Back in business

So… here we are. February.

It’s been a busy few months, and I return with my tail between my legs. I think I’ll do a few separate entries, rather than one big behemoth job.

I last wrote in November, when I faced harsh truths about working part-time:
1. You can’t live on a part-time publishing salary in London, no matter how much freelance reviewing you manage to land.

2. If you do work part-time, and your company has use-it-or-lose-it holidays, you have plenty of time, no money, and holidays you must, well, use or lose.

3. Holiday days carry more weight when you’re part-time. If you work a three-day week, nine days of holiday means three weeks off.

I could have just handed them over to The Man, but I was having a lousy time and determined to sit around in my bathrobe and eat discount bonbons in Norf London if it came to it. A girl’s gotta do…

But that would have been grim- my own sugar-laden company can only amuse for so long. Instead, I spent a week toddling around London, seeing the sights, meeting the mates, reading through the stack.

Then, I thought about where else I could go. I had to have accommodation supplied, under the circumstances, so I considered the options, and found myself back in the town of my birth. Very odd to be back, and odder still as I it was the first Thanksgiving in eight years I had in the States.

My cut-price where’s-the-catch? trip took me from Gatwick to Detroit to National Airport. Not Reagan. National. Got it?

At any rate, I spent most of it inhaling a copy of I Served the King of England by Brohumil Hrabal (Vintage, 2005). A slim volume with a decadent, mouldy brown cover sporting a dusty 1920s scene in a plush hotel, waiters, flappers and wealthy gentleman sunk into velvet banquettes, hiding in snugs and dark wood panelling. Hrabal’s was not a name I knew, but Milan Kundera called him the greatest writer in their country. If it’s good enough for Kundera, it’s enough to knock the rest of us sideways. It is essentially a picaresque, but not of the sunny, blond-haired, rosy-cheeked, dirty fingernails variety. The book opens with a young, poor man helping his resourceful grandmother with her rather unusual work: she profits from the profits of others, as visiting salesmen up on their luck toss their old, worn shirts, socks and jocks out the window into a stream. There sit the young man and his grandmother, who wait, heron-like, ready to lift them out, wash, mend and resell them down the ladder of working men. Soon, the boy seeks to come up in the world, and gains employment as a waiter in one of Prague’s old hotels in a day when waitering was a career, and only the observant, the skilled and the discreet could get ahead.

From this unremarkable start opens the most charming, exquisitely-written tale I have read in years. Though it never leaves Prague and surrounds, the boy has an education beyond his wildest dreams, as lush, exotic and glittering as the most colourful travel lit. Hrabal writes sensually, not sexually, about the boy’s first encounters with the garish women who frequent the hotels, as he ‘covers their laps with flowers’. He captures awe surrounding the prime minister’s misleading dinner for three, as the staff twigging with varying speeds to the non-existence of third diner as man and mistress tumble, sweetly into a pergola in the gardens.

There is an air of magic to this book, and though I know that the term ‘magic realism’ can turn people clean off, there is nothing here as blatant as Garcìa Marquez or Angela Carter. It is as if the magic has just left the stage, leaving just a twinkle in its wake. Here, the King of Ethiopa arrives with his full entourage, and a banquet is created the likes of which Bohemia has never seen. The near-orgiastic scene that erupts as the camel stuffed with x, stuffed with y and flavoured with all the spices of the Orient is cut and consumed is loud, sparkling, funny and mesmerising. There are more such scenes, but I won’t spoil it for you. (If you’re interested, another blogger, waggish, has run through it comprehensively)
What’s more, I was so astonished by it, that I threw my copy across the living room in Washington at my father, and left it there, demanding that he read it. Oi, you people who don’t read modern and contemporary fiction – get to it.

As to my time in Washington, it was lovely, filling and all those good things. Met up with the Best Friend, and thinking of happy nights in Addis in King's Cross, introduced her to some first-rate Ethiopian in Addams Morgan, and sampled some fabulous but pricey mojitos. She is muchly missed, but there we are. Also, did some wandering in the Old Country of the outback of North West DC and relearned my driving skills all over again. Relaxing. Not London. Good.