la vie en straw

The Artist

2012-03-05T02:39:00.000-08:00

I can’t hide it; I have to tell someone… I’m in love with Peppy Miller! Well, the character played by the gorgeous Bérénice Bejo in The Artist. But then I’ve also been in love at various times with Audrey Tautou as Amélie, Marion Cottard as Coco Chanel and Juliette Binoche as almost any of her characters… I guess there’s something that appeals to me about French actresses. It’ll pass.

My latest infatuation is a very recent one. I went to see The Artist on Saturday night with The Daughter and a friend of the family who travelled here by train with her mother all the way from Sheffield for a long weekend. Having left our Guardian on the train, they tried to fob us off on arrival with a copy of the Sheffield Telegraph. The cheek of these visitors!

Succumbing to the hype, we went to see the latest Academy Award winner at the cinema in nearby Vayrac. Normally we aim to get there five minutes before the customary 9.00pm start, safe in the knowledge that you still have the choice of any of the comfortable seats in the steeply raked cavernous auditorium. There’s always time before the curtains part to exchange pleasantries with the familiar faces who turn up like clockwork for the twice-monthly versions originales. Five euros to watch a new release in the company of friends and familiar strangers: now that’s what I call a deal.

On Saturday night, we got there 20 minutes before the scheduled screening time. All the usual parking places were occupied and, for the first time ever, I had to try out the car park behind the cinema, which is maybe 25 yards further from the entrance. There was already a queue at the booking office and the auditorium continued to fill up until the last possible minute. It was a well-and-truly packed house. Never seen anything like it in all my born days! Not even for The King’s Speech.

It was hardly surprising. The French love their films and they’re very patriotic about any that become international hits. Not too long ago, they were queuing up in droves for Des Hommes et Des Dieux, which won a mere Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. They even queued to see it at the makeshift cinema in Martel, where you sit with bum-numbing discomfort on wooden benches for the experience of all those exasperating features of private film clubs: jumps, scratches, suspect sound and pauses between reels. In an age of multiplex screens and American-style buckets of popcorn, it’s reassuring to know that it’s still possible to watch films in purgatory.

Of course, Of Gods And Men was accolade-lite in comparison to The Artist. Not only has it won five Oscars, but also those Oscars weren’t just for Best Foreign Film or Best Trained Animal. No sirree, they were for Best Film and for Best Actor. Sacré bleu, Jean Dujardin even managed to hold off the challenge of George Clooney. Which. I imagine, must fill the national bosom with as much pride as Mother Russia would have felt when Yuri Gagarin pipped Alan Sheppard, John Glenn et al to be the first man in space.

Well, I’m happy to report that the accolades were thoroughly deserved. For a start, I would have awarded it an Oscar for the most audacious idea for a film. Imagine having to pitch it to a producer. ‘You want me to find x million dollars to finance a silent film?’ It’s one of those blissfully simple and retrospectively obvious ideas that can never be repeated. Hopefully, the powers of Hollywood will have the taste to recognise that you cannot make The Artist 2 and Son of The Artist.

I think the last silent films I watched would have been films like Battleship Potemkin, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Metropolis: all those classic films that anyone who fancies himself or herself as a serious student of film feels duty-bound to watch. So it was quite strange to be sitting among an audience gathered together to watch a silent film for no other motive than sheer entertainment. It’s hard to tell in the dark, of course, but I imagine that just about everyone there sat through it with a fixed grin. If there was anyone there who understood English, they might have even derived a curious pleasure (as I confess I did) from lip-reading certain words and phrases and then mouthing them idiotically to themselves. Maybe silent films do that kind of thing to a spectator. We will have forgotten.

As someone who has attempted to script a film, it was also a fascinating reminder of just how much information you can convey visually. There were minimal captions and, even without them, I think I could have managed to unravel what was happening rather more easily than my wife did when she went to see Kurosawa’s Ran in Copenhagen, forgetting that the Japanese dialogue would be dubbed into Danish and not English.

All in all, the leading man had a winning smile, his dog was as captivating as The Thin Man’s Astor the Wonderdog and Peppy Miller was just a doll. I could have wrapped her up in brown paper and taken her home – but I’m not quite sure the family would have taken it. She captured the same kind of goofy charm and vulnerability that Shirley MacLaine had in Sweet Charity and Judy Holliday had in Born Yesterday.

It’s a clever, charming and entertaining film and you can understand its popularity. I suspect, however, that it will prove to be one of those Oscar-winners, like Around The World in 80 Days, that never really stands the test of time – something more of the moment than one of those truly great Oscar-winners, like On The Waterfront or One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, to name but two, that last from here to eternity.

I’ve heard that the demand for Jack Russell dogs has rocketed in the wake of the film. I suppose that’s slightly better than everyone wanting an orang-utan in the wake of Every Which Way But Loose, or an endangered tropical fish after that Disney film whose name I have forgotten. I’m not like that, of course. Not susceptible to that kind of influence. I’d be quite happy with a Peppy Miller.

Life Is A Cabaret

2012-02-26T13:02:00.000-08:00

Friday night was the 10^th Cabaret du Coeur at the Curemonte Salle Polyvalente. The first cabaret, old chum, was mounted in response to the tsunami – which happened, if I remember correctly, in 2003. 2012 minus 2003 seems to be nine, but it was definitely the 10^th one. So it is now officially a local tradition.

This time, I was too busy to take part either as a writer/performer or a Master of Ceremonies (modelled closely on Joel Grey in the musical). Which meant that I could go with my dear wife and a bunch of friends and giggle stupidly in the audience. Nothing induces naughtiness like amateur dramatics. I remember going with a workmate to see a mutual friend and colleague during my days in the Civil Surface. The pair of us behaved like a pair of seven-year olds and Debs must have wondered whom she had recently married. An upset stomach this time meant that my behaviour was somewhat more in keeping with my years.

The idea of the Cabaret du Coeur is that members of our local association – which exists primarily as a means to order wholefoods at slightly less than the outrageous going rate in France – their children and assorted hangers-on perform music, dances, sketches and other turns. In return, the audience pays for their tickets and all the drinks and comestibles provided by cast, crew and families that it can consume in the name of some ‘cherridy’ of democratic choice.

Each year the mayor of Curemonte, l’un des plus beaux villages de France, a medieval marvel perched on top of a hill), lets us use without charge the communal hall for rehearsals and performance. It’s the perfect venue: an ante room that can house a ticket office, an intimate auditorium that houses just enough people to create a good atmosphere, an offset vaulted corridor where the buffet and bar can be set up, a raised stage and a backroom that serves as a dressing room for the stars.

Things have escalated over the years. The first cabaret was on a solitary Saturday night. This year, Friday night’s performance was the first of three this weekend. Perhaps it’s testimony to how little there is to do round here in the deep mid winter, but each one was sold out a good fortnight ago. In the past we’ve had to bring along a table and chairs to help seat the audience, but this year two handy members of the association had fashioned some scraps of wood into round tables – which meant that we could beat a hasty retreat at the end rather than hang around to recover our garden furniture.

Some things, you see, haven’t changed. It still went on for at least an hour too long due to the customary reluctance or inability to start on time, little or no stage management and a tendency for acts to outstay their welcome. But that, I guess, is half the charm of amateur dramatics. So was the juggler who dropped his batons, the kids who consistently muffed their punch lines, the dancers who were just out of synch, the clowns who weren’t particularly funny and the serious performers who were. It doesn’t matter: everyone knows everyone else and, when you’re among friends, you can make a spectacle of yourself without fear of hecklers.

So it was fun. And there were some welcome surprises this time around. The troupe of djembe drummers opened rather than closed the show, banged their drums in time and didn’t go on interminably. My good Canadian friend, a computer technician by trade, didn’t fluff his lines and created a musical piece with his girlfriend that was surreal and achingly funny. I was proud of him. For years, his very idiosyncratic sense of humour has bemused French and English alike, but this was like the apogee of his art – almost as if his whole public life has been leading up to this one marvellous moment of triumph.

The crowning moment was reserved for last. Anna the MC, who emceed with considerably more professionalism than I last managed, was half way through her thanks. She singled Christophe and Chantal’s son, Hélios, for his sterling unseen work at the edge of the stage, operating the curtain. Cue the applause. She moved on to the next credit and half way through it Hélios appeared, looking bewildered and sheepish. He took a diffident bow and beat a hasty retreat back to his unseen spot behind the curtain at the side of the stage. As TV types have a tendency to say these days, you couldn’t have scripted it.

We’d taken bets on taking our seats as to whether we’d be able to leave for our beds before midnight. Well, we made it with a quarter of an hour to spare, which meant that we could take our friends back home and pick up our daughter, who was babysitting for their two young children, and get back home and under the duvet by 12.15. I knew from bitter experience that we had left the performers to stay after the auditorium had emptied and tidy up for the next show. I didn’t feel guilty because of the simple act of having paid for my ticket. You might call it spectator’s privilege.

Next year, like every year before it, I’ll have to weigh up the pleasures of camaraderie and showing off as part of a show on one hand with all the hard work and commitment on the other. Now that I’ve seen it from an audience’s viewpoint, I’m leaning more towards absence rather than participation. I might just exercise another of my spectator’s privileges and leave it all up to the amateurs.

Work Experience

2012-02-19T14:03:00.000-08:00

At the end of last week, I had a young stagiaire here, observing my every action in the name of work experience. I couldn’t really afford the time, because of the pressing demands of deadlines, but it was a kind of quid pro quo deal. His mother gave our daughter some coaching in French literature for her oral Bac exam, and since the child subsequently obliged with a perfect score, it would have been churlish to turn the boy away.

Besides, once I’d given up trying to work and occupy Victor at the same time, it turned out to be a very agreeable experience. During her work experience, Tilley had mainly sat twiddling her thumbs in a kind of graphic design office. So I was determined that Victor wouldn’t have to endure the ignominy of watching me typing on a keyboard all day long.

Normally, the prospect of trying to communicate with a 14-year old boy would fill me with horror. But Victor proved an exceptional ‘yoot’. Hearing that he was a student of the guitar, I’d made him a compilation of assorted guitar heroics as part of our family effort to thank his mother for her coaching efforts. One evening I got a phone call from him to thank me for the CD and to tell me which tracks he’d particularly liked. I was impressed. I mean, how many 14-year olds can you think of who’d have the self-confidence and good grace to phone up and chat with an adult they didn’t know from Adam? A foreigner, to boot.

He brought his guitar with him and a sheaf of official papers from the school. It was revealing to go through the documents with him on our first afternoon together. What sector was my enterprise in: primary, secondary or tertiary? What hours did I work each day? How many days a week did I work? All sorts of questions that were very difficult to answer and which testify to a cultural incomprehension of the ‘profession libéral’. All his classmates were doing their work experience in shops, bakeries, veterinary practices and the like. Victor, I’m certain, would have been alone in observing someone who follows his own rhythms and who works for himself and for as many hours and as many days as it takes to get the job done.

How to be a writer

So what could I do for the poor lad? I showed him a few magazines to which I’ve contributed, a few CD reviews, an e-learning storyboard or two and a notebook full of chaotic ‘Mind Maps’. But it’s not as if you can demonstrate the whole writing process as you might take someone through the process, say, of baking a loaf of bread.

I decided that the most valuable thing I could do for him was to give him a potted history of 20^th century American black music to complement his guitar studies. It was the right thing to do, for both of us. It gave me a taste of the joy of sharing a passion and it gave him the reassurance that there are people out there in the world who understand why he wants to be a guitar player when he grows up.

So for 2½ days we had a ball. Armed with some books in French borrowed from Brive library, I set him a curriculum of the blues guitar on Thursday and the jazz guitar on Friday underpinned by a DVD on Wednesday afternoon about the music of New Orleans. I gave him a bit of homework – to read up on the likes of Howling Wolf, T-Bone Walker and Wes Montgomery – in preparation for the music we would spin the following day. As part of the deal, I was supposed to talk to him a bit in English, but translating every other phrase slowed us down too much, so we muddled by in French. I got used to his scrambled syllables, while he sorted out my bizarre pronunciation. Since music is a universal language, we managed fine.

On the second afternoon, he took himself off to our spare bedroom to practise his beloved jazz manouche (gypsy jazz) and promptly fell asleep for an hour and a half, which gave me a chance to catch up on my e-mails and concentrate properly on the guy from Lyon who came to explain how the EDF photovoltaic deal works. Which reminds me… Has anyone out there turned their roof into a private solar farm to produce and sell electricity back to France’s biggest suppliers? If so, does it work as they state on the packet?

While he was asleep, someone from his school phoned up to see how he was getting on, whether he’d arrived punctually and so forth. I told the man that he was a diligent and charming pupil and that everything was going fine. When Victor got up, full of apologies about such a lapse in etiquette, I let it slip that his teacher had phoned up and that he’d wanted to speak to him, but I’d said that it was a shame to wake him up because he was obviously tired out. His expression of barely suppressed horror was wondrous to behold.

Early on Friday evening, Victor’s elegant mother came to pick him up. We all assured her that he had been impeccably polite and helpful and utterly charming, and hoped, without actually saying so, that she would encourage him in his ambition to be a guitarist rather than push him into some ‘sensible’ profession that would probably bore the pants off him.

He went home with a couple of CDs and a few indecipherable Mind Maps and, I think, the ability to tell Albert King from B.B. King, Professor Longhair from Little Richard and Miles Davis from Dizzy Gillespie. No doubt he will have a few revelations to trade with friends who have learned how to kneed bread. As for me, I got an idea of how much more tiring it would have been to have two children rather than one around the house. But I learned a bit about the father/son relationship and the mutual value of handing things down from one generation to the next.

Later that evening I managed to get on with my work, but I’d already indicated on the official papers from the school that I’d be willing to do it again next year. The chances, though, of having another stagiare as interested and as personable as Victor must be fairly slender.

Ice Age 4

2012-02-12T04:49:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, a friend sent me one of those e-mails that undermines your will to live. This one suggested that, far from globally warmed tropical conditions in Western Europe, we would be plunged into a new ice age as a result of the Gulf Stream being diverted off course. As yet, it hasn’t happened – and I sure hope it never will – but, to paraphrase Stingray, ‘anything can happen in the next half-decade’.

This cold ‘snap’ is providing us all with a sneak preview of what to expect. This morning, I took the dog out for a walk, swaddled in all kinds of winter paraphernalia. Cycling, however, into the teeth of a wind that seems to be blowing direct from Kamchatka or some such other frozen wilderness made a mockery of all my compound tog value. It was like placing your bare chest on a sheet of cold steel. My face was locked into an indelible grimace.

In 16 years of soldiering through continental winters, this is the coldest I have ever known it. Once, while visiting friends in the Alps, who persuaded us to take our daughter up a mountain for a ski lesson, I experienced cold that made my whole frame shake, cold that brought this grown man to his knees. But that was due to the fact that I was dressed more like Tintin in Tibet than a sensible modern-day parent.

In terms of consistently sub-zero temperatures, this current spell beats the winter of 1963. There was more snow then certainly – I remember being off school for several weeks, seeing the snow half way up our morning-room window and reading all about the cancelled matches in my Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly – but it can’t have been as cold as this, because central heating in those days was a new-fangled mod con and my parents certainly hadn’t invested in a system, so I wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale.

Let us now remember the poor beasts

Yet, apparently, and according to the retired guy down the road who likes to chat whenever I bump into him during one of my Alf-time twice-daily dog walks, it was worse than this during the winter of 1956. It was so cold that he remembered the sound of the plane trees cracking and splitting in Martel. There was certainly no chauffage central in dem days and, he told me, families would huddle around their fireplace to keep as warm as they could.

The combination of cold and water, I’ve discovered over the past few days, can be dramatically destructive. A good friend of mine here, who looks after houses while the owners are away as one of his many sidelines, phoned me in a state of some distress. While hugging the wood-burning stove that was struggling to maintain 14 degrees in the house, he noticed water dripping from the floor above. A practical man, he dealt with the leak as best he could before popping next door to check their empty gîte. There he found that six of their old cast-iron radiators had burst with the cold, spilling black gunge all over the floorboards. Did I know of a plumber who could help? I did not. The one reliable plumber in the area has gone back to the UK. And the plumber who fitted all the pipe-work in this house is still wanted, dead or alive. Just to put the old tin lid on everything, the owners’ geriatric cat, poor creature, now seems to be peeing blood. The owners are due back in a few days and so far no plumber has answered his S.O.S. calls.

On Friday, after a week spent marooned at the bottom of our drive, due to a dead car engine and ice on the gradient, a friend took me to the château that I’m supposed to be looking after. A scene of devastation greeted me, with stalactites hanging off fractured radiators, taps frozen up and, in one apartment, a bath full of water that must have dripped from the ceiling above and frozen solid, unable to drain away via a frozen plughole. Boilers had been left on in hors gel position, but the wind from Kamchatka must have got in under the eaves and rendered the heating useless. I had to send e-mails to all the owners and describe the damage to their beloved apartments. So now It’s my turn to try to find a plumber prepared to come out and help. Second homes! Who’d have ‘em?

Cold as it is, though, what on earth must it be like in Siberia, Alaska, Spitzbergen, Greenland and all those other frozen parts of the globe? Imagine the misery of trying to stay warm in conditions that are twice, even three times as cold as it is here at present? No wonder them Russkies drink so much alcohol. What else is there to do in such a climate other than to climb into bed, your head befuddled with vodka – and stay there? You can’t possibly work. Even eating becomes an effort.

Cycling into the teeth of that glacial wind this morning, I also thought back to Scott, Shackleton and all those other intrepid polar explorers. Whatever possessed them? Voluntarily to put yourself through the misery it must have been to drag a sled full of instruments and provisions, trying to fight off frostbite in an era before Gore-Tex, polar fleeces, Damart thermals and other sensible modern weatherproof clothing. What were they thinking of?

Not a happy chappie

I remember watching a dramatised documentary about Apsley Cherry-Gerrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, when he and a colleague endured the most appalling deprivations to bring back a King Penguin’s egg (or something like that). Poor guy developed irritable bowel syndrome and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder for the rest of his born days. OK, he achieved some degree of immortality – though he would probably have gone down in history in any case as the possessor of one of the most ludicrous names ever given to a child. Faced with the choice between a warm bed and a penguin’s egg, I think I’d have known which one to choose. Screw the immortality!

So there you have it. Has anyone seen the long-term weather forecast? I’m hoping that this week will see the back of this Arctic cold. I’ve had enough of genuine winter already. I’m told that this kind of frost is good for the soil and the next harvest. But after the big chill comes the big thaw – and we all know what happens to frozen pipes and frozen baths when temperatures start to rise again.

‘… Then Play On’

2012-02-05T08:33:00.000-08:00

In view of recent meteorological events, I was thinking of writing Mr. Sampson’s Lack of Feeling For Snow this weekend. But I’m too worn out by spending Saturday afternoon in the crawl space under the house, known over here as a vide sanitaire, lagging pipes that should have been lagged years ago. The horse, in fact, had already bolted: we had no water from our taps – just long enough to give The Daughter a taste of what it must be like to live in some hell-hole across The Continental Divide.

So I’m taking the easy option. The fact is I was so buoyed up by all the comments and all the nostalgic reminiscences that came pinging into my in-box as a result of last week’s musical discourse, that I thought: why not offer a few more musical pensées?

After all, the second part of the BBC Four trilogy on How the West Was Won (by British musicians in the U.S.A.) aired on Friday evening. And it was a good week musically speaking, because four CDs arrived through the post. Normally I hate opening up our letterbox – and only do so because it lets the rain in – for fear of official missives. But no, there were four CDs over the space of two days. Three from old friends, plus a promo. I love receiving friends’ compilations. I may not approve of every track, but it’s delightful and d’lovely to know what they’re listening to these days. (The promo, by the way, was Sly & Robbie’s forthcoming new offering. Fans will be heartened to know that they have laid down some of the best dub known to Jah.)

The second part of the trilogy added some new characters to the mix. Jon Lord of Deep Purple and Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson, the Laird of some wee island off the west coast of Scotland, both come over in a suitably lordly way. Bill Bruford, former Yes and King Crimson drummer, is a good friend of someone whose maison de vacances I keep an eye on. I have been on at this good friend for months to persuade Bill to get over here, as I’m certain he would be game for some studious musical discourse. Keith Emerson appeared remarkably youthful and remarkably decent, considering he was partly responsible for creating Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

The south paw from Birming-ham

But my vote for pick of the week goes to another guitarist – the lugubrious Brummie, Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath fame. Somehow the man has lived to tell the tale of touring with Ozzy Osbourne. Quite a different character from dear, charming Jimmy Page, but an engaging chap nonetheless. For more on Ozzy, Iommi, ‘Geezer’ Butler and Bill Ward’s bulbous W.C. Fields-like nose, make sure that you catch The Black Sabbath Story next time it’s shown.

While on the subject of guitarists, which we sort of were, Peter Green’s name cropped up in a few of the comments I read last week. It sent me searching for an obscure French compilation of British Blues for a Peter Green cut from 1978, some time after he and Fleetwood Mac had gone their diametrically opposite ways. It’s called ‘A Fool No More’ and it features some of the most resonant and educated guitar playing you are ever likely to hear. And one mustn’t forget that poor, drug-blasted Senor Green also had one of the most distinctive of singing voices. There is some memorable footage from the Top of the Pops’ archives of Fleetwood Mac performing ‘The Green Manalishi’. With his long curly locks and his checked maxi-coat, Pierre Vert (as the French call him) looks like some 17^th century cavalier who has been dragged by a horse across Marston Moor.

I’ve always had a special affinity with the guitar. Though I can’t play a single note, I reckon you can hear in an electric guitar all the beauty and the anguish of the world. I always took my guitar simulation very seriously. In my early youth, I would stand in front of my dad’s Ekco gramophone, ‘playing’ along on my orange plastic Beatles’ guitar to hits by the Fab Four, the Stones and Brian Poole & the Tremoloes. I could have been a contender, Charlie, but (as I suspect I’ve mentioned before) my days of simulated guitar-heroism died as a result of mortification. My mother walked in on me in mid Frank Zappa solo on ‘Willie the Pimp’, my Slazenger tennis racquet ‘plugged’ into an old electric fan heater. Oh well, as Peter Green would have sung.

However, I still feel qualified to mention some lesser-known and maybe temporarily forgotten guitar-smiths of yore in the hope that it will prompt some chatter. How’s about then, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Ollie Halsall of Patto and beyond, or Gary Boyle of Isotope and Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express, or that proto-metallurgist with a gift for the ominous chord, Robin Trower of Procol Harum? And though I never gave a fig for Alvin Lee and his pyrotechnics, I should remind you perhaps of Albert Lee of Head, Hands and Feet, renowned ‘guitarist’s guitarist’ and – judging by his appearance with Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings at Cahors a few years ago – one of the sweetest and most modest of men ever to depress a wah-wah pedal. Let us also proffer our respect to a man known more for his voice and his organ. I speak, of course, of the outrageously talented Stevie Winwood.

There’s always a danger that musical discourse turns into a boys’ thing, so I shall try to correct the gender imbalance by mentioning two axe-women. I’m very fond of a Philadelphian jazz guitarist called Monique Sudler, who could be based in France these days. And there’s Deborah Coleman, a blues woman, whose solo of roughly 25 notes on ‘Dream’ is one of the most eloquent solos ever crafted. Less is more and all that.

Yes, indeed. Time I stopped this chitter-chatter and let you get on with your Sunday evenings. May your pipes continue to flow throughout the continuing cold snap.

‘Musi-cal Dees-course!’

2012-01-29T07:17:00.000-08:00

Thanks to BBC Four, Friday night is music night in this household. After what seems like an eternity of repeats and dross-age, the station got back on track on Friday with the first of a three-part series on how the West was won. That is, how British musicians conquered America.

I use the term ‘household’ rather liberally. Despite my best efforts, I watch alone. As interested as they are in music, the ‘girls believe that music is for listening to. They can’t generally be bothered with documentaries and in-concert footage. Fair enough, maybe it’s a male thing. But I can’t help but feel that they’re missing out on an added dimension to their music for pleasure. (And who remembers that label? MfP – 14 shillings and sixpence.)

No doubt I’m showing my age, but I derive as much pleasure from seeing how the rock stars have aged as I do from watching the contemporary newsreel footage. As the terrible landmark of 60 looms on the horizon, I find myself looking at people like Paul McCartney and wondering whether, if I keep up my punishing schedule of twice-daily dog walks, I shall look so presentable at 70. He’s showing a little saggy round the jowls these days, but is still recognisably Paul. Not bad for someone who hasn’t (to the best of my knowledge) gone in for a little ‘lifting’, as they say in France.

It was a particularly good programme in that respect on Friday night, because it was full of characters who don’t tend to be wheeled out for every other music programme. There were the usual shots of the screaming hordes at Idlewild airport (as JFK was then known) to great the fabulous Beatles, but there were also some great clips of the minor stars who followed in their wake. The Animals, for example, arrived to find the airport and the streets of New York worryingly deserted. It provided an excuse to talk to the Eric Burdon of today. He may not be the best preserved of individuals – after all he looked 50 when he was 21 – but he’s certainly the funniest. Despite all the years of living in LA, he still sounds like a fisherman from South Shields.

Mike Pinder, the singer of The Searchers, has an air of a double-glazing salesman on the threshold of retirement nowadays. Tony Hicks, the baby-faced, spindly-legged guitarist of The Hollies, is still as thin as a rake. His face is testimony to that ne’er-quoted truism, ‘once a baby-face, always a baby-face’. He didn’t get to say much, because he was sitting beside drummer, Tony Elliot, who took the opportunity to wax lyrical about all the jazz legends he saw during the group’s first visit to New York.

Another splendid double act was Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone of The Zombies. The latter, he of the breathy singing voice of an adult choirboy, didn’t get to speak much, because he was Ernie Wise to Rod Argen’s Eric Morecambe. The last time I saw Rod Argent on the telly, he was playing Hammond organ with his eponymous group and had just about the biggest head of hair I ever saw on a male (until the day I saw a Rastaman in the Paris Metro, with dreadlocks down to this shins). If I remember correctly, Rod chirped away about visiting Graceland – only to find that the King was away for the day. His dad, though, was happy to show the lads from St. Albans around his son’s humble abode.

Washes whiter - and it shows!

My award for the sweetest person on view went to a disarmingly white-haired Jimmy Page, who talked ingenuously about the awe of simply being in the land of all his blues heroes. Peter Noone ran him a close second. Herman of the Hermits still looked and sounded like the cheeky little Mancunian chappie who won the hearts of middle America. I still find it staggering to think – and don’t quote me on this, because I haven’t checked my facts on Google – that they sold more records in the U.S. at one time than the Fab Four themselves.

The best moment of the programme came when an 18-year old Peter Noone, a naïve supporter of the Vietnam War at that time, was debating the impact of music with a Graham Nash just on the verge of going all Crosby, Stills and. Our Graham, bless him, was arguing that music had the power to stop all wars. Peter Noone, even at 18, wasn’t so sure. Graham rubbed the point in by suggesting that if everyone stopped to listen to what Donovan was singing about, they would put down their weapons. ‘No more wars, no more wars…’

Well, it was a delightful sentiment, but you only had to look at Donovan today to appreciate the error of judgement. Britain’s very own Bob Dylan looked like a hurdy-gurdy man preserved in East Anglian clay and dug up by an archaeology team a few centuries later.

There are two parts still to come and I’m dying to see what Robert Smith of The Cure looks like these days. Will he still back-comb his hair? Does he still outline his eyes with kohl? All will be revealed on Friday at 10pm on BBC Four. The girls have got it wrong: music is far more than a mere auditory pleasure.

Mais C'est Normal

2012-01-22T04:13:00.000-08:00

Dearly Beloved, as a prelude to this week’s sermon – on this sad weekend when the ‘chan-toosse’, Etta James, took the celestial elevator to the penthouse suite, there to serenade the wing-ed throng with renditions of ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’ and ‘Tell Mama’ – I must mention something rather splendid.

