This is a shorter version of a piece about tango that I’ve just put on Substack. Substack just seems more fun and, from a simple mechanics point of view, much easier to post on. I recommend you go there. But, if you don’t want to, here’s the edited version (without video and other fun bits).
There are several different styles of tango, but at a traditional milonga people usually only dance three. One is just called tango (and we’re talking Argentine tango here, not ballroom tango, which I could write a whole different post on). The other two (to add to the confusion) are also tangos, but use different music: vals and milonga.
At social dances (milongas), music is played in sets of three or four songs (called tandas), separated by some non-tango music (called the cortina) while people sort themselves out for the next set. In traditional milongas, you play two tango tandas, then a vals tanda, then two more sets of tangos, and then (just to confuse everyone again) a milonga tanda.
Most people will recognise tango music when they hear it. I can’t put in examples (copyright issues) but there is a link to one well-known song (and also one of the best movie tango scenes) HERE.
‘Vals’ is just the Spanish for ‘waltz’ and is music in waltz time. It’s usually danced faster than a regular tango and it has a very distinct ‘feel’ but most people who tango will also dance tango vals.
Milonga is different. It’s probably the oldest, simplest kind of tango and has distinctively syncopated beat. There’s a link HERE. Although it’s simple, the steps are very fast and it makes a lot of people nervous.
EASIER DONE THAN SAID
Tango is not really that complicated. It started as a dance for working people in South America who wanted to relax at the end of a long day and the music grew from the different styles of music that he various immigrant communities brought with them. It has spread throughout the world as a joyous way for people to come together in dance. As it has spread, so it has grown and developed, so that many people will not be dancing in the formal milonga patterns of yesteryear. New styles have developed with new and exciting music. Underlying it all, though, remain the three basic types of music — tango, vals, and milonga — and the different styles of dance that go with them.
TANGO IN MY BOOKS
There is no tango in my historical fiction, because the dance didn’t develop until the late 19th century I have written some Urban Fantasies, though, and these feature a vampire who loves tango. I’ve always thought tango would appeal to the Undead because it exists largely in a nocturnal world. Perhaps that explains the elaborate cemeteries in Buenos Aires.
Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires
My vampire is living (or undead) in London where Brompton Cemetery has to stand in for Recoleta, but he dances an awful lot of tango, which is quite central to the story.
Something Wicked has been described as “a cleverly-conceived, well-written and excellently plotted novel about murder, policing, vampires, and Tango”. It was certainly fun to write and I hope you find it fun to read. You can buy it on Amazon in paperback (£7.99) or on Kindle (£2.99).
When Napoleon accepted his defeat in April 1814, he accepted also the idea that he would go into exile. Exile was to me made a less onerous punishment because the French government promised to pay him six million francs a year as his pension.
It was suggested that he might go to Corfu or Corsica, the country where he was born. However he chose Elba, an island between Corsica and Italy.
Enfola Beach, Elba. Photo: Michael Joachim Lucke
Besides his pension he had been promised that he would retain the status of a sovereign, so the Emperor of France became the absolute ruler of this island of about 85 square miles, and a few smaller islands around it. As the ruler, he was entitled to his own army, although, compared to the armies he had once led, it was little more than an honour guard, with around 700 men.
At first, Napoleon seemed reconciled to exile. The pension, he had observed, was “a great deal for a soldier as I am”. He was to be joined by his sister, Pauline, who was too ill to travel with him when he first left France, and he expected his mother, his wife and his son to move to Elba later.
He threw himself enthusiastically into public works: building new roads, improving the quality of the streets, and making plans for the development of the iron mines that were the country’s main industry. To the irritation of the Allied powers, he started to recruit new soldiers from Italy. Arguably, as the recognised ruler of Elba, he had a perfect right to do this. In any case, he pointed out that with Moorish pirates regularly operating in the area he had a duty to maintain an army large enough to garrison the defences of Elba and its surrounding islands.
Flag designed by Napoleon for Elba
Princess Pauline did not arrive until June, but her appearance at Elba substantially improved social life on the island with balls, concerts, and theatrical performances enlivening the place. What had originally been a guardhouse to the mansion that Napoleon had made his home was turned into a theatre, where plays were performed by the princess herself, her ladies and the officers of the guard.
