January: A Winter's Tale

At last, a real winter. It was even snowing here when I began this on Woden’s Day, the 7^th of yet another new year. We haven’t had snow in these parts for a few years. That’s the thing about climate change: you never know what to expect from one year to the next. From one day to the next, in fact.

Gisèle is delighted. She sells us eggs, butternut squash, potatoes full of untreated eyes and the best walnuts for miles around from her nearby barn. Bitter cold means death to the bugs and pests that make eyes in her spuds and generally make her market gardening problematic.

Unfortunately the big Yuletide chill didn’t come early enough for Daphne. A couple of days after Boxing Day she failed to greet me with her usual enthusiasm first thing in the morning. Her head hung low and she wouldn’t or couldn’t look at me. I wondered whether she’d had a bad reaction to the first of a new brand of chews the evening before, a present from her ‘godparents’, the Thompsons, on Christmas Day. Unable to eat her breakfast, I knew that something had to be seriously wrong. Daphne is the world’s greediest dog.  

On taking her to see Valérie at the vets’ in Martel, Sampsondottir and I learnt that Daphne had the pirose, as they seem to call the tick-bite disease in these parts. Despite the number of ticks we are forever removing, Daphne has never had it before – unlike her predecessor, Alfred Lord Sampson, who twice almost died from it – and we were beginning to think that she must have an in-built tolerance to the vile bloodsuckers. But no. Fortunately, we caught it early. Unfortunately, the injection of the antidote must be very painful. When wife and daughter took her back a couple of days later, they reported that they had never, ever seen an animal shake so much with fear.

Before the unwelcome drama, we’d enjoyed some beautiful ‘Family Walks’ (as our family-oriented daughter would surely capitalise them) including one from a nearby table d’oriéntation that offers the best view in these parts of the Dordogne way down below. It takes you as far as ‘the house on the hill’, as we know it: a house almost as big as a chateau that sits precariously on the very edge of the limestone cliff, overlooking a bend in the river where we go swimming in the summer. Many a time we’ve looked up at it and wondered how you get up close and personal. Now we know – and it was worth the wait.

The next day, if my journal serves me well, we were enshrouded in thick fog that didn’t lift till after lunch. The sun shone radiantly on the dwellers of the uplands. We’ve taken to walking backwards up our adjacent chemin rural. It was something I started as a lark, but I read subsequently that it was good for your back, legs and mental acuity. I don’t know if I’m any the wiser as a result, but it gave us a laugh and you don’t half feel it on your thighs by the time you reach the road at the top.

Anyway, on the way back from this particular walk, we stopped to marvel at the scenery at a point on the road up from Bonnard where hang-gliders have been known to leap into the Great Unknown. Looking down onto the plain beneath us, the landscape was cloaked in a winter-weight duvet of mist. A just-visible roof and conical tower made the Château de Blannard appear perched on the shore of some Alpine lake. I felt like that lone ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ by Caspar David Friedrich, staring out across nature’s ‘divine creation’, feeling blessed despite the minor irritations that I chose to live in the Land of the Gauls.

Today the snow lies hereabouts. It’s not exactly deep and crisp and even, but it’s incontrovertibly snow. Unfortunately, it arrived elsewhere in the land on Monday, when I took the Good Wife and our progeny to Limoges airport for their flight to Stansted. For once, I wasn’t fixed on catastrophes. The sky was so blue and so cloudless that I pictured an easy flight with birds’ eye views of the terrain below. But on the outskirts of the dreary city with little claim to fame other than porcelain, Tilley the Kid announced ‘Oh no!’ The flight had been put back from 4 till 8pm. And after that it all just got worse and worse.

Ryanair in its almighty commercial wisdom decided that the plane load of passengers should be transported by coach to Nantes. It took over an hour for said coaches to arrive and I knew that they would never make it for 8pm without the kind of driving associated with the Paris to Dakar rally. With a heavy heart I waited with Daphne till the pair of them squeezed onto one of the coaches; my poor innocent ‘girls’ boarding a magical mystery tour.

