The Top 5 Cities for Dating

Posted in Dating, Writing by carolcooper

It depends what you’re looking for (and, as a friend rightly says, how old you are, there being obvious differences between Vienna and, say, Ibiza).

I was on the look-out for settings for my latest novel and wanted guidance. The advisory panel retired to a bar to deliberate the top cities for dating. Several rounds later, they had discarded New York and Rome, and came up with these five choices.

1. Paris

For: Possibly the most heavenly city on earth, with no shortage of romantic places for a rendezvous.

Against: the pickings can be slim, according to a writer friend who lived there and longed for more than a married lover for some cinq-à-sept.

2. Amsterdam

For: Vibrant, hip and imbued with sex as well as culture, this city can put you under its influence without ever going near one of the infamous coffee-houses.

Against: the weather is unpredictable. And the men love to eat raw fish.

3. Dublin

For: A beautiful and historic city, with plenty to see. And Dubliners are wonderfully gregarious. There are no strangers, just friends you haven’t yet met – with some bound to be single.

Against: the weather is predictable. It rains all the time.

4. Havana

For: If your idea of dating is to go salsa dancing as soon as you land, or be serenaded to Guantanamera when you only stopped to cross the street, this is the place.

Against: prepare to consider yourselves ‘engaged’ by the end of the night.

5. Cleethorpes

London was going to be on the list until my friend Rachel convinced everyone how much Cleethorpes has to offer. There’s the seafront, a lovely pier, a light railway, romantic trams, even a statue of The Boy with the Leaking Boot.* The Greenwich meridian goes through the town, and the weather’s not so bad if you wrap up warm (you weren’t going to have sex on the beach, were you?).

Despite these obvious attractions, I did the dirty on Cleethorpes. I plumped for London as the setting for my novel on dating.

I know it’s beautiful, because I live there. Alongside the obvious pubs, restaurants and bars, there are some of the finest shops in the world. There’s also free entertainment: museums, galleries and parks, or just a stroll by the river. Time it right, and you can catch Tower Bridge opening.

Cleethorpes may have lyrical trams, but in London a lot can happen on its iconic red buses or the extensive underground system. Commuters being what they are, you can even give birth on the Piccadilly Line without anyone batting an eyelid.

I set several scenes in Marylebone because it’s buzzing. There are upmarket grocers, specialist bookshops, funky gadget stores, designer boutiques, not to mention charity shops which stock a lot of designer cast-offs. Despite there being more cafés, patisseries and restaurants than anyone could possibly need, they’re always full of customers lured by the aroma of warm bread and freshly ground coffee. Marylebone is very much the place to be, especially if you have nothing very much to do.

The Jacaranda bar, where most of my characters meet, is off Marylebone High Street and has the longest zinc bar in town. It’s named after the original Jacaranda bar in Liverpool, the first venue ever to host the Beatles.

It would be poetic to say the advisory board met there, but it wouldn’t be true. My Jacaranda bar isn’t a Mecca for Beatles trail tourists. If you go looking for it in Marylebone, or anywhere else in London, you’ll be disappointed. I made it up.

Still, my city is the star of my story, just as much as each character. It’s cosmopolitan, it’s loaded with heritage, and, best of all, if you don’t like the one you’re with, it’s big enough to avoid said person. Not something you can say about Cleethorpes, is it, Rachel?

*Cleethorpes is said to be the number one destination in the UK for seaside holidays. For more, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleethorpes

26Sep2013

One Good Thing about Having Surgery

Posted in Pills, Writing by carolcooper

Sanjay is only in his 30s but he’s had a lot of surgery, all of it since the cancer was diagnosed. That’s if you don’t count ingrowing toenails as a teenager, now best forgotten along with his pongy trainers.

As with Laura, Geoff and the other people in my novel, I made Sanjay up. He only lives, breathes and sheds tears in my fiction.

In his opinion, the only good thing about operations is the pre-med. That injection is chock-full of morphine. Makes you as legless as a freshers’ night out. There’s also some stuff to dry up secretions, so your mouth is like an African drought. But with the morphine on board, who gives a fuck?

Then the anaesthetist gets him to make a fist. “Now count to 10 for me.” He never gets beyond four before drifting away.

