Only the English can contrive a concert during which people eat, in total strained silence, while the concert goes on. And then put the whole lot under floodlight. I attended such a concert a few nights ago and came perilously close to getting the giggles while watching people mouthing “Please pass the salt” during the Allegro Giusto of Vivaldi’s Mandolin Concerto (RV 93). The tension became well-nigh unbearable. Who would be the first to drop his fork? Who would tip over a wine bottle? Who would swallow something down the wrong hole and erupt in a cataclysm of coughing? It was surely only a matter of time.

In Mexico for instance (a country which I know well) the noise levels during such a performance would have swamped our quartet of guitarists, forcing them to throw in their all - or the towel - depending on inclination. Here, upwards of a hundred people managed a heroic partial silence, somewhat akin to someone trying to rein in their wind when sitting in the next cubicle to another party in a public convenience. A partial silence, I should add, except between movements, when the entire hall erupted in a paroxysm of clapping.

Each table of diners had its own inimitable dining style. Meringue roulades competed with kedgeree which competed with cottage pie, sprouts, and jam roly-poly. The plate clicking during Leo Brouwer’s incredibly delicate Cuban Landscape With Rain resembled nothing so much as a set of those mechanical false teeth which gallivant across the table when wound up to their full extent. This politest of cacophonies became so fraught at one point that a woman nearby nearly had a panic attack. There was an elderly lady directly in front of me eating a yoghurt from a very small pot with a very large spoon. Finally, clearly at the end of his tether, her husband snatched the spoon away and glowered at her - I fancy Brouwer would have done the same. Either way, I sensed that the man was at the very least reassessing their fifty years of marriage.

At one point, after the rains so beautifully conjured up in Brouwer’s music, it sounded as if a small army of angry moles had erupted from the swampy ground left over after the storm. Gluggings clashed with mumblings, rustlings, maunderings and tappings to create a sort of demented chain reaction. Which didn’t do a lot for Stephen Dodgson’s Follow The Star. For that and the Brouwer are two of the quietest pieces one can contrive for the guitar. They are hardly dinner music, in other words. Or suitable for a thé dansant.

Actually, it was a very memorable evening, verging on the grotesque - the musicians were outstanding, the audience dire. Groucho Marx would have loved it. It was just the sort of concert he and Harpo would have contrived in their A Night At The Opera heyday.

2011 has been my year of the Third Antichrist. I know it seems an odd thing to say, but it’s true. My non-fiction book, Nostradamus & The Third Antichrist: Napoleon, Hitler & The One Still To Come [Watkins] came out a few months ago, and the third and final part of my fictional Antichrist Trilogy, The Third Antichrist [Corvus], came out on 1 December, to complete the saga begun by my The Nostradamus Prophecies and The Mayan Codex.

The idea that there may be ‘three’ Antichrists is an entirely Nostradamian conceit. The bible mentions one single Antichrist, or, on occasion, Antichrists. Nostradamus, however, in one of his key quatrains [Century 8 Index Date 77], has this to say:

The Third Antichrist will soon be annihilated

His war will have lasted for twenty-seven years

The heretics are either dead, captive, or exiled

Human blood reddens the water that covers the earth in hail.

As a veteran Nostradamus commentator with four previous non-fiction books about the seer under my belt, I felt the onus was on me to explore this further, both in a fictional way, and via fact. The rationale behind my decision was an easy one. It consisted of a series of ‘what ifs’.

For instance, what if all the extant information on the Antichrists, revealed by the cracking of the index date codes in my previous non-fiction books, was gathered together and laid before my readers? What might they learn? What might all the Antichrist quatrains – seen in toto and, even more crucially, outside their usual context – show? And wouldn’t this be the ideal way to allow people to make up their own minds about Nostradamus’s vision for the coming apocalypse, rather than via the usual pre-digested pap promulgated by a plethora of not entirely disinterested eschatologists, and in which the grinding of a multitude of axes invariably drowns out anything that passes for common sense? The answer was obvious. But it also begged a number of important questions. Did Nostradamus see the world we live in as inevitably doomed? Did he believe, like that great novelist of the post-apocalypse, Cormac McCarthy, that:

…there’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

Or did he believe that humanity could learn from its historical mistakes and rectify matters before they came to an apocalyptic head? And why did Nostradamus decide that there were three Antichrists, and not the one apparently foretold in Revelation? Would the prophesied arrival of the third and final Antichrist betoken Armageddon and the End of Days, or would it simply mark a Great Change – something along the lines of what the Mayans are suggesting for 21 December 2012, when the Long Count Calendar and the Cycle of Nine Hells are both expected to conclude at roughly the same time?

