Late August 2024: An Adventure Before Dementia part 2

‘How’s your cognition?’

My mother-in-law didn’t know how to answer the assistant manager’s question. Well, you wouldn’t really at 95 – nor might you at 45. At this point of her induction to her new care home on the Wednesday morning, the second and final Wednesday of our mission of mercy to England, her favourite son-in-law, her only son-in-law, stepped in to offer a translation. The Outlaw managed to answer satisfactorily. That’s to say, she wasn’t completely dotty yet. Judging by the comportment of some of the other residents, she soon might be.

The previous Wednesday, the Good Wife and I had managed with Jim’s help down the road to get her out of her giant reclining armchair and into a wheelchair and then lift her in said chair down the front steps and kind of slide her into the passenger seat of the hire-Merc without incident. Once she was safely buckled in, we set off for the care home: a preliminary visit to see whether she would approve of the place and agree to a move to what we all secretly hoped would be (quite soon) her final resting place.

We went via the nearby army target range. During the first week of our visit, I remember hearing the apparent sound of my printer cleaning itself – as it does sometimes. Since the printer was at home in France, I was probably mistaken. It was only later on that someone in the village mentioned that the Ukranian troops were out on the range practising warfare. That Wednesday, though, the guns were quiet and the red flag was furled. We passed a house with no windows, presumably used for exercises. Perhaps if the care home didn’t work out… I speculated silently.

In fact, she loved the place. She was greeted outside the front door by an old friend from up the road, who was now a permanent resident following her abduction by the fairies. In the past, the neighbourhood travelling coiffeuse had cut their hair together in my mother-in-law’s stifling sitting room, so it was nice to think that they might quite soon renew this practical relationship. The staff seemed friendly and attentive, the manager (a tattooed ex-Commando) clearly ran a happy ship and if the room he took us to see was rather small, there would be another rather bigger room currently being refurbished that would be ready for her next week. All seemed suddenly well with the world; there was light at the end of a very long tunnel.

One week on, a week of shopping for anticipated essentials, labelling and packing of clothes, sourcing a basic mobile phone and such like, I followed George up to her new room at the end of the first-floor corridor while Debs and her mother Mary answered questions on care and cognition. George led me through a kind of secondary day room where an old guy who used to sing country & western sat listening to Waylon Jennings all day long. ‘All right, Bob?’ George asked cheerily. ‘Help!’ moaned Bob. An adjacent catatonic old woman said nothing. I could hear the faint ring of alarm bells in my head.

The refurbished room was not that much bigger than the room we’d seen the week before: a single bed, a sub-Ikea wardrobe and chest-of-drawers, an armchair, a tiny table on wheels and an even tinier en suite bathroom. By the time we’d deposited the Outlaw’s impedimenta, it seemed not much bigger than a prison cell. A very expensive prison cell. But there was a nice view of the woods outside and a colony of rabbits hopping around the perimeter lawn. There were resident red squirrels, too, George assured me. Later, once we’d parked our charge in her armchair, it was painfully clear that her angle of repose wouldn’t allow her to see either rabbits or squirrels.

We returned the next day, once we’d done the deed. That day was the worst of the fortnight: we had an appointment at the local vet’s for 11 o’clock. For whom the bell tolls… Giving Omar his final breakfast before the meeting with his Maker, I felt like Albert Pierrepoint, the last British executioner – except this wasn’t simply a job, it felt like murder. As hard as we tried, we couldn't equate the picture of Omar fighting for his breath the previous week prior to his steroid injection, with this beautiful tabby cat, rescued from near death, so plush and seemingly healthy. The vet, one of many fine Cumbrian country people I met, administered the lethal dose, while stroking the poor innocent cat till his heart beat its last. It was worse even than the night when our local vet did the same for our Labradoid, Alfred Lord Sampson. He was old and suffering; he had to go. And as bad as the time I had to despatch a dying robin with a stone, or the morning on the way to Martel when I witnessed a young terrified deer being hit by a car.

