August: Life's Lotteries

While watching the Wallabies hammer the British Lions in the torrential rain of Sydney in the final test of the tour Down Under, my friend and genial host Tim told me about some American billionaire nutcase (or shrewd influencer, depending on your perspective) who has developed a health algorithm or protocol called ‘The Blueprint’. My pal suggested that this guy spends about a million dollars each year on supplements, fads, lab reports and other paraphernalia to promote longevity. I asked Tim how old this guy was, expecting him to answer that he was in his 80s, someone experimenting with prolonging his life beyond its usual expectancy. But no, this is someone in his middle age. How I laughed! Doesn’t the deluded sap know that life’s a lottery? He could be killed on his way to the gym, the spa or the laboratory.

Life’s a lottery… and sometimes you win. When we were younger and more anxious to curry favour with the locals of the Corrèze, we learnt not to enter raffles, not because we had no chance of success, but because the prize more often than not might be a side of pork or a litre of walnut wine, neither of which enticed a pair of abstemious vegetarians. I rarely enter competitions, but a month or so ago I went in for one sponsored by the Anglophone newspaper, The Connexion, to win tickets to the Marciac jazz festival. It involved a brief paragraph to say why you wanted to go. Since I’ve learnt the discipline of writing brief music reviews for Songlines magazine, and since jazz is one of my life-enhancing supplements, I felt I might have a chance of winning. Sure enough…

After due consultation with the Good Wife, I nominated an evening with the Christian Sands trio and the Wynton Marsalis sextet. Which necessitated a trip down south-west to the Gers on the last Monday of July. It was our first visit to this annual festival in a sleepy little town in a sleepy little department, which has become as big an affair as Nice, Vienne or Aix-en-Provence. Why on earth hadn’t we been before? I suppose summer’s a busy time here and some aspect of life usually gets in the way. But on the journey, we both discovered the principal reason why: it’s a hell of a long way. When you try to travel cross-country in France, map distances double. Leaving the motorway at Montauban, the route nationale to Auch (pronounced ‘Osh’, I discovered) turned into the kind of grind that persuaded us many years ago to pay autoroute tolls once our family income had stabilised.

We stayed just outside the little town, already buzzing when we passed through it mid-afternoon after four fairly frustrating hours on the road. As well as a dog-sitting facility at a not-negligible €7 per hour, our lodgings offered a view across the rolling countryside from our bedroom under the roof decorated with souvenirs of Niger. The distant mountains were invisible in the heat haze, but in Spring, it seems, the snow-capped backdrop of the Pyrenees turns it into something sublime.

The next day, we shared a communal al fresco breakfast with two other couples also there for the concerts. The young couple had driven up from Valencia, a young Spanish trumpeter (who told me in broken English about the problems of embouchure) and his partner, a Cuban pianist. The older couple were from the Bordeaux area: Madame, a charming cultured woman, perhaps a former teacher, who spoke excellent English, and her husband, a former trumpeter with a bandas marching band, who’d lost his embouchure with the advancing years. 

We compared notes – about the ambience and the music itself. After a veggie burger and chips in the designated food-truck area (or ‘Les Foux Treux’ I misheard it mystifyingly) accompanied by a band of teenagers playing 1950s hard bop, the Dame and I took a stroll around the town square, with live music emanating from every bar and every brasserie. The menu du soir took place in a big Big Top big enough to seat around six thousand. At 9pm on the dot, the Christian Sands trio delivered the entrée. A personable young pianist, he played to my mind with the style and panache of a young Herbie Hancock. The main course soon after 11pm was Wynton Marsalis, looking a little pudgy around the jowls these days, with younger brother Jason on drums, his long-time bass and piano players, and two young saxophonists who looked slightly in awe of the legendary company.

