Tag: cocktails

Categories
brazil zero moment

Thoughts turn to Book 3

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I’m not trying to make anyone feel jealous. I just want a nice image to look at.

I usually try to avoid going on holiday to hot countries whilst it’s miserable and cold at home – inevitably you return home to spend three weeks going around looking at the grey drabness in disbelief and thinking ‘Why do I have to live here, again?’

I can see I’m going to have to make my list of Great Things About Living In Oxford, England.

Or I can pretend I don’t, continue in denial and write another book set somewhere warm.

Warm and inevitably, rather threatening.

I lay awake in bed at some very late hour this morning thinking about book 3 of Joshua, I had forgotten that in my bedside notebook I’d once written an idea to use a certain song as a symbol (a sort of literary synecdoche, if you want to get clever) for a certain character in the book. But in the work of constructing the plot, I forgot.

Screenwriters often use a visual image – or colour as a symbol. Oranges in “The Godfather” symbolise death; fallen leaves in Alfonso Cuaron’s “Great Expectations” – and also “Y Tu Mama Tambien” symbolize encroaching chaos. The main symbol in ‘Joshua Files’ is the natural body of water – it spells mortal danger for Josh. And characters in Josh’s family are sometimes referred to via a song.

So I’d had this idea to use a song like that…and then totally forgotten. But just as my subconscious mind used to kindly wake me at 3am after a long day in the lab with the reminder that I’d actually thrown my experiment in the bin instead of the freezer…this morning it woke me with this great suggestion for book 3.

I was dreaming about this fox in a garden that suddenly started being very friendly, and then saw it’s cub, even cuter…meanwhile music was playing and I recognised the song as ‘Dream A Little Dream Of Me’. And I remembered that I’d had this idea to use it in book 3, but hadn’t been able to decide how.

Well, the dream gave me the idea…from that came a way to develop what will be probably the most important subplot in the last 3 Joshua books.

When it strikes really full-on like that, inspiration can be very fruitful.

I think I have dengue fever, by the way. I have a slight temperature, headache in an unsual part of my head, and a disastrous stomach…

Categories
brazil

One Last Caipirinha

One Last CaipirinhaOriginally uploaded by mgharrisWell it’s come to this…As Ali and I down one last caipirinha we contemplate what a terrific place North Eastern Brazil is for a holiday. None of the insane commercialism and sheer dedication to tourism that you find in Mexico’s premier resorts, but a warm and well-organised welcome in all the hotels…big and fancy or titchy and family-run.

Lots of great activities to do; but the rough-and-ready type that make use of natural beauty without bending it to the will of the tourism magnates. So it’s sand-dune buggy rides, zipwire into a lake, snorkeling off a platform into a coral reef, all the tasty seafood you can eat washed down with any lime-based cocktail you like; caipirinha (cachaca), caipiroska (vodka), caipirissima (rum).

Ooh…there was an aqua theme park…is it the thin end of the wedge?

I’ll miss the coconut, cashew and mango trees, the bareback horse-riders and the cheerful buguieros (buggy drivers).

And I’ll miss the limey afterburn of endless caipirinhas…
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Categories
travel

Ouch. How could this happen…again?

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Ponta Negra beach, Natal, Brazil

You’d think that a grown woman with two kids and a lifetime’s experience of sunny holidays would have some clue how to avoid getting a painful sunburn the first day of a holiday.

Tragically, no. It’s been so long since we’ve been anywhere genuinely sizzling. And the equator is a few hundred miles north for goodness sake, you’d think we’d have borne in mind that the power of the sun was FAR stronger than we were used to. You’d think that we would have remembered that a refreshing sea breeze is the very devil of temptation, enticing you to stay out just a bit longer.

For some reason though, first day in the holiday that I catch some serious sun, I always burn. And then days of pain.

Moan, gripe, whinge; I sound like my eldest daughter.

Natal, Brazil is a laid-back resort, very peaceful right now and with a huge, practically deserted beach. The ocean is blue-green and WARM, lovely long waves that surfers can ride for ages before they wipe out. Very little undertow, so perfect for swimming too. And the beach vendors keep the caipirinhas and ice-creams flowing.

Therein lies my sunburn cure, by the way. I plan to spend the next day or two under the affluence of incohol, as my brother-in-law Paul says.

For purely medicinal purposes, naturally.