When we arrived at the care home and delivered the news to the Outlaw, she appeared to react a little like Lady Macbeth. The deed was done; no need to dwell on it. I'm not without compassion: her life is no life at all and she's asked many a time for a lethal injection (when not threatening to slit her throat or jump in the river), but there’s a hard and ruthless streak to my mother-in-law that even her beloved André Rieu has never mollified. It probably keeps her ranting and raging against the dying of the light, rather than going gently. This is the woman who despatched both her daughters to boarding school at age 11 and figuratively threw away the key. The same one who wrote my bride-to-be a poisoned pen letter on the eve of her wedding, highlighting the dangers of hitching her wagon to a worthless favourite son-in-law.

Debs puts it down to a rich seam of jealousy. The previous weekend we’d witnessed it at work during a visit from one of her many attentive friends: when the conversation gravitated away from mother and towards daughter. She started to throw a wobbly – complete with fidgeting, closed eyes and laboured breathing – and attentive friend was advised to leave. I’d witnessed something similar the previous Christmas and was a little alarmed, but my wife is wise to her mother’s wiles. It was just a comédie, as they say in France.

To where we returned that weekend, with relief and some misgivings, since after all the place did appear to be a business-class Bedlam. We got back to a burning-hot Paris at the tail-end of the final day of the Olympic festivities. Our Eurostar was cancelled once more, just to round off the trip neatly, but once more they got us onto an earlier train and we arrived in Brive at midnight to find the dog and daughter waiting on the platform.

Any sense, though, that our mission of mercy might have resulted in a done deal has been subsequently scuppered. The transition has been… to use the euphemism of positive thinkers the world over, ‘challenging’. There were 22 calls one Sunday from her easy-to-use (easy-to-abuse) mobile phone. ‘Would you please phone George and tell him that they’ve forgotten the sugar in my tea again.’ ‘Mum… Mum… Mum! Listen please, it’s the weekend. George isn’t there…’ George is beginning to spot the difference between the sweet old lady whom he assessed initially as potentially perfect for the home, and the fire-breathing, finger-snapping sociopathic monster she can become when people don't dance to her tune. He and the Good Wife have started co-counselling each other. Nevertheless, George has 'advised' her that the Outlaw's behaviour has been so bad that they might have to ask her to leave.

Nothing winds my wife up like a sense of entitlement and the behaviour that goes with it. She was so incensed by her mother's insensitive complaints about never being so miserable in her life to her former neighbour and unsung national treasure, who still works for a living at 80-plus, who still cuts her own firewood with a chainsaw, so incensed that she knocked off a severe e-mail to be printed by George and deposited in her ladyship's room. Her comportment was considerably better the next day.

Of course, there are two sides to every story. It has taken three weeks to sort out her incontinence pads and for several days she was without soap in her bathroom. When you're paying six grand or so per month, you have a right to expect a better service. The fact that she doesn't receive it suggests that they're probably under-staffed. If they found the extra bodies, no easy task, the fees would be even higher. The shortcomings are no doubt par for the course; western society's treatment of its old people is generally quite shocking. Help! indeed.

Meanwhile, life is currently on hold – we can't make any hard-and-fast arrangements lest we are summoned back over the water to come and collect a banished resident and her baggage – but there have been a few promising developments. The other night, for example, the Outlaw was able to laugh about a visit from a fellow resident, a former vicar apparently, who started removing his pyjamas. My guess is that it was the well-spoken man who greets all passers-by with a cheery cod-Yorkshireman's ay-oop. My mother-in-law managed to send him packing before anything unseemly occurred. It is, as she chuckled, Bedlam.

But what to do? My brother recommends a hired assassin and a friend has offered us a burial plot in her garden. And I guess if all else fails, there is always that home, home on the [firing] range.

 

August 2024: An Adventure Before Dementia pt 1

Any trip to the UK is a bit of an adventure for the reluctant traveller that I have become. This one was doubly so. Our mission, impossible to refuse – to stand in for my mother-in-law’s principal carer for two daunting weeks while she was on holiday in Norway– was cloaked in symbolic significance: we travelled out on the day that the Paris Olympics started and we travelled back on the day that they finished. Both times our Eurostar was cancelled. On the day of an opening ceremony that featured a resuscitated Céline Dion, sabotage made mayhem at the Gare du Nord. Though the slashed cables were duly repaired in good time for the closing ceremony, our train was cancelled for no evident reason. On both occasions, the staff pulled out all the stops to get us onto an earlier train. Thank heavens for the paranoia that dictates we turn up considerably earlier than the majority of travellers.