I popped into Cash Converter in Brive on Saturday morning for a quick rootle through the music and found a double retrospective of Dillinger’s career – the Jamaican ‘toaster’ and not the gangster. I would have paid the derisory asking price for the title alone: Natty BSc. Isn’t that marvellous? The idea of Dillinger, in full dreadlocks with mortarboard and gown, receiving his diploma in one hand, with a huge spliff in the other…

I saw Dillinger back in the distant days when I was a postgraduate student in Brighton. I remember very little about the concert other than the audience singing along to Dillinger’s hit of the time, ‘Cocaine’ (‘running around in my brain…’). I suspect it didn’t occur to me at the time, but now I can only think in contrasting terms of a cinema audience, during the Blitz perhaps, cheerily following the bouncing ball as they sing out with gusto, ‘Run rabbit, run rabbit, run run run…’ How, I wonder, did society evolve from singing about a running animal to a running hard-drug in 30 years or so?

Maybe I should ask a policeman for his or take on such a conundrum. The police wouldn’t approve of Dillinger and I don’t generally approve of the police. The French police, in particular, scare the living daylights out of me. They don’t ever smile and don’t even appear to be human. But… I met a very pleasant and personable gendarme this weekend.

He and his wife are based in the extreme north west of Brittany, but they have just bought an apartment in the chateau I look after as one of my day-jobs. Like me, this gendarme experienced a coup de coeur on seeing the countryside here for the first time. We both told ourselves that we wanted somehow to spend our days here. He managed to get himself a job for nearly ten years as a sports coach at the big School for Gendarmes in Tulle. Now he’s back in Brittany, but together they have made a first step towards a ‘re-implantation’ in the area.

The three of us sat in their new kitchen amongst all the unpacked clutter that they brought with them in a hired van. We sat drinking tisanes and nibbling on delicate chocolate biscuits and exchanging life-histories. They asked me all the stock questions, but with sincere interest: what brought us to France, how do we cope without our families, do we ever feel like moving back to the U.K., what do we do to earn a living and so on? I quite forgot that I was talking to a gendarme. Normally I would feel much more guarded than I did, fearful of revealing anything incriminating lest I end up in some dank dungeon deep within the Château d’If. (I suppose the experience might at least test my ability to grow a long beard.)

All this and crepes, too?

Anyway, at the end of our ‘interview’, the gendarme’s charming wife presented me with a carrier bag full of edible delicacies from the Land of the Bretons. Cider, crêpes, biscuits – that kind of thing. But what was this for, I protested? It was for having the keys cut for them and responding to all their e-mails so promptly and generally giving the impression that someone was looking after their interests. ‘Mais, c’est normal,’ I protested some more, in the time-honoured fashion that I have learnt over here. And it was. After all, it’s part of my job: to look after the occupants and their best interests.

As we emptied out the carrier bag together later, Debs and I talked of other such acts of kindness we have experienced since we have lived over here. And we wondered why acts that we, and most Britischers, would indeed consider quite normal should apparently be taken as tokens of abnormal gentillesse. We could only conclude – based on our own experience – that French people are staggered when someone they don’t necessarily know does something for them that they say they will do.

When I think about it, I don’t think I have ever known an artisan or an office clerk or a shop assistant or a fonctionnaire phone me back when they said they would. So if someone asks me on the phone now for my contact details, I always punctuate my response with something like, ‘But will you be sure to phone me back?’ I’m not sure why I bother, because I know that they won’t. It has become one of the Top Five frustrating aspects of life in France that we have simply learned to accept: the administration, the inability to say sorry, the refusal to specify a time for receiving goods, the failure to listen to you, particularly once you’ve been twigged as a foreigner, and… the impossibility of returning a call.

We also recalled an old woman in the village where we used to live, who would also ply us with (homemade) goods in return for acts of quite normal consideration. With the insights she’s gained over years of dealing with clients’ convoluted psychological processes, my wife also thinks that it could be symptomatic of country people’s fear of histoires. As in, ‘je ne veux pas d’histoires…’ That is, a fear that, if they don’t return like with like, all those acts of ‘normal’ kindness might stack up in the ‘Debt’ column of the accounts book until one day you pay them a visit, Mafia-style, to call in the accumulated debt. ‘Madame, you remember that troublesome tax inspector I mentioned the other day?’ (Unwraps the bundle held in left hand to reveal a pistol…) ‘Well, Madame, this here is a Magnum .45 – the most powerful handgun in the whole world. It can blow your head clean off etc. etc.’

Maybe. Maybe not. The fact of the matter is, we were both very touched by the gesture and we enjoyed our Breton crêpes for breakfast. But as for unravelling the intricate patterns of the national psychology, you’d need a BSc for that. Even a ‘natty BSc’.

Destination Bed

2012-01-15T06:01:00.000-08:00

Who here agrees that the best place on earth in winter is bed? Did I hear you say yeah? (Yeah!) ‘Said, did I hear you say YEAH? (YEAH!!!)


The 'Master Bed'

My feelings exactly. There is simply no place quite as cosy, comfortable and comforting – especially now that January is here (which, contrary to what T.S. Eliot would have us believe about April, has surely got to be ‘the cruellest month’) – as my lovely ever-welcoming bed. When you look at the history of mankind through the ages, bed was probably the best of all inventions.

At this point, I have to confess to a mean and heartless act. Although I failed to find any music for a sensible price in the disappointing January sales, I found a great new ‘hoodie’ reduced from 55 bucks to ten. The rule my wife has imposed in this house means that I have to identify some old item of clothing to discard whenever I buy something new. I duly found something that I tend to wear only once or twice per decade, so it was relegated to my hamper full of work clothes.

However, because the hamper is way too packed, I then had to identify something to relegate to a work rag. On taking the demoted item down to the cave to put into my old plastic laundry bag-o’-rags, I disturbed a mouse that had made itself at home inside. Without stopping to think, I leapt back and danced around in my habitual fashion before taking the bag at arm’s length to the door, turning it on its side and kicking the bottom. Whereupon the poor terrified mouse ran out and away. No doubt it will become one of Daisy’s nightly kills. When I looked inside the laundry bag, I realised that the mouse had created itself a cosy little bed for the winter. It wasn’t doing anyone any harm – and I evicted the poor creature. I’m gutted and repentant.

That poor mouse had exactly the right idea. A friend of mine once made us a compilation CD entitled ‘Getting Through February’. That may well be the case for Sheffield, but we all know that February can be a surprisingly fine month in France, full of the hope of spring. Getting through January is far more to the point. January is a useless month. It’s cold and nothing grows. There’s no decent food in the markets. In the words of Gwen Guthrie, the soul singer, ‘There ain’t nothing goin’ on but the rent’.

So what better course of action than to go to bed and stay there for the entire month? Curl up under a warm duvet with your beloved, just reading, sleeping and what have you. You know it makes sense. Certainly in times of yore, dirt-poor French peasants apparently would effectively hibernate in the deep mid winter to slow down their body-clocks and thereby suppress their appetite for food that they could neither produce nor afford. Come some sunny day in February, you could wake up with a smile and leap out of bed full of renewed vigour after your month under the duvet.

Alas, there’s just one thing wrong with the idea. There’s a living to be made and a daughter to be taken each morning to school. So the alarm goes off at 5.50am in this household. Our old battered Sony clock radio ‘cube’ has a pause button. We allow ourselves three ‘bashes’ on the button, i.e. three blissful six-minute hiatuses, during which we can luxuriate in the warmth of our bed in a state of semi-wakefulness.

We were talking the other day, the wife and I, during one such period of suspended animation. We were wondering just who invented ‘bed’. She thought it had to be a man; I thought it had to be a woman, because women are feline, sensuous creatures who surely have a natural affinity for the wonderful world of slumber. My wife, whose mission in life, Jim, is to help people resolve their problems, suggested a compromise: it was probably a husband and wife team. The man, Monsieur Bed, in the best tradition of French bricolage, created the base in his cave and his wife, Madame Bed, invented the mattress and the bedding.

Which led us to speculate when it was that the Beds came up with their invention. Not thinking straight at this hour of the morning, I suggested the hedonistic 18^th century. But of course this was ignoring all the evidence of Hampton Court and other showcases of four-poster beds and such like. It couldn’t have been as early as the age when Alfred the Great was burning the cakes, because people still slept on straw (didn’t they?). The invention had to derive from a time after the invention of the saw, so Monsieur Bed could fashion his base. The Romans had no doubt came up with a prototype, so maybe the Beds lived in France at a time when the Romans’ influence was still evident. We decided on the Dark Ages, since there was nothing better to do then than sleep. There were certainly no January sales in that epoch.

The conversation might have drifted on to the subject of how the word ‘bed’ became ‘lit’ in French, but there is no fourth bash in our household. I take it upon myself to get up and make the drinks and feed the animals and stoke the fire, because I have the luxury of staying at home for the rest of the day while the girls must ply their trade in Brive. I could, of course, sneak back to bed once the little 107 has driven up the drive and I am alone again (naturally). But I don’t. Guilt and the pressures of the daily ‘to do’ list will not allow it. All I can do is anticipate that glorious moment later in the day, when the shutters are shut and the dishwasher has completed its cycle, that glorious moment when I climb back into bed and pull the duvet (or what’s left for me once my wife has completed her cocoon) around me again. Bliss.

So let’s hear it one more time, y’all. Let me hear you say yeah! Bed, huh! What is it good for? Absolutely everything. Bed: the best place on earth, particularly during the useless, redundant month of January. Anyway, won’t be long now till February comes calling once more.

Health Matters

2012-01-08T09:04:00.000-08:00

This is the time of year when everyone exchanges their best wishes. Over time, prompted by the locals and my desire to participate in the game, I have graduated from a simple cheery ‘bonne année’ to a rather more sententious ‘mes meilleurs voeux’.

The trouble is, it doesn’t stop there. Yesterday morning at Martel market and then again at the new improved Intermarché, I was reminded that the meilleurs voeux are just the gateway to a whole rigmarole of hopes and wishes that lead the conversation inevitably to health matters. ‘…And good health above all. Yes indeed, you can have everything else, but if you don’t have good health blah blah blah…’ Out waddle all those duck-billed platitudes that get passed on down the generations. When, without a hint of irony, some polite and earnest teenager comes out with all the bonne santé stuff, it does make you question the spontaneity and sincerity of it all.

I suppose the ritual is hardly surprising, given how seriously the French take the whole business of health. And my God, what a business it is! I hadn’t appreciated just how big it was until a visit one day to the little converted bread-oven in the village where we used to live. It was owned by a deeply unpopular pair of French holidaymakers, whose mere presence would stir up the sleepy village two or three times a year. Les Parisiens, they were referred to with a certain heartfelt contempt. It used to make me feel slightly better about our label as Les Anglais. In the caste system of outsiders, we didn’t appear to be quite so far down the pecking order as the Parisians.

Anyway, one day in their Wendy-house, I witnessed a shocking scene. It was aperitif time and while Monsieur Parisien poured the drinks, Madame fetched a carrier bag from which she produced, like a magician pulling object after object out of a top hat, packets and sachets and multifarious containers of medication. By removing one or two pills or soluble capsules from each, she built up a little multi-coloured heap in the centre of the table. I can’t remember whether this was for her alone or for both of them. The thing is, I don’t believe she was particularly ill. She was just a run-of-the-mill native hypochondriac.

It’s a big self-perpetuating business that’s bleeding this country dry. The laboratories produce all this superfluous stuff – pills to counteract the side-effects of all the other pills – and then push them with incentives to surgeries, clinics and hospitals throughout the land. Doctors then prescribe them to their patients, who use their carte vitales like credit cards to offset the crippling cost of all this gratuitous medication. Too late, the politicians have woken up to the need to wean the populace off their doctors. It’s way too late now: they’re hooked. Such is the culture of dependence that people – as we all well know – will go and see their doctor if they catch a common cold. (I say: catch a common cold and put it in your pocket, save it for a rainy day…)

Sweeties for all?

I know that this is no startling revelation to anyone who’s lived in this country and observed the natives at work, rest and play even for a few months. But I thought about it the other night, after talking to my pal in New York. Despite any of the new Obama health reforms, the fact of the matter is that, in comparison to the American populace, the French have no idea how lucky they are. My friend has a health problem and he is currently out of work. While he was in work, something like $700 was deducted from his pay packet each month. Not only that, but now that he is unemployed, he has no accrued rights whatsoever. He can, of course, retain his rights if he can find a further seven or eight hundred bucks per month during his unemployment. He chose to waive that option. And now he finds himself with a medical condition.

Without insurance, if he wants to go to see his doctor – who is apparently a fairly average doctor and certainly not a doctor to the rich and famous of the Upper East Side – he has to pay $300 for a ten-minute consultation. This same doctor arranged a test, which was not a particularly complicated one. He then presented my friend with a bill for something like $3,000. Without wishing to rub salt in his wounds, I told him about our local doctor in Martel. A highly qualified homeopath and a very conscientious man, he charges €38 for a good hour of his time. Part of this charge is then reimbursed via the carte. For a Brit like me, raised to be self-reliant and accustomed to hard-pressed NHS doctors who get out their prescription pads as soon as you open your mouth, a doc like this (or a toubib, as they say) is a revelation.

Talking to my friend about health matters led me swiftly to a couple of conclusions. Firstly, America is clearly no country for old men and my friend needs to get back to Europe before he reaches that stage of his life. Secondly, for all my quibbles about the French national health – people’s obsession with the subject; the tyranny of Big Pharma and the medical mafia; the child-like dependency on doctors and a general lack of personal responsibility – we are blessed with a system here that protects the haves and the have-nots alike. It’s comforting to know that if you develop a serious health problem in France, the treatment won’t bankrupt you – even if, over the course of time, it will probably bankrupt the nation.

The New Year And The Old Place

2012-01-01T08:46:00.000-08:00

So there you have it. Audrey Hepburn has come down from her spot on the kitchen wall, which she has dominated – in different guises – throughout 2011. She has been replaced by 12 views of Britain from the golden age of railway posters. During January, I will be looking at one of South Devon’s coves and imagining the excitement of travelling there from London (courtesy of Great Western Railways) in the summertime, when the weather in those days was always fine.

That was then and this is now. The great wheel of the celestial clock has slipped another cog and the old year has given way to the new. 2012 is upon us. (Be afraid, be very afraid!) I wished my parents a happy new year this morning and, stupidly, asked them how they celebrated the night before. My father told me that they went to bed well before the midnight hour. It’s all stuff and nonsense and what is there to celebrate anyway? I guess that, when you’ve negotiated 84 years on this earth, you start to think like that.

My younger sister turned up with a copy of the Mail on Sunday and my father read me the headline. Something about the Inland Revenue declaring war on millionaire footballers who don’t pay their taxes. Not before time. When I suggested a fiscal war on every overpaid individual who doesn’t pay his or her taxes, he launched into a diatribe on Jonathon Ross. I managed to steer the conversation onto more positive ground – an appreciation of Oliver Postgate, in fact, and his charming creations, like The Clangers and Bagpuss and Noggin the Nog – by telling him about our New Year’s Eve.

It was a rainy night in the Corrèze – and it felt like it must be raining all over the world. We dropped The Daughter off at the Salle de Fêtes in Ligneyrac, where she and her friends were seeing in the New Year, free from adult supervision. We drove on through the pouring rain to Serilhac to have dinner with old friends. At least the rain kept the gendarmes off the roads. I had nothing to hide, but I always fear those routine roadblocks. ‘You have a defective side mirror, Monsieur. That will be 180 euros and six points.’

American Steve had invited one of the other Steves from his band, unofficially known as The 3 Steves. I’d met him (2^nd Steve) before at a gig, the night when he aired his new Fender Telecaster, but I’d not met his wife, nor their good-looking, personable son. They moved here from Bristol six or so years ago and renovated an old hotel in La Roche Canillac, an improbable medieval village that perches precariously above the steep-sided valley of the Doustre, a tributary of the Dordogne. It was only a 15-minute drive from our old house, so we grilled them for news about the old place. The beautiful little lake where we used to go for swims in summer and walks in winter was still beautiful. The garden full of topiaries, nicknamed ‘Corrèze Disney’, was still as outlandish as ever. The bearded Welsh oceanographer still lived in the village, but the retired German couple who befriended us had moved now to the same hamlet as our ex-family doctor. The German couple were good friends of Oliver Postgate, who spent many a month in his holiday-home in the bourg. By a stroke of very neat good fortune, Oliver Postgate’s stepson has bought their old house in the village, which has been up for sale for several years.

Ivor or Tacot?

Apparently, during the dark days when Steve and Jo were renovating the old hotel and trying to galvanise builders (who ended up absconding with a sizeable deposit), the Germans lent them a DVD that Oliver Postgate had made about the old Transcorrezian railway, affectionately known throughout the department as the Tacot. The fact that this old stately steam train, which once wound its way through some of the more impenetrable valleys of the Corrèze, taking passengers from Tulle to Ussel and back at little more than a walking pace, might have inspired Oliver Postgate’s Ivor the Engine somehow gave Steve and Jo the courage and belief to keep going, instead of throwing in the towel and moving back to England.

Our meal culminated in Jessica’s homemade Christmas pudding and her twin brother’s approximately 95% proof brandy butter. American Steve went outside to light some fireworks and Debs and I took our premature leave, as our Belgian friends had booked me for a two-hour DJ slot at their annual party in Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne. We would all meet up there later that evening.

The party-people danced, but not like it was 1999, and I fretted about the sound quality in general and distortion in particular. My cross-fading was a little perfunctory and Amadou & Mariam went missing for a few worrying minutes till I located the disc in the bowels of the console. Nor did I feel it was quite right to be wearing reading glasses to keep an eye on my playlist. So by the end of the slot, I had to ask myself: should I really be putting myself through all the doubts and the stress for the sake of my demanding ego?

Later, my wife and I chatted some more with 2^nd Steve and Jo at the bar. Steve picked up on my reference to ‘Bullmoose’ Jackson’s scurrilous ‘Big Ten Inch (Record of The Blues)’ and Jo professed to wanting to come up and riffle through my vinyl at some point. It also crossed both of our minds that our daughter might like to meet their personable son, so we ended up inviting them for dinner later this month. Let the new year start with new friends!

On counting out the old year and counting in the new, we all raised our plastic champagne flutes (left over from our Christmas Eve party), toasted 2012 and then indulged in that invigorating pastime we’ve all learned from the French: indiscriminate kissing. Two for most nationalities, but three for the Belgians and possibly, if I remember correctly, the Dutch. More fireworks were then set off – outside and not in – before people started settling imperceptibly into the latest calendar year.

1.30 in the morning seemed a rather amateur-ish hour at which to leave the festivities, but Debs by then had lost all traces of her voice and we are, as they say, ‘not so young as we used to be’. On leaving (with three more kisses), our Belgian hostess Natasja echoed my feeling that 2012 is going to be a singularly hard and testing year, but – she suggested – we must all be ‘true to what is in our hearts’. Amen to that and nobly phrased. Happy New Year, one and all!

Thank You Letters

2011-12-26T09:10:00.000-08:00

Inevitably, once you become an adult – once you assume the responsibility of filling the stockings, because you know that, if you don’t, no one else will – Christmas loses some of its magic. From a certain age onwards, you have to experience it vicariously via the smiling faces of (your) children.

However, there are compensations. One of them is: you no longer have to write ‘thank you letters’. As an adult, a telephone call (or these days an e-mail) will generally suffice. Today is Boxing Day. It’s the day when all your Christmas presents go back into their boxes. And it’s the day when all those smiling children (‘I’ll soon wipe that grin off your face, Sunshine’) have to sit down and write down a list of all the people to whom they have to write thank you letters. And if you’re a very, very good child, Boxing Day is also the day when you sit down and actually write some of those projected letters.

Children get far more presents than adults do, so the writing of these letters is a task that is requiring-to-be not-underestimated (as my old Latin master, Dezzy Spence, might have put it). This year, conscious of the annual battle of wills between both parents and a stubborn daughter, skilled in the ways of The Procrastinator (or Procrastinatrix?), which generally stretches for a good fortnight after Christmas Day, we suggested to our daughter that she might consider the tactic of writing one letter per day. Boxing Day is nearing its close and I haven’t seen any sign of that first missive.

Being a goody-two-shoes, I used to write my thank you letters in one great outpouring of literary creativity. Like Scott Fitzgerald, perhaps, on a drunken binge, I would sit down at our ‘morning room’ (or would ‘mourning room’ have been a more appropriate label?) table and rattle off eight, nine, ten, or however many it took – at a single sitting. Everyone from the grandparents to any obscure relative thoughtful enough to send us a cheque or a ten-bob note.

I am not inhuman, however. I have never even suggested that The Daughter should repeat such epistolary endurance feats. What’s more, I’ve passed on all the tricks of the trade and even given her a template for production-line success: start with a short paragraph expressing thanks for whatever gift it was that Dear Uncle This and Auntie That bestowed upon you (and if it was money, suggest how you might spend said money); state your heartfelt wish that they have passed a good Christmas and sketch how it was that you passed your own; talk about some of the other presents you received this year (without making them feel guilty that their own present might not measure up to the others); and end by wishing them a Happy New Year and reiterating your undying gratitude for their gracious gift (in the unspoken hope that they will repeat the gesture next Christmas)..

Easy-peasy. However, all my aides, all my prompting, cajoling, threats and sarcasm, never seem to have any effect. We always end up going the distance. Usually, some time around the final evening before the return to school, our daughter’s intransigence finally buckles in the face of relentless parental pressure. The crazy thing is that, once she starts, she’ll polish them off in a matter of a couple of days. I wonder sometimes whether it’s the ‘common courtesy’ angle that wears her down, or whether it’s the ultimate threat: that people won’t bother sending her anything next year. No matter. It works. Eventually.

Just to show you that I may be an adult now, but I haven’t forgotten my roots, I’m going to finish with a thank you letter of my own. I like to get them out of the way, you see. That way they’re not hanging over my head for the rest of the holidays like the sword of Damocles.

Dear Reader,

Thank you very much for reading my blogs in this Year of Our Lord, 2011.

I hope you had a nice Christmas this year. We certainly did. Our little ‘soirée’ on Christmas Eve went very well. Myrtle the cat sat on our bed all evening among a pile of guests’ coats that got bigger and bigger. Alfie, our dog, stayed in the room with her most of the time, which is strange because normally he likes gatherings of people. Friends’ children played with Tilley’s Playmobil in the spare room and didn’t break anything precious. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and they left early enough for us to tidy up and watch Son of Rambow, which was brilliant.

On Christmas Day, we had Brussels sprouts with our nut roast thanks to Bio-Woman at the local market. We all watched Spartacus in the evening. Kirk Douglas has the deepest dimple ever seen on celluloid. It was brilliant. My best friend phoned from New York just before it was time for bed and now I know he’s still in the Land of the Living.

This Christmas I got a brilliant book on Art Nouveau from my wife and daughter, an immense History of Europe from my wife, some brilliant Black & Decker work gloves from my mother-in-law that have got little rubber nipples all over them, which means that you can grip things like logs, so I can use them for fetching wood for the fire (among other things), a double boxed set of Cotton Club recordings by Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and others of their kidney, which I bought for 90 cents in Cash Converter and which I wrapped up for myself, pretending that my parents had bought it for me, and I got lots and lots and lots of chocolate.

Well, I’d better go. Thanks again for reading my blogs and I hope you’ll continue to read them in 2012. I hope you have a brilliant New Year and let’s hope that 2012 won’t be quite so disastrous for the environment, for humanity and for the animal kingdom as 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 etc. were.

Yours truly,

Mark

The Un-extended Family Christmas

2011-12-18T05:35:00.000-08:00

That’s it, then. The first page of the Christmas Radio Times has been consulted. The tree from Intermarché has been stuffed into the old chimney pot we brought with us from Sheffield and expertly decorated by the women folk. All along the route from here to Brive, Father Christmases are busy clambering over illuminated houses. The weather is getting colder and Phil Spector’s Christmas Album has been dusted off for another year. Yes, the Yuletide season is upon us once again. So bring us a figgy pudding!

Yesterday afternoon I went to my first Christmas drinks party: an intimate affair in nearby Turenne, l’un des plus beaux villages de France, in a Wendy house that has been converted tastefully into a small-but-perfectly-formed gîte. Plenty of mulled wine, mince pies and festive conversation. Everyone there, including us, will be here for the Christmas weekend.

It’s at Christmas that the expat can be particular susceptible to homesickness. During the ‘farmhouse years’, when we knew precious few compatriots and The Daughter was but an infant, we were both conscious of our fellow villagers, all gathering together with their extended families to enjoy the customary 36 courses on Christmas Eve. We felt excluded and… yes, not a little lonely. We both hankered after an extended family Christmas back home. So once, or maybe twice, we made the epic journey north. The A20 hadn’t quite been finished in those days, the globe had not yet warmed quite so alarmingly, and – because the ferry companies ramped up their prices to target hapless home-goers like us – the cost was alarming.

Once in England, we soon realised the folly of our ways. At the best of times, traffic in the UK is hellish; at Christmas it’s positively apocalyptic. You rush hither and thither, visiting friends and relatives, living out of a suitcase and spending much of the time, when most self-respecting folk are tucked up warm and snug within the bosom of their family, driving up and down motorways in weather that’s fit for neither man nor beast. And when we got back, neither refreshed nor relaxed after our exhausting trip, we returned to a glacial house that would demand at least four days’ worth of wood before an equitable temperature was restored.

Now, whenever I feel the slightest bit nostalgic for family Christmases past, I remind myself of one year in particular. It started badly with an argument between parents, with my mother accusing my father of being too merry at too early an hour. Things escalated as the grandparents rushed in to defend their particular offspring and we ‘kids’ chipped in with our two-penny worth. While the battle raged, there was a knock at the front door. I opened it and my giggling younger brother fell over the threshold, drunk as a waiter who has spent his tips on seasonal alcohol. Later, at the meal table, my mother gave a memorably maudlin peroration that concluded with a toast to ‘the fam’ly! Hic. My wonnerfll fam’ly’. Yes, our wonderful extended family – just a couple of years before both of my sisters were divorced, to be followed soon after by their older brother.

Myrtle's dreaming of a white Christmas...

And so, for the last decade, we have stayed put. Just the three of us, with no obligations to anyone else, we can please ourselves. Our circle of friends now serves as a kind of extended family. On Christmas Eve, in the tradition of old friends from Sheffield, we invite people over to partake of pink fizz and selected nibbles – and kick them out before 10pm (unless my attempts to get people dancing on our terracotta dance-floor have borne fruit), so there’s time to take in a good film, fill our three stockings with inconsequential gifts and leave a little glass of port and a Clementine on the dining table for the old fellow with the white beard… Now I think of it, isn’t it rather strange that our dog doesn’t wake us with his apoplectic barking: a strange man in a red suit in our sitting room, with a team of reindeer stamping their hooves on the gravel outside? I guess it’s just another miraculous aspect of Christmas.

Nowadays, too, thanks to the miracle of 21^st century technology, we can beam by satellite the post-prandial speech of our gracious British Majesty into our outmoded television set on the mezzanine level of our French home. We can even behold our parents and other assorted loved-ones as we speak to them on Christmas morning via Skype.

This year, despite the aversion of wife and daughter to such Yuletide delicacies, I have a Christmas pud of my very own to look forward to. I’ve just bought myself a carton of pre-package crème anglaise to accompany the heaviest dessert known to humanity. There’s a week to go and everything’s almost ready for our umpteenth small-but-unflustered family Christmas in France.

Bring me that figgy pudding, then, and bring it right NOW! Personally, I’m not going till I’ve had one – and I’d advise all my fellow expats to do the same.

Making Steps

2011-12-11T08:33:00.000-08:00

It’s a well-known fact that every French countryman is handy. If you don’t believe me, you can look it up in Mark’s Little Book of French Facts. Every French man who lives in the countryside is a keen bricoleur by disposition. He likes nothing better than to repair, modify or construct bits of his house and/or garden with the sort of useful stuff you find in Mr. Bricolage or the lorries that park in the marketplaces of small French towns to service the queues of men in berets and blue boiler suits, all clutching the prospectus that arrives in the post about a week or so beforehand. If you’re married to such a useful individual, you need never worry about what to buy him for Christmas. You buy him a tool or a gadget from Mr. Bricolage or a travelling lorry.