Back in the guilty comfort of a warm home, the texts arrived. They were stuck outside of Nantes on the motorway in a snowstorm. When they finally arrived at the airport, the flight was postponed till possibly the next day. No hotels, nowhere to sit and nothing to eat. Someone brought some blankets and bottles of water, but there weren’t enough to go round. My girls weren’t prepared to battle the hoards of cold, frustrated passengers and fortunately Tilley had travelled with the packet of grissini that Father Christmas left in her pillow case. Organic grissini. Santa is so very middle class.

Needless to say the chaos continued the next day. The flight was put back on several occasions and finally postponed till the following day. The girls managed to score a pain au chocolat to eat, but mercifully forewent a coffee, as several passengers subsequently reported food poisoning. From coffee!? They even managed to find a spot in an ‘e-conference room’ in which to sit and think nostalgically of home. ‘Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.’

Rather than wait for Ryanair to find them a hotel for the night, they managed to find one themselves in the city. They devoured some reasonably healthy Japanese fast food, slept a full and comfortable night and then ate a hearty breakfast. Ryanair has apparently agreed to pay reasonable expenses and graciously despatched tokens which they were unable to access on the app. Nor were they valid on a Ryanair flight. ‘Crasser and crasser, said Debo.’

Nevertheless, they got away early the next afternoon and arrived safely at London Stansted – even if they weren’t able to spend their tokens on the plane. We shall now see whether the company will reimburse them for their additional reasonable expenses. Perhaps it would all have been different if I’d pre-imagined all the catastrophes in my customary fashion. I blame myself.

Back home and culpable on the pretext of looking after the animals, my job is to keep the home fire burning. Thus far, with carefully selected ‘overnighters’ and a little early morning kindling I’ve kept it going without a break for at least a fortnight. It’s not that we rely entirely on it with under-floor heating, but that doesn’t reach the mezzanine level where I’m currently spending a lot of time researching the development of UK television for a chapter in an academic book about the impact of the Fifties on life as we once knew it.

Well, I once knew it – kind of. The research has taken me straight back to my early days in Woodside Park, a tree-lined suburb near the end of the Northern Line, watching programmes in black and white and 405 lines on our first family telly. The announcers still talked down at you with plums in their mouths, so Andy Pandy danced around with Teddy on highly visible strings to the tune of ‘Endy Pendy’s coming to play, la-la-la la la-la.’ I preferred ‘Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men’ with Shlobbalopp the tortoise and Little Weeed, and ‘Rag Tag and Bobtail’, a trio of animated animal glove-puppets who did only what they could in case anything too adventurous revealed the operators’ hands above the primitive cardboard scenery. Did I actually Watch With Mother, or did she park my sister and me in front of the set while she took a well-earned rest from her chores?

Being a serious little boy, even then, I insisted on staying up for the nightly current affairs programme hosted by Cliff Michelmore, Tonight. The Good Wife and I recently watched the team’s documentary about the Big Freeze of 1963. What it lacked in sophisticated graphics, it made up for in the clarity of the information. It was a good team: Cy Grant might sing a topical calypso, Fife Robertson would sport a bushy beard and a deerstalker hat and speak with an easily mimicked Scottish accent, the easily mimicked Alan Whicker was still perfecting his curious, slightly stilted manner of speech pre-Whicker’s World, and Derek Hart and Kenneth Allsopp added journalistic gravitas.

Fond memories. I don’t watch current affairs programmes in my dotage; I find them too upsetting. Walking the dog, feeding the fire and mounting tracks backwards tend to keep my mind from wandering into catastrophic scenarios. Pardon me if I get on with my research into a bygone age when apparently we never had it so good.

 

December: History Lessons

December already. Another 12 months have almost ratcheted by, soon to be consigned to the annals of history. The March of Time!, as the stentorian voice-over proclaimed to preface each edition of the bygone newsreel.