Whether the 700 soldiers of Napoleon’s private army were amused by the new social opportunities we do not know, but it is certain that they were bored and Napoleon himself referred to them affectionately as his “grumblers”. The soldiers who had accompanied Napoleon to Elba were all volunteers – indeed, some officers had resigned their commissions and enlisted in the ranks so that they could go into exile with their leader. They constituted some of his most loyal troops, many of them battle hardened. Napoleon regularly reviewed them and insisted that they continue to train. Artillery enthusiast that he was, he had them practising regularly with both regular round shot and heated shot. Despite this, though, there is no doubt that they found life on Elba, though comfortable, profoundly dull.
Napoleon’s enthusiasm for his new realm gradually waned. To his dismay, the French government reneged on the promise of a pension and the cost of maintaining his court and his army vastly exceeded the revenue that could be extracted from Elba’s iron mining and its other limited revenue-raising opportunities. Servants were let go, building plans were abandoned and Napoleon, from keeping himself busy inspecting his projects around the island, began to sulk around the house, putting on weight.
Napoleon on Elba
The arrival of his mother, to whom he was devoted, improved his mood, but he was genuinely distressed when it became clear that his wife and son were not to join him. His wife was Marie Louise (who had replaced Josephine in 1810). She was the daughter of Emperor Francis II of Austria and the Austrian government was unhappy with the idea of her and her son forming the focus of Napoleon’s new court. She was persuaded not to join him and Napoleon seems to have accepted this, but he could not come to terms with the idea that he would never again see his son.
The shortages of money and the absence of his son soured his mood. He regularly received news of the situation in France from his supporters there as well as studying the French and British newspapers. By the spring of 1815, he was convinced that there were plans to force him from Elba – plans which he said he would resist by force. “Avant cela il faut faire une brèche dans mes fortifications, et nous verrons.” He believed that the Allies might send him to St Helena and subsequent events suggest that this may have been in their minds.
Faced with what Napoleon saw as a threat to his future on Elba, the refusal of the French to pay his pension or the Austrians to allow his son to visit the island, he looked at the disenchantment of the French with their restored monarchy and decided that he would be better off returning to Paris.
Napoleon’s brief experiment with ruling a small island in the Mediterranean was coming to an end and the events that would lead to Waterloo were being set in motion.
An aside on that palindrome
Napoleon never created the famous palindrome, ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba.’ The first recorded use of it is from 1848, long after Napoleon’s death. It appears in an American publication, Gazette of the Union, where it is credited to an anonymous Baltimore author, known only as JTR.
Further reading
For a detailed account of Napoleon’s time on Elba see The Island Empire by the anonymous ‘author of Blondelle’, published by T Bosworth in 1855 and available in Google Books.
A shorter summary is available in Life and Campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte translated from the French of M A Arnault and CLF Panckoucke, published by Philips Samsung and Company of Boston in 1857 and also available in Google Books.
For a detailed discussion of the origin of the palindrome, see Quote Investigator: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/15/saw-elba/
A word from our sponsor
Napoleon was right to believe that there were many people in France who hoped for, and in some cases actively worked for, his return. Amongst other plots, there was one to assassinate Wellington, who was representing British interests in Paris. This period is the background to the beginning of Burke at Waterloo.
Of course, Napoleon did leave Elba and eventually met the British at Waterloo were James Burke played a small, but crucial, role. [Spoiler alert: Napoleon lost.]
One of the fun things about writing historical fiction is the details of language that turn up. Guessing the dates that words or phrases were in use is tricky. I recommend that historical writers get a copy of the Complete Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which gives the earliest recorded use of words in their context. It was very useful when an editor objected to ‘garbage’ in the late 18th century because it seemed too modern. I was referring to bodies after the Battle of the Nile floating ‘like garbage’ in the Mediterranean (in Burke and the Bedouin). I had just thought it sounded right, but I had to check. It turns out that the word was originally used of offal and waste thrown out by butchers, so garbage was exactly the correct word – though it was mainly a happy guess.
This comes to mind because I was recently writing about the early 19th century and I referred to soldiers’ gear, which a reader said they thought was too modern. I had the feeling I had heard of ‘gear’ being used right back to knights in armour and it turns out I was right. The OED gives me ‘On ich wulle mid mine gære’ from 1305 when it often referred to ‘warlike accoutrements’. I thought the modern equivalent would be ‘kit’ but here I was mistaken in the other direction. The word was recorded, again in a military context, as early as 1785: ‘The kit is likewise the whole of a soldier’s necessaries, the contents of his knapsack.’
