Willkommen Bienvenue Welcome

Welcome, gentle readers.

This is an everyday tale of regular folk, who moved from Sheffield to the deepest Corrèze in France Profonde and thence to the rather more cosmopolitan Lot in search of something… different. We certainly found it.

The Lot is an area of outstanding natural beauty. Reputedly, a famous TV globetrotter was asked where, of all the places in the world he had visited, he might return to. He answered, ‘The Lot’.

Fans of Channel 4’s Grand Designs will know that we built a somewhat quirky straw bale house-with-a-view here in the Lot, not far from the celebrated Dordogne river. You can read all about it in my book,
Bloody Murder On The Dog's Meadow, or watch the re-runs of the programme on More 4, or view it on You Tube.

After a break in the proceedings to write a book or two, this blog now takes the form of an everyday journal. Sometimes things happen, sometimes they don't (but the art school dance goes on forever). I hope it will give you an entertaining insight into what it's like to live in a foreign country; what it's like in the slow lane as an ex-pat Brit in deepest France.

I shall undertake to update this once a month, unless absent on leave. Comments always welcomed, by the way, but I do tend to forget what buttons to click in order to answer them.


Monday, March 11, 2024

March: A Short History of Nearly Everything About This February

Yes, you guessed it, during the long train journeys of last month I read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Mind-boggling concepts aside, my mind was boggled by the sheer audacity of taking on such a project and making it all entertaining, beautifully written and just about intelligible. Concepts like the solar system will remain forever inconceivable: for all the sun's astonishing capacity to supply energy, it was notable that its lack this month caused both my solar watches to stop dead in their tracks. His book should be required reading in every school in every land. Had it been so for me in my schooldays, I may not have dreaded Physics, Chemistry and Biology as much as I did Maths. It's thanks to Bill that I now see science as something interesting and not just the province of weirdos with bad haircuts.


You need a good book on a train, and we decided to do our travelling by train rather than by road or air as a fairly feeble gesture to help our chronically ailing planet. We were to travel out on a Friday and back on a Friday, and therefore our journeys wouldn't be subject to French rail strikes that tend to happen on a Tuesday and/or a Thursday. But... we were travelling at half term. And what better way for the SNCF guards and conductors to ruin people's holidays than by laying down their tools on Friday through Sunday? Thanks to Bill Bryson, my design of an apocalyptic device to plant deep within SNCF HQ has now progressed beyond the conceptual stage.

February generally belongs to my Good Wife and February 2024 was no exception. The still-radiant Aquarian turned 66, a time to think seriously about hanging up her essential oils and massage couch. The Daughter had organised on our behalf a special and secret late-birthday treat for her towards the end of the month at Sadlers Wells, London. Only our destinations – first to Brussels to see old friends from the Corrèze and thence to London – were known to the birthday girl. Rather like the time I 'took her' from Sheffield to Robin Hood's Bay on the North Yorkshire coast. I couldn't drive at the time, so had to sit in the passenger seat and give road directions. Drive, he said...

Her 66th birthday was deeply symbolic: she decided to sell the clinic in Brive that has served her so well for almost 20 years. While the physical massage (and there was a time when she couldn't use that word for fear of upsetting the medical mafia here), while that will go, she will carry on the EFT face-to-face with clients thanks to the miracle of Zoom (which Bill didn't get around to explaining).

Anyway, we were on our way back from a summit meeting with our appointed estate agent, when Debs received an alert from SNCF to tell her that our train had been cancelled. Credit where credit's due, they had given us more than the customary 24 hours' notice. Life has taught me to be thankful for small mercies. Quick as a flash, she looked up an alternative for the day before. (I was driving.) Two seats available on the 17h59 train to Paris. First class for no extra charge. Book 'em! the driver cried. Too late! Gone in a nano-second. And then there were two more. Second class, but an €8 supplement to pay per passenger. Now how do you figure that? The compounded indignity! The French rail company moves in mysterious ways, its miseries to perform.

