perils and dangers as Josh. And decided that they’d probably do pretty well, no worse than Josh.

At 14 they’re MUCH fitter and stronger than…ooh, let’s say, for example, me. They may still be children but they’d survive jungle dangers far better than I.

I’d be a total wuss. I’ve seen the rainforest thicket into which I sent Josh. You wouldn’t get me more than 5 metres into that without severe panic…
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Swinging under the SpitzhornOriginally uploaded by mgharris

Lying here watching my daughter on the swing, my legs are actually sizzling inside my jeans.

Yes, heat! Have hardly felt it all summer long but here in the Swiss mountains, there’s plenty.

Oh it’s lovely, very Swiss with log cabins and the gentle tinkle of cow bells and the smell of warm hay.

I feel a desperate need for cheese and milk chocolate…

The manuscript is taking a break while I work on my tan and play with babies.
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My nieces and nephews are so cute it hurts. I miss them already. My brother and his wife’s twin babies are still at that adorable little baby phase where they make cute little sounds and curl up against you to burp, and stare into your eyes as you rock them to sleep.

Broodiness alert…beware of spending a week with small ultra-cute babies!

My sister’s kids are also fabulous. I hadn’t seen my 22-month old nephew since he was 4 months old. Now he’s racing around, but occasionally stops asking to ‘Cuddle’ or ‘Kiss you’. And my ten-year old niece/goddaughter listened to me read out my new opening chapter of ‘Jaguar’s Realm’, and spent quality time with my sister and me down at Charly’s Tea Room.

But I’m back now, full of useful information for fellow travelers. Such as:

1. A winter’s supply of wood for a wood-burning stove costs around £45 and takes 4 hours to carry up stairs and stack in neat little piles near the door. In my brother’s Swiss mountain village, all houses have a lovely pile of wood outside the door. It’s probably an offence to stack it wrongly. Neatness is very high on the agenda in Switzerland.

2. Charly’s Tea Room will make any cake you like to order for a reasonable price and deliver it. After scouring the bakeries my sister-in-law was about to resort to baking her babies’ christening cake herself, until her older sister told her this useful bit of information. The chef at Charly’s loves to make imaginative cakes. He did wonders with a request for lemon sponge and white glaze icing. He’s quite some pastry chef, his mille-feuille is to die for.

3. The older version of the Catholic Rite of Baptism includes a mini exorcism, just in case the Devil’s already starting to get ideas…A few grains of salt in the mouth of the babes and a few exorcising prayers (which are best said in Latin) go a very long way with innocents. Fr. Julian of the London Oratory flew out to perform the ceremony and explained all the way through a very full-on christening service. My nephew and niece were good and baptised!

4. You can leave Gstaad at 3pm and take a train, plane and then bus to Oxford without waiting more than a few minutes for anything, except for the long airport check-in.

5. Even though the official ski season starts in December, an early dump of snow on the mountains will prompt the efficient Swiss to start preparing pistes and running the ski lifts. My brother and sister-in-law managed to get some skiing in on the Wispile, before the early gift of snow melted away.

6. You should eat a mille-feuille (vanilla slice) by first knocking it over and then tackling it side on, using the tines of the fork to snap the delicate layers of crunchy pastry, mixing in enough creme patissiere and jam to make each mouthful a little slice of heaven. If you don’t have jam on your mille feuille it is substandard; you have been ripped off.

7. Skiing is for people with strong legs. I learned that one a few years ago. Don’t ski unless you are fit and strong!

See, this is the kind of thing you won’t hear from Taki – a famous resident of Gstaad – in his Spectator column. With him it’s all about the Eagle Club and the Palace Hotel…

Well blog readers, all five of you, I’m back. Two weeks of driving across Europe close to the Swiss/Italian border in the canton of Ticino, where it’s all Swiss, but Italian style.

For example – they speak Italian but serve fresh Swiss muesli for breakfast. For example, where you can hire a motorboat without a licence and drive across the lake but the minute you moor it, a taxi-boat driver comes beetling across the lake, brow all furrowed and tells you off for going too near the rocks which might damage the engine. Yeah, we noticed that too…were taking care and everything… For example, where you get Swiss efficiency but instead of cheese fondue and raclette they serve yummy Italian food with pasta al dente and everything. See how it works?

The publishers of ‘The Joshua Files’ kindly sent out a couple of bound proofs of the book for me to peruse. Here I am holding my first copy of ‘Invisible City’. Bit of a thrill, actually. I was so excited at breakfast that I forgot to eat and the waiters were clucking at me, trying to get me to hurry up and finish that croissant and just go, already…

An Olympic standard beach volleyball player, poor girl, she’d broken her wrist. Not skiing, either, but falling off a bar stool or something.

So, out of all the Mexicans in the valley, we ended up in adjacent hospital beds. Klutzes or what?

We started to chat. The young woman’s mind was, not surprisingly, turning to thoughts of a post-volleyball career. I asked her what she’d studied and where. Personnel administration, at the UNAM. Well then, I offered, maybe you’ve read my grandfather’s book. He’s Agustin Reyes Ponce.

And that was the strangest part of all. That two crumbly-boned Mexicans should meet at the base of a wintry ski slope, I buy. That one should be in awe of the other for being an Olympic athlete…okay. That the other should be silenced in respectful memory of a deceased guru of the Mexican business schools, was taking it all too far.

How big is this world, anyway?

