Bunny on a Bike by Bev Spicer is just 99p this week.

When I left university with my friend, Carol, I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do.  The career officer's spiel dulled my senses with suggestions that made the future into a nine to five nightmare.  I panicked.  Did I really have to choose?  Couldn't I put it off for a while?

Then I saw the advert for Playboy croupiers.  Never in a million years had I ever wanted to be a croupier and especially not for Playboy.  I imagined boobs, wild orgies and middle aged men pinching my cotton-tailed bum.  Somehow, reverse logic kicked in and I saw it as a challenge.

So, because it was a totally random thing to do and because it would undoubtedly shock a lot of people, I told Carol and we applied.

Bunny on a Bike tells the story of our adventure in 80s London, training in Victor Lownes' mansion and dealing blackjack in Playboy's London casino.  It's not a kiss and tell story.  It's a story of friendship, stolen teabags and comically lustful landlords.  And what it was really like to work for Playboy.

I'm so glad I did it.  And I'm so glad I did it with my lovely friend, Carol.

It's just 99p this week, if you want some fun between literary masterpieces.  Just click on the link below.  Hope you like it. 

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My French Life

Pinks (oeillet d'Inde)  

Did you know they’re called pinks because they’re frilly, not because they’re pink?  I didn't.

The garden is still a mess but I see there is life poking out here and there.  I’m digging up weeds today when I should be editing my latest detective novel.  It’s as though there are two of me, and the one who likes to be outside wearing gardening gloves and standing in mud is generally the winner.

I do keep popping back to the laptop, not to check a spelling or deliberate over a comma, but to follow the progress of my youngest son who is sitting on a plane waiting to be taken to Singapore.  He was supposed to be travelling with a friend, but there’s been some mix up over passports and so he’s on his own for the time being. 

Still waiting on the runway.

Back in the garden, I inspect the new plants I purchased in Saintes – the most beautiful French town, and on my doorstep – on Monday.  A man pitched up with his wares, a real French raconteur.  His prices were irresistible and so I loaded my bags, eventually managed to pay, laughed at his 'I love you' routine and promised to marry him when I left my husband - all in the name of getting a bargain and being pleasant, you understand.  Anyway, I’d put my purchases out in the fresh air and watched from my back door as rain bucketed down, suddenly turning to hail, thrashing anything that moved, including next door’s cat who’d been bird watching with his evil twitching tail.  I was glad he got his comeuppance.  Now, there’s bright sunshine and my plants seem fine.  I think I’ll dig in three pinks under my kitchen window, some primroses by the back door and leave the others where I can view them as I stand at the sink (daydreaming and scheming, not washing up). 

I wander round the garden eyeing up last year’s successes and failures.  I’m a serial mover of plants.  They don’t get much peace in my garden.  But most of them survive and some flourish.  Like my Mexican Orange bush, which is taking over a little too raucously.  I’ve cut it back and moved a rose that was being stifled, but big is big – nothing can make it downsize really.  What I need is a larger garden.  Must tell my husband.  He wants to treble the size of his garage for his motorbikes – the ones he has and the ones he wants to have.

I’m inside again, reading about pinks.  They need coarse sand, it says.  I don’t have any about the place and can’t think of an alternative, apart from skimming the impasse for some chalky pebbles.  I have a bucket and a rake, but do I dare?  My neighbour, who owns the land to the front of my house, has a big white van and thinks very little of running over my hollyhocks if provoked.  Perhaps I’d better go to the garden centre and buy an inadequate and overpriced bag of grit and be done with it.

Update: Alfie is eating his way around Singapore, and I’ve visited two garden centres whose staff knows nothing of coarse sand for planting (‘...pas en France, Madame!’).

Not sure I'd like an Indian pancake for breakfast...

Happy Days 

Sunday Walking in France II

I must be wired this way – I’d rather be outside.

With the sky blazing blue and the sun yellow as an egg I wrapped up warmly and set off from Royan along the beach towards St Georges de Didonne.  The chill wind had me pulling up my cagoul hood leaving only my sunglasses and nose for a face.  I like to be warm more than I like to be pretty.

No more than a handful of people on the beach, as is normal before lunch here in south west France.  A calm sea and soft sand flicking up inside my trainers, I began to ask questions like ‘I wonder how many people have walked along this beach in the past thousand years?’ or ‘How long does it take to make a grain of sand?’.  At the same time I thought about the poem I’d promised to write and deliver on my daughter’s wedding day.  It had seemed like a good idea at the time.  She doesn’t want Shakespeare.  No sonnets.  She showed me an Ogden Nash which we both liked.  But Ogden Nash doesn’t know her, and I do.

