Category Archives: English Working Class Life

The Grapes of Sloth

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The sun came out and so did my lizard. For what seems like weeks there had been no sign of him/her. He lives either in the drainpipe or in the cracks of the stone wall. What I like about lizards is their apparent perfection. Dogs, cats, humans, foxes and most other things have some kinda limp, crooked ear, attention deficit or bad hair issues. Lizards are perfect as far as I can see. I only saw him because the neighbourhood Patio Posse came round to tell me about South facing walls and the NEED to plant south facing growing things. “OK – I’ll have one of those grape bushes.” I said – hoping that  this obviously correctable mistake would appease them. “Vigne!” said the Chair. It was agreed. There will be a grape bush. Now the only reason I know anything about grape bushes is that a neighbour has one and big bunches are growing over onto my roof (Pinching some would be so much easier than growing them) I’m watching their progress..I don’t suppose I could make any wine with it do you? When I was a kid my dad used to go to the home-brew shop in Tooting and buy tins of grape juice. This was just about as his car welding/rabbit breeding phase came to an end. We had cupboards full of “Bordeaux” and “Burgundy” which he made on top of the fridge. He started listening to records like “Beethoven’s Greatest hits”. He assured us all that wine improved the mind. My mother was glad when he went back to beer. There is only so much improvement that a family can take.


Let me just for a moment return to the actual purpose of this blog- Romantic fiction. I’ve nothing against real life but where can you get a sexy romantic handsome intelligent, poetic, muscled super lover? OK – I know we all have one but it’s nice to have a slightly different one isn’t it? (Oh by the way – Gilles does not read the blog!). However, I’ve been doing market research. Well actually Rosina’s been doing it.  “Could I do anything involving lesbian werewolves?” She asked on the phone. “What about supernatural bisexual sex therapists?” I retorted. “WOW – Emma – you just gotta do that – WOW, that’s ahead of the market honey!” Food for thought isn’t it. How about supernatural perfectly formed alien sex lizards?”


Talking of wolves – they’re back in France near the German border. Wolf huggers and shepherds are readying for battle. Sheep and little rouge riding hoods are somewhere in the middle. Now, could there be a supernatural angle? Am I the next Dan Brown? Something would be brown if a pack of ’em came at me!….Now how’s that for modern romance style!”




Emma thinx: Know nothing. Advice loves a vacuum.

Sound Investment

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Most days I hear sounds of other lives but today is Sunday. When I was a kid in the UK my mother was a bit concerned if we made a noise on the Lord’s day – not that she was religious. In St.Savinien folk work hard. Yesterday there was a sound of a generator making power for a guy rebuilding a nearby ruin. There was a radio, somebody singing, car horns doing that marriage cacophony so popular in France and of course the sound of voices talking. Today, even the dogs are silent. How do they do that? If you could develop Sunday France Canine Silence into a product you’d be on a winner. Gilles decided to make some progress with the patio and I went out to help. In the silence it seemed almost sinful to chisel at pavé knowing that the noise would probably travel to Bordeaux. In the end we gave up and watched the last stage of the Tour de France…..won of course by a BRIT. I didn’t say anything, or leap about or offer any magnanimous smugness. I might do later though.



Sunday being so special creates certain niche opportunities. Americans and Brits holidaying in France will know that shops still close for anything up to 3 hours in the middle of the day. However, the Intermarché at St. Savinien opens on Sunday morning. Now, South London Asdaholics and the like would just think this was normal. These great cathedrals of consumerism open 24 hours to keep the faithful junkies supplied. This in itself becomes addictive. It’s like having Wikipedia or a million Euros in the bank. If you need it – you can have it now. All around the region you see reassuring posters telling you that Intermarché is open on Sunday morning. Don’t worry citizens – YOU ARE CONNECTED. It is so popular that you have to fight for a trolley. Oh – the attached bakery is brill and les pains don’t go stale until the next day.


During the Tour de F, I heard a French commentator say that there were ten thousand camping cars in, on and around the Col du Galibier – a famous climb. As you travel South from the Channel ports you see several massive dealerships selling motorised caravans. You know, I’ve never been sure whether their popularity is because the French are paying homage to the Roma Gypsies or to snails. Probably both.


Emma thinx: A slug is just a homeless snail. Be kind.