My first instinct was, and still is, that the answer is contained within the quatrains – one has only to gather them together and ask the right questions. Sir Galahad – the knightly embodiment of Jesus in the Arthurian legends – followed a similar path when he finally learned that the true question needed to unlock the secrets of the Holy Grail was not the obvious ‘What are you?’, but rather the infinitely more noumenal ‘How can I serve you?’

Faith, in other words, and not curiosity, is the prerequisite.

The process of non-fiction choice was, in and of itself, an interesting one. My first criterion was simply to check through my own The Complete Prophecies Of Nostradamus [Watkins 2009] to see which historical personages Nostradamus wrote about the most. Would they be largely destructive or benevolent? Would they grace the world with their presence, or disgrace it? The list I came up with was a fascinating one, with perpetrators of evil, destruction, and bad faith securing all three of the top places.

Far and away the top runner in terms of numbers was Napoleon Bonaparte, with 47 quatrains to his name – that’s five per cent out of Nostradamus’s grand total of 942 quatrains. An incredible figure, surely, given that Nostradamus was writing 250 years before the revolutionary events he describes with such uncanny accuracy. Second in line was Adolf Hitler, with 30 quatrains to his name – Nostradamus was writing a full 380 years before Adolf Hitler’s seemingly inexorable rise to power, making the factual accuracy and concentrated historical nous contained in his Hitler quatrains an even more astonishing achievement. Adolf Hitler’s total is closely mirrored by that of Nostradamus’s Third Antichrist personification – the mysterious and unnamed stranger we shall call the ‘One Still To Come’ – to whom Nostradamus dedicates an extraordinary 36 quatrains. This time the seer was writing about events due to occur more than 600 years after his own death, thereby stretching to its very limit the 700-year boundary he appears to have imposed on himself. So between them Nostradamus’s three Antichrists notch up more than 100 out of his grand total of 942 published quatrains – a significant preponderance, I trust you’ll agree.

When placed alongside the 100 Antichrist quatrains, the 5 or so quatrains apiece that Nostradamus dedicates to Henri II, Henri IV, Philip II, Charles 1, Marie de Medici, Louis XIII, Louis XIV, Cardinal Richelieu, and Benito Mussolini, inter alia, pale into insignificance. True, he concentrates considerable attention, and a considerable number of quatrains, on the French Wars of Religion, the Lutheran Heresy, and the Ottoman Empire, but these are generalized quatrains, and do not refer to any specific Antichrist. They are simply part of the vast historical panorama that Nostradamus appears to have had at his fingertips.

No. Three specific historical figures get all his attention, and in the chapters entitled ‘The Concept of the Antichrist’ and ‘Nostradamus’s Antichrists’ in my non-fiction book, I attempt to tease out why. In addition I have constructed time lines and birth charts relating to each of Nostradamus’s three Antichrists, and I finish up with a Conclusion summarizing what I have found. I trust that, by the end of this sequence, my non-fiction readers will feel that the journey they have undertaken has been worth the effort, and that their understanding of Nostradamian process and the seer’s unique take on eschatology has been concomitantly enriched.

As far as my fictional Third Antichrist is concerned, all bets are off. I have allowed my imagination free rein, and have created, I trust, an entirely memorable character with few, if any, redeeming features. The Antichrist needs to present himself as the evil mirror image to the Christ figure he seeks to undermine. Dracul Lupei/Mihael Catalin does this by mimicking Christ and secretly undermining His message. This makes of him a true Antichrist in the tradition of both Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler, both of whom promulgated cults of personality designed to undermine traditional religious faith and an adherance to conventional morality. The only morality that counted in their eyes was an expedient one, designed to further their own hidden agendas.

