October: When I'm 64

This month, I came of age. That age. The age that Macca wrote and sang about. How did I get to be so old? My wife assures me that she still needs me and will continue to feed me – whenever it's her turn to cook. To supplement her birthday greetings, she presented me with a bottle of wine. A nice one, too. St. Emilion, bio, gold medal winner. There are no grandchildren on my knee as yet, although the Daughter is discovering that there's more to life than long hours in a fashion house and wants to have a family when the time is propitious. Knowing her, I doubt whether they'll be named Vera, Chuck or Dave. I'm sure she'll find some suitable equivalents.

How did I get to be so old? When I was my daughter's age, it seemed inconceivable that one day I would be 64. There were decades to go; I could rest easy in my big brass bed. But here I am and they've all gone. We're obsessed these days about keeping young and beautiful: whether it's a vigorous work-out in a gym or just a teeny-weeny injection of Botox or a little 'lifting' or the newly discovered ingredients of some elixir of life. But I don't think it's sour grapes on the part of this old codger to suggest that youth is an overrated commodity. When I think about Our Kid, somewhere near the first step on her career ladder, I'm rather glad that I'm not that young again. I wouldn't relish the idea of setting out once more on a road ahead, paved with hard graft, painful decisions and unsettling discoveries about human nature.

All that in exchange for what? A little more energy and vim, clearer vision and Iggy Pop's 'lust for life', which probably boils down to sex drive for mere mortals without the means for fast cars and wild parties. At 64, the body's still willing, it just recognises its limitations. This weekend I was helping some friends stack straw bales under a hangar, snug for the winter prior to building in the spring. I was chatting with a guy I hadn't seen for a while. He'd turned 60 in the interim and we were both pondering why we had to pause for breath so regularly. What had happened to our former energy and strength? In our minds, we were still the same age that we were before.

I wonder sometimes whether I've simply got the numbers round the wrong way. Like my wife's godmother, who's sneaking up on 96 in a very sedentary way. When Debs saw her last year, not long before her own 60^th birthday, her godmother suggested that they were both the same age. 59. 'I think you'll find you're a little bit older than that,' my wife suggested. 'Oh am I? I don't know; I think they must have got it wrong somewhere,' her godmother chuckled. 

We've just seen the old dear a couple of times during our recent stay in the Frozen North to mark the bitter occasion of my mother-in-law's 90^th birthday. She, the godmother, slips in and out of reason these days. She recognised us both and even introduced us by name as husband and wife to her helper, but a few moments later she was questioning the whereabouts of her mother-in-law. 'I don't know where she can be,' she fussed. 'She's been gone a long time.' 40 years or more, to be precise. She took on the old woman when she married her deceased husband, the local butcher, in prehistoric times. Such was the deal that she ended up having to change the old woman's nappies. What with that and the stench of animal carcasses, married life can't have been a bowl of pot-pourri. 

Back when she was turning 80, my mother-in-law told her daughter that she didn't want to live another decade and end up as a burden to her friends and family. So you can appreciate that the 90^th birthday was something to be endured rather than celebrated. For all concerned. Things have moved on apace in 10 years, if that's the mot juste for entropy, slowing down and general deterioration. She's as deaf as a post, her knees are failing her, and the eyesight has faded to the extent where she's wary now of driving her car, her only feasible way of getting around the wilds of Cumbria, where the wind bloweth and the rain raineth seemingly every day (apart from the brief respite of summer). 

It wouldn't be so bad if she were as innately idle as my dad, who is only too happy for others to do everything for him. My mother-in-law, however, is proud – and stubborn – to the point of hostility. And my poor wife is the one who has to bear the brunt of it. On the Monday morning, for example, while I was swanning about on Appleby's deserted golf course with a friend from my days in Sheffield, wrapped up against the wind but basking in some rare autumnal sunshine that lit up the Pennines on one side and the Yorkshire Dales on the other, the Good Wife was in conference with her mother and a young woman from some organisation linked to the local Social Services. Any helpful proposition about extra cleaning or converting a cloakroom into a walk-in shower fell apparently on determinedly deaf ears. Debs slept fitfully that night and shed tears of frustration and sadness for the passing years.