It’s another well-known fact that British men who come here from some urban outpost of the United Kingdom are often not at all handy. I would number myself among this cadre of useless individuals. However, in the face of exemplary indigenous usefulness, one learns to mend one’s ways. I was talking about this learning process with a friend of mine the other day. He’s a graphic artist by trade and therefore, ostensibly, as ill equipped as I am for a practical life. He has only been here a few years, but he has made great strides and is now, I’m ashamed to admit it, much more useful than I am.

Specifically, we were laughing about chainsaws. I know that chainsaws are generally no laughing matter – witness the celluloid devastation caused by masked men with chainsaws from Texas. In fact, I stopped on a couple of occasions recently during my dog-round to chat with a near neighbour. He speaks with cleft palette and is notoriously difficult to understand. On the first occasion, he showed me a new foreshortened chainsaw that he’d bought for one-handed tasks. On the second occasion, he showed me his heavily bandaged hand, which he’d lacerated while working with his new chainsaw. But Dan and I were laughing, because we both own chainsaws yet would never have dreamed of buying such lethal implements if we’d stayed put in the U.K. Manly tools like this are de rigeur in rural France. Dan has a proper chainsaw that runs on Sans Plomb 95. Mine is an electric chainsaw from Lidl. I used to have a bright yellow petrol-powered model from E. Leclerc, but I could never start the bloody thing. My Lidl chainsaw fires up every time you press the red button and it carries a three-year guarantee.

We both also own strimmers. The Australians call these whipper-snappers, or something equally strange. Mine is actually better than Dan’s because it’s got a Honda motor, but débroussailleuses (I trust that’s spelled correctly, as you don’t find words like that in the dictionary) are also something that neither of us would have dreamed of owning in the U.K. Within the first year of arriving in France, I realised that everyone in the village had one – and had one for a reason. It’s one thing mowing a manicured English back garden with a push-me-pull-you mower, but it’s another matter trying to tame terrain with such an implement. So I bought myself a strimmer from E. Leclerc and the Honda motor – touche bois – has never since let me down.

With tools like these, you learn quite quickly to be A Man. Of course, you make some howling mistakes along the way, but that’s what the learning process is all about, isn’t it? The upshot of the matter is that I’m now a lot handier than I was when I arrived in this country. I’m not quite Top of the Form material, but I now see myself as somewhere maybe half way along the Useless/Useful continuum. Believe me, that’s a big improvement.

With every notch you move along the continuum, your confidence grows. One of the great things about living with no close neighbours is that you can get on with your little projects without fear of someone looking over your shoulder, someone given to ostentatious tut-tutting and suggestions that you don’t want to do it like that, you want to do it like this. Here, there’s no one to know whether you’ve done a betise until it collapses. My wife and daughter, bless them, are unstinting in their encouragement, but probably couldn’t distinguish cowboy workmanship from the dog’s gonads if it jumped up and bit them.

Anyway, what I’m leading up to is the revelation that I made some garden steps on Friday afternoon. The mere idea that, a dozen or so years ago say, I would have filled an idle hour by making a set of steps out of wood off-cuts (donated by departing neighbours) to facilitate progress from the terrace to the compost bin, well it’s quite inconceivable. But there you are. It just goes to show that you are to a degree a product of your environment.

Ever since this triumph of construction, I’ve been taking every opportunity to go up and down my steps, partly I suppose to confound lingering doubts that I can Do It Myself. Miraculous to relate, they feel quite solid underfoot. Nor have I slipped yet on the way down. Lo! And the Lord looked down upon my creation and pronounced it good.

On a recent trip back to England for a three-hour meeting (for pity’s sake) to kick off a new work project, I ‘overnighted’ with some old friends in Sheffield. After breakfast the next morning, mein host proudly showed me the greenhouse he’d built as a lean-to on the side of their house. I was almost aghast with admiration, having failed to appreciate that he was as useful as he clearly is. My steps aren’t quite in the same league, but I’m now so buoyed by my success that I’m already planning to make steps down both sides of the house. Who knows where it all might lead. Perhaps right down to the bottom of the field. Good grief, you might even find me one day when the lorry comes to Martel, queuing up with native bricoleurs in a beret and a blue boiler suit.

Talking Trash

2011-12-04T06:09:00.000-08:00

I suppose it’s symptomatic of The Great Recession that one of the newest shops in the ‘main drag’ on the western edges of Brive is Cash Converter: a glorified pawn shop, where you can bring your wares – however acquired – and convert them into some paltry euros. If the shop had a legend or a strap line (an honest rather than a specious one, that is) it would probably be ‘Yo’ trash ain’t nothin’ but cash’.

Most of the stuff looks tawdry or dodgy, to put it mildly. But if you hunt long and hard enough, you can find some gen-u-ine bargains, which probably explains why it seems to be doing such a roaring trade, now as we approach Christmas at a time when people’s money generally is ‘too tight to mention’. I went in out of idle curiosity really, because the last thing I need – being an insatiable hoarder – is more stuff.

However… there on the shelves, looking a little scratched and slightly dented, was a top-of-the-line JVC CD player, saying ‘take me, take me’. At €11,90 and with a smoothly functioning mechanism, I had to do just that. My reserve CD player, after all, is a DVD player from Lidl, which can move upstairs to the office to supplement the spare cassette player. So I duly tucked that under my armpit.

I had just enough time before hurrying off to pick up The Daughter from school to rifle through the CD bins. Sadly, it’s one of my favourite occupations in life. My pulse quickens and my temple throbs in anticipation of finding some overlooked gold in among the fool’s variety. My best friend has unearthed most of his impressive collection of Blue Note jazz LPs by never knowingly passing by a New York thrift store and by taking the time to sort through all the rubbish in the everlasting hope… His example has inspired me over the decades and only he would truly recognise my addiction.

Fight the flower!

Inevitably – in among all the Claude Francois and Jonny Halliday discs – there were temptations to a man. Things like a Slim Gaillard compilation and a Celia Cruz collection for 50c apiece and a live double Caetano Veloso in-concert recording for a fraction under €3 went straight into the basket. But I approached a French collection of American hip-hop with much more trepidation. At its most intelligent and creative, hip-hop can be wonderful; at its most base and bombastic, it can be crude, dispiriting and plain offensive. Since it cost a mere 90 cents for a double album’s worth, I decided to ‘risk it for a biscuit’ (as we used to say at school). Thanks to computer technology, I can conserve anything I really like for a future compilation and then pass on the original to a deserving cause. Why, you might ask, don’t I just download the good stuff for such a purpose? Well, firstly I never know what might constitute ‘good stuff’ until I’ve heard it, and secondly I hate downloading. It’s too easy; it takes the fun out of the chase.

I took my stuff home and waited till I was on my own before I aired the hip-hop, because there would surely be things to which I wouldn’t want to submit my ‘ladeez’. There were indeed some gems: predictably the De La Soul and Gang Starr tracks and unexpectedly tracks by the likes of Missy Elliot and Tupac (or 2pac, as it says on the tin). Inevitably, though, there were plenty of tracks that were misogynistic and quite horrible. Nasty posturing bully-boys ‘talkin’ tray-ash’. I had to press the ‘skip’ button of my new JVC CD player.

The following evening, I caught an episode of Top of the Pops from 1976, hosted by Noel Edmonds, the man with the trim little beard and the smooth-as-peanut-butter patter. Among the acts were The Manhattans, a black vocal group that dated back to the golden age of Doo-Wop. I think they were performing ‘Kiss And Say Goodbye’; but I didn’t take note. It would have been easy to mock the sappy lyrics and the Temptations-style choreography, but it was utterly charming and I couldn’t help comparing it with the macho trash that I’d skipped through earlier in the day and wondering how, in 35 short years, we had evolved (or regressed) from this to that.

Where did it all go wrong? How come – and I generalise of course – that we have substituted sex and ‘bitches’ for ‘lerve’ and ‘ladeez’? It seems to me that if you listened to an exclusive diet of hip-hop and rap, you’d get the idea that male/female relationships are all about gratifying the top dog. Maybe it was ever thus; maybe it was simply better disguised for public consumption. But I doubt it. There’s a lot less room these days for sensitivity and compassion. With the impact of The Great Recession still truly to bite, there’s going to be even less room, I fear, in the time to come.

Thanksgiving in France

2011-11-27T05:06:00.000-08:00

Me and the wife, we often say that we’d never have met the heterogeneous (well, perhaps we don’t use that particular word in conversation) mix of people that we’ve met over the last 16 years or so if we’d stayed put in our nice comfortable suburb on the west side of Sheffield. It has been positively life-enhancing to fraternise with so many races in one small-ish locality.

And so it came to pass that I spent last Thursday evening in the company of some American friends, who come over here periodically from Madison, Wisconsin with their red setter, Elliot, who travels in a special doggie-cage in the hold of the airplane. Being from Wisconsin, they are serious fans of my favourite American football team, the Green Bay Packers. It’s a publicly owned franchise, but the waiting list for tickets is so long and the price of a seat so high that John and Heidi watch their games on telly. It just so happened that their Sky Sports package was showing the Packers’ Thanksgiving game against the Detroit Lions. So I was cordially invited – along with another, mutual American friend and his French wife – to come and watch the game and eat some food.

I turned up for the occasion, decked out in my antiquated Packers T-shirt, which dates back to the first time (following their glory years in the ‘60s) they reached the Superbowl, back in the ‘90s – when we lived with nothing but the standard, awful three French TV channels and I had to ask a French neighbour to record the game for me on Canal Plus. John and his friend Jack’s French wife were also suitably arrayed in Packer paraphernalia.

I arrived early for the pre-match chat at their traditional stone-built house, which they let out during the holiday season. It’s extraordinary: there are people in the area who come over here regularly from places like America, South Africa and even – for God’s sake – Australia. The expense of it all! Not just the epic journeys, but the cost of maintaining their holiday property and swelling the coffers of the local Trésor Public. John and Heidi are in the middle of having their roof completely re-done at some no doubt inordinate cost. They must really love it here. I wonder what Elliot thinks of it all. I hate flying at the best of times, but to be stowed away in the hold with all the baggage. Thankfully, red setters are fairly mad dogs anyway. He seemed untroubled enough, wandering about with his squishy toy clamped inside his jaw.

As soon as the other guests arrived, the pre-match chat went for a Burton. No matter how much I rail against the more inane aspects of its culture that the US exports to the rest of the world, I just love all that inane chat and all those statistical analyses. I’ve been hooked on the game ever since I saw the legendary Joe Montana of the San Francisco 49ers throw a ‘bomb’ to one of his wide receivers when I tuned in idly to a match in my hotel room during my first trip to New York at the end of the 1970s. Pre-match chat, however, has to be sacrificed to social niceties.

Do fries go with that shake?

It wasn’t quite the traditional Thanksgiving depicted by Norman Rockwell: a table full of happy folk smiling in anticipation as mother puts down an enormous roast turkey, ready for carving. Instead, we ate traditional pre-match ‘tailgate’ food. We started at half time, with the Packers leading by seven fragile points, with a bowl of beer-and-Cheddar-cheese chowder. Hmmm. A soup of Wisconsin’s two most famous products – Packers fans are known affectionately as cheese-heads for the Styrofoam wedges of cheese that they wear on their heads at the games, and we all know by now that beer is ‘what made Milwaukee famous [and] made a fool out of me’ – seemed an improbable recipe. But it was rather tasty.

Then Heidi prepared shredded pork burgers with a pear, endive and blue cheese salad (which, I’ll wager, doesn’t come from a Wisconsin recipe book) for everyone, as we settled down for the second half. I have been a faux vegetarian all my married life, which is to say that I am strict at home, but will lapse from time to time if tempted at some social engagement. It’s not that the idea of eating meat revolts me; I was reared after all as a carnivore. But I like to know that the meat has come from a happy enough home rather than some intensive factory. Being a polite well-reared Englishman, I didn’t actually enquire about the poor pig that made the ultimate sacrifice. I just gamely chomped into the enormous bun. I am a slender man, known for a prodigious appetite, but I physically couldn’t manage more than half of this gargantuan burger. Not if I were to eat some salad. It’s a lot easier to eat piles of vegetables than piles of meat. Now I understand why Americans generally are so overweight.

During the second half of the match, the Packers’ ‘offense’ woke up and performed with the kind of élan that they have been demonstrating all season. So there was much noisy cheering and high-fives, which didn’t seem to perturb Elliot, who continued to wander about seeking attention, with his squishy toy still clamped between his jawbones.

With victory safely secured, we rounded off our tailgate meal back at the table for a bowl of apple crumble and ice cream. The general talk turned to roofs and septic tanks, but John and I managed a brief discussion on quarterback Aaron Rodgers’ phenomenal ‘numbers’ for the season. There are times, not that often in truth, when the company of men hits the spots that no other company can reach.

And so it came to pass that I was able to leave for home at a still sensible hour, having experienced for the first time an American Thanksgiving. Kind of, anyway. As a souvenir, I took back with me some old football mags that John lent me, along with my paper Packers plate and my paper Packers napkin. I went to bed in my Packers T-shirt and fell asleep half way through a list of ‘all-time’ Top 10 quarterbacks. Joe Montana, Johnny Unitas, Dan Marino… zzzzzzzz

Calendar Time

2011-11-20T10:37:00.000-08:00

They’ve started early this year. Sensing some canine activity downstairs while I was up working at my desk, I looked out of the window. Sure enough a car had pulled up – an event in itself, here in the heart of the heart of the country. Then, zut alors, two big strong uniformed men got out of the car. My heart sank. Gendarmes! You can’t pretend that you’re not at home with the gendarmes, just in case something dire has happened or you’ve committed some crime of which you’re not yet aware.

Then, as I opened the front door and let our ferocious dog out to greet the strangers, I realised the error of my ways. It was a pair of sapeurs-pompiers in dark blue military-style uniform. It was a case of both phew! and uh-oh! A pair of pompiers can mean only one thing: calendars. Let the season commence.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Logically enough, we first encountered calendar time during the lead-up to our first Christmas in France, way back in the last century. I think it was our factrice who presented us with our first calendar. Being naïve newcomers from the Big (British) City, we thanked her very much for her kind gift and sent her on her way. It was only after further visits – from the pompiers, the bin men, the League of Catholic Gentlemen, the Belotte Association of the Corrèze and the like – that we twigged. Dineros. Money money money.

That’s the trouble with calendar time. Like everything else in France, demands for money come in clusters. The calendar season comes at the tail end of the most financially exhausting time of year, when one avis de stealth tax follows another, and just before all the insurance demands kick you when you’re down. So you’re not feeling as generous as you might otherwise be. And, frankly, just how many calendars does a household need?

At first we acted by playing dead whenever there was a knock at the door around the end of November/beginning of December. Me under the kitchen table, perhaps, while Debs would swaddle the infant daughter close to her maternal bosom somewhere behind the sofa, lest she let out a tell-tale ‘da!’ or some such childish sound to give the game away. Once we heard footsteps descending the steps, then we could breathe again.

However, as we gathered more knowledge of the French system, we learned not to be quite so blanket in our dismissal of people bearing calendars. We learned to prioritise. For example, neither of us had realised that firemen and women in France are mainly volunteers. Soon after moving into our new home, we had a chimney fire, which was scary in the extreme. Even though the local chapter of sapeurs-pompiers got lost on the way here and arrived 25 minutes after I’d called the emergency number, I witnessed what a great job they do. So, if they come a-visiting when either of us is in, we pay far too much for a fairly tawdry collection of photographs of the squadron in uniform.

We also learned that facteurs and factrices retire on a nice fat index-linked pension from La Poste after not too many years of driving around in their yellow vans à la Postman Patrice, putting tax demands in people’s green metal letter boxes. In comparison to coal mining, chicken-packing, sweat-shop labour and the like, some might call it a cushy number. So this has determined what we give our post(wo)man for their correspondingly measly calendar. Just enough to encourage him or her to keep popping our tax demands into our letterbox rather than dumping them down a ravine. Some might protest, of course, that this sounds like a great option. I say unto them that the authorities don’t let non-receipt prevent them from charging their 10% surcharge for late payments.

As for the other hawkers of calendars who knock on our door at this time of year, we have learned to say – politely – ‘sur votre vélo’. It’s difficult, because one knock on the door sounds like any other. So if I find someone like Hervé from the local chapter of the League of Catholic Gentlemen on my doorstep, I’ve found that sending him nicely on his way without buying his ‘calendrical’ wares is good practice for dealing with incessant telesales calls.

The irony is that the most useful calendars here come free – in the form of the wall planners that you can pick up (if you’re in the right place at the right time) from La Poste or your friendly local insurance office. The irony is compounded by the fact that every year, as a Christmas present, my sister sends us a calendar for our kitchen wall. 2011 has been the year of Audrey Hepburn and 2010 was Gustav Klimt. Beyond that, my memory starts to fail me. But I don’t remember a single year when we’ve actually used one of the calendars for which we’ve paid through the nose. They hang around for a couple of months after Christmas until we’re fed up with photographs of men and women in uniform – before finding their way into the recycle bin.

Still, in the case of the pompiers at least, it’s money in a good cause.

The Miniature French Giant

2011-11-13T06:29:00.000-08:00

A couple of years before we moved to France, me and the Missus had the great good fortune to see Michel Petrucciani perform at the Brecon Jazz Festival. I’d read about the prodigious jazz pianist and the genetic brittle bone disease (osteogenesis imperfecta) that meant he would never grow more than three foot tall, but nothing prepared us for his appearance.

If memory serves me correctly, it was his bass player, Michael Bowie, who carried him on stage, holding in his arms this weird-looking infant-adult with outsize head and glasses, as his charge clung to his neck like a koala bear. We watched Bowie put him down and Petrucciani climb up onto his piano stool and adjust the pedal extensions that Steinway had made for him. He shuffled around on his seat to make himself comfortable, wished us ‘good evening’ and, for the next 90 minutes or so, he and his rhythm section played one of the most incredible sets I have ever witnessed. As chance would have it, the BBC recorded highlights for its short-lived Jazz from Brecon series, so we still have our video recording as a testimony to that evening in mid Wales.

On Friday evening, the two of us went to our local art et essai cinema to see Michael Radford’s captivating documentary on the French musical giant, who died in 1999 at the age of 36. Despite my efforts to drum up interest, the audience numbered the customary dozen or so, dotted around the cavernous steeply raked auditorium. The absentees missed a real treat.

In the years between Brecon and Vayrac, I’ve listened to just about everything Petrucciani ever recorded – including an astonishing solo concert recorded by Radio 3 from the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London – but I knew little about the man himself. Despite the temporary distraction of my initial guilt for dragging along a couple of Germans who couldn’t speak French (when I realised that, of course, there would be interviews with French as well as American people, and of course their words wouldn’t be sub-titled), Radford’s film was as riveting as the concert in Brecon.

Petrucciani sensed at a fairly early age that he wouldn’t be long for this world, and he crammed much more into his 36 intense years than most of us manage in a lifetime. His philosophy was ‘to have a really good time and never to let anything stop him from doing what he wanted to do. Encouraged by a musical Italian father, he started off playing drums, but then saw some TV footage of Duke Ellington and realised that he had to be a pianist.

He set about learning the instrument with the same intensity as he learned English when he travelled to America as a teenager. Within six months of settling in Monterrey – where his virtuosity and energy prompted the reclusive tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd to perform in concert again – he could speak perfect vernacular American-English with little trace of a French accent.

In California he met and married the first of his three or four (I lost count) wives. This was quite a shocking and revealing aspect of the film: first the fact that so many women would fall in love with someone half their size, and then that Petrucciani – in his desire to keep changing and to keep renewing himself and thereby to keep experiencing as much as he possibly could – was able simply to walk away from the woman he loved (at the time) and to take up with the next person he took a shine to. But this is often what you find with artistic geniuses. On one hand, their creativity and their charisma makes them enormously attractive; on the other, their ruthless dedication to the artistic calling means that their muse is more important than anything or anyone else.

When he moved to New York, he found himself living in one of the most exciting cities in the world, mixing with some of the jazz greats he had previously only revered from afar – and not surprisingly he went haywire: playing constantly, sleeping too little, consuming too many drugs and generally doing everything to excess. Eventually he went back to Europe, leaving his second wife behind and taking up almost immediately with wife no. 3. When she found herself expecting a child, they were faced with the dilemma of whether to risk passing on his hereditary illness to a child. Petrucciani’s reasoning was that he wouldn’t have missed the chance of life for anything, so they went ahead. Sure enough, their son was born with the same brittle bones.

One of the most poignant elements of the film was the footage of his son, a young man who was, apart from his beard, the spitting image of his father. He talked of living in a world of giants and the pressure that his sense of being so different put on him to try to do something equally extraordinary with his life. Somehow you sensed that he probably won’t and that everything could, as a consequence, end in tears.

Another poignant aspect was the revelation of just what brittle bones means. Michel Petrucciani played the piano with such physical intensity that sometimes he would break a clavicle or some other bone in performance. When you listen to his long, sweeping, almost breathless improvisations, there is a sense of his driving himself through the pain barrier. Music must have been both a spiritual and physical balm.

After his years in Europe, where he recorded mainly for the Dreyfus label and with the likes of Stéphane Grappelli and where in 1994 he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur, he moved back to New York. But his lifestyle soon caught up with him and he died in the middle of a fearsome east coast winter after another night on the town. He was two years older than Charlie Parker before him, another burnt out case, another wayward musical genius, who lived the jazz life and pursued the muse with similar ferocity, who also kissed the girls and made them cry along the way. Like Jim Morrison, Michel Petrucciani is buried in Paris at the Père Lachaise cemetery. I think he had a better time in his life than the tormented ex-singer of The Doors did.

As I strapped on my safety belt and started up the Peugeot 107 after the film, I felt chastened by the little man’s remarkable legacy of 36 short years on this earth, but also heartened to recognise that there are certain advantages in living an ordinary life.

An Edukayshun

2011-11-06T10:48:00.000-08:00

Having been through the entire French educational system – from école maternelle to lycée – The Daughter seems resolved to finish her studies in the UK. Therein lies the reason for a recent frenetic trip to the mother country. Three of us squashed inside a Peugeot 107, no bigger than a Dinky toy, travelling almost the length of Britain not once but twice.

It’s a long, long way from Southampton to Edinburgh and back again. Having ‘done’ the open days at the Glasgow and Edinburgh schools of art and been suitably impressed by the facilities and the teaching staff (who appear to have taken a vow to redress the sins of the ‘History Man’ generation of teaching staff, the self-important toads who looked upon students as either irritants or opportunities for an inappropriate relationship), we negotiated some of the busiest arterial roads of our island. It was the clichéd ‘white-knuckle ride’. By some fortuitous stroke of timing, we somehow kept avoiding the Friday evening queues about which the road signs regularly alerted us. Only stopping every two hours to swap drivers and/or avail ourselves of the sanitary facilities, we reached my sister’s on the edge of Southampton ‘round midnight. My neck and shoulders had fused.

The contrast three days later with the journey south from Dieppe couldn’t have been more marked. On a French motorway like the A20, you simply point the car in the right direction, switch to automatic pilot and just check your mirrors from time to time to verify that there’s still no one behind you. Zounds! You can almost get away with playing solitaire on the dashboard. It’s one of the remaining pleasures of living in France.

Given the journey involved in getting to Scotland and back, we might be forgiven for trying to persuade our girl to apply for a French fac like any other sensible member of the expat community. But she is determined to go anywhere other than France for the final part(s) of her education.

The Model Pupil

That might seem rather strange. Expat parents often compare the French system favourably to the British one: pupils work hard, they learn to read and spell and develop nice neat loopy handwriting, there’s more discipline in the classroom, they seem to achieve better academic results and the final qualification still has some market value. Like many aspects of French society, there is a suspicion that rigidity and standardisation are valued more highly than creativity and individualism. But then, maybe a system that produces socio-clones rather than sociopaths is better for everyone.

When you talk to our daughter about her experiences here, however, you realise why she wants to go elsewhere for what should be the most creative period of her education. Way back in école maternelle, when she was busy absorbing a new language and practising the precise boucles required for tying her shoe laces, every afternoon after lunch she would be made to lie down and nap even though she never felt the need for an afternoon sleep because she always went to bed at a sensible hour.

From école primaire onwards, she grew accustomed to hours of devoirs, regular tests and learning long poems to recite in front of her classmates. The idea behind this last requirement, we gathered, is to develop the power of recall – presumably so you are better able to regurgitate at exam stage what you’ve stuffed in during revision. Again, you could argue that this is very practical. If it’s all right for previous generations, then it should be all right for our daughter’s generation, but as a parent you see how many precious hours of childhood are wasted in the pursuit of total recall. It can’t endear you to the process of learning and surely only suggests that there is one acceptable way of doing things and one way only.

During this time and later when she graduated to collège, her experience of the education system here was also coloured by the difficulty of being a vegetarian among carnivores. If it wasn’t difficult enough being the only foreigner in her class, she was then expected to assert her rights as the only non-meat eater. No wonder she shied away from confrontation and ate without protest the buttered pasta or the French beans that she was given.

Things have been better since she went to lycée. For one thing, she can eat lunch with her mother. Resisting the pressure to follow a bac scientifique, to which many of the undecided succumb, has opened up a whole new exciting world of history of arts, with school trips to places like Venice and Paris. She appreciates the links to local museums and galleries and the fact that she gets free admission to Brive’s art-house cinema. Nevertheless, it’s all still very academically orientated and there’s still very much a right and a wrong way of doing things.

In my day, for example, we were taught the value of an introduction, a main body and a conclusion, but it appears that even the introduction has to be broken down into distinct elements. Whenever I suggest that teachers surely are more interested in her views rather than a digest of critical thought, I’m told that I simply don’t understand the way it is. Only the other evening, she was in floods of tears because she couldn’t come to grips with the required structure of her first Philosophy essay. I’ve heard of children here who have jumped out of top-floor windows or found other ways to express their inability to cope with the pressures of the educational system. Thankfully I managed to persuade our girl that there are more important things in life than Philosophy essays.

Once, I had a long conversation with a student from Limoges University on the train to Paris. What she told me suggested that higher education here is more of the same. Courses, she said, are generally over-subscribed and the authorities try to prune numbers by means of difficult exams at the end of the first year. I know it always rains in Limoges, but she didn’t seem to be having a whole lot of fun during the one time in your life when you get treated as an adult, but don’t have to shoulder the responsibilities of adulthood.

The Daughter wants to learn, but she also wants to have a little fun. She is leaning towards Edinburgh now.

Provided that she gets in and the tuition fees don’t soar to English levels, she should be happy as an art student in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I only hope that she won’t come to the same conclusion that two other daughters of expat friends came to after enduring a solitary difficult year at an English university: that British students’ principal idea of having fun is to get (as they used to say in Sheffield) ‘bladdered’.

French Resistance

2011-10-16T10:15:00.000-07:00

We spent Saturday night and Sunday morning this weekend with some friends in their tastefully restored farmhouse. At breakfast, we were talking about some German friends of ours who seem to carry an entire nation’s burden of guilt on their broad Arian shoulders. They are the type of people who are so kind and so thoughtful that it’s impossible to reciprocate in full. It’s as if they have turned themselves into model citizens in their adopted country as a way of saying sorry for the Nazi occupation.

Made-up maquisard

My friend Howard told us about an old man of the hills, who lived in their village during a previous incarnation of their lives in France, when they lived further south in the hinterlands of Carcassonne. For years, this particular man refused to talk to them. Then, one morning, Howard plucked up the courage to confront him. It turned out that he had mistaken them for Germans. In those days, Howard still had some (fair) hair. His wife and their two daughters are all blonde; therefore they had to be Germans in this man’s eyes. Once he realised that they were English, his resistance collapsed.

