Tag: family

Categories
appearances cuba salsa

Aching for salsa…Edinburgh bound…and maybe Oz too?

I’ve been getting ready for the Edinburgh Book Festival, much excitement, yay!

My event is on Wed 21st – sold out, I’m surprised and impressed to see. It’s a heck of a marketing machine, the Edinburgh Festival. Most of the Schools Events are sold out.

I have been getting my multimedia stuff up to scratch, cutting DVDs of my videos and rejigging my Powerpoint slideshow with one new slide – all about 2012. Apart from that, I have now booked my schedule solid between seeing friends who are visiting the Festival and hanging out at parties and lunches with my lovely publishers.

And I’m flying there! I will feel rather fabulous…

Meanwhile my sister has made us all very proud by giving birth to a bouncy boy, Benedict. I’m seriously thinking of going to his christening, all the way in Australia. Since we all live so many squillions of miles away from each other, my brother and sisters, these sorts of events are starting to be the kinds of excuses we can use to justify the increasingly terrifying expense of meeting up.

But maybe Scholastic Australia would like me to do some book events and schools visits….

That makes it much more justifiable, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile despite some very good news (apart from a new nephew) – which I’ll share in the next few weeks – I’m feeling rather melancholic. It’s been far too long since I went dancing – not since the Oscar D’Leon concert on July 12th. I think the doctor may order a trip to Mambocity soon. Damn salsa for being so addictive! I’m good and hooked.

Listened to BBC Radio 4 last night; Grevel Lindop reading from his book Travels On the Dance Floor – also on listen again. For a UK-based salsera like me his experiences are very familiar. It made me think nostalgically of Cuba. Especially when he played a song which played often when we were in Cuba. Whenever I hear it I feel a kind of desperate, romantic ache for Havana.

Well I listened to the lyrics, searched for the first line on Google and found this video: it’s the late guajiro Polo Montanez singing “Un Monton de Estrellas“.

Very romantic song. And turns out he’s dead – in a traffic accident in 2002, when he was 47. *sob*

I NEED TO DANCE TO THIS SONG SOON OR I WILL BURST!

Categories
brazil

Sunset and Hormones at Sao Miguel de Gostoso

Sunset Sao Miguel de GostosoOriginally uploaded by mgharris
Out for the afternoon stroll through the heady urban delights of Sao Miguel de Gostoso in Rio Grande do Norte state, Brazil, we happened across this fabulous sunset.The trip through town – a single street lined with colourful bungalows and coconut trees – was livened up considerably for our daughter by the sight of cute young Brazilian guys whose heads turned to check her out.

“I love it when guys check me out,” she murmured to me as she and I walked slowly down the avenue. Meanwhile I nervously adjusted my sarong in case their gazes accidentally strayed. “Look at that one,” she laughed aloud, identifying one of the boys with a flick of her finger. “He’s actually stretching and flexing his muscles in front of me! He likes me! OMG he’s so hot… When we walk back I’m going to give him a Look,” she said. And then set about considering which Look from her repertoire to deploy.

“How do you know this stuff?” I said, amazed. “I didn’t know any of this when I was fifteen.” She replied, deadpan, “Instinct. And I’m just a lot sexier than you.”

Actually my mother could have taught my daughter a thing or twenty about how to mix sex appeal with (apparently irresistable) vulnerability. But sadly she passed away before my daughter was born. So my daughter has to resort to discussing such matters with her mother-the-geek.

I sneakily took a photo of the boy she likes. He was wearing a blue sleeveless shirt that showed off a fairly beefcakey physique. He’s around 18 and has a dimple in his right cheek, which made her swoon. We have decided to refer to him as Blue Boy.

Categories
raves

Raving Stage Mom

Who me?

Argghhh, but I just can’t help myself, our daughter was just so darn GREAT in her Stagecoach performance of “We Will Rock You”!

Now’s the time to confess that in my time I have taken my daughter along to an audition for ‘Stars in Their Eyes’ (and listened from behind the door with tears in my eyes to my little 10-year old belting ut the Shoop-shoop song…), driven her back and forth from theatres to be in the chorus for the Bill Kenwright productions of ‘Joseph’, dabbed a hanky to my eyes watching her in the Ellen Kent production of ‘Turandot’.

I even started writing in hope that maybe I could make enough extra cash to send her to an independent stage school…but now she doesn’t want to go.

So it was with immense pride that we watched her finally blowing an audience away with the talent we’d seen at home but never seemed to quite find the right role. As Scaramouche she sang “Somebody to Love”, “I Want To Break Free”, “Under Pressure” and “Who Wants to Live Forever” (the last two as duets). And she totally ROCKED. A crowd of twenty friends from school showed up to support her, and practically carried her out of the theatre…!

We weren’t allowed to go to the Fan Club After Party, of course. We are Old and Sad and must make a Graceful Exit after the appropriately cordial congratulations.

Here’s a photo of our daughter as ‘Scaramouche’ with her co-star – ‘Galileo Figaro’. No video sadly, no photos or recording was allowed.

Plus – another way in which the 15-year old daughter has already surpassed her old mum; her blog has attracted several readers who have no connection to her except the blog (as serafina67 crows in ‘Big Woo’, Susie Day’s LOLarious forthcoming novel about a teen blogger – “I have INTERNET friends!”)

I’m not allowed to disclose the blog address though. It’s anonymous…and a bit scandalous. She’s no Peaches Geldof, still goes to church but…it’s a close thing.

Categories
raves

The Oxford Stargate

I asked my husband David to swing by Cowley and take a photo of a monument that we call the ‘Oxford Stargate’ on his BlackBerry.

But lookie what he made me instead!!!

Is that not awesooooome? Ooh, I want to go to M35-117…

Also my Brazilian visa arrived today. It is a proper full-page visa valid for 5 years. Yay!

Categories
raves switzerland

Things I Learned in Switzerland


Tree opposite my brother’s Swiss chalet.

I’m back. It was an awesome week in which I got to swap being a mother/wife for being sister/aunt.

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…