Narbonne

Why am I in Narbonne? because the alternator has broken and we have to wait a day for Fiat to fit a new one. It is a small pleasant town that we would otherwise have passed by. In fact we had already passed it by when the alternator failed we were almost level with Carcassonne, but if you breakdown on a French motorway, even if you have made it to a service station, you get taken where the official rescuers take you.
As we are now back in France it is necessary to get the French SIM in the iPad working, which meant a visit to the local SFR shop

Fortunately the hotel had a good wifi, so google maps told us where to look. At first sight it seemed odd that the marker pin came down in the middle of one of the bridges over the river ( see map). However google maps is accurate, the shop is actually on the bridge, which is completely built over.
So here I am, iPad functioning writing this blog sitting in a cafe in the main square in Narbonne and Lois is smiling.
Among the many interesting things about Narbonne, most of which I have not discovered yet, is the local accent. I think it is Catalan. They pronounce many words differently; for example the word 'demain', tomorrow, which is when the van will be ready. Round here they pronounce as it is written, to an English person. Normally in France the latter half of the word is pronounced 'man' whereas here they say it 'main'. 'Cinq', or five is pronounced 'sink'. My french is not brilliant, but add in the strange accent and a stay in Narbonne is a study in miscommunication.
Hopefully the van will be ready soon.

Saint Tropez

We had lunch in St Tropez today. The van was having it's brakes replaced, a job that took four hours, plus two hours for lunch, as we are in France. This left us with six hours to kill and no van to sit in. Unfortunately it was also raining quite hard, so some sort of sightseeing in the smart car forced it's way onto the agenda. Saint Tropez is about 30 miles away along the coast, and of course it is famous, so off we went.
Luckily it stopped raining by the time we got there. It took over an hour to get there because the road winds around the edge of the sea. This is great for the passenger who can sightsee, but there are so many bends and enough traffic that the driver has to concentrate all the time. I think it is a feature of France that the place is also awash with cyclists. Not the Dutch kind who swarm over Amsterdam, these are the serious looking, lycra clad versions. They go almost as fast as a car and tend to be sociable and talk to their mates, thus taking up so much road that you have to follow them around a few curves before they either notice or there is enough straight road to be able to see your way past them.
So getting to Saint Tropez takes a while. When you get there you need to park, fortunately they have provided some huge parks, one of which is by the harbour so you can be envious of the masses of floating gin palaces and very elegant yachts.
The harbour front is covered by restaurants and shops selling stuff that is priced about five euros more that any other place nearby. Take the trouble to walk back a few streets and you find yourself among a mass of designer boutiques with almost every famous international brand represented.
The place is a sort of Torquay meets Bond street, and it grows on you.
We wondered around the shops, where dressing yourself for a stroll down the block would cost the same as a small car and had lunch as about the cheapest thing to do.
Luckily it was only going to take six hours to fix the van, so our temptation to bankrupt ourselves in order to look cool was curtailed. We made it back with our wallets intact and picked up the van. Now we can drive it without making horrible graunching noises every time I touch the brake pedal.
The history of Saint Tropez is that it was a sleepy little seaside place until Bridgett Bardot made a film there. Since then it has been trendy, and judging by the designer goods on show it is likely to stay that way.
Hardly surprising therefore that there was a painting of Bardot on the wall of the bar where we ate.

Broke brake

For the last few miles the van has made funny noises when we stopped. Graunching, would be the normal english word, which translates into French as...
Spent an interesting day driving around Frejus, which is west of Cannes, looking for a Fiat dealer. We eventually found one and arranged to have one of the front disc brakes replaced on Wednesday. That means we will have to stay here a couple of days. Oh what a shame, the camp site has it's own swimming pool and the mediterranean is about sixty yards away. We actually swam in both today.
Last night it poured, with added thunder, leaving a few puddles about the place which have dried out in the sunshine today.
I did manage to write a chapter last night while the rain was keeping me awake. Now we have French Riviera weather, as in the post cards, and it's hard to write anything with an iPad in a deckchair.
The brake disc saga has been instructive, however. If you want to get to know a strange place, set your
mind on finding something out of the ordinary.
We once spent a whole day on Zakinthos trying to find a printer cable,
Lois was writing a thesis and it was the one thing we had forgotten. That escapade turned out to be much more fun than watching numbers of package tourists steadily turning pink by the pool, reading those novels where the author's name is in gold block letters on the paper back.
Tomorrow is my birthday, I think I might go to St. Tropez, it's just along the road.