This is a part of France where the Résistance was very active. You only have to look at the lie of the land – with all its woods and caves and streams and shepherds’ stone shelters – to conjure up a picture of fleet goings-on under cover of night. While researching an article on a particular village a few weeks ago, I talked to an old man of the bourg. He was over 80 and the palms of his hands were stained black from a lifetime of working the vines. His accent was so strong that I had to strain to catch sufficient words to piece together the story of his life. I did manage to garner that, as a young man in the war, he had run errands for the local chapter of the Maquis.

He offered to show me a couple of memorials that I’d never seen before. So he sat statuesquely in the passenger seat and directed me to a couple of fairly primitive stone monuments in clearings of the causse or scrub that surrounds the village. The first one commemorated the arrival by parachute of an English officer, who came here to work directly with the maquisards. The old man told me that the officer returned to the area after the war and he and his wife settled here until his death a few years ago.

We drove on to the second monument. It was bigger and more prominent, because it marked a day nearer the liberation when the sky had turned Technicolor with hundreds of different-coloured parachutes, all attached to canisters that contained arms and other provisions for the forces of resistance. As he told me all about it, the old man’s excitement was palpable: it all seemed still as vivid to him that afternoon as it must have been on that euphoric day over 65 years ago.

It put me in mind of the self-appointed elder of the village where we used to live in the Corrèze. When we moved there in the autumn of 1995, he only had another two or three years to live and you could tell that his life had become a bit of a chore. But every now and then we would sit together to hear his tales of the war. Briefly, they reanimated him as nothing else could (apart from his periodic rants about ex-President Mitterand). As temporary mayor of the commune during the war, he led a dangerous double-life as courier for the Maquis. He told us once of being stopped at a Nazi roadblock when he was taking money to the freedom fighters. One can only imagine the terror.

And that’s all we can do really: use our imagination. Britain hasn’t really been invaded since William fit the battle of Hastings-o. Until secrets were de-classified, we never even know about the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands. It was all kept hush-hush by the wartime government lest the truth should undermine national morale. Careless talk and all that.

Reading about what happened on Jersey and Guernsey only underlined that we don’t really know how we might behave in an extraordinary situation until it actually transpires. Similar kinds of things happened in the Channel Islands as they did here: on one side of the coin, acts of heroism; on the other side, acts of treachery.

My wife’s work as a therapist certainly confirms that whatever took place here during the occupation created many deep personal traumas that, in many cases, have never been fully addressed. When you consider that they’ve had the Prussians, the forces of the Kaiser and the Nazi hordes stomping across their territory in the space of less than 150 years, it’s hardly surprising that the French seem at times so wary of strangers. ‘Xenophobic’ is a word that has slipped into the odd conversation.

We were comparing experiences of friendship at breakfast. All four of us have plenty of French friends here, but we all complained of our inability to take that final step across the Great Divide. It’s as if every time you think that – this time – you’re really getting somewhere, a No Entry pops up and you take a hesitant step backwards. Of course, there are good reasons: all our cultural disconnections and a strong family-centric culture, certainly in rural France, which makes friendship more of a luxury than a necessity.

But it occurred to me this morning that my abiding sense of French resistance is connected to the French Resistance. We the rootless international settlers are really just the new invaders. If we sense a certain suspicion of our different ways and a reluctance to let us all the way into their hearts, is that so surprising? Let’s be thankful that they haven’t yet taken to blowing up our cars.

Lime-washing

2011-10-09T08:32:00.000-07:00

About this time of year, I start to get rather more nervous than usual.

Brilliant white walls

My immediate concern is the prospect of lime-washing the wall of the house that takes the majority of the weather. One of the drawbacks of living in a house of straw bales is that you have to build up a protective but breathable skin of successive lime-washes. The idea being that over time the walls become as hard and as naturally impermeable as those brilliant white ones you see all over Greek islands.

Somewhere in the dustiest recesses of my brain, I seem to recall images of black-clad natives slopping the white stuff on with old brooms. It looked easy. Alas, the reality is rather more fraught. For a kick off, there has to be an ideal meteorological window of opportunity. From early September onwards, I scan the not-particularly-reliable internet météo, looking out for this rare but perfect window. Roughly five days without rain with a range of temperatures somewhere between a maximum of about 25^oC and a minimum of about 5^oC. Too hot or too cold and the stuff won’t cure properly. It will crack and blister like last year’s cover-up did. And, of course, if it rains before it’s cured, it is likely to wash that wash right off of our walls.

Assuming that the forecast is reliable, you need sufficient notice to make up the lime-wash mixture, so that it can ‘prove’ for a few days. Which brings me to the mixture. These days, I’m a dab hand with our Sunday-morning crêpe mix, but a lime-wash is quite another matter. The ingredients are lime, water, some natural colour and some kind of fixative. I’ve discovered that there is lime and there is lime. Last year’s failure was made with the wrong lime (I was reliably informed by one of those experts who takes great delight in telling you that you don’t want to do it like that, you want to do it like this). So this year, I’ve ordered some NHL2 from the good people of St. Astier. It sounds good, looks good, but I haven’t made the error of tasting it – remembering, as I do, an unpleasant lesson from childhood when I ate a spoonful of Robin starch in my mother’s pantry, mistaking it for icing sugar.

Then there’s the fixative (which, I think, is an additive that stops the lime powder rubbing off on your fingers or clothes). Up until now, I’ve used something called sel d’alum, which translates as alum salt, but don’t ask me what this is. I do know that it’s extremely hard to get hold of. And in view of last year’s failure – which I’ve got to put down to ingredients and/or conditions rather than personal (in)competence if I’m going to do this every year until I get too old to climb a ladder – I’ve decided this time to try something else.

I came across a recipe in a back copy of The Last Straw journal (ordered at great expense from the U.S.A.) that uses a wheat flour paste. This appealed to me because I can pop down to the local supermarket for the ingredient. The only trouble is that the measurements are quoted in the American imperial system. Cups, quarts and gallons are all slightly different from the British equivalents. I imagine that it was something to do with the rebellious colonists wishing to assert their independence from the mother country in more ways than war.

I haven’t yet tried to make up the paste, which is another reason for my present state of worry. Still. It’s good to have a recipe to work from. The first time I lime-washed our walls, it worked well, but I misplaced my recipe. So the next time I did it, I took care to write it down – only to discover the following year that I’d written down things like ‘1 bucketful…’ without specifying what size of bucket. So it’s all been very hit and miss and far from systematic.

Assuming that I get the mix right this time, I’ve then got to apply the stuff. I’m not good with ladders at the best of times. Once I get beyond a certain rung, I start to picture the whole assembly tottering over and wondering whether, like the Pink Panther, I could judge my moment and simply step off onto solid ground just before the crash. My insecurity is compounded by the fact that I need to get up there with brush, bucket of lime-wash, a second bucket of water in which to dip the brush before each application, and a sprayer for wetting the patch of wall to be washed. I’ve managed so far – in a way that Heath Robinson would surely have approved of – by hanging everything from my strimmer harness with home-made hooks of green fence wire.

Then, assuming that I get everything safely up the ladder, there’s the business of painting the lime-wash onto the wall itself. Being lime rather than paint, the liquid starts to dry as soon as the brush travels across the surface. Hence the reason for a bucket of water. But then you don’t want to get it too wet or… And the brushstrokes themselves. An artistic neighbour, who works with lime mixtures in her work as an interior designer/decorator, advocates the ‘slap it on at random’ approach. Which I like. But the received theory suggests that the best protection comes when you apply it in two coats: the first with horizontal brush strokes and the second with vertical brushstrokes, down which the eventual rain will travel safely away.

Oy vay! What happened to that mental image of mine of native Greeks slopping it on with old brooms? I’m sorry to go on, but you understand now why I get a little apprehensive at this time of year. It does make me wonder why we opted for straw and not those terracotta capillary briques that you render once and once only, thus sparing the proprietor of the house this annual autumnal torment. Strange to relate, I’m all for a quiet life.

Insect Asides

2011-10-02T12:20:00.000-07:00

Last week I disappeared off the edge of the blogosphere – rather like those unfortunate sailors did in the days before they discovered that the horizon wasn’t so much a precipice, more an ever-shifting focal point.

I was in London for the week, trying to accustom myself to the sound of cars and human beings and early-morning foxes. I got back yesterday via the white elephant that is Brive Dordogne Valley airport. Got back to my home, sweet home to discover that the willows are alive with hornets. What’s more, they’re the dreaded frelons asiatiques. This is bad news – just to compound the present misery of financial meltdown, environmental disintegration and the increasingly inevitable prospect of re-electing our diminutive president.

Death, Japanese Style

Day and night the activity in the willows sounds like a squadron of Lancaster bombers bound for Dresden. The inconceivably warm air is alive with their terrible drone. These creatures – with their angry orange ‘saddles’ – are fearsome. I watched a fascinating documentary about them some time ago. It was set in Japan, where they kill on average 50 or so human beings every year. Their sting is so virulent that you have to sever the affected limb with the nearest available blade to stop the venom reaching your heart. Well, possibly.

In Japan the indigenous bees have learned to contend with these aerial mass-murderers. A Buddhist monk explained how the colony lures the scouts into the hive and then swarms all over them so that they overheat and die before they can race off and tell their fellow killers that there’s a vulnerable hive at so-and-so coordinates. Alas, the poor naïve European honeybee – already facing extermination from pesticides and Traumatic Hive Disorder (or THD, as it’s known to the apian brotherhood) – is defenceless. The Asiatic hornet will just take them out in mid air or raid the hive and wipe out the entire colony just for the fun of it. They’re the etymological equivalent of Mexican drug gangs.

Until I came to France, I’d never encountered a hornet. I wouldn’t have known what one looked like. Then it was suddenly frelon this and frelon that, and pretty soon I was classing it with the equally dreadful viper in my almanac of French Fauna to Fear. I remember sitting up late one summer’s night, reading by lamplight near a window. There was a constant tapping at the glass and I looked up to see a frelon outside the size of a bullet, banging itself against our fragile farmhouse window, determined to get inside to kill le lecteur à table. It was like a scene from a horror story by Edgar Allen Poe. Reader, I was so perturbed that I took up my book in a cold sweat and retired at once to my bed.

Miles Davis lived for a while in Paris and he, too, must have heard tales of this intimidating insect, because he wrote a number called ‘Le Frelon Brun’ for his Filles de Kilimanjaro album. Whenever I give it a spin, I am transported back in time to that vengeful nocturnal kamikaze. The house defences held that evening, but sometimes they do get in – and it usually provokes a scene of panic and pandemonium. If I reach for the plastic fly-swatter, The Daughter is given to scream at me – not because she wants me to spare the life of the marauder, but because she fears that her father will miss his target and be stung unto death.

In fact, in recent times, I’ve learned that the common frelon is not aggressive. Unlike the wasp, it will not set out to sting you. However, when it has over-indulged itself at the vine, at the time of year when the juice of the grape is turning to alcohol, it is known to do reckless and headstrong things. So we take no chances in this house. Under the influence of my wife, we have renounced violence against intruders. Instead, we turn off all interior lights, turn on the outside light and open a door.

The trouble is, as I say, we are now faced with squadrons of frelons asiatiques, gorging themselves on whatever property they find on the leaves of the common willow. I can only assume it’s the equivalent of coca leaves for native South American Indians. They’re an unknown quantity at the best of times, but pepped up with vegetable amphetamines, who knows what they’re capable of?

For this reason, over the next few days I’m going to be sitting outside on a director’s chair with binoculars and Jonathon Franzen’s wonderful new novel Freedom. I’ll be lifting my eyes from the page to track their flight path to the wood. Apparently, they travel in a straight line, which makes the task a little easier. They nest, I’m told, in constructions that resemble ovoid paper lanterns, high up in a tree.

Either I call in an expert, who will then remove the nest at a fee commensurate with the considerable human risk involved. Or I go down to my neighbour’s house and ask if I can borrow the WW2 flame-thrower he salvaged from the Eastern Front. I appreciate that the trees are suffering enough from this current apocalyptic drought, but I’m honestly prepared to singe a few tops if it means eradicating the colony of frelons. Good for willows; good for bees.

In fact, I can already see the film. Sampo! ‘He… was just a little-known writer, who took up arms against a brutal foe to defend the departmental bee population – and in the process he won fame, glory and a Legion of Honour.’

A Writer’s Lot

2011-09-18T13:11:00.000-07:00

When I were a lad – and not long after my parents moved us from London to Belfast, Norn Iron – I told an old woman in the guest house where we stayed initially that what I wanted to be when I grew up was ‘a book-maker’. I couldn’t understand why she laughed.

It seemed a perfectly reasonable ambition for someone who spent much of his early days writing and drawing Western strip-cartoons in the manner of the Dell comics that my dad would buy for me from time to time. Then I stopped drawing and devoted my creative energy to inventing parallel football and cricket worlds. So I guess ‘book-making’ was in my blood.

I can’t think of any other reason why I do it. I read a rather depressing statistic not that long ago, which suggested that something like 80% of writers earn less than £10,000 per annum. J.K. Rowling, bless her, is a special case, but most publishing money these days seems to be heaped upon such talented and acclaimed writers as Victoria Beckham and Peter André for their keenly anticipated memoirs. There’s little left for the Johnny Normals of this world, particularly those who find every reason to equivocate, rather than to settle down, eliminate all distractions – and just do it.

Fortunately, after years of hanging around the periphery of training and personal development, I have drifted into the niche market of scripting e-Learning storyboards and thereby found a way of shoving myself, in rugby parlance, just over the ‘gain-line’. Not far enough to trouble the functionaries at the department’s Hôtel des Impôts, but just enough to boost my self-worth and supplement my wife’s annual earnings.

Not The Great Gatsby

Without those storyboards, and given my tendency to beat around the literary bush lest my creation fails to measure up to The Great Gatsby, I’d be reliant on the crumbs offered by magazines and newspapers. This is not much of an option. For a start, we’re staring into the yawning abyss of the Great Recession. As sales and advertising revenue drop, so the size of the crumbs on offer diminishes. I see bigger ones these days on our bird table.

For another thing – with the notable exception of the Archant stable of France-themed magazines – most ‘organs’ treat you like dirt. Admittedly, editors are busy people, but if you get a reply to your e-mail enquiry – even a negative one – you can count yourself lucky. The received wisdom is that you follow-up your e-mail with a telephone call. The thing is, writers often write because they are much better at expressing themselves in writing. If ever I’ve managed to get through to an editor and am then asked to ‘tell me more’ about my idea, I usually go to pieces and end up sounding as intelligible as Benny from Crossroads.

Early this summer, I managed to sell an article to a French paper focused on expatriates (I won’t name names, but I wouldn’t like you to think it was the paper with a two-word name). The Features Editor offered me two-and-a-half largish ones for text and photographs about the Galerie Pomié’s fascinating summer show, Inde Vivante.

The owners moved here from Ireland to create their rural art gallery. As survivors of the great rock ‘n’ roll circus, they know how to put on a show. They’ve travelled extensively in India and recently attended a Maharajah’s wedding that was featured in Vanity Fair. So there was plenty of good material. I made three or four trips: to interview them and two of the artists who would be exhibiting in the show, and to go through the owners’ huge collection of photographs. I then spent a couple of days writing the first draft and e-mailing the illustrations.

By the time the private view of the show came around, I hadn’t heard anything from the editor. Nevertheless, I was sufficiently carried away by the splendour of the exhibits and the promise of my fee that I bought a couple of miniature paintings of gilded elephants by a certain Mr. Pareek.

The issue of the paper for which my article was destined appeared – but with no sign of my feature. After several e-mails and abortive phone calls, the editor eventually replied to say that she had liked my article, but felt that it wasn’t right for the paper. It was possible, however, that she would use it, in slightly modified form, in the August issue.

After the August issue came and went with no trace of my article, I wrote a polite note to the editor to point out that I had been commissioned to write the article and that I was entitled to ask for payment for the work I had put in and the expenses I had incurred. However, I would ask instead for half the agreed fee, as I appreciated that the paper wasn’t as cash-rich as, say, The Daily Mail. No reply. I sent a few more – to the editor and the publisher. Silence. The Void.

The only apparent criticism of my article that the editor gave me was that she felt it read like a ‘PR puff’ for the gallery. Well, it seemed that the owners could have done with a bit of publicity. After seven years of banging their heads against a wall of indifference, they have decided to close the gallery. Their house is on the market and they might move back to Ireland. Meanwhile, neither they nor I will be buying any further copies of a French paper for expatriates.

I do sometimes ask myself why I do what I do. There’s a fair amount of heartache associated with writing. You have to inure yourself to repeated rejection. But I guess it beats cleaning swimming pools and holiday homes. I should know. They’ve just remaindered my last book – before I could earn any more than the fairly derisory advance on royalties – but book-making, as I’ve said, must be in my blood. And I have this faith, delusion, whatever you want to call it, that one day I might make a book I will be proud of.

Same Old Junk

2011-09-11T11:35:00.000-07:00

This Sunday, 11^th September 2011, our commune celebrated the fourth or fifth anniversary of its annual brocante or vide grenier (or ‘attic-empty’). It’s fast becoming a significant event in the bargain hunter’s calendar.

This year’s event came complete with new improved parking facilities and a raft of extra stalls in front of the new Salle Polyvalente – or hall of many activities – built at great expense to local tax payers to replace its dingy ‘60s predecessor, which was built, allowing for inflation, at great expense to local tax payers in its time. Despite the fact that Deb O’Rah and I had been up late helping to celebrate a friend’s 60^th birthday, we got up early to drive down from our lofty seat to the bourg below in order to avoid the worst of the bargain-hunting crowds.

Who'll give me half a euro for this then?

As usual, though, we found very few bargains to divert us, while bumping into more than enough friends, neighbours and acquaintances to detain us. ‘Well, must get on and see what there is to be seen,’ or words to that effect. The truth is that there’s very little to be seen except the same old over-priced junk: some of it plastic, some of it ugly and most of it completely useless. I even steered clear this year of a few stray boxes of vinyl records, because disappointment has taught me that they tend to be twice the price of what you’d find back in the U.K.

While we browsed and chatted, I found it interesting that not a single person mentioned the fact that Sunday 11^th September 2011 marked a rather more significant anniversary. It was ten years ago that I answered the phone in our old house to hear the voice of one of my wife’s old clients – a kindly soul who used to bring us produce from her garden and the kind of plastic gifts for our daughter that eventually find their way to brocante stalls. My French wasn’t as decent as it is now, so I didn’t understand everything that she was trying to tell me, but I certainly understood the urgent note of something akin to hysteria in her voice. She told me to turn the television on there and then, because something apocalyptic was happening that was going to change everyone’s lives. I felt the fear in the pit of my stomach and a loosening of my bowels: like the sensation that I used to get as a school kid when summoned to see the headmaster in his study.

In those days, we had a cheap indoor aerial from E. Leclerc that allowed hazy access to three uninteresting French channels. I put on France2, because the reception and quality of news was evidently better, even to an alien’s eyes. On the screen were those awful unbelievable images of the Twin Towers belching black smoke. When my wife had finished massaging her client, I muttered something in her ear so as not to alarm our impressionable young daughter, and together we watched the events unfolding – as our parents’ generation had huddled by the wireless in 1939 to listen to Chamberlain’s announcement – with mounting unease but without appreciating quite what we were in for.

The talk at the brocante was more of the ominous black clouds and the likelihood of rain. My neighbour, who’s a gardener and a Méteo fundamentalist, told me that it wouldn’t rain, so I could put away the foolish brolly that I’d brought with me. We joked about buying their table full of wares on the way back, so they could go back home early, knowing full well that it would all still be there virtually untouched.

And so it proved. By the return leg, we’d acquired four DVDs for a tenner from a very overweight English woman with a stall full of DVDs still wrapped in their cellophane, and a Moroccan tagine, if that’s how you spell those domed ceramic North African cooking dishes. We knew that, come six o’clock when it was time for all the stallholders to pack up and go back home, the majority of the stuff on display would find its way back into cardboard boxes to be stored once more in attics until the next opportunity came along to empty those attics and remove the same old overpriced junk from those cartons.

These brocantes are a constant source of disappointment to me. I remember all those jumble sales from my student days, open-air markets and car boot sales from the Brighton and Sheffield years and think of all the genuine bargains with which we kitted out our early married quarters. Over here, if the real bargains do exist, they’ve certainly managed to escape me thus far. I see the same old people with the same old stuff year after year. It reinforces my belief that the French people don’t really grasp the market economy. Rather than charge a sensible price and get rid of their wares, they prefer to stick stubbornly to an inflated price and go through the rigmarole of packing it all up again for the next time. See no competition, hear no competition, speak no competition.

More than that, though, it also reinforces my mantra that the only thing we learn from history is that mankind doesn’t learn from history. In the immortal words sung by Edwin Starr, ‘War! HUH! What is it good for? Ab-so-lutely nothing!’ War on terror, war on drugs – say it again, what is it good for? Man – and I use the term literally, because we’ve never given the female of the species a chance to run the show – seems incapable of learning from his many mistakes, recognising that something isn’t working and trying a new enlightened approach. So we’ll go on re-processing household junk and re-packaging wars until (Bunny Wailer’s) ‘Arma-gid-deon’.

Fin de Saison

2011-09-04T09:43:00.000-07:00

As August dissolves into September and holidays segue into la rentrée des classes, as the holiday-makers pack up and go back home, and as the temperature goes down and daylight diminishes, I always feel a profound sense of mixed blessings.

If anyone has ever tried to make a living or part-living from renting property to holiday-makers, you’ll probably know what I mean. Without that ingredient, there would be no blessing at all in the end of summer. I’m not one of these curious people who positively enjoy winter. It seems inconceivable, I know, but there really are people out there who relish the cold and the wet.

However, if the coming of September holds any compensation for someone who hated the idea of going back to school as a child, it’s the liberating thought that my life at least won’t be plagued by vacanciers for another eight months or so.

Holiday-makers threaten Martel market

On a general social level, it means that I can go shopping at Martel market on a Saturday morning without having to circle around in search of a parking space and without having to queue endlessly at my regular stalls. I can get twice as much done in half the time, while keeping an even temper. Of course, I remind myself that little rural communities such as ours could not exist without the tourists’ euros. It’s unreasonable of me to begrudge them the space and facilities we must share for just a few weeks every year. I should know better. For decades, I have harboured a distrust of Cornish people, because I once – as a student en vacance – felt their collective disdain for grockles or whatever it is they call summertime visitors. But hey, enough already. I don’t want to be branded as a grumpy old man while I can still dance to Martha Reeves & the Vandellas.

On a specific personal level, my discomfort with holiday-makers goes much deeper. When we lived in our old stone farmhouse – with more space than we needed for regular family life – we thought it would be a great idea to turn part of it into accommodation for PGs (as my grandmother used to refer – with a certain traumatic resonance born of hard times in the 1930s – to paying guests). Without a pool we concluded, sensibly, that we couldn’t compete at the top end of the market. So we pitched it lower down: at people with lesser and more reasonable expectations. Even so, we had our fair share of people who would have benefited from a quick plunge in our septic tank. One wet day when I was working in Jersey, a black BMW pulled up. My wife went out to greet the couple with umbrellas at the ready. The woman took one look at the apartment and said, ‘There’s a cooker! What am I supposed to do with a cooker?’ Being an astute reader of the human mind, my wife suggested that they were clearly not happy with their prospective accommodation and offered an immediate refund. After thrashing herself with a stray branch from our sheltering vine, my mortified wife then offered to phone up and book them in at the local hotel. ‘Huh!’ said the woman. ‘Why should I trust you to do that?’

Later, when money for a while was a little too tight to mention, I looked after a purpose-built holiday home for an English couple. I would shop for the guests, meet and greet them, sort out their problems and generally ooze unction and servility. It wasn’t long before I was spending my weekends dreading the buzz of my mobile phone. It meant (but only sometimes) a problem to resolve. And off I would go, with my toolbox in the boot and a well rehearsed line in abject apology.

Now I should say at this juncture that the majority of people I encountered were decent, charming examples of humanity at its best. Unfortunately, the experience was blighted by the few who found fault and felt that the fact of having paid good money for their gaff justified the kind of behaviour that should have ended with the British Raj. One party suffered an unfortunate invasion of flies and felt that I should organise someone to come that day and spray the back wall of the house (where they, the flies, had gathered) with insect repellent. I grovelled and humoured them and suppressed a great urge to point out that, if they had chosen to stay on Easter Island or wherever it is, they might have had an invasion of migrating crabs to contend with. In other words, it was a phenomenon of nature. Get over it and get a life.

Someone else took a photograph of a cobweb under the wood burner that the cleaner missed and sent it with a demand for a refund to the travel company. Another family of Herberts were collectively traumatised by a hair on a duvet. The old dear who nearly keeled over at the sight insisted that she couldn’t sleep under it because it felt unclean. I changed the duvet cover for them and popped the hair into an envelope so I could send it to the Forensic Department at Scotland Yard. Well, I changed the cover. And wringing my hands like Uriah Heep, I backed slowly out of the house with the unclean duvet cover, bowing and scraping and wishing that I were the God of hell fire who could bring them FIRE!! I tell you, had I come across that woman in the desert and she’d begged me for water, I’d have given her gasoline.

But they’re gone, gone, gone. They’ve all gone and I need no longer practise my ps and qs. September is here and life is returning to normality. We permanent residents have been abandoned once more to face our fate. Winter.

Sceptic Tanks

2011-08-28T09:09:00.000-07:00

Before moving to France, I was a lifelong citizen of the Big City. I knew nothing about sanitation. I knew that when you ran a tap or flushed the loo, the water ran away to some far-off sewage farm. I knew enough to know that one mustn’t pour paint or bleach or hydrochloric acid down the plughole because it would end up killing something aquatic somewhere.

Since moving to France and living in the country, I’ve had to put my faith in a septic tank. The trouble is, I’ve never been convinced that you can put your faith in a fosse septique. Having a tank teaches you sanitary responsibility, but short of putting all surplus paper in loo-side bins, avoiding any cleaning agent that will upset the delicate bacterial balance in the murky water beneath the big green plastic lid, and flushing down a sachet of food for the benevolent bacteria at the end of every week, there’s little really that you can do. I feel quite powerless.

I would describe myself as a septic-tank sceptic: I’m never convinced that they’re altogether doing their job – probably because I don’t quite understand what goes on under the green plastic lid. Probably because I’ve never seen a programme that illustrates the septic process with time-lapse photography.

Mind you, after 16 years or so of ‘overseeing’ a septic tank, I now understand a little more than I did when my wife and I first went hunting for a quaint stone-built house in the middle of Nulle-Part, rural France. To paraphrase Manuel, ‘I knew notheeng’. All I knew was this: we would need one. And so it became one of the principal criteria of our search. Whatever we bought, wherever we bought it, it had to have a fosse septique.

Hindsight, alas, has shown that we turned down many a shrewd investment simply because there was no septic tank. We ended up buying somewhere, which hindsight has shown that we shouldn’t really have bought. It had a septic tank – that much was certified – but it wasn’t until the thing started backing up in our bathroom and I had to scratch around the back garden to find it that I realised how inadequate it was. Sure, it was a modern plastic one rather than some deep dank leaky pit, but it failed to meet all modern standards. It was far too near the house, it was too small for our needs and there was no proper soak-away.

Subsequently, as part of the construction of the current Maison Sampson, I’ve watched our tank being lifted into a big hole in the ground and a filter bed being created with supposedly special-grade sand. And behold it seemed to be good. At least it helped to de-mystify the process. Some time afterwards, a nice man from the unfortunately named SPANC service inspected the works and pronounced them acceptable. He explained that I should unscrew the two plastic lids to inspect the overflow pipes on an annual basis. I nodded thoughtfully and very soon forgot what it was I should be looking for. He also told me that I might as well feed it with yoghurt for all the good that the special bacterial food does. But I still religiously flush down a sachet of placebo every weekend in the hope that it will keep things active down below.

Nice job!

