Inspiration

Lovely word in-spi-ra-tion. The breathing in... the oxygenation of the brain... the suggestion of the divine. The Marie Antoinette piccy above is an inspiration award for my blog from Aspiring Writer (ah, another one: a-spir-ing) whose blog I like to visit. And I am touched especially as I have been a bit quiet on here recently.

The idea is I pass the award onto seven others now, link to them, let them know and generally spread the love. The trouble is, five of the seven bloggers Aspiring Writer (Joanne Ganley) has picked are on my list of seven anyway! I see those five have said the same thing. It's a funny world the internet - it seems so big, but inside it are these tight little communities like villages.

Anyway, here are seven of my inspiring blogs - I can't say much about them because I should be packing ....

1. To Joanne who is Aspiring Writer and is enthusiastic and smart and keen as mustard to write and has lovely pictures of her garden 2. To Vanda Symon - a driven woman! She writes a book a year, raises two children, seems to have created her own mountain range of laundry and hosts a book show, and still keeps smiling all the time. 3. Gondal Girl who is quirky, mad on Emily Bronte, has finished her first novel, looks a bit like Nicole Kidman and seems - from her blog - to share so many of my preoccupations including birds. I feel I know her but we've never met. 4. Rachael King who is stylish and clever and honest to a fault, and driven to complete novel no. 2 while also sharing her love of collecting and a form of dance with a name that escapes me and some lovely music. 5. Andrea at acatofimpossiblecolour who captivates with her honesty about her life as a Zimbabwe immigrant in NZ. She writes madly and buys clothes crazily and collects gorgeous tea cups and shows all this off with such style and warmth. 6. Denis Welch at Opposable Thumb who refuses to be pigeonholed and will write intelligently, fluently, and beautifully about anything from the sound a car door makes when it shuts to his view on the Israeli-Palestinian issue to books he's enjoyed. 7. David Cohen's This is not a Blog Post - incisive and provocative media and political commentary by the Master.

Finally 8. (aren't I allowed a number 8?) Bookman Beattie's mad book site which he updates many times a day - full of stuff about books and writers. It gets a thousand hits a day from all over the world. Couldn't do without it.

Actually I have a number 9, too, Fifi, and a 10, Shroedinger's Tabby .... better stop...

I think my brain is a little lacking in oxygen at this late hour and a plane to catch tomorrow for one of those long, brain-numbing flights. I have packed my clothes and gifts for the family, and helped by daughter (and travel companion) pack her things. She has been far more efficient than me. I asked if she'd brought some jewellery (for when we hit the high spots in New York) and she said, 'I'll be wearing it.'

She has also chosen to bring the heaviest book in her collection of books to read, it's the third book in the Inkheart trilogy by Cornelia Funke and called Inkdeath - at least 500 pages long by the look of it and in hard back. This writer is one of Issy's faves, but couldn't a lighter book be found for the trip? I dragged A Suitable Boy around Samoa for six weeks and know how important it is to 'travel light.' But my daughter just smiled sweetly and pushed Inkdeath into her back pack.

She's a lot better by the way. Just hope those muscles of hers are up to lugging that back pack around Canada and the US. Then again, I suppose I've got my laptop and a small selection of books of my own. More on that later.

I'll try and blog while I'm away.

The Blue 's Odyssey

Since The Blue was published in July last year it has travelled the world. That's the way of a books I suppose. They can slip into suitcases, bags and pockets. They're fairly compact and unlikely to set off alarms. Forced to share space with a make-up bag, three moleskine notebooks, a pen, a camera, an ipod, a cellphone, an unpaid parking fine, and a hairbrush, a book will squeeze its pages together, loosen its binding and hunker down.

The first photograph of The Blue away from home was taken on Andros, Greece, shortly after publication. The fishing boat looks like it's called George. Sue and John took the snap and sent it to me (he's a doctor, a Shakespearean actor and a tango dancer, and she's one of the best midwives in the world and a tango dancer). I was delighted. I was seriously jealous. I could smell the sea, see the pelican, hear the Greeks: Ti kanees simera? Eise trelos?

My father is part Greek, you see, and my Yiayia (grandmother) and Aunts Mary and Chryssoulla lived there. Dad left from Pireaus as a WWII refugee with his family at the age of six. Another boat leaving at the same time was bombed. There was nothing for him to eat but triangles of processed cheese. They went to Egypt, then South Africa and eventually England. Yiayia and his sisters returned to live, Dad didn't. He visited, though, and once when I was there. We went to Delphi with Chrys. We stood in rare air, amongst ancient stones, and breathed in the muses. At the Greek Easter celebrations, we walked home in the dark with our candles and made a smoky cross above the door for luck.

My husband Ian and I lived in Athens for nine months. It was over twenty years ago and we weren't married yet. We stayed with Chrys in her small apartment on Argolidos Street, drinking cafethaki, smoking Karelia Lights, breathing in the diesel rising from the streams of traffic below, watching our clothes drying on the balcony and playing Beriba (cards). We ventured out into the markets with the leafy oranges piled on tables, we passed the butchers with the whole carcasses of lamb, we breathed diesel fumes, we sat on buses to the sound of old men clicking kobboloi (worry beads), we drank wine that tasted of resin and chicken that tasted of fish, we bought koulouria in Syndagma Square and ate outside in the Plaka, when Yiayia hurt her hip we gave blood so the doctors would operate and took small fried fish into the hospital for her to eat.

We worked -- I taught English to small children whose parents sold fur coats and Ian held conversation classes with DHL couriers. We drove to Delphi, we skied down Mount Parnassus, we went to Olympia via Sparta, and took a boat to Mykonos and Santorini and Rhodes. We rode a donkey on a cliff edge, stayed in a white-plastered house high above the Aegean, saw dancing bears, swam naked in a turquoise sea, stood amongst ruins and poppies and in the cool of Orthodox churches. My friend Sandra came over and the three of us went to Crete. We rode bikes and fended off Greek men who wanted to even the numbers. We went to Rethymnon where Yiayia's family came from. Later, she told us her family actually came from a little village outside Rethymnon which we never got to.

Another time, Ian and I crossed the border to Turkey where we went to the library at Ephesus, spent New Year underground at Urgup, and swam in water the deepest inkiest blue. All the songs there were about love and involved clapping. Tea was in glasses with sugar lumps. We saw the Agia Sofia and the Black Sea. On the way back to Athens I had food poisoning and the bus crashed. Nobody was hurt. In the still night, by the side of the empty road, just across from what appeared to be a chasm, beside a roadside altar, we stood in silence crossing ourselves and considering our good luck. Until one of the German tourists farted. And it wasn't any old fart. It was a bounce-off-the-mountains, echo-to-the-bottom-of-the-chasm sort of fart. Everybody -- Greeks, French, English, Germans, Turks, tourists, businessmen, drug dealers, families -- laughed and laughed. And then I was sick, all the way to Thessaloniki.

John and Sue didn't know any of this when they sent the photo. And now they've started something. I have over a dozen photos of The Blue's travels which I'll post in coming weeks sent by people I know and people I don't. India, the Middle East, and the US are just some of the backdrops. And there are stories to go with each of them. I promised a prize for the 'best photo', so I will deliver on that. I'm not sure how to judge it but I'll work something out.