Things have changed since either of us last went to such a similarly big concert. (For Debs, it was probably David Bowie at the Stafford cattle market back in the late ‘70s; for me, it was possibly Kid Creole & the Coconuts in the mid ‘80s at the Brighton Conference Centre.) For one thing, the sound was extraordinary – like listening, comfortably, on a humungous home hi-fi. For another, the big screens either side of the stage added a new dimension. I didn’t get it previously: why go to some mega-show where the artists are so far away that they’re dots on a distant stage, so you spend your time watching them on a screen? You could be tucked up in the comfort of your own sitting room watching on YouTube. But I was wrong; terribly wrong.

Under the gaze of our solicitous hostess, keen to know that her guests, French, Spanish and English, could communicate and enjoy her homemade peach and butternut squash jam, we gave our marks. The Dame, the teacher and the Cuban pianist enjoyed Christian Sands and his young rhythm section for their youthful enthusiasm and their sheer brio, while Marsalis and co. seemed tired and world-weary. Yes, the trumpeter was perhaps tired to be up late at his age, but I argued that he’s serious because his music is demanding and he’s self-conscious about his place in the pantheon of jazz. Although he launched straight into the long, intricate ‘Integrity Suite’ with only an aside that there’s little of it about these days, Wynton is no Van Morrison, who truly deserves the epithet of ‘little fat miserable turd’. Debs enjoyed the encore most, when he invited some guest stars onto the stage and played with a real joie de vivre, but I was enthralled throughout the main show by the ensemble playing and the individual solos and how everything slotted together so fluently with barely a note dropped or out of place.

Before hitting the long and winding road for home after breakfast, we were treated to an encore by the Cuban pianist on our hostess’ baby grand. Her entrancing performance underlined how the Cuban state conservatory produces some of the best musicians in the world – only to lose them when they go off to seek fame and fortune. Our hostess also came up with an unbeatable deal on our way out: book with her for the next three consecutive years and earn a (gasp!) 10% discount. It might be a tad controversial to suggest this, but based on our 30 years’ experience the French are not always the most generous of people – unless there’s food and drink involved.

The journey home was even longer and more tortuous than we had figured. We went via Villeneuve-sur-Lot to visit new friends who have bought a ruin just south of the town. He’s an Oxford don, a charming softly-spoken Scotsman with, I surmised, as limited practical nous as my own and a similar impulse to spend his remaining years reading books in a comfortable chair. She’s a German eco-warrior determined to restore the house in the most ecological and expensive way known to human kind. When we were younger and crazier, we fortunately never had enough money to throw at our old farmhouse in the Corrèze. Fortunately, it remained a house with potential (for its proprietors’ ruin) until the day we sold it on to another dreamer.

In the car later we discussed our friends’ venture with heavy hearts. If only, I suggested, they had read my book about buying property in France. Perhaps the one truly useful advice I offered was that it’s often cheaper and quicker to pull down a restoration project and start from scratch. The cry of The Last Poets resonated inside my cranium: This is mad-ness! But there’s nothing you can say and nothing really that you can do to help. We all have to learn for ourselves, usually the hard way.

It took an eternity to get home. Having crossed the river Lot, we somehow found ourselves back on its south side. Map-reading, I was reminded, is not one of my dear wife’s talents. Nevertheless, we got back with 10 minutes to spare before said spouse had to order the fortnightly fish from the online co-operative. I left her to it and sped off down the road to pick up the dog from her godparents’ – or dogparents, depending on how you arrange the letters.

Will we go back for the next three years to take advantage of the 10% discount? I don’t know. It’s an awful long way. There’s an element of madness involved. Talking of which… I started with an example of modern madness. Here’s another in conclusion. In Brive on the first Sunday of August, on the way to the monthly brocante, we noticed that the fairly-fast-food emporium near the theatre now advertises itself as a Glacier Afterwork. Somewhere, in other words, where you can go after a hard day in the shop or the office and eat a nice unhealthy ice-cream sundae. The Blueprint wouldn’t advocate it. Le Aftaire-werk, alors. Yet another appalling misappropriation of the English language in the name of a trendy Esperanto. My mother and her mother were serial users of the word ‘vulgar’; they would have found all this so very vulgar. And, for all their faults, the French generally don’t do vulgarity. Or didn’t. When we arrived here, the Salon wouldn’t allow such linguistic depravity. You couldn’t even name your child Kevin. In olden days, a glimpse of stocking… Now, anything goes. This is indeed mad-ness.

