Just back from a holiday in Cap d’Agde (pronunciation varies
but reminds Al and I of a song involving pushing a pineapple and shaking a
tree…). It’s a jolly little resort made up of a million campsites one of which
I chose more or less at random. Yelloh
Village – you may have had the pleasure, as it’s a chain. Anyway, I foolishly took along and failed to
read through the latest draft of my new DCI Alice Candy manuscript. I got to page ten on the third day, hunched
over in bed, trying to ignore the rave that was going on not far enough away
from my open window, open due to the online misrepresentation of what was
supposed to be ‘air-conditioning’ and which was in fact a wall-mounted fan.
Hot and bothered, I squinted at the bundle of A4 paper and
blamed my husband for the print size and spacing. All to no avail as he quoted my request for a font size of twelve
and extra wide margins. Double spacing
hadn’t been specified, apparently.
Three days gone. And
editing barely begun.
We had neighbours with young children on either side of our
mobile home. (Mobile homes, or tin
boxes with zero sound or heat insulating properties, are not recommended for
authors wishing to add value to a manuscript.)
I wanted to make sure there was continuity and check detail. My neighbours wanted to vie with each other
in a ‘tolerant parents’ contest, calling to their children in increasingly
harrassed tones, urging them to stop destroying various toys, washing lines,
plastic chairs and wooden deckings. In
the end, with nerves frazzled and wanting to strangle someone, anyone, I knew
that going to the beach was the only option.
Ah, the beach. No,
really. The Mediterranean does it
well. Soft sand, blue skies and water
heated to a temperature cool enough to make you squeal and yet just perfectly
refreshing once you were ‘in’. If I
couldn’t write, I could read, stretched out on my mat, working on my tan. What could be nicer? A pleasant walk along the beach? An enormous human turd in
cross-section? I stepped around it,
wondering where the other half might be, still questioning how it had settled
next to a group of oblivious tourists chomping on beignets.
Oh, well.
In a matter of what seemed like minutes, with a number of
salads under my belt and a higher number of glasses of wine sloshed down in
some of the most chilled out restaurants I’d ever eaten in, built on the beach,
with the sea fifty metres away, I eventually forgot about the editing I hadn’t
been able to do. I’d had a great
time. And so had my sons and my
husband.
The journey home was fabulous. Our Peugeot 406 had developped alternator problems which had been
easy to ignore until the day we left Cap d’Agde. As we clanked to reception to hand in our signed inventory,
pedestrians looked round in astonishment believing, no doubt, that they were
moments away from being killed by a tractor with engine problems.
“It’ll be okay,” would be the mantra of the day.
And the magic of positive thought seemed to be working…
Then, approaching Toulouse a message flashed up on the
dashboard, ‘battery charging fault’. It
was the first of many, each one staying on for a little longer. I diagnosed the problem, slowed down and it
disappeared.
We limped home, grafeful for every mile covered and
momentarily appalled as we almost got taken out by a poids lourds pulling out
in front of us at two miles an hour from the hard shoulder. Al shouted, “go, go, go!” and I did. Never had I been so focussed – I made for
the gap with inches to spare.
We got home in one piece and lugged in the cases.
To celebrate, I went to the butcher's and bought entrecotes
which we ate with jacket potatoes and butter.
Bye, bye Caesar salad and café liégeois.
Yesterday and today I’ve been putting the garden to
rights. Tomorrow my friends arrive for
a week. We have no car until
Thursday. Maybe I’ll wait until next
week to get Alice Candy by the scruff of the neck and sort her out.
Or, I might get started right away…
The first DCI Alice Candy book is available here. It’s a dramatic
tale that will have you guessing from the start.
Locked Away by B. A. Spicer