The birthday meal – cooked traditionally to order by my wife, who obediently put away her Yottam Ottolenghi recipe book – went not with a knees-up but a polite whimper. My mother-in-law drank just enough champagne to render her affable and pliable, and her three local friends all parted at an hour that left sufficient time for recuperation in the sanctuary of our bed. It was enough of a success to leave us feeling that duty had been done. Interestingly, though, in an age of ceaseless snapping and posting, not a single photograph had been taken. On the way back to our 'love shack', as we christened it, at the other end of the village, I expressed the wish that there wouldn't be a 100^th birthday. Debs muttered something dark and un-filial about a 91^st birthday. 

Safely restored to our French home, a safe distance from the stark beauty of Cumbria, I can reflect on the week away and wonder when I the Visitor will become me the Visited. When will Vera, Chuck or Dave come to rouse their grandfather from his torpor? It's a daunting and not very salutary thought. When I turned 24, the thought of reaching 42 seemed like a fantasy. When I turned 46, the idea of being 64 seemed a bit whimsical. But if I add the factor of 18 to the same equation, I get 82. And that's no joke. I'm not even sure that the law of averages will permit me such an age.  

I hope it does. It's a strange thing. Even though the world seems to shift monthly further to the right as the apparent majority denies the obvious inconvenient truths about life on planet earth, I'd still rather be here – gnarled fingers and all – than six feet under the sod.

September: A Wee Trip

It was ever thus before the birth of The Daughter and, now that she's flown the nest, we are reverting to type by taking our annual holiday in September. It seems apt now that we're in the late summer of our days. 

There are fewer white touring Plastic Fantastics on the roads of Ireland than there are in France, but then the weather's less inviting. We went on holiday with low expectations in that respect. The Good Wife's all-seeing phone suggested rain, rain and more rain. It was raining when we arrived late in the evening at Cork airport and it was raining spitefully the next day when we drove to Dingle on the first leg of our Tour d'Irelande. We picked up a pair of bedraggled young Finnish hitchhikers at Killarney, who'd missed by a minute their bus to Dingle. When we dropped them off in the town centre, we imagined their day and felt rather apologetic (although Finnish summers apparently also leave much to be desired).

The rain cleared overnight, giving us the mountains of Kerry with our breakfast at Mrs. O'Whatsit's guest house. She persuaded us to drive around the stunning headland as a prologue to our epic haul to Donegal. The sun stayed with us off and on for the 400 kilometres or so to the wild north west. Since we had little time or desire to visit the latest bizarre tourist attraction of 'Famine Cottages', there was nothing much to see inland until Sligo. There the table-top mountain of Benbulben dominates 'Yeats Country', as featured in the second film of Michael McDonagh's 'suicide trilogy', the bleakly bleak Calvary. 

It then rained bitterly the day after our overnight stay in Ardara, County Donegal, in one of the tiniest rooms ever offered for Air B&B. I spent a holiday near there as a child, when I ate myself to a standstill in a hotel that burnt down a few years back. In the rain, the beach did not look as inviting as I remembered, and banal new bungalows now pimple the erstwhile virgin land. Clearly the Irish and/or the Americans have discovered Donegal since the so-called Celtic Tiger sprung briefly into life during the '90s. 

Beautiful as the coast is, driving across the barren windswept heartland of the county made me wonder why anyone would choose to settle there – but hey, each to his or her own. In Letterkenny we stopped for a half-way decent coffee in a café decorated throughout in apophthegms. Many a maxim makes Mark a muddled man. One thought for the day is OK, but 60 more will only bore. Quite a few were jokey sentiments about the uselessness of husbands. My wife, who tends to stand up for men (sweet innocent that she is), observed that had they been derogatory comments about women, the perpetrators would have been dragged off by the thought-police. On leaving, I asked the woman at the counter roughly how long it was to Derry. 'Oh, about 40 minutes. Is that OK for you?' On the road to Derry, we speculated about what she could have done for us had it not been.