 

July: Our Own Little Worlds

On the hottest day of the year so far, I phoned my brother in Finland. He showed me around his place in the forest with his phone-camera and the vegetation looked lush and green under grey cloudy skies. He had a mild moan about the weather. At something like 18 degrees on that particular morning, it was about six degrees less than the temperature during the previous night here. This was the culmination of the second official heat wave and we hadn’t yet seen off June. Finnish weather, he told me, had been nothing to glow about since his arrival three weeks before, but it sounded like the kind of summer I wrote about in flowery terms this time last year.

This year, the dial has clicked past 30 degrees on more days than I care to count. It makes my blood boil, triggering traumatic memories of 2003 when we camped on the land prior to house construction in a caravan during the hottest, driest summer on record. The Brother asked how we manage to stay cool. We do and we don’t, I explained, since coolness is relative. When you come in from the inferno outside, the house feels nice and cool, but on that hottest day of the year the digital thermometer above the dog’s basket registered 29 degrees by 4pm. Daphne had vacated her basket and was flaked out on the cooler clay tiles in a dark corner of the living area.

I sketched out our routine on such days: rise at 6am and open all shutters, doors and windows for an hour or so; do anything that needs doing outside, like watering pots and the paltry crop of vegetables that has survived thus far the heat and the attention of slugs and deer; walk the dog if she’s sufficient energy before breakfast; close back doors and shutters after breakfast, then the front set mid-morning once the sun has shifted southwards; work upstairs before the mezzanine level turns into Namibia, then retire after lunch to a darkened bedroom for any further work to be eked out between bouts of lethargy and sheer exhaustion; drive to river early evening with dog and spouse for swimming (or, in my case, to float, float on…); return to eat light dinner and open all doors, windows and shutters prior to evening entertainment and bed. Rinse and repeat…

There’s a lake near the Brother’s house in the forest, about a 45-minute drive north of Helsinki. When he and his partner bought it just a few years ago, it came with sauna, guest house and furniture and fittings, including boat – and all for about the price of a garage in central London. He told me that he bought a battery-operated outdoor motor for the boat and that they’ve had a couple of excursions during their stay this time, but a snake spotted in the water has put them off a plunge.

From the photos I’ve seen, the lake (presumably one of hundreds and thousands in the area) looks similar to but rather bigger than the lake near our old house in the wilds of the Corrèze. We would pick up Tilley the Kid from school and go there on hot days to swim and repose. The Good Wife is a good swimmer; she could swim from one side of the lake to the other and back again, often accompanied for at least some of the way by our old dog, Alfred Lord Sampson; Alfie, for short. When she swims in the Dordogne at our favourite spot near the village of Floirac, she sets off upstream and soon disappears from view. I know roughly where she is because she triggers the colony of frogs on the other side of the river. Their extraordinary racket echoes around the limestone cliffs on the opposite bank. Daphne doesn’t go with her, but restricts herself to intermittent sorties in pursuit of her tennis ball. Once bored, she tends to impersonate some kind of basking shark by trying to catch in her mouth the miniature aquatic life with which the river teems. Or she’ll wander into the undergrowth to sniff out scraps left by picnickers.

When there aren’t too many humans and/or mosquitoes, the river is one of the most heavenly places on earth. Apart from the occasional sound of a car heading along the road on the rive droit, or a barking dog, or a chorus of frogs, or a passing convoy of canoes, the silence is golden and the peace is total. The world and its woes – or ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ as baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams put it so elegantly – seem far, far away. The Brother told me how maybe four or five vehicles per day pass by their house in the pine forest. When they drive the 70 or so kilometres to visit his partner’s daughter, they encounter a mere clutch of cars on the road.