Lines came to me: ‘impish smiles’ and ‘vagabond wishes’, ‘arms around you, arms around you’, flitting through my brain – if only I’d had a dictaphone with me. There are others I can’t remember and they won’t come back, if past experience is any guide.

Preoccupied with one immovable fact, I walked on. My mother is suffering.  She has heart failure – it’s actually a condition you can live with, according to the NHS site, and can be graded from 1 to 4.  It doesn’t matter how you grade it, the fact is that it’s serious and means that mum has limited time to be with the ones she loves and do the things she still wants to do.  Pictures float in and out of my mind.  I see her young and strong on the hockey field (she was a county player), or rushing out to the ‘pumps’ to administer petrol to a lunchtime motorist (my dad managed a Shell petrol station for some years), or on a bike as we all sped round the lanes in Broseley where she made her home after the divorce.  More recently, she and I have driven to St Palais and eaten Camembert on french bread, adorned with ripe tomatoes and accompanied by a beaker of Bordeaux.  We sat on benches by the sea and felt like kings.  I hope we can again.

Incoming thoughts led me back to wedding days and rhyming couplets.  Maybe Ogden Nash would be better.  At least he’s a poet.  But I will rise to the challenge – what is anything worth if it’s too easy?

On I went, to the centre of St Georges de Didonne, where I found a café serving good coffee and homemade biscuits.  I read a magazine and lingered over an article on plants and how they can cure almost anything.  Funny what we can believe in moments of crisis.

Back round the coast along a different path, towards the lighthouse.  Few people still.  A woman sat alone reading, perfectly at ease.  There were boules pitches to the side of the path with the sea yards away.  I dug out my phone and discovered, as usual, that there was no power to take a picture.  The setting was blissful.  The sea surged gently and waves rose up against the rocks, echoing along the coast.  The only sound.

I re-joined the walkway along the road to Royan and wandered amongst ever increasing crowds.  Hats, scarves, gloves.  Still cold, but the sun had climbed higher and I was toasty.  I found my car and drove home, listening to Ed Sheeran, Indochine, Imagine Dragons, enjoying the sense of calm that still travelled with me, induced almost drug-like.

Arriving home, Al was in the garage welding.  I told him I loved him.  He said my sisters had rung and that mum has liquid in her lungs, which is why she’s finding it hard to breathe.  A common symptom of heart failure, apparently.  At last, something that makes sense.  There is medication to fix this.  My heart swelled with love as I walked around the garden and saw the pinks and primroses and buds upon the rose bush mum bought. 

I think of weddings and of beating the odds and having mum to stay again.

Happy Days

Sunday walking in France

Love this house in Pontaillac

Due to lack of interest on behalf of my husband and son, who were involved in DIY and planning a trip to Thailand, respectively, I set off to Royan for a walk along the coast on my own.  I like walking on my own, especially by the sea, but I don’t do it often enough. 

Just after 11.00 am and no one about on the coastal path.  Blue skies, sunshine and stepping out in comfortable shoes and kagoule (apparently there are four different spellings of kagoule) in case it rains.

I am hit immediately by an amazing thought – that the brain is like a musical instrument.  It can be played, plucked, strummed.  As I proceed at an even pace contemplating the metaphor (which I know to be flawed) I am aware of several competing ‘tracks’ vying for space, with the rhythmic backing of the sea rushing like wind through trees. After a minute or two of appalling self indulgence, I return to more practical musings…I can often get above myself.

Practical musings generally mean how to progress with my current work in progress.  I hear you yawn.  

With my current novel near completion, safe and fully absorbed inside my brain, my mind turns to what comes next?  I have two choices: a half-written manuscript, literary in genre, about a woman who travels to Turkey and Greece, recounting tales of her experiences (mostly to her daughter) when she returns out of the blue – she left years ago to run away with her soul mate, Sebastian Love.  I’ve called it Joanna Love’s Stories.

Or, there is the thriller without a title that’s been going round in my head involving a rather stiff solicitor, his promiscuous wife, and a young girl he sees from his office window, who fascinates him in ways he cannot understand.  It’s a story of class, trickery and betrayal. There will be at least one murder and just the right number of red herrings.

I play around with points of view, clever twists, intriguing plots, knowing that this is perhaps the most enjoyable phase of writing – when the creative process is still fluid, before anything is written in stone.