For all my comparative enlightenment, I still have no faith. Maybe I’m not so much a septic-tank sceptic as an atheist. I wait for the day when the telltale stink in our bathroom will indicate that the tank has broken down once more. At least I know that when the day arises, I can pick up the telephone and ask for some sanitary enterprise to send a big lorry over to stick its big hose into the horrible water, pump the contents away, flush out the pipe-work and start the thing off again. Or better still, I can save a few hundred euros by asking the local farmer to come and suck the contents into some rusty mobile tank – to take away and spray all over one of his fields. So I suppose I’m sufficiently septic-tank savvy to realise that a sanitation breakdown doesn’t indicate the end of the world.

This very weekend, my lack of faith was tested by our kitchen sink. It hasn’t been draining away properly and there has been a nasty odour, which joss sticks have failed to eradicate. I have been trying to ignore it for at least a fortnight, because I was convinced that the problem emanated from our septic tank. Finally, it failed to drain away at all. Clutching at straws, I unscrewed the trap beneath the sink – but sure enough found nothing blocking the U-bend. Before I changed into my worst waterproofs and an old pair of Marigolds, I thought I might as well unscrew the plughole itself. Blistering barnacles, but holy, holy Mount Zion, I discovered a thick compacted bung of all things grey and malodorous. So that was the problem, not our septic tank after all. My relief was of Mafeking proportions.

Nevertheless, I say unto any readers of little faith, the day of judgement must surely come again. For all my due diligence, I know that I haven’t done enough to assuage the vengeful gods of the impenetrable murk. I am already thinking that – if funds should ever present themselves – our next eco toy will have to be one of these micro stations d’epuration (or whatever they call those, what are they… I guess a kind of mechanical reed-bed).

Ah! Now there’s an idea. A natural filter-bed that will provide clean water in times of scarcity to wild life around here. The trouble is, I know even less about reed-beds than I do about fosses septiques. Ideas please on a postcard…

Les Vacances de Monsieur Sampson

2011-08-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

When we moved to France many moons ago, we had this idea of using our new continental base as a launch pad for visits to the various neighbouring countries of Europe. No Channel to cross, easy-peasy.

In fact, we’ve visited Italy once and Spain twice in 16 years. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Nordic low lands and whatever Czechoslovakia is called these days have yet to be graced by our stately presence.

The last time we went to Spain, two years ago this April, we rented a cottage in the Alpujarras, an uncommonly verdant region way down south in Andalucia, not far from Granada. It was lovely, but the drive down the Mediterranean coast put me off for life. The Costa del Sol was like a vision of some dystopian hell, where nature has been stripped bare and replaced by a sea of plastic, glistening in the fierce glare of the sun and billowing in the hair-dryer wind, under which tasteless fruit and vegetables are force-grown with fertilisers and pesticides for the voracious European market. Never again, we decided.

And so it came to pass that we have spent virtually all our holidays in France. After all, isn’t it the most visited country in the world? When you live here and you can explore the place at a rather more leisurely pace than that of the annual frenetic fortnight’s break, you realise why. I often wonder what it was the French people did to deserve such a beautiful country. It’s like the old advert for Topics: a chocolate bar that has gone the way of Tiffin bars and Five Boys chocolate. ‘A hazelnut in every bite,’ proclaimed Toby the squirrel. Well, here in France, there’s a treasure at every turn of the road. Increasingly we ask ourselves the question: ‘Why bother going anywhere else?’

I remember the excitement of seeing the Pyrenees for the first time. My spirit soared into the stratosphere. I came to the conclusion that the Béarne – with its green, green valleys under a dramatic backdrop of jagged mountain peaks – couldn’t possibly be beaten. (Now there’s a good slogan! How much could I charge the local tourist officials for that one? ‘The Béarne – it can’t be beaten…’)

Well, the thing is, it can. We’ve just got back from a few days away in Savoie, a truly stunning area that belonged to Italy until 1860. I’m not sure how it came to be French: a straight territorial swap perhaps, or the result of some financial chicanery along the lines of the Louisiana Purchase. Anyway, it’s French and I’m as delighted as Queen Victoria reputedly was when she travelled to Aix les Bains under a pseudonym to avoid the paparazzi of the time. (‘Who’s that dumpy little character?’ ‘Oh, Countess Balmoral or some such minor dignitary.’ ‘Not worth the film then?’ ‘Na.’)

Looking down on Lac de Bourget

If there’s one sight that thrills Monsieur Sampson, the holidaymaker, every bit as much as the sight of the sea, it’s that of a fresh water lake set among the mountains. Aix les Bains is at the southern end of the Lac de Bourget, apparently the biggest natural lake in France. It extends 20km or so north to the point where the mighty Rhone heads off across country towards Lyon and all points south on its epic journey down from Lake Geneva. The lake is limpid and inconceivably blue and surrounded by precipitous slabs of Alpine mountains. It’s a setting to induce a Victorian monarch to throw off her corset, unroll her stockings, hitch up her skirts and wade in the water with a song in her heart.

We were staying, the Missus, the Hound and I, up river from the lake in an old wine-grower’s cottage on the steep eastern slope above the canal that links a diversion of the Rhone for the purpose of hydro-electricity. The cottage used to belong to my friend Claude’s grandmother. She spent the entire war there, hiding away in one room with a metal sink and a small wood-burning stove. She gave it to Claude and his conversion of her cellier into a modest but comfortable cottage for four would, I am sure, have garnered the old woman’s compliments.

Inside were all kinds of artefacts and curios of a bygone age, including two pristine rolls of the most destructive-looking toilet paper ever conceived by a sadistic manufacturer of bathroom accessories. My God, they made ‘em tough in those days – the people and the toilet rolls.

The great thing about Savoie is its timeless beauty. Things have changed, of course, since Claude’s grandmother’s frugal days, but not irredeemably so. People still work the land and even in mid August the area is not overrun with cars and tourists. You can look out over all that mountain greenery and imagine that all is still well with the world.

Monsieur Sampson, his wife and dog – even his daughter, should she ever wish to holiday with her parents again – will be returning to this little piece of potted Shangri La again on future occasions. Meanwhile, he shall continue to explore this beautiful land, which has not yet been overrun by human beings nor denuded of all its natural resources.

Aren’t we lucky to live in such a country? I do hope the natives truly appreciate that which some mysterious deity has bestowed upon them. Here’s another slogan for you. It should earn me at least a million euros. ‘France – why holiday elsewhere?’

Captain Haddock and The Plague

2011-08-14T06:22:00.000-07:00

Last week, an old school friend of mine reminded me of French A-level classes with Chesty McKeenan. I couldn’t stand the man. He once gave me a dressing down outside the men’s staff room on account of the length of my hair, the bum-fluff on my upper lip and the fact that, by wearing my dad’s short-sleeve sweater, I was sporting the wrong school-colours. He put the fear of God in me, so I passed up the opportunity of studying Albert Camus and his kidney at A-level.

Years later, when preparing to move to France, I regretted the decision somewhat. An A-level would have been more valuable than an O-level, I reasoned. So I got hold of an old copy of La Peste and laboriously ploughed through it in an effort to build my French vocabulary. Weeks became months, as I religiously noted down all the words I didn’t understand, to look up later in a dictionary. Then my wife and I would test each other on an ever-lengthening list of vocabulary during the long drives south from the Channel ports to our house in the Corrèze.

The novel dragged into a second and then a third year. When I reached about page 150, I finally saw the light. Sod this for a game of soldiers, I thought, life’s too short to read Camus in French. So I took up my Penguin copy in the English translation and read it from cover to cover, as if a veil had been lifted off my eyes. And I gave up trying to learn lists of the kinds of words that you probably only find anyway in great literary works.

Besides, I discovered fairly early on that the French taught at school, whether at A- or O-level, was of little use once someone started talking to me in a broad Correzian dialect. The adventures of the Bertillon family – Monsieur (a customs officer at Orly airport), Madame, Philippe (the older boy), Marie-Claude and Alain (the youngest), plus of course Miquet the cat and Miki the dog (they adopted as a stray) – might have helped when asking the way to the nearest boulangerie, but it wasn’t much use when it came to more pertinent enquiries – such as, ‘Do the contents of your septic tank flow into the pond in our garden?’

After the momentous decision to give up La Peste, I figured that if I were going to read French to boost my vocabulary and general comprehension of this difficult language, then I might as well read something fairly easy and enjoyable. As a kid, I had been a great reader of comics (The Topper and The Victor were my first rags of choice). No doubt they played a useful role in assimilating my mother tongue. Since it appeared that the French were mad keen on BDs – or bandes dessinées – then why not revert to my childhood pastime in order to learn this demanding new tongue?

Whereupon, I ploughed through just about the complete Hergé’s Ad-ventures of Tintin (as the excitable voice would announce before the animated versions they used to show on British television). I graduated to Asterix the Gaul without ever quite coming to terms with all the puns and plays-on words. I even negotiated an adult BD lent to me by a kindly neighbour: the story of some Franco-Spanish freedom fighters during the Spanish Civil War, which ended up with a shoot-out on the Plateau de Millevaches. It was pretty good, though it didn’t convert me into a full-time reader of adult comic books. That was something for the locals.

Word must have got out that I was devouring BDs, because French friends would turn up at birthdays with things like the Bidochons (a family of slobs, genetically modified versions of The Simpsons, Rab C. Nesbitt and Andy Capp) and the adventures of a group of bikers called the Joe Bar Team, whose humour escaped me as surely as did Coluche’s. I don’t entirely blame the French national sense of humour for that. I admit that my own total lack of comprehension was partly to blame.

What was that, Captain?

The big difference was that I didn’t make lists of new vocabulary to learn. I looked up each new word on its appearance in the hope that it would sink in after two or three repeats. And, I’m happy to say, it worked. The only trouble being that Captain Haddock’s colourful nautical slang, say, has only a limited application to everyday life. I’ve never to this day ventured a ‘Sacré bleu!’ or a ‘Tonnère du Brest!’ in response, for example, to a price quoted in Point P or Monsieur Bricolage for a few measly building materials.

Nevertheless, Tintin and his cronies served me well for a time and I must have absorbed at least a hundred new words from Hergé’s wonderful books. More to the point, I enjoyed reading them. Now, however, I’ve come to terms with my natural level of (in)competence. I can just about hold my own in a simple conversation that doesn’t turn too philosophical. The fact that my French doesn’t appear to be getting any better no longer gives me stress. As they might say here, I’m reasonably comfortable in my skin these days.

At long last, I’ve discovered that the best way to learn the language is to accept the fact that I’ll make some mistakes – and have a go anyway. If someone corrects me, I don’t take it as a sleight to my manhood, but I smile graciously and learn from the error of my linguistic ways.

And then, following the example of le capitaine ‘Addock, I might walk away, muttering something under my breath. ‘Mille millions de mille sabords…’

Fair Weather Friends

2011-08-07T03:16:00.000-07:00

I once read an article in one of the Sunday papers about the house-in-France that all went badly wrong. It was written (I think) by a daughter of some famous British family: a descendant of Evelyn Waugh, methinks. But don’t quote me.

The reason I mention it is that the whole dream, the whole escapade went pear-shaped largely because of friends. The family found that they were paying for a succession of friends to have a free holiday in France. Said so-called friends contributed very little and only helped to trash the place.

It came to mind because we waved farewell this weekend to old friends from Sheffield who came and stayed for three very pleasant, invigorating days that reminded us all of what good friends we were and are. They respected our space, helped with all the day-to-day tasks and even revitalised our kitchen garden for us.

Now whose turn was it to go shopping?

And the experience makes me think: on one hand, what kind of friends did that couple have and, on the other, why in God’s name did they tolerate such abuse of their hospitality? The answer leads me to conclude that perhaps they deserved what they got, which might explain why I read the article without feeling a shred of sympathy.

At the end of September we celebrate our 16^th anniversary of life in France. After the first two or three years when we were fairly well inundated with visiting family and friends, the novelty wore off and visitors came and went in a more orderly and manageable fashion. This year has proved an exception, with a bewildering succession of short, sharp visits that have left us panting a little and looking forward to a respite.

In all that time, though, we’ve only ever had one visit from friends that we wouldn’t wish to repeat. Fortunately, it happened quite early on and, with hindsight, probably did us a service as it underlined the importance of ground rules. We didn’t know them that well and initially they wanted to stay for a fortnight. We managed to trim that down to a week – and even that soon became quite long enough. ‘She’ didn’t help at all and was quite happy to watch us wait on them hand and foot, while ‘he’ – the clumsy git – managed to break something every time he did help. They contributed very little in terms of shopping and, to put the old tin lid on it, their visit coincided with a spell of awful weather, which meant that they were indoors and on top of us for seven long days. No names, no pack drill; suffice to say that we successfully parried all future suggestions of a return visit.

The family I read about didn’t manage to get over the honeymoon period. The other day I was talking to some nearby friends, who have just negotiated theirs. She told me that during their first or second season they undertook something like 40 return trips to Limoges airport to pick up visitors. That’s at least 80 hours of road travel. I only hope that their visitors were prepared to contribute to the cost of all that diesel. Anyway, things are considerably easier now. They’ve found that they can get on with the business of living a reasonably normal life during the summer months.

Maybe we’ve been lucky or maybe we’ve made our own luck – by being a little firm and assertive when necessary – but in almost every case visitors have been respectful and generous. Most recognise that it’s a time-consuming and expensive business, having people to stay, and most act accordingly: doing unto others as they would have done unto themselves. Most recognise the element of truth in the adage that friends are like fish: after three days they start to smell a bit. You could add perhaps that the best are like frozen fish: they don’t start to smell for a week or so – when the fish has been taken out of the freezer and allowed to defrost in a cool place.

Inevitably, though, no matter how much you like someone and no matter how considerate they have been, there’s always the double-edged emotion when they take their leave. I think back to my grandparents, who used to have my parents, my three siblings and me to stay with them in Bath for a month every summer. I would look back from the car to see them both waving until the car disappeared around the corner, my grandmother dabbing away the tears with the handkerchief she kept up her sleeve. But I never saw them step back inside their house, close the front door and say, no doubt, ‘Well, thank God for that. We can get our lives back again’.

I’d be interested to read about the fall-out from the newspaper couple’s house-in-France misadventure. I imagine they must have sold the house eventually. But did the experience cause them to sit down and evaluate their friendships? Or did they just carry on gaily as before? I don’t know. I only hope that if they sold their house to Brits, the newcomers had a rather more sensible attitude to the conundrum of visitors.

A Head for Festivals

2011-07-30T05:20:00.000-07:00

My wife went into Cultura, the big multi-media emporium on the western reaches of Brive, to buy a ticket for Saturday night at the Africajarc festival in normally sleepy Cajarc. She spelled it out for the benefit of the young woman at the desk, who smiled sweetly and didn’t listen to her. Oblivious, she tried a variety of combinations on the computer: Afrique-Cajarc, Afrikajarque and so on… until eventually she typed in Africajarc.

‘Et voilà! Africajarc.’

‘But that’s what I was trying to tell you…’

‘Yes, but white woman speak with forked tongue. She foreigner. We no trust foreigners. They no know their onions.’

Never mind, she got her ticket. And promptly regretted it, because I reminded her that the festivities go on till around three in the morning and she’s got a very full week next week. So I’m going with my friend Dan, a graphic designer, who re-designed my wife’s business cards. It’s a beautiful drive across the limestone causse, which terminates in a spectacular descent to the Lot valley via a series of hair-raising hairpin bends.

Waiting interminably for the band...

I go every year as a representative of Songlines magazine, which means that I get in with a press pass and – more to the point – I get to wear the pass around my neck. I am thus able to kid myself that I’m someone half-important who has succeeded in his chosen profession. The illusion doesn’t seem to fool anyone else and I have yet to be collared by some enthusiastic youth who says, ‘I say, you’re a journalist! What an exciting life you must lead. Do tell me about it.’

During recent years of self-deception, I’ve seen some iconic (the word of the decade, it would seem – right up there with ‘awesome’ and ‘massive’) figures of Franco-African music at the Africajarc festival: from Manu Dibango, the bald-headed alto-saxophonist from Cameroon, whose ‘Soul Makossa’ was once a massive (there we go again) worldwide dance-floor hit, to Alpha Blondy, the Afro-reggae star from Guinea.

In fact, it was while waiting – still standing after midnight – among the closely packed hordes for Mr. Blondy to saunter onto stage that I came to the worrying conclusion that I was getting too old for festivals. Still in my early teens when Woodstock happened, I was only dimly aware of its impact. I had to wait until I was a student before attending my first festival – at Reading – because my mother wouldn’t allow me to go and see Pink Floyd performing ‘Atom Heart Mother’ in Hyde Park one summer when the family was staying with friends in London. With hindsight, she was probably doing me a favour.

When you factor in the journey time there and back, the hanging around, the latent claustrophobia that comes from being part of a milling crowd, the sheer weariness of staying on your feet till the wee small hours, the idea of a festival is often more compelling than the reality. And, of course, you’re fit for nothing the next day. So I’d told myself that I was ready to hang up my festival passes. But then… the prospect of seeing Staff Benda Bilili and Femi Kuti on the same bill got me all fidgety again.

The extraordinary story of the Congolese group Staff Benda Bilili was told on a recent documentary that did the rounds in France. They hail from the streets of Kinshasa: a group of older men crippled by polio, who whiz around in customised tricycles, backed by younger musicians made up mainly of street kids like Roger Landu, whose invented instrument (made from an old fish tin, a piece of wood and a guitar string) gives the band its distinctive infectious sound.

Femi Kuti is one of two performing sons of a legendary (and surely iconic) father. Despite his dodgy dealings with women (he married his entire phalanx of backing vocalists at a stoke), Fela Kuti has long been a musical hero. For many years, and despite countless beatings and general harassment, he stood up to the brutal regime that was current in Nigeria, taunting the government with the lyrics of songs that meandered on for 20 and even 30 minutes at a stretch. His backing band generated enough power to turn unwary listeners into jelly. There’s a moment every time in ‘Water No Get Enemy’ when work stops, my life freezes and time stands still: the moment when the whole horn section bursts through the low-key hypnotic intro with the combined fury of a squadron of B52s releasing their bombs en masse.

Over a million people lined the road out of Lagos for Fela’s funeral. It was comparable to the turnouts for Winston Churchill, J.F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and Princess Di. Only Fela’s life, however, has been turned into a musical. Mind you, We Shall Fight Them or Winston’s War must surely be on the cards. I can just see the banner now: ‘Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Elvis Costello’. Maybe not.

Fela’s son Femi is not yet the subject of a West End show, but his smaller band still manages to create a ‘Positive Force’ (as he dubs it). He’s a crinkle-cut chip off the paternal block and I’m hoping for inspired things. But I’ll see how I feel at 3 a.m. when the clammy nocturnal river mist shivers my weary timbers. See whether I’ve still got a head for festivals.

Guilty as charged

2011-07-23T09:41:00.000-07:00

This July weather has been testing my culpability. I don’t know what’s going on in other necks of the wood, as I don’t watch the weather forecast on telly and have little faith in the internet’s chaine méteo, which seems to change its mind from one day to the next, but here we’ve had leaden skies, persistent showers and unseasonable chill in the Lot for a couple of weeks.

The great French summer

It doesn’t worry me too much: in fact, it’s a salutary reminder of what we’re missing back home. But when I meet and greet holidaymakers – who have generally paid a small fortune to get and then stay here – my middle-class English upbringing rears its apologetic head once more. I feel personally responsible for the bad weather and generally as guilty as O.J. Si… (no, don’t say it; don’t court controversy).

My Canadian friend Bret always chides me, ‘What is it about you English? Jeez, you’re so polite; you’re always apologising.’ Coming from the New World, he doesn’t understand the burden of the Old World that has kept my shoulders round all these years. It’s true, though. Sometimes I feel like I have to apologise for my very existence.

This very morning I went up to one of the two holiday homes that blip away on the periphery of my personal radar screen. ‘I’m so sorry about this weather,’ I started off. ‘I’ve never known a July like it. June can be a bit dodgy, but usually you’re guaranteed good weather in July and August’.

My luck was in. The holidaymakers in question – a charming family from Newcastle (Tyne & Wear, as opposed to County Down) – were very philosophical about it. I guess you would be if you choose to live in Newcastle (they met at university and decided to stay), where the weather is exactly like this for most of the British Summer, those five giddy weeks that span the tail-end of July and the August Bank Holiday, whereupon winter sets in again.

They explained that the upside of a fortnight’s lousy weather is that you don’t spend each day lounging with a good book by the side of the pool, but you get out and explore the area. And we chatted about places of interest that they had visited, like the Gouffre de Padirac: a great big hole in the ground where you can climb down an iron staircase into the centre of the earth and take a boat trip to explore the caverns and marvel at the stalactites and stalagmites at the earth’s core.

So I was lucky. I came away from our farewell meeting feeling reasonably good about myself and sufficiently reassured to think that they might have had a fairly good holiday after all. It doesn’t always go so well. Sometimes holidaymakers who feel they have been short-changed by the weather can act like sharks that scent blood. They’ll drop the kind of little barbed asides into the conversation that make you squirm with the conviction that you are personally responsible for their ill fortune.

Of course, it’s totally illogical. Of course you’re not to blame. Yet you go away feeling the weight of all those pounds sterling they have spent on having a lousy time. They’ve worked hard and saved for 50 weeks or so in the year in order to spend a fortnight in France experiencing the kind of weather they’d have had if they’d stayed put. ‘Next time, pal, I’m off to the Costa del Sol, where the plastic billows in the wind and the scorching sun sears your unaccustomed skin and where you can’t stop me having a good time.’

The trouble is – and I’ve said it before at the Brighton Conference – people just get the wrong end of the stick about France. We do get more sun and generally better weather than they do on the other side of the English Channel, but essentially it tends to mirror roughly what’s happening in the UK. If there’s a depression sweeping in off the Atlantic, then it’s going to depress us too, and if there’s a trough of high pressure settling in over the Low Countries, then we’ll be in for some settled weather, too – only it’ll be hotter in summer and colder in winter than it is in, say, Harwich. The only virtual guarantee of good weather comes on the Mediterranean coast ('warm wet winters with westerly winds and hot dry summers,' as we were taught).

A spell of unseasonable weather doesn’t worry me at all. We need the rain and it’ll help the flora and fauna. Besides, as a full-time resident, I know that we’ll run into some pretty good weather again soon enough. That shows how much I’ve changed after 16 years of living in France. Weather-wise, as Jack Lemmon might have said in The Apartment, I am now quietly confident. We moved here from Sheffield, where there were times when you wondered whether you would ever see the sun again.

So maybe the guilt derives from residual empathy. Since I still remember how grim the weather can be in certain parts of the Old Country, I still remember how much hope one invests in a summer holiday. So I know all about that feeling of being cheated by the elements. And I suppose that if there’s someone daft enough to assume a degree of responsibility, well why not offload some frustration on said eejit?

Comprehension Test

2011-07-16T07:49:00.000-07:00

Only the other day, I was… No, I’ll start again lest I lapse into a Vivian Stanshall pastiche. (Are there any other British expats in France who remember the Bonzo Dog Dooda Band on the kids’ TV programme, Do Not Adjust Your Set, which spawned Monty Python?)

But I digress. As I was saying, I finished my work earlier this week and treated myself to a rejuvenating haircut at the Bio Coiffeur of Brive. Happy with the cut, I then treated myself to a d”égustation spéciale at the Café Bogota, my coffee shop of choice. You can relax in the neo-Art Deco surroundings, enjoy the smell of roasting coffee and watch the comings and goings at the counter.

I eavesdropped on a blind woman in denims and Roy Orbison-ic shades, chatting to some cronies of hers, who were fussing over her guide-dog. They were talking about the apocalyptic storm of the night before, when the rain (finally) fell in torrents. I gleaned that there had been a mini tornado in Tulle, the departmental capital.

Since the rain was still coming down in sheets and since, inexplicably, I’d neglected to bring an umbrella with me, I took refuge in a local media store (a thing which, of course, I don’t often do – unless it’s sale time). Just one look, just in case they’d added anything to the bargain box since my first visit of the sale season. They had.

So I took my booty to the cash desk, where a youngish woman was muttering to herself about something. ‘What was that?’ I asked.

She looked up at me and I registered her expression’s instantaneous change. ‘Oh sorry,’ she said. ‘You’re a foreigner.’

Nothing wounds my expatriate pride like the implication that I won’t be able to understand the lingo. I haven’t lived 16 years in this country to ignore an insinuation that I can’t hold my end of a conversation. So I told her that it was all right, I understood, and we duly started chatting.

She explained that they got a lot of foreigners at this time of year and that her English wasn’t as good as my French. Which is my cue casually to chuck in my longevity card – as in, ‘Well it should be reasonably good after 16 years’, just to imply, I suppose, that I’m not some fly-by-night who comes here to buy a crate of wine, lounge by a pool, sell for a profit and move on. I added that The Daughter went to the school just around the corner (read: fine upstanding member of the community, who pays his local taxes and helps to support the ailing economy). Whereupon – and I just couldn’t help myself, brimming over as I have been recently with parental pride – I let slip that she had scored 20 out of 20 in her BAC French Oral (read: definitely the sort of foreigner to grace rather than clutter the country, so not to be ejected by the secret police).

It was a pleasant conversation: the kind of conversation I would never, ever have imagined possible when I was mimicking the American French accents of the ‘O’-level language tapes we used at our school. (‘Where is the baker situated please? I would like to buy a baguette for my breakfast. Perhaps I shall buy a croissant, too.’) And the kind of conversation that reminds you that it’s a fair achievement to be able to communicate on any kind of credible level in a language that’s not your own.

It was nothing deep or significant, of course, but it certainly beat those awkward exchanges where someone spots your accent and jumps in with their broken English and then you are both not sure where to go next. In such situations, I generally take the line that the onus is on me as a foreigner to speak in the other person’s tongue, but this can then trigger a farcical kind of duel – the winner being he or she who sticks to their foreign language the longer.

Just to put the old tin lid on an agreeable interaction, she even commented on one of the CDs I’d picked out of the bargain box. It was the first time in all my years here of grabbing bargains at sales that anyone has ever ventured an opinion on one of my purchases. Rosalia de Souza’s D’Improvviso. She’d heard a track on the radio and pronounced it good. I said you couldn’t go far wrong with Brazilian music. It’s a disc made by a Brazilian singer with an Italian band and it’s some of the best Italo-Brazilian jazz I’ve ever heard. Or Brazilo-Italian jazz for that matter.

Whichever way you look at it, though, as a foreigner I don’t understand a single word she’s singing.

Stop the Week 32

2011-07-10T10:13:00.000-07:00

What is it they say? ‘When the girls are away, the boy will play…’ Something like that.

Actually, I’ve been far too busy with my latest ‘project’ (the details of which I dare not disclose in case someone has sent a Trojan horse via Gobble or Yazoo into my motherboard to gag on my gigabytes and compromise my data), so the absence of the ‘girls’ has, in franglais, ‘arranged me well’.

Despite spending far too long staring at a screen, I’ve managed to drip-feed some culture into my blood during the week gone by. For one thing, their absence means that I can dig out some of the more difficult jazz that I dare not spin in polite company. I’ve even found myself pumping out a bit of Soil & Pimp Session’s Japanese death-jazz when I’ve needed an invigorating blast of noise.

I’ve been re-reading Saul Bellow’s dazzling Humboldt’s Gift in nibble-sized chunks during the five-minute windows of opportunity each night between my head hitting the pillow and the book hitting the floor.

And I’ve taken the odd meal in front of the telly so I can follow the protracted Death of Mr. Lazarescu, a so-called comedy from Rumania that has been lurking on the hard drive for almost a year, because I’ve failed to engender any family enthusiasm for it. Poor Mr. Lazarescu, who has so far passed through the hands of countless callous, patronising and/or disinterested hospital doctors… I’ve deduced from the title that he’s not going to make it and I’m very worried about his three beloved cats incarcerated in his dowdy apartment. If I manage to get through it unscathed, I might just try next the Bergman trilogy I recorded the other night. Mmm – lashings of Nordic solemnity and misery.

Probably because I’ve spent such an inordinate amount of time at the computer, I settled down on Saturday night to watch an excellent drama-documentary about the life of Vincent Van Gogh (using the correspondence between Vince and his brother Théo) only to fall asleep even before we got to The Potato Eaters.