We talked about the curious course of existence whereby two such misanthropic siblings should somehow find their entirely different ways to two such different earthly paradises. ‘Back in our own little worlds, with nobody to bug us,’ as The Tubes once put it (which probably carbon-dates me). Finland is very different to France, of course, but what it lacks in the variety of its scenic wonders, it makes up for in the sheer good sense of a tiny population educated by the best system in the world and a pragmatic administration to find contentment in everyday life and communal harmony founded on trust. Were it not for my age and the daunting prospect of another major upheaval, I would be tempted to join the Brother there. I shall content myself with as many visits as I can manage: perhaps by means of a Eurorail ticket if I can plot a route up the west coast of Norway to the Arctic Circle and then down through Finland, then back home via the 30-hour ferry crossing from Helsinki to the north German coast and thence to south-west France.  

Whereas we packed up and went at a time of life when we were both comparatively footloose and fancy-free, both fuelled by a sense of adventure and equipped with vaguely transferable professional skills, the Brother was more hidebound by routine. A self-employed plumber by trade, it must have been difficult to jump off the hamster wheel, living in a part of Surrey where there’s money available for new heating systems and en suite bathrooms, and only a small pool of skilled and reliable professionals to fit them. Back now in England, he’s finishing his final bathroom before he packs up his bag of tools and disappears with his pension into a Guildford sunset. He’ll be free to take the long and winding road to Finland for as many days at a time as the post-Brexit regulations allow. At least until he and his partner have sorted out their visas and whatever else is required for a longer stay. I’ve undertaken to show him how my Wise app makes foreign exchange so much easier.

Finland, he tells me, is an equally attractive proposition in either summer or winter. I don’t doubt it. Winters here, too, were spectacular when the landscape was covered in snow. Now with virtually none, winters are no more than mild and agreeable. The Brother’s house came equipped with one of those high-performing ceramic wood-burning stoves that heats the efficiently insulated living space with ease. So he can go there when it’s minus-20 or even colder and hunker down far from the madding crowd and listen to pins dropping outside. Of course, though, you pay a price for paradise. In Finland, it’s the sociopathic enemy across the Gulf. The pragmatic populace, however, is geared up for invasion and ready as one to fight off again any Russian invaders with the kind of cunning, stealth and courage that they showed in the Winter War of 1939-40, which arguably showed Hitler that Russia could be defeated, thus changing the entire course of World War II.

Here in my own little isolated world in rural France, the price we pay is somewhat different: appalling anti-social driving, a multitude of undesirable insects, an impenetrable administration, a rigid unforgiving nationalism, which decrees that the only way is French, a total absence of Bombay mix… and the heat. It can only get hotter from here on in. If the Good Wife and I are to survive until we’re laid to rest, we must learn to adapt or die.  Exterior curtains and keen shutter management are all very well, but such things only save a degree or two at most. Whereas many lament the end of summer, I feel relief at each one passing without incident. For the moment, the bedroom is the coolest place in the house during the hottest part of the day. Bed is still the best place on earth, especially when cooled by a Dyson fan.

 

June: Me, Marseille and I

A recent trip to Marseille did nothing to amend an abiding impression that dated back to 1978. In the back seat of my friend Philip’s white Renault 4 with the future first Mrs. Sampson, I remember thinking that Marseille was somewhere I never particularly wanted to see again. It seemed big, noisy, dirty and rather intimidating. We were on our way to Cassis on the other side of the Calenques to visit the same friends we spent two days and two nights with last week in a kind of upmarket holiday camp.

But visit it we did; the second Mrs. Sampson felt that her life would not be complete if we didn’t evaluate France’s second (or third, if you’re Lyonnais) city. Besides, it was kind of half way between us and our friends in the Alps, Jacqui and Claude. And we could all get there by train. And Jacqui found us a midweek deal at the Villages Clubs du Soleil, a cross between Butlins and one of those ghastly cordoned-off holiday compounds inside which you can lie on a lounger, turn a shade of fuchsia, drink until you’re blotto and watch the natives on the other side of the perimeter fence going about their alien lives. It was classier than both, but born of the same all-in mentality. Being France, it wasn’t a case of all-you-can-drink, but rather all-you-can-eat – which made choosing a venue for dinner that suited all four of us a whole lot easier.

