Hotel de Polis

Just imagine you're an architect and you've been given a brief to design a hotel with the monumentally boring name of Hotel de Police. What do you do?

Simple.

Have a god-like Adonis straddling the top-floor balcony going around two sides of the building.

Tres magnifique.

Paris in spring

I’ve just finished an enjoyable and very quick stopover in Malaysia where I worked a day at the Australian International School in KL. The students were wonderful and very responsive and after five shows in a day, I slept most of the overnight flight to Paris to wake to a perfect spring day and thousands of french people chain-smoking outside government buildings; young women in high heels fondling obscenely large cheeses in fromagaries; old ladies walking ugly pug dogs down cobblestone lanes; tourist lines snaking around the corner at Notre Dame; and not one French person being rude or unfriendly. If you try and speak their language and make a complete fool of yourself, then without doubt the French will respond with courtesy and passable english. Today’s example was arriving to our hotel at 8.30 in the morning and trying to explain in childish french jibberish that we’d like to leave our baggage here until we’re allowed to check in at the appropriate time. The desk clerk smiled and offered us the keys to an available room. Try doing that at an Australian motel early in the morning.

Fact I didn’t know: Number One

The owners of the huge palm oil plantations in Malaysia release deadly cobras to protect their precious fruit from rats. When it comes time to harvest the crop, the workers wear big boots and long pants and watch where they walk. It’s illegal to kill a cobra. Not sure if it’s equally illegal to be killed by one.

Reader Beware - unrestrained gloating ahead

I've just received in the letterbox, two reprint copies of the my first verse-novel "love, ghosts and nose hair" from UQP, who, being a friendly publisher, always send me copies of every new reprint. I open the book and see that this is the ninth reprint since the original was released in 1996. I'm very pleased and proud. It makes "nose hair" my second-best seller behind "the simple gift" which this year went into it's eleventh reprint.

Not too shabby for books of poetry. Or verse-novels, to be more precise.

And no, I don't really think it means that hundreds of teenagers and adults are storming the doors of bookshops to buy these volumes - I'm sure it's due in a very large part to the support I receive from teachers who order multiple copies for class sets.

A moment while I bow in gratitude to all those teachers.

And now the gloating - I'm pleased the teachers do this because I've always wanted to turn young people onto poetry, and I believe my verse-novels get teenagers interested and excited by poetry. If we want people to gain a love of poetry, it makes sense to get them interested at a very young age - that's why I write what I do and that's why I visit so many schools to conduct performances.

It's the best job in the world.

And while I'm having a break from writing verse-novels at present, while I concentrate on prose, I've no doubt at some stage I'll return and begin my eleventh verse-novel.

Actually, (whisper whisper) I'm half-way through a verse-novel for children - it's just having a nap in my bottom drawer at present.

melbourne and steak tartare

I've just returned from a wonderful five days in melbourne where I visited too many schools to name (on average three a day) and ate copious amounts of french food at a restaurant within walking... stumbling... distance of my B&B in Richmond. All the waiters spoke french, the cook regularly walked outside to have a cigarette, and I got to eat Steak Tartare, which tasted like raw steak with eggs and spices, which it is!

I hastily add that this dish was ordered by Hilary, my editor at Allen & Unwin - a brave soul willing to tackle not only piles of raw meat but pages of my next poorly-written manuscript! My publisher, Sue and I wisely ordered food that had seen a stove.

Over creme brulee, We discussed the possibilities for my "verse-novel that never was" black painted fingernails. It's now a prose fiction I am enormously excited about - I can't wait to do another (hopefully final!) rewrite - it should be out in 2011.

The other highlight of Melbourne was spending time with my son Joe and his girlfriend Natalie who were having a last holiday week before returning to University. What did they do? Hung out in cafes, went to galleries, visited lots of bars, and drank wine on the backdeck of the B&B... and made me wish I was twenty years old again.