The London Eye looks on ...

Part of the view from my seat in the Horse Guards Parade arena

We spent a happy morning yesterday, watching four beach volleyball matches in the rare sunshine. As you can see, the view was spectacular. I doubt there'll be another chance to see it from that angle ever again, as the arena is temporary, and will be dismantled after the Games. 

Beach volleyball never seemed very competitive to me. When I lived in Greece, we spent many happy times on sandy beaches bashing a ball backwards and forwards over a net, rarely forcing our opponents to dive for a save. But it is taken very seriously and is extremely athletic when it is an Olympic sport. The snatches of surfing music that burst out between points, and the exhorting of the crowd to clap and shout Ole! and do Mexican waves, all seem to uphold my original opinion, but the effort and skill of the players cannot be denied.

Photo of the big screen showing a dramatic save

It also occurred to me that this was probably the only sport in the modern Olympics carried out in almost the same physical conditions as boxing and wrestling in the Ancient Olympic Games - a precisely measured rectangle of soft sand under the (blazing?) sun.

However, the umpire does not hold a whip and everyone wears some kind of clothes. Strange that for the women these cover so much less of their bodies than for the men ...

Olympic Games, here I come!

Today I'm travelling down to London for the Olympics. I'm going by car, not by ship, like Themis in The Boy with Two Heads. And it will only take six hours, not six days. 


We have tickets for three events: beach volleyball on Monday ("the hottest tickets in town"), athletics on Friday evening, and trampoline on Saturday (these must be warm tickets, at least!). We decided against boxing, in spite of its relevance to my story. The weather looks dryer there ...

Horse Guards beach volleyball venue

Since I last blogged, Connie has overcome the technical difficulties and up-loaded the e-book of The Boy with Two Heads to Amazon. She decided the price would be £3.99, with a 'free day' sometime soon, when readers will be able to download it for free. I'll blog the date when I know.


Meanwhile, I've been writing the first draft of a new reader manuscript, probably for Cambridge. 

Which is why I haven't been focussed much on my Boy! But he's been selling gently all along, and I did take two days off to go down to London two weeks ago to go round the bookshops near the Olympic Park and in Central London to raise awareness of him. I wore my promotional T-shirt. I hope to have more to say about that when I've had a chance to see if there have been any results. Waterstones' website says he is available to order. Blackwell says he is 'not in stock - our special ordering service will try to obtain this title for you'. At least, they've stopped saying he's only available from the USA!


So now I'm all set to enjoy the Games. We watched the Opening Ceremony on TV last night. The papers are saying it was "a Triumph". Thank you, to Danny Boyle and all the thousands who took part!  It was fascinating to be reminded of the variety of human cultures and styles as the athletes paraded into the stadium. My favourite moment (from among many funny and touching and enthralling ones) was when those 204 copper petals rose up and became a burning flower. The London 2012 'cauldron' was designed by Thomas Heatherwick, truly thinking outside the box. No bowls on sticks for him. Wow!

The Olympic Torch on Midsummer's Day

Almost as soon as I got back from Greece, the Olympic Torch came through Cumbria. Connie of Trifolium Books had arranged for me to do some signings on its route.


The first was at the Wordsworth Bookshop and Coffee House in Penrith. It was sunny and people were out on the forecourt as well as inside at the tables. My thanks to Jon for his careful preparations and for spoiling us with a delicious lunch. 

We moved on to Carlisle to Bookends, where Gwenda Matthews had created a sporty window display with The Boy with Two Heads as the centrepiece (see Connie's blog). There we watched the Torch come through. After many sponsors' vehicles and police cars and bikes had passed, we actually saw one of the handovers when the next runner lights his/her torch from the previous runner's.

There were trampoliners (is that the word?) flying high, taut and graceful, and gymnasts bursting with energy in the pedestrian precinct, and quite a large crowd. 








Next day we were at the Fountain Gallery in Wigton where we were visited by Rory Stewart, the local MP. I signed a copy of The Boy for him and he took one of each of Connie's other books, which are on sale there every day. It was wet, though, and the crowd did not gather until just before the Torch was due. 

The street is narrower than the Carlisle precinct and there were no barriers. 

The outriding police bikes came close enough to the crowd to high-five some of them. Everyone enjoyed that, and there were those who climbed onto the monument for a better view ... The actual run with the Torch seemed to last only a few seconds once all the other vehicles had gone. So a damp but enthusiastic passage.