Whatever delicious thoughts he has on going to sleep, there’s always hell to pay when he wakes up. Last time, someone was moaning like a wounded animal in the recovery room.

And Sanjay was in serious pain. Just because you were asleep when they plunged a knife into your neck didn’t stop it hurting like hell afterwards.

He thought of his mate Ben. He must have been in agony for hours. Sanjay wondered if anyone had given him enough morphine, whatever ‘enough’ means when an IED has ripped off one of your arms and a hunk of leg. Was there was someone sitting by him, like this nurse here? Probably not. Just another wounded soldier, doing his best with a tourniquet and praying the MERT would show before they both snuffed it.

In the recovery room, Sanjay had the irresistible urge to sit up, but the pain and the nurse kept forcing him back down. He had a sore throat and felt sick. The smell of antiseptic didn’t help, nor did the bilious scent of dressings. Nurses insisted there was no smell, but they were wrong. Since the chemo, he could smell everything.

The moaning still hadn’t stopped. Some poor deranged sod really didn’t want to be here. “Hush now” the nurse said. “I’ll get you a sip of water.”

The thirst was unbearable, but all he got was a plastic thimble of water, with instructions to take a small sip. Most of it went down the front of his hospital gown. Miraculously, the moaning stopped when he drank the water, which was when Sanjay realized that he was the deranged sod making all the noise.

He patted his neck and shoulder tentatively through the dressing. Strange that such a small procedure would lead to so much trouble. Maybe it was the drugs. It was always a bad idea to mix drugs, but hospitals dosed you with reckless abandon, with gases out of metal cylinders, and loads more stuff into your veins. One of the anaesthetists explained it. She was one of the new docs, a woman with long red hair and a piercing that went right through a massive freckle on the side of her nose.

She was flirting with him, he was sure. So he flirted back, as best one could when lying down and wearing a hospital gown instead of Paul Smith loafers, Armani jeans and lucky pants. That was when he learned about the IV anaesthetic drugs, like fentanyl and ketamine. All the stuff to make sure you didn’t come to during the op. No wonder by the time he got to the recovery room he felt he’d gone four rounds with David Haye and had an overdose of Ivory Wave or whatever high you could get for a tenner these days.

He’s hoping he won’t go under the knife again, but the cancer always seems to have other ideas.

19Sep2013

Female, 38, seeks altruistic single male

Posted in Dating by carolcooper

“I’m fussy, that’s the problem” says Laura.

Her friend Ruth nods. They both know ‘fussy’ is shorthand for 38 and single.

This week, Laura escapes from the pages of my novel and ponders a report that shows altruistic behaviour makes men more attractive, even as one-night stands.

Now that Laura is back from working abroad, her CV looks great but her love life doesn’t. She needs to meet people other than those at the office. Hooking up in bars is dodgy. But more dodgy than hooking up at work? She thinks back to last year and Jamie in socks, tie and nothing else. Er, no.

“How about what’s-his-name off that dating site?” asks Ruth.

Laura makes a face. She had a drink with what’s his name last week. ‘I’m a paralegal’ she replied to his question. ‘A pair o’ legal what?’ he leered, getting too close.

In fact she’s a lawyer. She also tells people she’s 34, called Emma, and lives in Hampstead. There’s a fine line between honesty and ending up dismembered in some lockup. Or several lockups.

There hasn’t been one big dating disaster that she can dine out on, just a series of soul-destroying evenings trying to find something in common with people like Wayne from Wasp Control. He’d said he was a wildlife expert, so obviously he’d bigged it up a bit, like his photo which looked like Johnny Depp. In life he looked more like Johnny Come Weekly. He’d also promised that she’d never meet another man quite like him. Laura hoped that bit was true.

“What exactly are you looking for?” Ruth asks.

She wasn’t looking for smelly guys in grubby leather coats, emotional idiots who blubbed about the ex-girlfriend, jolly men who said they had GSOH. That meant they laughed at their own jokes. Or the forgetful type like Tom. One detail he’d omitted? He was still living with his ex-wife. Another detail was that the wife wasn’t ex.

Most matches she deleted without meeting. The ones who claimed to be’tactile and sexy’ were plain creepy. The more discursive entries were equally cringe-making: ‘I’m into all kinds of sports, and keen to find a partner who wants to explore our physical passion in all its forms.’ Why didn’t they just cut to the chase and write ‘deviant’?

