It all began 3 years ago today

Three years ago today, Suzanne Short (a Year 10 student from Cumbria) started out on a strange and wonderful adventure. You can read her story in my time-slip novel, The Boy with Two Heads. Her best friend is Bernadette, known as Bernie. This is an extract from Bernie's blog:

From Bernie’s Blog. Feb 15th 2010, Monday 

School trip to Greece, Day 4 

Athens. Hotel Artemis.

THIS HAS BEEN THE WORST DAY OF MY LIFE!!!!!!!! 

Where do I start? 

Poor poor Suzanne. Will she be OK? Why did this happen? And in a country where I don’t understand anything! 

So… Concentrate! Start at the beginning … 

This morning we all got our backpacks together with packed lunches from the hotel, and water bottles, and questionnaires, and all the usual tourist stuff. And Suzanne seemed a bit quiet. Yesterday she was leaping around and like ‘We’re gonna see where it all began.’ Meaning the Olympics, of course. She’s obviously still obsessed, even though she gave up the idea of competing because of bloody Ian. 

But today she was really quiet. Then she told me that Ian had dumped her. Up at the top of the Stadium! By text! Right in the place she’d been so excited to see. ‘Where it all began’. 

And now, maybe where it all ends.
OMG!
Pause for tears. Oh help … 

Right. Trying to get it together now. 

We were all crossing the road along the open end of the stadium. We’d all got across except Suzanne. She missed the light so she could take a last photo. I was just teasing Gina about there being no cake in the packed lunch, when I heard a screaming noise from an engine and a load of shouting. I turned round and saw that Suzanne was lying on the tarmac near the pedestrian crossing. The traffic was stopped dead. A motorbike was on its side in the middle of the road and Mr Green had his arm round a man’s neck. ...

Panathenaic Stadium pedestrian crossing

And this is where Suzanne's story began, on the pedestrian crossing by the Panatheniac Stadium in Athens. (As you can see, crazy motorcyclists are not a common occurrence.)

Olympian water works

While I was in the Peloponnese, I spent a few hours at Ancient Olympia again. I wanted to find the alleged swimming pool near the gymnasium which I had not had time to look for before. It features in many of the reconstructions of about the time of The Boy with Two Heads and I included it in the story. It was not used in competition, it seems - just for cooling off and perhaps for training. This reconstruction is of about a century later.


I found lots of venerable rubble in the area where it must have been, but no sign of the thing itself. Of course, there have been 24 centuries of wild goings on at Olympia since then, so it's not exactly surprising.

I did find a strange square hole, but it looks more Roman than Greek to me and therefore possibly 500 or so years later.

I also saw a possible bath (though I think it's more likely to be a water trough).




So not quite a swimming pool. There had been lots of rain, though, and everywhere was green and lush. On my way back I crossed the Alpheios River higher up the valley by the road over a large dam.

A wide modern aqueduct takes water along beside the river towards Olympia and the coast. I can't imagine what that will all look like in 2000 years ...






[There are lots of websites about Ancient Olympia, and many of them perpetuate misunderstandings and even mistakes. I find the visuals on the Wikipedia site the clearest.]

We take The Boy to school

Do you remember the photographer from the Cumberland and Westmorland Herald who nobbled me at Words by the Water at the beginning of March? An article and his photo of us there appeared in the paper on March 24th. It covers a lot of ground with admirable clarity.


I was in London when the paper came out. I went down there to attend a seminar at the Society of Authors about making author visits to schools. This gave me some very good ideas, but also pointed out some of the pitfalls. The most common questions students ask visiting authors seem to be "What's your favourite book?", "How much do you earn?" and ... "What colour is your underwear?" or some such personal probe designed to disconcert.


On Thursday I paid my first visit to a school as the author of a novel. Connie from Trifolium was with me and has also mentioned the visit on her Trifolium blog. I gave some historical background to The Boy with Two Heads, including locations, religion and the Olympic Games in Ancient Greece, and I read some short passages. 


In the first few pages of the story, one of the main characters is called Bernie (from Bernadette), and one of the teachers accompanying the school visit to Athens is called Mr Green. The class teacher at the Solway College who had organised the visit is called Bernie Green!

That coincidence caused a laugh or two, as did the fact that I had not noticed the three-letter English word in the middle of this Ancient Greek inscription. But my pictures of vase paintings and statues of naked athletes caused even more giggles (see Connie's blog). The subject of underwear, mine or anyone else's, did not arise, thank goodness.

Attic red-figure kylix, 520BC, by Pheidipos,
now in the British Museum

I hope the students learned as much as I did from the visit. Thank you, Mr Green and your colleagues, for your warm welcome and support.

Robbery in Olympia

This is not the place to post an opinion on the paralysing economic problems of Greece. But sadly I am not surprised by yesterday's theft from the Museum of the History of the Olympic Games in Antiquity, which is one of three museums at the site of the ancient Games in Olympia. 

Museum of the History of the
Olympic Games in Antiquity

Cuts in staff numbers and salaries due to the austerity measures mean that these museums are more vulnerable than ever to criminals. It seems that armed thieves tied up and gagged the one female security guard, broke glass cases with hammers and grabbed sixty or so bronze and pottery artefacts, although exactly what has been stolen has not been reported yet.

All the artefacts in the museum, though, were relevant to the ancient Games and so depicted athletes, their equipment and their concerns. I was in that museum in late 2009 researching for The Boy with Two Heads and I took these photos. 

The athlete in the centre of the kylix (a drinking cup) is preparing for a long jump, holding weights to help him go further. I don't have a record of who the male statue is as he is of a later period than I was interested in for my research.

Nike, ancient Greek goddess of victory

The female statue is a modern copy of the flying Victory or Nike that stood on a 10 metre high column near the ramp up to the Temple of Zeus. The remains of the original, made by Paionios in about 421 BC, are in the larger Archaeological Museum nearby.

In May the Olympic Flame will be lit in the precinct known as the Altis, near the site of the most ancient temple still discernable (the Heraion) and about 200 yards from the museum that was raided. There’s a brief but pithy article about this on the Inside The Games website.