An addendum. In the afternoon I did actually swim in the sea. Lois took a picture to prove it.

Venice

At the moment we are in venice. Anyone who has been there will know that it is almost impossible to describe, so I won't try. Reading some of the web resources I find that many recommend simply getting lost as one of the top travel tips. The place is a mass of tiny winding streets interrupted by canals of varying sizes, so getting lost is easier than trying to find any particular attraction.
The process of getting lost is assisted by modern technology. I carried a new iPad, so in theory I could use Google maps to get around - in theory. My iPad has a phone SIM in it, so should be able to work anywhere. In fact it needs a decent 3G signal or access to WiFi. In order to avoid vast data roaming charges from my UK network I bought a pay as you go Italian SIM card. That worked well in Verbania and traveling along the autostrada to get here, but in Venice it is far less good. The picture shows what Google maps produces for most Venice, not very helpful.
An alternative is to use what I think is called a MiFi, which is a sort of mobile phone that produces a local WiFi signal. We tried that on the second day and did manage to get maps to work for a rather larger part of Venice. The rechargeable battery ran out after about four hours, so if you really needed to rely on this to get around, then you either need two, or you have to keep switching it off to save power. It takes a minute or so to boot up each time, so would not be much help for things like translation on the iPad. The app called Converse, for instance, is brilliant but it needs the Internet to be connected.
I am impressed with the iPad, I've taken some great movies and pictures with it, but if Apple really want people to get the best out of it, then they should use some of their money and muscle to get the mobile phone companies to perform better. It is completely foolish that a place like Venice, an internationally renowned treasure should have a rubbish mobile phone coverage.
Having said all that, nothing can detract from the wonders of the place. It is, of course, unique. The solution to getting everyone to walk and use public transport and be slim, is not to flood the place and make the streets narrow. Anything learned about to live life here would probably not be relevant anywhere else. I am sure they run the place better, they could learn something from Disney about how to manage crowds and queues, for example, but in general it is just one of those must see places and I am immensely glad I came.
The pictures are just a sample, limited both by space and by writing in Blogger's very primitive iPad app.

Research or reality

Research versus reality

Part of my novel Side Effect is based in Verbania, in Northern Italy, a place I've never been to. I did pass fairly close to it on a coach going to a ski resort, but that hardly counts.
How come I set the scene there? I needed one of the characters to have come from somewhere near London and to have been on a holiday to Italy, when she was still at school. I searched for places south of London that were twinned with towns in Italy that looked as though they would make a plausible holiday destination. After a certain amount of messing around I found that East Grinstead was twinned with Verbania, a town on the north side of lake Maggiora. On that ski trip the coach had driven along part of the shore of that lake, on the way from Milan, and I remember that it looked pleasant. So Verbania was, at least a possibility.
I set about researching the place from the Internet and spent about an hour playing with Google Earth, trying to get an idea what it was like. It seemed to fit the bill. The place looked as though it had a romantic charm and a certain amount of style, sufficient to be impressive to a 17 year old schoolgirl, who might fall for an older italian in a place like this.
Much later in the book that same schoolgirl's daughter returns to Verbania, with the same italian, after she has discovered that he is her father. By then he is dying and the place also has to make sense as a a setting for a sort of nostalgia, that she has never had, a place that could be sad and happy at the same time, where ragged ends could come together and life make sense.
Finding all that out from the Internet is a tall order, but the tools available now are very impressive. After a day researching it I was fairly sure that it worked and I included Verbania in the book.
This year I got the chance to go there and see if the real thing lived up to my imagined view. At one level I have to say that I was slightly anxious, what if it was completely wrong? I guess I would have to go back and edit the book. As it turned out I found that my impression from the web was a good reflection of the actual town.
The real thing has more depth. You can't get the atmosphere of little cobbled streets and the elegance and style of some of the shops, by looking at pictures taken from a satellite miles above. What is surprising, I think, is the way that the structures you can see give the impression of the sort of place that it turns out to be. Well designed public areas, like the harbor for instance, are clearly seen from space, so it is easy to assume that there would be shops and restaurants capable of paying the kind of taxes necessary to keep up appearances. It wouldn't be cheap and there wouldn't be rubbish in the streets; and there wasn't. The picture show Lois in one of the charming, winding streets. It would be impossible to capture that from space, but google street view is already beginning to provide pictures that do reflect local detail.
If I had been there would I have written the same thing? I think there is a real risk that I would have written too much, would have been tempted to include a little more flavor, a little more depth and perhaps got in the way of the story.
If you want to write about a place, then I suspect you have to go there and walk the streets, smell the flowers and eat the soup, or in my case, the pizza. If on the other hand you need a place for something to happen, then what you can find on the Internet may be enough. If the place is a setting, then you need about as much reality as the backdrops and scenery in a theatre; enough to take the imagination of the reader to a place that works for them in the story, and preferably no more than that.

