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.

 

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.