Me, I thought about people I’d visited in hospital; my mother, father and my grandmother, and Jane, and how they were all dead now.

I thought about how physical pain diminishes a human being. I thought about all the terrible suffering in the world and how little I was having to deal with, by comparison with hundreds of thousands of people in the world, especially the tsunami victims. I thought about the horrors of life before pain killers, and how ‘pain relief’ doesn’t actually mean that they get rid of the pain, just that they reduce it enough so that you stop screaming, or don’t pass out.

None of this came as news to me, by the way; but the acute experience of sharing, even to some small extent, what had happened to my mother, to Jane and to other people whose bodies have been broken, did give me some insight, just for a few days, and it was pitiful. I don’t mind admitting that I cried hot salty tears for many of the nights (only when the pain levels came down though, because real pain makes you selfish; you can’t think of anything else and you don’t care, not unless you are a saint).

I realised that the crying was a useful was to release tension, from which I suffered quite a bit, being immobilised on my back with my leg up on a support. Sometimes I even chose to listen to something that would turn on the tap. My sister-in-law Rachel lent me her iPod, complete with her own musical selection.

So here are my top tunes for inducing the night-time boo-hoos.

1. Angels (Robbie Williams)

2. Feel (Robbie Williams) Damn, that boy writes some good sentimental songs. And he met my mother. Once, when she was with the Manchester Olympic Committee, she met all the lads from Take That.

3. English Suite No2 (JS Bach) Just because it’s so beautiful; it seems you appreciate beauty more when suffering.

4. Anyone Who Has A Heart (Dionne Warwick, by Bacharach) Oh who knows why this one set me off. I was missing my baby, Lilia.

And to cheer you up:

1. Cosmic Girl (Jamiroquai) I was fair dancing in my bed.

2. Voi che sapete (Marriage of Figaro, Mozart) Well, anything from this opera cheered me up.

3. Any song by Celia Cruz. La Reina de la Salsa! If I could have had salsa to listen to from the beginning I would probably have healed faster! Thank goodness for my conga drums. Playing them is almost as good as dancing.

On Dec 28th, I decided to switch from my snowboarding lessons – where progress was slow and bruising, to skiing, which I do poorly but at least can stay upright for more than ten minutes at a time.

I agreed, with Tom, a cousin of Michael’s wife, to share an instructor, Rolf. We all departed for the Eggli mountain and Rolf and I hit the chair lift with enthusiasm. Well, me with some trepidation, because it can be tricky to get off those when you are as clueless a skier as I, but somehow I made it off the machine and remained upright. I mean, it’s been 4 years since I last skied and 15 years since I did a chair lift; it wasn’t bad going!

Rolf and I skied down the top part of the mountain a couple of times and rode up on the T bar. The T bar was easy, but I had the feeling that Rolf was making this so. The third time down the mountain, Rolf looked at the T bar, shrugged and said “This time, let’s go down the mountain”.

One of those flashes of insight, which I have stupidly trained myself to ignore (because of all that scientific training, the requirement for evidence and such rot), told me that I should NOT go down the mountain. I was tiring; I could feel that I wasn’t leaning forward enough in my boots, my toes weren’t pointing quite enough, the skis didn’t feel like extensions of my feet; in summary, I still felt as though I were strapped into two slidey bits of plastic on a slippy, slidey mountain.

But the silly, rational part overrode that insight with sensible thoughts like “If the instructor thinks you are doing okay then it will be fine. And then you can use the chair lift to get back. And you’ll feel great when you get down there!”

We made a left turn down a narrower part of the piste, where I had to turn three times in quick succession – and was just beginning to feel comfortable, when the Rolf urged me to join him further down. At the last minute, I lost my nerve; he was on a narrow section, in front of a tree and I wasn’t sure I could stop in time. So I swerved towards the apparent safety of the fresh powder at the side of the piste.

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

As I snow-plowed into the powder, my right ski connected with something very unpowdery, and stopped abrubtly. The left ski slid neatly beneath that locked right ski and when the boot connected, I fell forward with the force…and didn’t come out of the bindings, but instead felt my leg break against the top of the boot.

Well, panic, panic, screams for help, the instructor came over and held me as I struggled to stay conscious, waiting for the rescue sled.It was a long and painful 25 minutes. I wondered vaguely what the next hours and days would hold in store. My worst case scenario was a minor break, a plaster cast and back to the ranch in time for tea.

But no. The face of the radiologist (at Spital Saanen) fell when she saw the break and she said, abruptly; “It’s broken and for sure we have to operate”.Well, the rest was 48 hours of pure pain, pain, pethidine shots, an untimely fever, a quite wonderful operation under epidural, during which I opted for Mozart and sedation, quite a lovely hour by comparison with the rest.

Then 48 hours with the epidural still in place to spare me the horrors of post-operative agony, then the return of the pain and more lovely pethidine. Once the fever and intestinal effects of that fever had cleared my system, I felt surprisingly strong and was able, with crutches, to hobble to the bathroom and give myself a shower and change of hospital gown.

So they let me go. All in all, as wretched it is to be in hospital and in pain, a ski injury isn’t much to complain about. It’s partly your own fault and you aren’t actually sick.I thought a lot about Jane, and Monica (whose leg was chomped by bacteria within an inch of her life), and I couldn’t feel sorry for myself. But I did feel sorry for poor David and my kids. Anyway, it’s home to bed and three months recuperation for me. What will I do with myself?