July: Insect Apocalypse

No doubt I'm tempting fate, but so far – weather-wise – this has been a perfect summer: a bit of sun, plenty of cloud-cover, a few thunderstorms, a fair bit of rain and, above all, fair –to-middling temperatures. If anything, they've had it hotter in England. My sister tells me that the recent torrential rain has turned the grass in her garden back to green. It's not easy being green here at this time of year, but this year green is very much the prevailing colour.

What they don't have in England, particularly in the town, are the insects. The teeming hundreds and thousands of them. While a lethal combination of intensive agriculture, insecticides, 5G and other human activity is busy killing them off all over the rest of the world, here there are bees and butterflies in abundance. Perhaps there are fewer than there might have been, say, 20 years ago, but every time I walk past the lavender bushes at the front of the house, the air is loud with the sound of bumble bees, multi-coloured butterflies and hummingbird moths all busy with their daily activity.

How perfect it would all be if that were all. Alas, there are flies. Just as a cricket ball tends to swing more under cloud cover, it seems that the threat of rain and particularly thunder brings out the flies in their multitudes. They mass on the glass windows and doors, they swarm in the kitchen and they upset my delicate mental balance. The big ones are bad – once they get into the house, they fly around the place, crashing into windows and walls as they look for a way to get out again, yet when I open a door for them they head in the opposite direction, back into the house to fly around noisily like the model airplanes down at the aeronautical club in the meadow directly below us.

The small ones are worse, though. Far worse. The silent enemy that doesn't even attempt to get back outside. They fly around your head and land on you when you're attempting to concentrate on any activity – such as some supposedly relaxing yoga to redress your mental equilibrium – and every futile attempt to brush them away only increases their determination to land on you. I hate it, just as I hated being tickled as a child, so maybe it's a throwback to those days. When I used to go to evening yoga classes BC, before COVID, our teacher would tell us just to let it go and welcome their visits. What woolly and idealistic nonsense.

I've tried everything. I've even tried some readers' tips from the Daily Express, which somehow found their way onto my liberal phone. With hope in my heart, I tried dissolving some common soap in a dish of white vinegar. Not a single fly investigated it. Not a single fly was drugged by the heady mixture and rendered too heavy to fly. I even resorted to the vacuum cleaner when I found them massing on the underside of the extraction hood. My disgust trumped my usual frugality when it comes to unnecessary use of heavy-duty electricity.

So it's been back to the trusty two-pronged assault of fly paper and fly-swat. The former is as disgusting to try to secure to the ceiling with a drawing pin as it is once it becomes a popular port-of-call for inquisitive flies. Not to mention the business of taking it down and disposing of it in the bin without getting glue or dead flies on your skin.

The fly-swat turns me into a raving, raging psychopath. My rampages are generally accompanied by the kind of foul and abusive language that would get me sent off a football pitch – although I've come to try to adopt more the Good Wife's German 'verdannpten fliegen', which means approximately 'bloody flies'. The basic plastic swat from Intermarché is now so patched with grey gaffer-tape that it's almost unrecognisable. Being a thoughtful psycho-killer, I don't like to chuck away plastic that probably can't be re-cycled if I can positively help it. The grey gaffer-tape has the advantage that the whacked fly sticks to the implement long enough for me to dispose of it in the bin. It also gives the weapon a little more heft. But the time is rapidly approaching when I am going to have to trade it in for a new one.

And then there are the mosquitoes. For some reason, there are many more of them at the front of the house than there are behind it. Being conscious of how much water is wasted every time you flush a loo, I like to use the ample facilities of mother nature in the summer. But it's a hazardous business thanks to the mozzies that proliferate around my favourite watering holes.  

Generally speaking, a quick one and back inside and you can elude attack. Should I stop for a bit of weeding, however – which I do from time to time when the need to do something useful (even if futile) becomes overpowering – I'm quickly bitten to buggery. The speed with which they bite and suck is astonishing. I try to ensure that they pay the ultimate price for such temerity, but the little swine are even smaller and nippier than the common housefly.

Of course, I could resort to the back balcony. Half- or fully-cut with whiskey, William Faulkner would piss from his balcony at or onto visiting strangers, but discretion is my middle name. To be a real writer, you have to live in extremis or a semi-permanent state of inebriation.