Since the train was re-routed on local lines, we arrived at St. Pancras over an hour later than our original, later train was due. But we still had half an hour before our ‘Azuma’ was due to speed us to Leeds. ‘See it, say it, sorted’, as they drum into UK rail passengers. From Leeds, the magnificent Settle/Carlisle line took us over the Yorkshire Dales and some of the most stunning scenery in England, this time – unlike our Yuletide trip to Skipton – the landscape was bathed in balmy sunshine.

At Garston station, a big colourful sign advertises the scenic splendours of a branch line that takes you to Morecambe Bay and on, if you’re daft enough, to Barrow-in-Furness. They call it the Bentham Line; maybe (I’m guessing) it has something to do with the philanthropic 19^th century industrialist. What you really need to know is that the Bentham Line is ‘dementia friendly’. Perhaps because we’d been up since 4am and/or had a surfeit of stress and travel-tension to release, this nugget of information caused us to giggle like school kids. Did this friendliness towards people with dementia suggest that other lines would refuse to transport them? Or did the line recruit them in the way that B&Q recruits people past retirement age? If the latter, it would be more a matter of ‘See it, say it, but just don’t expect our staff to sort it.’

On timely arrival at Appleby station, there was Jack from the Temple Sowerby garage with our hire car for the fortnight. My canny wife has been using them ever since she discovered that they’re half as expensive and offer twice the customer-care as the hire-car giants. We had a Mercedes saloon. ‘Oh Lord, won’t you rent me a Mer-ced-es Benz.’ I’ve never driven a Merc before – and very nice to drive it was, too, once I’d learnt to use a handbrake located just under the steering wheel. The first car, too, that I’d driven with a sixth gear. The trouble was that it was so brand-spanking-new and Cumbrian roads are so narrow and so full of blind bends that every sortie was a journey into fear.

Sleeping soundly in our small-but-somewhat-imperfectly formed Airbnb haven from Purgatory further up the road, little did we guess just how apt that dementia-friendly tag would prove. We were woken early the next morning by a call from a carer to say that the Outlaw had had another fall. Debs threw on her clothes to race up the road and speak to the ambulance crew. I arrived a little later, just before they departed, leaving the neighbours with plenty of food for speculation. In fact, the old dear wasn’t badly hurt. But both ambulance crew and a little later the community care doctor (masked and protected from head to foot by non-degradable plastic) agreed that this situation couldn’t go on. My mother-in-law needed full-time care and not just four visits from carers per day backed up by countless phone calls to her distant daughter. This was music to the ears of said daughter since Part 1 of our mission of mercy was to get an obdurate accident-prone nonagenarian into the Merc and off to Kirkby Stephen for a pre-arranged visit to a prospective care-home.

While the Good Wife administered daily care to a woman who would, as my mother used to tell us kids, ‘try the patience of a saint’, my support role was that of shopper, principal driver, cook, domestic and a shoulder to scream on. As the Outlaw’s favourite son-in-law (her only son-in-law), I could do no wrong. I’m a man, so someone to women of her generation to be served and revered. On presenting the meals I prepared with such care in her ill-equipped and insanitary kitchen, my aged fan would instantly shake salt and squeeze tomato ketchup all over my creations with the impatience of someone killing a fly that refused to die. I tried not to take it to heart.

The post-meridian became our golden time of day. Once our charge was settled and sleeping after lunch in her enormous all-singing all-dancing armchair, we could walk up the Fell-side if it wasn’t raining to gaze upon the Eden Valley in all its topographical glory. And we could feed a carrot to Tony the faux zebra, alone in his field. A shaggy black Fell pony festooned for some strange reason in a stripy jacket, Tony proved a most amiable creature. We could tell him our woes while he stood stoically, resting his head on the gate. On other days, we could head west in the Merc on the A66 to Penrith for some shopping for she-who-must-be-obeyed. After which I would be excused to go back to our lodgings to work on a commissioned article, do a spot of constricted yoga and prepare supper for my homecoming saint.

