April: Let Sleeping Snakes Lie

There was a big black bank of cloud hanging across the horizon that morning. I should have recognised a portent when I saw one. Nevertheless, I wanted to check our water meter. According to our bills over the last few years, our water consumption has gone from as low as 28 cubic metres (shurely shome mishtake; maybe the counter got stuck during cold weather) to 127m³. So the price we have to pay for it has been equally variable. I normally stay away from the meter, because it’s underground and the hole is full of insects that proliferate under the polystyrene insulation that protects the meter from extreme cold. The water company usually sends an e-mail to urge customers to do this, thereby absolving themselves of responsibility. 

So... just a quick look to check the counter, compare it to the last official reading, do a calculation of sorts and evaluate whether there could be a subterranean leak somewhere between meter and house. I removed the first chunk of browning polystyrene – and put it straight back again when I saw something wriggle and slither. A snake! I’d disturbed its annual hibernation. And not just any snake. I’m not given to exaggeration – that’s the Good Wife’s province – but this was the biggest snake I’d ever seen outside a wildlife programme. It was, too, a rather beautiful snake, ringed with black hoops that seemed to oscillate as it slithered off into a dark corner of its bedroom. It was probably just a rather large grass snake and not a fugitive cobra from the local charmer’s wicker basket, but you don’t mess with a serpent rudely awoken from a season-long slumber.

All this I gauged in the fraction of a second it took for me to shut the lid. I decided there and then, remarkably calmly in fact, that I would read the meter another day. If something is leaking, so be it – and damned the expense! I went back inside to report the incident. My wife was on her phone, probably checking her next rendezvous with a client. When she’s on the phone, she’s good for nothing else.

‘I’ve just seen a giant snake, in our water meter,’ I announced casually.

‘Mmm-hmmm?’

‘No, that hasn’t landed, has it?’

‘What? Sorry, what did you say?’

‘I’ve just seen a giant snake…’

‘Oh my God! Where?’

‘In the water meter hole.’

When it did get through, she seemed more perturbed than I’d been, although she, too, recognised that it had probably been a grass snake. We’ve both become quite sanguine about snakes after 30 years or more of country living. I go by my wife’s maxim that we’re surrounded by them outside the privacy of our own home, but they’re probably more afraid of us than we are of them. Nevertheless, I have on occasion lifted a stone to find a sleepy viper shading itself from the glare of the sun. Those little critters are small but perfectly poised to jab you with poison, whereupon you have to rush out to the nearest pharmacie for an antidote before you die. A grass snake is about as long as a whip and as thick as a saucisson: the stuff of childish nightmares, but I believe (and I cannot testify for sure) totally harmless. You see the poor creatures from time to time squashed on a road, looking like a length of perished rubber.  

Country living, if nothing else, prepares you for the vagaries of nature. About this time of year, the ants begin to mass like marines, ready to invade. Every spring we have several Ho Chi Minh trails, as we call them – in the kitchen, in the reading area, in the bathroom. If they become too invasive, we resort to those round plastic things with tabs that you snap off to activate. The ant wanders inside looking for booty, attracted no doubt by some artificial hormone, then returns to the nest to contaminate its colleagues with some lethal insecticide. We try not to use them. After all, we’ve made peace with the wasps. Every year, they nest under the eaves of the mezzanine and/or in the concave roof tiles. I gave up trying to obliterate them years ago in favour of diplomacy. I step outside onto the top balcony and make a deal with their leaders: Listen, we’ll leave you alone, if you leave us alone. Thus far, it has worked and, to extend the metaphor, the price of oil hasn’t rocketed.

The mites in the pantry, however, are not so ready to deal. They’ll be out soon, ready to plague us for another year. The situation seemed to improve last year when I moved our annual 5kg bag of walnuts from Gisèle down to the cave, to hang from the ceiling by a hook. Nevertheless, we’ve learnt to store all foodstuffs in tightly sealed jars and to fix nasty sticky papers around the pantry to entice the little bleeders with some other brand of artificial hormone. Changing the papers is not a job that I relish. There’s no way that you can peel back the protective paper once affixed to the wall without getting sticky stuff all over as you try to stop them coming away from said wall. Few things in life are guarantee to put me into such a foul humour. 

In our time here, learning to live in harmony with nature, I’ve dealt with a viper in the house (involving a long period of deep reflection and the inelegant use of a cardboard box) and my poor wife has been stung twice in one evening by a hornet, thus murdering sleep for the entire ensuing night. Our dog attends to the mice brought in by the cats, but I’ve not yet learnt to be phlegmatic about flies. Tics regularly attach themselves to cats, dog and occasionally humans (often in the least accessible places). Giant green grasshoppers, mange-touts as we call them, sneak in during high summer, then scare the wits out of you by taking off without notice and landing right beside you. Punaises, or shield bugs, have the same tendency to alarm and also come with the horrible smell of almonds past their sell-by date.

