FEAST OR FAMINE

  Night Boat to Tangier (2019) is set in the Spanish port of Algeciras in 2018, with flashbacks to 1994. Twenty-three-year-old Dilly Hearne is missing.  In October 2018, two Irish gangsters are looking for her at the ferry terminal in the Spanish port of Algeciras, and waiting for the night boat to Tangier. At the port of Algeciras, “on such a clear night you could see an hour south to the lamps of Tangier.”  Maurice and Charlie are old drug-smuggling friends. Maurice is Dilly’s father. The story goes back to the time, in 1994, when Dilly is three years old and how Maurice and Charlie met in Cork, Ireland.  Now, in 2018, they wait and watch people coming and going from the terminal in Spain. They are hoping they will see Dilly to bring her home: ‘on the same bench, Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond sit together alone but for their remorse.” Maurice is ashamed: “I’ve done a lot that’s wrong.” But he knows in his blood that Dilly is near. Both men “know what they had once and what they

 

  I completed an easy jigaw of one of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s famous paintings. French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) mostly painted Parisian society and current events of the times.    The wooden  jigsaw is a replica of Renoir’s ‘Luncheon of the Boating Party’ (1881). The real oil painting is in the Phillips Collection in Washington DC in America.     Renoir painted his friends having lunch on a balcony of the Auberge de Pere Fournaise restaurant in Chatou in France, along the river Seine. Playing with the dog, in the foreground, is his future wife Aline Charigot. MARTINA NICOLLS MartinaNicollsWebsite   Martinasblogs Publications Facebook Paris Website Animal Website Flower Website SUBSCRIBE TO MARTINA NICOLLS FOR NEWS AND UPDATES    MARTINA NICOLLS   is an international aid and development consultant, and the  author   of:  The Paris Residences of James Joyce   (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Libe

  The Park (2020) is a collection of poetry. The park of the title is the Jardin du Luxembourg – the Luxembourg Garden in Paris.  The collection is all about the park in all of the four seasons of the year. Moreover, it is not only about the structure of the park, but it is also about people and their relationship with nature, and the culture of the park and its people. He explores both the largeness of the park and the solitary walker or user of the park. He explores the design and its structured flower beds and lawns, not for touching or sitting on, and the scatterings of hundreds of iconic green chairs.  He explores the vast openness and expanses lined with trees. He explores people’s reactions with each other in the park and in Paris in general. He writes of the locked gates in the evening. Its themes go beyond nature and beauty – with poems entitled ‘Birds’ ‘Spring’ ‘The Pool’ and ‘Crow’ – to questions and thoughts about Parisian life – ‘Ordering a Café in Paris’ and ‘Why Paris i