Adam Sabir (the name Adam is a calculated one, and is fully explained, as are all the names used throughout the trilogy, in the Glossary at the end of the new book) is the troubled catalyst via which the Antichrist may, or may not, be beaten. I trust that readers who have read all 1600 pages of the trilogy will feel that my 21 December 2012 ending on Silbury Hill, in Wiltshire, brings the cycle to a satisfying conclusion.

What I most wanted to point up is that what matters most in this world is not dogma, politics or force, but people, and how people interact one with the other. My books are all about such people - of different races, different cultures, and different backgrounds, but all having to learn to live together and give as well as take. It’s a simple equation, but very hard to put into practice. I fervently believe that fiction is the best vehicle for such insights, and trust that my readers will agree.

It’s odd the things that happen - I was going to write a blog about scams. An American friend of mine had her e-mail address stolen and a letter sent out to all her friends that she had been mugged whilst in England, and that she could not pay her hotel bill. Her plane was imminently taking off and could we help? Well of course we could. Naive as I am, I foolishly put down the spelling mistakes and infelicities in her e-mail to shock from the attack. It was only when I received the second e-mail in response to my offer to pay her bill and pick her up from, God help me, Kent, that the truth started to dawn on me. The first glimmer of suspicion that imposed itself upon my Sherlock Holmesian brain was the fact that she spelled her own name wrong. “Aha,” thought I to myself. “A clue!” The second was that the sender of the e-mail asked me to send $1255 to an address in Ramsgate. Yes!!! A second clue!!! By this time I was on my third metaphorical pipe and had figured the whole thing for a scam. Bright, or what? My friend and I had a happy chortle about the whole thing and she changed her e-mail address. I suggested to her that this might be the ideal time to tap her friends for a loan…

Well, you see, I was going to write about a scam, but in the event, I’ve just received the news that my book, The Nostradamus Prophecies, sold 50,000 copies in mainland China during 2010. Hot damn! Even better than the 33,000 it sold in Sweden during the same period. I mean, CHINA! Makes me really pleased. Suddenly I’m a net exporter to the most heavily exporting nation on earth. RESULT, as my scamming friend in Kent would probably say. And I’m really, really pleased that I wasn’t quite dumb enough to send $1255 via Western Union to an illiterate stranger. Move over Sherlock - make way for Inspector Dork.

The Latin tag above is by Manilius. It means “from the moment of our birth we begin to die, and the end of our life is closely linked to the beginning of it.” An early English gravestone I once saw paraphrased Manilius perfectly: “When we to be to be begunne, we did beginne to be undonne.”

My cat, Beachy Bede, was killed today. Some of you may remember a number of Bede stories I have told over the past few years. He was an outstanding cat, in his prime, and very much the Alpha male here at the stables. He had three on-site girlfriends, Zoe, Figgy, and Olive, and an elderly male chum, Caspar. He lorded it over them all. Weighing all of 15 lbs, he dwarfed the other cats both in terms of character and size. He had just had his sixth birthday in August - a Leo, of course.

This afternoon, a lady who lives across the way knocked at my door. “I think your cat’s been run over. He comes and visits us sometimes. I’ve moved him to the side of the road.” It was true that the Bede travelled far on his hunting sorties. And when Ned Halley and I have our literary lunches, he often followed us on long walks. He was splendid company.

Yesterday he had a particularly affectionate day, with much lounging on my mouse platform (beside my computer), on the gate post (as I lean across the gate, both of us monitoring the comings and goings at the stud), and on my and my wife’s lap (in that order, watching the news and a recording of University Challenge). He had also been having a magnificent mouse harvest recently, with the occasional rabbit thrown in for good measure. Two mornings ago he surpassed himself by leaving a mouse just outside the bedroom door, upon which my wife trod on it in bare feet first thing, letting out a terrified shriek. This gave him immense pleasure - you could almost see the grin on his face.

He was a philosophical cat - addicted, unfortunately to knitting (kneading), which caused him to drool with pleasure. I banned him from knitting on my lap, and he adhered to this with difficulty - but adhere he did, preferring the prospect of the lap, sans knitting, to no prospect at all. A great joy would be to hide behind the stairway curtain and swordfight with me through the material. He usually won. He was also prone to giving me double bats on the back of the leg if he felt I had done him a disservice - claws sheathed, needless to say. I had begun to train him to sit in my wife’s bicycle pannier, but he would only last a minute or so before ejecting himself onto the verge. He was an adept at wire-walking, however, and often soft-footed across the ten foot long metal gate top with an extraordinary assurance.

