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.

September: Twisters and Sisters

For several years, I’ve bought some or all of our weekly vegetables from a woman called Giselle, who once ran a stall at the Martel market but now sells them direct from her barn. She’s had some quite serious health issues of late, which has meant that she can’t work quite as hard in her fields as she once did. Nevertheless, I can count on her courgettes and tomatoes and potatoes, and her asparagus and walnuts when in season. When the hens are laying, I buy our eggs from her, too. This summer, though, the supply has dried up. Either they’ve been conserving their energy during the heat-waves or it’s chickens’ way of protesting against human-induced climate change.

Anyway, Giselle’s a cheery soul who manages to remain positive in spite of it all. She always greets me with a smile and we often exchange tips on delicious ways to cook vegetables. She knows that we’re nominally vegetarian and therefore a little odd, but she values me as probably her most loyal customer. I suspect that her politics are a little right of centre, but I don’t let that spoil the tenor of our relationship. I send her a text every Friday to check that it’s all right to drop by the following morning on the way back from the market, and she always replies yes or no and to wish me a bonne soirée.

On the last Saturday morning of the not-so-merry month of August, I pulled up outside her barn. I normally telephone her to tell her that her best customer is ready and waiting for her, but this time I spotted her further down the road among a group that included her husband, their daughter and grandson (who live next door) and his worship the mayor (who lives and farms across the road). I waved cheerily, as is my wont, but she didn’t exchange the greeting, as is not her wont. Aha, I surmised, something’s afoot. Sure enough, when I joined the disparate group, I saw that something was indeed amiss. They were all busy picking debris from the roof of the mayor’s farm buildings out of Giselle’s field of beans across the road. What the chuffin’ ‘eck!?

Giselle described what had happened the previous evening. An American-style tornado, just like the twisters you see in photographs or on news footage, had swept through the vicinity. Admittedly, it was on a smaller scale than you might experience in the Mid West, but it did some considerable damage nonetheless: his worship’s asbestos roof had been ripped off in chunks; Giselle’s beans had been flattened and the poly-tunnel where she grows her tomatoes was in a state of semi-collapse; and a couple of plum trees had been rent asunder as if struck by a bolt of lightning. It was, she told me, quite terrifying.

The curious thing was, I suggested, we live less than a five-minute drive away on the other side of the main road and we saw and heard nothing. I noticed the rain at one point hammer onto the back balcony as if blown from a water cannon. The Good Wife was busy in the reading area with a client and she was so involved that she didn’t even notice the rain. Apart from deepening the barranca that runs down our drive of limestone chippings like a knife wound, there was certainly no damage to report. Giselle wasn’t at all surprised. These phenomena are localised. She was philosophical. Usually it’s somewhere else that’s hit; this time, it was her neck of the woods. Life’s a matter of chance.

Before we wandered off together to visit her barn of plenty, someone else pulled up to see what was afoot. Someone in one of those awful aggressively macho pick-up trucks beloved of good ol’ boys. Everything about him said ‘hunter’ and potential right-wing storm trooper. He shook everyone’s hand in turn, including mine. I would’ve withdrawn mine to leave him shaking fresh air, but felt that such a gesture might be a little incriminating. One of these days, he and a band of camouflaged pals might turn up on our front porch. Better to shake the hand and live with hypocrisy.

Later that morning, I was recounting the twisting saga to the Dame while we were out walking Daphne. She was as surprised as I was. Meteorology is not one of our strong points. Is it something to do with hot air rushing into cold or vice versa? During our discussion, a car pulled up beside us. It was VeeVee. I wrote about her back in April, likening her to little Edie in Grey Gardens. I speculated at the time whether the death of her diminutive mother might open up a whole world of possibilities. Well, the rubbish is still piled up in bags on the front porch and the garden is still an indescribable mess, but it seems that the man in the passenger seat is here to stay.

It seems, too, that he is both very nice and very good for VeeVee. She seems much happier and full of the joys of late summer. When she cuts the engine now, it’s still a cue for sinking hearts because you know you’re in for a long haul unless a car arrives and she’s obliged to move on, but it’s not such an arduous ordeal as it once was: her man interjects, he smiles, he laughs, he contributes and gives an impression of being a thoroughly bon oeuf.

The conversation turned to the common denominator of twisted sisters. Hers, a supply teacher, lives the other side of Souillac, a safe distance away even if not quite as safe as New Mexico where Deb’s sister weaves her tangled web. The two still speak, VeeVee explained, but rarely now that their mother has shuffled off. VeeVee’s man-friend chuckled sardonically; he knew the sister before he knew VeeVee. His gesture suggested that she’s hard work. I stayed on the edge of the conversation because I’m lucky to have a good relationship with all three siblings.

A car arrived to release us. As we continued on our merry way, we confirmed that conversations with stationary cars are not now so irksome and that it behoves us to enter into the spirit of such occasions for the sake of inter-cultural neighbourhood entente. After all, VeeVee never fails, as her mother didn’t either, to enquire about la petite. Yes, she’s doing quite well, thank you. We do have to explain each time what it is she’s doing in London, but then there are times when we have to ask ourselves the same question.

There are few things in life quite as heart-warming as late-flowering love (unless it involves Rupert Murdoch). So we both felt a warm glow from the encounter. For many years, VeeVee’s been shut up behind closed shutters inside… inside God only knows what, looking after parents who both appeared quite dotty. And now she’s blooming like a houseplant that suddenly perks up when you’ve lost all hope for it. We wondered how they met and speculated that it was probably at a Day Centre for Funnies. The Good Wife, who’s good in so many respects, doesn’t approve of such a politically incorrect label as funny, but it was conceived in the spirit that best approximates the French term brave. As in someone who’s very nice, but there’s just a little something lacking in the upper storey. Nothing too drastic – the equivalent of a door handle or a banister perhaps – but not quite all there.

And so we find ourselves now in September. The days are contracting, the nights are pulling in and an extra layer is sometimes de rigueur. We’ve had our now annual Night of the Neighbours and both sets of Parisians have gone back to the capital. Hopefully, too, we’ve had the last of the severe-health-warning heat. Now it should be plain sailing till the autumn, give or take a tornado or two. Oh, and the good ol’ boys with their rifles and pick-up trucks. Hey ho, hey ho, a-hunting they shall go. The bastards!

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.