Dame Boudicca

It is really nice to be away out in the real world from time to time - at least if it involves working with books and writing (or doing stuff which will make it possible to do so). I went to the Swedish Book Fair in Gothenburg - a gigantic thing with all and everyone in the Swedish publishing world, and then some. The point is to find cheap books, especially those from publishing companies you've never heard of!

And if you have a nice idea for a nice book it might be a good idea to talk to a publisher about it. And shake hands with them you already write for.

Of course I did all of it. I have a suitcase full of books - everything from comics to archaeology reports (I have too many interests, I find too many books I like), shook hands and promised to mail an outline. I was so nervous talking business, but I still think it went well (at least, it obviously did not go wrong!).

Nothing like a migraine to keep you away from the computer for a number of days! Sorry about that - I have them so rarely, why can't I skip them altogether?

Anyhow, this is mostly to say I won't be around much for a while - I'll be going to Germany tomorrow for about ten days. We are supposed to have Internet, so I might post - but I won't promise anything.

See you when I get back, otherwise!

I won't spam you with pictures (if you want that, you can visit me over at LiveJournal). The reason for this is simply that I first and foremost view this as a writing journal.

But there is always room for small exceptions, and I took quite a bunch of nice photos in London - so I'll be giving you a daily high-light. This is my favourite from the first day:
( Photo from 3rd of June )

So I am back in London for a week of fun and games, culture and entertainment. Same hotel, different season and different company. I loved it then, everything is pointing at me loving it just as much this time. And the room is better this time around too (not that it was bad in any way before - but a bathtub is always a bathtub, you know...

This far we have taken it rather easy, and it has been terribly nice - and not killing in any way. We stumbled into Victoria & Albert so that I could point out some nice samurai armours, and take a bunch of pictures of clothing (better camera this time than last), and visited the Freemasons to have a look around - and my boyfriend bought a cute teddy-bear complete with apron! We resisted the Masonic gift-wrapping paper though.

Of course we have gone shopping, no surprise there, and it is already time for me to start wondering about how I will get everything back with me. And we have eaten very well indeed. There are a bunch of nice restaurants just around the bend from where we are staying (Earl's court, South Kensington, btw), and today we tried out an extremely genuine Chinese... sorry Taiwanese, restaurant. We were just about the only guests in the vicinity not talking Chinese in some shape or form. And the food was great - a far cry from what you get at home (I had gigantic meat-ball with salted egg yolk).

And now, while my loved one is struggling with the last touches of the comments of a book-manuscript, I will try to get some writing done too!

They say you learn as long as you live (though, I want to know who "they" are - "they" seem to know an awful lot, to say the least). Here are a few examples from the last few days here in Normandy:

¤ Farmers demonstrating can make you get lost in a big city. At least if they are French (I have yet to see a Swedish farmer do that). Their aim was higher pay for their milk, and the method was (apart from going on the free-way with their gigantic tractors which are fast compared to what I'm used to, but not THAT fast) to build road-blocks of manure and old tires. Preferably in the middle of the city - we had a horrible time in Cherbourgh, trying to find the way around, which was impossible when you couldn't go to the city centre. And now and then they put their road-blocks on fire. The smoke was fascinating. The smell somewhat less so...

¤ You can find the most amazing salmon at a small restaurant in the middle of nowhere, in the only restaurant the village had to offer (which says quite a lot, when French villages tend to have a restaurant at every corner).

¤ Frenchmen have a thing for baguettes.

¤ You can't enter Bayeux cathedral without interrupting some kind of service. At least this time it wasn't a funeral but a baptism. It is after all a more cheerful event, and the other plus is that it was quite all right to walk around the church while they were at it. (The kid did not seem to appreciate the drama all that much though, even though the priest did his best to sound cheerful and fun!)

¤ My understanding of French when written is about ten times better than I thought it would be. And you can actually have some use for a French-Swedish dictionary from 1915 (what can I say - it was cheap, and it is small enough to fit my handbag, even though it contains three times as much as a usual tourist-dictionary, thanks to its small print).

¤ Entering a real, small Romanesque church in the French countryside can actually make me feel all warm and happy inside.