November: Town Mouse & Country Mouse

The other morning at breakfast, I had a coughing-fit caused by muesli dust. If anything underlines the privileged middle-class life I lead it’s surely the notion of choking on (organic) muesli. It’s like admitting to people that my mum used to spank us kids when we got too much for her with a rolled-up copy of House & Garden. Perhaps I’d better explain the phenomenon quickly. Here's the thing (as they say), I was tipping the muesli into a big Kilner jar. With insufficient room for the entire contents of the bag, I tried to squeeze the air out before sealing the remains to keep the mites out – whereupon some residual dust went up my nose and down my trachea (or wherever), thus introducing dust into the lungs (presumably) and causing the spasms.

It’s just another part of the rich tapestry of life in the bucolic middle of nowhere. Like conversations with locals about mushrooms – the edible rather than the hallucinogenic variety. Recently, for example, on my way to the hustle and bustle of Martel market, I pulled up at Giselle’s barn to buy some eggs and whatever vegetables she had to sell at this late-season juncture, and found her chatting to his worship the mayor, who lives in the house opposite. I wished them both a cheery good morning and attempted to contribute some nugget to the conversation. Unfortunately, I score a D-minus mark and a note to see me after break, boy when it comes to fungi. It remains a mystery to me that people can get so fired up about the subject. At least it’s harmless, I guess, and doesn’t involving killing Mother Nature’s creatures.

My best friend missed out on such edifying matters during his recent visit here. Nevertheless, he saw enough – despite the miserable weather at the time – to pronounce that my life was good, to paraphrase Randy Newman: which felt like a benediction and made me proud, because My Man in Manhattan ostensibly leads such a rich cultural life in the city. Even so, Johnny Town Mouse always remembers the good times spent as a child at the farms of his uncles, one in county Fermanagh, the other near Portstewart on the north Antrim coast, during our time at school together in Belfast. He has lived in a basement apartment a short walk from Central Park West for even longer than I’ve lived in France, so respective visits to each other’s domain help to recharge the parts that other trips can’t reach.

He came bearing gifts including a conviction (the operative word) that Trump is toast. My friend is a deep thinker and extensive reader, so I took some heart from what he had to say, though still convinced that all the books in the world won’t halt the march of Fascism. 

Talk is easy for us. We are both the responsible eldest child of four (two boys and two girls) and were born exactly six months apart. We both live surrounded by books and music, both love the same kind of films and no doubt both agree that Hejira is Joni Mitchell's finest album. We have lived remarkably parallel lives a long way apart since going our separate ways at the end of our school days.

Face-to-face talk is so much easier than talk on a phone. In my case, I think I was unwittingly traumatised by my friend Satpol during my time in primary school in north London. A tall Indian boy who wore his black hair in two pigtails seemingly fashioned into the two handles of a jug or a vase, he had a wart on the palm of his right hand, but I didn’t let it spoil our friendship. One evening he phoned me, and my mum handed me the big black Bakelite telephone receiver. I didn’t know what to do or say, and I think he was equally perplexed at the other end. It was almost like trying to converse with a heavy breather. I realise now, of course, that he was probably just feeling lonely and needed to connect.

My astrological twin and I have no such trouble. I’m more of a listener than a talker, but when Johnny Town Mouse is here, I can give as good as I get. I can pull out a record from the shelves or find a Corgi car in its original box or wax lyrical on the craftsmanship of a plastic cowboy wielding a lasso on horseback and know that my enthusiasm is both mutual and entirely comprehensible. For all the talk about aches and pains and the ageing process and what's going to happen to our records when we die, all the talk about our hopes for at least another two decades of active service and dreams of leaving a lasting legacy, either as a writer or a stinking-rich philanthropist, it was like being a kid again. It always is. We didn’t stop nattering from morn till night. The Good Wife looks upon it as having two husbands in one house.

Our only real point of divergence, probably due to our contrasting environments, is his propensity to sit up late into the night, sometimes delving deep into YouTube rabbit holes, while I like to retire to the ‘best place on earth’: bed. There comes a time when you have to switch off and shut down: like a TV set in the days before 24-hour schedules for addicts and night-owls.

Of course, I sat up late with him on the night of his departure. I’d found him an inexpensive ticket on the night train from St. Denis près Martel to Paris Austerlitz: a first class berth on a couchette that would allow him to sleep all the way, then find his leisurely stress-free way across town to Charles De Gaulle airport and thence direct to JFK, and all for less than a 50-euro note.  

We sat up till after midnight listening to music and pouring over an old school magazine from our time together as teenagers with big dreams, reminiscing about pupils we had known and loved (or not). Neither of us featured in any of the photographs, since we were and are both serial non-joiners. He got a mention for his part in the Russian society, while I got one for earning a point for our House in the annual sports event. I suspect that even then our big dreams were tempered by a healthy dose of ironic self-awareness.