Friday night is music night on BBC 4 and fortunately I managed to stay awake for a new documentary on the history of LA’s Troubadour club. Did anyone see it? I thought it turned into a bit of a James Taylor/Carole King love-fest. There are worst metamorphoses to be had (you could, for example, turn into a beetle), as both James and Carole are terribly nice people, but I could have done with more of the peripheral characters – like the ever-incisive David Crosby, like Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raitt, and (I should be so lucky) like Laura Nyro.

I’m always fascinated to see how well or badly stars from my youth have worn. Jackson Browne doesn’t seem to have changed a jot, but he was younger than the others. David Crosby is a wreck. Roger McGuinn is still recognisable. Carole King is in her late 60s now and still looks remarkably cuddlesome. James Taylor is obviously no longer ‘sweet baby James’, but he wears a hat well, which certainly endears the man to me.

In fact, I never used to listen to either Carole or James when I was earnestly imbibing lyrics as an over-sensitive teenager. Pete Hammill’s dark, doom-laden lyrics for Van der Graaf Generator appealed more to my brooding teenage sensibility. I tended to lump James Taylor with Cat Stevens as fodder for girls and I couldn’t tolerate the fact that Carole King’s marvellous Tapestry (I see it now of course) sold in its millions.

These days, apart from notable exceptions such as Joni Mitchell, I tend not to bother too much with lyrics. Half the music I listen to is African, Cuban or Brazilian anyway – so who knows what they’re on about? Which reminds me… The UK’s very own Far Out label publishes some of the best Brazilian music on the planet. They were kind enough to send me a promo of the re-formed and legendary Banda Black Rio’s Super Nova Samba Funk. If you like your Brazilian music smooth, melodic and funky, you could do a lot worse than this toothsome morsel.

On that cheery note, I must away and prepare my supper. I need to find out what happens to Mr. Lazarescu. More to the point, I need to find out whether anyone will bother about his poor cats. Ha, will they heck-as-like.

Further Dental Practice

2011-07-06T23:35:00.000-07:00

I’ve written about French dentistry before. Still, a visit to the local surgery this week for part 2 of some pre-crown root-canal work prompts me to add some further observations on this delicate subject.

Having recently completed my field study on tartar build-up on native teeth, I’m led to conclude that the state of the national dental health leaves a lot to be desired. This is surprising given that – in my opinion, anyway – dentists here are generally more professional and less expensive than their British counterparts.

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule. The Butcher of Brive, for example, who performed root-canal work on my poor wife without the aid of anaesthetic. Cursed as I am with a vivid imagination and having seen Marathon Man twice, it pains me to think of the agony she must have suffered at this sadist’s hands. She dare not tell me his name – she knows I’d take my Lidl pliers from my Lidl toolbox and I’d go find that goddamn tooth-butcher and extract every goddamn tooth in his head.

Not my dentist

Anyway, soft words butter no parsnips and I come not to bury Caesar but to praise him. My fine local dentist, that is. Painless though it was, the visit on Tuesday morning was not without its ‘issues’.

There is the continuing saga of how to address my dentist. Since I have met Docteur Garcia at a couple of social events, I was torn between ‘Docteur’, ‘Docteur Garcia’, ‘Philippe’ or an indistinct mumble. Well, last week – for part 1 of the root-canal work – I took a deep breath and blurted out ‘Philippe’. It didn’t seem to faze him, so I concluded that it wasn’t such a capital breech of social etiquette as my brother once committed (as a tip-happy waiter, who stored his spare coins in a pair of stack-heeled shoes) by tipping his dentist.

This week, though, I worried about whether I should use the second person singular or polite plural. After all, if I was bold enough to address him by his first name, it kind of implied that I should tutoye him. To tutoye or not to tutoye, that is always the bloody question in France. Fortunately, I was sufficiently awake at 8.15 in the morning to catch a second person singular tripping casually off his tongue. Which makes it much easier. If he can tutoye me, the cheeky monkey, I can damn well tutoye him.

So good is mon cher Philippe that I didn’t even feel the needle push up into my gum. I lay there in the chair tapping away at the acupuncture points on my fingertips, as my good wife has shown me, trying to deflect my thoughts from terrible images of dentistry throughout the ages and experimentation on terrified animals, and there was really no need for such anguish, because the man was gentleness and consideration itself.

Nevertheless, the business of trying to decipher his constant masked and mumbled commentary kept me on my toes. I managed to catch enough single words to work out that the reason why the preliminaries were taking so long was the dogleg that one of my three root canals took, making it very difficult for him to insert the Lilliputian metal file to prepare the passage for the paste that would block it up, hopefully, for good.

These difficulties generated a new source of anxiety: namely the number of ‘radios’ he had to take. Over the two weeks I have counted something like six X-rays. I know all about the tragic fate that befell Marie Curie. I’m hoping that six tiny doses of radiation do not equal a Chernobyl proportion. One shouldn’t be flippant about such matters, but I’m trying to shunt it to the back of my mind. I try to live my life by my wife’s credo – that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Anyway, I made it out of Philippe’s surgery and I’m still here to tell the tale. There was, however, one further unwelcome issue to address. On proudly handing the secretary my new Carte Vitale, I discovered that the estimate I’d received for the crown – the one I’d thought to be so reasonable – was not the end of the story. Oh no. It didn’t include the actual treatments. That is, four sessions at however much they are a pop. I couldn’t pay, didn’t pay, because I hadn’t brought my chequebook with me, expecting to settle up at the end of the course. And yes, it’s all very well that your Mutuelle pays the difference, but I have no Mutuelle. So that goddamn dogleg in my root canal is going to cost me.

Voilà! You have been warned, gentle readers. Dentists may generally be the business here in France, but you can never be too careful. May your root canals be less complex than mine.

Stop the Week 31

2011-07-03T10:06:00.000-07:00

I’m sure that there are friends of ours – Londoners in particular – who think that we must live in a cultural desert. There have been times, I admit, when I’ve thought something similar. There were long winters, for example, during our sojourn among the hill people of the Corrèze, when the only posters in evidence seemed to be for concours de belotte – a popular card game, which never intrigued us quite enough to investigate.

So it’s nice when you can cock a snook at the culture-vultures back home. Only last week I sent an e-mail to a friend and fellow film-buff living in The Metropolis to ask him what he thought about Terrence Malick’s wonderful new film, The Tree of Life. Debs and I had callously left The Daughter to her final revision before her last exam of the year and drove the 20 or so kilometres to Souillac’s Le Paris cinema to see this year’s Palm d’Or winner at Cannes.

It’s an art et essai cinema, which means that it also shows the less commercial current offerings, often in version originale – with subtitles rather than the dreaded incongruous dubbed voices – usually to audiences so small that the cinema’s very existence depends on heavy subsidies from some regional or central government fund. There were maybe eight of us in an auditorium big enough to house a couple of hundred. You could have heard a pin drop throughout. Everyone sat spellbound in respectful, reverential silence until the last of the credits had been swallowed by the top edge of the screen.

Burt with Debora and dodgy bathers

No, came the reply. He hadn’t yet seen the film, because we were way ahead of them in England, where it hasn’t yet been released. Which made me feel a little smug. This Sunday, the three of us are going back to Souillac to see the restored version of Visconti’s The Leopard, a three-and-a-half hour costume epic starring Claudia Cardinale, when she was quite as beautiful as Sophia Loren and Monica Vitti, and the great Burt Lancaster, when he was wearing 19^th century Sicilian garb rather than those dodgy swimming trunks he wore in From Here to Eternity and again in The Swimmer.

Back in London, you’d probably have to go to the National Film Institute to see it. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it would likely involve an hour’s trip. It will take us about 20 minutes. And if it came to the Uxello in Vayrac, it would take us 10 minutes. The Rex in Brive shows nothing but V.O. films and it’s only 35 minutes from here. So we do pretty damn well really and friends from the mother country should understand that.

What’s more, we’ve entered July now. Anyone who’s been here for more than a season will know that during July and August there are more cultural events than you can shake a sizeable stick at. So many, of course, that things often clash and, by the time you reach the end of the summer, you’re probably bent double with cultural indigestion. (‘Take winters for express relief…’)

Being ahead of the folks back home by one hour and the occasional film sometimes works both ways. My wife and daughter are travelling back to Cumbria this month to see how my mother-in-law’s doing. Tilley was hoping to see the new and last Harry Potter film. It’s out already in France, I believe, but she has resolutely refused to see any of its predecessors dubbed into French and she’s not relenting now. Alas, it doesn’t come out in the UK until the very day they travel back home. There’s rough, as they say somewhere. Wales?

She can’t complain, though. It was mainly due to her subtle and not-so-subtle lobbying that we relented and installed a satellite TV system not long after moving away from dem dar Correzian hills. So now she can watch all those great cultural offerings on BBC Four. Or, more to the point, catch up with Coronation Street on ITV, or Radio 1 on her hand-me-down laptop.

No, we don’t live in a cultural desert here in rural France. Though sometimes, it’s true, we could do with just a little more rain in the barren seasons.’

Caniculaire, canicular…

2011-06-30T02:10:00.000-07:00

Whenever I hear that word ‘caniculaire’ – I suppose the English equivalent would be ‘heatwave-ish’ – it fills me with fear and loathing.

I met a man last weekend, a big strapping jovial man from Norn Iron who now lives in the Creuse (or, as Raymond pronounced it, the Cruise) and he told me that he loved the hot weather: ‘the hotter, the better’. In Turkey, the previous summer, apparently it had been up over 40 degrees most days. I looked upon his hairless red pate and shuddered.

Had I been able to get a word in edgeways – because Raymond was a real ‘boyo’ and I was happy to let him ramble on, as his broad Norn Irish brogue made me all nostalgic for the old country – I would have told him that once I felt like he did. I suppose anyone coming from the temperate British Isles, starved as we usually are of anything resembling a summer, would relish the prospect of hot weather.

I know that when we arrived in France back in 1995, I was gung-ho for the heat. ‘Le plus chaud, le mieux,’ I would tell the natives (in what I hoped was correct French). Well, all that was before the summer of 2003.

The dread ‘Canicule’ of 2003 happened to coincide with our move from the Corrèze to the Lot. We swapped the nice thick cool stone walls of our old 17^th century farmhouse for the thin plastic prefabricated walls of a caravan. It was like living in a sauna. From the plastic windows, all we could do was to look out on our scorched land and dream of the house we couldn’t build too soon.

Warning: Severe heat can seriously discomfit

Those of you who were here during the Canicule will remember what it was like. Those of you who weren’t will probably remember the news broadcasts, about hundreds of thousands of old people dying in the nation’s capital, abandoned by their thoughtless families, off soaking up the sun on the coast. And oh yes, in true French fashion, didn’t the government levy some new tax designed to insure against such occurrences in the future? Maybe the money was used to train a phalanx of vélo-vendeurs, who would pedal from apartment to apartment, delivering refreshing ice cream cones to the elderly. More likely, I think, it soon found its way into the Treasury’s gaping coffers.

All through July and August, we suffered in our sauna. We suffered like the wildlife, sheltering in the woods, and suffered like the vegetation itself, gasping for water as its foliage turned yellow and then brown. There was no shelter anywhere from the relentless sun. The best you could do was to go into the woods and try to find a patch of mossy undergrowth where you could hide for half an hour or so. We tried sleeping in tents, but because of the steep pitch of the land, I for one found the business of waking every half hour or so to haul myself up into something resembling a horizontal position even more draining than sleeping in a sweat-box.

There were days when it felt like my brain was boiling inside my cranium. Scanning the skies for anything resembling a rain cloud made you appreciate what it must be like to live somewhere like the Horn of Africa. Having the water supply shut off for several hours each day by the water company was irksome enough. What in heaven’s name must it be like to live without water?

On Monday this week, the temperature in these parts reputedly reached 41 degrees. Mercifully some rain fell late the following day. But in 2003, the hot weather went on and on, with only the occasional shower to bring any kind of relief. I remember the scenes of elation one August night at some friends’ party when we saw lightning flashing over the horizon and heard the distant rumble of thunder. I remember the joy of driving back to the caravan in the rain, wondering whether this marked the end of the meteorological madness. It must be like that every year in countries like India, where people dance with joy and relief in the first Monsoon rainfall.

Somehow my sainted wife worked on through that summer, massaging sweaty bodies on her couch to put bread on the wood-composite table in the caravan. This Monday reminded me just how difficult is any activity, physical or mental, in such conditions. You lose the will to live. No wonder all those abandoned elderly French died in their millions. No wonder the male of the species sends his women out to work in the fields so he can sup alcoholic refreshments and smoke cheroots in some cool white-walled taverna.

The hotter, the better? Not at all. The hotter, the worse. Keep the Canicule far hence, that’s foe to man…

Stop the Week 30

2011-06-27T01:04:00.000-07:00

There’s little time for cultural pursuits during Wimbledon fortnight. But then I suppose that ‘Wmbldn’ (as Harry Carpenter would have put it) is a culture in itself.

These days, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to sit in front of the telly and simply watch. We have to content ourselves with Today at Wimbledon, the highlights programme, hosted by the debonair John Inverdale in the company of the marvellous Boris Becker, the much-improved Tracy Austin and others of their kidney. It’s reassuring that such brats from the past have, for the main, evolved into reasonable human beings.

Even John McEnroe can now look back in wisdom at his teenage anger and admit with humour and good grace that he was an unregenerate asshole. I strongly suspect that my childhood bête noire, Rod Laver, is a thoroughly decent, pleasant and rather modest man. Poor guy. My brother and sisters used to sit in front of the screen and chant ‘serve a double’ to try and put him off. It rarely worked and he often won. Which was the trouble, of course. Had we but appreciated our tennis lore, we would have watched a legend in his prime with proper appreciation and awe – as I do now when Roger Federer’s on. Even my wife and daughter have forgiven the swish Swiss his emblazoned jacket of a few summers back.

Whenever I worry as a parent that The Daughter might be spending too long in front of the box, I think back to those Wimbledon fortnights of yore and blanche at the realisation of the hours my siblings and I must have spent parked before the screen. To be fair, the fortnight usually coincided with that delicious hiatus between end-of-exams and end-of-term when there was little homework and much frivolity. Caramba! I seem to remember watching a whole chunk of the legendary Charlie Passarell/Pancho Gonzales match, which established the template for endurance until John Isner and Nicolas Mahut re-designed it this time last summer.

Serve a double...

Much of our erstwhile viewing took place in the evening. The fading light of day was consecrated to doubles. If there’s anything I regret about the modern game, it’s the absence of the four-(wo)man game. I know doubles are still played, but for me the golden age expired with the retirement of MacNamara and MacNamee. In my day… (are you listening, children?) there were wonderful doubles partnerships, the likes of which we will never see again. There were the plucky Mexicans, Osuna and Palafox, who would send up towering lobs from the baseline for the opposition to smash until they tired of the game and sent the ball into the net or into the crowd. There were Hewitt and MacMillan: Leyton’s belligerent dad and white-capped Frew, who never had a prayer in the singles, but on a doubles court was virtually unassailable. There were Tiriac and Nastase, the Roumanian renegades, who looked like they could defeat the opposition with a series of fierce looks. There were Emerson, with his funny wind-up serve, and the perennial runner-up, Fred Stolle. There were Ann Jones and Francoise Durr, the unlikely slow-moving slow-serving big-busted couple, who somehow won more matches than logics and physiology would have suggested. And, of course, there were Newcombe and Roche on one side of the gender equation and Navratilova and Billie Jean King on the other. Ah happy days, happy evenings!

Of course, there are still the Williams sisters (curse 'em!), but for the main gripping star-studded doubles matches seem to have been consigned to Wimbledon’s history – along with invisible white balls and wooden racquets and their presses: those strange contraptions that stopped the racquet head from warping while allowing child racquet/guitar heroes like me to play their Slazenger Les Pauls and use the lever of the press as a tremolo arm.

So now those days have gone and if the telly goes on in the late afternoon during Wimbledon fortnight and stays on up to and including Wimbledon Today, it’s more for the familiar pock-pock of ball on racquet as a reassuring background. My viewing days, like my playing days, have gone into a fairly steep decline. Nevertheless, I’ll have you know that I was once runner-up in the under 14 competition at the Saint Polycarps tennis club of Finaghy, Belfast. I wore a hand-me-down lilac airtex shirt and yellow socks, a right little André Agassi. I played with a cheap wooden racquet (made in Pakistan) from F.W. Woolworth. I was 5-1 up in the first set, but as soon as I started sniffing victory, my mind started to play games and I went to pieces, losing to a chubby Stuart Smith in straight sets. Who knows what I might have achieved with a bit of coaching, some proper kit, a physio and a sponsor? (And a little more talent and drive.) ‘I could’ve been a contender, Choliie…’

‘New balls, please!’

Longest Day Blues

2011-06-23T06:05:00.000-07:00

So there we are. That’s it then for another year…

For a few days every year either side of the solstice, I go into mourning. My wife and daughter have learnt to handle me with care. Dutifully, they respect my annual suggestion to ‘appreciate’ the last few protracted evenings before the 21^st (without ever questioning what ‘appreciation’ entails).

It’s hard to spell it out. Appreciation for me means being more aware than usual that it’s still light outside. It means stepping outside or staring mournfully out of the window, soon after the 10pm watershed, at the delicious mysterious half-light, as it hangs on tenaciously before slipping into darkness.

19^th century doctors would probably diagnose my complaint as ‘acute melancholia’ and prescribe laudanum to be taken in increasing doses until helpless, hopeless addiction set in. Fuelled by opiates, I could settle down with my quill and bottle of ink and compose countless odes on the subject of all things bright and beautiful and the sadness of knowing that all such things must pass.

The solstice equals the end of the best part of summer and the beginning of two mad months when you can’t move for holidaymakers. When everything and everyone wilts in the heat. It means: Wimbledon, then the British Open, the Oval Test Match, the Last Night of the Proms, September, October and bye-bye blue skies, here comes winter.

Fortunately, the mood dissipates. For one thing, I sensibly elected to share my life with a perennial optimist. Where I might stare glumly at a half-empty glass, she rejoices in what’s left. While I see a world stripped bare by voracious humanity, she sees richness and abundance. It’s hard to shake off a lifetime’s pessimism, but bit-by-bit I’m learning to see things in a healthier perspective.

The legend of Stern'enge

In France, the longest day coincides with the national Fête de Musique. Back in the UK, druids, pagans and even ordinary citizens wend their way to Stonehenge to do whatever they tend to do within the ancient stone circle. The French cluster throughout the land to eat and drink and listen to music.

It’s a lovely tradition and one that’s catching on apparently in other continental countries. Nearly 20 years ago, I first stumbled upon it as a holidaymaker one sultry evening in the sleepy medieval town of Argentat-sur-Dordogne. Ella Fitzgerald accompanied us on our romantic evening promenade via a network of municipal speakers suspended from trees and lampposts and the eaves of buildings. It was ‘de-lovely’, if rather be-wildering.

So now we tend to take to the streets en famille with everyone else. Of course, you’re at the mercy of the elements. A few summers ago in Brive, torrential downpours rained off all the long-planned outdoor concerts and we were left to throng aimlessly with hundreds of others in search of… something. We ended up buying ice creams and going home.

Another summer we took The Daughter to nearby Martel to see her school band play under the remarkable parasol-like roof of the 18^th century market ‘hall’. Locals ate their collective picnics at the trestle tables set out around the square, while the pizzeria plied the drinkers with hooch. The headmaster was there to support his group of final-year pupils. Even when a neo-grunge outfit from the nearest lycée came on to assail our ears, no one moaned about ‘the racket’. Not a mouth was puckered in disapproval. Everyone was there to enjoy the occasion and celebrate life out-of-doors.

We missed out on the Fête this summer, because the child was too busy revising for her BAC. So I was left to brood on the relentless march of time. I’m trying to train myself to see the 21^st symbolically as a gateway to all the concerts and festivals (for which there’s never enough time) that are crowded into the ensuing months of a French summer, but I’ve still got a way to go.

When I get ‘dem ol’ summer solstice blues again, mama’, I remind myself that Blues, the music, though born of suffering, celebrates life with all its vicissitudes. And after all, as a child, the solstice represented the imminent end-of-June and the beginning of the long school holidays. I guess I need to learn to ‘appreciate’ every evening on earth, protracted or not. Instant karma would then be mine for the deriving.

Stop the Week 29

2011-06-19T02:31:00.000-07:00

It’s one small step for mankind and one giant step for Murk Sampons. Having run this blog for roughly half a year, I finally worked out last week how to locate and even read comments from people. There was even a comment from my reclusive best friend. I then spent several frustrating hours trying to work out how to reply to some of the people who left comments. When I found a possible route, I then discovered that I had to identify myself in terms of a whole range of perplexing options, including a Google account. I didn’t even know I had a Google account. Passwords, don’t ya just hate ‘em?

The point is, I wasn’t able to reply to some of the interesting comments that people left. So, if by chance you’re still reading the ramblings of the churlish bastard who can’t be bothered to reply to you, may I offer my sincere apologies. And if anyone would like to comment this week, please let me have your e-mail address, as I’m a big old incapable Hector and this seems like a pragmatic solution to my problem.

Before I got sidetracked, I was going to say what a joy it is for a music-loving father to discover that his offspring is beginning to take an interest in his music archives. I got back the other day from trying to remove the last of the algae from the pool at the chateau I look after to hear the familiar sound of Etta James coming from the speakers. The Daughter is well into the likes of Adele, Amy Winehouse and Duffy, so it’s rather nice to think that she’s exploring the roots of all that ‘Nu Soul’ (although that’s probably not the term they use these days).

She loves Aretha Franklin too, but, although the Queen of Soul didn’t get her title for nothing, it’s particularly gratifying to think of her developing a fondness for Etta. Not only has she had a very tough life (Etta, that is, not my child) – being, among other things, a heroine addict for many years – but she also never really garnered the accolades that she surely deserved during her prime. And the prime of Ms. Etta James is captured in all its glory on an absurdly cheap triple-CD set available from the usual Amazonian outlets. Track after track of pearls such as ‘At Last’ (used in an advert for… what was it, Sainsbury’s clothing or something equally incongruous?), the storming ‘Tell Mama’ and the timeless, heart-rending ‘I'd Rather Go Blind’, which was once covered by Christine Perfect of Chicken Shack, before she married John McVie and joined her hubby in Fleetwood Mac.

Tilley, my daughter, asked me whether Etta was a Motown artist. I resisted the temptation to give her a quick history of the Brothers Chess and their Chicago-based label, but, with great restraint, simply pointed out that Etta recorded for Chess, the most famous blues label in the whole U.S. of A. And very appropriate it was, too, because Etta James, more so than others of her kidney chasing Aretha, Mavis Staples and Irma Thomas at the top of the Premiership, was equal parts ‘old school’ R&B and soul chanteuse. In fact, she quite recently made a fine album of blues standards with a couple of her kids in the band. More recently still, the poor woman was diagnosed with dementia followed by leukaemia. Whether it will help her now, I don’t know, but you could do yourself a real favour and get hold of that Best of Etta James (on Chess) so you can cop a listen to a woman voted no. 22 by Rolling Stone in their 100 Greatest Singers of All Time.

It also warms the cockles of a film-lovin’ daddy’s heart that his daughter is also taking a keen interest in films old and new. I encourage it. However, I would certainly not be happy to think of her seeing Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream. Not yet, anyway. Aronofsky made The Black Swan. The Good Wife of La Poujade Basse found it overwrought, so I didn’t bother going to see it. But I did watch Dream during the week. It’s been parked on the DVD’s hard drive for several months, waiting for the necessary courage to sit through it.

Lawdy Miss Clawdy. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it sho’ ‘nuff is harrowing. It’s based on a novel by Hubert Selby jr., who wrote the grim Last Exit to Brooklyn, and it depicts the descent into drug-addled delusion and degradation of a mother (played by the admirable Ellen Burstyn) and her junky son. It was brilliant, but dreadful. The Daughter’s 16 and there’s time enough for her to find out about the awfulness of life. So I did what a control freak or a responsible parent does, depending on the way you look at it, and pressed ‘delete’ after viewing.

Drugs… helping to link Etta James to Requiem for a Dream. Well, there’s a rather infelicitous way to pull these cultural thoughts together for another weekend. Have a good week, y’hear.

The Last Word

2011-06-16T06:50:00.000-07:00

One of the least pleasant aspects of life in France is taking goods back for exchange or refund. As you know, the customer is neither king nor queen here, but someone to be treated with disdain. Approximately like something nasty that you might pick up on the sole of your shoe.

Only the other day, I had two items to return – in two different establishments. So the preparatory dialogues inside my head were incessant. Mercifully one of the items in question came from Lidl. Now whatever you think of Lidl – and I won’t reiterate the joke about the French woman and her gynaecologist at this point, because I need to check all the salient details before repeating it (I’m notoriously bad at re-telling jokes) – it’s a German-based supermarket chain and its attitude to customers betrays its Teutonic origins. In other words, they give you ‘nuff respeck’.

So I went there first – to help my confidence and build up my nerve before confronting the second establishment with my broken chair. I did my regular week’s shopping in my yellow-and-blue prefabricated emporium of choice and, at the end of the customarily frantic business of trying to bag my items in time with the scanning, I casually presented the cashier with the universal telecommande that stubbornly refused to zap the humblest electrical appliance. I showed her my receipt and she asked no questions. A perfect example, in other words, of customer service as it should be. I pocketed my refund and wished her the French equivalent of ‘top of the morning’.

'Someone large must have sat on this chair...'

Then came the harder stuff. All the way down the main drag to Malemort, which is one long commercial zone on the eastern edge of Brive, I rehearsed my spiel. ‘This chair that I bought as part of a set of bijou outdoor table and three chairs… Well, the other day I noticed that one of the slats is broken.’
‘You must have sat down too hard on it.’
’Madame, correct me if I’m wrong, but a chair is designed to support the human frame, is it not?’
’You must have sat down too hard on it.’
’Please look at me, Madame. I weigh under 60 kilos. My wife weighs less than that and our daughter less than her. No one else to the best of my knowledge has sat on this chair. Perhaps a passing deer in need of a rest…’
’Then you must have stood on the chair to do that…’
’No, I assure you, I am 56 years old and have been educated to BAC+4 level or however you measure it, and I know the difference between a chair and a set of steps.’
’No, someone must have stood on this chair to do that.’
’OK. Let’s look closely at the fracture. You’ll see that it runs diagonally, suggesting an inherent weakness in this piece of wood. Had someone stood on the chair, isn’t it likely that it would have snapped like this…(at which point I would have mimed a clean horizontal break)?’
’We’re not going to change it. It’s your fault, not ours.’

And so I was ready to stand outside the shop with my hands on the back of the broken chair, ready to mutter to every potential client entering the shop, ‘This is what you can expect if you buy their merchandise.’ Of course, every potential French client would merely shrug and continue quand meme, n’est ce pas?

Anyway… I pulled up, turned the engine off, found my receipt, grabbed the broken chair and boldly marched into the shop. You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? Yes, that nice woman behind the desk took one look at the chair, examined my receipt and said, ‘We’ll change this for you right away’. Say, what????

So she scribbled some hieroglyphics on the receipt and told me to take it to the warehouse. There I got a little annoyed because the man who took my receipt promptly dealt with a delivery driver who rolled up a few seconds after I did. But hey, that’s normal and I was getting a new chair. When finally said chair was handed to me, an officious little toad who seemed to be the second-in-command handed me back my receipt with a cautionary ‘Attention, your receipt is presque mort’.

I stared at my ‘nearly dead’ receipt and could feel the ire rising up from the small intestine or somewhere close by. I snapped at him, ‘Well what am I supposed to do about it then?’ Take a photocopy, apparently. Ah. Hmmm. I took a few deep breaths to calm myself off and drove off with our new chair in the back of the Berlingo. I felt just a little triumphant.