This post is being produced on my iPad, sitting in our camper beside Lake Maggiora, see the second picture. The text was written in pages, which seems to default to American spelling and the post was constructed in the free blogger app for the iPad, which is a bit on the clumsy side. I am fascinated to see how it turns out,

The BT saga

Moving to the new flat has meant a long saga with BT in order to get a phone line and broadband. Of course I have no idea whether my experience is typical or just a crazy anomaly but it has consumed so much time and energy that I can’t resist trying to write it down. The key question is of course whether I can write it without degenerating into a quivering heap with my blood pressure going through the roof.

The saga began before we moved. I was impressed by Sky’s offer of phone plus broadband at a good price and with all the TV stuff as well. I signed up after talking to some very helpful people on the phone, my old phone at the old house, that is, they sent me a helpful text the next day saying how pleased they were to have me as a customer, and two days later they sent me a text saying they were sorry, but they couldn’t do it after all. I phoned. The nice lady sounded upset and set about investigating and after about ten minutes said she had no idea what the problem was. So we cancelled the order and did another one. Another text next day saying how pleased they were to have me back, and next day a text saying that the refund of my original order was under way, and the next day a new text saying that they were sorry but they couldn’t do it after all. More phone calls and it remained a total mystery.

“There must be something about the exchange,” was the best they could do.”

I went into Worcester and tried to sign up with a SKY operation in the shopping centre. Ten minutes on their computer got the same message. “Sorry, we can’t do broadband at that address.”

So if Sky can’t do it I went back to BT. I ordered a new phone at the new address by filling in the form on the Internet, and then the trouble started.

They sent me emails and text messages, all saying different things. It took me some while to figure out how to export text message so that I can show them on here, so this is just a sample.

Foolishly, I tried to phone them in order to find out which day they were actually coming. That involves working your way through lots of choice menus, which usually start off by asking you to key in the number that you are calling about, tough when you don’t have a number yet. Some of the time I just had to hang on until the computer felt sorry for me and connected me to a human.

How we ended up with multiple order numbers and multiple dates on which engineers were supposed to come and connect us up, with what they expect to be different packages, no one knows. Phoning only makes it worse.

In addition to the various texts and emails I also had a voicemail informing me that there was a problem and they would get back to me.

With the possibility of an engineer visiting on 20^th, 24^th, or 27^th I tried phoning to clarify what was actually going to happen. I was informed that 27^th was the only valid date and that my order did not include broadband and could not be altered. Luckily a man turned up on the 24^th and installed a phone and a package of broadband kit arrived. The phone worked but the broadband didn’t. I waded my way through the phone menus again and was informed that there was a problem at the exchange and that the broadband would start on 31Feb.

“What about 27^th, can you make sure to cancel that.”

“There is definitely not anyone coming on 27^th.”

Fortunately, we were in on the 27^th when two men arrived, expecting to connect a phone, actually with a different phone number. We politely asked them to go away, after first offering them a cup of tea; after all, they work for an insane organization so they might need some sustenance.

The broadband did actually start working on the 31^st and two days later a man phoned asking how to find the flat because he was coming to fit our phone. We explained that we now had a phone, had told a few hundred people the number and didn’t really want another one. As he had not actually made it as far as the flat, we didn’t offer tea.

I decided to leave it a few days before writing this piece, in case anything else happened. Two days ago I had another voicemail saying my order had not gone through and to please contact BT. I note that the phone number they quote does not work from mobile phones, yet they are calling to say that they haven’t connected me. What sort of world do they live in?

I started writing this piece, ready to lay all of the problems at the door of BT, but that would be unfair. Yesterday I caught a piece on the BBC with a quote from Julia Stent, director of telecoms at uSwitch. For those not in the UK, that is the outfit set up by the UK Government to help us all switch provider in order to promote more competition and supposedly better service as a result. She said,

“Britain might be riding the wave of a super-fast broadband revolution, but for 49% who get less than the national average broadband speed, the wave isn't causing so much a splash as a ripple.”

Is it any wonder that BT are hopeless, when one of the key agencies responsible for improving things has not yet realized that about 50% of the population will always get a below average service, it’s the nature of averages. If they can’t get that right, can they even count? 