Worst of all is being trapped in a bedroom with even a lone mosquito. That appalling high-pitched whine somewhere near your head as you sink into the pillow tells you that you're in for a night of it. My skin must be particularly tasty to the blood-suckers. When I'm around, they leave the Good Wife in peace. She is troubled by the moon and the concerns of her clients, while I tend to wake up only when the call of nature or the need to scratch a mosquito bite becomes too strong to ignore. They always go for my knuckles, where the most intense itching on earth seems to occur. It calms down after about half an hour, but by then I'm in such a state of agitation that getting back to sleep becomes fraught – usually demanding an extended case of fictional cricket teams. Eventually, the mental exercise tends to bore me back to sleep.

So every night I scan the walls and ceiling of our bedroom armed with my taped-up fly-swat. If you're lucky, you can catch them off their guard, dozing as they wait for the lamp to go off and the nocturnal blood bath to begin. So why not get a mosquito net and drape it around the bed, you may ask? Two reasons: one is that you get tangled up in the thing when you get up to answer nature's call; two is that said entanglements can tear the net – and if there's one thing worse than a mosquito in your bedroom, it's a mosquito in your comfort zone.

That said, you're probably right. It's time to buy a new mosquito net and a brand-spanking-new fly-swat. Neither, though, will stay spanking-new for long.

 

June: Still Collecting After All These Years

Since moving to France, almost 28 years ago now, we've taken a perverse pleasure in collecting Anglocisms, if that's what you call them, that have crept – or rather leapt – into the French language despite the efforts of a Salon dedicated to keeping it pure. Les baskets, for example, are a form of footwear – which doesn't mean, alas, that people here wear great cumbersome basket-shoes on their feet, woven out of straw or raffia or whatever they're made from these days. No, the word means 'trainers' and presumably derives from basketball shoes.

Another early one that we have taken in our stride is un jean. Normally it takes about three French words to approximate one English word – and hence, I suppose, all these Anglocisms – but in this case it's the other way round. Un jean equals 'a pair of jeans' – again alas, because I like to imagine a whole nation of one legged-people wearing a single denim trouser-leg (and wearing a woven basket on the foot at the end of that leg). Sadly, not the case.

Le jogging was another early favourite – it's old hat now – as in 'Est-ce que vous faites le jogging chaque matin?' To which my stock answer would be, 'No I prefer riding my bicycle each morning with my faithful dog at my side, because jogging probably wrecks your knees over time.' A properly equipped French jogger does le jogging in un jogging (no 's', no need for 'pants'). From le jogging it's a comparatively logical bound to le re-looking. You can go to a hairdresser or a stylist for a re-looking, or you can even give furniture a bit of a re-looking, perhaps with a bit of sandpaper and a tin of varnish.

The other morning I received a gleeful text from the Good Wife, who'd tuned into a radio station on her way to work in Brive and heard about une stand-upeuse. All day long, I imagined it had something to do with women who made a habit of not keeping their dates – as in 'Oh, that one. She's a notorious stand-upeuse. Good luck if you think she'll turn up for the film.' But no, I was quite wrong. When the worker returned, she revealed that it means 'stand-up comedienne'. Sorry, I shouldn't say that any more, should I? 'Stand-up comedian.' So the male of the species would be un stand-upeur. 'What do you want to be when you grow up, Jean-Luc?' 'Je veux être un stand-upeur.'

There are many more that tickle us consistently. I won't even start on 'Cuir Homme', the leather shop for men. Fortunately, they don't take up any physical space, unlike my compulsive need to collect tangible objects. The ageing process slows most things down, but my obsession with cultural artefacts is growing apace. The older I get, the more it seems I want to look at things, touch them, listen to them while I'm still here to enjoy them. You can't take them with you.

It started early in my life, with Corgi toys and Britains Limited cowboys and Indians and... zoo animals. Then it was records. Then it was books. Then it was more records, and cassette tapes, and video tapes. Then it was CDs and DVDs. Now it's more records and more CDs. My wife's maxim is that for every new item that comes into the house, an old item should leave it. I've managed to get around it by being literal. I don't buy new items (well, not generally), I buy things second-hand.

The passion for books gradually abated after my student years. Books do furnish a room, as Anthony Powel entitled one of his novels, but the trouble is they have furnished most of this house. The shelves are full, there's room for no more. Besides, books take so frigging long to read and we're both, rapidly, running out of time. The same with DVDs. There's no more room and anyway there's not the pressing need now, given Film Four, Talking Pictures and so on.