Thinking about it on the way home, wasn’t it just typical that yer man had warned me about my nearly dead receipt rather than uttering a word of apology. ‘There you are sir. Very sorry that you’ve had this little inconvenience. Take this new chair and have a very nice day.’ It’s not difficult, is it? But no, he had to have the last word on the subject. It’s the French way. I’m right and you’re wrong. No, I’m right and you’re wrong. OK, then, have it your own way, I’m right and you’re wrong. (Ponder that one, you jumped-up little amphibian…)

But still, does this episode suggest that the French are finally – finally – learning that it pays in the long run to provide decent customer service? Or was it just a blip in the status quo?

Stop the Week 28

2011-06-12T01:50:00.000-07:00

As you may well know, Friday night is music night on BBC Four. Repeats have been doing the rounds, so there hasn’t been a lot on of late. But there was a fascinating documentary on Carlos Santana this Friday, followed by some in-concert footage.

Guitar heaven indeed

I hadn’t realised that Carlos’s dad was a musician in a Mariachi band and young Carlos first learned to play the violin – which perhaps partly explains the unique lachrymose sound he coaxed from his guitar as it took flight. Carlos stressed throughout the programme the need to ‘hold a melody’. His ability to do this and to hold individual notes without resorting to any fancy tremolo effects helped to transform the electric rock guitar into something supremely melodic. It’s surely no coincidence that he chose to cover ‘Black Magic Woman’, since Peter Green was probably his most lyrical British contemporary.

As a troubled teenager living in San Francisco (once the family had moved from Tijuana), Carlos used to go to a park where a blues/rock band, a Latin band and a Mariachi band would all be playing simultaneously. I might have found such a weird melange of styles a little perturbing, but it tripped a light bulb inside the young Santana’s head: this was the sound he wanted to create. And so the Santana Blues Band, or whatever they called themselves, was formed – and the rest, as they say, is history.

It’s a history, though, that has worn very well. Being a fan primarily of British ‘prog rock’ at the time, I somehow managed to miss Santana until the timeI swapped some Subbuteo players with a friend’s kid brother for his copy of Caravanserai. Being an acquisitive little collector even at that age, I promptly signed the inner sleeve ‘Mark Sampson from Ian Bamford 1974’. It’s been with me ever since. In fact, it’s one of the few vinyl albums I’ve duplicated in digital form – if only for the enhanced separation that the CD brings. Just to hear that magnificent percussion on tracks like ‘Every Step Of The Way’ coming at you in both ears!

Carlos was warned at the time of Caravanserai’s conception that the shift to a new jazzier plain represented commercial suicide. In the fashion of a restless creator, he apparently thought ‘Mmm, commercial suicide: that sounds interesting’. Like Frank Zappa with the Mothers of Invention, Santana pretty soon took over the band – which sounds suspiciously like a monstrous ego at work, until you reflect that, without the direction he imposed on it, Santana might have lasted no longer than his brother’s equally competent band, Malo. Because of their single-minded creative drive, both Frank and Carlos created a huge musical legacy to leave mankind. It makes you wonder really how come the Beatles managed to last as long as they did, driven by two such single-minded and sometimes antithetical creators as Lennon and McCartney.

However… the footage of Santana circa Woodstock, when the band dropped acid, expecting to come on much later in the day, and a concert replicating 1999’s Supernatural underlined what can happen along the way. Santana in its pomp was one hell of a band, with everyone playing in ferocious unison: from Greg Rollie’s integral beefy Hammond organ to Michael Shrieve’s relentless drums and, of course, Carlos’s sinuous guitar. But Carlos Santana plus special guests was as curiously unsatisfying as Supernatural itself. Great in parts, but overall rather wearisome. Although the great man, with his trademark curly locks tucked under a reversed trilby, could obviously still play his sunburst guitar, I was uncomfortably reminded of Liberace.

So these days, I go back to the early albums that I missed at the time and marvel at the way the band tackled numbers like Willie Bobo’s ‘Evil Ways’ and Tito Puente’s ‘Oye Como Va’ and, as the cliché goes, made them ‘their own’. And while I’ve long grown out of The Yes Album or Trespass or Pawn Hearts, Santana’s output from the same era still sounds as ‘fresh as the day your dentist fitted them’.

Otherwise, not many blips on the cultural radar screen during a week dominated by the visits of friends old enough to remember closing their eyes to let ‘Samba Pa Ti’ transport them to some far-off heavenly plain. However, I should mention the Australian ‘claymation’ film, Mary and Max, about two of life’s lonely outcasts who become the unlikeliest pair of pen-friends ever portrayed on a cinema screen. It’s a little gem that should by rights last as long as Caravanserai.

Stop the Week 27

2011-06-05T06:48:00.000-07:00

‘This movie makes as much sense as a rat fucking a grapefruit…’

Also spracht Marlon Brando, one of two troubled geniuses wandering across my cultural radar screen this week. I thought that Patricia Bosworth’s biography of Montgomery Clift was one of the most enthralling Hollywood tales that I’ve ever read. The portrait of Brando seems a bit quick-and-easy in comparison, seemingly borrowing a lot from Brando’s own autobiography and other, fuller biographies on the market. But it’s entertaining enough to induce me to leave my bike in the cellar, propped up against a stack of boxes, and take once more to my walking boots. By chance the 2^nd hand copy I brought is a large-print version from Hammersmith & Fulham public libraries (Serving our community, the memorable strap-line that no doubt cost them a pretty packet), so it has done wonders for my walk-and-read technique. So much so that I’m now sketching some Heath Robinson contraption for the bike that will allow me to ride-and-read (possibly not serving our rural community too well in the process).

I have always had very ambivalent feelings about our Marlon. I remember as a kid seeing him as Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront, and it was – and still is – one of the most powerful cinematic experiences of my life. It was a staggering performance and the back-of-the-car scene with brother ‘Chollie’ must be one of the most quoted scenes in movie history. But while I loved him in Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Missouri Breaks and The Godfather, to name but a few, equally I hated him in Mutiny on the Bounty, Last Tango in Paris and Apocalypse Now, to name but a few.

He was a mass of contradictions: gentle, generous, sensitive, kind to animals, loyal to friends on one hand; crass, boorish, conceited and a royal pain-in-the-ass on the other. Unlike someone, say, of Tom Cruise’s ilk, who seems to have worked so hard at being a star throughout his career, Brando was a star almost in spite of himself. ‘Acting is a bum’s life,’ he said. ‘It leads to perfect self-indulgence. You get paid for doing nothing and it adds up to nothing’. Which is maybe why he ended up squandering his massive talent and describing himself, even in the early ‘60s, as a ‘balding, middle-aged failure’.

Trevor Howard said of his co-star in the ill-fated Monty on the Bonty, as my siblings and I used to call it, that ‘he could drive a saint to hell in a dogsled’. If this was so, then Klaus Kinski could have done it simply by glaring at the unfortunate saint.

Just fiends, Mr. H. and Mr. K.

I bought a boxed set of Werner Herzog’s films with the demented actor about five years ago as an investment in my child’s future. I have been training her to watch Aguirre, Wrath of God ever since, but she tells me that she still doesn’t feel ready for it (if you ask me, she doesn’t like reading sub-titles: the curse of the micro-attention-span generation). So last night, Debs and I decided to watch the slightly barking director’s documentary film about his completely barking star, My Best Fiend.

We’re about half way through it and it makes for riveting viewing, what with Herzog’s hypnotic Teutonic delivery and clips of Kinski raving at Gas Mark 10. His co-star in Woyzeck, Eva Mattes, actually talked of a sensitive, caring side to the man. It’s an extraordinary notion. At one point Herzog’s camera captured Kinski in Aguirre costume and character set about some of the extras with a broad sword, I think because they were picking at some of the food to be used as props. One of them showed Herzog the traces of a large scar on his skull, some 30 years or so after the event. If he hadn’t have been wearing his helmet, he would have been a dead man.

But if it’s true that there was a gentler, human side to the raving madman, I guess it goes part of the way to explaining how such a monster managed to sire such a soft, feminine creature as Natasja. My God, though, assuming that her father played any significant role in her childhood, she must surely be a very troubled soul.

It all does make you wonder why Herzog was prepared to put himself through the torment he, cast and crew all suffered from K.K. not once but five times. When you think about the premise of Fitzcarraldo – pulling a boat across a hill in the middle of the jungle to transport it from one river to another – there must be a strong element of the masochist in Herzog’s make-up. Maybe you need an element of insanity in order to make great art. Countless biographies seem to reinforce this idea. So maybe Herzog recognised that, if he could survive the trauma and shockwaves of working with such a human maelstrom, then he would get the kind of charismatic performance that his films needed.

Well, the proof of the pudding is there in the eating. From the staggering opening shots of the group of conquistadors snaking their way down the mountainside to the final restless circling of the camera as Aguirre and a raft-load of monkeys drift downriver, Aguirre for one must be one of the most riveting collaborations between director and star ever committed to celluloid.

Shades of ’76?

2011-06-02T08:59:00.000-07:00

Well, that’s it then. May, my favourite month of the year, has been and gone – and not with a whimper, but with a bang. Many of them, in fact.

After almost two months of scorching weather, virtually without rain of any description, there was a momentous storm on Monday, with rain so torrential you might have thought you were in Kuala Lumpur.

I’d just got back with the hound from the château I look after as one of my many gainful jobs, fiddling around with the swimming pool there, trying to balance the pH and wondering what to do with the copious deposits of algae that must have flourished undercover during April’s heat wave. The blue sky had suddenly clouded over and turned the colour of a granite work surface. The first big drops of rain had appeared on the windscreen as we neared home. There was just enough time to run to the four corners of the house to check that the down-pipes were all in ‘fill-rain-butt’ mode.

Safely indoors, I turned off the computer smartish and un-plugged the Neufbox and the telephone. Then, there was nothing to do but watch and wait. I wandered out onto the terrace from time to time to peer over the edge and check the level of the nearest rain-butt. It seemed a bit slow at first and then even threatened to stop, but a second wave swept in across the valley and once the Kuala Lumpurn rain began to fall, all four tanks were full in a thrice. There was no way I was going to dash out into the maelstrom to close off the down-pipes, so I just had to watch the splash-backs soak the walls.

The Daughter phoned half way through the downpour. ‘Is it raining there, dad?’ ‘Yes, it’s raining dogs [as she used to say when she was very small]. Is it raining in Brive?’ ‘It certainly is. Are you happy now?’

Yes, I was happy – despite the fact that the force of the rain was washing away the surface of our drive and gouging out more ravines. But I was almost happy enough to run outside and dance in it. I was happy to know that I wouldn’t have to water the flowers and vegetables that evening, and happy for all the wildlife in the woods, scratching around desperately in search of moisture. We’ve talked in recent weeks of how terrible it must be to live in somewhere like India or Africa, where your life literally depends on the vagaries of the weather.

Despite the rain, there have been ominous rumblings among the country folk here about the worst drought in the making since 1976. ‘Ah yes, I ree-mem-bare it well…’ I spent most of August that year in the Channel Islands with my disreputable friend, Simon. We started off in Sark and got kicked off by a policeman they fetched from Guernsey for illegal camping. One morning, there was a scratching at our tent, pitched perilously close to the edge of a cliff. The policeman told us that we’d have to take the late afternoon boat back to Guernsey. Simon and I debated the idea of hiding out in the copses of the Dame’s island, living on nuts and berries and stealing foodstuffs in the dead of night, but in the end we felt we’d enjoy ourselves more across the water. From the boat, we saw the policeman scanning the passengers from the quayside. So we hid ourselves, only to pop up at the last minute and give the man a cheeky wave.

The rest of that sun-baked month, we spent camping in Saint Sampson and living on bread, tomatoes and the bag of ‘erb we’d smuggled on board with us at Weymouth. We hired bicycles and spent each day gradually exploring the island, moving from one cove to the next and pegging out in the sun. We went to see Bugsy Malone one evening in St. Peter’s Port’s little old-fashioned cinema, so pie-eyed on grass and so transfixed by the images on screen that we believed that we were watching the greatest film ever made. I seem to remember being nominated to ask the usherette about the last bus back to Saint Sampson.

Michael, the silent destroyer, mobbed by team mates

Another time in a bar, I think, we watched images from the 5^th and final test match against the West Indies from the Oval, which was so denuded of grass that it looked like an Arabian sandpit. Michael Holding was at his silky and lethal best and Viv Richards (Dennis Amiss, too, I believe) plundered a double century.

As a student, the summer of 1976 was just one long idyllic meteorological aberration. The weather broke almost the very day we got back to the mainland. Simon and I split up to hitch our way back to our different destinations, where we would show off our resplendent suntans to the girls who awaited our return.

In this part of France, the drought lasted until October apparently. The thought of another summer like that one – now with new added adult responsibilities – just fills me with horror. You are old, brother Markus, you are old/You will wear the bottoms of your trousers rolled…

Stop the Week 26

2011-05-29T06:43:00.000-07:00

‘Can you call on Lady Day? Can you call on John Coltrane?
’Cos they’ll, they’ll take your troubles away…’ (Gil Scott-Heron)

Sunday morning in this household, for no compelling reason, is always given over to jazz, but the sad, sad news of Gil Scott-Heron’s death on Friday night in a New York hospital sent me searching for some of the great man’s best music among the serried ranks of old cassette tapes.

Brother Gil

The news of his demise made the chance we were granted to see him last summer in Central Park even more poignant. It was at the tail-end of our once-in-a-lifetime holiday to New York, Ottawa and the Maine coast. We were back in New York, sharing my best friend’s tiny vacated basement apartment with the piles of records he’s trawled from countless visits to thrift shops and the like. It was our last Sunday and we spent the morning in the hallowed space of the Metropolitan Museum.

I kept a close eye on my watch, because I knew that Gil was playing in the park as part of the city’s Summer Fest. My oldest friend and I had already seen Baaba Maal during the first leg of our round trip and I’d missed out on McCoy Tyner, John Coltrane’s former pianist, while we were visiting another old friend in Newport, Rhode Island. So I was keen to get there early in case we were turned away from the concert venue on account of overcrowding.

As usual, I’d imagined the worst-case scenario (although there was a nervous moment when Tilley was asked for some I.D. – not because Gil had gone X-rated, but because of the local liquor laws). We got there far too early and took our fairly uncomfortable seats with a nice central view of the stage. So far the weather had been kind to us, but that afternoon we had a real New York summer afternoon to contend with. It was ‘silly hot’ and airless. We sat and watched the human traffic and we waited. We sat through some self-important support act that went on far too long, all three too busy fanning ourselves even to bother with polite applause.

The Daughter, poor lamb, was getting restless and hungry. She kept protesting that she was all right, but it can’t have been much fun going to one of your first music concerts with your parents. She knew of ‘The Bottle’, his dance-floor hit of the ‘70s, and she knew that we had both seen The Man in Sheffield. I told her, too, about the first, magical, time I’d seen him back in my ‘20s in Brighton: how he ambled on stage, this stick-thin tall black man dressed all in black, and sat down at an electric piano, and how his often hilarious patter would segue into a series of resonant message-songs like ‘We Almost Lost Detroit’ – but I don’t think it convinced her that she was about to see someone as exciting as Adele or Paloma Faith.

When he finally loped onto the stage, carrying a bottle of beer, still stick-thin but grey-haired and grey-bearded now and frankly not looking too well, he was late. He joked about this in his rich deeper-than-ever drawl and everyone forgave him at once, because he always had a way with words that made you feel like he was addressing you personally. Then, as he’d done 30 years before, he sat down alone at the piano and launched into a long, droll monologue that dissolved into the chillingly beautiful ‘Winter In America’.

The band joined him after a while and a little of that special intimacy was lost in the mix. The girls gave up the ghost and sidled off for some food back in our record depository. Common, the Chicago rapmeister, came on for a guest slot and a kind of valedictory for a man who has sometimes been dubbed the ‘Godfather of Rap’.

But, heaven help us, Gil was a lot more than just that. He was a novelist, poet, humorist, musician and above all perhaps a genuine humanitarian. If I’ve got it right, he once asked in a song ‘Whatever happened to the people who gave a damn?/ Or did that just apply to dying in the jungles of Viet Nam?’ Well, Gil gave a damn and, what’s more, he was prepared to do something about it. His death seems like another nail in the coffin of humanity.

Wedding Bell Blues

2011-05-26T10:01:00.000-07:00

Sitting in the little park outside the Mairie last Saturday, sheltering from the fierce afternoon sun, while waiting for the arrival of the bride and groom, my wife and I both felt distinctly like fish out of water.

Normally, I love a good wedding. There’s nothing quite like them. But the prospect of a French wedding made us both feel uneasy. Queasy, even. Which does, of course, beg the question: what were we doing there at 4.10pm on a Saturday afternoon?

Debs concluded that she had been seduced into it. Her client and our former neighbour from days of yore, when we lived in a small village where your business was everybody’s business, had asked her to be her witness. It’s quite an honour at the best of times, but particularly flattering for a foreigner. It’s a kind of seal of approval, I suppose – which is why she said ‘yes’ without really thinking about the implications. And I said ‘yes’ to give her my support and because I love a good wedding.

'Can I get a witness?'

Then, in that little park, the implications dawned on us. It would be just like the old days, when we would feel like objects of curiosity from a different planet. We would spend the next several hours in the close company of people with whom we had nothing in common, indulging in small talk over an interminable meal that would probably leave us feeling as if we’d just eaten a half pound of butter. We’d get back at some unearthly hour, wake up late on Sunday morning and struggle all day with a sense of having frittered away a precious weekend. We decided that we would put away such churlish thoughts and do our best to enjoy the occasion.

By the time the bride arrived, we felt less apprehensive. Natalie looked lovely in a long crimson taffeta skirt with white bustière and hair styled by Franck, the bio coiffeur of Brive. To see someone you like radiating joy and delight is guaranteed to melt even the stoniest heart. But I had witnessed her first wedding – in the cathedral at Tulle – a dozen or so years before, and I knew that her ex-husband’s dysfunctional family were a vindictive, twisted bunch, so I kept a wary eye on the nearby road for potential drive-by shootings.

After milling around and exchanging chit-chat, the small, select bands of guests trooped into one of the Mairie’s ‘state’ rooms for the ceremony itself. His worship the mayor, with a republican sash draped diagonally across his jacket, conducted the brief ceremony – which consisted of reading through the relevant civic codes, including a new addendum that makes husband and wife responsible for each other’s debts. Natalie’s new man, an engaging chap almost 20 years her senior, dressed quirkily in light-grey silk-effect suit with complementary hat, earrings and surgical boot, feigned indignation. I tried to ensure that I wouldn’t be in the pictures that someone was taking, just in case a photo appeared in the local paper and someone vindictive… well, you know.

Then we shuffled out for confetti and photographs before driving off in convoy to the reception at a little hotel/restaurant in the heart of a picturesque village somewhere in the hills above Brive. These wedding convoys involve mass honking of horns. It’s rather appropriate, as we both believe that the French often only let themselves go when they’re behind the steering wheel of a dangerous four-wheeled machine.

When we arrived, a gaggle of British bikers were busy drinking beer and soaking up the balmy evening outside the hotel. We were in the back garden down below, underneath a spreading maple tree and high above the motorway that skirts Brive en route for Paris or Toulouse. A bevy of earnest waiters in penguin suits attended to our desires. Debs and I found ourselves sitting with a pleasant if somewhat staid recently retired couple, who both knew England. She had spent a year in a school in Datchett and they had good friends from Bletchley Park. I felt that it beat talking to the two ‘rugby men’, to whom I had been introduced earlier, who would probably spend the entire evening teasing me about English teams past and present.

There was a sense, of course, of biding time before the real focus of the whole affair: la grande bouffe. It was a long time coming. We were finally ushered in around 9.30. As witness, Debs got to sit on the top table beside Natalie. Mercifully I sat within hailing distance. Everyone had a menu in the form of a scroll, which the happy couple had procured via the internet. The new husband, sweetly, had done a translation for the pair of us – also via the internet, so it bore very little relation to what we were about to receive.

And that was a steady stream of rather fussy nouvelle cuisine creations (such as a white pudding of lobster meat… soused in cream). Everything that came our way was guaranteed to delight on first acquaintance until the realisation that the flavour was butter, cream and salt. A sorbet refresher half way through was drenched in calvados and no substitute for a nice fresh salad. It soon became obvious that any idea we might have had of escaping before midnight was ludicrous.

The combination wedding cake/dessert finally arrived at 1.30 in the morning. Taking our cue from a young couple with baby, we felt able to take our leave after the surfeit of chocolate. That way we wouldn’t have to bear the indignity of trying to dance to one of Claude François’s ersatz disco confections. Moreover, we were able to sneak out without going round the entire room shaking hands or pecking cheeks in the time-honoured fashion.

We got to bed around 2.30 and spent all day Sunday trying to claw back lost time. But it would be churlish to dwell on the negative aspects of our outing. It was a nice wedding and the couple’s evident happiness was a joy to behold. And what’s more, so far, I’ve neither witnessed nor read about any drive-by shootings.

Stop the Week 25

2011-05-22T06:16:00.000-07:00

All week long I’ve been greedily reading the Mojo Frank Zappa Special that I brought back with me from Southampton airport. The bike’s been off the road, stymied by a rear-wheel puncture, so I’ve been literally walkin’ the dog and perfecting my technique of directing my feet on automatic pilot while my head is buried in the text.

Francis Vincent Zappa, family man

I’ve always been a casual fan of Frank’s without ever being a serious fanatic. His face used to grace my bedroom wall on the top floor of our house in Belfast. My mother thought he was the devil incarnate, with his twisted mop of dark hair and that trademark combination of droopy moustache and bushy ‘Imperial’. She changed her tune a little when I pointed out that he was happily married and had two children – though I didn’t tell her that they were named Dweezil and Moon Unit.

Hot Rats has always hovered around my Top 5 albums, despite the indignity of being caught by my mother one afternoon, playing along to ‘Willie the Pimp’ with my Slazenger tennis racket ‘plugged’ into an old fan heater. You can’t really wriggle your way out of that one. Just grin and bear the mortification.

The Mojo Special painted a picture of a difficult and driven creative glutton, who never hesitated to hire-and-fire assorted band members in the pursuit of musical excellence. Captain Beefheart, his High School friend and fellow ‘difficult genius’, shared a love/hate relationship with FZ, who reminded him of a ‘cataract’ and whom he described memorably as looking ‘like a fly’s leg’.

Ironically, a lot of his copious musical output is far from excellent. Like so many autocratic prolific creative geniuses, he could have done with a stringent editor. Someone who might have excised some of the puerile dross that peppers his albums. For that reason, I’ve stuck mainly to Hot Rats and taped compilations of gems like ‘Montana’ and ‘King Kong’ that lurk among some of the more disposable items in his huge back catalogue.

But the man was never less than interesting and while I’d never label myself as quite such a misanthropist as he seemed to be, I always related to his contempt for human stupidity in all its guises. I read my comic from cover to cover, as I used to do when I subscribed at various times to The Topper, The Victor, Fabulous, Football Monthly, The Cricketer and Melody Maker. It was a shock to be reminded of the fact that the man died in his early 50s. Frank must have been far too busy creating his vast legacy to read magazines from cover to cover.

It served me a salutary reminder that he was younger than I am when he died. Younger, too, than Hugh Laurie. Which brings me very neatly (or not), ladies and gentlemen, to an interesting programme I watched during the week on the other half of the Stephen Fry double act. As you may know, Hugh ‘Dr. House’ Laurie, has just been paid to go and record an album of his favourite New Orleans classics with a band of solid Noo Orlinz session musicians and a few invited luminaries.

It’s a sad fact of life that the record company in question clearly recognised that the album will probably sell in big numbers on the strength of his famous name alone. That said, Hugh had the good grace to recognise his huge good fortune and his infectious exuberance throughout the programme would have won over the most died-in-the-wool sceptic.

I was very pleasantly surprised by his musical and vocal competence. He’s certainly no Allen Toussaint, but he had the good sense to hire the great man – the man behind hundreds of the finest recordings from the Crescent City – to arrange some of the numbers. He also had the exemplary good taste to cover a couple of the beloved Professor Longhair’s numbers. If he introduces a few new listeners to the likes of ‘Fessy’, Irma Thomas and Huey ‘Piano’ Smith then he deserves all the plaudits and sales he can garner. (But what a lucky bastard, eh?)

English Country Gardens

2011-05-19T02:20:00.000-07:00

My dear horticulturally-inclined wife prevailed on me to accompany her on Sunday morning to a big garden show about an hour’s drive from here. It’s an annual event, rather like some of our flowers. (I’m still learning the difference between annual bloomers and hardy perennials, but don’t ask me to explain the difference unaided.)

This annual event takes place at somewhere called La Nouvelle Abbaye. Never having seen it written down before, I heard abaille (bee) rather than abbaye (abbey), so I had a very strange mental image of the place as a kind of geodesic dome built in the shape of a bee. Given the location – in the middle of fairly remote countryside – this now seems a fanciful misconception on my part.

It’s actually an old abbey. It was new some time around the Middle Ages and has been crumbling ever since. It finds itself, as The Daughter might have it, a few miles the other side of Gourdon, the sub-prefecture of the Lot. Some people like Gourdon, but I hate the place. It’s where the tax office is located, or the Hôtel des Impôts, as it’s known: an innocent enough name to lure in unsuspecting citizens who don’t know their rights. Twice I have been grilled there by battle-axes determined to catch me out and make me grovel. Twice I have had to pay supplementary tax following the ordeal on some specious grounds that I still don’t understand (though I suspect that it was to do with a tax on being foreign, topped up with a surtax on being English). So I shuddered on Sunday as I drove through Gourdon looking for the New Bee.

It was just after 9 o’clock when we arrived, but the place was already heaving. Parking in a converted field and walking along the lane towards the abbey, it soon became apparent that most of the heaving was English. We were dangerously near Dordogneshire here – and it showed. Here an accent, there an accent, everywhere an accent…

Garden created without a single Spear & Jackson tool

The English do love to garden. There were signs for and references to jardins anglais everywhere. There were Brits with stalls and one even selling Spear & Jackson tools at a supposedly unbeatable price, which I suspected could have been beaten quite easily via the internet. One elderly couple pressed into my wife’s hand a flyer for their (presumably) magnificent garden – visits by arrangement only, price €10 including a cream tea. We smiled sweetly and kept their flyer for as long as it seemed proper and then dropped it into a rubbish sack.

The French have taken to their bosoms this notion of a nation of gardeners. I was talking to someone recently on my return from England. I explained that I had been away for a few days. ‘All those beautiful gardens,’ he or she suggested. I suppose there is an element of truth in it: you are rather more likely to spot a perfectly manicured lawn with immaculate herbaceous borders in England than you are in France.

The French are rather more pragmatic about their gardens. Apart from the lunatic fringe who create driveways lined with plaster animals leading to some improbable gateway, they tend to invest more time in their kitchen gardens. It’s fodder of course for la bouffe.

I’m not a great one for these events. It’s rather nice to wander among the exhibits, but I never know what to buy, particularly given the arid nature of our limestone soil. So my principal role is usually testing my wife with penetrating questions to ensure that she doesn’t go overboard. There was a fair bit of going overboard-ness, judging by the roaring trade that local girls seemed to be doing – offering a wheelbarrow service to your car.

Besides, I’ve always hated crowds. Humanity was beginning to seethe by 11 o’clock. So, after a quick chat with friends encountered at the refreshment tent, and having eavesdropped on an attempted conversation about pruning dead wood between an earnest English couple and an improbably patient French stallholder, we decided to take our purchases and flee.

Driving anywhere in France on Sunday is always a lottery, because the gendarmes are generally out in force – except, of course, between the hours of 12.00 and 14.00 (at the earliest) – so I was delighted to get through Gourdon and all the way back home without being pulled over.

Debs was as delighted with her haul as I generally am following a good music sale. We pottered away most of the afternoon in our country garden, which is neither really very French nor English, she with her plants and me with my Honda strimmer: the very model of a modern expat couple in springtime. A pair of quite hardy perennials, successfully transplanted from one location to another.

Boosting the G.D.P.

2011-05-14T11:36:00.000-07:00

When my sister dropped me at Southampton airport on Wednesday morning, an old guy waiting for a bus collared me. ‘How’s the house?’ he asked.