The train took the strain, so a long but relaxing coming we had of it. One change only: at Montauban (‘Ville des Bourbons’, apparently), as unedifying a city as our café crèmes at an establishment just down from the station. It’s quite an achievement to render coffee so milky and revolting, but that café managed it triumphantly. Our connection from Bordeaux arrived on time, to take us via Toulouse and Carcassonne, then along the Mediterranean coast via Narbonne and Sête, then Bezier, Montpelier, Nimes, Arles and finally to Marseille Saint-Charles.

The station sits atop a promontory that affords a view from the top of its grand central steps across a ramshackle roofscape to the sea. It reminded me of Brighton’s main station, only Marseille is hotter, noisier and dirtier than London-by-the-sea. Depositing our minimal baggage at our nearby first-night hotel, we set off for the Office de Tourisme near the old port at the foot of Marseille’s famous main-drag, La Canibière. A solicitous young man helped us when we must have looked like a pair of lost tourists. The office was there across the wide boulevard bisected by tram tracks, a little further down on the right. And how did we get across said boulevard? I asked him (in the apparent absence of a pedestrian crossing in the vicinity). Errr, by walking across it. Oh. Right. I thanked him. What a pair of eejits. But what a nice young man.

Another nice man, Olivier from the Office de Tourisme, sold us the last four tickets for a guided tour of Le Corbusier’s famous social-housing experiment, the Cité Radieuse. In discovering that we were adoptive Lotois, he asked us how we liked the local duck. We didn’t, being vegetarian. At which point, we lost him. He wished us a happy stay in the city and we went off armed with a map. My mission on that first afternoon, which my understanding Good Wife chose to accept, was to track down one or two of the record shops I had earmarked at home. The expedition took us up into the edgy hinterland of the 6^th district, an area full of seedy alleyways, vintage shops, organic salad bars and colourful graffiti. The city fathers (and mothers) seem to have given up trying to fight the ubiquitous spontaneous decorations, which range from monochrome scribbles to vibrant murals.

Tangerine, the first record shop we stumbled upon, was so eye-wateringly expensive that we stumbled straight back out again. But on the trek back to the hotel, we discovered La Bonne Mère (taking its peculiar name from the nickname given to the city’s most famous landmark, the basilica high above the port, Notre-Dame de la Garde): a tiny establishment with a wonderfully diverse collection and a few bargain bins run by a charming guy passionate about his wares. Debs went back to the hotel while I chatted to him about music from the Antilles and Disques Debs International in particular. I came away with a bag of seven LPs for 30 bucks, including Sonny Rollins’ film score for Alfie. What’s it all about, this addiction of mine?

At breakfast the next morning, we chatted to a quartet of British expats who have settled south of Bergerac. They were on a cruise until the ship caught fire somewhere near Toulon. Apparently, they were told to wait in their cabins for further announcements – which never came. Another reason never to take to the water in a vessel resembling a block of flats.

We spent the morning before our friends’ arrival exploring the area of cobbled streets, steps and alleyways overlooking the port known as Le Panier (the Basket) and made famous by the novels of Marcel Pagnol. Heaven knows what the likes of Marius, Fanny or César would have made of our holiday compound, a hot half-hour walk from the station on the other side of the railway tracks. We all agreed to stay there for the rest of the day to unwind and enjoy the facilities: the pool, the boules, the bar (for our complementary kier) and the buffet-style restaurant. We sat outside to dispel a hint within of a glorified canteen. One of the staff came out periodically to issue a verbal warning to Roget, a voracious seagull that has become a local celebrity.