And so it came to pass that the intrepid travellers left their cosy home a day earlier than planned. The cats would have to endure the food dispenser for a day extra, and the dog would have extra playtime with her best pal. Thus it was that we arrived in Paris just before 11 bells on Thursday night. Since Line 5 of the Metro was out of action, we took the bus to the Gare du Nord. Three buses, in fact, since two of the drivers decided to clock-off before their ultimate destination. We spent the night in a dreary hotel bang opposite the terminus. Another hundred bucks plus to circumvent the guards and conductors, curse their generous occupational pensions.

The next day, the incessant rain of February rained some more and, on our way by foot to a little West African vegetarian restaurant we identified for lunch, my sole, like my soul, came adrift. My favourite Palladium boots. How could I possibly walk around Paris, Brussels and London with a right boot that thought it was a flipper? I don't know if it had something to do with all the North African men clustering mysteriously outside a building of indeterminate but perhaps religious purpose, but as we turned the street to find our restaurant... lo! A miracle. There, before our very eyes, was... a cobbler! What are the chances?



I cannot, with my hand on my heart, recommend to you West African veggie cuisine. You would have to like tasteless root vegetables prepared blandly. But I can recommend that saintly cobbler. An application of glue and 15 minutes in a shoe-mender's vice and hey presto! That right boot of mine held – all the way back to the Gare du Nord, all the way to Brussels, all the way to London and all the way home again.

And we did a lot of walking. In the rain. Paris, it always seems to me, is overrated. Brussels was a gas: not a pretty city, but a lively multi-cultural one with a great tram system and terrific music venues that could theoretically (one day) accommodate refugees from the French countryside. London is cripplingly expensive and far too big, but a lot of fun with a daughter for a guide.

Soon after arriving in London, she took us to – and I paid for – Bubala in Soho for a Middle Eastern vegetarian feast that was possibly the tastiest meal I have ever eaten. After our late lunch, we walked all the way from Soho to Sadlers Wells, past a bevy of barbers around Tottenham Court Road advertising haircuts for less than the price of the service charge in Bubala. Since my hair was shaggy and we had time to kill, I urged the female sex to tarry while I popped in to see Herr Kutt. Tilley the Kid wouldn't hear of it. I would come out looking like a geezer. So discretion got the better part of valour.


Though a native of London, it was my first-ever visit to Sadlers Wells. The Good Wife once worked there in her youthful prime, ushering punters to their seats and selling white and 'non-white' coffee. Her birthday treat was a performance of Pina Bausch's Nelken. Carnations. Modern dance; her favourite choreographer. From our prime seats in the circle we looked down on a stage 'planted' with silk carnations. The madness and audacity of the venture seemed to rival Bill Bryson's. I didn't know what to expect, but came out of the theatre blown away by the ambition and, surprisingly, humour of the piece. 

So now you know how the sole of my boot was saved by a young Parisian cobbler. But, oh capricious irony, when we got back home to Camp Street... No, not the boot, that was still roadworthy, but I found another copy of Bill Bryson's book on our shelves. My mind these days is increasingly muddled. I grow old... I grow old/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Ah well. Anyone want a spare copy of A Short History of Nearly Everything? Requests please on a postcard...

 

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

February: Happy Sad

January was one of those months, as it often is. A happy sad month. The title incidentally comes from a Tim Buckley album, a singer-songwriter of my youth, but one with whom I never quite clicked: his music, like the voice that many found angelic, seemed to meander, straining for a tune. Both he and his son Jeff met tragic ends long before their allocated time on this earth would have normally expired. Tim died of a heroin overdose at 28, while Jeff, the son that he barely ever saw, drowned in the Mississippi at 30. One of Tim's earliest songs was entitled 'Grief In My Soul', so I guess his life was more sad than happy. But at least he – and Jeff – left durable legacies.


I've given up making the kind of New Year resolutions probably necessary in order to leave a durable legacy. Now it's more a matter of survival: hoping that the incipient aches and pains won't turn into fully qualified arthritis; that 2024 won't be the year that I develop tinnitus in my other ear; that that new mole on my neck won't demand deeper examination; that the occasional shooting pains inside my cranium are merely linked to muscle tension.

