Christopher Campbell-Howes

Having taken early retirement from teaching in Scotland, I settled in the Languedoc to follow a second career in writing and composition. My first book to appear was French Leaves: Letters from the Languedoc, which was a collation of articles I had written for The Northern Scot, a local newspaper serving the area I had previously worked in. It was published by a Dutch company called Gopher (emblem: a squirrel) which was later taken over by a company more interested in publishing magazines than books. They returned my contract. After a lot of thought I set up my own publishing company with the support of family and friends. We called it Romarin, which is the French for the herb rosemary. Rosemary grows plentifully where we live in the south of France, and - at the time - no one else had claimed it as a domain name.

French Leaves: Letters from the Languedoc under its new imprint sold very well. It was quickly followed by the French version, Feuilles françaises (on Kindle), translated by Prisca Swan, and then Französische Blätter (not on Kindle, sorry) translated by Barbara Grüner mainly for significant numbers of German visitors to this part of the world.

More French Leaves: Tales of a Titular Organist followed, again a collation of monthly pieces originally written for a UK holiday lets and property company called French Connections. My connection with The Northern Scot had ceased when the Editor, perhaps encouraged by the alluring pieces I used to write, upped sticks and also came to live in the Languedoc.

I turned to fiction with Midi et demi, the French for half-past twelve, subtitling it Unlikely Tales from the South of France, a set of short stories which I enjoyed writing for their quirky and unpredictable forays into aspects of French life locally. Meanwhile a novel was in progress, something I had been wanting to write for years: Romarin published The Night Music in 2006, and in December of that year it became one of The Guardian readers' 50 best books of the year.

My other creative interest, composition, had been rather eclipsed by writing and publishing, so a line was drawn under Romarin (at least for the time being) to enable me to compose various works, some for the choir I conducted. 'L'Imitation de Notre Dame la Lune' (The Imitation of Our Lady the Moon), settings of poems by Jules Laforgue, was followed by 'Sounds and Sweet Airs' setting of 15 Shakespeare songs. Instrumental pieces included a piano trio called L'Olarguaise, after the village it portrays, a string quartet based on Milton's poem L'Allegro (first performed in Paris in 2019 by the Quatuor Lugha), a quartet for oboe and strings, a sort of in memoriam for a much-loved cat, among other minor works.

Parallel with this ongoing activity was a full length biography of the British artist Evelyn Dunbar (1906-60), which appeared in 2016 under the now revived Romarin imprint. Not on Kindle, I'm afraid, but Evelyn Dunbar: A Life in Painting is available through Amazon.

In spare moments I try to cultivate strawberries (preferred variety is Charlotte) and other fruit and veg. The pleasure of building drystone walls occupied me for a long time, but now they're complete, allowing what has turned out to be a long and sunlit retirement to be more punctuated by making music with friends, one of life's greatest pleasures.