From (London)derry, we pushed on, ever onwards, to the north coast. In Coleraine, it was surprising after so long in France to see school children in uniform. Just another reason perhaps for feeling instantly at home again, even though I only spent 12 years of my life in the province. Roots I guess are what make people return to, say, the inhospitable heartland of Donegal. Roots are what stir your emotions for no sensible reason. Walking along the great sweeping strand at Portstewart, with the dunes to our left and the north Atlantic to our right and far off in the distance obscured by drizzle, Malin Head, Ireland's most northerly point, it was all I could do to stop myself from skipping like a wee child across the sand.

And it's the roots that make you want to hug your host for the night for lighting a wood fire, showing off his rock-solid triceps from 'years of lifting beer kegs', giving us the run of his extensive bungalow and generally reminding you of just how welcoming, big-hearted, voluble and funny the Norn Irish people are. Nothing was too much trouble for Michael, a big softly-spoken man who re-acquainted me with some of the indigenous grammatical quirks: 'Now go youse to the end of the road and turn right onto the main road. Then go youse straight over the wee roundabout and keep going straight, straight, straight till youse see a Tesco there on your right. D'youse know Tesco?' 

We knew indeed Tesco, even though the supermarket hadn't penetrated this far in my day. At Michael's insistence we picked some pink ladies off his apple tree to take with us the next day for our trip along the north coast. And behold, they were as good as yer man proclaimed. Behold, too, the coast was every bit as beautiful as they say: the White Rocks, White Park Bay, the miniature harbour at Balintoy, the ruined castle at Dunluce hanging on precariously to the edge of the cliff... If anything, the miraculous Giant's Causeway was the biggest disappointment – simply because of the number of tourists swarming over the pillars of basalt. When I went there for the first time around 30 years ago, I was about the only person there and this wonder of the world exuded the kind of mysterious power diluted this time by so many people. A young married couple posed for the telephoto lens of a photographer, striking the kind of Hello! attitudes that would register their brief time in the limelight and leave us with a sickly taste of Facebook. 

The tourism stats have been boosted by visitors from all over the world, come to see the locations for Game of Thrones. At Cushendun, another family holiday destination back in the '60s, we stumbled upon some caves that were apparently used in episode x of season y. Tourism has even transformed Belfast – where dozens of gigantic cruise ships tie up annually in order to visit the Titanic museum. Buses and taxis take you to see the ironically-named Peace Wall, as if a relic of a past that's ancient history now. But is it? Catholics and Prods probably mix more these days, but it was an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu I felt while driving down the glorious Antrim Coast Road to pass through villages bedecked by flags flying the red hand of Ulster. Ireland has become a modern European nation in the decades since the Troubles. The omnipotence of the Catholic church has dissipated. Even if the south really wanted a united Ireland, the hard-liners in the north would have nothing much to fear today. I had hoped that they might have grown up and put away their foolish Orange regalia, but I fear not. 

Nevertheless, Belfast has changed out of all recognition from the time when we teenagers used to queue up to be frisked by the army at the turnstiles that cordoned off the city centre. It's a lively, swinging urban affair these days. Even the drab little family-run hotel where we spent our first six weeks or so in a new city in the winter of 1961 has been transformed into something bigger and grander. Reputedly the food's good, too. They probably serve something other than meat, cabbage and potatoes now.

We parked opposite in the drizzle for a look at our last house in the city. It has been joined at the hip with the house next door to create a crèche for wee babs. Their strap line states Happy memories of childhood, which was too delicious to miss the opportunity for one of those awful posed photies that should probably end up in the Delete bin. We walked down to my old school, there on its little hill – or monticulo in Latin, according to the fairly absurd school song that we would sing with gusto on public occasions.

After wandering around the Botanic Gardens, inspecting the refurbished hot houses and browsing a fascinating photographic exhibition of The Troubles in the Ulster Museum, our friend Joan drove us through the city centre to the Titanic area. Once it thronged with Harland & Wolff ship-builders; now it throngs with visitors. Time being tight, we decided to forego the attraction, instead visiting the Dock Café for tea and cakes. It has survived for six years as an 'honesty café', where you can spend a whole afternoon if you wish on an old sofa with your laptop and pay what you feel the refreshments are worth. On the whole, Belfast people are kind, honest folk. 