I went to collect him from the side of the road and carried him back to the stables. I found an old coal scuttle and placed him inside to protect him from predators - an irony, as he was the greatest predator of all. I sealed the mouth of the scuttle with a stone, rather as one would seal a sepulchre in the bible. I buried him behind our shed, on the land he used to hunt on. I won’t put up a plaque. It’s unnecessary. He will eventually become part of the soil he lived on, just as happens to us all.

Thursday was a remarkable day. It started in a rush, however, in which I found myself locked behind an Aldi lorry all the way from Tidworth to Swindon. I was due at the BBC in Swindon at 8.50 am to take part in a round table discussion on Religion: A Force For Good Or Evil?, but at five minutes past nine I was still trying to find the BBC car park (up a maze of one way streets). I asked a passing lady for directions. “Are you appearing on a program?” she said. “Yes. In about five minutes!” “I’m the vicar’s wife. Why don’t you park in the vicarage? Then I’ll point you out the way to the studio.” A miracle! Hot-footing it up to the BBC, I squeezed through security, and sat down in my place just as the program started. Around the table were a Rabbi, a Catholic Priest, a Humanist Officiant, and me (with a Muslim lady called Jasmine taking part over the telephone). There followed an excellent hour of discussion, sometimes heated, often placatory. Here, for anyone interested, is the link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00k5sb6/Mark_ODonnell_22_09_2011/

At one point in the debate we were discussing condoms (as one does). Father McAndrew was explaining the Catholic Church’s view on the matter. “You can’t slide out of the condom issue so easily,” said Judith Stares, our humanist. “That is a magnificent pun,” I opined, trying not to corpse, and thoroughly enjoying watching the engineer and producer silently cracking up in the hermetically sealed control room.

Later, I drove north, aiming for Rugby School, where I was to give a lecture to the Temple Society (sixth formers interested in philosophy, the arts and discussion). Rugby School was my alma mater - I spent five years there from 1967-1971, and this was pretty much the first time I had been back. It all seemed very strange, as the school has become entirely co-educational in the interim, and my old house is now a girl’s house. But my host, Dr Jonathan Smith, and his wife Sandra, were so welcoming, and the atmosphere in the school so peaceful and calming, that I instinctively knew that the evening would be a successful one.

After the talk, Barbara Inge, the wife of one of my old masters forty years back (whom we schoolboys all knew as Bill Inge), told me that she had not fallen asleep during my lecture as “You have a smile in your voice. It kept me awake.” It was quite the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. Later, after a chat to the headmaster, Patrick Derham, and to the former housemaster of Whitelaw in my time, John Pierson, Jonathan, Sandra and I dined with nine or so of the Temple Society members, and continued on with our discussion. I was very impressed indeed with the sheer quality of the young people seated around the table, and touched that they were kind enough to show such an interest in my subject. I spent the night at Dr and Mrs Smith’s house, and I have to say that the whole experience was one of the pleasantest I could imagine. The school has improved no end since my time, and the young people I saw were clearly benefiting from being brought up in a mixed - both ethnically and in terms of gender - and tolerant environment, in which learning is valued per se, and not merely viewed as an adjunct to passing exams. Floreat Rugbeia!

There’s very little that can beat the buzz of starting work on a new book. I’m not talking about the mental preparation, the character breakdowns, the background searches, the frenetic visualisation - all of which put the fear of God into me. No, it’s the actual writing that is so compulsive. The ‘not knowing where you’re about to go’ feeling one gets when starting on a new chapter. The quasi osmotic creation of character beneath your very eyes, when the way you thought it would go isn’t the way it goes at all. I call it ‘living on the hoof’. You start off by thinking you’re in charge, but you soon realise that the story is in charge of you. That you are drawing from wells you didn’t even know existed.

I’m at that stage now. The stage where you are scared to talk about the thing you are working on - what Hemingway called ‘putting your mouth on it’ - for fear of diluting the energy, which needs to be transferred directly onto the page, and not into anyone else’s ears. Hemingway added that discussing work in progress ‘takes off whatever butterflies have on their wings and the arrangement of hawk’s feathers if you show it or talk about it.’ He was right.