Next morning, our complementary 24-hour Citypasses took us by a boat crowded with young schoolchildren and German tourists to the Chateau d’If, where we were dive-bombed by Roget’s kind on a stroll around the perimeter fortifications. We must have got too close to their fledglings and downy young that wandered aimlessly about like feckless teenagers. So we took refuge in the chateau itself, a great pink slab with walls two metres thick at the apex of the rocky outcrop. I was able to call upon my vivid memories of a BBC drama series with Alan Badel in the title role to summarise the Count of Monte Cristo for the others. The cells were so dark and daunting as to suggest that tunnelling his way through to his ancient neighbour – and thence to the sea below by means of a body bag – smacked of creative license.

The apartments within the Cité Radieuse of Le Corbusier are light, airy and spacious in comparison. Our tour kicked-off at 2pm, which didn’t give us much time to get back from the rocky outcrop, find somewhere mutually agreeable for lunch and then locate our destination, a brisk 20-minute walk from the nearest metro station. Claude’s first reaction to the monumental concrete block about as big as a modern cruise liner was ‘HLM’ – which is exactly what it is: une Habitation à Loyer Modérér, constructed with state aid to house those with modest means. In this case, some of the bombed-out families of wartime Marseille. Squatting on vast concrete pillars and coloured with splashes of primary colours like something conceived by Piet Mondrian, the building went many, many times over-budget, which no doubt explains why most social housing blocks thereafter were built with such minimal concern for either comfort or community.

It was when the tour moved inside that it got particularly interesting. We speculated whether our guide was a resident, so intimate was her knowledge of the building’s concept and design features, even down to the detail of the €400 monthly charges that today’s proprietors pay on top of any mortgages for the upkeep of such a behemoth. One of the interlocking apartments has been kept in its original early-‘50s state, when the colourful sliding cupboards and fitted galley kitchens were state-of-the-art. It looked a little like the set for Jacques Tati’s modernist Mon Oncle. We were asked to look but not to touch and to wear covers like blue shower-caps over our shoes. I noted with dismay that I was the only one of the party to somehow put them on inside out.

From there, she led us up to the roof, which was truly the pièce de résistance. With its 360-degree views all over Marseille, with its recreation areas and even an in-house on-roof école maternelle, it’s like an architect’s adventure playground. Although I’ve never seen it, it made me think of the Fiat factory roof in Turin. I kept expecting the latest test models to come roaring round around the bend and down the home straight. From the northern rim, you can look down at the Orange Vélodrome, the equally impressive stadium where Olympique Marseille play their football. On the way back to the metro station, we passed the stadium and wondered why so many people were milling about under the cold, wary gaze of soldiers cradling sub-machine guns. The football season was over, surely. Back in our glorified holiday camp, we learnt that Ed Sheeran was playing there that night. Last week it was Bruce Springsteen.

Come Saturday morning, we discovered why a midweek stay in our holiday village is a better option than the weekend. Our converted maternity hospital was now crawling with guests. Some of them looked like the type to chat noisily in the corridor outside your bedroom at 5am and wake up the oldies within. It was time to leave – and, after one last stifling walk around le Vieux Port, time, too, to leave town. The Dame can tick it off her list of places to visit. As far as I’m concerned, once you’ve seen one big Mediterranean city, you’ve seen ‘em all. I was itching to get back to the peace and quiet of home: to play my new records and watch the bees and the butterflies dance among the flowering lavender. The only slight problem was that we had nearly two hours to kill in Montauban. And there’s another city I never want to see again.

May: The Great Iberian Khyber Attack

I’m not best suited for travel. There are too many things that can go wrong: breakdowns, postponements, missed connections, deportations, personal injuries, thefts… Strangely enough, I don’t worry about plane crashes, only the potential damage to my ears: a hangover from my last trans-Atlantic trip to New York, which could have been the source of the tinnitus in my left ear. It’s good to experience new places and see new things, but my natural nesting self prefers the comfort and security of its own home.