People think I'm mad keeping my cassettes; you can never find the one you're looking for, anyway. But they represent a considerable chunk of my misspent life, they still sound pretty damn good and pre-recorded cassettes (for some peculiar reason) are becoming sought after. Records and compact discs, though, remain another matter. The official shelves are sagging at the seams, but you can slot records into canny spaces if necessary and you can build little hillocks of piled CDs. One of my few regrets is that I wasn't more avid in my collecting when vinyl was as unloved as CDs appear to be nowadays. But there are still bargains to be had, which makes the thrill of the chase perhaps that much more thrilling.

My oldest friend and lifelong male soul-mate spends much of his spare time trawling for records in the thrift shops of Manhattan. He has a small and just affordable basement apartment replete with tower-blocks of piled books and cupboards full of records. Apart from both being the eldest of four, we're shaped by quite different family influences, yet we're two peas in a pod. My hunting grounds are the charity shops of Romsey, when I'm back in the U of K, and – now that Philippe has closed his record shop in Brive to take his retirement – Emmaüs, La Ressourcerie and the Secours Populaire here in France. Charitable thrift shops, I suppose.

Much of the time, I come away empty-handed, but just recently I've had a bit of a shark's feeding frenzy. The other day, I came away with what could have once been someone's entire jazz collection on CD: 30 of them and a triple Django Reinhardt LP set, for 11 euros. I probably didn't need any of them, but they filled a few holes in my collection, which is already big enough to keep me going till the bitter end and into the after-life. My brother quizzes me with quasi-mathematical problems like, 'If you did nothing else, how much time would you need to spend to listen to everything you've got?' But that's missing the point. It's just so nice and reassuring to have them. I'm an inveterate browser, and it allows me to browse to my heart's content.

If this sounds like I'm a sad bastard, I'm happy/sad, as Tim Buckley might have had it. I was very happy the other day, when I stumbled upon several boxes of records in a depot, probably part of a house clearance, priced at three for two euros. The name on a couple suggested a fellow Brit and, judging by the records' vintage, perhaps a similar human vintage. Perhaps he died and his collection was dumped by long-suffering loved-ones. Perhaps he sold up and moved back home and decided that he couldn't take them with him. I don't know. In any case, he left behind Pink Floyd's first two albums. I'm not even a particular fan of Pink Floyd, but the adrenalin rush nearly knocked me off my feet. I could sell them for a considerable profit, but I'll probably hang onto them even though some of the music makes me cringe. It's simply to have them there, so I can pull them out of the rack and look at them from time to time and maybe glow in the pleasure of showing them to someone and hearing them gasp. Unfortunately we have few visitors these days, and even fewer who are remotely interested in perusing records. I shall have to wait for my Man in Manhattan's next visit. 

Just lately I have also started collecting ticks: those fiendish parasites that jump onto your skin or clothing when you brush past their natural habitat. It's a hazard of living in the French countryside, but this year they have reached epidemic proportions. On Sunday morning, for example, we took Daphne on a long walk through the woods. I wore shorts because it was hot. When I got back, I removed seven microscopic swine scuttling over my legs. If you don't get them straight away, they burrow into your flesh to suck your blood. The tiny ones are the most difficult to remove with the green plastic hook device.

We removed at least seven from Daphne, too. Her coat is so thick that they're hard to find, and you generally only discover them after they've gorged themselves on her blood. Sometimes, if you miss them, they get so big and bloated that they fall off onto the floor. The other day I trod on one in bare feet. It was not a nice experience. The blood in the bulbous sac was a deep, virulent red and very difficult to wipe off foot and floor.

Just one of the many hazards of being a collector. But if I were young and wanted to follow a career as a stand-upeur, it'd provide plenty of material. I could call myself Kid Kollektor or something edgy. The other day, right...?  

May: The Past is a Different Country

The Good Wife's away in Amsterdam at present, meeting up with a friend and fellow therapist from the U.S. She managed to get tickets for the Vermeer retrospective, which are like gold dust. I suggested that she sell them on the black market and recoup the cost of the sojourn. Once you've seen one Vermeer, you've seen 'em all. The upshot of the matter is that I can suit myself for a week. Wednesday morning, for example, I slipped some clothes on over my pyjamas, the light-blue linen pair that I got for Christmas, in order to walk the dog before breakfast. Anyone who's ever read these despatches will appreciate the extent to which I like to live on the edge. I couldn't be bothered to shower until I got back; that's my excuse. I was late to bed the night before, having done my bit on the door of the cinema association in nearby Vayrac: an avant-premier of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, which – much to my horror – was dubbed rather than the version original as billed. A digital mix-up somewhere along the line.  

