Decombustion

Browsing the teenage fiction section of the library the other day,  I came across The Carbon Diaries 2015 by Saci Lloyd.  I borrowed it, planning to read a few pages and then pass it on to my sons (16 and nearly 13) but it proved impossible to rip it from my cold green hands until I’d got to the end.

The novel, as suggested by the title, is set in 2015 when, following storms which have devastated our western coasts, the U.K. is the first nation to bring in carbon rationing.   It is narrated by Laura, a middle class sixth former from Greenwich in South London who plays bass in a straight edge punk band, argues with her parents and elder sister and is falling in love with the boy next door.  The author is a teacher at a sixth form college and knows her environment well, with a few touches (the iPod has mutated into an ePod; a new quasi-anarchist hydro symbol is being scratched onto petrol cars) to remind us that the story is set a few years (but only a few) in the future.  The love story is predictable, Jane Austen’s old favourite, and Laura’s dysfunctional parents distinctly George and Pauline Moleish (is it ever possible for  teenage diaries to avoid echoes of Adrian?)  but these don’t really matter, as the focus is upon the events surrounding the characters rather than their individual characteristics.

The story begins gently, with Mum’s attempts to negotiate the bus, their central heating being turned down and the family’s cuisine morphing from Waitrose ready meals to locally-grown carrots.  Pretty soon, however, we’re into a summer of heatwave and drought, paralysing power outages,  riots, torrential rains and the flooding of large parts of London.  Meanwhile Laura’s cousin reports of the catastrophe wreaked by a hurricane across the western U.S.  and we watch as European riot police strike down climate change protestors from Rome to Brussels.  It’s all very much more than plausible; the virtually inevitable migration of catastrophes that are already taking place in the majority world.

The book, and its sequel, The Carbon Diaries 2017, are to be filmed for the BBC, so there will no doubt be much discussion (and dismissive contempt from the usual ’sceptics’) of  Saci Lloyd’s  not-quite dystopia.  Meanwhile I’ll be interested to see what our boys make of it…

I don’t know why I hadn’t come across it before, but better late… Highly recommended, especially for those days, like today, when all drivers appear to be blithering idiots. I was forced off the road at lunchtime today by a farmer in a 4×4 (glossy Japanese one, not old Defender) pulling a trailer full of horned rams. He overtook me coming up to the (red) traffic lights, then as soon as the car was past me, pulled abruptly into the left so that the trailer swung in behind him. Luckily I was looking out and managed to scramble on to the pavement before my bike and I were crushed between the trailer wheels and the kerb, with the added excitement of being impaled by the horns sticking out between the bars. Ho hum. Yesterday another one (farmer, not ram) drove past as I was waiting to cross the road to the cycle lane, parped his horn, gave a thumbs-up sign and continued driving at seventy miles an hour with his horn playing like an Italian wedding party. Too much carbon monoxide, I guess.

Just a couple of lines to finish off the car hire bit. Russell Howard was surprisingly brilliant, far more substantial in every way (biceps, satire and extraordinary creative energy) than the winsome West Country boy on the box. Highly recommended, if you get the chance to see him live. I took back the car the next day, driving through real snow, which I don’t like, on the country roads and handing over the keys with elated relief. I celebrated with a bowl of sludgy soup and the beginning of Rose Macaulay’s Letters to A Friend (why do I always type ‘fiend’ the first time?) and felt gloriously free. Going home on the bus, after bank & book things in Belfast, was sheer delight; so wonderful to have someone else doing the driving so the only tricky choice is between the book and the iPod.

Talking of books, I’ve just read a wonderful one: The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall. It was published last year, and is set around twenty years in the future, in a post-oil, post-economic collapse Britain. A thrilling story, a bit like a feminist John Wyndham, but very very terrifyingly plausible. Looking it up now, I see that it won several prizes, as did her earlier books. I don’t read very much contemporary writing; am a bit stuck in the middle of last century, but sometimes something gets up and kicks me into the present.

