The International Archaeology Conference

While the political world was rocked by the surprise revelation that Gordon Brown is actually a normal human who hates having to talk to plebs in the street (thank the invention of radio mics and incompetent aides for that story) I was busy dealing with a far more important issue: a delivery of 20 tons of gravel for my driveway. There’s now a small mountain of tiny stones in front of the house, which means we have to leave one of the cars on the street until I get the strength to rake it level. This could take me several days, meaning that the car has to stay on the road all that time. And Gordon Brown thinks he has problems?

The novel edits are progressing steadily. The massive historical revelation in the book is something that Ruby has to present to her sceptical and bearded peers at the International Archaeology Conference. I made up the existence of this conference, although I’m pretty sure most male archaeologists enjoy extravagant facial sproutings. Ruby is guarded by Guatemalan agents so she can’t escape even though she’s giving a talk to hundreds of academics.

Right now I’m now editing the chapter in which American special forces try to snatch Ruby away from that conference at a venue in Marseille, right under the noses of her Guatemalan guards. I love this scene because the special forces soldiers arrive pretending to be archaeologists. Their crew cuts, clean shaven faces and complete ignorance of history and archaeology make them stand out a mile, totally undermining their attempts to blend in with the other attendees. One of them is asked an archaeological question that he’s so unprepared to answer that he simply reaches for his gun.

I bet Gordon Brown would love to have the option of whipping out a Beretta whenever he didn’t like the tone of a voter’s line of questioning. It would certainly liven up those political walkabouts.

Election day looms

So the UK General Election is set for 6^th May. Judging by the hyped-up newscasters on Sky we’ll all feel politically burned out within a few days. No one can last a month of this stuff. It’s not like the good old days when the parties were separated by policies and values that made for a good scrap on the telly: the only arguments I heard today were that David Cameron had a privileged background (shock horror); Gordon Brown has ‘gravitas’ (although he can lose that if he visits the gym more often); and the Other One can sometimes argue passionately about Stuff. But no one knows quite what Stuff that would be. Looks like we in the UK, and those of us soon to be returning to it, are in for a month of luke warm debate about which party leader has the best haircut, the prettiest wife and the good sense to be born of a father who hadn’t been too much of a financial success.

At least I won’t need to pay too much attention to it all. I already know where my vote is going, which means I can focus on my novel for the rest of the month. Well, that and getting the back garden ready for barbecues on the off-chance that we get one or two days without torrential rain this ‘summer’. Today was a hot one in volcano-land, so I made sure I wore my jeans and jacket to keep the sun off me. Things started off with me driving with my Brazilian missus in a German car to eat an American breakfast in an Irish restaurant in a Spanish marina development a hundred miles from Western Sahara. After that things settled down a little, and I studied some more Mayan glyphs and continued to avoid the overly-enthusiastic sunshine.

In the evening I found an English language bookshop and browsed around its limited offerings. Most of its stock was second-hand, brought to this island by tourists who would read their Mills and Boon romantic novels and then trade them in for something else in this shop. The best thing about this place was that it stocked two second hand Summersdale books: Downhill all the Way by Edward Enfield, and Mañana Mañana by Peter Kerr. It was nice to see a book that I had been involved with so far from home (I worked on the cover design for the latter title). Keen to spread the word about our excellent travel books I bought the Peter Kerr memoir in order to leave it behind at the villa for the next tenants to enjoy. I hope that one day copies of The Sphinx Scrolls will find their way to remote parts of the world like this…