May: Be Nice, Be Kind

Although a healthy dose of culture is just what the doctor orders from time to time, it's always good to be back in the parallel world of what a friend calls 'Shangri-La'. For all the interminable to-dos, there's a calmative sense of unreality about the place. Only the other morning, for instance, Daphne and I were on the return leg of the first of our twice-daily round trip when we encountered the sturdy carthorse from the field by the bins clip-clopping ponderously down the road towards us, followed by a very slow-moving car. I'd been chatting to the poor solitary creature only 20 minutes prior to this revelation. Perhaps the electric barrier had failed and he had decided to wander off in search of companionship.

I remember a huge muscular horse pulling a milk float in our north London suburb during my earliest years, but once they went electric the sight of a horse in an urban street became as rare as rag-and-bone men. Despite the reassurance of the woman in the car that the owner had been contacted, I didn't see my redoubtable mate since crossing him on the road. The awful thought was that he might have clip-clopped his ponderous way down to a main road where the drivers are less patient than the woman in the blue car.

So... we'd been talking for years about a trip to the Brighton Festival in May. Alack, there wasn't much on of any note in the very year we chose to go. The organisers published their programme late and we had to book early to avoid disappointment and obtain train tickets at a sensible price. At least a very long train journey for two is part of the package, offering a rare chance for mutual snacking and protracted reading. Having decided last month that I could and would re-read E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, I had to ingest it in 20-page bursts. So intense it was that only by interspersing calming doses of MP3 did I recover enough mental strength for the next exhausting chapter.

We broke our journey in Crystal Palace: a suburb of south London now voted the best place to live in the Metropolis. Or some such specious accolade. We stayed in one of two houses in the street with a yellow front door. Curiously, the other house belongs to recent friends from the parallel world of rural France. Asked by our hostess to select from the huge menu of culture, we opted for the new Stanley Kubrick exhibition at the old Commonwealth Institute in Holland Park, now the refurbished Design Museum. A nice building, but the permanent collection was a little sparse. No such paucity, though, when it came to the Kubrick. We went round it in three hours, only because we were all flagging. With a pinch of meth-amphetamine, we might easily have managed five. So much to see, so much to read, so much to ponder. Seeing his extraordinary attention to detail made it clear just why Leon Vitali – the subject of a fascinating documentary on Kubrick's 'film worker' – would devote his prime years to slaving for an artistic genius. 

The next day, the three of us went down to Brighton by train. In my childhood, when TV programmes were also sparse, they would fill gaps in the schedule with little film-ettes, like the potter's wheel that turned a lump of clay before your very eyes into something recognisably pot-like. My favourite was London to Brighton by train in a minute. The viewer rode with the driver in his cab and journey flashed by at the speed of a passing Superman. 

At Crystal Palace station, we witnessed a young American father of three make an asshole of himself by berating the ticket vendor on account of some credit card that wouldn't function. His three children watched their father – in shorts over Lycra leggings, I should add – with bewilderment, while their mother (presumably accustomed to such dull-witted demonstrations) said nothing. I had to bite my tongue. Now look here, my good man. I know you Americans think you own the world, but what sort of example do you think you are giving to your children? With more confidence in my physical prowess, I would have swung into action and nutted the tosser. As it was, we behaved instead with compensatory civility to the man behind the safety glass. An African gentleman, I believe. Later, on the train, I looked at our tickets and realised that I'd probably paid far too much for our return journey. Keeping up appearances can be a costly business.

Brighton has changed, terribly changed, in the 30+ years since I met The Good Wife there back in the year of the great hurricane, which ripped through the town and uprooted many of its finest trees. For a start, it's officially a city now. Back in my day, it was a good place to be a student, but it wasn't as it is now Studentsville, UK. Every ten paces, there's a vintage clothes shop or a vegan café, or both. The streets throng with youthful and seemingly privileged life. There were and presumably still are two infamous sink estates, but they were generally out of sight and out of mind until I went to work in the Unemployment Benefit Office. Whatever possessed me? Nowadays, you can't escape the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. In trying to avoid their eyes, you risk tripping over all the homeless people cocooned in crusty old sleeping bags and propped up against shop windows. 

