Inspiration all around

Our moving truck in New York City

For those of you who follow my admittedly sporadic blog, you have probably noticed that my family moves a lot. We always hope we'll settle where we land, but so far that hasn't happened. Since I got married I've moved from Cambridge to Yorkshire to Connecticut to New York City to Cumbria to the Cotswolds to Wales. Whew!

Starting over isn't easy, even when you're used to it. My children have all been in school a week and that feels like a relief. They are starting to know their way around and have made a few friends. The worst, I hope, is over.

One nice thing about living in lots of places is the inspiration I've found in each one. Most of my books are set in places I've lived, whether it's my women's fiction such as This Fragile Life (set in New York), my Tales From Goswell series (set in Cumbria) or one of my Christmas novellas such as A Yorkshire Christmas (set--well I'm sure you can guess).

Next month I have a new series coming out set in the English Cotswolds. I only lived there for a year but I was inspired to write about the beautiful village and countryside where I lived, as well as the interesting mix of people--London transplants and old farming families, and how they all managed to get along. A Cotswold Christmas is the first book in what is The Willoughby Close series, set in the entirely-fictional-but-a-little-bit-based-on-reality village, Wychwood-on-Lea. You can preorder it here.

In the meantime, I am trying to get to know my new surroundings, a small, friendly market town in Wales, built between two rivers, with beautiful, hilly countryside all around. Will I become inspired? Watch this space...

The Beauty of The Bath

I once wrote a short story about the different bathrooms, and mainly bathtubs, that a couple had through their married life, and how each bathroom/tub represented a different stage of life. I was inspired by my own life, because in some ways I can track our marriage (and family life) through our bathtubs.

Take the first bathtub we had, in a flat in Cambridge, England. We lived in the top floor of a nineteenth-century vicarage near Newnham College, and the bathtub was a lovely, long, claw-footed masterpiece that invited deep, long, bubbly soaks. Unfortunately, there was only enough hot water to fill it to about two inches. My husband was a theology student, we were ridiculously poor, and this tub pretty much summed up our life. When I became pregnant that year, my husband very kindly would boil kettles of water and pour them into the tub so I could have a bath--one of the only things that helped with my morning sickness. I have memories of sitting in the tub, naked and shivering, in two inches of hot water while my husband hurried to boil kettle after kettle, dear man.

We moved to a college flat the next year, in the top of a bell tower, and this time we had a deep tub and unlimited hot water. Bliss! Plus the bathroom was on a floor above our flat, having to go up eleven twisting, turret stairs, and you couldn't hear a baby crying from it, which was also bliss. My husband would take our squally newborn for an hour while I would lie in the tub and wonder just what we'd taken on. Sometimes I still wonder that.

Next tub was the house of my husband's first curacy. Tiny, olive-green, in a semidetached house in Hull. We had two children and very few baths.

Moving on to America: a decent tub but not extraordinary by any means. Three children, and the bathtub usually saw them all squeezed in there together, water slopping over the sides.

And then New York: no bathtub, but two marble showers. Which sounds far more luxurious than the 1950s box-like apartment was, but at least the kids liked it and one of the showers was a two-person one which meant you could bung them all in there together for a quick evening bath, or rather, shower time.

And finally here, the bathtub in a two hundred year old vicarage. Six feet long, nice and deep, and an immersion heater to make sure you have all the hot water you could ever need. And, quite importantly, a fan in the bathroom that keeps you from hearing the often-incessant knocking on the door, the requests to play a game, mediate an argument, find hockey kit, and/or free up the bathroom for the other six people in the house.

I've been taking a lot of baths here. In winter, I take one almost every night. And no, I don't have a compulsion to be clean. You could say I have a compulsion to sink into deep, hot, bubbly water, sip a glass of wine, and read my book. After a long day working, writing, cooking, cleaning, and managing the lives of five children, a half-hour or so in the bath brings me back to a good and peaceful place. And, as a bonus, it keeps me warm! Even with new windows our house can be a bit draughty (but that's a whole other post) and I love going to bed with my skin still lightly steaming.

You could say my bath is my guilty pleasure, but I don't feel remotely guilty about it.

My Love Affair with the Aga

I'm not sure when I started fantasising about having an Aga. For those of you who have not seen one before, an Aga is a cooking range that looks like this:

I won't go into the technology behind the Aga, because I don't really know it. What I know is this: it runs all the time, so it is always warm and your kitchen is always warm. There are, on the large Aga as pictured above, four different ovens, each one at a different temperature--one for baking, one for roasting, one for warming and one for simmering. The hotplates also have different temperatures on different area of the hotplate--hotter in the centre and cooler on the outside.