But don't get me wrong: my month of January was far more happy than sad, which is I suppose the general state of a perennial melancholic. Life makes me sad, but I'm determined to enjoy it while feeling sad. Despite all that's going on, and despite the customary post-Christmas anti-climactic feel that always colours the first month of the year, how can you feel too sad if your child is staying in the bosom of her family?

For all the minor exasperations – like her slavish adherence to recipes that suggest, for example, you roast six cloves of garlic prior to adding them to your sauce – The Daughter, Tilley the Kid, is a joy to have around. She's forever affectionate and often caustically funny, and it's just generally good to have a fresh perspective on things that challenges the old familiar ways – even if her youthful outlook and physical beauty contrast starkly with one’s own flagging resources and sagging physique.

The trouble with children, though – and I'll wager I'm not the first parent to notice this – is that nothing underlines more the relentless march of time. Haven't you grown! And once they're fully grown physically, you watch them growing mentally, emotionally and in all other ways, watching with a mixture of anticipation as they retrace your footsteps along the continuum of time and trepidation lest they make similar mistakes and experience the same kinds of disappointments and frustrations.

But the trouble with children, too, is that they can't stay children forever. Much as you'd love to hide them away in your own cosy nest from any slings and arrows out there, there's an unspoken recognition on both sides that a month in the country is quite long enough. Any longer and there would be serious questions asked in the house. Did we carry out our role properly? Did we do all that we could? Where did we go wrong? So back to London she had to go: for the next phase of her young life. And when they go, of course, it leaves a gaping hole. Absence makes the heart grow heavier.

And another thing. Around my daughter's current time of life, there were regular weddings to attend, and cards to open announcing the arrival of this or that healthy bouncing babe. Now it's deaths and funerals. Last month, another good friend was ferried across the river Styx. Our friend Howard in the words of e.e. cummings 'sang his didn't he danced his did' and departed far too early. We knew how life-threatening his illness was, but it was still a shock to hear that he'd gone. Not long before, over morning coffee and in my naivety, I believed that he was coping quite well with the treatment, that there was a chance of recovery. I clung to the case history of Wilko Johnson, Dr. Feelgood's manic and hilarious guitarist, who'd been given a death sentence, but then granted a reprieve of several years by a Cambridge surgeon. But no...



So there was a funeral to attend – just a couple of days before The Daughter caught the train back home-for-now. It was a beautiful day for it; 'unnaturally warm for the season' (a cliché ever since we stopped getting snow). We headed south on almost deserted roads to Capdenac Gare, which is actually just across the river Lot and therefore in the neighbouring Aveyron. Leaving nothing to chance, we got there 45 minutes early, giving us time to take a first look at Capdenac-le-Haut, one of les plus villages de France. And it is.

And since we were still too early for the ceremony, we stopped off for a coffee in one of the few bars open on a Monday morning. Pushing open the door, we both did a silent double-take. 'Did you see what I see?' Debs asked, once seated at a table. I did. Both of us had thought immediately that the man in the corner, working with his back to us on a laptop computer, was some avatar of Howard: the same stocky physique, the same shiny bald head. Next time I looked, he'd gone. It wouldn't have surprised me if he'd vanished in a puff of smoke or with a rush of chilly air.

It was a simple, dignified ceremony, with immediate family and a few close friends. A young be-suited Frenchman led the service in English with a charming accent. We were invited at one point to take a little time to remember Howard silently in our thoughts. I remembered the kind of friend who would call a spade a spade. If you'd done or said something to offend him, he'd tell you that rather than leave it hanging around unsaid like a bad smell. But should you ever be in trouble, you knew that he would help you out without a murmur. He was kind and as caustically funny as Our Kid can be. Friends like that are rare, to be treasured and sorely missed.


His body lay in a simple coffin of what looked like unvarnished poplar. We were also invited to take a marker-pen and write him a message on the bare wood: a nice touch and one which I might copy when the time comes, because I'm a notorious copycat. An even nicer touch was to end the ceremony with (I think) Prince Buster's version of 'Enjoy Yourself'. It was Howard's favourite song. How it would've appealed to his mordant and irreverent sense of humour, concluding what tends to be a po-faced service not with a hymn but with some Jamaican ska. 'Enjoy yourself (it's later than you think)/ Enjoy yourself while you're still in the pink...'

