My dream of being a poet vanished like a thing in a whatever… My thanks to my friend, bold Sir Edmond, for that little gem. I don’t quote it gratuitously, because it resonates with me. If I were serious about writing a masterpiece in the remaining time allotted to me, I wouldn’t have spent so much of the precious commodity these last few weeks re-painting the house’s external woodwork. I’d have employed some young able-bodied tradesman to do it while I sat inside composing my requisite daily 2,000 words.
It had to be done. It’s 22 years now since the original
paint went on, a testimony to the endurance of the Swedish linseed-oil-basedpaint and an insight into why I paid over €50 per litre tin to renew it. When I
applied it first 22 years ago, I was much younger and better equipped to do the
job. And I had the help of a guy called Dave, who turned up with his mate Steve
one day when we were still building the house. They had been sent here via some
strange circuitous route that involved a Dutch woman called Angela. Dave and
Steve were told about the Grand Designs
coverage of the build and were hoping for a little vicarious publicity to help
them launch their damp-proofing business after leaving the British army and
setting up in France. Steve went back to England after a year or so, but Dave
stayed on and became a friend. Both he and Angela are dead now. Dave was a bit
of a thrill-seeker, who died while hang-gliding in the French Alps, smashed
against a rock face by a rogue thermal. My friend Bret telephoned me with the
news while I was shopping in Lidl and I was so shocked that I probably pushed
my trolley down the middle aisle without looking at that week’s special offers.
Poor Dave; he’s remembered fondly in these parts.
This time I had the help of The Brother. I promised him that I wouldn’t mention how many years it has been since his last visit to Camp Street. Suffice to say it’s been a long time. To be fair to the poor sibling, he’s finally packed in his career as a plumber, so he finds himself with time on his hands for the first time in decades. Reliable plumbers are never short of work, particularly in a part of the world where en suite bathrooms are de rigueur.
I picked him up from outside Limoges airport on a gloomy Monday, a lone figure in a Panama hat eating a sandwich. He’d left his flat at Guildford at around 2 o’clock in the morning to catch a flight leaving Stansted at some horribly anti-social hour. He revealed that the M25 is quite navigable in the wee small hours of the morning. We drove home down the A20, which is equally devoid of traffic at all times apart from certain weeks in high summer. Once off the motorway, I was surprised at how nervous a passenger he has become. I pride myself on being a careful driver, ever on the lookout for idiots and ever ready to take evasive action, but it underlined how we adapt to the different situations to which we become accustomed. I think nothing now of driving around the kind of narrow country lanes which seemed to make him flinch at every bend, but he will happily negotiate the A3, the M3, the M25 and all kinds of other white-knuckle drives that leave me a nervous wreck.
Anyway, the deal we struck some months back after high-powered negotiations was that Miles would help me paint our external woodwork and in return I would help him at a later date repaint his house in Finland. The fact that his house in the woods by a small lake is built entirely of wood caused an impasse in the negotiations. They might have broken down altogether had it not been for the brotherly love that has made working together in the past such a joy. The Brother is on his day one of the funniest people I have known. There but for fate and family background he might have written for The Fast Show. As it was, we spent time after dinner most evenings watching old Fast Show sketches on YouTube; the sillier and more idiotic, the better. I in turn introduced him to one of my favourites: the W.C. Fields short film about the harassed shopkeeper trying to meet an angry customer’s demands for kumquats while coping with Mr. Muckle, the irascible blind man with a lethal cane that smashes everything in its sweeping arc.
The last time we worked together for any length of time was in the Corrèze. My reckless wife and I had bought a 17th century farmhouse that was unfit for 20th century purpose and Miles was recovering from a premature heart attack. For a couple of weeks or so, we had a hilarious time as Les Frères Sampson, a hapless pair of expatriate brothers trying to make a living in rural France. Faites votre problème, notre problème! was the slogan we would have painted on the side of our van. We thought it was very good and rather witty, failing to appreciate at the time that the over-literal French probably wouldn’t understand it because it wasn’t grammatically watertight. We had a lot on our plate, rectifying the hapless DIY of our vendor, Monsieur Malvestio. His most heinous crime against humanity was to lay a crazy-paving floor on the ceiling of the basement cave. Not only did it crack and disintegrate, but the weight of the folly caused the floor to sag like a tarpaulin after a downpour. And so, les Frères Sampson made the problem their problem, laying in its stead a beautiful floor of local chestnut parquet. (I use the third-person plural, but in reality I would stand around like an incompetent lemon, awaiting orders from my practical sibling: Do this, please; hand me this; cut this in half and so on.)
That was more than three decades ago. We had our middle age to look forward to and it didn’t seem too daunting a prospect. This time les Frères Sampson were two old men, still horsing around and feeding each other punch lines, but now competing to be solicitous: Mind your back; bend your knees; careful on that ladder etc. I always thought of myself as the Worry-Wart el Supremo, but The Brother’s anxiety has come on in leaps and bounds during the intervening decades. As we approach old old age, we are both keenly aware that life is just a lottery. Every supplementary day of reasonable health could be our able-bodied last. That outline of the care home on the horizon becomes clearer with every passing week. It was a good job that the hyper-expensive paint we applied during a week of erratic weather is supposed to last a good 15-20 years. I can’t see myself getting up a ladder as a nonagenarian.
Apart from the grab-handle that The Brother put up in the shower, maybe five times quicker than it would have taken me, for the visit of a friend from London who’s unsteady on his pins, I felt more of an equal partner this time. Age has granted me more of an equal footing on the ladder of life. Besides, it’s rare that anyone with a paintbrush in their hand could be branded as genuinely incompetent, and being the more slender of the two siblings meant that I could shin up the ladder, contort my body into unnatural positions and generally tackle the more challenging parts that the heftier figure can’t reach. So we got the work more or less done in the petite semaine available to us. There are a few small areas left to be done once our annual French tax return is submitted and once the weather settles down, but it looks good. I can step back and admire our handiwork, proud in the knowledge that this time it was a truly joint venture.
I delivered The Brother to Brive Vallée de la Dordogne airport on the Friday morning at a civilised hour before hurrying off to Bergerac to pick up the next two visitors from the Old Country. We promised each other that we wouldn’t leave it so long next time before spending more quality time together. Anyway, there’s all that paintwork in Finland in prospect. It could be later this year if our best laid plans slot into place. Another problem for Les Frères Sampson to assume and resolve. I’m looking forward to it. I like the Finns and admire their education system, their sense of national contentment, their prowess in ski-jumping and the way they fought off the Russians in the Winter War. They’re quirkier than the French – although an old friend told me a joke about them. How do you tell an extrovert in Finland? He’ll look at your shoes when he’s talking to you rather than his own. Try telling that to a literal Frenchman and gauge the reaction.