The other thing I know about Agas is they are very expensive. A large new one cost in the region of £12,000 ($20,000) which is frankly a ridiculous amount of money to pay for a cooker. A refurbished one is £5000-£7000. So I pretty much understood an Aga was and would always be out of our price range. Even if we could afford it, I would have trouble justifying spending that amount of money on an appliance.

So imagine my stunned delight when I found out the Vicarage came with a Rayburn, which is like an Aga except slightly different (don't ask me how, they look the same!). I couldn't believe I was actually going to move into a 200 year old house with an AGA, or at least an Aga-like Rayburn.

Here is ours, with the prerequisite puppy in front of it. (She is now 3 years old.)

I soon discovered that cooking on a Rayburn was tricky, and running it all the time when it is fuelled by oil is disastrously expensive. We had a little digital meter in our kitchen that counted down the amount of oil in the tank outside from 9 to 1, when it started blinking a red light. Every morning I came into the kitchen and glanced at that meter in trepidation, willing it not to have gone down a number. In the coldest part of winter it went down once a week, which was extremely stress-inducing.

We ended up having to turn the Rayburn off unless we were using it which meant a.) The kitchen is not all warm and cozy b.) It took 20-30 minutes for the oven or hotplate to become remotely warm. So spontaneous baking or cooking was not in the cards.

However, I still loved it. Because there is just something so cozy and welcoming about a Rayburn or Aga, even when they're off and stone-cold. It doesn't make sense, and some people hate them, but...! I was insistent on keeping ours.

Until it broke. And broke again. And kept breaking, with the only Rayburn repairman in the entire country living an hour and a half away and leaving the kitchen covered in soot and oil when he fixed it. [Repairmen don't seem to feel a need to clean up after themselves here, I've noticed]. And then the Rayburn broke at 10 pm on Christmas Eve, and my love for our cooker was sorely tested. We ended up cooking for three months on a portable stove that was kept in the pantry. And then we ended up getting rid of the Rayburn, because fixing it was going to cost thousands of pounds and it just wasn't worth it, no matter how much I loved the idea of them.

So now we have the best possible alternative: an electric oven/gas stove that LOOKS like an Aga. Sort of. And it cooks quickly and has four ovens and eight burners, and well, I'm happy, even if I still hanker after the real thing.

So instead of cooking on an Aga, I write about them. Every book I've written that takes place in Cumbria has an Aga in it, and Rainy Day Sisters (see post below) even has one on its cover. Because I still love them. I just don't want one anymore. At least, not much.

The Joys of Living in a Small Place

The other day I went to our little village library to sheepishly return several books that were--cough, cough--two months overdue. In New York, when I once returned a book that had been lost under a child's bed, I was told by a stony-faced librarian that I owed over forty dollars in fines. And even if I bought the book, I *still* had to pay the fines. That, I tell you, was a racket. (Confession time: I returned the book, said I would pay the fines on my next visit, and never went back. At that point I knew I was moving to England.)

Another time, in Connecticut, I saw a sign that said, for one day only, if you donated canned goods for the food bank your library fines would be wiped clean. I approached the desk with some trepidation--the librarians in Connecticut were a fearsome bunch--and presented my box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese as well as some tinned tomatoes. The librarian looked up my account on her computer and with her eyes narrowing and her mouth going tight, she informed me that I owed over fifty dollars in fines. "But the food drive..." I began in hesitant hope, and she had no choice but to wipe the fines clean. She clearly was not happy about it.

In my little village here, my experience was a bit different. I approached the desk with my three overdue books, resigned to paying the 20p a day fine times three, times sixty days... a fairly significant amount of money, but I recognised it was my fault and I was ready to pay. The librarian looked up my account, frowning. "Did you know your books were overdue?" she asked and I hung my head. "Yes, I did," I said. Her frown deepened and then she said, "Oh, but there have been building works going on all summer, haven't there? And you with your little baby... you must have had trouble getting around to the library." I admitted, hesitantly, uncertainly, that I had. She smiled and said, "Well, I'll take those fines off your account then. You've nothing to worry about, Mrs. Swartz." And then she started chatting to my five-year-old daughter about her books.

I walked out of the library thinking how much I loved living somewhere where, to evoke the television show Cheers, everyone knows your name--and your situation.