Moving house in Venice is, as you might imagine, a little more “interesting”, shall we say, than moving house anywhere else. Crouching on the back of a boat, ducking under low bridges, trying to reassure an unhappy cat with one hand and to stop some your worldly possessions being swept into the canal by a low-hanging rosemary bush with the other…yes, it was an experience. Mainly a good one, so here’s a few pictures.

 

 

Well, we’re just about settled now, but some of those sprigs of rosemary survived the journey and I thought I should cook something with them to commemorate the occasion. So here’s a recipe for “Removal Risotto”.

Ingredients

Half a medium sized pumpkin, chopped and deseeded

One onion

One clove of garlic

Small stick of celery

Small handful of pine nuts (or chopped walnuts)

1/2 litre of chicken stock (vegetable will do)

Butter and Parmesan (and a parmesan rind if you’ve got one)

150g risotto rice (I’ll leave the variety up to you)

Salt, pepper, some sage leaves, and – ideally – some rosemary plucked from the overhanging bushes of a canal at the precise moment that the boat containing all your worldly goods passed underneath. Or, if you can’t manage that, some rosemary.

Cooking time

I managed to listen to the entirety of Pink Floyd’s “Meddle” and the first side of “Atom Heart Mother”…so about an hour.

Method

1. Make spritz. You know this by now. Set this to one side, but not for too long.
2. Be careful when chopping up the pumpkin – put a towel under the chopping board, use a good sharp knife and mind those fingers. Put the bits (of pumpkin, I hasten to add) in a roasting tin with a good old slug of olive oil, some chopped rosemary and sage, and season and toss with salt and pepper. Cover with foil and put in an oven at 200C for 30 minutes.
3. In the meantime, make a soffrito with the celery, garlic, pine nuts and onion. Add the rice and let it toast for a bit (I’m convinced this really does make a difference).
4. Throw in some vermouth (we didn’t have any so it had to be white wine) and let it sizzle. Then start adding stock and make the risotto in the usual way. At this point I threw in a parmesan rind. I think it added a little savouriness, so – if you have one to hand – I think it’s worth doing.
5. Cook until the risotto is just about done, stir in the roasted pumpkin, mantecare with some chilled butter and grated parmesan, take it off the heat and cover for two minutes. Then give it a good old stir and serve, with plenty of red wine on the side.
6. Just a thought but – a teaspoon of chestnut honey works really well with this. It has to be chestnut, mind – any other kind will make it far too sweet. But that sweet/savoury bitterness of  a chestnut honey will work really well to balance the sweetness of the pumpkin.

So there we go. I’m sure there were more interesting things that could have been done with the sprigs we salvaged, but this is now my “Removal Risotto.”

We’re settling in here. Most things are out of boxes now, we’re meeting people in the area and, I hope, are starting to make friends. Mimi found it a bit distressing at first – she’s not the best of travellers – but she’s settling down now and appreciates having more space for me to throw balls in.

And with that, it’s goodnight from me, and it’s goodnight from Mimì (who, like me, has never had a dishwasher before and is keen to investigate it…)

 

 

 

So, as some of you will know, I’ve just received my author copies of “To Venice With Love.” It’s my first time in trade paperback size, and I think it looks wonderful.

A few words then, on what has changed since “The Venice Project”. Well, the new version brings the story up to date, and has been professionally edited and produced. There’s more background to the story and as to how Caroline and I ended up where we were, a lot of material has been rewritten and about a third of it is completely new. If”The Venice Project” was the rough sketch, “To Venice…” is what I was aiming towards, and what the original book, perhaps, should have been. If nothing else, the new edition has a proper narrative to it instead of feeling like a disparate collection of articles. Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s a charm to “The Venice Project” – if nothing else, it’s absolutely honest – and I’m very grateful to it. But I also hope I’ve learned a few things as a writer since 2013. 

It was interesting and, to be honest, a bit strange to revisit it. After all, the genesis of what I still call “The Project” goes back almost ten years. I suppose we were more than a little naive when we first moved and, yet, here we still are. Caroline is semi-retired, I manage to hold down one-and-a-half jobs (both of which I’m very lucky to have) and, along the way, Mimì joined us for the ride. As I write, we’re surrounded by boxes as we prepare to move house again, and another little adventure begins.

Anyway, initial response to To Venice With Love has been very positive, and very exciting. I’m delighted that Reader’s Digest magazine have made it their non-fiction Book of the Month in their April edition. Readers of the Sunday Times will be able to read an extract (and, gulp, see photos of us both!) in the Home section of the March 3rd edition. And if you’re at a loose end on the morning of Monday 4th, you can tune in to Talk Radio Europe and hear me in conversation with Giles Brown at 10.30 GMT / 11.30 CET.