We had one whole day off. Despite the ominous sky, we took a trip through the glorious West Lakeland hills to the unremarkable Cumbrian coast. The wife needed some sea air and we had promised ourselves some freshly caught fish and chips. At Maryport, a drab little town that has seen better days, we came upon a white van bearing the legend ‘On an adventure before dementia’. We laughed our legs off, though subsequently discovered that it was old-hat, proof if needed that the expatriate’s lot is to be forever slightly out of touch. Further up the coast in Silloth, a broken coffee machine spared us an uncommonly expensive diversion at Mrs. Wilson’s Tea Room. We spent the money we saved on fish and chips – not the best in the county, but the seagulls enjoyed some of the oily undercooked chips. Wonderful the way the seasoned pros were able to swoop and catch a discarded chip in mid air.

Such is the dizzy entertainment to be found in Cumbria. While the rest of the country was focused on fascist riots in outposts of civilisation like Hartlepool, or on the Olympics in Paris, or Trump’s latest gaffs, or the war in Ukraine, the front page of the weekend Cumberland & Westmorland Herald was describing unprovoked attacks by seagulls in the centre of Penrith, while its cultural supplement carried an article about the Matterdale Paris(h) Olympics. Now that’s what I call real news.

Despite the goings-on in Purgatory, I found myself falling a little in love with Cumbria. The scenery is God’s own and the country people, for all their political proclivities and undoubted support for Brexit, are as kind and as helpful and friendly as their accents are musical. As an alien from France, however, my impression of Penrith, supposedly the gateway to the Lakes, was coloured by charity shops full of old Jim Reeves and Perry Como records and a town centre dominated by unsuitable young mothers, decaying old people on mobility scooters and a conglomerate of the heavily tattooed and shockingly overweight. There is, too, the metropolis of Carlisle at the end of the railway line and I was thinking of going there to check out the local record shops, but I decided that I needed more records like a hole in the head and that the city would probably depress me further. I need a nearby town in my life that I can learn to love and currently can accept no substitute for Brive.

The pace quickened after the disturbing reports of seagull bombardments. The Outlaw’s beloved cat, Omar, whom she took in just after COVID when he was at death’s door, became seriously ill one evening, fighting for his breath like an asthmatic. My wife, the therapist, calmed him with a drop or two of lavender essential oil, but when we took him in to the local vet for his monthly injection, the vet explained that his lungs had probably been permanently damaged by whatever virus had nearly killed him. Effectively, we were keeping him going from one month to the next by an injection of steroids and, in view of the likely upheaval to come and the extreme difficulty of finding someone to take him on willing to shell out £80 each month, maybe the most humane thing to do would be to put him to sleep. Debs told the vet that her mother had often said the same thing about herself. It was difficult to gauge how that one went down.

When we reported back to the Outlaw, it was as if the barrier to her moving had been suddenly lifted: We would put Omar to sleep, cremate him and scatter his ashes over her designated burial plot, and she would move to the care-home where she would receive 24-hour care and everything would be tickety-boo. But guess which cat-loving couple would have the task of escorting this beautiful cat to Death Row.

Find out more in the second part of this missive from Oop North. Learn how our intrepid pair of stand-in carers would deliver their charge to her ruinously expensive new home, breathe a collective sigh of relief and then bear the burden of guilt all the way back home to France…

July: A comfortable ornithological truth

Not that many years ago, I would have described the summer – and the spring – that we’ve had thus far as ‘lousy’. Even ‘shite’. But now, with the same kind of perverse logic that my elders and betters in Norn Iron would have described a day fit for neither man nor beast as ‘a brave wee day’, I am here to tell you that – at time of writing – it has been a fantastic summer. So far, we’ve escaped any kind of extreme heat. My mother used to tell us of a time in ‘her’ war when, perhaps in her bedroom in North London or walking back home from school, she would hear the death rattle of a ‘doodlebug’ nearby and when she heard the motor cut out, despite her better instincts, pray that it would fall on some other poor soul, blowing their house to bits and not hers. So I scan the news headlines on the way to the sport page and see how they have suffered in north India and other points east, and I thank the weather gods that we have (certainly until now) been spared.