AD 2025 will go down in the Gregorian calendar as the Year of the New Kitchen, with a few short trips to the motherland as appendices. Our days, though, have generally become those of the privileged semi-retired. Touch wood, both of us still enjoy sufficient mobility and good health to start each day, after breakfast of course, by walking the dog. We do it together now, on the basis that there is a less urgent need to ‘get on’ with our to-dos than there was a few years ago.

Just recently, our walks have been fog-bound, as the weather decides which way it wants to go. Sometimes we might get a glimpse of a deer bounding across a meadow as it races for cover in the next outcrop of trees. Usually, though, we see no one and nothing. The other day, however, the sun came out and everything turned unseasonably mild. We bumped into the bearded man with the adorable ageing collie whose path we cross from time to time, and, in determining exactly where we live, he gave us a fascinating lesson in local history.

In the days before our respective communes were created, isolated settlements such as an older version of our own were part of an area known locally as Quatre Pariches, its approximate territory linked to four churches and their parishes. The tiny nearby hamlet of Bonnard was even tinier then, excluding the area where Michel, the semi-retired sheep farmer, and his family set up shop. Down beneath the hamlet and all the way along the under-cliff of the limestone escarpment that separates the residents of the ‘crest’ from the dwellers of the plain below, apparently, you can find traces of ancient fortifications built either by the Gauls to keep out the Romans or vice versa. By this time, my French was beginning to pack up and I was itching to get on.

Still, these things are good to know. Local history is a microcosm of what happens nationally. The bearded man seems to have lived all his life in these parts, so he knows just about everyone and everything here. The Good Wife and I now also know that he lives in one of our favourite landmarks: the house with blue shutters and the two amiable donkeys. It’s a slightly ramshackle place with plenty of character, and a suitable dwelling for a man, we conjectured, who might have been a teacher during his professional life. 

When I’m not out walking or transporting leaves from our track and taking them to a part of the garden where they might do some good, I’ve been masquerading as a proper journalist this month. In other words, not simply reviewing music in splendid isolation, but actually talking to some of the musicians who create it. I’m not entirely sure why, but I tend to shy away from these encounters: not because I’m reluctant to make a connection with human beings, but more because of my technophobia, I guess. My First Lady does all the donkey-work in setting up calls on her Zoom account, but I still fret lest things go wrong and I’m left mouthing or waving at my interviewee because one of us can’t hear or see the other.

Everything, however, ran perfectly smoothly, I didn’t make a twerp of myself, and I enjoyed my chats with two quite delightful individuals. It’s good to talk. Wasn’t that the slogan of British Telecom a few decades or so ago before social media transformed life into one big universal chit-chat?

Jaime Ospina is an expat Colombian based in Austin, Texas, a verifiable ex-(music)teacher and full-time musician, mainly with the party-hearty cumbia group, Superfónicos. We talked about his inspiring ‘Feeding Souls’ initiative, whereby he (and others who have joined) will go into elementary schools on Friday lunchtimes to bring a different kind of sustenance to pupils. He sets up in the school’s ‘cafetorium’, an auditorium doubling up as lunchtime refectory (similar, I imagine, to my old senior school in Belfast), where the kids eat their sandwiches or whatever food they’ve brought with them. ‘I could see at first hand,’ Jaime told me, ‘the joy of the kids as they come up after their lunch and see what’s going on – and they find the connection between movement and sound. Music is not something sterile that comes from speakers; there are actually humans involved in its creation.’ The first time he experienced this, it got him ‘thinking how great things like this should happen as often as possible, especially in these times when horrible things are happening.’

I discovered, although I knew already, just how difficult it is for a musician to make a decent living in this era of Spotify. Live music should be a right, Jaime underlines, and not a privilege for the well-heeled few who can afford today’s ticket prices. He has a dream – of world denomination. ‘Feeding Souls’ could become a worldwide phenomenon, nourishing the souls of school kids, prisoners, inmates and all who are denied live music, and nourishing the musicians who are paid to go into institutions and perform.