But country life has taught us to adapt, survive and live mainly in harmony with our natural surroundings. City life, by contrast, does not generally equip one for the hazards of nature. Trouble can arise when urbanites visit the countryside expecting all the predictable facets of suburban life. When I looked after a couple of holiday homes in the area to supplement my wages as a writer in the days before Her (now His) Majesty’s Government decided to pay me monthly for being old, there was a family from south-east London that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Mike Leigh play… Not long after settling them in and showing them the ropes, I was summoned one evening to face a barrage of complaints from Mother, Father and Grandmother, provoked by an invasion of flies. They took me outside and showed me the back wall of the house where, for some reason best known to themselves and certainly not in this case the lure of an artificial hormone, local flies had gathered en masse. They took it as a slur on the cleanliness of the house. I sympathised with them and grovelled abjectly, but there was really little to be done. If you live in the middle of nowhere, there will be flies. Yet they honestly expected me to call the French equivalent of Rentokil to spray the entire wall with something noxious. By the time I made my apologies and slinked away, I was ready to slap them, one and all.

Similarly, wasps will gather around a swimming pool in search of water. What realistically can you do? In the other house I managed, some nouveau riche Liverpudlian toe-rag gave me a dressing down in front of his (rather more pleasant and probably abused) wife as if I personally had summoned the wasps to disturb his post-meridian aperitif by the pool. Were it not for the fact that he was nearly twice my size and would probably deck me, I would have expressed a wish that he would die soon.

I’ve spent half my life in various big cities and the other half in the heart of the heart of the countryside. Both have taught me some important life-lessons. Among others, city life taught me how to use public transport, which areas to avoid at night and where to find the best music bargains, but I’ve actually learnt many more practical lessons since Iiving in the countryside. This recent one I feel compelled to pass on: never check an underground meter till spring has passed. Let slumbering serpents snooze.

March: Heaven and Hell

Early March. It’s that miraculous time of year once again when the bushes and trees are in blossom. It doesn’t last long, alas, but while it does the countryside is a riot of colours: white, yellow, pink and deep red. The cherry trees take the floral biscuit; such a rich pink that you could harvest the flowers, whizz ‘em up in a blender and drink the results. (I’ve never tried it.)

I’ve taken to stepping onto the terrace outside the kitchen just to gaze in awe at the pair of plum trees that separate us from the communal track that leads down to our occasional Parisian neighbours. We’ve only ever had one decent harvest of plums – remarkably sweet yellow-green Reine-Claudes – but the white blossom is so dense that it looks in the early light of day as if it has snowed overnight. And the smell! A heavenly perfume pervades the surrounding air. (It took a nudge from the Good Wife before noticing it, I’m ashamed to admit. As befits an aromatherapist, her nose is as attuned to odours as my ears are attuned to sounds.)

For the lucky ones like us, particularly at this time of annual transition, life is a many splendoured thing. Unfortunately, there are constant reminders of what goes on outside the blossom-coloured bubble in which we live. On Sunday, for example, on our walk with Daphne and her best chum Holly, we passed a whole battalion of hunters congregating in their day-glo jackets just outside Patrick’s sheep shed. The cars and those big macho pick-up trucks with grilles at the back to confine the baying hounds within were parked higglety-pigglety all over the verges of the road. These good ol’ boys congregate with guns and dogs most Sunday mornings for the pleasure of killing as many innocent animals as they can flush out of the protective woods – and, what’s more, in the self-righteous belief that they are doing us all a favour because we would be overrun otherwise by deer and boars.

The scene put us both in mind of the Lord of the Flies dramatisation we are currently following on the Beeb. Golding’s idea for the novel was a stroke of genius: placing a band of boys on a tropical island without the moderating influence of women and seeing what develops. It’s been many, many years since I read it, so I can’t remember what happens, but already the battle lines are drawn: in the red corner, the odious Jack and his obsequious band of hunter-followers; in the blue corner, the reasonable and probably doomed Ralph and Piggy and the ‘Little’ns’, the ever silent majority. For the moment, the hunters are out for the blood of wild pigs, but I fear it won’t be long before the trainee psychopaths commit their first murder.

It’s a cliché or truism that most men are like overgrown children. If he gets off the island, someone like Jack will turn into the kind of cowardly charismatic bully that wields authority, either in industry or finance or even politics. Place him in a position of real power and you can see how easy it would be to incite a band of obsequious followers into doing his dirty work. It’s not too fanciful to extrapolate how this Sunday morning sport is really just a substitute for war. Big boys need their war, war and more war. What a depressing ledger of conflict it makes throughout the centuries, and all due to a surfeit of testosterone. With Grand Theft Auto and other such video nasties now to train the younger generations for indiscriminate havoc, there’ll certainly be many more such devastating conflicts to follow.