Nevertheless, I’m not counting my chickens – perhaps because neither the Good Wife nor I have still not done anything to realise the much-expressed wish of having some fine feathered friends scratching around the house, eating the huge brown slugs that abound. Indeed not. Only the other day, we re-hung the jute curtains on the mezzanine balcony after their hibernation in the roof space. We commissioned a young seamster last year – if that’s what you call a male ‘seamstress’, although my daughter might tell me not to be so contra-sexist (and does he, I wonder, belong to the local Local of the Seamsters Union?) – from nearby Martel to make them for the front porch and the balcony above in an effort to cut the temperature of the house by a degree or two. They worked, to a degree, and my wife thinks that they look nice, particularly from the inside looking out. That’s all that ultimately matters. So I pegged them back to the wooden rods known in these parts as tringles (that’s a strangulated ‘tran-gls’), with The Dame clutching the ladder anxiously as her habitually anxious husband teetered at its apex. 

To get back to chickens, we really would love to have some. It would be a challenge to strike up a meaningful relationship with the sisters and how very satisfying it must be to eat ‘your own’ eggs (as we say, in our customary ‘specist’ way). I love birds, although I know very little about them. I haven't loaded my wife’s app on my phone, which identifies a species by its song. ‘Ornithology’ for me is one of Charlie Parker’s best-loved numbers. This much I can tell you, however: the lack of extreme summer heat has helped the local avian population. Our woods are alive with the tropical sound of golden orioles, which I confused with the call of the hoopoe until a friend and amateur twitcher disavowed me of the notion on a boat trip along the river Charente for France magazine. As well as the everyday robins, tits, blackbirds, sparrows and the occasional parliament* of crows, we get the rather more exotic jays, nuthatches, yellow woodpeckers and all the other lesser-spotted varieties I’ve given up trying to dissuade from thieving our fruit. Meanwhile, up above in the friendly sky, buzzards and rarer kites and hawks wheel around 'incredibly high', ready to plummet like Mexican cliff divers or more aptly Stukas, given their thirst for prey. It’s enough to keep even the most indifferent inveterate couch-potato captivated.

Despite my lack of knowledge, only the other day I had an experience that I’d like to share with you. It was without doubt what I’d call a spiritual or extra-terrestrial experience. I’m not a particularly spiritual person; I love gospel music and I talk to the animals, but that’s the extent of it. Unlike The Dame, who’s spookily in touch with any of life’s extra dimensions. Literally sometimes. She can massage a client and pick up on something germane to his or her make-up that goes back several generations. She was the first I told about my experience, like a frantic child eager to impress a grown-up.

It was the other Saturday and there I was, working away at my desk, busily earning the pension granted me by King Charles’ parliament. Just above my screen is one of our two round windows, yeux de boeuf or ox-eyes I guess, one on either side of the mezzanine walls. I was suddenly aware of a fluttering and looked up to see a crested hoopoe looking in at me. My heart fluttered in return. I sat transfixed by the caller, occasionally mirroring its neck movements, so close that I could see the way the breeze ruffled its feathers and the blink of its diaphanous inner eye. Wanting to grab my phone to take a crafty photo as proof, I dared not move anything other than my head in response to the bird's gestures. For five minutes – I kid you not; I am not given to the default exaggerations of the Good Wife – we sat in silent communion, then it hopped off onto the roof to preen its feathers with its rapier-like bill for a good couple of minutes longer – before flying away.

Even before I’d recovered from the metaphysical shock and the rare feeling of being blessed, the friendly neighbourhood hoopoe was back. Once more at the round window, to repeat our meeting of the spirits. During this second communion, I was able to establish that the hoopoe flattens its crest when stationary and opens it in flight. I’m thinking of publishing this invaluable insight in a specialist journal, but should perhaps consult with Sir David Attenborough or someone of his kidney for confirmation. Just in case my hoopoe was like one of those Native American 'braves' that would do everything arse about face.

Finally, it flew off. For the next few days I felt a little like Moses after the business of the burning bush. If nothing otherwise of note were to happen in 2024, my encounter with the summer visitor would have filled me up for the year. I scanned the sky and the woods for any further sign of my soul-mate, knowing of course that if you’re lucky enough to see a UFO or the Loch Ness Monster it happens only once in a lifetime. No indeed, nothing. But wait! A couple of days later it flew onto the top balcony, to stay just long enough for me to reach surreptitiously for my phone like the card cheat in a Western film who knows he’s been clocked. And so I offer you this admittedly poor portrait of my exotic friend. 