It was the kind of conversation that made me feel that I was performing a useful service in helping to disseminate such positive and inspiring ideas. Not long after this, I had another such conversation, but this time more of a history lesson, with Roger Glenn. Roger’s an octogenarian, who has recently brought out his second solo album after a lifetime in the business and more than half a century since he released his debut, apparently a difficult and dispiriting birth. He’s one of two musical sons of Tyree Glenn, who played trombone with Cab Calloway’s orchestra during the Swing Era, and later trombone and vibes with Duke Ellington, before becoming a studio musician for radio and TV and ultimately joining Louis Armstrong’s All Stars. Roger’s dad taught him to play the vibes, just one of 18 or more instruments that he plays. Thrillingly, I discovered, he played vibes for flautist Herbie Mann, flute for vibraphonist Cal Tjader, and both for Dizzy Gillespie. What’s more, he played flute (un-credited initially) on Donald Byrd’s seminal Black Byrd.

Roger was very keen to talk and I was maybe even keener to listen, so I lost the thread somewhat of the interview, but gathered enough material for an article that will help publicise his solo album, My Latin Heart. Like Jaime Ospina, he needs all the help he can get. The album has been very well received, but he calls the physical CD a mere ‘calling card’. He’s hoping to bring it out in vinyl soon, which will probably sell somewhat better than the CD, but there’s little money to be made from the tangible product in a virtual world. He needs to perform live in order to push the album, but that demands the kind of personal investment that he can’t make without a struggle.

So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would have said. Such matters may be a trifle depressing, but it is good to talk (my garrulous First Lady should know). You never know what you might learn. Talking of which, I learnt on discovering an envelope in our letter box up the track that all septuagenarians and over receive a plastic card from the commune that you can redeem at the local Intermarché for upwards of €10. The exact amount is a surprise.

Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas, one and all!

 

November: Incomplete Lives

My sister Jo has one of those Alexa thingies that sits on the work surface of her kitchen. She and her husband occasionally speak to it and it answers back or responds in kind. It also flashes up headlines, thoughts for the day and other messages. Walking past it the other morning, without my glasses on, I read – or thought I read – ‘Your life is incomplete’. This took me aback. When did these machines learn to be so ontological? Was the programmer someone concerned by the big issues of existence? In any case, it seemed a rather damning observation. Downright rude, in fact. Damned if I’ll ever let such a device into our house. On mentioning it to my sister, she explained (with the benefit of glasses) that it was her list that was incomplete. She uses it sometimes for shopping memos.

Even so… It was food for thought. AD 2025 seems to have been a particularly sociable one in retrospect. I was over in the motherland for about my fourth short visit of the year. This one was triggered by a brief trip in July to attend my friend Trevor’s 70^th bash, where a plot was hatched with a mutual friend to spend time together in Trevor’s holiday home in Lyme Regis. At this late stage of our lives, there’s the nagging awareness that one’s life could be completed at any moment, so you have to seize these opportunities while ye may.

Besides, it’s a welcome break for my life-partner. Much as we enjoy each other’s company, absence does of course make the heart grow fonder. We both relish the occasional independence days, when you can please yourself without reference to the other. Mind you, it’s tricky to follow your own rhythms when you’re being bombarded by calls and constant lists of essential purchases from my mother-in-law, the Outlaw. Now that she has recently celebrated her 97^th birthday, we both await the day when her life will be complete. Her longevity is not so much a triumph, more a testimony to sheer perversity. She’s been telling her daughter that she wanted to conclude proceedings since she turned 80. Although we’d both gladly offer our help, it’s not yet legal in the UK.