Ruth had an idea. “You want someone who does good deeds. Have you seen the paper today? Research shows that altruism makes men more attractive as a potential partner. Women too, apparently, but it works best for men.”

“I’m not looking for someone to help me cross the street just yet.”

Ruth digs a newspaper out of her shopping bag and shows it to Laura.

As soon as Ruth has gone, Laura logs onto the site. Now Alan the surveyor sounds quite nice. There’s already a message from him. And look, it says here he helps out in a homeless shelter!

You have to live in hope. Laura clicks Reply.

*Link to the study from Nottingham and Liverpool John Moores Universities http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/2013/september/selflessness-can-be-attractive.aspx.

19Aug2013

How are you today, Granny?

Posted in Family life, Writing by carolcooper

No matter how good a doctor you are, if you don’t look after your own, you’re right at the bottom of the class. That’s the opinion of Geoff, a 30-something general practitioner from the pages of my novel One Night at the Jacaranda.

Granny shuffles to the door in furry Elmo slippers. ‘I haven’t been for three days,’ she says, adding, ‘I’m 92 you know.’ Geoff is pretty sure she’s only 90 but Granny often adds a year or more for effect.

She doesn’t see her friends anymore. Yet today she insists she sees them daily and plays bridge. ‘Elsie even brought me chocolates this morning.’ When Geoff looks at the box, he sees the sell-by date is 2011.

Apart from her bowels, Granny’s life now revolves around food and meal times, but she only picks. Geoff checks her fridge and throws out rotten pears and expired cheese.

Today she demands a haircut. ‘You were going to be surgeon,’ she reminds him. He’s not sure he was training to cut the three strands of white hair left on the old girl’s head, but he gives it a go. She stands in the bathroom, clutching the sink and bending down so he can reach even though he’s no longer the small boy she read stories to. He’s 5’11” and she’s shrunk to about 4’10”, so he practically has to kneel.

Although it’s August, there are Christmas decorations all over the bathroom, or rather the bits she can reach. Granny has never before celebrated Christmas. Now she reaches out with a sinewy hand to adjust the tinsel on the towel rail then looks at him proudly. ‘I’m 93, you know.’

Today is a good day because it’s only her shoulder and her constipation. Last week it was her knee and a rash. The week before, it was her ankle, which she sprained on VE Day 1945. He said it was just wear and tear, so she poked him with her walking stick and called him stupid. Geoff can’t understand why her mental state fluctuates so much. Obviously dementia has a vascular component, but how can it possibly change to that degree?

‘I’m going to do Big Poo,’ she announces. This reminds Geoff of his son. The difference is that five-year old Davey’s brain is still making new connections between cells. In Granny’s case, the opposite is happening. He imagines her brain full of holes, like Emmental cheese. He’s glad his mother died before she got like this, even though it meant Granny lost a daughter.

She installs herself in the toilet, legs not touching the ground. Geoff knows this because she won’t let him shut the door.

So he waits in the darkened living room, where there’s a pile of plastic bags, all neatly folded on the sideboard, a stack of old envelopes which could be useful for making lists, and electricity receipts going back to 1988.

Alte kakers. Only Granny makes Geoff want to break into Yiddish. She makes him want to break into the Bristol Cream sherry too. There must be an unopened bottle in the sideboard.

Geoff remembers that alte kaker means ‘old shitter’. As he waits for Granny, he thinks of the words patients use. Faeces. Number Two. Dump. Crap. Ploppies.

He’s sure an hour has passed, but when he checks Granny is still on the throne, with her legs sticking straight out.

‘You know I love you, Bubala,‘ she calls out from the toilet, voice still strong.

‘I love you too, Granny.’

Related posts:

An Evening at the Proms

Hospital Tests: Has the Doctor Got it Right?

Germs and Geriatrics

Six Characters in Search of a New Year’s Resolution

25Jul2013

What’s in a name, by George?

Posted in Family life by carolcooper

So it’s George Alexander Louis. Altogether more regal than, say, Clive or Keith, though I think it’s a shame William and Kate didn’t choose College. We’ve never had a monarch called King College Cambridge.

