Up a Mountain in Kosovo (Part 1)

On a clear and cold April morning, we leave the town of Ferizaj where we are staying and head south towards the mountains.  We come off the highway and onto a dusty road, then pull in at a mini-supermarket.  We are here to pick up Hysen, the mountain man who is going to take us up Lybeten, one of the tallest and most beautiful peaks in Kosovo.  Outside the tired-looking building, with its faded cigarette and soft drinks posters, three children sit playing on the ground.  This is the only store for miles which provides essentials for local villagers.  Hysen’s family has owned it for two decades.  The room beside the shop is a café and in the hot summer the plastic white furniture comes out, whilst in the harsh winter the chessboards come out.

Hysen comes out of the shop and we climb out of the dusty car to greet him.  He is a sturdy man in his late 50s, with a mountain-weathered face and a smile of rugged serenity.  When I shake his hand, it feels rough from many years of manual work.  He is going to take us up to his house near the top of the mountain, where in the warmer months he takes his herd of sheep and goats and spends time in solitude.  He apologises for not speaking English and occasionally shifts from his native Albanian into German.  Limited job prospects here mean that many families have a breadwinner living in Western Europe.  German is, therefore, the second language for many Kosovans with links to the diaspora communities in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. 

After the customary greetings, we set off in our car, with Hysen leading the way in his car.  We begin up the winding hairpin road at the foot of the mountain, forest on both sides, until we reach the point where we change vehicle and go off-road.  Hysen is already waiting for us, his hand gently resting on our mountain vehicle.  It is a dull green Lada Niva from the 1970s, Russia’s answer to the Landrover, and a reminder of Kosovo’s communist past as part of Yugoslavia.  From the outside it looks more like an army relic than a usable vehicle, but under the bonnet it is well maintained.  Vehicles are a big investment for many poor families, so they are extremely well looked after and older models are often reconditioned to last a long time.   As he holds out his hand to help us into its high cabin, Hysen jokes that it is the only vehicle that can manage the higher mountain tracks. 

Shortly after we set off, we see a man descending the track on a horse and cart.  He passes us with his eyes lowered.  The cart is full of logs and Hysen explains he is an illegal logger.  Most Kosovan houses are heated by woodburners and so the logs are an essential resource.  Hysen affectionately calls him Robin Hood.  For the first part of the journey, there is still forest on either side of the rocky road and, with our centre of gravity much higher, at times it feels as if we are almost vertical.  It is a deciduous forest and the trees that we pass are familiar: oak, birch and beech.  It takes 30 minutes drive to reach the higher part of the mountain which opens onto lush green pasture, and then a further 10 minutes to reach Hysen’s mountain house.  Next to the house, the track continues upwards until the grass recedes to a white carpet of snow which stretches as far as the mountain peak.  Out of the earthy shade of the forest, the quality of light here is very different.  The green fields are bright and lush and the sun on the snow is almost blinding.  Even at our destination, the mountain house, it is still a three-hour trek from the peak.  We climb out of the Niva and walk towards Hysen’s house as he explains that the last of the snow will not melt until late summer.  

A happy marriage?

 

I love a mystery.  There’s something about one that captures my imagination and like a dog with a bone, I can’t let it go until I’ve solved it.  You never know when you might stumble across one. On a recent visit to Harewood House, near Leeds, a chance remark by my Mum ignited something, which then took hold of me for the next three days. 

Harewood was the home of our present Queen’s Aunt, Princess Mary, only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary.  She married a wealthy aristocrat, Henry Lascelles, the 6th Earl of Harewood, in 1922.

We were just nearing the end of our tour of the house when my Mum told to me she had previously read that Princess Mary was unhappily married and that her much older husband could be ‘cold and abusive’.  She said that there had been rumours that Mary did not want to marry Lord Lascelles, that she had been forced into the marriage by her parents and that Lascelles had proposed to her after a wager at his club. 

Her brother the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, to whom she was very close, was said to be against the marriage because he did not want his sister to marry someone whom she did not love.  She had apparently ‘cried her eyes out’ the night before the wedding.  

Princess Mary was no longer this distant figure from history, she had become real to me, human and tortured.  I wanted to know everything about her, right now.