Thanks to all of you again, and I hope you enjoy the book. As ever, do feel free to get in touch, it’s always a pleasure to hear your thoughts.

As some of you know, we’ve been looking for a new flat recently. Our five year lease is up, our landlord is selling the place (he’s a decent chap, and has always been straight with us, so no hard feelings) and so – with a certain amount of regret – we’re moving on. It’s been a little bit sad seeing all our neighbours’ doors decorated for the season and realising that this is our last Christmas here.

It’s not been easy finding somewhere else : rents are up, and vacancies (for residential contracts) are down. There are any number of reasons for this which you can read about elsewhere, but I won’t go into here. So we’ve seen a few places that ranged from cheap(ish) but depressing to smart but unaffordable.

And then, a few weeks ago, we got an email from a Dr E—— C——– who told us she had an apartment to rent in Cannaregio, not very far from where we are now. “Fondamenta Ghetto” is an address which doesn’t actually exist but, nevertheless, it gave us an idea of the area. Similarly, it was a bit strange to see it being advertised as having ‘parking’ but that, surely, was just a cut-and-paste error or, perhaps, it even had mooring for a boat? 100 m2, four rooms, two bathrooms, air conditioning, recently restored and available on the now rare-as-hen’s-teeth 4+4 contract. The flat, from the attached photographs, looked clean and modern and the rent was absurdly low. Too good to be true, surely, but nevertheless worth investigating further.

The good dottoressa was delighted to be in touch with us, and just wanted to know a few more things about ourselves. Given that landlords like to know about hobbies such as a propensity for playing Norwegian Death Metal in the middle of the night, this wasn’t all that unusual, if, perhaps, just a little bit strange given that we hadn’t even seen the place yet. Nevertheless, we gave her some basic information – nothing more, really, than you could find via Google.

Wonderfully, she seemed to think we were exactly the right people for her flat which she would make available to us on either a one year, 3+2 or 4+4 contract. There was just one thing : she was about to move to Switzerland for five years, and, unfortunately, it would be impossible for us to see the flat before moving in…

At this point the “too good to be true” signal started flashing.

This wouldn’t, she explained, be a problem as the rental would be arranged via AirBnB. We would pay two months deposit and a month’s rent in advance, but in the event – unlikely of course – of us not being completely happy with the flat, we would get a complete refund.

Oh, there was just one other thing. Could she have a scan of our ID cards?

At this point, warning lights were flashing, sirens were sounding, and we were reminded of that nice Nigerian gentleman who got in touch with us a few years ago who asked if we could help him with a temporary cash-flow problem.

We did not reply further to the good dottoressa. Since then, she has not been in touch with us either.

A little research on the internet revealed this to be a scam, and one growing in popularity. The flat, of course, does not exist. The photos are stock ones. AirBnB are not involved in this and – as far as I know – do not arrange long-term rentals. The scam works in one of two ways, either by separating you from your money or by stealing your identity.

I was unsure what to do about this. Could we, should we, go to the police and make a denuncia? Should I get in touch with my journalist contacts? Could this even be a case for Nathan Sutherland?

In the end, we did nothing. I’m not sure if that was the right thing to do or not, or, indeed, if there was anything that could have been done. I’m writing this just to say that – if you’re looking to rent a flat in Venice, or, indeed, anywhere – just be careful out there.

And in case you’re worried about us, please don’t be. We are moving to Dorsoduro in February and are very happy and excited at the prospect. But more news about that next year…

Caroline is wrapping presents, Mimi is helping as best she can and I’ve got a hefty list of people to send e-cards to. But that can wait until I’ve written a brief roundup of the year. Or, not so much a roundup, more a list of what I’ve enjoyed reading, watching and listening to this year.

Music : well, you know about my new obsession with Italian prog. But there wasn’t just that, although Caroline might tell you otherwise. I listened to a lot of Monteverdi, mainly as background to writing “The Venetian Masquerade”. Hawkwind’s 49th anniversary album “The Road to Utopia” divided fan opinion, but I found it utterly charming (not a word I’ve ever applied to a Hawkwind album before), mariachi-style arrangements and all. I’ve also gone through a bit of a 70s krautrock phase with Neu and Cluster. I think Caroline and Mimi prefer this to Italian prog but, given that they insist I listen to it in a different room, I can’t be 100% certain.