We walked on towards the farm. I resisted the temptation to slash some tyres (although, to be honest, I’d quite neglected to bring a Stanley knife for the purpose and, to be still more honest, I’m a yellow-livered coward who avoids unpleasantness). We did, however, discuss an audacious plan to solve this age-old problem of male aggression. Much as I disapprove of modern farming methods, there’s a lesson to be observed in the meadows. Look no further than the image of a herd of cows with solitary bull…

What if… every community on earth were female only, each limited to one male for the purpose of procreation? The male could be kept in some kind of cosseted seclusion, to be farmed out to any female particularly keen on having a child who has passed an emotional intelligence test. The male could go and stay with the female for a few days, or however long it would take to do the business and, in between vigorous bouts of 'craq-craq-biscotte', to carry out some useful woodwork or mend a dripping tap. I might be up for the role if my practical skills weren’t so negligible (although I’m frankly getting a bit too long in the tooth for anything demanding vigour).

Which does, I suppose, raise a number of key questions about this audacious plan. This peripatetic progenitive male would have to be carefully selected to meet the demands of the role. A big sturdy bull in a field with a healthy set of equipment is one thing, but this stud would have to be sufficiently handsome to attract the emotionally intelligent females; he’d have to be a Monsieur Bricolage type, a dab-hand at DIY; and he’d have to be intelligent enough to ensure that the progeny would benefit the community. And then there’s the problem of what to do with all the males who didn’t tick the necessary boxes. Ah… I begin to see where this audacious plan might lead. Somewhere uncomfortably near Hitler’s Final Solution. No, I fear we’re stuck with them.

After our walk, I turned on my dad’s old laptop and tuned in to the BBC homepage for a quick look at the headline mayhem en route to the sport. My attention was diverted by an article to the effect that there is a groundswell of desire, presumably on the part of more militant women, to rename certain parts of the female anatomy that were named after males. I never knew, for example, that fallopian tubes referred to an Italian anatomist by the name of Gabriele Falloppio. The Adventures of Falloppio… It has a certain Disney-like ring to it.

While I can empathise with the annoyance and even resentment that this must provoke in certain women, I can’t help but think that this collective energy would be better channeled into something more worthwhile and ultimately beneficial – like for example the foundation of a truly tooth-ful rather than tooth-less United Nations body that could stop wars before they start, or end wars swiftly where they already have.

Alas, I have neither illusions nor delusions. When I hear my ever-optimistic wife speak hopefully of a Golden Age, I know that she is living in Cloud Cuckoo Land. Its creator Aristophanes knew a thing or two about utopia and disillusionment when he was busy satirising society in the centuries Before Christ, back when the Greeks were fighting the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War. I studied that particular war for Ancient History at school and I still couldn’t tell you what it was all about.

As for what’s happening now in the Middle East, it’s not hard to imagine (unless you’re a moronic megalomaniac in charge of a military machine) that the genie is now well and truly out of the bottle. The consequences are likely to be wide-ranging and long-running. Unlike the beauty of the blossom around here, it’ll be very ugly and far from transient.

February: The Square Root of Purgatory

During the not-so-merry month of January I turned into a hermit crab: one of those solitary creatures that quietly goes on with its own business without fuss or distraction. David Attenborough would know whether this description applies to a hermit crab, but given its name and the habits of crabs, I reckon it probably does.

In my solitude… apart from listening to Duke Ellington, I’ve been able to get on while the Good Wife has been in England. She’s been working like the proverbial Trojan, tying up all the loose ends of her mother’s house sale and then helping Sampsondottir move down the Windrush line from Crystal Palace to Honor Oak, where we trust her life will be rendered a little easier. Why did the Trojans have a reputation for hard work, by the way? It was industrious Greek carpenters who had to hammer and saw night and day to make a wooden horse big enough in which to hide a small army. I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts… a crumb of A-level Latin that lodged in my cranium.

So yes, I’ve kept my head down and ploughed my lone furrow while I’ve been on my own: reading more books and listening to more music than I did as a student, making meals that last for three days so there’s more time for getting on, walking the dog twice a day, watching a film or two and finishing my chapter on the development of telly in the 1950s. Nevertheless, there comes a time in every hermit crab’s life when it has to emerge from its hiding place and merge with the mainstream. I did it twice in one day mid month and both times it led me to purgatory. Nothing too South Sudan, but on both occasions I wished I’d stayed in my lair.

It was a Saturday, a time when many a human bean shakes off the shackles of work to go shopping in town or go to a football match to yell blue murder at the referee. In my case, I had an invitation from His Worship the Mayor to go down to the Salle Mathieux to partake of a slice of galette du roi and drink a verre d’amitié. I had a sneaky suspicion that the gallette in question would not be the flaky-pastry-with-almond-paste variety because the commune would only have sufficient funds for the unappetising brioche variety, and the thought of drinking a cup on a Saturday afternoon with my fellow communards fills me with fear and loathing, but as a perennial outsider I thought it might be politic to show my face and glad-hand the mayor and his team of élus.

