Tag: friends

Categories
cuba salsa

Dancing at Carnival de Cuba 2008

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I finished editing the clips I filmed of the son band playing and people dancing at Carnival de Cuba last Saturday in sunny London. Featuring my friends Becs (in white with turquoise top), Deborah (red cardy, dancing with me), Nicola (white top and trousers, flowing blue-and-white overshirt) and Mel (halter-neck, brown-and white polka-dot dress), all of whom I’ve previously blogged.

Seems implausibly cold now…an artic breeze in blowing through my window at exactly the right angle to torment my wrist, which already throbs with strain from typing and the computer mouse.

I dreamt such a great idea for a story last night. I really should have written it down but as usual I thought it so vivid on waking that I wouldn’t need to. But as ever, an hour or so later and all I remember are fragments. In the dream I was shown a photo of a bunch of people who were known to have been behind the funding of a particular scientific project – a project that later had was found to have sinister connotations. The photo was an unexpected capture of all the suspicious parties together. And those faces were indeed surprising. I could identify some of them from my scientist days. One in particular was someone I hadn’t liked at all. In the dream, I had that delicious thrill of Aha!….followed by hmmmmm…

I’ve forgotten all the details, except the faces of the scientists that I recognised.

That’s right guys. I know who you are. I’ve seen ya!

Ah well, back to the manuscript.

Categories
writing zero moment

Jam (and writing, but mostly jam)

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I woke up this morning thinking that I really wanted some homemade apple-and-raspberry pie, a sure indication that pie season has begun. However, a simple idea of pie became a trip to the pick-your-own followed by a big jam-making session. It’s been ages since I made jam, and never from your fancy farm fruits like strawberries and raspberries. Before it’s always been jam from the wild blackberries that grow on a mass of brambles on Sunnymead meadow. But last week a friend from Manchester dropped by with a pot of homemade strawberry jam from his own family’s trip to the PYO. It was so delicious – and nearly all gone by now.

So now I have 5 jars of strawberry jam, 2 pots of raspberry and since I had 500g of jam sugar left over, thought I might thaw the left-over blackberry pulp and jam that too.

That’s a year’s supply of jam, in one evening. More, to be honest. We’re not big jam eaters. Now I have to make scones to go with that jam. Jeez. I’m going to wind up a blimp.

This has to be my most boring blog post ever…apologies. I WAS going to write some thoughts about how important it is to develop a writing method and how listening to a Radio 4 programme this morning about Method acting made me realise that there might well be some parallels with writing. Then I remembered that my agent has firmly instructed me Never To Tell Anyone How I Write. Not for fear of being copied – for goodness sake! But for fear of casting light on some mysterious process, exposing it for it’s quotidian normalcy.

A writer and actor I greatly admire, Victoria Wood, recently said – I think on Desert Island Discs – that she learned how to write jokes. And that she wouldn’t tell her method – for the same reason.

Anyway. I hope readers have as much fun reading Joshua book 3 as I’m having writing it. Yesterday I wrote the first scene of High Drama, which occurs around 55 pages into the book. Very exciting, set in the giant sand dunes of Genipabu, Brazil… (well I found it exciting to write. Only time will tell if it actually makes for an exciting read…years in fact! March 2010…?)

Categories
brazil

One Last Caipirinha

One Last CaipirinhaOriginally uploaded by mgharrisWell it’s come to this…As Ali and I down one last caipirinha we contemplate what a terrific place North Eastern Brazil is for a holiday. None of the insane commercialism and sheer dedication to tourism that you find in Mexico’s premier resorts, but a warm and well-organised welcome in all the hotels…big and fancy or titchy and family-run.

Lots of great activities to do; but the rough-and-ready type that make use of natural beauty without bending it to the will of the tourism magnates. So it’s sand-dune buggy rides, zipwire into a lake, snorkeling off a platform into a coral reef, all the tasty seafood you can eat washed down with any lime-based cocktail you like; caipirinha (cachaca), caipiroska (vodka), caipirissima (rum).

Ooh…there was an aqua theme park…is it the thin end of the wedge?

I’ll miss the coconut, cashew and mango trees, the bareback horse-riders and the cheerful buguieros (buggy drivers).

And I’ll miss the limey afterburn of endless caipirinhas…
Emailed from my BlackBerry®

 

Categories
travel zero moment

Tiny Ali and MG

Tiny Ali with MG in Natal
Everybody takes their own version of this picture at the sand dunes near Natal.

What a day! We hired a couple of heavy-duty dune buggies and expert drivers, took a ride up north of Natal where we:

  • rode giant sand dunes like we were in a big snow powder basin in the Rockies (no safety belts or anything)
  • stopped to swim at a fresh-water lagoon filled with teeny little fishes, and drank caipirinhas
  • sat in a creek in the middle of a cashew nut tree wood, drinking cocktails of pineapple and strawberry juice with vodka, eating freshly barbequed shrimp and crayfish (one of our six-year old friends, however, is a natural vegetarian and wept bitterly as we tucked into the crustaceans with I’m sorry to say, as little pity as the Carpenter showed for the oysters they gobbled in “The Walrus and The Carpenter”. We tried to comfort her…)
  • rode a zipwire down a high sand dune, straight into another lagoon

No seat belts, no safety nazis, no washing hands before lunch at the creek, cheerful Brazilians everywhere.

 This is a great country.

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.