If this sounds cruel and heartless, you’re probably right. But there are extenuating circumstances. Debs labels as ‘abusive’ the barrage of calls, the constant complaints and the ceaseless lists of items to buy for her (chocolate éclairs and slipper socks figuring highly on most), and she should know after six decades’ experience. At least this year the birthday present was a resounding if brief success. Mother Mary has an imperious sense of noblesse oblige that makes her namesake, the wife of George V, seem reasonable. She is notoriously hard to please. One year, my wife’s sociopathic sister took the trouble to make her mother a bonnet in hand-spun felt for cold Cumbrian days. The Outlaw quickly relegated it to a cloth for her car windscreen.

Putting much thought into gifts is frankly futile. This year, Debs found a sparkly brooch in a Brive boutique for five euros. Though fearful that it would be rejected as a blatant fake, she and our daughter delivered it in person during a Mother and Child Reunion in September. The bargain brooch was a huge success. The best present her daughter had ever given her.

Said brooch was the talk of the nursing home, for a few days at least – until Mother Mary lost it somewhere in her room. As is her frequent wont. So assorted carers and cleaners were commanded to look for the missing brooch until Debs phoned the matron to reassure her that it was worth less than a packet of chocolate éclairs. When the search was called off, Mother Mary added another item to the daily list: would her daughter please phone the insurance company to find out if they would cover the loss of the brooch.

So anyway… I left the Good Wife to field the never-ending calls while I headed for England with our daughter. We left at an unspeakable hour for the 5.20am from Brive. All went well till Turenne Gare, where the barrier of the level crossing was down. We waited with the van and the lorry in front of us. And we waited. But the barrier stayed down. One of the drivers tried the emergency phone while the other attempted to lift the barrier. Still it stayed down. Panic set in. I turned off the main road to find our way by unlit narrow country lanes to wherever they might lead. Driving like a Finnish rally driver of yore, I somehow made it to Brive just as our train pulled in. Once the stress levels had sunk back below the danger zone, the Daughter and I settled back in opposite seats for the journey ahead. I felt her glare of disapproval as I buried my head in Mrs. Gaskell’s North And South. Funny, I fancied that I’d driven rather damn well.

However, she thawed by the time we reached London, and I was touched by her concern for her Old Man. I had to meet an expatriate Brazilian musician who goes by the name of MOMO. for an interview in the BFI’s café. Would I be OK walking from Waterloo to the British Film Institute? Should she accompany me and keep me on the straight and narrow? I confessed to having walked around London alone on many occasions; my life was hopefully not quite so near completion as she might fear.

The rally drive proved to be the worst part of the trip – along with the execrable weather. After a congenial session with MOMO., I caught a train to Dorset and stayed overnight with friends near Sherborne. They drove me to Lyme the next day and that evening Trevor and I took a walk along the promenade and down the venerable wind-lashed Cobb, while Our Mutual Friend, who has trouble with his legs, waited in the warm. We returned with a bag of shopping, drenched from head to foot. After a restorative supper, we watched the first of six episodes of the delightful and charming Leonard & Hungry Paul, which sustained us over the next three evenings. I even warmed to Julia Roberts’ incongruously American voice-over.

The next day, rather less torrential, we visited the Lyme museum, one of those delightful private institutions (whose one-time curator John Fowles ties with Mary Anning, the Victorian palaeontologist, as the town’s most famous resident) that warm the cockles of your heart long after the visit. Our Mutual Friend and I talked dogs with the woman on shop duty and he found her a photo of his beloved former pooch, a huge black Russian beast that looked exactly like a pantomime bear, so big that it would sit in a chair like a human.

Since the weather relented the next day, Trevor took his two nervous passengers to Exeter, our alma mater. Due to an urgent call of nature, I popped into Wetherspoon’s for the first time in my life and found it packed with old people. Another old friend of mine met us for lunch in the lee of the city’s ruined castle, where she and Trevor discovered their own mutuality: the same school in Ealing and even perhaps participation in a school play or two. After lunch, we drove around our old campus and reminisced like a trio of superannuated undergraduates.