With the sea rushing and the the waves lifting against the rocks, anything seems possible and, all at once, I become conscious that I may be grinning like a maniac.

waves crashing onto rocks - how tame they seem here

After a lunch of warm quiche and less warm coffee in Pontaillac I wander around the backstreets, looking at mostly closed up houses, muttering to myself in an abstract kind of way, and then descend onto the beach, choosing a line of surf debris to follow.  In the past, I've found a two-euro coin and a tiny silver ring.  Today the treasures are buried too deeply.

I stop midway to watch the surfers.  I wish I were one of them and imagine going into the surf school office to enquire about lessons.  Why not? I tell myself.  I may not be in my twenties, but I'm still game.  The sea heaves in slow motion, rising humps fall and crash in white foamy fractals.  Some of the surfers catch the right moment and ride in, others float on their stomachs watching and waiting.

I continue on my way – there’s a man staring out to sea while his small son draws circles in the sand with a stick.  A little way off a couple with a toddler staggering and squealing kiss, the man pushing back a strand of his wife’s hair.  People gather in their bubbles of happiness and reflection and I feel a surge of empathy, just another soul out to feed her eyes and treat her brain to a bit of beauty and peace.

On and up the steps, round the cliffs, past the grassy bunkers and exercise machines where families take turns, for fun.  Round another corner and there’s Royan.  My Smartwatch beeps to tell me I’ve done 10,000 steps, my daily target.  But I’m not finished yet.

An experiment to amuse myself.  How many people will smile back at me if I smile first?  There are crowds now, after lunch strolling.  Couples, parents, children.  A couple younger than me come towards me, their children on skate boards in the road.  I think ‘liberal’ I think ‘joyous’ I think ‘irresponsible’.  The man gives me an enormous grin and the woman, knowing somehow that I am a mother too, smiles with her whole being, shepherding her children to keep them in her sight.  She will watch over them and keep them safe.  Next there is a woman wearing garish lipstick, her skin weather beaten, her eyes narrowed against the sunshine.  She rewards me with a beautifully all encompassing smile – she knows the stage I’m going through – your birds have flown the nest and you’re looking forward whilst still looking back – her expression seems a comfort and also wry with secrets.  Now a family group advances, blocking the pavement, the matriarch in her eighties or nineties, on her daughter’s arm.  Gathered around them, a quiet husband and two bright teenage girls, grandchildren doing their duty.  No smiles for me – they are a closed unit, stopping suddenly en masse for the daughter to wrap a scarf around her mother’s neck.  I wonder what it feels like to be old and to be guided along, having lost the ability or the will, or both, to stride out independently as I do now.  I get an aura of acceptance edged with tedium – but I might be surmising too boldly.  I try to catch the old lady’s eye, but she doesn’t want me to – perhaps, to her, I am insignificant – just another passer by. Of course I am.

And then I think: how do I look to others?  I’d like to know.  Dressed as I am for winter on a sunny January day in south west France, removing layers as the afternoon warms up.  I carry my gloves and scarf inside my bobble hat, using it like a bag.  Inside my bulging grey windproof jacket, I have my purse, my phone, half a salmon and leek quiche, a pack of tissues, car keys and a Murray mint.  I wear the black trousers I use for gardening and the blue and white trainers I bought for running last year.  I have on odd socks, but no one can see them.  My face is scrubbed clean, my hair, too long for my age (so says my mother), flies out in the breeze.  And I’m smiling outwardly as well as inwardly, greeting all who pass with empathy and optimism.  What do they see?

In kindly mood I arrive at Royan beach where dogs on leads pull their owners along, and the scene makes me think of a painting, comical and full of fun.  The crowds are dispersed along the endless sand, all out for an afternoon by the sea, thinking, like me perhaps, how wonderful it is to be out in the world on such a day.

I walk still, reluctant to turn back towards the town but eventually making for steps to the promenade where more organised strolling is in evidence.  Couples, some with their sons and daughters, or grandchildren, each belonging to the other in different ways and yet each looking out through eyes that feed an individual mind. 

people on the beach at Royan - I must get a better camera

I arrive back at my car and remove my coat.  Throw my things on the back seat.  Get in and notice what it feels like to be stationary.  I drive home in placid contentment.  I’ve had a perfect day, watching others equally glad to have come to the winding coast and, just for a while, leave their daily lives behind.

Happy days!

At the Beach with Bev and Carol

Bev and Carol are graduates, spending three months in France as part of their degree course.  They are young and frivolous, unfettered by preconceptions or mortgage payments. Bev is bookish, a bit of a dreamer, and Carol is down-to-earth, unafraid to say what she thinks.  In this (exceptionally frank) excerpt, they experience the challenges of their very first nudist beach.

‘Does ‘Naturiste’ mean what I think it means?’ asked Carol, standing in front of a very large sign with a very large arrow on it.