Napoleonic re-enactor with his kit
Phrases bring problems too and the OED won’t help here. I remember reading that an author had been criticised for referring to people in the early 20th century as ‘hanging out’ with each other, but research revealed that this was definitely a term used at the time.
EDIT: And just a few days after writing this, I have come across this from a vicar in 1858 (thanks to Eva Chatterji’s excellent blog): “Felt very Mondayish today; so I took a holiday, and went to some pony races…”
It’s because of things like this that the simplest paragraph in a historical novel can lead to ridiculous amounts of research. I’m not sure that readers really appreciate it, but if you don’t like checking that sort of thing, then writing historical novels is probably not for you.
I’ve been away from this blog for a while because there are so many more interesting things to do in summer than sit writing at my computer. I even got out of town for a few days to visit Norfolk – which, it turns out, is not nearly as flat as people say it is.
The main attraction of Norfolk for me was that it was Blickling Hall, the childhood home of Henrietta Howard. Regular readers will know that I am a big fan of Henrietta Howard because of the time I spend working in the house that she retired to – Marble Hill in Twickenham.
There is a portrait of her at Blickling, wearing a masquerade costume for a ball. It was painted around 1720, when she would have been in her early thirties and was at living at court.
Henrietta grew up at Blickling Hall which sits in open country about 15 miles north of Norwich. It was built in the early 17th century on the site of Anne Boleyn’s childhood home. It’s owned by the National Trust, who describe it as Jacobean, but Sir Henry Hobart, who had it built, wanted the architecture to preserve the historic links to the Tudor house, even as he demolished the old building. The result is a bit of a mish-mash of Tudor and Jacobean style, further confused by the architect’s enthusiasm for Flemish gables, which give a distinctive Dutch feel to the place.
Inside, it’s even harder to make sense of the architectural style, as successive owners have made major changes to it over the centuries. Henrietta’s brother, John Hobart, modernised it in the 1740s. Henrietta, who had always loved Blickling, gave him a lot of advice on the changes which saw the long gallery transformed into a library to house a collection of 10,000 books.
It’s an impressive room. Its 17th century ceiling has somehow survived to today.
I particularly like this panel, which apparently urges young women to consider the qualities of an older husband.
A few years later, after John Hobart’s death, there were more changes when his son (confusingly, also John Hobart) moved the main staircase and made another matching stair to produce the dramatic double staircase that now dominates the entrance hall. Henrietta was dying by the time he had the staircase made but she was in touch with him over other changes, which included having a new suite of rooms decorated with Chinese wallpaper.
Henrietta had put Chinese wallpaper in the dining room at Marble Hill House and we know that John talked to her about his own wallpaper as some of the sheets were marked with her name. Buying paper from China was not straightforward, although there were agents to help arrange it. All the papers were hand painted to order, so you had to provide details of the design you wanted and the exact size of the area to be papered.
The paper arrived in small sheets rather than rolls, so fitting it all together was quite an exercise and often mistakes meant it didn’t quite fit.
It seems likely that In this case, the sheets were bought at auction (hence Henrietta’s name with a lot number on them) rather than being painted to fit the space. It seems that the blue ‘sky’ at the top of the wall may well have been painted onto backing paper in England so as to meet the ceiling, with the mountains being cut out to fit against the new background. A closer examination than we were able to make is also supposed to show some painted figures added to cover errors where the seams don’t quite match.
The wallpaper here (which is original) looks very different from the hand painted Chinese wallpaper at Marble Hill, which is a modern reproduction using designs suggested by the Victoria & Albert Museum, based on sample they have from the period. The Marble Hill wallpaper was originally put up in the early 1750s – more than ten years before that at Blickling Hall.
The new suite John Hobart had made includes an elaborate state bedroom which is divided in two with a row of columns – a design which copies (on a grander scale) the way in which Henrietta designed her own bedroom at Marble Hill.
Blickling Hall was lived in as a private house until the Second World War (the last owner died in 1940) and there were many changes made to create a pleasant home in the 1930s, making the interior a jumble of architectural styles from Jacobean through Georgian into 20th century. The National Trust was bequeathed it in 1940 and let it to (presumably rich) tenants until 1960, when restoration started. The house and grounds are now open to the public.