I won't copy that one – I've already decided on my own funereal music, which will include Miles Davis's 'So What' (even if some may not get the joke) – but it was a happy way to conclude a very sad event. For three minutes or so I for one wore a big smile on my face. Yes, happy sad. As Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Band suggested, 'Life's like that, isn't it?'

Monday, January 8, 2024

January: André Rieyeuch's Winter Wonderland

At the risk of sounding ungracious, I'd describe Christmas 2023 with my mother-in-law as 'challenging'. It's a long, long way from the Lot to Cumbria, but the journey wasn't the worst of it. Nor was it the 'outlaw' herself (as my pal Dan might call her), the brunt of all those jokes of past comedians. She can be utterly exasperating, but can also be – at times – quite sweet. No, the most indelible souvenir, longer lingering than driving down the A1 in the aftermath of Storm Whoever, was something I witnessed on Christmas Eve TV, stretched out on the floor of the outlaw's suffocating, overheated sitting room. It seemed to confirm that we are on Talking Heads' road to nowhere.

But that's getting ahead of myself. We had to get there first. A wet coming we had of it and an even wetter going. French motorways are a doddle; you could almost drive them in your sleep. But even less-travelled routes like the autoroute between Rouen and Calais can be hostile when you add darkness, rain and holiday traffic into the equation. This much I can tell you about Calais, where we stayed the night in a B&B that smelled suspiciously of powerful air-fresheners: its centre boasts a fine-looking belle époque theatre.


We arrived at our destination later than scheduled, just as a rainy night in old Westmoreland was falling. One forgets what a difference an hour makes. In Cumbria, you cannot forget the rain, which raineth seemingly every day. Once tucked up tight inside the outlaw's converted chapel, our first task was to inspect the contentious all-singing, all-dancing chair – like the one that Frasier's irascible dad sat in throughout the sitcom – that my well-meaning wife had bought from a friend whose father had just died. It hadn't worked since the contentious delayed delivery. Several assorted carers had checked it over, and the octogenarian proprietor of Appleby's electrical shop had been consulted. To no avail.

In among the sophisticated electrical doings underneath the seat, Debs and I found two cables that seemed to have come apart. After reunification, behold! Press a button on the accompanying handset and the contentious chair could perform its gymnastics: up, down; back and forth; recline, decline; foot-support going up, foot-support going down. Debs attempted to give her mother a lesson in self-manipulation. Not easy. Not only is the old dear quite deaf, but also so heavy-fingered that she has broken several phones in the last couple of years in her impatience to phone someone, anyone, when bored between visits from carers or neighbours.

Who knows what might happen if she were let loose with the zapper? What hazards might lurk? Mind you, after listening to all the crass remarks about being more comfortable in her old armchair (after all the litany of complaints about the Big Chair's non-arrival and then its non-functioning), the idea of her jabbing irritably at the zapper and catapulting herself across the room to crash into the opposite wall seemed something devoutly to be wished. Longevity had its place for Dr. King, but there's a big but in the equation...

Fortunately, dear understanding friends from our days in Sheffield had lent us their beautifully restored holiday cottage a safe 20-minute drive from the house of wounding complaints. So we were able to slip away at the end of each trying afternoon to find refuge in an oasis of sanity. Each morning we lingered longer and longer over breakfast.


We did allow ourselves half a day off to travel on the stunning Settle to Carlisle train line, across the famous Ribblehead viaduct and the windswept, rain-lashed Dales to Skipton for a visit to the Oxfam bookshop and a chance to do some shopping for stocking fillers. Skipton has been surveyed as one of the happiest places to live in England and, even in the rain, one could see why. It has a down-to-earth, attractive charm and its inhabitants seemed uniformly friendly. Its Oxfam bookshop is a treasury of fine reading matter.