Our Mutual Friend’s tale of Bob Marley took the biscuit. For much of my life, I’ve dined out on the fact that I saw Bob Marley & the Wailers live – at Exeter University, for God’s sake. How could that be? Well, our Social Secretary was a wheeler-dealer who managed to procure a whole welter of notable acts for campus concerts (including John Cale, the Kinks, Todd Rundgren and Chick Corea’s Return to Forever to name but four). To procure Bob’s services, he agreed to provide a weight of grass for the dressing room. Since OMF and the SS were friends and OMF had the temporary use of a car, he was inveigled into driving to a house of ill repute in London. On returning to his car with a big bag of ‘erb, OMF noticed a suitcase on top of his car with the word BOMB spelled out in decorative studs. Being a time of IRA activity in the capital and taking no chances, OMF phoned the police from the house of ill repute. The police duly arrived. OMF waited with his illicit goods at a safe distance from both house and car while they removed the suitcase and very gingerly opened it up… to find nothing but old clothes within. It was the work of some merry pranksters. Nevertheless, the law duly thanked OMF for his sense of social responsibility and sent him on his way. After returning the temporary car to his father, he procured a lift back to Exeter with his aunt and uncle, who were going his way.

Safely returned to college, OMF handed over the bag of grass that had been burning a hole in his pocket – to be thanked sincerely for his social irresponsibility, but neither rewarded by a cut nor invited to visit the Wailers and the iThrees in their dressing room. OMF contented himself with the chance to see them, presumably stoned out of their Rastafarian heads, deliver the kind of concert that rendered our student lives complete.

The following day’s torrential rains brought flooding to Wales and other places, but mercifully didn’t prevent me reaching my sister’s in Romsey and thence London. On Eurostar, in between deep dives into Mrs. Gaskell and The Birth of BeBop, I reflected on all the water that’s flown under the bridge since those heady days of youth. Had we been born little more than a century ago, we’d all three be six feet under now. I hope that we might have another chance to enact The Old Ones and crack the kind of puerile jokes more in keeping with The Young Ones, but you can’t count on anything once past A Certain Age. I’m lucky to have made it this far relatively unscathed and felt doubly lucky to be greeted by wife and dog at journey’s end.

I was tired out the next day by all the travel and the reading and a habit of waking up at French time, 5.30 each morning, during my absence. But the Good Wife offered me a slice of chocolate and hazelnut cake she’d made to go with my afternoon tisane. She doesn’t bake many, but it was the very best, most sumptuous cake I could have wished for. My life was complete.

October: Momentarily Unavailable

It’s like the most exciting train set ever devised for a child. I never knew of its existence until reading about a journey across the northern half of the island on the BBC homepage. Ever since, the Good Wife and I have resolved to return to Corsica and this time to explore the northern rather than the southern part of the island. And this time by train. Le petit train to be precise, which rattles all the way from Ajaccio on the west coast through the mountainous interior and thence to the north and/or north-east coast. A week’s rover ticket costs a mere €50 per person and allows you to hop on and jump off according to whim. With a few provisos…

Not because I’m bone-idle, you understand, but because my ‘better half’ relishes this kind of thing, I left all the arrangements in her capable hands. And verily, it all went more or less like clockwork. We left on the first day of this glorious October from Souillac station, where you can park the car for free for an unspecified time. Our train to Montauban was on time, we had a decent cup of coffee in the station Relay, and the Bordeaux train to Marseille was on time. We arrived at the appointed hour, giving us three hours to cross the city to the new port, where cruise ships dock, the size of apartment blocks. The journey there (no thanks to Deborah’s App) by bus through a dodgy part of town was fraught, but we found a salad bar still just about open, they let us onto the ferry early and Security didn’t confiscate my Swiss army knife.