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Wet Blanquette

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Too late – what a horrible term it is. To me it conjures up all those official gate closings and back end of bus disappearings that surely punctuate everyone’s life. Here in Charente Maritime it means drought withered sunflowers too far gone to benefit from eventual rain. There is hope that the maize crop can still plump up and perhaps save an extra 10 percent of the expected loss. For certain the rain is not too late to send hordes of campers back home. Camp sites are reporting more departures than arrivals, ice creams and bikinis remain unsold.  When I was a happy camper I used to think that rain was an essential part of the holiday. My kids have endless memories of pebble beach picnics wrapped in cagoules and penned in by windbreaks. Wasn’t it wonderful to gaze out on an angry grey sea as flurries of rain swirled in the storm. Then we would all return to our half destroyed tent, slip into damp bedding supported by deflated air-beds. Ahead of us lay a fabulous meal of Cornish pasties with instant mashed potato and a torch lit night of holding down the tent. Go home? Dear oh dear – no wonder we won at Trafalgar.


Poor Gilles took a few days off to construct my patio. Poor lad has to sit indoors watching the Tour de France. Genetically they are just not used to day after day of rain. A French guy who knows I’m English, called out to me this morning – “Hey – this is your weather!” as if I were some kind of meteorological witch. Good job I haven’t got a cat. 

OK, I know I shouldn’t keep going on about the Tour de France. However, sport does provide us with so many metaphors and simply demonstrations of truths. Thomas Voeckler is still leading the race. I have just been downstairs to see why Gilles was apparently beside himself with excitement. Now, just to be in the Tour means you are in an elite of the elite. But if you think about all the genetic chances, the number of sperm, the chances of your progenitors meeting at all and the vagaries of the female cycle YOUR CHANCE of being born at all puts you in an elite of the nearly impossible. So, Thomas Voeckler put on the yellow jersey and became it and all that it means. All over the world so many disadvantaged and lost folk under achieve and we just accept it. What would they do in the yellow jersey – whatever race they were in?

Emma thinx: If you have the power- award a yellow jersey. You do have the power.

A Strife on the Ocean Wave

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Home – yes home and re-toothed. Another fabulous Breakfast at Brittany’s aboard Le Normandie. The restaurant staff are just a delight of friendliness and efficiency. The trip began badly with hundreds of kids running wild on the ferry. Seemingly several coach loads of them were on their way to see historic battlefields in Normandy in order to civilise and pacify them. Let’s hope it works. Looks like a mountain to climb. At least their keepers didn’t seem bothered if I can judge by their absence. A wonderfully politically incorrect broadcast was pushed out by the ship’s staff. 

“Children who are travelling in groups. Go now to your cabins and stay there until you come out for breakfast!” A further broadcast asked the would be pacifist historians to “Respect other passengers.”
It’d been centuries since anyone in England spoke thus to brats. Several of them will live their lives as emotional cripples as their creative externalisation of personality expressed in charging downstairs knocking others aside was thwarted.

As I left the UK the phone hacking frenzy appeared to be spreading to the USA. A comforting note was that British politicians have found someone to blame at last. It is of course the police. Why didn’t the Metropolitan Police take all their officers away from suicide bombers and drug cartels and investigate the newspapers, the editors of which dined as courted mates with the prime minster? That’s one tough question. And who should answer it?

Regular readers- (by the way I love you all) must have begun to think that I am obsessed with baguettes. Once I had offloaded my father’s old desk and the tandem bicycle I went to the local Intermarché. I bought une baguette at the cost of 50 cents and gave the Monsieur a one Euro coin. Now, at the time a family of shoppers had arrived with a new baby and there was a kiss-kiss-hand-shaking  fest being held over the counter. Le Monsieur gave me change of 50 cents AND my original one Euro which he kept in his hand and not put in the till. I pointed out his kind error.
“You gave me 2 Euros!” He informed me with a flat dismissive finality.
I  hackled and argued back. “Non- You gave me too much change – I did not have any 2 Euro coins.”
A shrug of  surly wounded pride accompanied the coin as it was tossed into the till.  I had hurt him. I felt ashamed.


Emma thinx:  Being right is just as likely to land you in the wrong

Kangaroo Caught

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Oh dear – there’s trouble at St Rupert’s College. I’ve just seen the Head Boy on the BBC. A wicked colonial student hid in the dorm and saw matron in bed with one of the local police constables. Then he conspired with the editor of the college magazine (a younger but related colonial), and blabbed the story in the campus organ “The Bare Rupert”. Now, much of this will make no sense to my American readers. Watching from France, British politics seems even more upper class. The story is that the most famous British tabloid newspaper “The News of the World” is to shut down almost immediately. Journalists have been hacking phones and paying police for juicy stories. Outrage and disgust sputter from every righteous quarter as the scandal rocks …..well, actually what does it rock? This is a wicked and grubby old world and the people who lead it should be the least surprised. For every spotlight triumph, there is a grim backstage, for every tame tiger there is a cage and whip. Deep beneath it all there is an unspoken issue. Murdoch (who owns the newspaper and a lot of outer space) is a damn Australian. I think they’re gonna have to ban him from the tuck shop. Oh huff puff – just be grateful that we’ve solved world poverty, war and disease otherwise we wouldn’t have the time for this stuff. We bred and fed a bright generation of self seeking shallow thrustoids to tear at one another in pursuit of gain at any moral cost. They did all we expected of them.