Cinema : I rarely go to the cinema these days. I might try and rectify that at the next film festival but, on the whole, most of the films I enjoyed this year were old ones, and mainly classic Italian horrors or gialli. So I took in a retrospective of some of the works of Mario Bava. ‘La maschera del demonio’ is probably his masterpiece, but there’s much to enjoy in ‘Sei donne per l’assassino’ and ‘I tre volti della paura’ as well. Much more to explore next year. I also undertook to rewatch of all the films from Dario Argento’s great period (which, according to me, runs from 1970’s ‘L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo’ to 1987’s ‘Opera’). If I get the time I might write a little more about this next year.

Books : it may surprise you, but I don’t actually read all that much about Venice. I did enjoy ‘First Spritz is Free’, edited by Kathleen Ann Gonzalez, a fascinating collection of contemporary writings about the city (disclaimer : one of them is by me). Elsewhere, I thoroughly enjoyed Gregory Dowling’s “The Four Horsemen” (literate, funny and informative in equal measure) and Scott Stavrou’s elegant “Losing Venice”. But most of my time was spent on reading Italian crime. Two reasons – (1) to improve my Italian, and (2) having started writing crime, I feel I really should read more of it. Gianrico Carofiglio is an old favourite of mine, but I was a little underwhelmed by the relatively brief ‘La regola dell’equilibrio’. Carlo Lucarelli’s ‘Peccato Mortale’, set in fascist-period Bologna, makes the most from a brilliant central idea which I won’t reveal here. But my real discovery has been the late Giorgio Scerbanenco, sometimes referred to as ‘the Italian Simenon’. ‘Venere Privata’ is utterly gripping, and Scerbanenco’s prose is lean and compelling. More to explore in his back catalogue next year.

Writing : well, in an exciting two-month period next year, I have not just one but two (2 – count them – two!) books coming out. “To Venice With Love”, an updated and improved “Venice Project” with stacks of new material, will be out in March, with the third Nathan Sutherland novel “The Venetian Masquerade” following in April. And, post-Christmas, I really should settle down to Book 4 – the title of which I could reveal, but won’t just yet!

It has been some year. The Nathan Sutherland books took off in a way that none of us – myself, my agent and my publisher – had ever expected. I’ve written more about this elsewhere on this blog so I won’t repeat it all. Suffice to say, it was a year in which everything changed.

I’ll sign off with thanks to my agent and publisher, and to Caroline for her infinite patience. But, above all, thanks to all of you for the messages I’ve received. I’m flattered, honoured, and just a little bit surprised that so many of you have wanted to get in touch. I do reply to every email, but I apologise if sometimes it takes a bit of time.

It has been the best of years, and it couldn’t have happened without all of you. Thank you so much.

With all good wishes for a happy and peaceful Christmas, and the best of New Years.

Philip and Caroline

(and not forgetting Mimi…)

It’s early evening. We’ve been out all day flat-hunting and Christmas shopping and, worst of all, I’ve had a disappointing lunch. We could go out for dinner, or I could just go and pick up a couple of pizzas, but neither of us feels like leaving the house. So I’ll have to improvise something from the little food that remains in the fridge.

I have a fillet of salmon, a solitary potato, a carrot, some onions and a head of garlic. The potato is too small for chips, or roasting or baking. But mashed, it might just suffice for fishcakes…

So here is a recipe for Emergency Fishcakes

Ingredients

One large fillet of salmon (perhaps 250-300g)

One smallish potato (150g)

Two medium sized onions

One head of garlic

One sad carrot (for discarding)

Some dill seeds

Some English mustard powder

Perhaps 10 capers

Salt and pepper

Polenta flour

 

