Earlier this month I was a guest at the Brussels Festival of Fantastic Fiction, which turned out to be a noteworthy experience. Not least because I found out what disgusting and quite repellent things Belgian and French people can do to perfectly good or at least innocent tea, of which more later. But first let me tell you of the Film Festival at which I was also a guest.
Somehow (and I'm still not sure why or how) I was suckered into making a stage appearance before an auditorium of 800 people already impatient to see a film premiere. Slightly baffled by my own presence there I waited in the wings as the nervous compere went on stage to be greeted by a demonic jeering and booing from all quarters of the auditorium. It seems that the Brussels film audience (regulars at this festival) don't in the slightest enjoy an intellectual resume offered before the film and they let the organisers know in the traditional manner. Beyond that the programme was running an hour late. Then, into this howling auditorium, some obscure bloke from England called Graham Joyce was introduced.
Why?
Dunno. But…
Now the Belgians are very polite people. They don't mind booing their own, but it was while I was thinking >this is such a bad idea< that they broke into rapturous applause of unnerving enthusiasm. I lifted the microphone to my lips and they applauded even harder. I tried my best to mumble a few words and they went into a state of noisy ecstasy. I got the idea and handed the microphone back to the compere, whereupon they cheered louder still. It was the first time I've ever been >ejected< from a stage by the obscure but effective method of unearned approbation. Eight hundred Belgians taking the piss, that's something.
The film premiere was The Gift, and the audience was incredible. Sophisticated movie-buffs, they critiqued the film instantly and noisily. Every visual cliché (and The Gift suffers terribly from this) was greeted with an eight-hundred-strong chorus of abusive sound-effects. The full moon behind scudding clouds elicited eight hundred lone wolf howls. A lousy and gratuitous love scene induced a kind of wet slurping on the backs of eight-hundred hands. A tap dripping blood provoked eight-hundred glooping noises.
This film's famous director would not want to have been there. When the film is good, I was assured, you can hear the fabled pin not just drop but judder as it embeds in the deep pile carpet. See, Sam Raimi, I can do crap sound effects, too.
But back to the subject of tea. Now it is often remarked that you can get anything you want in America with the exception of a good cup of tea, and this is perfectly true. In America, after you've negotiated the tea-bag-on-a-tampon-string fiasco and made it contact with pointlessly lukewarm water in a hideous stainless-steel spittoon-type pot you tip the excrescence into the nearest plant and settle for coffee. Same >on the continent< of Europe as we little-Englanders might say.
Imagine my delight then, on finding out that my wonderful host Sarah Doke was an avid tea-drinker. The delight was doubled when I met my brilliant French translators Michel Pagel (The Tooth Fairy)and Michelle Charrier (Indigo) both charming and sympathetic, who also claimed to be tea drinkers. Not only that but the company was joined by the hugely talented French author Mélanie Fazi, yet another connoisseur (so it was claimed) of the cup which refreshes but not inebriates.
But God help us! No sooner had we returned to Sarah's comfortable Brussels apartment than I was offered tea, with a sweeping gesture indicating a rather chilly and ugly piece of pottery perched on a low table. A joke, methought. Un jeu. Une plaisanterie. A bit of the old-style Brussels buffoonery, like at the film festival. Not a bit of it. These otherwise civilised, sophisticated and hugely talented people were actually proposing that we drink the wretched stuff not just >cold< but bloody well >stewed<. I took the lid off the pot and peered in at the vile syrup congealing in the bottom of the pot, where it looked like something craftsy people might use in a putatively authentic process of batik-dying.
Perhaps I gave myself away with the flicker of an English eyebrow, but when I proposed that tea should be drunk hot, the proposed solution was to stand the damned jug on the radiator for a few minutes. Failing that, it was suggested, the by-now pernicious brew could be revamped in the microwave.
British people reading this will be wondering why, at this point, I didn't simply make my excuses and board the next Eurostar shuttle home. But the above company was in every other sense perfectly normal, intelligent and hospitable; even a delight to be with. Besides which I had to appear on a panel with my translators the following day, so I attempted to educate instead. Vanity. One of the heathens even challenged me as to how I knew microwaved stewed tea was no good when I'd never tried it. I'm all for talk of the European Union until this sort of thing happens.
Fortunately, they make good coffee.
But the debacle of the tea aside, it was great to meet my translators, and I am in awe of their talents. Michel Pagel was to put to translate The Tooth Fairy when the French equivalent of this mythological figure is a small mouse; and when the word fairy is designated female, my gender-switching fairy notwithstanding. Meanwhile Michelle Charrier led a conversation in which she tried to explain to me an unusual perversion in which Minis (as in the motor car) often become the object of a rural Frenchman's lust. (Exhaust pipes: don't think about it to long.) Bizarre, yes, but why was this a specifically >rural< fetish I wanted to know. As an Englishman I felt I had a right to be told why the same lust does not grip your average Parisian. Because, Michelle explained patiently, from the rear the Mini might be said to look like a sheep.
Did this lose something in translation, I wondered (and wonder still). And are my books in safe hands? And do we really want to go ahead and join the European Union simply because of the currency advantages?
Meanwhile in May I will attend the WHC convention in Seattle, but before then I plan to be in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where I will no doubt encounter just as many language problems as I did in Brussels. The schedule at the moment is for me to be signing at Dark Delicacies store in LA on Saturday 19 May, then at Borderlands Books in San Francisco some time the following week, and winding up with a signing at the UW Bookstore in Seattle on May 24 before the convention. Please come and say hello. While in the US I will happily drink coffee, but not tea, with anyone.