Categories
Joshua Files mexico

Day of the Dead

Calaveras de dulce – sugar skulls on sale in Cancun’s Market 23

Well, I’m back. I was going to post a very jolly thing about Day of the Dead and the party we had last night to celebrate the Mexican festival of Dia de los Muertos, but it seems rather crass given that for thousands of Mexicans in Tabasco state, yesterday was one major disaster – the awful floods.

Earlier this year, photos of Oxford flooded made it onto international news and resulted in my Mexican relatives sending me anxious emails. A bit of a turn-around – normally we’re the ones calling about earthquakes or volcanic eruptions (part of my family comes from a small town near the active volcano Popocatepetl).

Anyway, from the looks of it Tabasco state has got it pretty bad indeed, but so far not many people dead, thank God. Either it’s a miracle or Mexico isn’t so third-world as the outside world likes to portray it.

It’s been a busy, busy week and I started it by being ill with some virus. Had to go to London to do stuff with the publishers and only started to feel better yesterday. Then I set myself up as the cocktail mixer for the party, making margaritas and daiquiris, sampling all batches of course. Feeling a bit delicate again to be honest…

“Invisible City” has been selected by the trade magazine “Publishing News” as one of its February Picks with a very nice review that head of publicity at Scholastic passed on to me:

“Conspiracy and intrigue, complemented by non-stop action and excellent characterisation make this an exciting debut. Think Young Bond/CHERUB levels of potential. Plus the cover is really cool.”

The publishers and I are all pretty chuffed by that…

Categories
cuba salsa

Daiquiri en La Floridita


MG with a classic Daiquiri
Originally uploaded by mgharris

Finally, I get to have my daiquiri en La Floridita*.

In honour of…oh who needs a reason…we went to celebrate, dinner & dancing with friends at London’s La Floridita.

It’s a fancy restaurant/bar/dance club that features the finest examples of Cuban music, and a big variety of rum-based cocktails, including my favourite, the delicious daiquiri. I tried three different ones and they were pretty, pretty, pretty good.

The band was El Guayabero, an excellent son group from Holguin on the eastern side of the island. They played 30-min sets of up-tempo son numbers with some boleros and cha-cha-chas mixed in. No one danced for the first two sets – maybe the people at the bar were shy? Others like us were scoffing down food yummier and more luxurious than you’ll find anywhere but in the very fanciest restaurants in Cuba.

The first time we ever went to Floridita was in January, for my friend Becs’s birthday. That was before we’d been to Cuba (Becs had been many times), before we realised that Floridita is like an idealised, fantasy version of Cuba. In reality I didn’t see anywhere in Cuba that looked anything like this. It’s the levels of consumption – no-where we went in Cuba looked this fancy, certainly not the type of places bands like this play (excluding Varadero – the tourist-only enclave, which I didn’t visit.) In our experience bands like Guayabero play to sweltering, smoky rooms with ineffective celing fans, and the dance floor heaves with expert Cuba couples and salsa tourists being taken for a spin by their Cuban insrtuctors.

During the third set, when we were moved off the table (you only get a 2-hour sitting on busy nights) and back to the bar, we decided to go for it on the dance floor. One couple had just taken the floor. Within seconds of us joining them the dance floor filled. The musicians looked utterly delighted. It must be a drag for a dance band to play to a motionless audience.

However, salseros, whilst the music and atmosphere are romantic and evocative (if not authentic), the drinks are wonderful and the food delish, it is not a cheap night out… And like us, you will probably still need to factor in a visit to a salsa club for a proper dance fix.

We went on to Salsa Republic@Club Colosseum, where the music of Maikel Blanco, Manolito, Issac Delgado, Adalberto and Los Van Van was as ever, wall-to-wall and sizzling hot.

P.S. Inexplicably, a photo of Becs and I dancing at the Manolito concert has rapidly risen to become one of my most viewed photos on Flickr. Is this blog to blame?

Let’s do the experiment. Here’s another MG & Becs dancing salsa photo – better quality, taken last night at Club Colosseum.

* the reference is to Hemingway’s habit of drinking “my daiquiri in La Floridita and my moijto in La Bodeguita” – two of Havana’s most famous bars. The line is quoted in one of Los Van Van’s most popular songs, “Tim Pop con Birdland“, a timba riff on the 1970s jazz classic “Birdland”. For those who are interested in such things, I reckon “Tim Pop con Birdland” may well be my keeper on a Desert island Disc selection…