I'm in danger of becoming a hoopoe-bore. Like that pesky Ancient Mariner, I waylay anyone prepared to listen. Sometime after the event, I went to my garrulous friend Paul's 'Boys' Night'. It's something he loves to host when he comes over alone from North Devon to use the former family home as a holiday venue. It's become such a regular annual event for a small but select bunch of us ageing boys that it's even got its own What'sUp? chat group now. Paul makes us pizzas in his purpose-built oven outside on the covered terrace and we drink beer like proper men and he swears a lot, like someone who has been let off the leash. There's usually four of us, but this time there were five, as Dan brought along his son who was over from Bristol for a week or so. He'd grown his hair and a bushy beard since I'd seen him last, so he reminded me of Ben Gunn, emerging from the bushes in Treasure Island.

We talked, as we tend to do, of music and sport and children and animals and the vagaries of growing old. Given a captive audience and since I don't often have a lot to say, I recounted my spiritual experience with the avian visitor from Africa. Dan reminded me that he had had a similar experience. In their old house, he too used to spend far too long working at a screen just beyond which was a window to the natural world. One day a hoopoe hopped onto the window-sill and engaged in a bit of silent communion. I'd quite forgotten in the excitement of feeling unique and blessed.

We concluded that maybe what the hoopoe sees in such close encounters is not the worker within but its own reflection on the glass. Maybe the crested African visitor is at heart a vain bird. Perhaps, unused to its own image, it lingers like a window-shopper to admire the goods, twisting its head this way and that to study its beauty from different angles. My, it might think, what a beautiful creature I am. In which case, maybe we should rename it the Politician Bird or better still the President Bird.

Which reminds me: there are elections happening either side of the Channel this month. I shall cling to my preferred version of the ornithological truth meanwhile in the face of all the inevitable uncomfortable untruths flying about the political landscape.

(Photo of Brecon Beacons courtesy of Dorin Vancea (@dvancea) on Unsplash.com)

* My friend T.T. points out that it should be a 'murder' of crows, but I'll leave it as it is because it proves my contention that I know nothing about birds.

 

 

 

June: Henry Miller and A Good Acquaintance

Several decades ago, I went through a phase of reading the American author Henry Miller’s books: Nexus, Sexus, Plexus et al. I love his writing, and not just for the infamous naughty bits. I remember seeing the film version of Tropic of Cancer as a febrile 6^th former at the Queen’s University arts cinema and being very impressed – but perhaps mainly by Ellen Burstyn’s magnificent body.

In recent years, I’ve tended to take Miller for granted – like Bellow, Roth and others of their kidney – in my search for new writers of a similar stature. It took the Good Wife to remind me just how brilliant he can be. She was inspired to read his travel book about Greece, The Colossus of Maroussi, when I revealed that our lovely German friend Martina reads a passage from the book at the start of every workshop that she and her diligent husband Achim run in their chateau near here. Miller happened to spend some time down our way before he met up with his friend Lawrence Durrell and went off to Greece just before war engulfed Europe in 1939.

The passage Martina reads suggests that this area is ‘the nearest thing to Paradise this side of Greece.’ To have seen the Dordogne, he concludes, ‘gives me hope for the future of the race, for the future of the earth itself. France may one day exist no more, but the Dordogne will live on just as dreams live on and nourish the souls of men.’ Martina reads it out perhaps to reinforce their punters’ decision to come and spend some time here. It’s only a page long, but it whetted my wife’s appetite to read the entire book. For the next few days, she waxed lyrical about the book from breakfast to bedtime.

While she was away up north attending to the whims of her ancient mother, I decided to re-read Maroussi. With a certain trepidation, I should add, having re-read recently another favourite of mine, John Kennedy Toole’s extraordinary A Confederacy of Dunces, only to have been slightly disappointed. Better to have remembered it as something hilarious and unique. Not so Miller’s book. The writing throughout is wild and wonderful. It’s like jumping onto a spinning carousel and hanging on for dear life because you dare not get off until it stops.

