Oh we do like to be beside the seaside

This fairly eclectic post was prompted by me reading a book featuring an early 19th century English protaganist referring to "the ocean".

Thing the first: my readerly reaction

From a readerly point of view, well, I noticed it. Nothing more than that really. But to me - as a born and bred Brit - that doesn't sound English. I hesitated briefly, then moved on.

I should emphasise that this is not a complaint. This is not me saying I am British and therefore am the ultimate arbiter of how English people in the nineteenth century spoke. I'm sure there are many many other people who have never set foot in Britain who have a better understanding of standard 19th century spoken language than I do. But it's fascinating to me because it's an example of the complexities of how readers filter what they read. How every bit of your experience goes into reading the words on the page.

Thing the second: my take on this

But why doesn't it sound right to me?

The reason is that British people talk about The Sea. Not the ocean (*prepares self for contradictory comments*).

Here's an (solitary and unscientific) example from Persuasion by Jane Austen:

The party from Uppercross passing down by the now deserted
and melancholy looking rooms, and still descending, soon found themselves
on the sea-shore; and lingering only, as all must linger and gaze
on a first return to the sea, who ever deserved to look on it at all,
proceeded towards the Cobb, equally their object in itself
and on Captain Wentworth's account: for in a small house,
near the foot of an old pier of unknown date, were the Harvilles settled.

Why should it be that Brits always talk about the sea? Well, if you look at the map of Britain above, you will note the following:

• Britain has a long and convoluted coastline
• You are never very far from the sea
• Britain has the North Sea to the north and east and the Irish sea to the West
• Between the English coast and France there is the narrow English Channel
• Ireland stands between mainland Britain and the Atlantic ocean for the most part
• Britain is an island but with many near neighbours: France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden.

We have a lot of coastline, a lot of sea. But when I stand on a British beach (or, more properly, when I stand on any beach, as a Brit) I don't look out thinking of thousands and thousands of miles of unending ocean. I think of the lands beyond mine; over there.

Thing the third: some of my favourite beaches

Here are three British beaches that are special to me. There are many more...

Robin Hood's Bay

I couldn't find a photo that really did this special place justice. I wanted to show the breadth of the beach and the old cobblestoned-clifftumbling--fishingboat-village. This was the best I could do but it's much more beautiful than this. It's also close to Whitby Bay, famous for being the place of disembarkation of Dracula - and also for Whitby jet.

Mr T and had a very nice weekend here a decade ago for Mr T's birthday. We camped in Robin Hood's Bay (nowhere near Nottingham if you're wondering - it's in North Yorkshire) and walked from there to Whitby where we had what a good Scot would call a Fish Tea (fish & chips and bread & butter and tea) in the Magpie Cafe. We got the bus back to our tent and drank champagne as the sun set.

Bamburgh Castle

This is Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland. It's a good mid-point meeting place for us with Mr T's family who live in South Yorkshire. We will usually meet them here at least once each summer. Beach games and sandcastles and ice-creams and BBQs on the beach. And, this being Britain, lots of cardigans.

Gairloch beach

Another Mr and Mrs T campsite! This one is in the very north of Scotland and we camped here many years ago - when we were still students in fact. We borrowed an hilarious and very old tent from Mr T's uncle. It didn't have any inner tent or tent poles - instead it had these weird tubes that you filled with air that formed the structure. We were in fits while we were putting it up. Mr T - who has flights of fancy - insisted that we would go to the nearby harbour and buy a lobster from a fisherman. I - being sceptical - laughed at his belief that we would meet a salty old seadog selling his wares on the harbour. But there was a boat and it did have a lobster - though a very sad looking one. It didn't quite fit in the Trangia and the lobster's claw tapped gruesomely on the side of the pot all through the cooking of it.

I couldn't eat it.

Thing the fourth and last: beaches in romance novels

With all this talk of beaches, I've found myself trying to think of romance novels that feature the sea. Not High Seas novels/ pirate novels, but novels with a bit of sea and/or sand in there somewhere. I've already mentioned Persuasion. I also find myself thinking of Devil's Cub in which the wonderfully wicked Vidal kidnaps Mary Challoner and takes her across the Channel to France, thus ruining her. While on board, Mary shoots Vidal, thus leading the way for many other gun-toting romance heroines.