I took him down to the local station in plenty of time for the 12.50 train, still a bag of nerves after my wife’s experience with the same night train: cancellation, non-appearance of replacement bus, hasty trip to Brive to find what we would find. But no, this time there were others reassuringly waiting on the platform, and the train from Rodez rolled in on time. The two mice embraced warmly and my Man in Manhattan showed his ticket to one of the three controllers (one for each carriage) and got on board. Johnny Town Mouse was on his long, long way home, leaving the Country Mouse bereft.

But only temporarily. My life is good. This rural mouse has friends in the vicinity with whom he can walk in the woods and miss all the mushrooms, revel in the night sky, moan about French drivers and even spin a record or two, just as his urban equivalent can play poker with pals, go and see some jazz at the Village Vanguard or classical music at Carnegie Hall, and pop into the local thrift store for yet more books and music. Jealous, moi? Well, perhaps a little envious on occasions. But each to his own domain.

I heard from him later that morning. In true SNCF fashion, they’d double-booked his bed. When he opened the door of his couchette, he found a young woman occupying his berth. She, it transpired, had booked on the train leaving before midnight, while I had booked on the train after midnight. Two trains, yet one and the same. SNCF Connect disconnected. Being a polite and reasonable man, my twin didn’t take advantage of the situation, but merely excused himself and took an unoccupied bed. 

I should have warned him – to approximate what the cop tells Jake Gittes in Chinatown, Forget it… it’s France. And thank God, because I wouldn’t want to leeve in Amereeka now. How long will my Man in Manhattan tolerate living under a sociopathic convicted felon as President, backed by his bully-boy storm-troopers who like to ride around in heavily armed pick-up trucks? Far from Trump being toast, I fear it’ll be the rest of us. I’d better keep the home fire burning for Johnny Town Mouse.

October: Still Hanging About

Any year that ends with the number ‘4’ is a deeply significant one for me. A lot of hoo-ha attaches itself to the accompanying birthday, then a few years down the line you wonder what all the fuss was about. In ’74, I was a student deluded by self-importance. In ’84, I thought I had matured into manhood, only to discover that I still didn’t know doodly-squat. In ’94, I believed I was on the threshold of a sensible middle-age, but moved to France the very next year to begin my life over again. In ’04, I embraced middle age. In ’14, I felt that 60 was the portal to old age, only to learn that there were a few good years still left in me.

This time, however, there’s no kidding. Seventy is o-l-d, old. I have definitely stepped over the threshold into what will prove to be either the penultimate or the final act: I wake up every morning, despite my new indecently expensive pillow, to find that my body hasn’t regenerated itself overnight, but merely aches anew. My neck, my shoulders, my lower back… Entropy has well and truly set in. Everything is winding down and slowly but surely disintegrating. Friends urge me to go in for an M.O.T. and I will take advantage of the departmental medical board’s kind offer of a free overhaul, promise, but there are so many body-parts to go wrong at this age that it’s a journey into fear…

Like the Caisse Primaire Assurance Médicale, or whatever it might have changed its name to in recent times, I try to act preventively and responsibly. First thing now, before feeding the animals and turning on the wi-fi (for heaven’s sake), for example, I try to remember to hang for a minute or so from underneath the stairs to the mezzanine level to prevent my bones from fusing. It’s the self-help alternative to Smallweed’s periodic command to his long-suffering wife in Dickens’ Bleak House, ‘shake me up, Judy.’

For the last few years, I have been approaching the stage of life where one does a lot of mental arithmetic. Everything these days seems to involve a subtraction from a hundred – the absolute maximum life expectancy – to calculate how many years are potentially left, supposing that you survive illness, disease, accident or rising summer temperatures. If I make it as far as ’44, will I still have the will to push on for a century? My lifelong passion for cricket has taught me that this is the right thing to do, but what if I’ve been consigned by then to an old people’s home? There are only so many communal singalongs that a person can tolerate.

Yes, the will to live. It’s a stage in your life where those you have known, whether personally or by repute, have given up and/or are dropping like flies. A dear friend from my days as a deluded self-important student at Exeter University recently passed on the news that a mutual friend of ours had topped himself. Apparently, he’d had problems with the demon drink and had lost the resolution to keep going. I was very saddened by the news. True, I hadn’t seen him in decades, but he was the first fellow student I met when my father delivered me and my youthful impedimenta to my hall of residence. He had smiled warmly and spoken with the air of a well-seasoned public-schoolboy. Always unfailingly courteous and charming, there was nevertheless something slightly nervous about him. On hearing the news of his premature demise, I immediately wondered whether he’d suffered some kind of abuse at public school that he had never confronted. Perhaps drink was his way of trying to blot it out. And when that doesn’t work…