I was staggered that anyone should recognise me after what, one or two viewings of Grand Designs Revisited. It’s not as if I’m a newsreader or a weatherman. Maybe it was the pork-pie hat I was wearing. ‘I admired your persistence,’ he continued. ‘I really liked what you did. How is it holding up, the straw and all?’ He told me about climbing into haystacks as a child and feeling the heat rising up from within all that natural insulation.

He hurried off to catch his bus and left me feeling rather bemused. A little taste of stardom – but it goes quite a long way. Later, when I’d passed through the Departure gate and had some of my more suspicious-looking purchases checked and re-examined – the pack of batteries, the gold-plated Scart-to-Scart video lead, the car-lighter USB adaptor (all of which could probably be fashioned into a detonation device for a bomb) – I was collared a second time. This time it was a woman with a clipboard, who wanted to ask me some questions to help determine the impact of tourism on the U.K.’s G.D.P.

She asked me what I’d done during my brief stay. Had I visited any museums or art galleries? Er, no. Had I been to the cinema or theatre? Er, no. Had I dined out in a restaurant? Again no (unless my dad’s take-away curries from Asda or my own fish-and-chip supper for three counted). No, all I’d done was to sit and talk about gardening and the War with my mother, about music and films with my father, and about our reminiscences of childhood with my sister. And to shop. Which was embarrassing to confess, because when I’m in France I’m pretty scathing about our national obsession with shopping – as if I’m above such inane activity. And what do I do as soon as I touch down in England? I shop. Not once, not twice, but thrice in four days.

'My head's about to explode!'

Monday morning I went to Romsey and did a charity shop dash for an hour. The French don’t go in for charity shops; they seem to have an aversion to things second-hand. I miss them. I miss the occasional excitement of coming across the unexpected. In the Oxfam shop, for example, I unearthed a double CD by Weather Report for just under four quid that I hadn’t even known existed. Live & Unreleased. In the Salvation Army shop, I encountered a young auxiliary, who was a dead-ringer for Little Britain’s Vicki Pollard. She kept announcing incoherently that her head was about to explode, because she had to serve me while in the middle of putting some clothes on a rail. I paid her a quid for the three-volumes-in-one of George Melly’s autobiography. And in Help the Aged, of all places, I found a fabulous ska compilation for another quid.

Later that morning, I took my dad to the vast Asda at Chandler’s Ford. He hadn’t been since the last time I took him six or seven months ago. My parents order their groceries on line these days, so they never have to leave their house. But he needed some little round coloured stickers for the wall chart in his office. A red dot, I would think, denotes a day of inactivity. I bought myself that dodgy Scart-to-Scart lead and a pack of recordable DVDs that cost about a fifth of what they would cost in France.

Finally, on the Tuesday morning, I went to Southampton’s ugly city centre to deposit some cheques and to buy presents from the HMV Shop: a boxed set of Norman Wisdom films for my dad’s 84^th birthday; a boxed set of reggae for my sister, who loves Bob Marley, but wouldn’t know her Toots from her roots; a couple of films for the missus; and a couple of ‘modern’ CDs for The Daughter. And a little something for myself.

We sat in the sunshine afterwards, eating exotic wraps from Pret-à-Manger and watching the human beans walking on by. As if to remind me that I was back home, a newspaperman periodically barked out something unintelligible that sounded like a foghorn in the night. I suggested to my sister that it would be an ideal job for someone with Tourette’s syndrome.

After all this shopping, what forgiveness? Fortunately, I’d travelled ultra-light and just about managed to stuff everything into a bag that would fit into the FlyBe hand-luggage gauge. At least the woman with the clipboard would have appreciated my efforts on behalf of the nation’s gross domestic product.

Stop the Week - On Location

2011-05-08T08:20:00.000-07:00

Dedicated as I am to the task of feeding my followers with inconsequential information, I am writing this while far from my desk. I'm in Southampton or thereabouts for a tour of filial duty. The little prop plane from Limoges flew over the city and from my seat by a window I saw the expensive football stadium where the red-and-white striped football team won promotion to the old Division 2 yesterday. A little further on, as it circled over Winchester and swooped down towards the airport at Eastleigh, I watched a game of cricket far below and actually saw a batsman scamper a single. Incredible what one sees from an airplane.
A couple of days before I packed my bags to come away, I drove to Brive to watch a couple of games or sessions or whatever you want to call them of the Pelote Basque world championship at the Fronton Municipal. I know very little about pelota - apart from trying to play one of the varieties with French friends while staying at their holiday home on the Atlantic coast north west of Bordeaux. It was extremely difficult and I was embarrassingly crap. It involved hitting a ball with a kind of stunted wooden paddle against a huge solitary free-standing wall.
The two games I witnessed took place indoors. I sat at the side of the arena on an incredibly uncomfortable bench in among a load of school children (bussed in to create a bit of noise and atmosphere). While the players warmed up, the P.A. system treated the early spectators to some excellent salsa from the likes of Celia Cruz. I warmed at once to the mysterious sport.
The fronton is a three-sided affair, like a cross-between an elongated squash court and a real-tennis arena, marked at intervals with different-coloured lines. All very exotic and rather incomprehensible.
However, when the first game started, it soon became obvious what it was all about. First off was a game of La main nue variety: two teams of two participants whacking a leather ball against the end wall with bare hands bandaged with Elastoplast. It looked merciless and exhausting. In the white shirts and white nylon 'slacks' were two Spaniards, who looked remarkably like brothers. In the red shirts and white 'slacks' were two Venezualans. I feared for them after watching the warm-up and thus it transpired: they were no match for the battle-scarred Spanish 'brothers'.
It is a best-of-three sets affair. The first team to ten points wins the sets. The server runs up to a line not too far from the end wall, smacks the ball with his hand against the wall and hopes that it lands so far back in the court that the receiver hasn't the strength to smack it all the way back. The hapless Venezualan receiver at the back of the court had a stinker and his colleague at the front was rarely involved. The two sets were over in about 20 minutes of one-sided carnage and the Spanish pair, cheered on by a noisy party of schoolchildren all the way from the mother country, waltzed into the semi-final. I was heartened to see that the two teams felt able to embrace each other warmly at the end. No hard feelings, just hard calloused hands.
The second game was one of La Paleta cuir: a much faster affair played with beechwood paddles (about the size of a wooden spoon designed to stir a Lancashire hot-pot for a small community) and a Puckish hard leather puck that travels at roughly the speed of light. We spectators were thankfully shielded from possible harm by two huge safety nets, which were pulled across like curtains. This game, too, features a Spanish team. This time they were in red, but again looked like brothers. Two David Tennant brothers, in fact. Moreover, with their white helmets and their safety goggles, they looked like they once played with Devo ('Are we not men? No we are Basque Pelota players...'). One was a right-hander, the other a south paw: the perfect combination for this game. Once again, I feared for the opposition - a pair of stockier, swarthier Cubans. Since they were clearly underdogs and since Cuba gave unto the world such wonderful music, I rooted for the team in the white shirts.
In this version of the game, it is the first team to 15 points that wins the set. The server plays from the back of the court, scrutinised by three officials in black trousers, light blue polo shirts, crash helmets and goggles, who look for all the world like a team of Securicor men. The puck ricochets off the far wall and has to bounce past one of the lines but not beyond another line towards the back. Otherwise, it's all very similar to the bare-hands variety.
As I had feared, the two Spanish David Tennants strolled through the first set. But spurred on by my vociferous support, the stockier Cubans scrapped and clawed their way back into the game to pinch the second set. Alas, the abbreviated third set was an anti-climax and the Tennant brothers eased their way into the semi-final.
It was all over. There was an hour-long break until the next match, but after over an hour of squatting on the wooden bench, my backside couldn't take any more. I left the bench, I left the tomb, I took three paces through the room - to emerge in the bright sunshine of a warm spring day in Brive la Gaillarde. I drove to the nearby pawn shop to pick up the Sony CD player I had reserved at 25 euros.
And so I can now tell my grandchildren that I once cheered for the underdogs at the 2011 world championship of Basque Pelota. It was an interesting, enjoyable affair, but - to be quite honest with you - I doubt whether I shall be going to the next one four years hence. Particularly not if it's in Venezuala next time.

Tales of the Unexpected

2011-05-05T01:50:00.000-07:00

A number of things helped to lift my spirits this week: the torrential downpours on Tuesday, for example, which replenished our rain butts and restored our lettuce plants; the boost to Obama’s re-election hopes with the unexpected disposal of Osama Bin Laden. Most of all, though, the news that the ex-Queen Mother, bless her little pick-me-ups, liked steel pan music and Jamaican ska.

Three-minute hero? Or my girl Lallipap?

Can you imagine? The old Queen Mum jerking away in time to the staccato riddims of the Skatalites? ‘Charles, it’s granny… You must come over, dear. I’ve just got this wonderful new record by Roland Alphonso… the Skatalites, you know… No, Don Drummond was the trombonist. Didn’t that ridiculous school of yours teach you anything…? Do pop by, won’t you dear? I’ve got this most terrible urge to dance…’

Such little unexpected things restore your faith that there is magic in the quotidian. I revel in the incongruous: the fact that things and people don’t always fit into convenient cubby-holes. Heavens, I’m even prepared to admit I might be wrong when the French fail to conform to stereotype.

It’s a shame in a way that they got rid of their royalty. There’s a lot to be said against a royal family as titular heads of state, but it’s undeniable that the Windsors are a source of endless fascination and, judging by the way that the French have taken William and Kate to their collective Gallic bosom, surrogate royals for my republican brethren. They sure help to boost our national stock. ‘So Breetish’ is a phrase that suggests both mockery and envy.

I look after a quintessentially Breetish couple whenever they visit their apartment in the nearby chateau that provides just one of my many distracting day-jobs. The phrase ‘look after’ is not patronising, but literal. This elderly couple exist on an intellectual version of Cloud 9, thus rendering them as helpless as upturned tortoises in the event of the unexpected. They spend their time here reading and pottering, and when they go back home they pass on to us all the food that they haven’t and all the books that they have consumed.

The biblical rain that I spoke of was accompanied by a storm of apocalyptic proportions. It blew out the couple’s electricity supply. Edgar phoned me on his mobile during the afternoon to ask what they should do. I suggested that they wait a little while to see whether it would be restored and then to check their trip-switch. I didn’t hear anything more and (dangerously) assumed that everything was once more, to use their phrase, tickety-boo.

That evening, while eating the delicious dinner that I had prepared in my role as househusband, the phone kept ringing. It was Edgar each time – until he was cut off each time in the act of explaining, laboriously, what he had done. I managed to gather enough to realise that they were still preparing for their departure the next morning without the aid of power.

So I drove up to the chateau as soon as I had polished my plate and taken it to the sink. The electronically operated gates seemed to work. I checked the other apartments and found that their lights still worked. This suggested… well, to Edgar and Elizabeth it suggested a crisis. I should phone the electrician straight away, if I wouldn’t mind awfully. I asked to see their fuse box. I pushed in the button, which had clearly tripped, and hey presto! Power was restored. They were both as surprised as children watching a conjuring trick. Elizabeth gave me a hug and thanked me for my prestidigitation. Earlier she had emptied out the immobilised dishwasher and washed up in a bowl of cold water. Her paternal husband looked bemused and a little sheepish. This is a man who once helped to run ICI. Oxford-educated, he has written a mighty tome on the life of Admiral Nelson. He is half way through some epic new biography of the poet Houseman. But practicalities has he none.

I was not surprised. However, when we sat down to chat, I heard about the education of their son, James, a successful doctor. I discovered that he was very much into heavy metal as a ‘yoot’. Nowadays he likes opera and he will go with them to Glyndebourne. But he still listens to heavy metal. Now it would have been truly wonderful to discover at this point that Edgar and Elizabeth were fans of Metallica and Black Sabbath. Alas, they are not. But… but their son taught them to value the music of Elton John.

I drove home that evening with a big smile on my face. I haven’t been a fan of the dumpy Sir Elton for many decades, but I had an endearing image of Edgar and Elizabeth driving back to the U.K. and singing along to ‘Benny and the Jets’ or, heaven forfend (dear boy), ‘Saturday Night’s All Right for Fighting’. When next they’re here, in July, I should try them with a little Laurel Aitken. If it worked for the Queen Mum, why not for my ageing aristocratic couple?

‘Skanga, skanga… Ya stick it up, ya stick it up…’

Stop the Week 23

2011-05-01T06:44:00.000-07:00

Growing up in 1960s Belfast, I remember the excitement when my dad brought back a green pepper from Smithfield market in the seedier part of the city centre. Some time later, I think I sampled an avocado pear and didn’t think much of it, foolish child that I was.

As with food, so with music. Just as peppers from the plastic tunnels of Spain and the greenhouses of Holland are the standard fare of supermarkets these days from Falmouth to Fishguard, so we have assimilated music from Benin to Viet Nam and cellophane-wrapped it as ‘world music’.

In 1960s Belfast, music came courtesy of Irish showbands, or from across the Irish Sea, or – if your ears were a little more open – from across the North Atlantic Ocean. Otherwise, there was only the occasional aberration like The Singing Nun, who hailed I think from Belgium. And Nina and Frederick, who derived from the principality of Denmark.

This week, I received a wonderful double CD of 80s World Music Classics courtesy of the Nascente label, which seems dedicated to re-packaging great music from all over the globe at a most reasonable price. The compilation was inspired by dear old Charlie Gillett, who died fairly recently at an age when he would have just been getting used to having a free bus pass. Charlie was a lovely unassuming man who wrote the classic tome about American R&B, The Sound of the City. He used to host a late-night music show on Channel Four with some daft dingbat, who couldn’t string a sentence together without making you cringe with embarrassment. I think she’s still alive.

All the classics of that exciting era of discovery are here. All the tracks that my friend, Pete, discovered while working as a teacher in the Gambia and thereafter packaged on a series of cassette tapes christened The Africa Series, which he copied selflessly for his friends. Before those tapes, my own limited idea of world music consisted of Jamaican reggae and Nigerian music courtesy of Osibisa and King Sunny Adé (whom Island tried to market as ‘the African Bob Marley’).

They’re all here. There’s a track from Salif Keita’s album, Soro, which introduced me to the extraordinary angelic voice of the albino minstrel from Mali. There’s a track from the first of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares albums, which acquainted western listeners with the cademces and slightly unsettling harmonies of Bulgarian female choral music. There’s Gilberto Gil’s original ‘Todo Menina Baiana’, which was covered, bizarrely, by Georgie Fame and produced, even more bizarrely, by Stock, Aitken and Waterman. There’s some jit jive from the Bhundu Boys of Zimbabwe, who treated my wife and me at the Leadmill, Sheffield (blissfully unaware as we were at that time of the misery that would befall that nation) to some of the most joyful music we had ever witnessed. There’s one of the tracks that broke Cheb Khaled in the UK, the moustachioed Algerian rai singer with the cheeky grin. There’s…

'Forward in all directions!'

Enough already! Save to mention the 3 Mustaphas 3, whose track ‘Linda Linda’ concludes the first of these two succulent CDs (‘Don’t say that word!’). Supposedly the nephews of Uncle Patrel Mustapha, Hijaz Mustapha, Sabah Habas Mustapha, Houzam Mustapha, Niaveti Ill et al were all pseudonyms of good old British musicians, who were surely the musical equivalents of the legendary music hall sand-dancers, Wilson, Keppel and Betty. Their slogan ‘Forward in all directions!’ reflected an ability to play convincingly music from all over the globe and to mix genres (such as Country music sung in Japanese) with reckless abandon. Unsurprisingly, such fez-wearing lunatic genius earned them the patronage of John Peel the Divine.

Anyway, if you want the best overview of the burgeoning world music scene in the 1980s at the best price this side of Pound Stretchers, buy this handsome CD. There. I’ve done my bit to justify my promotional copy. If you’ll excuse, I must arise and go now, and go to the great chateau of Curemonte (‘un des plus beaux villages de France’) for a concert of jazz this evening. It’s a tribute to Oscar Peterson. I know nothing about the pianist nor his group, but listening to jazz inside a beautifully restored medieval chateau appeals to my bourgeois sense of discretion.

Besides, we’re not yet in high summer (despite the weather), when the cultural cup overfloweth, so you have to grab such offerings with both hands during the rest of the year. ‘Wish me luck, as I wave you goodbye…’

Little Victories

2011-04-28T10:40:00.000-07:00

I really don’t like our green metal letterbox at the top of our lane. It’s not that I’m offended by its ugliness (because I sited it cleverly among the undergrowth), but I find the tension of opening it almost too much to bear.

These days, people don’t write letters; they send you an e-mail or post something on your Facebook wall. Not like it was when I were a lad. Nay, when I were working in Lord Harrowby’s stately home as an assistant archivist and later, when I were a young student in an Exeter Hall of Residence, the daily post was a matter of keen anticipation. There might be a letter from a (grand)parent, a sibling or a school friend (even, dare I suggest, a girlfriend).

But there are never any nice letters in our green metal letterbox. The only letters that we get are the heart-wrenching variety from charitable concerns, asking for funds, or the unintelligible official type from some arm of the insatiable Trésor Public, usually attached to a demand for payment. Otherwise, it’s publicités from supermarkets or gardening emporia and – just occasionally, if I’ve been a very good boy and I’m very lucky – a CD to review or simply to listen to.

Consequently, I tend not to go to our green metal letterbox for days at a stretch. C.f. the telephone. I let the messages pile up until the system overloads for fear that there might be a message demanding action. However, there comes a time when action must trump inaction.

Such a moment came at the beginning of these idyllic Easter holidays. We decided to take the dog out for a walk en famille at the end of the day. I brought along the key to the letterbox, as I strongly suspected the silent but powerful presence of an electricity bill – lying there on the Ho Chi Minh ant-trail that meanders into the box, over the contents and out again.

Heat pump, heat pump, measur-ing the energy...

And not just any old electricity bill, but The Bill. The big one, the bomb. Winter’s reckoning. This was our first winter not only with the new Mitsubishi heat pump, but also with an electric element grafted onto the side of the solar immersion heater to provide us with hot water. The awful gas boiler that had made the last few winters a personal misery was history.

We had a quick sweepstake on the way up the drive. I thought €300 would be a realistic figure. I would take that; it would still represent a saving on the three quarters of a tank load of propane that we customarily consumed. The Good Wife of La Poujade Basse, being an eternal optimist, thought €200. The Daughter, being a complete innocent in the adult world of utility bills, reckoned on a mere €100 (snort, guffaw).

Being the man – the hunter and bill-gatherer – I took it upon myself to open the envelope. ‘And the winner of this year’s prize of the Official Jury is…’ The tension was unbearable. I saw a figure ‘2’. 200, good. I could go for that. Then I noticed that there was a minus sign beside the digits. It was -€200! God damn it, EDF owed us money. So it was true what they claimed about their heat pump. This was the company that doesn’t lie. It really does use little more electricity than a fridge.

Not only had we cut our winter fuel bill by about 70%, but it was also reliable heat and hot water. By my calculations, we had kept ourselves warm this winter and provided enough hot water to clean the family for about €250. We hopped and skipped our way to the communal bins and back. Even Alf barked to see such collective joy.

It sounds a bit pathetic now that I re-read it. A lot of fuss and nonsense over an electricity bill. But in a world where the news seems unrelentingly bad, that minus figure represented a little victory: a triumph over adversity and the crushing power of the utilities companies in particular and unfeeling capitalism in general.

Needless to say it made our evening. We opened a bottle of wine and drank to the health of Mitsubishi. It helped to make our Easter. I felt so reckless and gay that I ate an entire Lindt dark chocolate bunny while watching Brokeback Mountain. I confess, however, that it hasn’t really helped to eradicate my phobia about our green metal letterbox. I went there today for the first time in a week and found… a review disc. And it’s a cracker! Things are looking up.

Stop the Week 22

2011-04-24T05:07:00.000-07:00

Up until April 2011, I had managed to avoid Private Benjamin. Then a friend, whose opinions on film I normally respect, suggested that it was a smashing movie and that I really ought to give it a chance.

Well, it was directed by the same guy who made the delightful Hollywood Cowboy, with Jeff Bridges as an ingenuous wannabee scriptwriter, who talks in clichés and somehow finds his way to Hollywood. When he sees the Pacific Ocean for the first time, the voice in his head utters the immortal words, ‘The wide Pacific…’

So, misguidedly, I recorded Private Benjamin when Film Four aired it. Still more misguidedly, I suggested to my wife and daughter that we watch it with our supper one evening last week. I can only assume that my friend must have been swayed by an infatuation with Goldie Hawn.

It started promisingly, with Goldie the spoilt Jewish princess getting married to the overbearing, but dull-as-ditchwater Albert Brooks, then cutting dramatically to the aftermath of his funeral. Harry Dean Stanton signs Goldie up for the army with a promise of an easy life. Thereafter, despite the presence of the splendid Eileen Brennan (who played the earthy waitress in The Last Picture Show) as Private Benjamin’s authoritarian nemesis, it degenerated into the most vacuous pap imaginable. I sat and watched to the bitter end, as I felt guilty about subjecting my family to it. There was even a smooth-talking Sacha Distel lookalike, who enters the equation as a potential second husband. Goldie realises the folly of her ways and jilts him at the altar, but I didn’t care and certainly didn’t cheer (as I do every time when Katherine Ross chooses Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin at the end of The Graduate).

Gonna crawl to the sod-busters' ball

Despite the stain on my credibility, I regained sufficient confidence during the week to propose that we all watch Shane when Film Four showed it yesterday to mark Easter Saturday. Shane helped to create the template for just about every Western cliché possible, so you know exactly what’s going to happen (although I was surprised that the Swedish ‘sodbuster’ didn’t get shot simply for being Swedish), but the film never fails to delight. Particularly when it’s viewed with a bar of 70% Easter chocolate.

For all that the camera tries to lie, however, you can’t help but notice how improbably small Alan Ladd is as the hero, even when dressed up to the nines in buckskin. He and the miniature Veronica Lake were truly a match made in heaven. In Shane, the love interest resides with Jean Arthur, one of those actresses – like Judy Holliday and Dianne Wiest – whose voices alone can make me melt at the knees and come over all unnezzizairy. The big question at the end of Shane, which The Daughter posed, is the extent to which Shane is wounded in the shoot-out with Jack Palance’s smirking villainous hired gun and the cattlemen who hire him. My wife, the eternal optimist, reassured her that it was only a flesh wound and that Shane will simply ride off to find more settlers to help. Being an eternal pessimist, I can’t help but feel that Shane rides off to die in the saddle – having helped Van Heflin and the others rid the town of evil, so they can make a genuinely democratic community for all but black people and native-American injuns.

My cultural activities haven’t been entirely passive. I’ve been busy drafting an article to promote the summer show of our friends, Keith and Miranda Payne, who have boldly – and some might suggest recklessly – converted their barn into an art gallery. For the last few years they have been testing the theory that fine art and rural communities can co-exist. This year they are putting together a stunning show based on their travels to India, with gorgeous materials, traditional miniature and tribal paintings and the work of three local artists who have painted in the sub-continent. The Paynes are under no illusion that original art can tempt the indigenous local community to draw apart their tightly-pulled purse strings in order to extract some euros. Unlike many, they are prepared to measure the success of their venture in terms other than financial. It behoves me, therefore, to do whatever I can to ensure that sufficient people will come and see and make the exhibition the talk of the Lot this summer.

Now if you’ll excuse me, being Easter Sunday, I must get back to the weekend’s principal cultural activity of assessing the respective merits of different chocolate bars and bunnies. ‘Shane! Come back Shane! You’ve forgotten your bar of chocolate to help sustain you for your final ride into the backdrop of the mighty Rocky Mountains!’

Schiste Happens

2011-04-21T02:48:00.000-07:00

Despite what I might have said in a previous despatch, on Sunday I went to Cahors to demonstrate. My body said no, but my head said yes. It was high time to take part in another manifestation.

It may smack of Not-In-My-Back-Yard-ism, but I don’t want the privateers of the petro-chemical industry despoiling this beautiful department – or any other department, beautiful or not – in the search for gaz de schiste.

For those of you who haven’t yet heard or read of this latest crime against the natural world cooked up by the Money Men and their tame back-handed politicians, let me explain.

Someone somewhere has dreamed up the wheeze of drilling bore-holes into the rock beneath the soil, then ‘fracking’ the sub-strata by pumping at high pressure millions of gallons of precious drinkable water mixed with a toxic compound of lethal chemicals in order to break up the shale and release all the bubbles of ‘natural’ gas, which can then be brought to the surface, stored in tanks and sold to the general public as a miraculous clean energy.

Except of course it’s about as clean as bio-diesel. But don’t let that stop the government of France’s diminutive president with the stack heels and shifty eyes from granting licenses to companies to go off and undertake explorative studies all over the Massif Central and its foothills. This sort of thing has happened already in the U.S.A. – with the predictably catastrophic environmental consequences. Surprise, surprise: the aquifers have been poisoned, the indigenous wildlife killed off and the landscape rendered lunar. I couldn’t bear to watch the documentary, Gasland, when shown at the local cinema, but reputedly it shows polluted tap water being set on fire.

So I persuaded my friend Adrian, the celebrated tree surgeon, to come with me on Sunday afternoon. It was a beautiful hot spring day and we headed south on the A20, which cuts through the kind of lush landscape that is under threat. We speculated about the type of human bean that could a) dream up such an idea in the first place, b) pursue money with such appetite and sangfroid and c) live with himself when the results of all this reckless greed are documented. It was ever thus, I suppose…

'Meet on the bridge, we're gonna meet on the bridge...'

Friends who dined with us the evening before told me that we would be assembling by Cahor’s famous old bridge – the Pont Valentré – at 3 pm. Despite the fact that we passed likely demonstrators all heading in the opposite direction, I managed to persuade my friend to follow me all the way down to the river. There was no one there, bar the odd Sunday promenader.

So we walked all the way back up the central artery, lined with gendarmes in their Sunday-best uniforms, to the big car park in the centre of town by the grand prefectural building. Incredibly, the first people we spotted in the human throng were the friends who had (presumably unintentionally) misled me. In fact, they didn’t stay long. Keith, an artist who has lived long enough to understand the way of the world, muttered something about the same old crowd and their dogs-on-string. ‘This lot aren’t going to frighten the bureaucrats. Where’s the press, man? Where’s the press?’

Nevertheless, Adrian and I filtered into the crowd on its way down the main street. We fell in behind a gaggle dressed as Revolutionary sans-culottes: a man playing a fife, another beating a drum and a couple of women shaking their home-made maracas. We turned left into one of the town’s narrow medieval side streets, which took us down to the monumental abbey. It would have been the perfect opportunity for a bit of Met-style ‘kettling’, but the crowd was well ordered and the gendarmes looked rather more amiably insouciant than usual.

Adrian recognised an old boy with a thick white beard and an anti-nuclear T-shirt, who looked like Ben Gunn reincarnated as an eco warrior. We stopped for a quick chat and discovered that there were roughly 3,000 souls present. Not bad, but not that good given the gravity of the situation. Then we fell in with our jovial fifer once more and followed the crowd down to the river Lot and along almost as far as the old bridge, where all the speechifying started.

I am not and never have been one for rhetoric. Adrian wanted to hang around on the pretence of people-watching (whereas I knew that he was on the look-out for his latest heart’s delight), but I persuaded him to return to the car, so we could beat the traffic back out of Cahors. In truth, though, I had been long enough out of my nest for one day and I simply wanted to get back home.

There were no military-style roadblocks out of the town. Nor was I hauled out of the car and beaten by gendarmes on the look out for dirty anarchists. As Adrian slumbered in the passenger seat and I steered the trusty Berlingo northwards, I wondered whether what we had done would make any difference. Perhaps not, but at least we had, to translate the French literally, ‘manifested ourselves’.

I was heartened to see that today’s Guardian was carrying a story about gaz de schiste and other demonstrations occurring around France. There is still hope. But what happens when hope runs out? I have to ask myself, punk, am I committed enough to get myself a rifle and learn to be a sniper? Whoops, there goes another Money Man…