A bit like music, really; it wasn’t until I got the idea of going to Glastonbury next year that I thought I ought to listen to someone who isn’t dead yet. And so to many contented hours wandering around with the Kings of Convenience and Turin Brakes (though I do wish the silent bit in the middle of Rain City could be a bit shorter, it not doing much to while away the drizzling wait at the traffic lights).

Talking of which (quite a little babble of consciousness this morning) I wrote a long email to the entity called Roads Western last month to have a little moan about the woeful pedestrian crossings in Enniskillen. I got a reply the other day, in which they said that pedestrians never have to wait more than two minutes to cross. This may or may not be the case (I need to go out with a stopwatch) but two minutes of standing at the roadside in the pouring rain, watching the cars sweep through the puddles before you, can feel like quite some time. More on this to follow…

Finally, a joyful note. I went to the film club last night (Gerard Depardieu, Quand j’etais un chanteur – beautiful) and walked home by myself under a couple of stars and a space in the clouds with the moon shining through. No one was out, except for a trio of teenage boys, and even the barbed wire outside the Territorial Army was shining. You don’t get that in a car.

I wake up, thinking that I’m either on a train or a ship, and wondering why my bed isn’t moving around. Then I remember. I’m in Lucca, and it’s buying books day. After a comprehensive, included-in-the-price breakfast and a bit more wirelessing I go back over the walls and, by either luck or instinct, certainly not conscious thought, find myself in the little ‘piazzetta’, the open square where the second-hand books and prints are sold. I select a modest eighty-six or so, and airily pack them into my enormous fabric bag. I manage to stagger out of the piazza with something like insouciance, only to collapse on a step round the corner, under the incurious gaze of fifty or sixty American tourists. After a few more false starts, the bag and I work out some sort of modus operandi, and I succeed in lugging it back to my room. Even the fact that the bag is considerably wider than the hotel doors doesn’t faze us for too long, as we come up with the revolutionary scientific principle of turning sideways for a bit.




Piled up on the floor, eighty-six books look like quite a lot, and I package twelve or so up to post back to myself. I’ve looked at the PosteItalia website, and reckon it ought to cost around six euro using the economy service. After a battle of wills between me and the Scotch tape, won by the Scotch tape – something about a Presbyterian upbringing, I expect – I take the packet to the central post office, using the same vaguely divining method by which I found the books in the first place. Alas; the economy service no longer exists, and the parcel will cost thirty-three euro to post; more than it cost me to travel on the sleeper train from Paris. After various discussion of alternatives, none of which help with much except to practice my Italian, I walk out with the parcel under my arm and console myself with a lemon sorbet at a nearby gelateria. It’s a very good sorbet, and I am thoroughly consoled, especially when I get back and find that I do, after all, have room for all eighty-six books, together with the twenty-eight that I go out and buy later in the afternoon. By then the booksellers are all celebrating the birthday of one of them, with a large bottle of bubbly stuff, and I enter into a confused conversation about Delft. It turns out that the confusion is my fault, as my pronunciation of Irlanda sounds to them like Olanda. Insufficiently rolled ‘r’ I think.






After a little more wall-meandering I go back to the rest of the Roquefort. Somehow I don’t feel quite as fond of it as I once did. To improve my Italian listening skills (honest) I watch the Italian version of Deal or No Deal. It’s considerably jollier than I remember the English one to be, with computer-animated characters, contestants from each of the provinces, audience-participation songs with actions, beautiful hand-made boxes with weird things in them and the contestant’s family sitting on a sofa next to her. Tonight’s was unlucky, ending with a choice between 250 euro and a cactus, but 7,000 euro appeared from a small sack, by way of a consolation prize, and a good time was obviously had by all.

I wake up briefly, at about half past four in the morning, as the train groans to a stop and eases itself off again, like an old man cajoling himself up from a park bench. It’s due to stop at Dijon, pass through the Simplon tunnel and call at a few northern Italian towns before Firenze (Florence) and later Rome. I wonder vaguely where we are, and go back to sleep. At seven my alarm goes off, and judging from the houses I can see under the blind, we are definitely in Italy. The train is due into Firenze at 7.15 but we left Paris late when the attendant comes round at half past seven with our passports, he tells me that it will be another half hour before we arrive. Ten minutes later we pull into a station and I glance idly to see the name. Firenze Campo di Marte. Aargghh. Fortunately we have our bags packed and are able to stagger out before the train chugs on to Rome.