Miller is particularly perceptive about the French. He spent quite a bit of time in Paris and wrote Quiet Days in Clichy about his experience there in the 1930s. The French, too, bless their non-conforming socks, published Tropic of Cancer when no one else was prepared to take the risk. Never let it be said that a Frenchman or woman is uptight about a bit of sex. So Miller knew a thing or two about the French race. In another incisive passage, he compares their attitude to friendship to the Greek’s. ‘With the Frenchman friendship is a long and laborious process: it may take a lifetime to make a friend of him. He is best in acquaintanceship, where there is little to risk and where there are no aftermaths. The very word ami contains almost nothing of the flavour of friend, as we feel it in English.’

I’m sure that anyone who has lived among the Gauls as long as The Dame and I have will acknowledge the acuity of these observations. It’s not snide to point out this national characteristic; it’s just the way it is. You pays your money and you takes your choice. Half the world knows how singular the French are, so we knew or at least guessed what we were letting ourselves in for. After nearly 30 years here, we have a very few good French friends and many acquaintances. C’est comme ꞔa.

Just recently, I have been forming a firm acquaintance with Stéphane down the road. He lives in the hamlet of Bonnard – or Bonard with one ‘n’, depending on what sign you see. Signage: another French quirk. I prefer the double ‘n’ because I love Pierre, the painter. Our paths often cross while out walking our respective dogs. He has a Golden Retriever, une gol-den as they say here, called Pêche. She’s a sweet peach of a dog, a superannuated bimbo. We often stop for a chat, which suits Pêche more than it does Daphne, because the former can pause to catch her breath, while the latter wants to get on. We’ve established, Stéphane and I, that we wear the same walking shoes and even take the same size, which is kind of spooky in an Edgar Allen Poe way. Quoth the doppelganger, never more!

In other ways than footwear, though, we’re chalk and cheese. He’s very tidy and organised and methodical for one thing. He’s just bought a little patch of land on the other side of the road from their house, and he’s busy growing things to eat. They’re growing, fast – in geometric rows. He’s built two little raised beds rather like the ones I built, except mine are jerry-built and his are right-angled and rigid. What’s more they’re full of lettuce growing at a rate of knots. My raised beds are still unmade, still recovering from last summer’s tangled riot of tomatoes, courgettes and Swiss chard. He’s made a proper hotel for benevolent insects. I attempted something similar last year, only Stéphane’s is five-star accommodation, whereas mine is a slum. It all makes me envious and a little bit sick. If we could only talk about Henry Miller or Latin jazz, maybe I could teach him a thing or two.

Never mind, he’s a very nice guy and I’m glad – and just a teensy bit proud – to be an acquaintance on such congenial terms. Only the other week, the sun came out between showers and the general deluge of the merry month of May, so I felt the moment was propitious to take Daphne out for her post-meridian constitutional. When we got to the main road at the top of the chemin rural, I looked back to spy Stéphane’s white van parked by the side of our little wood. He likes to spend time alone or with his golden bimbo combing the woods for mushrooms. I don’t have either the patience or the know-how. We spotted each other and waved in the way that genuine acquaintances do.

A minute later, he drove my way to turn the van round and head back for Bonnard. I made a point of getting Daphne to sit by the side of the road with the minimum of fuss on either’s part, as if sub-consciously to underline how well funny Englishmen train their animals. Not with a stick but a carrot – or some such comestible treat. Stéphane stopped for a quick chat while I patted Pêche, who was getting her breath back at the foot of the passenger seat. I asked him, as is my wont, whether he’d had any luck on the mushroom front. He opened a plastic bag and showed me a host of golden girolles. They’re the truly delicious and very distinctive yellowy-orange variety of fungus that you can be fairly sure won’t poison you. Wow! I enthused. And the next thing I knew, he’d thrust the whole bagful at me. Make yourself a nice omelette with lots of butter and garlic, he suggested. I protested of course, but he wouldn’t have it. His larder was coming down with them, he told me.

I was genuinely touched. I finished my walk with a jaunty spring in my step, swinging my bag of girolles like the beautiful Julie Christie as Woodbine Lizzie in Billy Liar. It still irks me: how and why could Tom Courtenay deliberately miss the train that was taking her – and him, supposedly – to start a new life in London? Anyway, nearly 30 years ago, my missus and I started a new life in France. We haven’t made many French friends here, but we have plenty of Gallic acquaintances. Some very good, very kind ones. Sometimes a mushroom omelette reaches the parts that other food cannot.