That night at our friend's family farmhouse, we went out with a night camera to watch for badgers by the set in their wood. One or two beautiful creatures duly obliged soon after dark, but they knew only too well that we were there. They didn't perform for the camera, so we were only too happy to leave them to the nocturnal cold and retreat indoors to watch the first half of our host's favourite film, the suitably madcap Hotel Splendide.

We left the North after breakfast the next morning, driving the surprisingly empty arterial road down to Dublin. Somewhere around the now indiscernible border, we passed the Belfast-to-Dublin 'express' train. What will they do once our moronic politicians go ahead with their suicidal Brexit? Will they stop the trains so that armed officials can climb on board to check the passengers' passports? And will they pull over tractors on the lanes in Tyrone and Fermanagh that wind back and forth between the two nations? 

The M50 that now by-passes Dublin resembles a second-cousin-once-removed to London's M25, but otherwise the journey all the way down to West Cork was long and tedious but easy enough. We spent our last three nights with friends who once ran a gallery in this part of France and now live in a house by the water's edge at the end of a narrow winding lane that menaced the paintwork of our hire-car. The weather was surprisingly benign despite ominous warnings of a full-throttle storm coming in off the Atlantic. Our hosts – like many of the local fish and farming folk – seized the opportunity to bring their boats in for the winter. We witnessed the tricky business of steering a craft onto a tractor-driven trailer early Saturday morning. The Good Wife, it transpires, has always dreamt of having a little vessel. Me, I'm not so keen.

The wind, more of a harbinger than the actual tempête that struck a few days later when we were tucked up tight once more in our own home, turned frisky on returning the car at Cork airport. No scratches this time, mum! Even so, they find a way to add a surcharge or two. On this occasion, it was the second driver whom I had assumed was covered. Never mind, it's the nature of holidays to bleed you dry. The flight was only mildly delayed by the wind and when we swooped down on Bordeaux, lit up like a vast printed circuit board as we banked steeply from the Atlantic coast, it was still 27 degrees at 9pm, a good 13 degrees or so warmer than the mean Irish temperature.

We both loved Ireland and the Irish. If ever circumstances and resources permit, we shall consider spending August there, when it's unconscionably hot in south-west France: two weeks near Balintoy or Cushendall perhaps and two weeks in West Cork. They say that the older you get, the more nostalgic you also get. I'll be zipping up my boots and going back to my roots more frequently now for a dose of the craic.

August: Back to Bales

Has you ever bin bit by a bee? No, but I've been stung by a hornet. Actually, it was the Good Wife who was stung. Twice on one arm. The hornet in question managed to attach itself to her dress as she was trying to usher it outside after our dinner guests had departed. I was in the kitchen at the time, washing up the mountain of dinnerly detritus, when Debs cried out in shock, 'God, I'm burning!' She half-screamed when the insect struck a second time in the bedroom. I managed to brush it off and then usher it towards the open door. 

When we got to bed, she was already in real pain. Even cider vinegar, the sine qua non of wasp attacks, didn't help. With no Paracetamol in the bathroom cupboard, and little relief from her trustiest of essential oils, all she could do was put some ice-packs around the two clearly visible stings and wrap her arm in a wet drying-up cloth. She didn't get a moment's sleep all night because she was in such pain. First thing the next morning, I went to the chemist in Martel to buy a pain killer. But it was only later in the day, after taking the homeopathic remedy prescribed by our local doctor, that the pain subsided and the itching took over as her arm swelled up like a sleeve.

It was the first time in 23 years that either of us had been stung by a frelon. Both of us had got a little blasé about these yellow-backed Lancaster bombers that occasionally fly inside the house for a brief but menacing tour of inspection before going on their way via an open door. They are supposed to be non-aggressive – unless you happen to be a bee – but we prefer not to take chances, especially since Daphne developed her masochistic taste for wasps. Presumably the equivalent of hot chillies, she seems to have been stung regularly. So we try to pre-empt an emergency trip to the vet by ridding the place of any bigger, perhaps more tempting, flying delicacies. 

You can't kill 'em either. It's maybe an old paisan's tale, but we've heard that if you kill a hornet, the pack will hunt you down and sting you to death. I can half-believe it. I remember in our old house being so freaked out by one of these virulent creatures that I had to go to bed. I was sitting at our dinner table late one evening. It was pitch black outside. The light must have attracted a particularly intimidating specimen that kept beating at the window like some vengeful figment of Edgar Allen Poe's imagination. It seemed to have my number and I was convinced that it would eventually find its way inside and seek me out. Exit man, pursued by a hornet.