Thank God for the internet.  Back home that evening, it took just a few clicks and my search began.  Within seconds up popped specialist websites, by people with a fascination with European royalty.  I obsessively trawled through blogs and forums, scanning the text for any titbits of information that would confirm or deny the rumours about Mary.  Hours passed.  Just when I was about to tear myself away and go to bed, I hit upon a nugget of gold.  Someone called Angele had posted the following comment on a thread about Mary’s marriage:

‘It is my understanding that Mary was very much in love with Walter Montague Douglas Scott, son and heir to the Duke of Buccleuch and these feelings were reciprocated.  Unfortunately though, for various reasons, it was not thought to be a suitable match. I do think that Mary made the best of the situation, probably helped by her sense of duty, which I believe she had in abundance.’

 

The romantic in me wanted to believe that that Mary had known true love before she had to marry Lascelles.  My imagination was now running riot, visualising Mary homesick and miserable at Harewood, pining for her lost love.  Further research revealed that Mary’s brother Henry ended up marrying Walter’s sister Alice.  Mary and Walter must have met again in later life.  Was the spark still there?  Did their eyes ever meet across a crowded room?  And did Mary, who had always been taught to negate her own feelings, ever wonder ‘What if?’’

 

Self-publishing - it's all in the detail

To indent or not to indent? That is the question you never thought you’d have to ask yourself. But there are many such decisions to be made when self-publishing a book.

There are the obvious ‘big’ decisions - do you publish just as an ebook or produce a paperback version too or instead? How are you going to go about getting the cover designed? Who are you going to get to edit and proofread the contents?

Then there are all the ‘little’ decisions you never thought you’d be dithering over:

• What size is the book going to be? (Who knew there were so many options? I’m currently deliberating between 5 x 8, 5.5 x 8.5 or 6 x 9 inches).
• What font are you going to set it in? Arial, Times New Roman, Palatino Linotype, Garamond?
• What font size looks best? 10, 11 or 12pt?
• What about line spacing? Single, 1.5 or multiple 1.15?

And then there’s the indenting. The convention is to indent the first line of every paragraph apart from the first one in each chapter. But my book is non-fiction and that just doesn’t look right.

Because of course, that’s the thing about self-publishing. It’s all down to you to decide what looks right and what doesn’t. If you’re indecisive like me, that makes the process interminably slow and painful. You might view it as intensely boring and pernickety. After all it’s the content of the book that is important, right? But I think these details matter.

Maybe, as a reader, you’ve never noticed what font a book's been set in. Rest assured you’d have noticed it if it had been the wrong font. If these things are done right they become invisible. They recede into the background so that the words themselves take centre-stage. Done wrong and they shout wrong so loudly you can’t see the words for the text.

Imagine if you were watching a play. It’s Macbeth and the cast are dressed in suitably Tudor style. Then Lady Macbeth appears and instead of wimple and gown she’s wearing a purple Mohican, tutu and wellies. It would jar wouldn’t it? (Although I wouldn’t mind seeing that production!) Your attention would be drawn to what on earth she looks like rather than the play itself. I think it’s the same with font choice, line spacing and yes, indenting.

These pernickety choices are important so that your carefully crafted words are presented to best effect. So that your reader is not distracted from the contents of your book by how it has been laid out.

So as I struggle from one decision to the next in the final stages of producing my book, I remind myself that it’s all worth it for a professional-looking finished product. One where the words are front and centre. 

ONE HUNDRED YEARS ON

Today, 4 August 2014 is the centenary of Britain's declaration of war on Germany during what was to become World War I.  This poem is a tribute to all those, of whatever nation, who suffered as a result of that devastating conflict.

 

ONE HUNDRED YEARS ON

 

 

To those of you who could not go to war

but stayed at home to fight the fight

in factories and lonely homes,

condemned to wait, and mourn your sons,

your fathers, husbands, brothers too.

We applaud you.

 

To those of you who boldly went

and not so boldly, too, but still you went,

to rot alive in rat infested trench.

You fought the fear, withstood the pain,

returning home as strangers in a land forever changed.

We thank you.

 

To those of you who gave your all,

who sacrificed the precious life you had,

whose final days were terror filled,

brave enough to show your dread, yet braver still

to hide it, too, for others' sake.

We salute you.

 

To all of you who lived your days

one hundred years before our given time,

whose love, whose youth, whose limbs whose lives

were spent in blood, whose skies were full of darkness,

whose hope extinguished lay, yet rose anew.

We owe you.