All of which makes April a remarkable month for your foreign correspondent, since it involved not one but two trips away – both involving hated airports and airplanes. The first one, early in the month, saw me winging my way to Belfast in a plane full of Norn Irish families fresh from evidently exhilarating trips to EuroDisney. It spoke volumes about the tenor of modern life that it tended to be the adults who wore the Mickey Mouse ears (for souvenirs). One such modern mum asked her wee child, ‘Would you like to play on your wee phone?’ I was transfixed by another specimen across the aisle with the blondest hair, the blackest eyes, the longest fingernails and the fattest lips I ever did see. Lord forgive them, I told myself, for they know not what they do.

We landed at Belfast International airport, 25 miles or so north of Belfast and built right beside Lough Neagh, now Europe’s most polluted lake thanks primarily to agricultural run-off. Yer man at the passports desk immediately made me feel at home. No worries about being barred from entry and incarcerated in an airless room for questioning. ‘How’re you doing today; you all right?’ he asked me with the cheer that’s entirely lacking when re-entering France. I told him I was here for a wee holiday. ‘Uch that’s great; have a lovely time now,’ he wished me, handing back my passport. (I always bring my French and British passports, just in case one gets lost or stolen and I find myself stranded and walled up in some alien hotel room. I keep them in separate pockets to defy thieves.) His welcome reminded me that for all the fat lips and pre-pubescent phones and sectarian violence, the Norn Irish people are some of the warmest and friendliest on earth.

I was there to meet my best-est friend from school, who flew in to Belfast City airport near Rory McIlroy’s Holywood birthplace after celebrating his 70^th birthday on the Queen Mary from New York to Southampton. My mission, which I chose to accept, was to hire a car from Mr. Herz (he dead), meet my main man at his cousin’s in suburban Finaghy, take a guided tour around our old school, check out the record shops in the city centre, then take off on a wee trip to County Tyrone and to Portstewart to see his childhood haunts and more long-lost cousins, before returning to Belfast for one last evening prior to wending our separate ways back home.

It all went miraculously to plan and I didn’t need that extra insurance that Mr. Herz (he dead) talked me into to protect me from damage and theft. Rory even finally won his elusive Masters on the Sunday. We were treated like visiting royals by the vice-principal of our old school, who proudly showed off the gob-smacking new facilities and presented us with a goody-bag at our conclusion. I now drink my morning lukewarm lemon in my MCB mug. We found one splendid record shop whose proprietor made me a present of the CD I took to the counter. Cousin Anna in Finaghy and Cousin Heather in Tyrone adopted me as an honorary member of the family. The latter couldn’t believe that we weren’t brothers. ‘You even write the same!’ (Mind you, she also thought that I was the calmest, most relaxed person she’d ever met.) I delivered the wee hired Toyota without a scratch, and the plane got me back to Paris Charles de Gaulle without incident. It was full of young families flying there to visit EuroDisney. Touch wood, my right ear seems to be fine.

Later that same month… after leaving Daphne with her godparents and the cats with our house-sitter, the Good Wife and I got up at the unspeakable hour of 3.30 to drive to Toulouse and catch a plane to Seville, there to meet up with The Daughter, who had a friend’s wedding to attend on the Saturday. Seville, I discovered, is the fourth largest city in Spain, full of narrow passageways, fin de siècle metalwork balconies, gaudy churches, tapas bars and populous plazas. The public buildings are among the most impressive I’ve ever seen: the church of San Salvador, a temple of religious kitsch that puts the Ro- in Rococo and the gold in bullion (no doubt plundered from the New World in the name of God, Spain and the Catholic church); the ‘ossum’ cathedral, the biggest Gothic cathedral in the world, from whose original Moorish tower we looked down upon a maelstrom of football fans in the squares below, drinking, chanting and setting off fireworks prior to the Copa del Rey between Real Madrid and Barcelona that evening in the local stadium (and never, ever have I seen so many replica football shirts); and finally the truly glorious Real Alcázar palace with its formal gardens alive with the cries of peacocks, a dazzling marriage of Moorish and classical architectural that maybe even tops the Alhambra of Granada. I must point out, too, that – according to the official translation – ‘the ablution court [of the cathedral] is dedicated to being a cemetery.’