I was out, not quite as bright and early as usual, in my pyjamas on my bike with Daphne trotting along beside me, when we encountered one of the departmental border-mowers, a great big bit of machinery with a prehensile jib that mows down the undergrowth at the side of the road and all that shelter within. While making ourselves small at the edge of the road and breathing in diesel fumes and that great smell of freshly cut grass, I reflected on what someone once told me in our nearest hamlet: how, in the days before these monstrous metal machines, the local peasant farmers would direct their flocks of sheep to keep the roadside vegetation in check. These days, the sheep are kept in sheds and let out only on special occasions. So it goes...

If there's one part of England where things might be done in a more traditional way, it's Cumbria. My increasingly fragile mother-in-law lives in a village on the edge of the Pennine Fells overlooking the Eden Valley. She requires regular visits. This time, as we found reliable house-sitters for the duration, I came along for the ride. This time, we took the car – principally so I could pick up the stuff from my father's now shockingly empty flat that my sisters had boxed up as mine. It was not a prospect I relished. Driving in France is easy, but the idea of going all the way up the west side of England, then down the east side unmanned me.

As it turned out, both the M6 and the A1 proved as gentle as lambs – and there were a lot of them in Cumbria. Nothing like the scraggy Rastafarian sheep around these parts, with their elongated prehistoric-looking profiles, but the white and woolly variety that can stand a long Cumbrian winter. We left my sister's in Romsey on Sunday after lunch to give us a fighting chance of reaching our destination before midnight. The worst that could be said of our drive, this time, was that it was dull. There is no scenery to speak of until after Preston. And then there's lots of it. The Forest of Bowland and the Yorkshire Dales on one side, and the Lake District on the other. The idea of a sheltered settlement like Arnside on Morecambe Bay rather appeals to the pensioner in me.

Mercifully, we didn't have to stay with my mother-in-law in her badly converted chapel. The idea of trying to kip on an air-bed while a restless, sleepless nonagenarian shuffled around on her Zimmer frame in search of a drink, either hot or alcoholic, chattering at top volume because she's as deaf as a Sixties rock star to Omar, her rejuvenated stray cat, was not an enticing one. Our saviours were old friends from Sheffield, who offered us shelter in their re-conditioned stone house in Crosby Ravensworth, a mile or so down the road from Maulds Meaburn, where mother sheep and their lambs wander freely around the green and charming village.

We went to Penrith one morning, the biggest town in the area. It has seen much better days. While Debs shopped for her mum at Booth's in the top end of town, I searched for souvenirs of the coming coronation in the bottom. Not for us, you understand, but for the young girl and her boyfriend who were looking after our dog, cats and house (in roughly that order of priority). I found nothing, not even a mug with Charles' and Camilla's faces thereon. Could they have been so unpopular? My mother-in-law has never forgiven the former for divorcing La Dee-Dee, as the French call her, and hoped that the latter, hussy that she is, would slip on the steps of the abbey. Which is very uncharitable of a self-professed Christian and God-believer. Or... did the better stuff sell out quickly? We will never know.

I delivered the bad news to my wife, whom I found pushing a trolley in a state of near panic because she couldn't find anything that wasn't wrapped in plastic. However, I made quite a nice asparagus risotto later in tricky culinary conditions, served in a neat mound in the manner I've picked up from Masterchef. My mother-in-law has not stopped harping on about my cooking ever since, which is very galling to her daughter, whose own delicious efforts have been systematically spurned in the past simply because a daughter is not allowed to grow up and usurp a mother whose former glory days in the kitchen are now past. Jealousy has ever been her middle name.

Still, my Good Wife, a good and conscientious daughter, managed to sort out her mother's paper work, massage her hands, legs and feet, and – with my assistance – get her out in a wheelchair for her first bit of fresh air since she fell and broke her hip back in Covid times. I pushed her up to the gate at the end of the road that opens onto a path up to Murton Pike and back again, and she waved regally as we went on our merry way to neighbours unseen but imagined behind sitting-room windows. It tickled us both pink because it wasn't done tongue-in-cheek.

Clearly, the woman's been watching royalty throughout her long life. She wasn't going to watch the coronation, though, she announced. An André Rieu concert on Sky Arts is more her thing. Such a nice man; he brings joy and happiness to many, you know. We weren't going to watch it either – not because I've got anything against Charles. He may have outmoded views about architecture, but I commend him for his organic principles (although they're probably reinforced by a lucrative contract with Waitrose, if their Duchy brand has anything to do with a plant-talking monarch). Camilla seems a fairly reasonable old stick and they clearly love each other, so I didn't wish her to trip on the abbey steps. Old age is undignified enough as it is.