Mary Balogh has lots of nature in her books and there are some beaches in there: Simply Love which is set on the Welsh coast springs to mind, as does One Night for Love in which the unconventional heroine shocks everyone by taking off her shoes and stockings.

One Week As Lovers by Victoria Dahl is mostly set in a coastal area with some key scenes taking place on beaches.

Anything for You by Sarah Mayberry has surfer protaganists.

Charlotte Lamb wrote a lot of books with beach settings. Compulsion is set in the Caribbean - the heroine is living in a silken trap, unaware (in the Nelsonian sense it might be said) that her fiancee is an organised crime boss, till the hero arrives to burst her bubble. It has a strong theme of sexual awakening that is mirrored neatly in the setting and the heroine's need to see that her Eden is something much more sinister; shades of Sleeping Beauty too. Duel of Desire is partly set in Southern France - the hero finally breaks through his engaged secretary's cool reserve when they end up stranded together (a sun-drenched version of my much-loved snow-in plotline). And I can think of at least two novels, Savage Surrender and The Long Surrender (though I suspect there are more) that have high-conflict beach honeymoons (cue lots of suncream action and feeling exposed in bikinis - you get the idea).

These are the off-the-top-of-my-head ones - I suspect I could think of many many more if I put my mind to it.

Do you have any favourite beach-or-sea-set books?

What's it all about ....

... Alfie?



I know I'm a big hunk o' cheese, but I love this song - it's full of great questions:

What's it all about?

Is it just for the moment we live?

Are we meant to take more than we give?

Or - are we meant to be kind?

The much underrated quality of likeability

I've already waxed lyrical about Sarah Mayberry. For my money, she's the best writer of contemporary romance I've ever read, bar none. The cornerstones of her strong satisfying stories are believable characters and relateable conflict. Part of me wishes she'd write something longer than her standard categories just so I could get more in one reading but then I'd have to wait longer between books and that would be awful. So, as long as she keeps writing, I'll be happy.

Initially, I thought Her Best Friend was going to disappoint me. I read the first couple of chapters and didn't feel hooked. But then I picked it up again and suddenly I was into it. It was just a slower burner getting started than some of her others.

This is a friends-to-lovers book, a trope I used to hate until I read Anything for You by Mayberry. Why did I hate such a favourite romance plot? On reflection, I think it's because the friends-to-lovers books I'd read before had failed to convince me about the underlying friendship. This is where Mayberry excels. You really believe in the pre-existing relationship and when her characters worry, for example, that if they get together they'll lose that friendship, it feels like a valid concern rather than just, well, made-up-shit.

Her Best Friend has another angle beyond friends-to-lovers though. As well as Amy the heroine and Quinn the hero, we have Lisa - Quinn's soon to be ex-wife and Amy's friend. The three of them had been friends at school with Lisa and Quinn getting together in their mid-teens and eventually marrying. So Amy and Quinn don't just have to develop from friends to lovers, they have to do so in the face of all that history.

When the book opens, Amy has just fulfilled a lifelong ambition by verbally closing a deal on a derelict cinema her grandfather had built and that she wants to restore. However, another developer wants the site and it looks as though the Council is going to welch on the deal. Reluctantly, she decides to call Lisa for advice. She's spent a year and a half avoiding Lisa and Quinn. Having been in love with Quinn for 16 years, she had finally decided that she needed to remove herself from his and Lisa's lives and get on with her own life. However, when she calls, she gets Quinn rather than Lisa. He gives her some advice but doesn't immediately tell her that he and Lisa split a year previously. Instead, he takes some leave and goes to his old home town to help Amy some more with the legal situation, and then with the actual restoration.

When Amy discovers that Quinn and Lisa have split, she feels torn. She's excited at the thought that he is available, a little guilty that she's having those thoughts and bothered that her hard-worn equilibrium is going to be upset again, when she's worked so hard to create distance between them. Overriding all of these reactions, though, are her strong feelings of love and friendship for Quinn. It's the same with Quinn - his primary reaction to Amy is one of caring affection with all the complications and comforts of a longstanding and deep friendship.