Method

1. You should know this by know, but prepare a pair of spritzes
2. Put some music on. I’m still working through my Le Orme obsession, and so I cooked this to their second and third albums Collage and Uomo di Pezza. Caroline, in the other room, listened to Tannhauser in order to drown it out.
3. Steam the potato for ten minutes, and then add the salmon fillets (skinned) for another ten.
4. While the fish and potatoes are steaming, examine your vegetables. Try and conceal any disappointment. Peel and chop the onions into 6 segments. Break up the head of garlic, but don’t peel the cloves. Throw into a roasting tin, dress with a healthy amount of olive oil, salt and pepper, and give them a bit of a toss. Put into an oven at gas mark 5 for 20 minutes or so. The timings are quite forgiving…if they’re on a bit too long, the worst you can expect is slightly caramelised onion and garlic, and neither of these are a bad thing.
5. (You may choose to omit this step). Look at the sad remaining carrot. Realise that it is no longer a fine, upstanding, crisp figure of a vegetable. It is a wizened, floppy thing that can be bent into a U shape without ever threatening to snap. Throw it away. You may feel disheartened but, at this point, it is important to remember that you have a spritz.
6. Grind up a a teaspoonful of dill seeds in a pestle and mortar. Rinse ten or so salted capers and chop them up.
7. Put the fish and potatoes in a bowl, and mash them. Add the dill, the capers, a teaspoon of English mustard (French would be fine, but I just felt in the mood for that extra little bit of heat. Also, I’d have had to open a new jar) and season.
8. Form the mixture into fishcake-shapes, and dredge in polenta flour.
9. I have never deep-fried in my life and don’t intend to start now. Shallow frying will be just fine.
10. Serve together with the onions and garlic. Squeeze the garlic out of each clove. It will be an almost toffee-like consistency, rich, unctuous and caramelly. To be honest, it’s actually the best the part of the meal, although the fishcakes were also pretty good.
11. Red or white wine will work equally well with this. I replaced Le Orme with Tannhauser before sitting down to eat though…

So why are these ’emergency fish cakes’? Well, the proportions are inverted in that there’s twice as much fish as potato, and there’s no egg used to bind it all together. I didn’t find that it made much of a difference.

This may seem to be a very British recipe – and it is – but if you made smaller balls out of the fish and potato mixture, and called them polpette – well, perhaps we wouldn’t find ourselves too far away from Italy after all.

Happy cooking, eating, drinking and listening!

Jeff Cotton (of ‘Fictional Cities’ and ‘The Churches of Venice’ fame) asked me a few months back if I ever listened to any Italian progressive rock. I had to admit that I didn’t really.

The only group I was properly familiar with was Goblin, most famous for their collaborations with the director Dario Argento. Following the different incarnations of the band is complex, but various members worked with the maestro over a thirty year period. “Tenebre”, “Phenomena” and “Non ho sonno” all have their moments, but their two great works are, without a doubt, the soundtracks to “Profondo Rosso” and the truly nightmarish “Suspiria”. They never bettered the latter, but that doesn’t matter. Few bands could have made such a recording in the first place. As a demonstration of just how good they were at the soundtrack form, compare their work for Argento with Keith Emerson’s score for “Inferno”…the stomping choral goth-rock of Mater Tenebrarum aside, Emerson’s work seems pale by comparison and – more seriously – doesn’t fit Argento’s visuals anywhere near as perfectly as Goblin’s.

The next step, then, was moving beyond Goblin, and the realisation that Italian prog is a massive genre to explore. More than that, much of it is utterly fantastic.

   Premiata Forneria Marconi – typically known as PFM – made the wonderful Storia di un minuto back in 1972. There’s an influence of Emerson, Lake and Palmer there but, in all honesty, I’d rather listen to PFM. They ran out of steam in the late 70s, but those early albums are all worth listening to.

A friend of mine recommended La Locanda delle Fate to me, a band whose tragedy was to come along just as the prog boom was coming to an end. Forse le lucciole non si amano più is a fantastic album, reminiscent of Gabriel-era Genesis. Again, I’d rather listen to La Locanda…

    Museo Rosenbach are mainly remembered for one single album Zarathustra. But what an album it is, the title track being a 20 minute prog epic of Wagnerian majesty. I’m still exploring one-album wonders Alphataurus and the more prolific Banco del Mutuo Soccorso.

Pride of place, however, must go to Marghera’s finest, Le Orme. Their debut, Ad Gloriam is reminiscent of early Pink Floyd. Their second, Collage, is more keyboard heavy in the style of The Nice, with two classic pieces in the title track and Uno sguardo verso cielo. Uomo di Pezza, their third album, is a lyrical, beautiful work, more acoustic in nature. Felona e Sorona, their fourth, is an ambitious concept album based around the idea of opposing binary planets. It is an absolutely stunning piece of work. It’s so good, in fact, that I’ve kind of got stuck on playing this one to death and so, fortunately for me, I still have plenty of albums by them left to explore.

I wrote most of The Venetian Masquerade to a Monteverdi soundtrack. Now I’m taking a bit of a holiday from him. Seriously,  if progressive rock is your thing, Italian prog is a genre you really do need to explore. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to play Felona e Sorona again.

It’s Saturday night, ‘Falstaff’ with Bryn Terfel is on Radio 3, a gigantic seafood lasagne is warming up in the oven and I finally have a bit of time to update this site.

The page on “The Venetian Masquerade” has been updated with the back cover blurb – now there may (or may not) be spoilers there, so it’s up to you if you want to read it or not! My publisher loved it (which was a relief) and I’m waiting on my editor’s comments.