I wasn’t sure, but I thought so.

‘I don’t mind getting my baps out if you don’t!’  she reasoned.

The beach was coming up fast and we clutched at each other, controlling our giggles as best we could.  We might have made it, had we not heard men’s voices behind us and looked round to see two bronzed gods swinging up fast.

‘Christ on a bike!’ said Carol, stepping aside and staring rudely.

‘Guten Tag!’ 

Please don’t stop and have a conversation with us!  I thought.

They passed in front of us and we watched their perfect asses for a while, breathing in for what seemed to be a very long time and, eventually, remembering to breathe out.

‘Did you see the size of his cock?’ asked my gobsmacked friend.

 ‘Well, yes.  I didn’t have much choice in the matter, did I?’

‘Come on!  There must be loads more on the beach…’

 I wasn’t sure that I fancied the idea of so much nudity all in one place, but I had never sunbathed topless before, so I was keen to give it a go in an environment where one extra set of, admittedly, perfect breasts would not cause too much of a stir.

To my horror, Carol was untying her bikini top before we even got there and soon it was difficult for me to concentrate on what she was saying as I felt a little sea-sick in the face of so much uncontrolled bouncing.

‘God!  Your tits are enormous!’ I said.

‘Pretty good, eh?  Aren’t you getting yours out?’ 

'All in good time, all in good time, my little Devonshire divvy,' I said.

It was a beautiful beach and there were a fair number of people, mostly couples or small groups, generally without a stitch on.  This was a whole new experience for me.  The German gods we had come across on the path had set up camp near the sea and looked over to us, waving.  Carol was all for joining them, but I suggested that we should keep our options open for the time being, not mentioning that I was rather uneasy about diving into a conversation with a couple of blokes with their willies out.

So we put our towels out about thirty feet from the dunes and sat down.  It wasn’t that easy pretending that it was perfectly normal to be sitting with a load of people we’d never met before who seemed very pleased to see us.  I was aware of my breasts in a way that I had never been aware of them before.  I wished they would just shut up (metaphorically speaking) instead of pertly announcing themselves to all and sundry.

‘Shall we whip off our pants, too?’ said Carol, as she was actually whipping off her bikini bottoms.

‘Really?’ I replied, ‘I don’t know whether-’

‘Don’t be such a prude!  No other bugger’s wearing any.’

She was right.  So I did.

Having no clothes on in public was an altogether liberating experience.  I got used to it quickly and was soon stretching out in various poses, sighing nonchalantly and acting as though it was all terribly normal.  I got out my latest find and started to read. I had brought l’Etranger to the beach and made sure that the cover of the book was visible to others as I read. In those days I was deeply proud of my literary pretensions.  I breathed in the ozone and tried to remember what my French tutor had said about Camus, but I kept hearing the Cure singing ‘Killing an Arab’ instead.

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Goodreads Giveaway now ended. Winner announced. Book in the post!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Stranded in the Seychelles

by Bev Spicer

Giveaway ends January 11, 2018.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

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My French Life

Dear Readers,

Happy New Year!

And thank goodness Christmas is over.  Not that I didn’t enjoy it at the time, but sherry trifle and meringues and cream can do a lot of damage!

With storm Carmen lingering, I think this has been one of the worst bits of weather we’ve had here in Charente Maritime for quite a while.  Didn’t stop me getting out there, though.  I’ve cleaned my boots at least three times, dried out numerous coats, hats and scarves most indecorously on radiators and had the tumble dryer going for hours at a time.  Still the rain comes down and the wind whistles.

It’s nice to spend more time writing, as things return to normal.  I’m heavily into a second edit of my Alice Candy novel (Book Two), which is covered with notes and suggestions from my tireless and shrewd editor, who cares about my book more than my sensibilities (thank goodness).  Everything makes more sense when I read her comments.  And, slowly but surely, I see my manuscript turning into something more like a ‘finished’ book.  I still have no title or cover – the most frustrating jobs for me.  Really impossible.  I have a wonderful professional cover designer to produce the artwork, but it’s my job to provide ideas.  A big font, a catchy title and a couple of shiny symbols: a country house, a painting, a speeding car.  How to show the reader what kind of book it is, without ending up with a cliché?

It can wait a while longer.

The interior has me hooked for the time being.

In the meantime, there are distractions: a trip abroad for one son during his gap year, driving lessons for another and a wedding day to help plan for my daughter.  All thrilling in different ways.  And expensive!  Looks as though we’ll be in thrift mode for a while, which I kind of welcome after the excesses of the past weeks.

Happy Days!