All this leads me to starting where I meant to start. Books about romantic novelists who fall in love with super hunks while researching a book where a romantic novelist …..blah blah, do exist. As yet I haven’t written any. When the media becomes the news it has much the same effect on me. The story is a serious one, but it just should not be a surprise to anybody. Let me fill you guys in a little. My book “Knockout” has a police theme. OK – it’s a romance but all the police politics, cynicism and attitudes are authentic. I know this because after my first marriage, I took up with a Scotland Yard cop, who introduced me to Wagner and many aspects of horns and helmets. What I learned was that much of what we see of gloss and celeb glitzywitzy is contrived. I also learned that outside the middle class comfort zone there are many worlds of despair and survival. That filthy guy drunk in the littered doorway has a story but it’s probably too dangerous to ask for it.


Oh – let me be quite honest about the vile, degrading, gutter dredging, over-sexed “News of the World” which is about to die. It was a fantastic paper and provided me with my earliest tingles of sexual pleasure and awareness with its utter filth and and disgusting titivation. I was appalled over and over again every single Sunday.


Emma thinx: Be outraged – it’s the in rage.


Knockout! Available at Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Amazon.com/australia

Sharp Practice

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“Try anything in life once except incest and folk dancing.” These words are attributed to none other than one of my heroes – Oscar Wilde. I suspect that a survey of British folk would reveal the view that folk dancing equated to Morris Dancing. A further survey might reveal a certain element of sniggering and derision as if Morris dancing was a form of train-spotting on acid.  Please let me assure any train spotting dancers that this is not my own view. (I was most relieved last week to stop the car near at a railway crossing and chance upon a French train spotter complete with notebook and camera). Returning to the dancing, the French have a completely different view. It is neither eccentric, comic nor quaint. It is the living manifestation of a shared tradition which is rooted in the soil of the soul. Readers will have noted my comments on the relative carelessness with which buildings and bones are treated. This is because France is not a museum. It is a land of living tradition and pride. Old stuff may fall down – this is the nature of time – but love of community and patrimoine is constantly renewed and handed on. France is a country of French people. Any one can enter but it’s not a theme park. The dancers are not entertainers, they are professeurs of pride.


When I first arrived I used to study some odd looking knives in the Intermarché. I thought it was a very blunt peeling knife. Soon enough Gilles explained to me that it was an oyster knife. OK, my experience of shell fish was the whelk and cockle stall at Southend and the best thing about these shell fish was that they didn’t have shells. Next time at the shop I bought knives and 6 oysters. Once I had stopped the bleeding, the oysters were ok. You have been warned. Hold the mollusc in a towel or chain mail gauntlet. I’m told that a scarred palm is a rite of passage.


Emma thinx: If the fall didn’t kill you be proud of your reflexes.

Bac on me bike

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If there’s one big thing I miss over here it is BBC Radio 4. Actually there is just nothing like it in the world. OK – it’s often a bit up itself but the breadth and quality of the programming is stunning. If there’s a cause that would get me to the barricades it would be to keep the BBC free. Media moguls must size it up and politicos may think of sizing it down. What a commercial market it would be for a few city chums. Whenever I get the chance I catch an afternoon play, the PM programme or the late night book on the internet and no one tries to sell me incontinence clothing or a Volvo.


My local radio station is France Bleu La Rochelle. Local radio was all we had before everyone in the world was an online author. Old wiseacres phone in with tales of trouble with turnips in France just as they do in the UK. Local radio reveals just how similar folk are. Today they are talking about the Baccalaureate  – the French equivalent of A levels. The day before the exam on Tuesday, one of the questions on the maths paper was published on an internet site for what the French call ados (teens). Now- why didn’t I get that kind of opportunity at school? Ironically, the maths required to recalculate the re-marking seem to be defeating everyone. According to some sources, the leaked question was an easier one just to get students into the rhythm of the algorithm, so you can’t simply divide up the marks using the unleaked questions. OK – I’m chewing my pencil….