Many are bivouacked along the main shopping street that runs down to the Pavilion from the Clock Tower. There are two big banners suspended across it for the duration of the Festival. One says 'BE NICE' and the other says 'BE KIND'. Lovely sentiments in a world increasingly without compassion, but how do you give alms to one and not the others? Late one evening, down near the seafront, I witnessed a gang of foxes darting past traffic and down side streets in their quest for something to eat. It struck me that these poor lean creatures, like the human caterpillars on the streets, are the pariahs of today's society.

My friend Tony was a nice man, and very kind. He died in 2017 of a virulent cancer after spending the last decade of his life in a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis. According to his widow, he remained positive to the end and barely ever expressed a word of self-pity. I saw him a few weeks before the end and could hardly bear to look upon his face and body ravaged by terminal illness. We stayed in their tardis in the Lanes. Although you walk straight from the street into their sitting room, the narrow house goes up and up, with shelves on every available wall space crammed with Tony's cultural artefacts. We slept in a room with swathes of Frank Zappa CDs and books by and on William Burroughs. Tony was a beatnik at heart, who should really have grown a beard and recited poetry with cymbals on his fingers.

With few Festivalities in prospect – other than a visit to a synagogue near the now decrepit Hippodrome where Max Miller would perform his 'blue' routines, and an exhibition of Stephen Jones' outlandish hats in the Royal Pavilion, the most outlandish architectural folly of them all – we took The Daughter and Min the Schnauzer with us on the train to Hassocks for a walk to the woodland cemetery where Tony now lies at rest in the lee of the Downs. We sprinkled petals of flowers past their display date on his modest grave and Carol lit some incense sticks while we stood and quietly contemplated the meaning of life. Afterwards, we walked up to see the Jack and Jill windmills close-up for the first time. Tilley, Min and I later ran back down the steep grassy slope as if in a scene from a French film with Jeanne Moreau.

The walk back to the station took us past the mouth of the tunnel that swallows speeding trains and spits them out at the other end. Another landmark and another folly, the tunnel entrance has been embellished with the facade of a fortress, crenellations and all. That moment just before the plunge into darkness was probably my favourite part of the old monochrome dash from London to Brighton. It is, I realised, an incredibly busy line.

'It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry.' From what cranial recess did Dylan dredge up such a title? I don't know, but our eventual return trip to France took a train or three. We arrived in Brive at midnight on the dot. We were both all read out from hours on the parallel rails. I finished both The Book of Daniel and Nick Kent's memoir of a rock journalist, Apathy For The Devil, grabbed as light relief in a Brighton charity shop. You don't get to read like that even here in the parallel world. 

Now I've embarked on Dig Infinity!, a biography of Lord Buckley from Tony's collection. It's a rambling, discursive, stompin' 'oral history' with contributions from the likes of Robin Williams, Ken Kesey and George Harrison. Since it was my learned friend who hipped me to His Lordship, the jive-talking raconteur, it seemed the most appropriate choice on being asked to select a memento from his library. Buckley was a nice man, apparently, if as crazy as a finger-poppin' coot. No one had a bad word to say about him. Not even Ed Sullivan, whose spendthrift friend reputedly owed him $300,000 at the time of his death. That's one hell of a lot of money even now, and quite some test of friendship. 

By the way, my friend the redoubtable horse has been found, I have now discovered. Some kind soul has thought to put him in a bigger field, with a herd of Limousin cows. They don't seem to have much in common and the presence of so many four-footed females doesn't appear to have stirred the creature's mighty stallion-hood, but at least he's got company. Other than flies.

Let me finish this month's protracted ramble with some germane words of wisdom from Buckley's 'church of the living swing'. 'I'll tell you what we have to do, you see. We have to spread love... People of this nation have got to learn to be kinder, more gracious... They must be more generous. The people who have things who are living next to people who haven't got things should give them some of the things that they have. We have to learn to give more. We have to learn to tighten, to magnetize this nation by love in this coming fight that we're in.'

April: Lightly Simmered Weeds

Only the other day, I was driving along the bottom road in the direction of Brive. The SNCF vans were out in force for the work on the level crossings along this single-track stretch of railway between St. Denis lès Martel and Quatre Routes du Lot. Some hugely expensive and ultimately doomed operation, no doubt. Between the raised railway line and my car, I spied the little bent man I see from time to time, walking determinedly with the rolling gait that comes with his deformity, and with a furled umbrella tucked under his arm. He walks at quite a lick for someone with such a natural disadvantage. But where he walks to and where he walks from, I don't know. 

