This is the worst hotel I have ever stayed in. It’s probably the worst hotel I have ever heard of. I’ve stayed in hotels where the heating doesn’t work and in hotels where the shower is reluctant to provide hot water, but the Altavilla managed the double. Perhaps they reckoned that nobody would brave the shower, so it wouldn’t matter that they provided totally inadequate towels. And the only bar of soap was left over from a previous guest who had generously donated his pubic hair.
Breakfast was disgusting – wholly inadequate and the croissants were stale and dried out. How do you even get dry croissants? Do they buy them on Mondays and then leave them to mature?
The place was grubby and the maid looked like a shifty character who was a stranger to hygienic cleaning products.
I’ve slept in a longhouse in the Borneo jungle and a stone shack 3000 metres up in the Andes. I’ve even spent the night in a hotel d’assignation in Paris. (It was late. I was tired. The implications of a tariff that rented by the quarter hour didn’t really sink in until too late.) Yet I have never stayed anywhere nearly as awful as this.
I heard of this place through Kirsten McKenzie. She has a lot to answer for.
People seem to have enjoyed the accounts of my trip to Talavera which have popped up on various websites while I’ve been promoting Burke in the Peninsula. I’d like to say that the whole experience was massively less chaotic than I depicted it, but sadly my beloved was with me and she keeps a diary. So, for those who want the full, unvarnished story of the battlefield reconnaissance that never was, here’s her account, written at the time and including an even more embarrassing error.
Our notes for Day 2 said take the old road to Talavera. Look at battlefield. Continue to Trujillo, via fort at Oropesa.
Seemed like a lot, so we get into the car and set off, straight after a fantastic hotel breakfast. I can’t say I was exactly relaxed – I tensed every time we passed something – and even if I didn’t scream I did make little squeaky noises from time to time. But we reached Talavera without incident. Only problem – Tom had no idea where the battlefield was. A ridge going north from the town probably. We set off northwards, trying to find the road out of town. As we passed an Aldi, I suggest grabbing something to eat. Went in, found some pears and croissants and pork scratchings. Tom started to get antsy. “We need a drink,” he protested, “and we can’t hang around.”
I went to grab a drink as quickly as possible. There was a large one and a half litre bottle of something green and sparkly which advertised itself as “fresh apple”. It clearly wasn’t apple juice. It was probably some chemical, sweetened concoction, but I didn’t have time to try to find something better. Grabbed and paid.
Once we’d found the road, we drove to a ridge. Was it the ridge. Who knew? It was surprisingly steep and stony above the flat, dry plain. As we wandered around, lost, Tom said he was thirsty. I gave him the apple juice and he took a large gulp. “Yuck. It’s disgusting,” he said, handing it back.
Not that bad, surely. I’d give him all the tea I put in the flask and drink the stuff myself. I took a glug. Okay. Not a drink. Clearly some cleaning product. Closer inspection showed it to be fabric conditioner. With a poison warning on the back. If drunk, seek medical advice.
Tom was not amused. He said a lot on the subject. We tried to wash away the taste with tea. And check to see just how ill we felt. Not quite right. But not exactly sick. Maybe the poison warning was exaggerating.
We pressed on and wandered around the fort in tiny Oropesa, and admired the storks’ nests on the towers, and burped a strong chemical taste of apple. Found some cough sweets in my bag, which reduced the odd taste in our throats. By the time we got to Trujillo we were feeling quite cheerful. And not at all hungry. If you are ever on a diet I recommend fabric conditioner as an appetite suppressant.
It hadn’t actually been a bad day and Trujillo turned out to be absolutely stunning. It was February, but freakishly warm, so we had the place to ourselves and the weather to enjoy it. Tammy (whose diary does contain quite a lot of detail on food, even when not washed down by fabric conditioner) loved our romantic meal in the plaza and our hotel – a 16th century palacio – was one of the nicest places we’ve ever stayed.
The taste of harsh words and chemical apple was all forgotten.
Evening in Trujillo
Burke in the Peninsula
We were visiting Talavera because the battle features in the latest book about the adventures of James Burke, Burke in the Peninsula.