From the air alone we would know we were in Italy. It’s still cold, and there is frost on the tracks. We know this cold. For the final seven or eight months that we lived in Italy, we rented a farmhouse in the Mugello, the hills north of the city, and caught the train into this station for Christmas shopping and for G to play rugby. But there’s nothing much to see, other than the pitch, and we catch the next train for the seven minute journey into the central station, Santa Maria Novella. There I fail to find a fornaio to buy plain bread so we breakfast on the leftovers from our French picnic supper – Roquefort, tomatoes and those ubiquitous sandwiched biscuits with chocolate in the middle. To be strictly accurate I have the tomatoes and G had the biscuits, so it isn’t quite as bizarre as it sounds. While G. digests the gastronomic feast, I go for a quick gallop around the city, armed with camera, thus:

When I come back, G. goes to catch his train for Pisa and I wait at the station to meet Timea, the export manager of the Italian publishers Giunti. I’ve dealt with Giunti since we first started our online Italian bookshop (now www.italianbooks.biz ) and Timea has been especially helpful, efficient and friendly. It is the first time we’ve met and we recognize one another immediately. We go to a new Giunti bookshop in Firenze and browse around together – I can’t think of a much better way of getting to know someone, unless it’s indulging in coffee and apricot tart at a corner café, which is what we do next. After that we go out to the Villa Giunti, the firm’s headquarters north of Firenze, towards Fiesole. It’s probably the most beautiful house I’ve ever visited in Italy, with ancient wall-paintings, a light gallery where the art and children’s departments work and a perfect library with huge windows opening on to the olive-strewn hills. I’m mostly lost for words, in any language, but nod as I’m welcomed and shown around with delicate Italian courtesy.

Back in Firenze I buy a ticket for Lucca at one of the automatic machines. It not only gives me the option of buying a ticket within Italy or internationally, suggesting the destination when I type L, U… but tells me the times of the next few trains and asks which I would like to take. The journey, as all Italian train tickets tell you, is 78km long, I have no eligibility for reductions, and have not booked in advance. So the price would be … imagining a similar situation in the U.K…. five euro. The train leaves in half an hour, as I have just missed one by seconds, but is already at the platform and I can get straight on and settle into one of the clean and comfortable seats. Looking around I see that special litter bins are marked inside the carriage for recycling of paper and cans. It’s the sort of detail we imagine in the Netherlands or Germany, but are rightly ashamed to find the laid-back Italians doing these things so much better than we can. The journey is smooth, quiet and quick, and I am soon back in Lucca, where we lived for a year and a half, and to which I cannot stop myself returning.

I’ve booked into the Hotel Rex, this time, next to the station and with precious wireless internet. The Rough Guide is a bit sniffy about it, complaining of a lack of atmosphere, but the staff are all exactly what most of us hope for, friendly and helpful without being pushy, and the rooms spacious and imaginatively furnished.






Mine is a bit dark, being at the back of the hotel looking out on a narrow alley, but we can’t all be at the front, and it is well-lit and a generous size for a single booking. To my mild surprise the wireless internet, which is free, works first time as soon as I get a username and password from reception, and I’m able to catch up with M, who is valiantly holding the fort at home, including snuffly son and missing books.






Later I go out to walk around the broad walls that circle the city, planning to pick up some bread, olives and water to supplement the remaining Roquefort. Distracted by memories, I am confused by a new chldren’s playground and come down from the walls too early, walking around the road for the rest of the way. But if I hadn’t, I would have missed the typical Lucchese sight; a young man cycling, in the chaotic rush hour, along the busy ring road, baby (six months at the most) in a carrier in front of him, while his golden labrador trotted along, also on the road, at the end of a sturdy lead. There are so many ways of travelling about, given a little courage and imagination.