But enough of such sad news, already. There’s quite enough of that kind of thing in the daily headlines. Since we’re on the topic of maturity, let me update you on recent developments around this house, which reached the age of 20 this summer. The walls of straw seem to be holding up nicely, despite the recent coloured lime-wash that rapidly turned as white as chalk, and the unmanageable garden is maturing nicely. This coming winter, we will no longer have to squelch over muddy grass to the front door, because Damien (our putative family retainer) finally turned up only two years after his original estimate to lay a long and winding path to the porch. Until the newly scattered grass seeds carpet the exposed soil between the limestone pavers, the path will be known as ‘the giraffe’. Passing friends and callers have admired it and I wish that I could have informed them that it was all my own handiwork. If I’d done it myself, I know only too well, it would have looked more like a brontosaurus than a giraffe.

I have to say, it was well worth the outlay. I often pop out onto the porch to admire it and, secretly, I have re-discovered the childish joy of trying to get from A to B without stepping on the lines. I have even attempted a return journey to the end of the line in slippers, just to prove to myself that I can do it without them getting wet or muddy. The march of civilisation goes on apace.

With the imminent arrival of sister and brother-in-law for my birthday, I mowed our lawn of weeds either side of the new giraffe – just to accentuate the new, clean look and to complement the pansies that the Good Wife has planted in pots in honour of the visit. My brother-in-law keeps their garden as immaculate as my sister keeps their house and, although we live very differently and believe that ‘when in Rome…’, you feel obliged to pull out all or at least some of the stops.

There’s little I can do about the lawn of weeds, however. While wielding my little Lidl electric mower, I was thinking of ways I could market it. Watching the adverts in between the marvellous screwball comedy The More The Merrier on Talking Pictures the other evening, it seems that you can sell anything if you’re artless enough. You, too, could have a lawn like ours. Just sow the seeds and scatter and watch those multifarious weeds take over. Simply send a cheque for £75 made out to Grassmyarse Ltd. Money back within 15 days if not delighted… I don’t think so. Never mind, it looks lawn-like for a moment.

It’s the garden that may well prove to be the death of me – to use my mother’s hyperbole. If anything other than osteoporosis or senile dementia drives us out of our house and into an easy-to-run flat, it’ll be the garden. Never knowingly horticultural, my failing body will make it even harder to maintain order in the years to come. We joke about a family retainer, and nothing could be finer in the state of Carolina, but we know that the financial family planning makes it a pipe dream. We’ve discussed the idea of offering board and lodging to a young WOOF-equivalent, but do we really want to share our house with a stranger? We did that for seven years when we lived in Sheffield and it wasn’t always easy. Once or twice it nearly ended in bloodshed. Mind you, the most trying offender was… French.

So then… What next? What does the future hold in store for an aged man and his ageing wife? Bobby, I don’t know…, as James Brown told his Famous Flame, but whatever it is, it’s got to be funky. I’m hoping that the regular yoga, dog-walks and stair-hangings will keep me reasonably limber for a little longer yet. I still believe I could dance all night (if they only let me), and until the day when I’m confronted by tangible evidence that indeed I cannot, perhaps it’s best just to carry on in the belief that you can and see how far that gets you.

Hmmmm. Perhaps I’ll turn to philosophy in my old age. That’s something you can do in bed, isn’t it?

September: Colette, Courgettes and Dodgy Barbeques

How good it is to be back on dry land, in a manner of speaking. After the exigencies of England in early August, I’ve appreciated even more than usual the beauty and riches of the French countryside. Peace and quiet. Heck, until this weekend there was a blissful week-long hiatus when the house phone stopped ringing. Mother Mary, the Outlaw, dropped her mobile phone down the loo. Some cur must have dried it out for her with a bowlful of rice.

Talking of water closets, I’ve appreciated being on one level again, too. Yes, there’s a mezzanine level where we have our TV and I keep my LPs, CDs and cassettes and my ailing desktop computer, whose speed these days is the equivalent of a shuffling nonagenarian with a Zimmer frame, but we had the good sense to put the bedrooms on the ground floor when designing and building the house. For a fortnight in England, I was taking my life in my hands whenever I got up for the regular nocturnal pee. The stairs at the tiny Airbnb lodgings were so steep that the steps were those alternate duck’s feet, or whatever they call them. It’s much easier and safer at home.

August passed by without any prolongation of the severe heat that The Daughter experienced while she was looking after things during our absence. It rained a bit and now September has started where it may finish, with mornings so cold that I’ve had to put on long trousers, gloves and jumper in order to give Daphne her morning constitutional. You feel a little sorry for the holidaymakers, but hey… that’s all part of life’s rich tapestry. A propos of holidaymakers, the Parisian neighbours – beside and below – have gone back to the big city now. But not before we discovered that yer man next door (who shall remain anonymous to preserve his modesty) apparently likes to operate the barbeque in the nude. Perhaps to Madame’s excitement. We can’t make out whether she wanders around in the nip or whether she’s wearing a flesh-coloured bikini.

