It’s odd, the way major royal events always seem to coincide with me being out of the country. I was in France for the Silver Jubilee – my parents had to get special permission for me to be absent from school and no one, I repeat no one from my class thought to save me a commemorative mug and coin – and I spent most of Charles and Diana’s wedding day in a park in Zell am Harmersbach right across the road from where my mother was watching the whole damned spectacle on a fourteen-inch portable TV with a gaggle of doting German royalists. I was Thinking Dark Thoughts and singing the Internationale under my breath.
For the past five days we’ve been in Montpellier for the Comedie du Livres, returning home yesterday evening to find the entire country covered in bunting and patrolled by guardsmen.
In a final last ditch attempt to pretend this wasn’t happening, I unpacked my holdall and went and hid in the Hastings Odeon, just in time to catch the 8pm showing of Prometheus. Only that was bad, too.
I’ll be kind-of writing more about that (Prometheus that is, not the jubilee) for my Starburst column next month. Meanwhile, Montpellier was glorious. Chris had been invited to participate in a festival strand featuring UK authors. The festival organizers made thoughtful and imaginative choices, and we felt privileged to be in company with so many fine writers including Jon McGregor, Sarah Hall, Ian McDonald, Anne Fine, Melvyn Burgess and Tim Parks. The Scottish contingent was particularly strong. On the Saturday morning I attended a panel on the new writing coming out of Glasgow – Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Louise Walsh, Alan Warner all in one room! The debate was forthright, passionate and wholly committed as only a discussion among Scottish writers can be, and I was particularly thrilled to meet Alan Warner, a writer I admire immensely and whose novel Morvern Callar continues to be a key inspiration. The experience left me fired up and itching to get back to my desk, a sure sign that the journey was worthwhile.
Chris’s panels and interviews went very well indeed, the passion for books and interest in writers among festival-goers a real joy to see.
Montpellier is a gem. Even more so because it has trams. We had a good part of the day free on Friday, so we took the tram out to the terminus and then got on a bus that transported us right to the edge of the Mediterranean at Palavas, a kind of Ballard-land of white apartment blocks and glass-fronted bars. It was weird but weirdly invigorating just to stand there and gaze at it all. I burned my bare feet on the sand and wished I’d thought to bring my swimming costume. My childhood memories are repeatedly underscored by such potent, recurrent images of the south of France, and being back there, however briefly, always feels vaguely extraordinary, a species of time travel.