When one is at this stage of a book’s process, one has to be prepared to get up from bed at any hour (if a suitable idea should introduce itself inside your waking moments), settle down at your desk, and get it down onto paper. It might look like hell later on in the morning, when you wake up again, but at least you won’t have lost it. Same thing if you luck into an idea swimming in the pool, lazing in the sauna, or relaxing in the jacuzzi. Get up, fetch a piece of paper/kitchen towel/envelope/wallpaper sample or whatever, and write the thing down. If you don’t do so you will always regret it, because you will remember it as being smarter than it probably was. It will stay cleaved to your brain, convincing you that it was the single greatest idea you’ve ever had, and that you blew it away for another ten minutes in the pool. This is the literary equivalent of self-immolation. From there on there is only the slippery slope that eventually leads to Tom Lehrer’s ‘Massachusetts State Home for the bewildered’….

Regular readers of my blog will know of my long-term friendship with Mallorcan-based American painter Bob Bradbury - a friendship that has endured for more than twenty-five years. I’m sorry to have to tell you that Bob passed away in June this year, a few days before what would have been his ninety-ninth birthday. Bob lived with his concert pianist daughter Suzy right up until the end of his life, and worked regularly until about a year before his death. I have a number of paintings from those last productive years, and they have enormous depth and subtlety - there was not the remotest falling off in his talent, which is an extraordinary achievement in itself. I estimate that he must have completed more than a hundred paintings in the last ten years of his life alone, and he will live on in these, and in the multitude of paintings and pots and carpet designs he completed during his more than fifty-year tenure in his Deia house.

Bob was one of the least vain men I ever met. Intellectually modest, he was also a committed Democrat of the old school - one who had experienced for himself the horrors of the Great Depression. After I’d cooked him one of my abominable meals - which he always insisted on complimenting me on - he would tell me stories of riding the boxcars during the late 1920s and early 1930s, through the wilds of California and Oregon. In one story he told me, he was saved at the very last moment from falling between two trains after inadvertently falling asleep on an inter-carriage link. Bob had a rigorous belief in the importance of ecological husbandry, and would rail against Governor Reagan’s decision to allow some of the great Californian Redwoods to be logged - his views on President George W Bush verged on the incandescent. He was also as close to teetotal as any man I have ever met - I never knowingly saw him take a drink. He lived and ate modestly, and on a smaller income than anyone I know - he managed for years on less than five hundred dollars a month, and still managed to save. An extraordinary man, and an extraordinary life.

Over the course of the past few weeks I’ve visited both Norway and Finland, and as well as learning a good deal about both countries, I’ve also taken time out to visit - and be entertained by - my publishers in Oslo and Helsinki. In Norway, after an interview with Norway’s top VG newspaper (and a photo opportunity in a church), my wife and I were wined and dined in the Hotel Bristol and then taken on a fascinating tour around the Viking Museum - thank you to my publisher, Tomas Algard, and my editor Anne Rath-Fredriksen. In Finland, I was met at Helsinki’s venerable (but ultra-modern) Academy Bookshop by Karisto’s Managing Director, Mika Kotilainen, Publishing Manager Sanna Vartiainen (who edited my The Nostradamus Prophecies), Editor Minna Klapuri (who edited my The Mayan Codex), and the translator of both my books, Pekka Tuomisto. I was then escorted down to the main floor of the bookshop to be interviewed and do a signing. Later, I was taken off by all four for a splendid lunch at the nearby Ravintola Teatteri, where our conversation ranged from General Mannerheim to the Roman Caesars, about whom Pekka has written an excellent book. Sanna then told me the good news that Karisto had made an offer for the third part of my trilogy, The Third Antichrist. I have to say that I am very much looking forward to working with everybody again - Nordic hospitality was certainly all it was cracked up to be. Everyone was extremely kind and I felt very much at home.

Now to The Mayan Codex and the remainder of my Nostradamus Trilogy . My editor at Corvus, Laura Palmer, has kindly put pen to paper to explain Corvus’s future plans re: the trilogy, in response to numerous enquiries about the timing of the final instalment:

>>>

We’ve made the decision to rebrand and re-issue the first two novels, THE NOSTRADAMUS PROPHECIES and THE MAYAN CODEX, alongside the third novel in the series, THE THIRD ANTICHRIST, in December this year.

