A Writer’s Lot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.