Baby Cambridge’s name doesn’t need to be hip and happening because it will set the trend for years to come. He may grow up liking his first name (as most Georges seem to) or not. A slew of given names brings the luxury of choice, though this is the first time in about 100 years that a Royal baby has had only three names instead of four.

Parents sometimes goof, as with the handle aired a while back on ITV’s This Morning. Presenters Phil and Fern couldn’t contain themselves. Who could, with a Hugh Janus?

When I was considering names for my own sons, I turned to the pages of the Financial Times for inspiration. Perhaps names like Julian, James, Henry or Anthony would give them a leg-up on the ladder to success (I’ll get back to you).

Parents have to settle on only a handful of names for their own children, while writers get to dream up many more. It’s fun, and if someone suggests something better, you can change it with just a few keystrokes.

In fiction, names can give away a person’s character. You just know Dr Legg is going to be an orthopaedic surgeon, and Professor Sir Benjamin Bigpurse is coining it from his private practice. Cruella De Vil is a prime example of a villain’s name, though Voldemort and Captain Hook are great too.

Reading To The Lighthouse, it’s obvious that Augustus Carmichael is a poet’s moniker and that Lily Briscoe is as complicated as hell, though perhaps the more obvious clue lies in the author’s name. Personally I’m still mystified by Seymour Glass, JD Salinger’s memorable if not wholly transparent choice.

As has been observed, even the naming of cats is a difficult matter. I’ve stuck to fruits for my own cats. Thus we’ve had Bananas, Peaches, and Cherries.

The current incumbent is Mishmish, meaning apricot in Arabic and Hebrew. But did we miss a trick when we overlooked Paw-paws?

15Jul2013

‘Am I in your book then?’

Posted in Writing by carolcooper

If you’re rash enough to tell your friends you’re working on a novel, they’ll be dying to know if they’re in it.

If? What am I saying! Of course you’ve told them. Blabbing about work in progress may stifle the muse, but the people in your life need to know why you stay in every night with your laptop and a bag of Doritos, thumbing through old Lands’ End catalogues in the vain hope of overcoming writer’s block.

So back to that pesky question. ‘Am I in your book?’

Of course they’re not. Yet no matter how many times you reply that it’s fiction, goddammit, they expect a cameo role, minimum.

If you don’t shoehorn them in, they’ll assume you don’t find them interesting enough. So they dangle tempting revelations. ‘You do know I was George Clooney’s girlfriend/chauffeur/manicurist? And did I tell you about the time I wrestled three KGB men under water?’

I usually reply ‘Cool. But it’s not that kind of book.’

Some people plead to be put into prose. Even non-fiction. Does Michele really want to end up in the chapter on personality disorder? Now that’s serious attention-seeking.

Yes, it would be great to use real characters. There are folks I’d love to transplant wholesale into a book, where they’d take root and flourish. Sadly, I can’t put in any of the wonderful patients I’ve seen over the years, even if it would save my imagination a lot of pointless exertion.

Then there are colleagues past and present: devoted, brilliant, arrogant, disillusioned, or dead drunk. No surprise I’ve got a doctor is in my forthcoming novel. Geoff is burnt out and now, going through a mid-life crisis, he wonders if he really does make people better. I like to think he comes across as authentic. All the same, he’s not real, nor is he based on any one person in particular. And he’s definitely not you, even if you have erectile problems and a cute son with asthma.

If you’ve already written your work of fiction, you’re doomed because family and friends always think they’re in it. What part of the word ‘fiction’ is so hard to get?

Real people don’t go in novels (though there are exceptions, like Princess Margaret in Edward St Aubyn’s Some Hope). Here’s why.

1. When you finally get off your sofa you won’t have any friends left.
2. The UK is the libel capital of the world. For more on what can happen, see John Preston’s recent Sunday Telegraph piece The Murky World of Literary Libel.

Fellow writers, I’d love to hear your views.

8Jul2013

The Best Sex Ever

Posted in Pillow-talk by carolcooper

A great sex scene in a novel is like happiness. When you see it, you know.

But it’s not easy to nail. The Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction award – rightly feted at the In and Out Club in London – was launched in 1993. Infrared’s author Nancy Huston scoped the prize in 2012 with unforgettable imagery like “my sex swimming like a fish in water”. I’m guessing it gets harpooned later.