“To Venice With Love” is now – at least on my part – pretty much put to bed and so I’ve added a page for it. It’s been an interesting and, I must admit, surprisingly difficult job revisiting a book I originally wrote nearly six years ago. I thought updating it would simply involved adding some new material. It turned out to be far more than that. There’s been a lot of rewriting, the whole saga has been brought up to date and it now has a proper narrative structure. I think it’s tighter, better and more professional (which, of course, it should be). Oh, and it’s also going to be a rather lovely large-format paperback. It’s been well worth the effort.

The soundtrack to all this has been Monteverdi for “Masquerade” and an awful lot of Italian progressive rock for “To Venice”. Italian prog has become a bit of an obsession in the last few months. I’ll try and write a bit more about that in the future…in the meantime Caroline and Mimi are putting up with it as well as can be expected.

So while I wait for my editor to get back to me on “Masquerade” I find myself without anything to write, for the first time in over six months. I should, I suppose, be working on a proper synopsis for Book 4 (working title…no, sorry, I’m not going to tell you that just yet) but I think I might just treat myself to a couple of days off instead. But only a couple.

And that lasagne, I think, is just about ready…

Back, then, from two weeks in Sicily where we are a lot of fish and drank the occasional Negroni. I even managed to get some work done. Edits for “The Venetian Masquerade” have been marked up, and I’ve got a story ready for Book 4 (‘The Arctic Blue Book’ as it’s called for now.)

Arrived back home to find a little treat waiting in the shape of the CD box set of “The Venetian Game”. This is produced by Oakhill Publishing and is for use by libraries – otherwise it’s the same as the recently produced Audible edition. As you can see, they’ve tweaked the cover design – quite different, more classical looking perhaps, but I like it.

In other news, we’ve managed to sell the German translation rights for the first two books. The first one won’t be out until 2020, so there’ll be a bit of a wait until there’s any more news but still – very exciting.

Similarly there’s a few events coming up in the next few months, including the “Mesthriller” crime fiction festival in Mestre. Again, more news a bit nearer the time.

Venice is punishingly hot and humid at the moment – obviously I expect no sympathy at from those of you in the UK. In an effort to escape the heat, Mimi the cat has taken to sleeping under the sofa or outside on the balcony at night. I think she might be on to something…

Finally, on a sadder note, I’ve only just found out about the recent death of the author and critic Jessica Mann. I never met her, but was absolutely thrilled when she gave “The Venetian Game” a nice review in the Literary Review last year. For a first-time novelist, things like this really do make all the difference.  Thank you, Jessica.

I’m going back to the UK next week for a few days, and I’m very pleased to be able to fit in a few events at Waterstones, namely :-

Wednesday 20th June : signing at Waterstones Carmarthen from 12.00 – 13.00

Thursday 21st June : evening talk and Q&A at Waterstones Swansea from 18.30 onwards

If you’re in the area, please do come along and say hi. Or ciao. Or bore da.

Elsewhere, there’s now an official release date of July 5th (although there’s always the chance of it appearing a bit earlier – Caroline spotted “Il Ponte dei Delitti” on the shelves at a supermarket in Mestre last year, a week before the official date) for Vendetta a Venezia, which, I’m sure you can guess, is the Italian translation of Vengeance in Venice. Here’s the cover, a lovely piece of work from Newton Compton…

And, on the subject of covers, here’s the first look at next year’s “The Venetian Masquerade”. We’ve moved away from the ‘lone gondolier’ theme of the first two books. Again, wonderful work from the good people at Constable. 

 

I think that’s pretty much all the news there is for now – but I’d just like to say a very big thank you to Tim Bruce and everyone at Audible for the great job they’ve done on the audios of “The Venetian Game” and “Vengeance in Venice”. I’ve enjoyed them immensely, and Tim…Tim really is Nathan Sutherland! Congratulations to all involved.

Okay, the book’s been available for over a month now, but I still felt there was need to mark the event in some way.

A memorable afternoon, lovely to see so many people there, some of whom had travelled quite a long way for some prosecco (by which I mean a lot), some snacks (by which I mean a staggering amount), and the chance to hear why I think David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi would be perfect casting as Nathan and Federica (if we could only invent a time machine).

Here are some photos of the event, for which I must thank my friend Roger Branson : a very nice man, a photographer of rare talent, and a man who – as onetime personal assistant to Michael Winner – can genuinely claim to have done the worst job in the world.

Here’s a link to his webpage, do check his work out :-

Roger Branson Photography