Dreaming Things Up

I haven't got a title yet, which is my natural state, whether for a book or a blog. I was thinking of something chocolate based to draw the reader in but that would be a cop out as there is no chocolate in this blog apart from a (very) brief reference to pistachio chocolate, eaten in the second court of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. Actually, that was it, there, the chocolate reference that is.

It's not about Turkey either, this blog, although I was in Turkey with my Mum after Easter. She is 80 and much better travelled than me, including jaunts with chapel to Welsh speaking Patagonia (I am dying to write the Welsh cowboy - guacho maybe - story in which Butch and Sundance drop in on Mrs Jones' tea rooms in Trelew).

I did get swept away in Istanbul, not literally, although my Mum leaving the boat at Uskudar was in danger of experiencing the Bosphorous rather more completely, and wetly, than is safe.

If any of you haven't been, it is fabulous, especially Aya Sofya which felt like nothing else but stepping into a real, tangible, Holy Roman past. It was so huge, that even among other gawpers, you were alone enough in the gloom with the dark red marble walls that you could imagine Empress Irene or Emperor Justinian, sweeping ahead of you and being one of a crowd of awestruck peasant worshippers, mouth open and eyes wide.

The best thing about it was, one night, sleeping fitfully between the muezzin's calls, I dreamt my new heroine. I have never had the experience of someone come - not quite fully formed - but named and in a kind of action, raring to go and be written into life. Perhaps it's a red herring and she isn't any use at all, we will see. But at the moment I'm in the almost ecstatic rushy state, a bit like love, where I can't stop thinking about her, and I am more than a little afraid to begin writing because after all it will never be as good as it is in my head right now.