65 Days

I haven’t written a blog since before Christmas, mostly because we have been moving house.

That isn’t really much of an excuse because Lois has written something every day, much of it about the actual process of moving. On the other hand, it has meant that she has hogged a certain amount of the meagre internet connection that we have managed to keep running. Sometimes by driving into town to drink coffee in places that had a WiFi, sometimes by other means, but never courtesy of BT who seem to think that a modern society requires people to be cut off from communication for a month if they want to move house.

I have the added excuse that I have been working with the iPad, because Lois has hogged the Mac Air and I find blogging from the pad a bit tedious. This is probably my fault, but something funny happens to the formatting when I write in Pages and try to upload to blogger.

For the last few weeks, we have got onto the web with a MiFi, so I have less excuse, but by then the number of things I might write about had also become daunting.

All excuses have now gone, even BT have relented and got us connected to both phone and WiFi. Why not ask Sky or Virgin or someone else I hear you say. The fact is Sky simply refused to give us broadband, said they couldn’t do it. I suspect that this is because we are in a new building and in the nine months while it was being constructed no one thought to make sure that phone lines were up to scratch. We did mention it to the developers about 10 times, but got no response.

So all this amount to there being a number of sagas that I will need to write in order to dump all my frustrations and anxieties on any poor reader. For today a summary, of sorts will have to do, in the form of a poem, a ditty, or maybe it is a song.

Days of Christmas

The first day of Christmas the agent said to me,

“I’ve found a buyer

who will take your house

with the partridge and the pear tree. 

It is true, we do have a pear tree and a pair of partridges often visit, though I’ve never seen them in the tree.

On the second day of Christmas the plot begins to thicken

We leave the Scottish land

Cutting short our tripping

Driving miles and miles in the dark

And the weather breaks, so we drive back in pouring rain, stopping in the lake district to sleep.

On the third day of Christmas negotiation starts for real

We agreed upon a date,

Much too soon for comfort,

but better to be sure I guess.

Are we lucky to find a buyer who wants to move at breakneck speed?

On the fourth day of Christmas, we begin to plan

we phone a moving man.

Who came at once to see,

Wrote it all in a little book,

And he gave us boxes and lots of lovely string, well sticky tape actually.

On the fifth day of Christmas

We start to throw away

All the attic stuff

We’ve kept for years and years

So much stuff we never knew we had and a hundred reminders of former lives, but it all has to go.

On the sixth day of Christmas,

We telephone to Sky

Try to book a phone

And lovely broadband too

One of the most charming and helpful telephone operator I have ever encountered, and they have a new system that brings you back to the first operator even if you have to visit other departments.

On the seventh day of Christmas,

We hire a storage room

And then another too

And finally a third

And the people at Storage King are a delight and their boxes are the best, and they provide trolleys, though Lois doesn’t seem to be able to drive one in a straight line.

On the eighth day of Christmas,

The removal man phones up

And cancels.

So we hunt around all day for another man with a van, and throw away more and more stuff we’re never going to move.

On the ninth day of Christmas,

Sky send us a text

Refund on the way

They can’t fit the line

Not only that, they have no idea why, and when we try again, they repeat the booking and subsequent refund as though we are in a time warp.

On the tenth day of Christmas,

BT cut off the phone

We redirect the post

And pack the motorhome in case

And a man from Shy phones up to ask if he can fit the line tomorrow, obviously no one told him the thing has been cancelled twice.

On the eleventh day of Christmas,

We start to pack the van

When the agent gives a call

We’re not moving house today

Half the money has failed to arrive, some problem with a mortgage broker failing to provide information. The buyer is heartbroken, but the breaker is the broker.

On the twelfth day of Christmas,

We activate plan B

Talking to the bank

Most of the working day.

But they make countless cock-ups and  the thing drags on and on. Twelve days are not enough. 

On the sixteenth day of Christmas

We finally move in

Then walk along the river

Drink a glass of wine in Brown

And generally feel a whole heap better because we are now on the third floor a long way above the river, which is rising rapidly.

On the twenty seventh day of Christmas

The money changes hands

The old farm-house is sold

And we open up the champagne.

The bank ring me up to say did you realise a huge sum of money has appeared in your account. Are they completely stupid, most of the money is the mortgage we got from them because the other bank was so slow? They have to work so hard to get their bonuses.

On the sixty fifth day of Christmas

I start to blog again

No partridge or pear tree 

but a nice view of the river instead

The view from our new living room