We drove home before the collective media madness. Well over a thousand kilometres in two days. We left Cumbria at first light, which was soon obscured by the lowering skies as we crossed the Pennines on the A66. But the A1 was fluid, the M11 just about navigable and even the M25 proved feasible. The M20, to my surprise, was a piece of date and walnut cake. And the biggest plus of all was that we sailed through customs at the Eurotunnel terminal, belying my customarily neurotic fears about having to unload our beautifully packed boot and having to convince a French functionary that the letters, books, records, paintings by my mother, her little oak bookcase and other detritus of former family life had absolutely no value other than the sentimental kind. Yes, I should have filled in a form, but my dad's not long been committed to this mortal soil, so please just gimme a break...

After an overnight stay just south of Rouen in a curious house owned by a couple of musicians that looked like it had been designed by Hergé for one of his peripheral characters, we made it back by four on the Friday. Just in time for the coronation. Our dog and cats were there to greet us and the house was still standing. What more can one ask after a hectic week away?

The car's unloaded now, the books and records put away and my mother's paintings hung on our walls. I haven't yet opened the box full of letters – mine to my parents and grandparents, my mother's from our distant outpost of civilisation in Belfast to her parents – for sentimental reasons. All those painstaking letters, hand-written with feeling in the days before e-mail. We did things differently then. I shall wait to peruse them until such time when I'm feeling less flaky.

We still haven't watched highlights of the coronation on YouTube. My friend Edmond sent me this quietly ironic picture of himself, perhaps taken on the big day itself. Rather than Charles III, I prefer the idea of Edmond I, our first South African monarch. A good king, a noble king. A head of state for our time. Floreat Edmondo!

 

April: Homage to Catalonia

Just before our short Easter break, I bumped into a woman I hadn't seen for an age in the Martel post office. We once worked together briefly at a local chateau on behalf of the inmates who'd been royally screwed by an Australian property developer. A crook by any other words. She asked me, 'Qu'est ce que t'es devenu?' or some such construction. It's not a phrase I've ever come across before, but the Good Wife who has experience of such things tells me it means roughly 'What have you been up to?' Being a literal sort of fellow, I translated it – literally – as 'What have you become?' I told her 'agé' – which is exactly what I've become. She laughed. When I told my wife, she laughed even harder – and promptly sent a message to our daughter, who replied 'that's classic', or words to that effect.

In the car during the long drive south to Cadaqués, a town of renown on the Costa Brava, not too far from the French frontier, Frank Zappa's 'Willie the Pimp' popped up on the USB random playlist. I realised with a short sharp shock to the system that I've been listening to the Hot Rats album for over 50 years. I have become truly old. When I was much younger, maybe 16 or so, my mum caught me playing along to Zappa's protracted guitar solo on my Slazenger tennis racquet. My Slazenger Les Paul was 'plugged in' to a little fan heater that served as an amplifier. It was all rather embarrassing.

Earlier that self-same morning, I had gone down to the Salle Polyvalente (the room of multiple uses) for a kind of open day for the commune to explain about all the local services on offer. As I went around the various stalls gathering up literature, it struck me that many of the services were geared towards the older members of the community. Assistance with your IT problems; an app for your mobile phone to enable you to check the state of your health; domestic help. That kind of thing. I nodded thoughtfully as each of the eager, charming women in turn went into more detail, then availed myself of a free cup of coffee and croissant, thanked his worship the mayor for such splendid enterprise and high-tailed it back home to finish packing for the trip to Catalonia.

It's a long way to Cadaqués, it's a long way to go for four nights and three days with our dog. While we had our music to entertain us, Daphne sat stoically on the back seat, watching south-west France evolve into north-east Spain. With the price of diesel here at nearly two euros a litre, I did my best to impress upon my wife the need to keep it steady at or just under 100kph. But she suffers from a complaint that could derive from an accident on a bicycle. It's called See lorry, chase lorry. I have suggested psychiatric help.

Cadaqués is a lovely place, its whitewashed houses, old but mainly now new, climbing up the rocky hills that wrap around the bay. It's a Spanish equivalent of Collioure on the French side of the frontier, where we've stayed on a couple of occasions, the first time back when you could have picked up a little apartment for little money and the thought crossed my mind... only to evaporate as is my custom when a shrewd notion enters one orifice to hang around for a day or two before leaking out of another. Still; the Easter crowds on the Catalan coast suggested that maybe my lack of practical action was a good thing.