Sometimes I've seen him wearing a 'hi-vis' waistcoat, but not recently. Maybe he has shed it since the gilets jaunes have brought the accessory into disrepute. I wonder about his life. I get the feeling that he goes out on a long circular walk every day, come what may and whatever the weather. He's either invalided out of or retired from full-time employment. What else does he do in life, this man on the road to nowhere? Is he visiting a paramour? Does he have a wife at home, waiting to greet him on his return? 

I'm home, dear! J
Ah, just in time for lunch. Did you enjoy your circular walk?
Not bad, not bad. I stopped off at the gypsy camp for a chin-wag. What's for lunch?
Belly pork and frites with a little salad composé fresh from our garden.
Sounds delicious. Merci, ma chère.

This is a dangerous time of life. Next birthday, I will be 65 – which will make me unofficially a pensioner, now that the official age has been raised to 66 plus. Just as 21 has remained the landmark even after the legal coming-of-age was downgraded to 18 a few decades back, for me and my generation it will ever be 65. I remember when both of my grandfathers retired. One minute they travelled to the City to work each day, and the next minute they were at home full-time. Pottering in the garden, solving crosswords, serving drinks, going to Sainsbury's and such like. I probably asked at the time What's retired? and was probably told that it meant that you didn't have to go out to work anymore. So I might have deduced from this that between the ages of 21 and 65 a man worked and after that he got to do nothing of any import.

When I passed 60, friends from the old home gave me a plastic cover for my Sheffield bus pass when the time came. Later this year, I can apply for something to go inside it. Not that there'll be anything for free in this country, though. The French are notoriously 'thrifty', for all the recent promises of our young president in his latest fruitless attempt to boost his ratings.

Freebies aside, I am more immediately concerned by the dilemma of when legitimately one can stop focusing on the future and derive succour from the past. This was triggered specifically by a novel. After many hints and much persuasion, I persuaded The Good Wife to read The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow: a brilliant novel based on the public execution of the Rosenbergs during the anti-Communist US witch hunts of the 1950s. She loved it. So I've been thinking, Can I now at this time of my life ignore what's still to be read to re-visit a novel that I last read over 40 years ago? A novel that actually prompted me to speak up for once during an academic seminar. A novel that has been on my list – which includes things like John Kennedy Toole's madcap A Confederacy of Dunces – of books that I want to read at least once more before it's time to go.

Although neither requires such an investment of time remaining, it's a similar thing with music and film. For years I've hoarded re-viewings of things like The Wild Bunch for that mythical day when I finally knuckle down to some serious creative work tempered by leisure devoted to the best of the past. Musically, I am still driven by the search for the lost chord: that quest to find something new that will blow my socks off, rather than admitting that I have all that I can possibly listen to and simply re-cycling what has already blown my socks off first time around. My brother is given to ask me, How long would it actually take you to listen to every piece of music on your shelves? He knows it irks me. You might as well tell a junkie to stop because the memory of the first fix ought to suffice. But he's right. Probably about 10 or more years. Non-stop.

So shall I finally give in to temptation and read that Doctorow novel again? Après ça, perhaps, le déluge. Will it represent a line drawn in the sand, and if so does it suggest that one's time is effectively up? The challenge of old age, it seems to me, is to ward off ossification by continuing to learn and to embrace new experiences. Without that, the Brexit mentality is all that's left. Staying active rather than passive is surely the thing. 

Hell. Do you know what? I'm going to re-read The Book of Daniel and be damned. If I follow it with A Confederacy of Dunces or a repeat viewing of The Wild Bunch (the director's cut arguably doesn't count), I'll know I'm in trouble. But maybe it won't come to that. Perhaps I'll be able simply to read it, discuss it and then get on with something new until the next time I'm overpowered by a need for re-discovery. Ah! Maybe the crux of the matter lies in that very word: re-discovery; an active not a passive impulse. So perhaps I'll be OK after all. Just so long as I don't start taking myself off every day on a circular head-down walk with no particular place to go.