We were two of the last foot passengers off the boat early the next morning in Ajaccio, despite being hideously woken at six by an announcement that spared no decibels. Perhaps we were too transfixed by the view from our cabin window. But anyway, we arrived at the train station, only to find the on-screen information ‘momentarily unavailable’, a kind of leitmotif for the trip.

As casual as a pair of loafers, the man at the desk printed our week-long tickets on paper as flimsy as a supermarket receipt. Err, what if we lost them? Debs had the brainwave of scanning the QR code onto her phone, but this merely takes you to the company’s homepage. Oh well, we shrugged as we wandered onto a platform where confusion reigned. A little train came in and a lot of people got off, but there was no one around to ask where it was going. We figured that it had to be going to Corte, the university town in the mountainous interior, and since it’s a single track and the next train wasn’t due for three hours…

After an underwhelming start to the journey past the scruffy environs by the bay, the train heads inland and soon starts to climb at a speed resembling a rickshaw. You soon begin to appreciate why the train has been nicknamed le tremblotant – or bone-shaker. It’s not a comfortable experience, but hey… the scenery is simply to shake for. You amble through cuttings so narrow you could reach out and touch the dense vegetation, through tunnels and over perilous viaducts to be granted the kind of vistas that confirm why Corsica is one of the most beautiful islands on this earth.

Although unwilling to take my eyes off the moving pictures for a second, there comes a time in any old man’s life when you must arise and go now and go to the lavatory. Le petit train, u trinichellu in the Corsican tongue, must be one of the few in western Europe where a locking door is momentarily unavailable. I had to hold the sliding door shut with one hand while aiming the appendage at the stainless steel with the other. I guess you could bracket it with the lack of on-board announcements and digital display as part of the train’s charm.

The lack of uniforms, too, perhaps. There’s something I find both relaxing yet disquieting about plain-clothes staff. Yes, it creates a laid-back ambience, but there’s also a nagging doubt that the company could organise a piss-up in a brewery. On checking their ticket, the on-board conductor asks each passenger where they’re going, but doesn’t appear either to note the information or to convey it to the driver. So you need to keep your wits about you. A close eye on station names and timetable is essential to avoid getting off where you shouldn’t. Our gay idea of hopping on and off at whim is a non-starter. Fail to flag down the only other train to pass that day, and you could be left in some primordial mountain valley with only nuts and berries to eat.

No such worries at Corte. The station is clearly marked even if the on-screen display was momentarily unavailable. Hikers exploring the valleys of the two principal rivers flowing through Corte bring tourism to the town. We opted for the Tavignanu rather than the Restonica on the guidance of the Office de Tourisme, since it offered the widest panorama in the shortest time. It was indeed magnificent, reminding me of super-sized Glens of Antrim in Norn Iron, but in our attempt to make it a round walk, we wandered off piste and got hopelessly lost, thus adding at least an hour more to our trek. Dinner that night in a local restaurant and breakfast the next morning in our charmingly old-fashioned hotel made up for the misadventure. My wife’s rather more infallible app clocked us at over 20,000 steps for the day, but failed to calculate the degree of difficulty.

The next morning, we got up early to catch the bone-shaker to Calvi, changing at Ponte Lecchia, a junction in the middle of nowhere. The journey was yet more breathtaking than the day before’s. It wasn’t that the scenery was any more spectacular, it was just that you could see more of it. As the two carriages serpentine through more cuttings and more tunnels, you rattle along one side of an incised valley and then back along the other, so you can see where you’re going and then where you’ve just been.

For the kid still inside me, still secretly yearning for that papier-mâché landscape that Santa never built for my Blue Pullman train set, this was thrilling. This time I tempered my intake of water. To add to the spectacle, after Novella there are glimpses of the distant Ligurian Sea twinkling among the folds of the hills. At a hidden halt where the road abuts the railway briefly with no barrier between them, a bewildered elderly couple disembarked, as if without the first idea where they were. To allay my empathetic wife’s fears, I suggested that they were staying with friends in the village down below. She wasn’t entirely convinced.