Similarly, my wife convinced herself after the mugging that the creature was still there somewhere in the bedroom. It would strike again at any moment. I couldn't convince her that I was almost certain it had gone out through the open door. I woke up in the early hours and we put the light on. Sure enough, there it was in the folds of a red cushion on the chair. I picked up chair, cushion and malignant insect and threw the whole caboodle out onto the balcony. I found it, dead, the next morning. It had stung its last.

Hornets were the last thing on my mind when I went up to some friends' building site for the first spot of straw-bale building since assembling the walls of this house almost 15 years ago. Big D. and L. are building a sizeable house on the other side of the valley above the pretty red-stoned market town of Meyssac. I re-read my notes and skimmed through my many books on the business of building with bales, but 15 years is a long time in the aging process and I was being asked to supervise the team of helpers, who were pitching in for the sheer joy of doing something new and different. Fortunately, my trusty cohort, Bret, was there with me and just as I learnt to count on him here, I could also count on him there.

Nevertheless, it was quite a daunting experience. Responsibility weighs heavily on my frail shoulders. There was the camaraderie that comes from team-work to lighten the load, but it soon became clear that it wasn't going to be easy. A complicated double wooden frame – an internal one to support the roof and an external one to hold up the eaves – meant that virtually ever bale had to be cut – with a large, unguarded and dangerous disc cutter. What's more, the supposedly medium-density bales delivered proved about twice as compact as the ones we used here. They were heavy to lug around, unwieldy to put in place and extremely difficult to cut.

Quite apart from the tell-tale straw rash on my bare arms, I didn't feel good after the first day. The initial wall we had raised would never have passed the Kevin McCloud test. It was lumpy and bumpy and full of hollows and convex-acious protrusions. Preparation for rendering would be a long and arduous affair. The prescribed and elegant alternation of cut-side and folded-side rows had long been lost in translation. And I was responsible.

Straw bales, though, even the most compact ones, are nothing if not adaptable. We adapted our methods to our raw material and, by the time we called it a week, and by the time the four helpers had gone back to the UK, we had somehow managed to make better progress than I had initially bargained for. Nevertheless, I was glad when the walls were finally cloaked in tarps and left to settle: 15 years on, I realised that my body is not what it used to be. 

Over communal lunches, we spoke when we could bear it of the buffoons back home who are busy directing Britain down the nearest pan. Disaster looms large on every front: economic, social, political, you name it. Having watched a film called 'The Riot Club' and being reminded of the League of Appalling Old Etonians that runs the country, it doesn't surprise me that negotiations with Europe are getting nowhere fast. It will not end well and then we'll all be sorry. In opening Pandora's Box, the chinless Cameron may well end up tearing his beloved Tories apart. 

But let me end on a positive note for once. I read an article in the latest Songlines about the Trinidadian-born poet and musician, Anthony Joseph, one of my current main musical men. Reading his words made me feel as proud to be British as did the episode on our contribution to the Martin Scorsese-produced history of the Blues. My pride has nothing to do with the fact that we once annexed countries all over the globe for the biggest spotty empire you ever did see, nor the residual sense of self-importance that this still seems to bestow on certain compatriots, but the way that the Beatles, Stones, Yardbirds, Pretty Things et al helped to resurrect the careers of Howlin' Wolf and other black originators of the genre, otherwise neglected and forgotten in their own country.

Here's what Anthony Joseph has to say about the immigrant experience. 'One of the most important things is the sense of inclusion that British people feel. There is nowhere else in Europe where black people have any positions of power, or where they feel really integrated into the society. But there's something about British liberalism, and it goes way back to what Englishness is based on, which is fairness. At the heart of what it means to be British is to be fair. If you do your work, you get paid for what you do, it doesn't matter where you come from, we'll let you in. That is for me what makes Britain attractive and interesting and beautiful. That is one of the things that has been helped by people from the Caribbean and all over the world coming here, forcing that change on people.'