The invitation was for four o’clock. Not wishing to be too English about my punctuality, I figured that five past might be a suitable time. People are usually late in this neck of France. Not on this occasion, not when free food and drink are involved. I found the salle packed with natives, all hanging around in anticipation. Unable to face the prospect of shaking everyone’s hand while wondering whether to kiss or not to kiss, I did what I usually do and sidled over to a familiar face for some vacuous conversation that leaves all parties feeling awkward and embarrassed.

I reckoned on half an hour, an hour tops, and then back in good time for the football results, but we didn’t sit down at the tables until almost five. I stuck to Patrick, a near neighbour who’s a good sort, with a sense of humour, but there’s only so much you can say about your respective dogs. Then my heart sank. His Worship took the microphone. True to form, he rambled on for at least half an hour, introducing the various associations in the commune and handing the mike to a representative so that he or she could ramble on for a bit more. Following this, it was time to introduce all the newcomers to our rural idyll and hand the mike to them so that they, too, could ramble on a bit more. Fair play to the man, the gesture showed public spirit and a splash of emotional intelligence, but the football results were pressing and I wanted my customary bottle of beer and bowl of peanuts because late Saturday afternoon is one time in the week when you can act like a real man.

By the time the bottles and the galettes were placed before us like an act of feeding the five thousand, I felt so like a fish out of water that I poured myself half a beaker of Brittany cider and cut myself a slice of brioche without even asking. And, readers, it was every bit as bland as feared. Still, with a mouth full of cake, you don’t need to worry about conversational pleasantries. At last the time came to overcome my reluctance to draw attention to myself, say a few desultory farewells, shake the hand of his Worship and thank him for the invitation, and high-tail it out of there with a profound sense of relief. Hey ho, the communal life is clearly not for a hermit crab.

Back home, there was barely enough time to catch the classified results, rustle up a snack supper and leave Daphne with a chew and some encouraging words about not being too long, before I was off for a second dose of purgatory – like two spoonfuls of cod liver oil as a child. That evening, I was on cinema duty in Vayrac and I’d had a text to ask me to get there earlier than usual because they were anticipating a crowd… for Avatar 3. God help me.

Usually, my job is to stand at the door like a spare part, tear the tickets of the punters and wish them a cheery bon film. Not hard but kind of mortifying. This time, there was someone playing that vital role: a nice guy with a propensity to ‘swallow his words’, as they say here, which means that conversations are based on guesswork. It’s a recipe for non-sequiturs. My role… was to hand each punter with his or her very own pair of 3D glasses. If there’s anything worse than having to sit through Avatar 3, in French, it’s sitting through it in three dimensions. And if that weren’t bad enough, some people mistook me for someone who might know, and asked me whether they could wear the contraptions over their prescription glasses.

There was a 5-minute trial run after which anyone could return non-performing glasses for another pair. Mine were fine, so I was able finally to settle back in a chair to enjoy more than three hours of hell in 3D. It was like being dropped into one of those Roger Dean topographic album covers that he created for Yes and other such groups – only to discover that the blue people lived in a world even worse than our own. It was war, war and more war accompanied by the constant crescendos of a soundtrack that made sleep impossible. And just to put the old tin lid on it, without either French or English subtitles, I was totally lost. Yes, the 3D graphics were impressive, but you come to expect that in this age of computer-generated images. Personally, I’m still more impressed by the recreation of the Himalayas in the Pinewood studios for Powell and Pressburger’s 1947 film, Black Narcissus.

When the credits rolled, I was eager to fulfil the second part of my role: to open the doors and wish the punters a cheery bonsoir as they file away into the night. Daniel, the president of the society that operates the cinéma Uxello, reckoned that the film was maybe 20 minutes too long. I suggested that it was three hours too long. He regarded me wryly.

Two doses of purgatory in one day. Purgatory squared. I was far too late into bed and I let Daphne stay in recompense for my protracted absence. Normally, she jumps down off the bed when I put my book and glasses down and wanders off to her basket in the sitting room. I slept off my ordeal and she didn’t wake me till it was breakfast time. I made pancakes as compensation for the mental torture I endured for the common good.

One good thing came of it. Soon after, the association held their own gathering for members, featuring this time galette du roi as confectionery intended it. I still felt like a fish out of water, but there were a few people I knew and the conversation was less stilted. I told Evelyne, whose job it is to organise the staffing for each séance, a thankless task, that in future would she please consider me only for versions originales, with sub-titles for the hard of comprehending.

She apologised for allocating me to Avatar, as indeed she might have.

January: A Winter's Tale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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