Mounting often features in sex scenes but Rowan Somerville tweaked the cliché: “like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too-blunt pin he screwed himself into her”. As Somerville said when accepting the award, there’s nothing more English than bad sex.

Just choosing the words is a challenge. Will they be biologically correct, or do you prefer words you don’t want the kids to repeat? Maybe there’ll be some common metaphors, or fancy phrases like Ben Masters’ ‘elfin grot’. Some writers shoehorn in some long words like anaconda, rissorgimento and philately. It makes readers think they’re erudite, or at least that they own a dictionary.

One of my favourite writers is Penelope Lively who does unresolved sexual tension better than anyone I know. Now and then we still get to go all the way. Bliss. Instead of using the whole thesaurus, she uses all the senses, as in The Photograph.

He spreads his coat on the grass, puts her down on it. She kicks off her trousers. It is the most urgent sex he can ever remember, a glorious immediacy, pinned forever in that place – the wind, the smell of crushed grass, some small piping bird, sheep moving about.

Lively doesn’t need to say that the grass is scratchy on the skin. Why else would Glyn put his coat down?

Not all readers are after the same thing. Sometimes raw and raunchy fit the bill perfectly, as in Mel Sherratt’s Taunting the Dead.

She ran the tip of her tongue up and down his shaft as he held her head in place. Might as well get it over with and then she could be on her way.

Maggie O’Farrell’s After You’d Gone has this study of Alice losing her virginity.

She begins counting the punching thrusts to try to block out the consciousness of this heaving, panting body thrashing about on top of hers. At number seventy-eight, she feels his back arch and at seventy-nine, he does a kind of prolonged rigid shudder and collapses on to her, breathing hard.

That was infinitely sad. For making sex funny, you have to hand it to Howard Jacobson. Here’s a passage from Coming from Behind.

Now that his gown has ridden up his back and hangs over his face, he is as blind as a school photographer, and it is his other end anyway… which confronts the door.

For me, there’s one criterion above all that’s the hallmark of a good sex scene. It’s the one I use in my fiction, and it’s simply this: when you read about the characters having it off, does it turn you on?

I’d love to hear what you look for in a fictional sex scene and who your favourite authors are.

24Jun2013

My first time

Posted in Writing by carolcooper

Yes, it’s my first time. My first post. Here, that is.

Although I’m a doctor, don’t expect this blog to cover worthy health topics. The one on thehealthcounter.com does that. Today I won’t be going on about the BRCA1 gene, measles outbreaks, a vaccine for Dengue fever, the dire state of the National Health Service, or why you should have a smear test (though obviously you should).

This baby blog is my sabbatical from medicine: a space to share what I’m writing and doing, and for you to tell me what you’re up to. But please don’t ask me about your fungal toenail infection.

I’ll be writing a bit about my novel One Night at the Jacaranda which I started a couple of years back. It’s hard not to now that it’s become part of my life.

While it’s completely fictional, the characters are real to me. Like my three sons, they don’t do rules. They get up to things I don’t want them to, such as saying things they shouldn’t and jumping into bed with the wrong people. But they’re looking for someone special, and everyone makes mistakes. I’m talking about my Jacaranda characters, not my sons. I’m sure they do some of those too, but they’re wise enough not to tell the world about it.

Characters do things because they want to (or they did at the time, as when getting a tattoo after a few drinks too many). In much the same way, I’m blogging because I want to.

This won’t be Danny Buckland’s blog FuturePills. Or Ben Goldacre’s. Or Joanna Penn’s. It’s mine,

I’m on the steep part of the learning curve and I don’t mind borrowing crampons to help me stay on.

It all takes me back to my first day at high school. Remember tiptoeing around in squeaky new shoes, trying to work out who the cool kids are, and smiling at everyone in case they want to be your best friend? Yes, I am cringing that much.

Or maybe it’s more like a first kiss, that first love. As daunting as it is, you still throw yourself into it. I think I’ve taken all the precautions though you can’t insure against getting dumped or your heart being broken.

So let me know if you’ve got some great tips on blogging. And please be gentle, cos after all it’s my first time.

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Pills & Pillow-Talk

Carol Cooper – trained to observe, born to write.

Tag Archives: novel