Mayberry does a good job of showing how the sexual attraction Quinn is experiencing around Amy feels - not wrong as such - I'm struggling to find the right word here, maybe, exploitative? There's a scene where he walks in on her while she's taking her top off. He pauses to watch for a few seconds before he backs away, undetected. He then spends the next few minutes pondering whether to 'fess up before uncomfortably deciding not to. The thing I liked about that scene was that it showed not only that their existing relationship was based on honesty and trust but also how uncomfortable Quinn felt when that was compromised. A mild little bit of voyeurism (the sort of scene a typical romance hero might well exploit to the full) becomes a neat illustration of how sex really will threaten the cornerstones of their friendship. Amy and Quinn both realise that sex will change everything between them and their carefulness with each other around this felt like believable behaviour in her hands.

I was relieved that Mayberry didn't resort to painting Lisa (who cheated on Quinn) as a villain. Lisa has her faults but she is a fully three dimensional character and someone Amy cares about and likes. However, she is not someone Amy is prepared to sacrifice her happiness over needlessly. While Amy cares about how Lisa will feel about her and Quinn getting together, Lisa's reaction isn't an insurmountable obstacle for Amy. It was refreshing not to have the musty old chestnut of I can't get together with X because of Y, even though their relationship is over. I'm not a fan of black and white thinking in protaganists so I greatly appreciated that this dilemma was not presented as complete obstacle that is then overcome right at the end by some sleight of hand.

And finally a word about likeable heroes.

I love my tortured Regency rakes, I really do. But it is refreshing to see a depiction of a hero who is kind, fair and non superhuman, just a very real, relateable person. Reading Quinn, it occurred to me what an underrated skill it is, to write a likeable character, particularly a romance hero. Arguably, tortured heroes are easier. If you have a hero who's all secretly traumatised and cold and distant, you can get away with having him act unemotionally/ appallingly all the way through the book, creating shedloads of conflict and then sort it all out with a big redeem near the end. How many times have you read that particular cliche? Hundreds in my case (and I love it, I do - I'm not dissing it!) but it's also satisfying seeing a hero be consistent and rational and thoughtful in a way that feels believeable and true. And actually, that's a quality I think I need to see in contemps more than in other genres.

And I know I said that that was my final point but I can't close without mentioning how much I loved the drunken and pillow-biting declaration scene.

If I was going to be picky, I'd have to say that Her Best Friend didn't quite reach the high watermark of Anything For You for me, but it really was a thoroughly likeable read.

Can you think of any memorable likeable heroes I should check out?

Pros and cons of a pretty good read

I liked this book, overall. First, a summary, then a quick lowdown of what I liked and what didn't work so well for me.

Summary: Emma is a young woman who is masquerading as a widowed peeress in Regency London. Her aim is to amass a modest fortune to invest and provide her with an independent living. The Duke of Somerhart (Hart) has a reputation for being cold and ruthless and controlling, having re-drawn his own character after a humiliating episode is his youth. When the two meet, they are helplessly drawn to one another, despite seeing the other as a danger - in Hart's case to all he has achieved and in Emma's case, to all she wants to achieve.

Here's the lowdown, pros and cons-wise:

The Pros

1. Nice prose. Dahl can write.

2. Interesting heroine. Might be criticised as anachronistic by some but there is a reason given (she grew up in her debauched father's home seeing adults behaving appallingly). Emma is very far from risk averse. She is reckless, she gambles, she drinks and she feels lust.

3. Hero with a humiliation in his past. Echoes of Black Silk here. I quite like the idea of a hero who's had to overcome being a laughingstock.

4. Good sex scenes - Dahl writes hot-ish scenes but not in a way that feels out of step with the period (for me - there's a good chance others will disagree).

The Cons

1. The book lost its tension for a while in the middle. There were a few chapters that felt flabby and as though they weren't really advancing the story.

2. (This was my major irritation) Emma's resistance to Hart went on far too long and for reasons that felt unconvincing. There came a point when I felt the conflict between Emma and Hart had been exhausted already and then, in the last tenth of book, we had to go through it all again. Felt rather like flogging a dead horse.

3. Emma felt too mature for her age to me. We discover at one point that she is only 19 but she behaves at least five years older. There was no hint whatsoever of her relative youth. Her thinking, her behaviour, her outlook on life - everything felt older to me. I almost had to edit this out. (Feel free to disagree and cite period at me etc. It won't change the fact that this *feels* off for me.)