Although I do believe that all the novels ‘stand alone’ on their own merits, I agree that it is all the more satisfying to read the entire story from start to finish. So we will be making it much clearer from the packaging and the contents of the text that the books form part of a trilogy. For example, we will be numbering the titles on the back cover, and each book will also contain the first chapter of the next book in the series to give a ‘teaser’ of how the story continues.

THE THIRD ANTICHRIST (December 2011) is a really fantastic story, and ends the trilogy with a real bang, so I hope readers of the first two books will find their patience more than fulfilled.

>>>

It would be very nice to feel that one could cheat fate, and avoid the inevitable low that comes after one has completed an acceptable full draft of a novel, and is about to begin the copy editing process. But it seems one can’t. Or at least I can’t. After all, one’s editor is happy - one is nominally happy oneself. But instead one feels bereft and unanchored - lost, mooring free, and coasting on a lee shore. One is standing on two stools, legs akimbo, weight evenly balanced between this novel and the next. But the lacuna is too great - the gap too wide to scissor. I feel like a surprised cat - you know, when they open their mouths and stare at you with their eyes wide open. Or at least that’s how my cat looks when I catch him unawares.

One responds by desperately finding things to do but not actually doing them. I have a list a mile long. I muse on the list. Weigh it up, as one weighs a glass of whisky one is contemplating drinking. Then I put it aside. Heck. I’ll do it all tomorrow. What’s pressing? I haven’t got my novel to write after all, because I’ve just finished that. Aaaarghhh….

There? You see? It’s Baudelaire’s spleen.

Why not go fishing, the devil on my right shoulder says. Go to the movies, says the devil on my left. Go to bed with a book, says the one perching on my head.

No, no, no, no, no, says the little angel hovering ahead of me and staring straight into my eyes. You have all sorts of things you need to do yet - write your glossary. Get on with all those little added extras you promised yourself you would provide for the book. Get thinking about your next one.

But you’ve still got copy editing to do, says the first devil. You can’t even contemplate getting on with the next book yet. You’ll simply spoil it…

Sheeesh. And what have I been doing for the past twenty minutes? Writing a blog for you guys.

The devil always wins….

I’m enjoying the juxtaposition of two books I’m reading at the moment - both about literary wives. The first is Paula McLain’s brilliant rendition of Hadley Hemingway, in The Paris Wife - this one is fiction. Mrs McClain thinks herself into Hadley Hemingway’s skin, and gives us the complex woman we always suspected Hadley was. Most Hemingway nuts, like me, have a soft spot for Hadley, and secretly think that she was Hemingway’s true love, and that he always regretted her. She was a thoroughly decent woman, and loved him. The second book, and equally fascinating, is Maryann Burk Carver’s autobiographical memoir, What It Used To Be Like: A Portrait Of My Marriage To Raymond Carver. Maryann resembles Hadley in many ways. Both were the early wives, who followed their men through the inevitable days in any writer’s life when they remain resolutely unknown, and hope outweighs the mundanity of the everyday. What astonishes me is how very young Maryann Carver was when she entered into marriage with the man who was to become, alongside Ernest Hemingway, one of America’s very best short story writers. Both men were convinced from early on about just what they had to offer the literary world. Both wives tried to match their support of their husbands’ ambitions with their very natural feelings and drives as women. Sometimes parallel forces like that jar, and both McClain and Carver perfectly deliver the complexities of keeping great egos/great men happy, long before they are great. Love helps of course, and both these women loved their men, and were loved by them.

These are the real stories of these men’s early lives, and the women who, to a large extent, allowed them to be themselves. The struggles are all here - the passion - the obstacles - the naturally occurring jealousies caused by having to share the man you love with an equal, but often competing, passion. In the event, both men were incredibly lucky with their first wives. Both married very young. Both moved on to other women later, in their maturity. But I will think differently, after reading these books, about the role of a woman in her literary husband’s life. Isn’t it wonderful what books can do? How else is a man ever to think himself into a woman’s world? What other art form can achieve this quasi-supernatural parlour trick? Books like these are very precious, and we lose sight of them at our peril.