Anyway... came Christmas Eve. I drove to Penrith to meet the London to Glasgow train and greet Tilley the Kid on a windswept, rain-lashed platform. After a spot of tea and Christmas cake, it was the outlaw's dearest wish to watch her beloved André Rieu's 'Winter Wonderland' on Sky Arts. Never let it be said that she misses one of his innumerable televised concerts. So we duly obliged. None of us had ever seen the inheritor of the easy-listening mantle passed down by the likes of Mantovani, James Last and Bert Kaempfert. As we watched aghast, with mouths agape, it became increasingly clear that the genial Dutchman has monetised that mantle TO THE MAX!


Superficially, at least, you can understand why my mother-in-law loves the cheery conductor. He's a man for one thing. Hers is a generation of often house-bound women who worshipped their men and forgave them their every transgression. Now that I've 'grown on' her, I myself can't do anything wrong – especially after cooking her a risotto last April with some of her frozen scallops that needed eating. I repeated the trick over Christmas and she loved it so much that she attributed everything lovingly cooked and served up by her daughter to me. The Man. At the further risk of sounding ungracious, I was both embarrassed and just a little outraged.

Yes, 'superficially': there's the rub. But it's not just the anodyne nature of the spectacle, there's a disturbing note of megalomania in the way that the genial raconteur keeps referring to his orchestra and his winter palace in Maastricht. Maybe that's why I kept imagining Vlad Put, Ben Muss and A-dolf H. in the vast audience, gaily clapping along with the gathered throng, beaming from ear to ear as the conductor and his proprietary orchestra served up the kind of pap that helps to mask all the ills of the world.  

But we endured the entertainment and it certainly gave us something to talk about. We got through Christmas, too. The outlaw told us that it was her best Christmas EVER and it would be ungracious, churlish even, to hope that we never, ever have to do it again.

All was well at home. During our absence, it was mild and wet. I spoke with my brother, who spent his Christmas in Finland. He understands completely the unease that André Rieyeuch creates – unlike our two sisters, who went to see the maestro at the O2 or some such mega-venue in London. He, too, reckons that Adolf Hitler would have loved him.

On Boxing Day, he had sent a video on WhatsApp of the season's white-out. All around his new second home was an all-encompassing whiteness. Like the icing on a Christmas cake. Trees, lake, ground, in eerie suspension under a blue, cloudless sky. Apart from the creaking of his footsteps on the virgin snow, the silence was total. A true winter wonderland. Just before he and his partner left for Helsinki for the flight back to England, the temperature fell to -24oC or some such Polar level. The cold is finally on its way.

 

Tuesday, December 5, 2023

December: Seasoning

 

On a day like this – to modify Dylan – the first Sunday of the year to be precise, it seemed that winter had finally replaced this long, wet and colourful autumn. When I took Daphne out for her morning constitutional, the frost had coated the carpet of fallen leaves and it was twice as hard as normal to cycle up our chemin. On the way back, my fingers froze inside their thermal gloves from Decathlon. I felt for the poor hunting dogs within their cold, loveless, concrete enclosures as they scrabbled up the wire fence and bayed at the pair of us, heading back for a nice warm house.


By the time I took the Good Wife to the station in Souillac after breakfast – we left 50 minutes for a 20-minute drive just to be sure – the sun was out and silhouetting the branches of trees blanched by hoar frost. What a magnificent sight; what a beautiful part of the world; how fortunate we are to live here, we agreed. Debs was off by train to Avignon via Toulouse and Narbonne, to stay with our oldest and dearest French friend, her first client and our daughter's first (and best) teacher. We arrived at the station nearly half an hour too early for a train that was bang on time.

The next day, though, the countryside was already wearing once more the sickly, saturated, post-apocalyptic look of Blade Runner. When my wife gets back, it's forecast to be 14 degrees that weekend. The meteorologists say that the coming winter will be mild again. So it could be that the first beautiful Sunday of December will be our only glimpse of true winter in these parts. All is deranged! All is perturbed!

My conspiratorial Dutch friend up the road from here doesn't believe that climate change is man-made, but merely an excuse for imposing more controls on us. He may be right, but after more than two centuries of a toxic Industrial Revolution it makes sense that we humans are responsible for wrecking the weather. After all, we've wrecked everything else. We can come up with Agent Orange and forever chemicals, so the climate should be well within our capabilities. When we talk about such matters, I generally nod and keep my own counsel. My French isn't quite up to expressing feelings or reinforcing points of view.

