Bavarian beer and cracked cords

Just took the last meeting of the festival, and now i'm working in the lobby of the hyatt hotel [where one coffee costs £4..] waiting for my producer to arrive.

I have lost my voice somewhere in town. There is only a strangled squeak coming out. High pitched pitching.

A friend bought dinner and read the pitch. He hated it. Which is oddly comforting.

Silent running

I know, I know, long gap.

I made a conscious decision in december not to do anything - travel, films, reading, blog, until the step-outline was finally finished.

It is now, on the eve of the berlinale. One last trawl for typos etc, and it will be in the post.

Berlin is full of sunshine. Last year was sparkling with deep frost. I wore two coats and drank hot chocolate.

This year it is 11 degrees, bright blue and cold, one jacket and i'm looking for an icecream...

I have a suitcase full of gloves and hats and puffas I can't wear.

I lost my first chioice script-editor. I think she was just two keen to do it; she offered to work unpaid for a co-writing credit, but with 1/3 of the bursary ringfenced for script-editing that deal made no sense at all.

Very odd being in a city after months with sheep.

I have running water in the bathroom

This is not a triumph of heath robinson plumbing, but the result of meltwater overtopping the ditch and flooding the porch.

Cue two very enjoyable hours building dams and channels in the mud to direct the new river elsewhere.

Luckily the cottage itself stayed dry throughout.

Being snowed in was huge fun. Being flooded turned out to be even better.

It's dark now - I can't wait to see how the water scours out my new ditches in the morning.

Still writing - getting closer. Thrown out another huge slice of ridiculous plodding stuff. The end should be getting nearer at last - in theory. Sigh.

Enjoy the longest night of the year...

After tomorrow the days grow brighter again!

More lavatorial humour

I have seen victorian urinals with a delicate image of a honey bee enameled on the sweet spot.

As any well bred properly educated 19th century english gentleman would know, the latin for bee is 'Apis'.

Not such a po-faced prudish bunch after all.

A crash in the kitchen suggests the mice got into the wine dregs in the washing up.

I'm too snug to go and fish drunken mice out of the washing up. They'll have to swim.

Just survived a dinner party in the cottage

5 adults, two babies, one stew.

That about as many as you can cram around the table and still breathe. The guests arrived cross country by landrover and brought coal - one of the most usual and thoughtful dinner gifts I have ever received.

Stew.

24 hours in advance - take a cast iron pot with a good heavy well fitting lid, hang over fire.

Add oil and diced bacon - sweat.
Add slices of beef shin - I left them whole, like steaks - they'll break apart easily enough.
Brown the beef on both sides.
Add 4 medium sized onions, whole but peeled, 1/2 a pound of mushrooms, a handful of tomatoes (optional), 4 peeled cloves of garlic, thyme, salt, pepper, a bay leaf and a strip of orange zest.
When all this is bubbling, pour on red wine - I think I added a pint and a half.

Clap on the lid and bring up to the boil - then stick the whole thing in a well insulated haybox, wrapped in old blankets, and forget all about it until tommorrow.

Heat for an hour, and serve the soft unctious result with spuds and cabbage, a glass of red wine and a screaming toddler.

Cheers!

Let's talk rude

I was digging through the cupboard in the back room when I found an extra chamberpot (a useful addition to any household where the privy may fall below zero on a sharp night.)

I turned it over to discover the manufacturer's mark.

It is delicately stamped 'PRICK'...

I have a one legged pheasant in the garden.

She's almost certainly a refuge from a shoot somewhere else in the valley, and has survived well over a week here in the garden, hop hop hop amoung the sheep. She gets a handful of extra feed from the bird table every day.

Funny how the solution to writing problems usually involves writing less...

... not more.

Cutting like crazy here.

from the bus - just crossing hadrians wall

Standing water is frozen to 2 - 3 inches and will bear my weight.

There's floating ice in the north tyne river.

The frost has turned even my 30 foot pine white.

I came here for a month's peace and quiet to write, expecting the cold to drive me out in november - i'm glad I decided to stay for december.

I'm not convinced that giggles are the sanest reaction to waking up in an ice cave

But it's so pretty (when I scrape the frost of the wihdows to look) and my duvet is so warm, I just can't help myself.