All went well until the Monday morning. It could have been worse; we could have been in a lift. We arrived at the Flamenco Museum to find it shrouded in darkness. The woman at the desk explained that the lights had gone out suddenly and we should come back a little later. While wandering around the old labyrinthine Jewish quarters, Debs picked up a snippet of conversation to suggest that the lights had also gone out in Barcelona. In trying to cross main roads rendered anarchic by the immobilisation of traffic lights in order to reach the shade and safety of the beautiful public parks, high anxiety set in. We had little cash, so how could we pay to eat out or even buy salad foods to eat in? How could water be pumped to the taps? How could planes fly without air traffic control to guide them? How, why, what, where, when…?

And when the power came back suddenly early evening, I worried that the rush everywhere to phones and TV sets to find out what had happened would plunge us back into darkness. For me, the most likely explanation seemed to be a cyber attack, no doubt courtesy of those fiendish Russkies checking to find how easy it would be to bring a nation to a standstill prior to invasion. My wife, my dear modern-day Mrs. Malaprop, with whom I have just celebrated 35 years of near-constant marital harmony, suggested it was a Khyber attack, but I felt a raid on central electricity generating boards by rabid hoards of spear-wielding Afghani tribesmen rather unlikely.

It was well that we left early for the station the next morning to catch our train to Cordoba. There was aggravated pandemonium in a forecourt that thronged with queues and crowds shuffling and jostling aimlessly to a soundtrack of incomprehensible announcements and instructions shouted through a megaphone, all witnessed by a camera crew perhaps from Seville Today. Having just about given up on the idea of travelling by train and discussing instead a drastic last-ditch flight by Über, suddenly we caught the word ‘Cordoba’ on the public address system. ‘T’was a miracle! Our church visits must have prompted some benevolent deity to give us a break. Mirabile dictu, we arrived in our destination only 15 minutes later than originally scheduled.

Significantly smaller than Seville, Cordoba is another gem – even though the proprietor of our apartment, almost certainly a man, neglected to provide a bread knife and instructions for one of the most incomprehensible induction hubs ever built to defy a Khyber attack. And yet… reader, I cracked it (quite by chance). Serendipitously, on our first afternoon there, we found the modest, unassuming Flamenco Museum, which charged the Missus and me a princely euro and Tilley the Kid twice that for admission to one of the most enjoyable and charming museums ever perused. The Good Wife likened it to another unexpected delight, Cumbria’s very own Pencil Museum. The history of the genre was stored in a succession of white drawers that opened to reveal information, videos, sound recordings, portraits and memorabilia.

Architecturally, though, the high spot of the trip was our visit the next morning to the Mezquita-Catedral de Córdoba: one-part mosque, one-part cathedral and several parts optical illusion. Like some fantastical M.C. Escher drawing, the columns and two-tier arches appear to recede into the distance in a perfectly straight line on latitudinal, longitudinal and diagonal planes. And plonked right in the middle of it all is a 16^th century Renaissance cathedral that glitters with gold and general decorative vulgarity. By contrast, the mosaics and extraordinarily intricate stone carvings of the Islamic remains are truly spellbinding.

Thus ended our trip to Andalucia – without catastrophe, despite the best efforts of Afghani tribesmen or Russian deviants. Who knows what long-term damage might have been perpetrated? But perhaps it will amount to less than the damage inflicted on the English language by incompetent translators (or more likely Artificial Intelligence). This splendid example comes from Cordoba’s church of San Francisco. Writing as if Saint Francis of Assisi, our guide states, ‘My fully evangelical, austere and simple religious life made me nt [sic] of brothers soon. And, although I do not like anything I admit, I am the first known case in the history of visible and external stigmatization.’

Well, it’s almost as impenetrable as that induction hob. As the first known case of serene anxiety and catastrophic calmness decidedly not dedicated to being a cemetery, may I suggest that these people pay a proper translator?