So that's A Rake's Guide to Pleasure in a nutshell. Overall, it's a win and I think I'll try a Dahl contemporary to see if I like her in that genre better. I suspect I may. Reccs?

Friday music: how has it taken me so long....

.... to post a Beatles video?

This is one of my favourite Beatles songs and I love this proto-music-video in all its delightful amateur-ish-ness. There are so many things to enjoy about it.



Also, George Harrison at this time, with that hair, that moustache, that beard, is just so scrumptious to me.

I am so very very predictable. It's sad, really.

What's with....?

1. ...all these heroines who cry when they have sex with the hero?

Am I the only reader who finds weeping during sex a bit weird? If a man cried when he had sex with me I'd be sprinting out of bed pretty damn quick, I can tell you. And most men I know would be seriously freaked out by such behaviour from a woman.

Also, is it just me, or is this particular sort of scene only made worse when the hero is all tender and tear-wipey?

2. ...all these heroes (with a nod to JessicaRRR's latest post) who find the pregnant heroine incredibly sexy because she has his "seed" in her womb?

Am I the only one around here who finds the juxtaposition between "she's hot" and "my unborn child is in there" a bit .... o_O? I mean, the two things are fine, it's just the connection that makes me goggle a bit.

Ok, I'm done.

Random musings from Casa Tumperkin

1. It's May and despite the freezing bloody cold, things feel a bit less wintry thanks to the sudden appearance of blossom. Still, snow is forecast for the Highlands tomorrow.

2. The UK General Election was on Thursday, but we still don't have a new government. Various options are being hotly debated and we wait. It's been a strange election. I was 22 during the 1997 election. I watched the results of that election emerge in my (now) husband's tiny flat in Chester drinking wine and cheering every Labour win. There was an such an optimistic feel about that election and its aftermath. Thirteen years later, things are very different. I watched these results without the wine and the cheering.

3. Funnily enough, my husband was living in Chester in 1997 because he spent 2 years working in Wales. While we were watching the news earlier about the oil spill on the US coast, he reminded me that while he was doing his first stint in South West Wales, the Sea Empress ran aground in Milford Haven. When he said to me tonight, it was weird - the sea wasn't behaving like the sea, I could remember him saying those words to me all those years ago.

4. On a cheerier note, it was the school fair today. I did a stint on one of the stalls and made muffins and rocky road for the home baking room. It was lovely. Before I had children I was such a misery about community-spirited activities but today had a fantastic feel of mutual support and collective fun. And my kids had a tremendous time.

5. As I type this, we're watching a Bollywood music channel and thoroughly enjoying it. It's taking me forever to write this post cos me as Mr T and I keep chatting and I keep forgetting what I'm doing. Right now, an extremely handsome Indian man is doing a sort of wedding dance. He looks like a romance hero and he's all in black. The backing singers are in every imaginable colour. It's distracting.

6. My three year old has quite suddenly decided to be crazy about muskateers. Tonight, he went to bed with a grubby blue plastic golf club (which, to him, is a rapier) and a cowboy hat with a peacock feather sellotaped to it (the feather was a lucky find at his great grandma's nursing home. I knew it would come in handy one day). He keeps saying he wants a muskateer vest. (I know, mummy! We'll go and buy one in the shop!) He has that three year old belief in shops being able to provide the exact and very thing he desires.

7. Tonight, after I put him to bed, I lay next to him, chatting. Or rather listening to him chat. It was quite a weird monologue about his wee pal from nursery. His hair was all soft from the bath and his face was all shiny and luminous in the way that children's faces are, like they're lit by something inside. And his profile still has that gorgeous little-kid-ness to it, like a Peanuts character, with a little Peanuts nose and round cheeks. And his wee teeth all white when he grins, all cheeky. Looking at him just feels like infatuation. I always knew I'd love my kids when I had them, but I never realised how much in-the-moment delight I would feel just being with them. It's not always like that, but maybe it's all the better for that.

I hope you're having a nice week?

My Anne Stuart glom leads me to make plea

I need your recommendations - see below.