Perhaps I should be humming the theme from dr. Zhivago instead - you know, the frozen dacha?

Anyway, I woke up with one of the solutions to "the writing problem", so high spirits as permissable. "Sleep on it" is often the best advice. After all the story srarted as a dream, many years ago.

I'm about to hike cross-country to catch the bus to town. I day of shops and coffee and people and library is just what I need.

Hmmm... 8 inch icicles inside my kitchen.

At least it keeps the milk fresh!

Lunch from the ashes

Take an unpeeled onion and wrap it in a sheet of damp newspaper. Tuck the parcel into the ashes of a log fire.

When the paper has finally burnt away the onion is done. Split, scape out the soft core and eat with butter and pepper, or soft cheese.

Yum.

We have the most beautiful still hoar frost under a blue sky. Everything is white, every leaf, blade of grass, wisp of moss or cobweb.

This morning I paused for a few seconds on a large flat rock while walking in the wood over white grass. Within that tiny space of time my boots froze to the rock. It felt tacky, like glue...

Coldest morning yet - delicate flowers of frost etched on the inside of every window

Walking on the bone dry frozen fell behind the house sounds like the
crackle of gunfire. All the sheep have come up to the shelter of my
walls, and loom out of the mist under my trees. I took pictures - I
hope they come out.

Still no connection, so this will be posted sometime in the future -
near future I hope. I am walking towards broadband and central heating
for the afternoon, but right now I am just thawing out with a mug of tea
and Radio 4.

Still no solution to the writing problem. I've tried all the sort cuts
- working on another section, proof reading - I just need to solve the
order of about 10 key scenes, so that I believe that one character (who
I like) would participate in the torture of another character who he likes.

I worry that much of my story is bad science and bad history; one of the
characters is a member of the Ahnenerbe, the Nazi's corrupt "Ancestral
Heritage" think tank, who started by faking pre-history and ended up
murdering men women and children in concentration camps in the interests
of "science". They aren't a joke - historians need as much ethical
rigour as physicists and biologists. Perrhaps more, when fantasies of
racial and cultural purity and past injustice are used to justify
mass-murder.

So I am terrified that by writing about Bad Historians in an
entertaining way I am just further muddying a very murky pool.

Actually that may help me - my Character's remorse at the crimes he
commits must be the drive the story needs to drive it to resolution.

I just don't believe it yet.

My domain host changed all my mail passwords without warning...

Me and all other users.

I wonder what security scare prompted that?

They didn't even put a note on the home page. 24 hours and several
attempts to get into the control panel to find out what had happened,
and another day to get a connection strong enough to log-on and reset
the password.

I'm just glad I found a solution.

Radio silence

My normal email account is out of order and my phone battery is about to die and I left the usb charger cable at the bottom of the hill (and even if it had a full charge I don't know how far I could go towards fixing this on a little pda) - this is a major comms disaster!

Luckily I have lots of work to do- I hit another script problem, and I am busy sorting that out - it's just as terrifying as the last one, but I am just a touch more confident that I can stick it out and fix it. (well enough)

Opps..

... I am getting through a pint of whisky a week.

Oh well, it's all central heating of a sort. The sky is full of stars and the
windows on the north side are icing up.

I'm within a few pages of completing this draft. Then revision, and I'm done,
(just two months late)...

I'll take a break for Christmas (plenty of background reading still to do) and
then start thinking about the next - full - draft.

Another hour of work tonight, then off to bed with two hot water bottles and a
wind-up radio.

Now - this really is cool...

Just came home by starlight. The grass is already crisp with ice, and it's not even 6pm.

The met is forecasting 4 degrees of frost. You can add a degree to that on the fell. You can bet i've already checked all the windows.

Wayhay! An excuse to open the whisky (again).

No wonder it was a little chilly last night.

I pulled back the bedroom curtain to find that the window was wide open all night. I'd propped it open when I headed out with the laundry, intending to air the house. It certainly did.

Just goes to show how well sheltered the house must be. I snuggled down last night listening to the roar of wind in the oaks, with not an inkling that my nose was only 6 feet from an open window. The curtain didn't even twitch.

It seems to have blown my cold away