And our thanks to Beatfords Tearoom in Cockermouth, for our 'pitch' there later in the afternoon. The carnival on Main Street was in full swing when we left, some time before the Torch was due.




[In preparing this posting, I have spent far too long watching the BBC Torch relay site. It really is well done, covers every moment of the whole procession from the first moment until now, and is easy to navigate. There are, of course, long bits of video of the road journeys - rather like some of the videos I make on holiday!]

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.]

Overview of Athens

I have just got back from three weeks in Greece. 

Part of Athens and the Akropolis from Lykavitos Hill

The first few days were spent in Athens, and I climbed the steep rocky hill called Lykavitos in the centre of the city each morning before it got too hot. This hill is mentioned in The Boy with Two Heads four or five times. There is now a small church on top and two restaurants, as well as a modern open air theatre. 

The Panathenaic Stadium, Athens,
from Lykavitos Hill

From the top you can also see the Panathenaic Stadium. It was just a small valley at the beginning of my story in 432BC. The Ancient Greeks turned the valley into a wooden stadium some years later and marble seats were only added 329BC. It was renovated in 1896 for the first modern Olympics. 

The pedestrian crossing where Suzanne is hit by a motorcycle is this one:








I was excited to be back and visiting my old haunts, but the city was strangely quiet as it prepared for the repeat election that took place yesterday. Life has changed drastically since I lived there. No one has the money for frivolities, like eating in tavernas and nipping down to the beach in the car. The people are dispirited and tired. Even hope seemed in short supply.

Talking about the Boy

Painting by Sian Frances of the
Statue of Zeus in his temple at Ancient Olympia

This last week or so I spent a lot of time preparing a talk about the Ancient Olympics (with reference to The Boy with Two Heads) for Adult Learners' Week at Penrith Library. This exhausted me because I was so nervous! Silly, but there we are. I find talking about what I've written myself much more difficult than talking about someone else's work. 
But I seem to be improving. It went OK on Tuesday (even the projector for the powerpoint pictures worked well) and the feedback the Library collected was overwhelmingly positive. People were particularly impressed by the wonderful painting by Sian Frances of the gold and ivory statue of Zeus that features so prominently in The Boy with Two Heads. 

Scraping off the oil
with a strigil
Foundry painter 480BC
Attic red-figure kantharos

They were also intrigued by the fact that the scrapings from naked athlete victors' skin, of olive oil and sweat and dust, was sold after the events as a good luck charm!


And in the midst of the preparation for that, Caroline Robertson interviewed me on Radio Cumbria on Sunday at 11.40 am about The Boy with Two Heads. I was hardly nervous at all! She made it a really pleasant experience. I read the first half-page of The Boy and talked about other books I've written. She was enthusiastic and full of positive energy. She emailed me afterwards and said my reading had been 'a real treat'. Thank you, Caroline!

The Flame is on its way

On the day the Olympic Flame is lit in Olympia in Greece ... 


I have finished reading 'The Secret Olympian' (by Anon) that came out this month, published by Bloomsbury. I can't say I like their You Tube video. They make such a point of protecting his identity that you can hardly understand a word that's said. The sudden flash from one clip to the next is also confusing and irritating. However, the worst thing in my opinion is that they have used a short piece of the same music by Vangelis that I used for my own video. (This is a joke, by the way ... )


From the content of The Secret Olympian (which is much better than the Bloomsbury video), I am guessing that the writer is one of the male competitors in the stadium at the 28th Modern Olympiad in Athens in 2004. It is structured around his diary entries during the months leading up to the Games. It covers the emotional and psychological stresses of taking part in such a huge event, as well as the training, the drug testing, life in the Olympic Village, the aftermath, and other practicalities of competing at that level. It also gives a broader picture in a section on politics and medal retractions. 


There is humour and unabashed emotion. I found it very easy to read in spite of the plentiful, careful detail. I am impressed, and recommend it to anyone who is thinking of starting to train for the Rio Olympics in 2016! 


Sadly, though, I know that many Greeks feel that, much as they enjoyed hosting the Games at the time, the immense bills for what are now empty sports venues have contributed to their present economic problems. 


This must be true, to whatever extent, and that thought leaves a bitterness that cannot be ignored. Life in Greece has become so very hard with more than 11% of people in the cities without jobs or food, many without a home, and even those with jobs paying higher taxes and prices from pay packets that shrink every few weeks. Michael Portillo's documentary on BBC2 last night confirmed what I know from my Athenian family and friends. 


So I can only hope the organisers of Rio 2016 can avoid such pitfalls, and that those in London have already done so.