Our break didn't start too promisingly. The woman at the agency gave my wife a series of printed photographs to find our Airbnb lodgings, but didn't make it clear just how difficult it is to find anywhere to stop and unload. In the end, we found a parking slot on the very edge of town, so had to haul our baggage – including Daphne's cumbersome mattress – half a kilometre or so through the human throng and up the cobbled alleyways to our billet right in the heart of the old town. The apartment, on the second floor at the top of a precipitous staircase, was much smaller and more rudimentary than it looked on the site. More like a studio flat. But hey, it was a prime location – wasn't it?

Well, yes and no. We were ideally situated for all the bars and restaurants, but both of us had forgotten how late the nightlife in Spain goes on. That first night in a bed, with no headboard for inveterate readers, was fairly disastrous. For a start, there was a strip of LED lights all the way along a shelf above the bed, like something that you'd find at Christmas time draped around a window or a door. We couldn't figure out how to turn them off and were tempted to rip the wires out of the transformer on the shelf, but didn't want to be liable for damages. In the end, I wrapped a T-shirt around my head in a vain attempt to create darkness. Secondly, Daphne isn't used to sharing a building with other residents, so she barked (loudly) every time someone came back in the middle of the night – whereupon one of us would have to leap out of bed to quieten her before she woke the dead. Thirdly, sounds resonate around the narrow passages of the old town. Nice as the Catalan people are, they seem to have little conception that people might be trying to sleep above them as they wend their noisy way back to their lodgings in the wee small hours.

And they are nice, the Catalans. They are the perennial good guys of Spanish history. Ever since reading Orwell's Homage to Catalonia as a teenager, I've seen them as a bastion of liberalism in the constant struggle against a country seemingly dominated by the church, bull torturers and fascists. It's Barcelona over Real Madrid in the El Classico every time. The hip logo seen around the town of Cadaqués is Transmontana Republik, in recognition of the famous frisky wind as well as the spirit of independence.

Since their language has certain similarities to French, everyone has either a smattering of French or English or both. They smile, too, when they serve you in a shop or pass you in the street. We found out just how nice they can be when we went to see the Dali house the day after our first unfortunate night – and our first fortunate morning, when Debs discovered a switch and a dimmer on the opposite wall that operated the LED strip. Well, really! Why would you locate a switch on the opposite wall?

We'd reserved our tickets for the house online in advance of our stay. Because we were reluctant to leave our dog alone in strange lodgings, we walked up and over and down the headland that separates the town from the surrealist showman's former lodgings. Half-expecting the kind of reception she'd receive in France at such a request, my amiable wife enquired at the ticket office whether we could split our allocated visit, so that one of us did a quick tour while the other hung around on the beach with Daphne before swapping over. Of course, no problem. Just remind me when you come back this afternoon.

In fact, we didn't have to remind her. The woman remembered us and did everything possible to make sure that we both had as much time we needed and more for our respective tours. When my turn came, I tagged along with a group of Spaniards and Catalans. Our guide, a darling man they might have called him in Ireland, with the air of an off-duty librarian or primary school teacher, gave his spiel in three different languages. Because I was the only English visitor, I had a personal dialogue with him, which made me feel like visiting royalty. The house was every bit as quirky and as fascinating as one might imagine a surrealist's domain to be, but we both agreed that the swimming pool was the pièce de résistance.

On leaving the house, our guide queried his opening gambit: 'It's not a guided visit, but an accompanied visit.' Was this good English? I said it was perfectly reasonable, but suggested that 'It's not a guided tour, but I will accompany you' might be a little better. He was touchingly grateful and, like a pair of well-mannered duellists, we traded thanks. The winner was he who outdid the other, but I think it was a draw.

After two leg-sapping return trips to Casa Dali and a fabulous lunch in the artist's favourite quirky Lebanese restaurant, we slept better that night. Daphne was more accustomed to the noise and the fairy lights served this time as a night-light, not a bright light. Nevertheless, we decided to go home early. We'd walk to the lighthouse and back on the Saturday, have our seafood paella in the restaurant tucked around the corner and travel home on the Sunday – when there were many fewer lorries to chase. That's the thing when you wind down and get stuck in your ways. Why be uncomfortable somewhere when you can be comfortable in your own home? Our bed has a headboard and the prospect of Easter Monday chez nous seemed the right thing to do.

It was a nice enough break and the Dali house was memorable, but we will bear the shame of the light switch for the rest of our days. Next time someone asks me what I have become, I'll tell them: old – and rather stupid.