my writing

Category: Culture

  • A Walk across, Paris along the Meridian : 4

    I walk down towards Pigalle. Cheap, grim hotels. Graffiti, ‘CHA CHA I HEART YOU’, many times, obsessively, I remember someone we knew in London, fixated on a call girl associated with a politician, fired shots through her door, blew up a scandal. Walking in front of me an oriental woman in black wide-brimmed hat, leopardskin…

  • A Walk across Paris, along the Meridian : 3

    The Blut-Fin (location of the Mire du Nord, first siting post for Picard’s measuring of the meridian across France, to begin the first accurate survey of Louis XIV’s realm) was one of thirty Montmartre windmills in 1700, milling grains, pepper, spices, locally-quarried gypsum for plaster and porcelain, crushing grapes. By 1830s most had gone, as…

  • A walk across Paris, along the Meridian 2

    I am standing on the Paris Meridian. (A meridian is an imaginary line connecting the north and south poles of a sphere.) The Paris Meridian was decided upon 6.6km (20,317 pieds de roi, in those days) south of here, on Midsummer Day, 1667, when members of the Academy of Sciences gathered to outline on the…

  • A Walk across Paris, along the Meridian: 1

    St-Ouen. Outside le Périph. A large silver ball has landed on a small traffic island. The sun blazes at its centre. Mirrors reflect; a curved mirror bends. And eventually deflects. Passing cars appear, swell, are gone, into St-Ouen. “St-Ouen Bienvenue.” Under Napoleon III, I see a marshal of France on horseback, sabre raised. Between the…

  • Vincent, Anselm and I

    In 1963 school student Anselm Kiefer received a grant to travel ‘In the footsteps of Van Gogh’, through the Netherlands, Belgium, Auvers and Paris, to Arles. With remarkable self-confidence the eighteen-year-old left his village near the Rhine for the first time, hitchhiked across countries occupied by Germany less than twenty years before, sleeping in barns…

  • Diggers & Dreamers

    Rural Languedoc. The South of France. Summer 1976. “There is another world, but it is in this one” – and the characters in this novel, in their different ways, mean to find it. Kris and Jane are an idealistic young couple who have bought La Balme, a run-down smallholding near Albi, city of the Cathars.…

  • A F.light Tale

    There was a time – in the past or in the future – when swans did not fly. They swam gracefully, they waddled awkwardly, but they did not fly. She was a bright and pretty cygnet, the best of the brood. How proud her parents were to watch her sport with the others, to see…

  • The Divided Wood

    “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” A ruined splendour, a white wasteland … what has happened in the great wood?When his overbearing magnate father dies, Geoffrey believes that he has inherited everything and can at last come into his own. But the old man’s will contains a…