In any case, they were both suitably clad when they invited the three of us and Lawrence and Sophie from down below and Sylvie and Olivier on the far side of the putative nudists for their annual good-neighbour bash. We all brought along a bottle and a dish for a bit of à la bonne franquette (I believe that's how it’s spelled). And very nice it was, too. We’d all been a little dreading it, because these affairs can be rather awkward, but it passed off rather congenially. The Parisians talked about the recent Olympic Games in their city and about the wonders of the produce at this time of year. Sophie and I go to the same vegetable stall at Martel market and she was enthusing about how cheap it was compared to Paris. And how much better the quality.

Better certainly than our usual disappointing harvest from our own little bit of horticultural paradise. The apples were covered like the roses in black spot and really only fit for stewing. The bountiful crop of pears has refused to ripen, even in paper bags on the window sills. The three peach trees – one of which I have now pronounced dead – yielded (count ‘em) seven peaches. The Swiss chard was severely coppiced by passing deer, although now re-growing vigorously. The chilli peppers have done well, but aren’t very hot. We had two stripy aubergines, a few yellow courgettes and two enormous green ones that I unearthed from a canopy of protective leaves. Yes, they make good soup, but it makes more sense to pay a market stallholder for all the effort involved.

Since the Night of the Neighbours went so well, we decided to invite the fully clothed variety from down below for an evening soon after the sans culottes had gone back to the big city. We have more in common with them. Lawrence and I tend to like similar music and, bless him, we came bearing a three-record set of King Cole Trio sides for Capitol. His Swiss friend’s father-in-law had recently died and left behind a legacy of old vinyl from which he chose the gift for me. He’d filled his boots, so to speak, and doesn’t tend to go back as far in time as I do, so I was delighted and not a little touched. A splendid time was had by one and they have invited us back for their next visit south-west.

They, too, have gone now, as have the girls. They’ve left me for 10 days in Athens and on Hydra, the isle just off the Peloponnese where Leonard Cohen once lived in the hippie heyday. It’s a long-promised mother-and-child reunion to celebrate Our Kid’s imminent 30 years on earth and to give the Good Wife a well-earned rest. Hopefully not from her husband, I should add, but from the demands of her all-consuming mother. The human succubus. So I’m marking time at home until their return. I have a few commissions to use as an excuse for my own private stay-cation, but in truth I love my home and surroundings and enjoy being with the cats and dogs and able to follow my own rhythms.

There’s always tons to do, tons to read, tons to watch and tons to listen to. Feeling a little more French, a little more bi-national than I normally do, I’ve just finished two short novels by Colette: Chéri and The Last of Chéri, a Penguin bequeathed by my Francophile mother. I thought it was about time, since Colette is a bit of a local darling around these parts. During part of the war, she sheltered in her daughter’s lodgings – one of the twin châteaux of nearby Curemonte, another of les plus beaux villages of these parts. Her daughter, Colette de Jouvenel, while not nearly so well known as her mother, is actually a fascinating and admirable character: a journalist, feminist and active resistant, who sheltered the children of deported Jews (among others) in her (then) dilapidated château.

But back to her mother…The translator had and did a hell of a job: the writing is very descriptive, often poetic and flowery and sometimes hard to follow, but surprising in its candour. The books were published in the 1920s and, in an age of euphemisms and suggestion, they tackle subjects like bedrooms and nakedness and desire – sex in other words, and what’s more between a young man and a considerably older woman – with refreshing frankness. But then of course, France has always been another country altogether: something confirmed by re-watching Philip Kauffman’s Henry and June, based around a possibly fanciful triangular relationship between Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller and June Mansfield, his wife at the time of his sojourn in 1930s Paris. Steamy and ever so slightly daft, I decided that two viewings is quite enough, thank you.

Well, the upside of September is that there’s little probability of life-endangering heat now. The downside is the start of the hunting season. Just before the girls left me to my own devices, we had our customary evening constitutional en famille with Daphne. It was ruined by the spectacle of baying hounds chasing a terrified boar across the bottom of the neighbours’ field, which reminded me of all those American convict films involving fugitives from the law pursued by a ballistic pack of bloodhounds. One of those hideous Amerikanische pick-up trucks with a hood to contain said baying hounds within then passed us on the road. The Good Wife pleaded with me not to give them the finger. She was quite right. I’m not built for violent confrontation or even mild altercation. Certainly not here in this green and pleasant land where courgettes grow to the size of barrage balloons.

Just to return briefly to the subject of Colette in conclusion. On the phone the other day, The Brother offered me his theory of the four stages of a human being's life cycle: excited, bored, bored rigid, rigid. It describes Chéri's indolent life to a tee. No time for that here; I must be getting on...

 

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.