When you think the journey can’t possibly get any better, the train positively gallops down to the coast to clickety-clack alongside a sea that’s improbably blue between L’Ile Rousse and our destination. Around a rocky headland it totters and lo! Suddenly, a great sweeping vista reveals Calvi across the bay, nestling under the mountains. Curiously, though: when we dismounted at the station, the screen display was still momentarily unavailable. Wittgenstein might have questioned the duration of a moment.

We stayed in a fairly basic apartment in the fortified citadel that crowns the harbour. This involved a lot of cobbled steps but granted 360-degree views over a landscape fit for a septuagenarian with a birthday to celebrate. The weather was even more than you could ask for from the month of October and every evening we joined the spectators at the little bar beneath our billet to watch the sun sink down over the town’s western edge. We loved Calvi, but agreed that four days of sun, sea and sand are probably our limit.

Nothing else for it but to boldly go by early morning train to Bastia. So early in fact that we could watch dawn break over the bay even as the previous night’s moon still shone above the town. Even though we’d already done the leg from Calvi to Ponte Lecchia, I opted once more for the scenery rather than Thomas Mann’s interminable Buddenbrooks. The final stage, from Ponte Lecchia to Bastia, was less interesting perhaps, but we enjoyed studying how the young conductress managed to marry her official duties with intermittent vaping and constant peeks at her phone.

Arriving at Bastia, not only was the screen display (surely permanently) unavailable, but the station WC was out of order. Moreover, when the Good Wife queried how to claim our free left-luggage facility, the Supercilious Assistant at the desk argued that black was white. Clearly, another case of Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown. It sent my customarily well-tempered wife into a tizzy. There are times when she hates injustice and officious men even more than she hates text messages from her sociopathic sister. Her mood wasn’t helped by that fallible phone app sending us on another wild-goose chase in search of our hilltop hotel. Reader, I didn’t at this juncture suggest that we’d be far better off following our noses.

The next day, our last on the island, we met up with a Dutch couple who had travelled by train from Holland to Toulon and then seemingly duplicated our own trip. They were there at the hotel and the station the next morning in Corte. They stayed in Calvi and left the day before us, arrived at our hotel in Bastia late in the evening because le premier petit train departed half an hour before the timetable suggested to accommodate school children. The same fallible phone app even sent them on the same wild-goose chase. Spooky!

We saw them again while exploring Bastia’s old harbour and endearingly dilapidated citadel, and once more at the museum, learning about the son of Louis Napoleon and his empress Eugénie, who might have been Napoleon IV had it not been for an inexplicable need to prove himself a man in the field of battle. He was despatched prematurely in South Africa by a Zulu warrior’s assegai.

And they ended up sharing our cab to the port late that afternoon. But… they didn’t discover at Raugi’s the cream of hazelnut glace, which was possibly the best ice cream that I have tasted in my life. EVER! Just one more reason why we ended up liking Bastia more than we initially thought possible. It exudes an honest, no-frills, habitable quality and mirrors the beating heart of industrial cities like Bilbao, Clermont-Ferrand and Sheffield. We watched it diminish from the picture window in our cabin as our Corsica ferry skirted the Cap de Corse before veering off in a general Marseillaise direction.

That’s twice now we’ve visited Corsica, once by car and now by train. That’s arguably enough in one lifetime. If we need to cross the Ligurian Sea again, we’ll head for Sardinia. As for the train trip… the Settle to Appleby leg of the line from Leeds to Carlisle was pretty special, and the Alpine scenery of the Briançon to Grenoble line is perhaps more grandiose, particularly in winter, but the petit train, for all its quirky faults and unavailable displays, was a boy’s own adventure of a lifetime. Next time: up the west coast of Norway to the Arctic Circle and back down through Finland. Maybe. Unless the Red Army renders it momentanément indisponible.