The Mausoleum
There is a mausoleum on the estate, a fair walk from the house. It’s a pyramid, an impressive 45 feet (13.7 metres) high. It was built by Caroline, the first John Hobart’s daughter. Henrietta Howard’s father had died in debt and she had known poverty as a young woman. (Her husband basically beat her and stole her money.) It says a lot about her rise in society (and the sinecures she got for her brother while she was the king’s mistress) that her niece was able to raise the equivalent of £200,000 in today’s money to build this memorial to Henrietta’s brother.
Last Friday, for the first time in about 15 years, I just didn’t bother to write a blog post. Friday came and went and I didn’t post an apology for not writing anything or worry about whether or not anybody would notice that it wasn’t there. I just didn’t do it.
I’ve been threatening to cut down on my blogging for a while, but this is the first time I’ve just followed through. Not a big dramatic statement – just the absence of some words.
What’s changed?
I think the whole business of engaging with people online has become increasingly difficult. It seems to involve more work and few obvious benefits. I don’t think it’s me or you, dear reader. I think the whole ecosystem that has supported online communication has rather curled up and died.
The most obvious example is Twitter. For all its occasional rancid unpleasantness (usually quite easy to avoid by liberal use of the block button) it was a lively place, with lots of interesting chat. Now the chat is lost, submerged in a flood of nubile young women who apparently just want to be my friend, political propaganda that owes rather too much to Dr Goebbels, and endless advertisements for crypto-currency. Many of the people I used to enjoy exchanging ideas with have fled the platform. Those who remain engage less often with anything I might say, presumably because they, like me, find it difficult to spot the stuff we might be interested in amongst the dross.
Some refugees from Twitter have gone to Bluesky and some to Threads. I’m on both of these platforms but I find it difficult to engage with people there. Threads, in particular, is endlessly entertaining, but not something I really engage with. Amusing (and, I suspect, often made up) stories are interspersed with random political stuff and recipes, and that is not really where I’m at. Bluesky is more serious but also almost silent. My old Twitter pals are scattered everywhere and we really don’t have a community any more. We just shout (or sob) endlessly into the void.
And don’t get me started on Facebook, which used to be a way of keeping in touch with people you don’t see around everyday, but which is now (at least on my feed) endless rants about the US administration (I don’t like it either, but I don’t appreciate the constant long messages about what’s going on in a strange political system a long way away), links to articles hidden behind paywalls, and plugs for theatrical shows I will need to take out a second mortgage to visit.
Speaking of shouting into the void, much the same thing is happening to my blog. I used to get very healthy readership of my blog posts. The posts haven’t changed. Occasionally I may even repost an old one that was very popular some years ago. But readership has dropped off a cliff. I suspect Google is fiddling with the algorithms again. Every so often Google changes the way it recommends blog posts and sometimes this works in my favour and I suddenly get massive readership and other times it doesn’t and – well, I’m not sure that many people will have even noticed this week’s post didn’t appear.
Does it matter that my great thoughts on (to take a recent example) the movers and shakers of Georgian Twickenham don’t reach an audience of thousands? It may be good for my ego to think that people care what I write, but what (as my mother used to say) does that have to do with the price of fish?
It might not affect the price of fish, but it does affect the profitability of writing. (I use the word ‘profitability’ loosely. If you take into account the cost of time spent writing at even the legal minimum wage, we are looking at the depth of the losses.) I’ve blogged recently about the financial reality of writing fiction. The sad truth is that few authors can afford to pay for enough marketing to enable potential readers to find their books in the hundreds of thousands of works published every year. They rely on word of mouth and one of the cheapest ways of spreading the word about your books used to be through social media and channels like my blog. (I do plug other writers’ works there as well as my own.) With social media and blogging both reaching fewer and fewer people, I have being dabbling in advertising. I’ve tried both Facebook and Amazon and discovered that, though they may increase sales, it involves a significant up-front financial investment which may never pay for itself. More importantly, it involves quite a lot of thought and effort. I didn’t retire to allow myself more time for writing so that I can fritter it all away on advertising my books. So I don’t. Which means that sales drop and the whole business of writing becomes less obviously worthwhile – especially on gloriously sunny days when I could be outside doing other things.
Am I going to abandon my blog entirely and never write another book? Probably not. But I will be cutting back on social media and the amount of effort I put into my blog. If you get in touch, I do read everything that is sent me by e-mail, comments on this blog, or messaging on social media and I usually try to reply. But, for now, I’m going to concentrate on enjoying the summer. I spent most of last weekend dancing in the open air and I loved it. I hope you all find something you love and spend the next couple of months doing that.