And here is something astonishing. The French racing cyclist Jeannie Longo has just won her 57th National title. Well, so what? Just that’s she’s 52 years old, has degrees in Maths and an MBA and I dare say she makes her own bikes. As I wobble my gasping mentally challenged way to Intermarché on my old bone shaker at about 10kph she will be my inspiration.

Connection thymed out.

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Emotional and intellectual connection to the soil is far closer to the surface here in France. The term “Terroir” with regard to wine reflects  a deep affection for the very life giving particles which mother the roots of the vines. It is almost like the cow in Hinduism – not sacred but looked up to as a giver of life. It is as if the soil has personality and this concept extends to stones and the shape of the land itself. Deep down I believe this is what the francophile Anglais detect here – a sense of connection and belonging to a past and also a future. This is not a dressed up arty farty middle class eco connection. (I had my own shameful phase of attacking folk with rainbow righteousness).  It is a matter of fact, accepted and simply lived.


In my childhood the soil was known as dirt and represented an area where family males propped up Herbies for some mechanical repairs. However, these days I find myself afflicted with a condition known as “La main verte”, which the English call “green fingers.” Now, to me gardening is a completely counter-intuitive concept. When you are young you have time ahead to plant saplings and hope to see trees. Yet, it is only when you get old and cannot hope to achieve much that one starts to surf the green wave. Having pondered all this and the influence of subjective ideas, I have come to the view that one of the principal differences between social groups is the perception of time. Young folk with advantaged and happy lives with encouraging families see time as shorter and therefore academic success etc will seed a flowering life that is within grasp.  Kids who are told they are crap and live miserable lives expecting to be kicked up the ass by superiors see time as long and any better future just too far away to be reached. Therefore as you age and a year seems like a month, it is never long to wait for Spring, even on the 1st of June.

Comes in bowls

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OK – I’ve been writing today and I’ve been allowed to record some audio poems. Once free, I emerged into the stunning gentle beauty of the Test Valley. If you’ve not been here, put it on your priority list with Venice, Paris and Charentes. Yes – it is a gentle beauty, self confident, thatched and patched with fields of green and gold, called by crows, bumble hummed with bees, lifted by larks, softened by silence.  This evening a team play cricket on a village green, an impossible profusion of roses slam dunk cottage doors with exclamation marks of belligerent tenderness. These hammer blows of beauty kiss as I imagine an angel would kiss a lamb. OK that’s double purple flame grilled whopper OTT – but that’s want I want to say to you about the power of this loveliness. Rejoice in this life. Kiss your lover as if their lips were love itself. Don’t let me be the only sad romantic, tearful as an iris blooms and a duck planes in to land on mirrored water.


Cricket – I had to mention it. My first memories of cricket were as a girl when my father and brothers listened to it on the radio. It was always the same commentary “Higginbottom, polishes the ball on his testicles, comes in from the gas works end, bowls around the wicket to Homerton-Smythe who bat and pads it away to silly mid off. A ripple of applause stirs pigeons on the boundary as the scoreboard records another maiden had over.”


Never can I serve soup or dessert without saying “comes in – bowls.” Oh dear, I’m getting a bit dotty and potty. I need my man!!!!

Certified organic

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Walking on the banks of le Charenton I chanced to see a very large but cute beast in the water. It looked like a cross between a scottie dog and a rat. Excitedly I told my neighbour. She shrugged and replied “Ragondin – you can eat them”. Seemingly there are thousands of escaped coypu in streams and ditches that are regarded as vermin – but edible. Life has two separate forms here in France. The first form is edible life. The second form is inedible life and comprises of human beings and outside of revolutions and long strikes, their pets. Yes – everything else is edible including all moving parts, bones, organs and plumbing. It’s just the same in the UK but it’s shaped up, covered in yummycrum and sold as swizzle twizzle escalopes. Ragondin makes a delicious terrine or pate I was told – mmmmm.


Tomorrow I’m gonna fly to the UK from La Rochelle. Gilles will be left to his own devices and I know just what he’ll do. He’s gonna go native. I’ve seen him eyeing up the rabbits chez le boucher. The minute I’m gone he’ll be down there. By dinner time the pineau will be out and les garcons will be round to re-find their roots in the soil. Pineau? well that’s another tale from Charentes. It’s a kinda liqueur and it’s definitely kinda nice. When I was a kid in London my father had a scheme to breed meat rabbits. We ended up with over 30 pets and a desert garden. No one ever ate one. He died poor.


Still reading Fantasy Lover. Emma x