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.


Friday, April 17, 2020

April: Still Life


Late in the afternoon of Good Friday, I drove over to Giselle's barn to buy whatever vegetables she had on offer. There wasn't very much, but she'd saved me half a dozen eggs, so the journey wasn't wasted. Snail Woman was there, her face half-covered in the kind of bandana I used to wear when I was a cowboy. Giselle admits us one at a time into her 'shop', so I dutifully waited my turn outside and joined in the conversation, which was predictably dominated by coronavirus. Last summer in the height of the heat wave, I would ask Snail Woman about the health of the molluscs she breeds for eating. The poor creatures suffered as we all did from the relentless heat.  

When she emerged and I prepared to go in, the conversation turned to traffic. On the way there, I hadn't passed a single car on the main road, which can be a little busy at that time of day – just as well, because my indicator has packed up again. My Noddy car suffers terribly from condensation in damp weather, which affects the little metal contacts that make the lights flash. I haven't had to swab down the windscreen from the inside for weeks, but the humidity has done its damage. Anyway, I learnt that two people aren't allowed in the same car at the same time. Debs and I had speculated about driving to Brive if the Airbnb enquiry turned into a booking. It didn't. We'd have been fined by the gendarmes, it seems, if they had stopped us. It's OK in the current climate to sleep with your partner, but not to drive with him or her.

Is that not utterly ridiculous? As indeed are many things right now. In Paris, for example, the poor citizens are not allowed out between 10am and 6 or 7pm, I forget which, but it surely means that everyone will emerge at around the same time, thereby running a far greater risk of contact with their fellow cell mates. I've subsequently heard on the grapevine that it's aimed at 'le jogging', but it's still enough to make you believe that my friend the tree surgeon is right when he says that 'its total bullshit, man!' He's a big-time conspiracy theorist, who sees all this brouhaha as a man-made plot to establish a new world order of fearful, compliant citizens who'll be too scared to protest any more. Who knows? He may just be proved right. I didn't stop to ask him about the absence of 'chem-trails' in the sky and what it signifies.

Who comes up with such decisions? Perhaps a committee – with panic on the agenda. Not, I would imagine, an individual who has taken the time to think it all through. Time is what we have on our hands at present, even if ultimately perhaps not. Nevertheless, the Good Wife and I still find there aren't enough hours in the day. She asked me over lunch on the front porch the other day how my perception of life has changed after a month of incarceration. Well... not a great deal in some respects. Perhaps I'm using the hours available to me in a more measured way, not trying to get everything done in a single day as before. Probably in recognition that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow will predictably offer more of the same. 

Deprived of my bicycle by parliamentary decree, I'm now walking the dog on alternate mornings. Walking her through the woods, which generally don't accommodate ageing cyclists, gives me the chance to commune more with nature. Even with headphones on to catch up on music promos, I still feel in the thick of the natural world. Today the eerie bark or mating call of a deer infiltrated the big brassy sound of Seun Kuti and Egypt 80. I've seen and derived encouragement from nature's remarkable ability to heal itself – the photos of clear skies over hellholes like Delhi and Bangkok are remarkable – but I'm not convinced that this strange state of stasis will morph into some kind of environmental golden age (unlike a certain eternal optimist on the other side of the marital bed). Any long-term recovery depends on mankind allowing it, and while commercial interests are at loose in a world governed by despots, with humans continuing to reproduce like rabbits, I don't give Mother Nature much chance of any kind of long-term recovery.


The longer we've been locked down, the better the resident optimist has been coping. She confessed that going out to work four days a week gave her a chance to escape from de-stabilising thoughts of the garden and her paper work, both of which she believed herself incapable of negotiating. Without the escape route, she's had to confront her demons. Just lately, she's spent many a happy hour toiling in our concrete garden (after a month without rain), and she's pretty well up to date now with her admin. Every morning, she finds time to practise the piano and her yoga sessions are apparently more 'meditative' than ever they were before. Despite the freeze on work, she's still been tapping away like there's no tomorrow – on Zoom rather than face-to-face and mainly for free, doing her bit to allay the fears and distress of individuals and groups. She is the very model of a modern miracle-worker.

As to how others are coping in these hard times, I can only comment on the family across the water. Our daughter's got herself an app for her phone and she and her housemate walk five or six kilometres in an attempt to clock up however many thousand steps it takes to satisfy the youth of today and fitness fanatics in this digital era. Her other housemate – the one who managed to get back to the family home in time for confinement – sent them a care package for Easter: a loaf of homemade sourdough bread, some cookies she made and some chocolate rabbits.

Easter came and went here without so much as a chocolate egg or a hot cross bun (two-a-penny, two-a-penny – but not alas in France), although we enjoyed pancakes with a melted square of dark chocolate on the morning of Easter Sunday – and very nice they were, too. Back in Cumbria, my mother-in-law made herself a batch of buns for Easter, decided that they needed a glaze, then burnt her saucepan to death in attempting one. Apparently, the buns weren't particularly nice in any case. Now her sorely tried daughter has had to find and order her a new stainless steel two-litre saucepan online.

Meanwhile, down south in Hampshire, one sister is in splendid isolation because of health issues, still carrying out her part-time work from home three days per week and busy at other times indulging her passion for genealogy. I haven't asked her whether she opens her window each week to clap for NHS workers. My other sister is allowed out. Instead of spending two or three hours per day with our father, she meets him for a quarter of an hour or so each day in 'The Exercise Yard', three times around the flats in which he's self-isolating for a longer life. I've been busy taking up the slack on Skype, generally now two sessions per day. My old man, love him as I do, is not to be confused with the 99-year old war veteran who has raised several million pounds for the NHS by walking up and down his garden with a Zimmer frame. 

With more time on her hands, my sister is re-discovering married life because my brother-in-law can't go off on business travels. They're taking long walks together and it's possible that their new plague routine will dampen their desire for foreign travel. My brother, meanwhile, has made a wardrobe and may be drinking rather less each evening, now that he's not getting back at the end of each day, worn out by the life of a plumber. But it's not guaranteed.

So it's not all doom and gloom for the lucky ones in this time of La Peste. Easter is already a thing of the past, but here in Shangri-La, the butterflies are fluttering around the mass of mauve flowers on the lilac nearest the house, we've had the best crop of purple irises in years and the trees are bedecked once more in enough succulent greenery to hide us from the road that leads to what tenor saxophonist Bill Perkins dubbed 'Civilization and Its Discontents'.