So far, the Burke books have avoided the Peninsular War, but the latest goes back to 1809. Fresh from his adventures in South America (Burke in the Land of Silver) James Burke is dispatched to join Wellesley’s army in the peninsula. To his disgust, he is not to be fighting as a regular soldier, but is again spying – this time travelling ahead of the army to try to build links with the Spanish guerrilla forces. But the conflict is a dirty war and Burke learns the hard way that not all the guerrillas are everything they might appear to be. It’s not long before he’s fighting for his life, but which of the Spaniards can he trust?
William Brown is with him, of course, but when the pair have to split up, Burke takes the war to the enemy behind French lines while Brown ends up fighting alongside the infantry at Talavera. Hence our trip.
So you get James Bond heroics and military historical fiction. There’s a girl, too – somebody from Burke’s past who I’m delighted to meet again. That’s adventure and romance and history: all for £3.99 on Kindle and £6.99 in paperback.
I live with somebody who understands a lot about money. I don’t mean that she’s great with the household budget (although we seem to keep afloat somehow) but that she understands some of the arcane areas of financial policy that make me very pleased that it’s her job and not mine. She’s always reading books on the financial system, or the pensions industry, and she knows how credit cards work. (You may think you know how credit cards work, but I promise you, you don’t.)
Anyway, I thought it might be nice if I could read something intelligent about money and kid her that I am entitled to view on whether or not Britain is running an unacceptable deficit, just as much as she is. So when Atlantic Books offered me a copy of Jacob Goldstein’s Money via NetGalley, I leapt at the chance to improve my financial literacy.
Goldstein hosts a podcast, Planet Money, and writes about money for New York Times Magazine. He understands his subject and is an excellent communicator. He talks through the history of money from the idea of proto-money – things that had value because of, for example, their use in religious ceremonies – through the use of precious metals as stores of value and into paper money. Paper money is probably what most people today would identify as “real money” but Goldstein goes on to point out that most value now is stored not as paper currency but as digital information on the ledgers of financial institutions.
As the money that we used to settle our debts, pay our mortgages, and trade with, became increasingly detached from any material store of wealth we moved more towards modern financial systems with all the strengths and weaknesses that they have. The strengths include the ability to create money by lending out more than you actually have. While you can’t lend people more gold than you have in your vaults, it’s easy to write promissory notes for more gold than there is in your vaults provided that not everybody cashes them in at once (as in a run on the bank). The extra money that is created in this way and the liquidity that it provides within the economy allows for substantial economic growth. Goldstein argues that times when money is being created correlate well with periods of economic growth while times when money is taken out of the system (for example by increasing interest rates or increasing taxation) correlate with periods of depression. He argues that the principal cause of the Great Depression was the Fed’s policy of raising interest rates in an attempt to maintain a link between the paper money that they issued and their gold reserves.
Whilst the creation of money not backed by any tangible assets allows dramatic economic growth and a genuine increase in wealth, it also allows substantial opportunities for fraud or crashes caused by that foolishness that we call “bubbles”. A good example of both would be bitcoin. It’s worth noting here that, whilst I still can’t claim to properly understand it, the description of the theory behind bitcoin given in this book is the clearest I have ever seen.
After talking us through the theory of the gold standard and the arcane mysteries of shadow banking, as well as more technical terminology (all terribly clearly explained) that I’m not going to fit into a review, Goldstein gets political. The theory behind the euro is examined and found wanting while the ideas underpinning modern monetary theory (MMT) get a much more positive assessment.
The penultimate paragraph of the book mentions covid (full marks for topicality). As we re-examine so many of the fundamentals of the modern world, perhaps MMT and the possibility of governments simply printing all the money that they need and never worrying about paying it back, is not as mad as it may once have seemed
This is a fascinating book full of random digressions that do not make you lose sight of the main argument. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of increasing wealth in terms of the amount of light that you can buy for a day’s work. It includes what is undoubtedly the most impressive illustrative graph I have seen anywhere and the book is probably worth buying for that alone. Even without that graph, though, it is an astonishingly entertaining and informative gallop through the theory of money and how it can be applied in the real world. If you don’t already know all this stuff and want to be able to understand something of what is going on around you (let alone share your opinions on social media) I strongly recommend that you get hold of a copy.