I'm home, sweetheart!
Oh good. Just in time for lunch.
Mmm. What are we having today?
A velouté of lightly simmered weeds from the garden.

March: At the Seaside with Ray Davies

Now that her six-month Parisian purgatory has come to a blessed end, our daughter has returned to the parental fold. Her land of soya milk and Manuka honey. We celebrated her homecoming with a week-long seaside holiday. But the subtext was our dog's pleasure. After four years of life on earth, we felt it was time to introduce her to sea and sand. Since she loves swimming in the Dordogne, she'd surely love the Atlantic.

I took with me a weighty biography of Ray Davies that I picked up in the Oxfam bookshop during a recent short stay in Romsey, Hants. A trip to see the Old One – who's still ticking along very nicely at nearly 92. A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan. I'll say it's complicated. Like many an artist before and since, Ray Davies is clearly a complex character. I always liked him, right from the early days. I must have done, to stand up in front of the class in primary school and sing an unaccompanied version of 'You Really Got Me'. Or was it 'All Day and All of the Night'? I caught them live in concert as a student at Exeter university, performing the Schoolboys In Disgrace album. I remember nothing much about it, which probably means that I was stoned or the music – like much of the Kinks' music after their late-flowering 'Lola'  – was rather forgettable. Even my mother was seduced by his gap-toothed smirk into wanting to paint his portrait (as she was by Charlie Watts' egregious bone structure). Latterly, I've liked to think of Ray sitting quietly and largely unrecognised in his favourite north London café, busy watching the world go by and penning songs for his occasional solo albums. 

But reading biographies can be fraught if you're looking for validation of your esteem. It's a compelling read and, although I'm quite a slow reader, with time on my hand I devoured hundreds of pages. For 'complex character', read moody, spiteful, callous, controlling, thoughtless, vindictive, provocative, capricious, bloody-minded and so tight-fisted that, as the author suggests, he made Rod Stewart look like a philanthropist. And this, I hasten to add, is not a character-assassination, but a balanced account based on the words of witnesses. The cheeky chappie who wrote some of the most endearing songs of the Sixties has morphed into a cantankerous miser. As for brother Dave, far from being a harmless mischief-maker, he appears to have been at the time a violent, hedonistic lout. 

There would appear to be certain similarities with Our Kid's former boss. She it was who mainly made her six-month internship such a purgatorial affair. It was, she described, a case of The Devil Wears Prada to the power of three. Clearly, it's a toxic industry. Stress rules the catwalks. Stress is no doubt the reason why her boss behaved so abominably, and why the minions in her department behaved so sneakily in turn. Stress begets stress. Significantly, when the boss was away on a buying trip, everyone else relaxed a little and even showed signs of consideration towards their fellows. 

Like Ray Davies, she is doubtless very good at what she does, but when it comes to running a team, she's a disaster. Spiteful, personal and hurtful to her underlings, she has probably had no training in (wo)man-management and her own bosses presumably believe that subject-matter expertise predicates emotional intelligence. The progeny's perfectionism can be infuriating and I can imagine that there might be certain issues around working with her under pressure, but she's a sensitive soul and her boss's behaviour was very upsetting. In her regular telephone updates around 8.30pm – when her chief's departure meant that finally the minions could finally pack up and go – she described how the woman would pace around the office with a cigarette, muttering to herself and ranting at her charges in a way that suggested that her work/life balance was so far out of kilter that her health could be at risk. So just as Ray Davies turned The Kinks into the sickest 'beat group' in swinging London, Our Kid's boss turned her office into a kind of war zone – which puts me in mind of that wonderful line from Dr. Strangelove: 'Gentlemen, you can't fight here; this is the war room!' Or words to that effect.

Anyway, she survived the ordeal – thanks partly to her mother's patient coaching on the telephone. I passed on my own parental advice founded on the years of living dangerously in an office, observing how human nature can be perverted in such an unnatural environment. 'Try not to take it personally. They take it out on you because they can and because it makes them feel better about themselves.' Life-lesson #1: Everyone looks for someone weaker to kick in order to feel better about him- or herself.

