Richard Lewis et son Destin Cabotin

SOAF member, writer-journalist Richard Lewis will be doing what he does best on Friday 26th January: playing the accordion. Only a Brit would be arrogant enough to bring an accordion to Paris and make the locals listen, but there you go. Accompanying him will be some non-SOAF members on cello, guitar, theremin and bass.

Le Press Café, 89 rue Montmartre, Paris 2e. Friday 26 January. From 19h. 100% free from reading or literary discussion. May contain waltz.

Radio Interviews

My telephone went off at four o’clock yesterday afternoon, a friendly American voice came down the line and, all of a sudden, I was speaking to over a million people, having their breakfast or setting off to work -- coast to American coast.

I had of course been forewarned, just a week before. What do you do when faced with a radio interview? In the past I used to diligently prepare myself: make sure I had all the facts at my fingertips, rehearse the principle themes in my bathtub and generally make myself neurotic so that by the time the microphone was placed in front of me I was a nervous wreck. With experience I have learnt this is not the way to proceed. But nor is the opposite extreme: to do no preparation at all. People are in fact very dishonest about what they do before an interview. The professionals always say they prepare nothing. You know damned well they are lying. Broadcasters have said this to me. I go into their studios only to discover that they are reading from a text, which gives them barely the time to caste a pleading eye up at me.

The answer, of course, is to meet that happy medium which makes you feel comfortable. Some have to prepare like mad, even learn their parts by rote. If you are one of them you are not in bad company. Charles de Gaulle, for example, was one of those professionals who said he never prepared. ‘Paris! Paris brisé, Paris outragé, Paris martyrisé, mais Paris libéré!…’ ‘Vive la Québec libre…’ ‘Je vous ai compris…’, etc. De Gaulle always said that he invented all this on the spur of the moment, in front of the microphone. This was total nonsense. The General had a very good memory and he always wrote his interventions, even his press conferences, down the night before. Churchill, after an unhappy experience in the House of Commons when he stopped in mid-sentence and sat down, red-faced and utterly paralysed, never after 1906 made a public pronouncement without written notes in his hand: even when standing on the top of a car you would notice in the newsreels that he was fumbling around with his notes. Some people need those props, and you are not the smaller for it.

The Blair spin? Not prepared? Don’t you believe it. Every turn of the phrase has been studied beforehand by teams of speechwriters. Sometimes, one is tempted to say that our Prime Minister is over-prepared.

Only experience can tell you what level of preparation is right for you. A beginner has to find this out for himself; my recommendation is to prepare a series of bullet points and stuff them in your pocket. You probably won’t refer to them. But a wave of panic is not uncommon and it is nice to know they are there… Broadcasters are always understanding.

We live in the high-tech era of electronic mail. Ask your producer in advance of the programme if you can field questions on their site immediately after the programme; this could appreciably influence your impact on those listeners who matter most to you: the ones who will buy your books and speak of you at their next dinner party.

How did my interview go? I hadn’t talked about my last published book in months, so I re-read it, jotting down bullet points as I went. When the telephone rang I was sitting at my horseshoe desk with those notes in front of me. But I only once referred to them. I had a fun hour with over a million Americans.

What are your recommendations for radio or television interviews? Tell us about your experiences.

Cross-Channel Travel

I have been absent for a short while in England. What is remarkable is that if I do not add posts to our blog, nobody else will. Really! I think we could all profit from a bit more participation.

But here is another subject for you to consider. What is the best way to organise your trips from where you live in France to England? If you live in the centre of Paris there is not much that will beat the Eurostar to Waterloo Station and the centre of London. I sometimes myself take day trips to see an editor, put an agent back on track or have a short interview. You are two and a half hours from London by train and then, for example, it is only ten minutes by taxi to the BBC studios at Millbank.

But Eurostar is quite expensive. I haven’t done it, but I imagine Ryanair from provincial France to provincial England is probably cheaper. The problem I have with airlines is that they never take me to where I want to go. And there is an awful lot of carrying of bags. Far better to throw all the equipment in the back of a car and drive to the nearest ferry.

Now that is cheap. My last trip to England cost me, with the car € 118, with the car, round-trip Dieppe-Newhaven. The problem was with the winter storms: a delay on the out-trip and a cancellation on the return. On the out-trip I eventually got aboard ship at midnight and took a cabin -- a spacious place with five bunk beds, a shower and basin, all for € 30. Switch out the lights and you will sleep for four hours, cradled by the sway of the boat and a slight creaking sound that will make you dream of sailing on a nineteenth-century schooner with one of Daphne du Maurier’s heroines lying next to you. Make sure your car is loaded with petrol. At night you have to go into the centre of Dieppe or, on the Newhaven side, down an unsigned alley by the docks -- and it will cost you 20 per cent more to fill up your tank in England.

A Newhaven landing in the light of day always brings the amusement of the first roundabout and the first English road signs. The French, and not a few English, stick to the right and then scud down the blind alley that takes you into a railway siding.

Those storms were impressive. The new ferries must be equipped with stabilisers for you barely sense the waves, save the large odd swell that smashes all the cafeteria cutlery -- you’d have thought they would be prepared for it. From starboard you can watch the ships go by, sending their white, luminous spray high into the winter’s sky. What memories in that cross-Channel voyage! Vera Brittan recalled crossing the Channel to England one spring day in 1917 after a dreadful tour of nursing duty; her boat passed a transport heading for France, the ‘men all waved to us and cheered.’ Benjamin Haydon, a painter, was among the first Englishmen to cross the Channel after the announcement, in April 1814, of Napoleon’s abdication. ‘You seem to be going, as it were, beyond yourself,’ wrote Haydon philosophically. ‘I am not ashamed to confess, that I looked earnestly at the hills which rose before me, to discover something French about them.’ To his disappointment, they seemed rather English; but he found the people exotic. If you have a memory like mine, which goes back a few hundred years, you will always spy something awe-inspiring in that cross-Channel voyage -- I do not know any other trip in the world quite like it.

What are your thoughts? And what is the cheapest, most efficient way of getting to England?