Anyway, winter's not officially here till the 21st December, so there may yet be time for the season to establish itself as it should. It gives me a few more days to prepare for whatever it has to throw at us. Just in case. We've already had two red days, so I've fired up the France Turbo wood-burner once more. Our wood is still not dry enough; I captured rather too much carbon when I cleaned the flue this morning.

And will we have enough to last potentially till the end of March? I've taken to dragging back portable dead trees from the woods around here to cut up for firewood. Wearing my Betron headphones that make me look like a 1950s comic-book astronaut and balancing a small tree on my right shoulder as my faithful dog trots along by my side, I must look like a queer fish to passers-by. Fortunately, there is very little traffic on our 'main road' and as yet no one has witnessed my acts of resourceful endeavour.

As for the garden, I'm too late to mow our sponge-like shaggy lawn and the strimmer waits in vain in the cave for a final outing before wintering. There's pruning... Theoretically, it's something I should be able to do. I'm a little less in the dark after speaking to Daniel by the bins during a post-meridian constitutional. He's an ageing man of the countryside, who helps out in his son's sheep-shed every day to ease him into retirement. He used to work for the local garden centre in Quatre Routes, so he knows a thing or two about horticultural matters. Not quite as genial as Monty Don, but a useful source of advice. He suggested that I don't prune the fruit trees now, but wait until February in case of late-winter frost damage. Moreover, I should prune the peach trees twice in fairly quick succession. I'll bet you didn't know that. I certainly didn't. His words of wisdom let me off the hook for a few months more.

Whether mild or severe, winter's still the time when everything shuts down for the duration. Back in the old days, in the deepest Corrèze, back when we had to struggle to keep warm in a draughty old stone farmhouse, it seemed that everyone closed the shutters and hibernated for a few months, emerging from time to time for a concours de belotte (some kind of card game whose mysteries I have never felt inclined to unravel) or, on very special occasions, an accordion-led French equivalent of a barn dance. That didn't tempt us either. Otherwise, we relied on charity in the form of invitations to dinner.

Culture and society aren't quite so limited during the long winter months here now in the Lot. There's the local art et essai cinema that shows films in version originale. Coming back from a prize-winning Italian film only the other night, I caught a magnificent stag in the headlines, ironically just across from the compound where the poor hunting dogs were presumably kipping on their cold concrete. I dipped the lights and it turned and ran off to the security of the woods.

The proximity to Brive also offers the three-screen Rex and the theatre. There's even a late-January jazz festival that has become a regular feature and next year's culminates in a concert at the theatre of the Cuban cellist Ana Carla Maza, followed by the Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca. My toes are already fidgeting. Next week, there's the exhilarating Malian singer and guitarist, Fatoumata Diawara, so things have really looked up after our years in the wilderness. 

One local option has now sadly closed. The Big Drama last month was the night when Le Bar Au Coin de la Rue in the centre of Martel went up in flames. Miraculously, none of the other contingent properties were damaged, but the bar has been destroyed and, tragically, we heard rumours that the owner's two dogs were in the building. Small fry, I suppose, in the light of Gaza and the Ukraine, but still shocking. Residents complained about the noise, but it was the only real meeting place for social mixers. Last time we went there, someone came with his llama. The poor creature looked a little disgruntled, but certainly got a lot of attention.


And there are always films, music, Scrabble and books to keep us going through the dead season. I'm currently belly-laughing my way through John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy Of Dunces. I've denied myself a second read of it for years. I might not enjoy it quite so much, and there are so many other books out there waiting to be read for the first time. But no, it's still wonderful, and the withering diatribes of the corpulent, indolent and flatulent anti-hero, Ignatius J. Reilly, still make me shake with mirth. My favourite insult thus far is 'Go dangle your withered parts over the toilet!' What a monstrous, savage slob he is. His poor over-weaning and long-suffering mother.

And that might be an appropriate moment to sign off and to think some more about wintering the strimmer. From time to time, if it weren't for the noise and the general mayhem, a return to city life seems like an attractive proposition.