It's a lesson that you have to learn for yourself, and the fact that the final few weeks of her tenure got a little better suggests that she was beginning to assume it. Helped by her boss's more frequent business excursions, she began to experience something akin to enjoyment. The satisfaction of a role, routine and (modest) reward. So much so that her mother's counselling sessions became more concerned with 'closure'. While not necessarily hoping to leave with a hullabaloo, Our Kid didn't want to go off like a damp squib. Some kind of acknowledgement that she'd served her time with fortitude and done a pretty good job in spite of everything would suffice.

My therapeutic wife would have got her banishing negative thoughts and focusing instead on some kind of positive outcome. And so, perhaps consequently, it came to pass that the team sprang a surprise party for her on the Wednesday evening. The champagne normally reserved for end-of-show jollies flowed liberally and she was presented with an enormous bouquet of flowers and a gold necklace from an in-house collection. The colleague who frequently pulled rank on Tilley even promised her a good reference whenever the time came. So she wasn't so useless; they loved her after all. 

Which only goes to demonstrate that you shouldn't necessarily take those slings and arrows personally. I wonder whether Pete Quaife, the bass-playing Kink, was able to rise above the fact that his employer was the only member of the group, the road crew and the management who didn't come to visit him in hospital after a severe car accident when returning from a gig. No wonder he was the first of the original four to quit.

While I raced through my book, the 'girls' enjoyed some much needed R&R beside the seaside, beside the sea. Royan is quite a featureless place, but it does boast some beautiful coves or conches, where Daphne soon revelled in the phenomenon of waves. On the first of our maritime walks, I spotted a monument to the 'Cockleshell Heroes' of Operation Frankton, who set off from there in the dead of a winter's night in folding kayaks on their perilous mission of sabotage. They rowed down the Gironde estuary and planted limpet mines on cargo ships moored in Bordeaux. Only two of the commandos returned and I believe that Trevor Howard was not one of them. Don't take this for gospel, as it is the product of my suspect French translation and hazy recollections of José Ferrer's adventure film. 

Royan was bombed by the Allies at the end of the war in Europe: a tragic and disastrous misunderstanding that cost hundreds of human lives and flattened the old town. Appropriately, perhaps, the blunder is commemorated by one of the most brutal pieces of modern architecture that I've ever seen: a concrete cathedral built in the approximate shape of a sailing ship. Maybe it looks better from afar than it does from close up. Royan today is an unlovely hotchpotch of styles. The best houses tend to be the very white and very modern flat-roofed affairs with stainless steel balcony rails that overlook the sea and betray the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright. (Probably cost a fortune.) 

As do the vets. It's a well-heeled and aging populace, and many a retiree seems to have a pampered pet or two – so the vets charge accordingly. On Day 2, our Terrierdor came down with another dose of bloody diarrhoea – awkwardly as we were crossing the promenade towards the biggest and no doubt busiest of the beaches. Try scooping that up with a plastic doggy-bag. We did the pragmatic thing and scarpered. The vet was a nice man, who charged roughly double what they do in Martel. He prescribed some medication, which Daphne took stoically several times a day for the rest of our holiday. Daily examination of her stools proved the efficacy of the prescription and the value of the innocuous butternut squash that I prepared for her meals.

Our dog recovered quickly and derived maximum enjoyment from sun, sea and sand. So that was the main thing. And oh! how we laughed to see her gambol on the shore and retrieve sticks thrown into the surf. I laughed until the final full day of our stay, when I 'did my back in'. It hasn't happened during the three or four years since I've been doing yoga. Now my pride is severely dented. I put it down to the dog. I reckon I took her out too early that morning to throw tennis balls on the grassy knoll. The weather was beautiful all week and people were out sunning themselves on the beach – in March, for God's sake. But at least the mornings and evenings were suitably bracing. Perhaps I should have been wearing a brace. All that bending down to pick up retrieved tennis balls before my body had warmed up properly.

 

Or stress. The stress of being away and visualising all those jobs that awaited my return. One theory, too, was that Daphne's intestinal turmoil was due to the stress of seeing us pack our bags on the day we went on holiday. Unless it was something that the arch scavenger scavenged. Stress has a funny way of affecting dogs and humans. With a hundred or so pages of my book to go, I'm hoping that Ray Davies will rise above his apparent stress and redeem himself somewhat in old age. For the next few days, I'll have little more to do than read. The meadow may be overgrown, but this man cannot mow it. Pardon the culinary pun, but I am for now a crocked Monsieur.