There are worse jobs

Oh, all right, sometimes the writing life IS glamourous. A bit.

My last day in Dubrovnik started with a cappuccino at a café near the Ploče gate end of the Stradun (the main, white marble street of the old town). There, sitting in the sun, I did an hour of work on the filmscript. Then a  break, a stretch, a move into the shade... I ordered a coffee with cream, in Croatian (kafa sa slagom) and got an enthusiastic and unironic "Bravo!" from the waitress, which made me blush (and think, hmmm, the average tourist mustn't try very hard here). I did an hour's work on my Prospect column.

Then I wandered the hundred yards or so to the Gradska Kavana (the City Café), where I was due to meet the wonderful Croatian actor Niko Kovač. Everybody knows him, so the waitress led me over to him (we'd only ever talked on the phone before). Soon we were joined on the terrace by those I love, and we all drank more coffee and tea and talked of disgraceful and amusing things. Niko is recovering from throat cancer, and thus of course talked more than all of us, pressing on a valve in his throat to do so. Splendid stories of Tom Stoppard, of Peter Brooks,  of legendary performances of Chekhov in the former Yugoslavia, of doing Beckett during the war as Yugoslavia ripped apart, in a blacked out theatre in the rubble of Dubrovnik. The tales were enhanced if anything by the whispering, hissing delivery.

Then later an idyllic couple of hours drinking on the cliffs outside the city walls, at Café Buža (well, one of two such cafés... Buža just means a hole in the wall...) Down the steps to the sea with the ones I love, and a quick swim in the Adriatic... I hadn't thought to bring swimming togs, but so what.

I looked back, over turquoise water, at the towering medieval walls, nougat in the sunlight. Hard to believe that, during the most recent war, REM were in the charts... (it was the worst of times - Vanilla Ice, Color Me Badd, Michael Bolton, Bryan bloody Adams at number one forever with (Everything I Do) I Do It For You)... I  couldn't help but remember, as I swam, that in 1991 people swam here even in December, just to stay clean, because the shelling had cut off the water in the city.

There are worse jobs. There are worse lives.

Dig the Shoes

 

The really rather terrifically wonderful Susie Maguire just sent me a nice picture of me sitting down in Dubrovnik. I won't explain what the heck I am doing, or why I appear to have a tinted monocle.

A chap needs to maintain an air of mystery.

My shoes are definitely the stars of this photo. They look like they're celebrating getting their own TV series. 

Croatia 2, Germany 1

Well, if that ain't symbolic.

(For the benefit of my North American readers, Croatia, with a population of four million people, just beat Germany, population eighty two million - and the 1954, 1974, & 1990 world champions - by two goals to one in the group stage of the European Football Championship Finals.) 

Ah, the pathetic fallacy. Back when Shelley and Byron and Wordsworth were lads, it was the weather in their poems that reflected their moods. Now, it's the football scores in our blogs. That's progress.

 Actually, my mood is more Croatia 9, Germany 9.  I hope Croatia and Germany both go through.

Nikolina just wrote from Zagreb, "Everybody here went crazy, if we get to the final, I foresee a baby boom in March '09."

The silence of the streets of Berlin is  one heck of a big, gloomy silence. They've all gone to bed early, but baby boom? Germany has lost its erection.

Croatia

 

I'm back from Croatia, and suffering an immense emotional hangover. That was one of the most intense, action-packed and enjoyable weeks I've ever had. I feel as though, since June 1st, I've lived an entire short, vivid life at high speed.

I was there for the International Festival of the Short Story, which took place this year in Zagreb and Dubrovnik. I cannot praise the festival highly enough. Best festival I've ever taken part in. And of course, as always, the quality comes down to the people. Charismatic organisers, magnificent volunteers, excellent translators, and great rattling crates full of terrific writers.

I'll post again on this, but right now I'm still too full of sights and sounds and memories I haven't processed.

Also, I can feel a lot of what happened in Zagreb and Dubrovnik already beginning the mysterious alchemical transformation into fiction. (Examples - I wrote a poem I really like, in the quarantine buildings outside the walls of Dubrovnik, and  got the entire plot for a damn good film while walking through the Square of the Loggia. And there's more on the way, I can tell by the tingle... It's extraordinary to think that in 1991, the year I was enjoying a hit single in Ireland with Toasted Heretic, this city was being hit by artillery shells and guided missiles.)

So, anyway, I can't really blog about the most intense or interesting stuff, because it would interfere with the fermentation process.

 But damn, I laughed, I cried, I swam, I ran, I nearly died.