Despite the ugliness of this cover (and you have to see it in the flesh to fully appreciate its horror), I am enjoying this new glom. As previously reported, it started with a more than decent anthology read. Since then, I've read an historical, The Devil's Waltz, which I enjoyed and a fab (and quite old - 1991) category called Lazarus Rising. I then started another category of a similar vintage that looks as though it may turn out to be a DNF (The Right Man - a third of the way through the heroine turned into her auntie 50 years ago by putting on her wedding dress - Stuart kind of lost me right there). Having set that aside, I am now reading Blue Sage, a contemp (in 1987) Western.

Some observations and questions:

1. I am loving the quirky and difficult set ups I've encountered. In Lazarus Rising, the heroine saw the hero 'die' only to meet him again 10 years later. In Blue Sage, the hero is the son of a man who went crazy and shot 16 people in a small town 16 years before the book is set. The heroine is the only survivor of the shooting. Although these books are two decades old, these set ups feel very fresh and interesting to me.

2. So far, every Stuart heroine I've read (apart from the anthology heroine actually) is tall and lean. Also, I'm noticing the heroines are all older (30s) and inexperienced/ virgin. The heroes are brimming over with experience yet find the lack thereof in the heroines 'erotic'. (This is always something I find difficult to buy in romances despite its ever-presentness in the genre). Are these tall, lean, relatively mature and relatively sexually innocent women typical Stuart fare or have I just picked a few examples of this coincidentally?

3. She also seems to often feature beautiful man/ less beautiful woman pairing. Fair?

4. And the men are quite immoral really. I enjoyed Lazarus greatly but struggled with some of the hero's I-may-have-to-kill-this-persky-woman POV. I coped with this basically by ignoring it and even tortuously interpreting some of his internal narrative. Sometimes I do this when I'm enjoying a book. Is this weird? Or even sinister?

Please share your Anne Stuart knowledge with me - on all/any of the above and on any other things I haven't noticed - I want to know! And please also - given the sheer size of her backlist - let me have your reccs for your Very Favourite Anne Stuart books. I want to read more; if possible, the cream of the crop.

Thanking you in anticipation,

T

The Perfect Film: a mini-review-cum-paean

The first Pedro Almodovar film I ever saw was Tacones Lejanos (High Heels) in 1991 when I was 18. I was a student and went to see it in the then rather shabby Cameo cinema with my boyfriend, now husband.

I loved it.

Loved the melodrama; loved the incredible music; loved the humour. Loved loved loved Marisa Paredes as the self-involved torch song singer and Victoria Abril - looking small and timid - as her newsreader daughter. I was amazed to later see Victoria Abril in Gauzon Maudit playing a character who was beautiful, vibrant and charismatic. What an actress.

That was the beginning of it. Since then, each new Almodovar film has been a great treat I have richly anticipated. One year on holiday in Spain, I found a fabulous CD of music featured in his films, through which I discovered the likes of La Lupe and Charvela Vargas.

My favourite Almodovar film, though, is streets ahead of all others. It is the superlative Hable Con Ella, his masterpiece. Even the trailer - there are no words, only images and music - is just wonderful.



There are four protagonists: two men (a nurse and a journalist) and two women (a matador and a dancer). The matador and the journalist were in a relationship but she went into a coma when she was gored by a bull. She is admitted to a clinic for coma patients where the nurse works. He cares for the dancer. The two men meet through their love for these two women. We learn about the pasts of all four protagonists. And then: something shocking. Tragedy follows. Then something new and wonderful comes out of the ashes of this.

Why do I love this film? So many reasons.

The story: it is so satisfying. Good is born of bad. And not in a silly coincidental way, but in a way that feels right and true.

The characters: one of the characters behaves in a way that is monstrous, but is still sympathetic. I also love that despite the fact that the men are the real focus of the film, they are depicted (and this is reflected in the title) as a support to the female characters. It's amazing that even in comas, the female leads dominate. Almodovar is obsessed by strong women and his films always feature strong female characters.

The images: the cinematography and the direction are superb. The dance and bull-fighting scenes in particular are stunning

The humour: there's a little film-with-the-film, a seven minute long silent movie that heavily references the Amazing Shrinking Man. Doubly pleasing is the fact that it so neatly mirrors the film's themes and has this incredible warmth and love for women about it.

And finally....

The music: lovely. I particularly love this scene, a flashback to a party the journalist and matador went to together before she was gored. The singer of this beautiful song is Caetano Veloso.