Today is finally the official publication day for Burke in the Peninsula’. It’s been a long time coming, and I hope you all enjoy it now it’s here.
It’s an inauspicious time to be launching a new novel. It’s not just difficult to whip up excitement while everybody is so worried and insecure. (You’d think people would be buying more books, but they seemed to be turning to Netflix rather than Kindle.) It’s also a strange feeling for an author. I’d normally do something to mark the arrival of a new book, if only a few friends round for drinks at home. That is obviously not going to happen.
The New Normal, though, should be somewhere where books – whether downloaded directly to a Kindle or, increasingly, ordered online – can continue to flourish, unlike theatres, coffee shops and railway companies. So I’m grateful for small mercies and keeping my fingers crossed that you will all be rushing to your computers to buy the latest James Burke adventure.
What will you be getting?
So far, I’ve avoided the Peninsular War, but this book goes back to 1809. Fresh from his adventures in South America (Burke in the Land of Silver) James Burke is dispatched to join Wellesley’s army in the peninsula. To his disgust, he is not to be fighting as a regular soldier, but is again spying – this time travelling ahead of the army to try to build links with the Spanish guerrilla forces. But the conflict is a dirty war and Burke learns the hard way that not all the guerrillas are everything they might appear to be. It’s not long before he’s fighting for his life, but which of the Spaniards can he trust?
William Brown is with him, of course, but when the pair have to split up, Burke takes the war to the enemy behind French lines while Brown ends up fighting alongside the infantry at the bloody battle of Talavera.
So you get James Bond heroics and military historical fiction. There’s a girl, too – somebody from Burke’s past who I’m delighted to meet again. That’s adventure and romance and history: all for £3.99 on Kindle and £6.99 in paperback.
One of the reasons why you have had to wait so long for this book has been problems with the American rights. Now these are sorted out, you can buy through Amazon in America just as easily as in the UK. I hope some of the many people who read this blog from the USA will be supporting it by buying the book.
I had fun writing this. I hope you have fun reading it.
Today is Cover Reveal day for Burkein the Peninsula. Those of you who shared the cover reveal on Friday might understandably be a little confused. Let me explain.
My covers are done for me by an excellent designer called Dave Slaney. I really recommend him. Not only does he put together wonderful covers, but he’s really good at sourcing the images that we use. The covers in the Burke series have generally been a combined effort. I sourced most of the maps, for example but Dave is really good at finding things like pictures of a Rifleman, such as appears on the cover of Burke in the Peninsula. I wrote a bit about this on Friday, explaining that the Rifles don’t actually feature in this story but do in others in the Burke series and it seemed an appropriate image.
It was, but within five minutes of posting this online I was contacted by Marcus Cribb, who manages Apsley House for English Heritage. Unsurprisingly, he is something of an expert on the Napoleonic Wars and also an enthusiastic re-enactor. He wrote:
The Rifle soldier is post-Napoleonic. He isn’t using a Baker Rifle, and has a “bobble” on the Shako, rather than the plume, I think the Shako/Pack may be slightly different too. But a 1807-1815 Rifleman would have had different kit/weapon.
Soon I had confirmation from other military experts online. The soldier I had featured was wearing a uniform that dated from the Crimean War.
Every so often, when I’m fussing about some detail of a military action, somebody will say, “Why don’t you just write whatever – nobody will notice.” If I had ever been tempted to believe that, I will never be tempted again.
The wonderful thing about Napoleonic war experts online is that they are incredibly helpful and supportive. Marcus put me in touch with the 3/95th Living History Society, who were able to provide photographs of their re-enactors in historically authentic uniforms. Dave worked at the weekend (I did say he was very good) to replace my Crimean War Rifleman which somebody who could have been fighting with Wellesley in Spain. The result is a shiny new cover which I think looks, if anything, better than the original and which should satisfy the most enthusiastic military uniform specialist.
Thanks to everyone’s help, Burke in the Peninsula will be published on schedule on Friday. It is now available on pre-order at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08JLJ8SC1 at £3.99. There will be a paperback (£6.99) along very soon.
