February: The Square Root of Purgatory

During the not-so-merry month of January I turned into a hermit crab: one of those solitary creatures that quietly goes on with its own business without fuss or distraction. David Attenborough would know whether this description applies to a hermit crab, but given its name and the habits of crabs, I reckon it probably does.

In my solitude… apart from listening to Duke Ellington, I’ve been able to get on while the Good Wife has been in England. She’s been working like the proverbial Trojan, tying up all the loose ends of her mother’s house sale and then helping Sampsondottir move down the Windrush line from Crystal Palace to Honor Oak, where we trust her life will be rendered a little easier. Why did the Trojans have a reputation for hard work, by the way? It was industrious Greek carpenters who had to hammer and saw night and day to make a wooden horse big enough in which to hide a small army. I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts… a crumb of A-level Latin that lodged in my cranium.

So yes, I’ve kept my head down and ploughed my lone furrow while I’ve been on my own: reading more books and listening to more music than I did as a student, making meals that last for three days so there’s more time for getting on, walking the dog twice a day, watching a film or two and finishing my chapter on the development of telly in the 1950s. Nevertheless, there comes a time in every hermit crab’s life when it has to emerge from its hiding place and merge with the mainstream. I did it twice in one day mid month and both times it led me to purgatory. Nothing too South Sudan, but on both occasions I wished I’d stayed in my lair.

It was a Saturday, a time when many a human bean shakes off the shackles of work to go shopping in town or go to a football match to yell blue murder at the referee. In my case, I had an invitation from His Worship the Mayor to go down to the Salle Mathieux to partake of a slice of galette du roi and drink a verre d’amitié. I had a sneaky suspicion that the gallette in question would not be the flaky-pastry-with-almond-paste variety because the commune would only have sufficient funds for the unappetising brioche variety, and the thought of drinking a cup on a Saturday afternoon with my fellow communards fills me with fear and loathing, but as a perennial outsider I thought it might be politic to show my face and glad-hand the mayor and his team of élus.

The invitation was for four o’clock. Not wishing to be too English about my punctuality, I figured that five past might be a suitable time. People are usually late in this neck of France. Not on this occasion, not when free food and drink are involved. I found the salle packed with natives, all hanging around in anticipation. Unable to face the prospect of shaking everyone’s hand while wondering whether to kiss or not to kiss, I did what I usually do and sidled over to a familiar face for some vacuous conversation that leaves all parties feeling awkward and embarrassed.

I reckoned on half an hour, an hour tops, and then back in good time for the football results, but we didn’t sit down at the tables until almost five. I stuck to Patrick, a near neighbour who’s a good sort, with a sense of humour, but there’s only so much you can say about your respective dogs. Then my heart sank. His Worship took the microphone. True to form, he rambled on for at least half an hour, introducing the various associations in the commune and handing the mike to a representative so that he or she could ramble on for a bit more. Following this, it was time to introduce all the newcomers to our rural idyll and hand the mike to them so that they, too, could ramble on a bit more. Fair play to the man, the gesture showed public spirit and a splash of emotional intelligence, but the football results were pressing and I wanted my customary bottle of beer and bowl of peanuts because late Saturday afternoon is one time in the week when you can act like a real man.

By the time the bottles and the galettes were placed before us like an act of feeding the five thousand, I felt so like a fish out of water that I poured myself half a beaker of Brittany cider and cut myself a slice of brioche without even asking. And, readers, it was every bit as bland as feared. Still, with a mouth full of cake, you don’t need to worry about conversational pleasantries. At last the time came to overcome my reluctance to draw attention to myself, say a few desultory farewells, shake the hand of his Worship and thank him for the invitation, and high-tail it out of there with a profound sense of relief. Hey ho, the communal life is clearly not for a hermit crab.

Back home, there was barely enough time to catch the classified results, rustle up a snack supper and leave Daphne with a chew and some encouraging words about not being too long, before I was off for a second dose of purgatory – like two spoonfuls of cod liver oil as a child. That evening, I was on cinema duty in Vayrac and I’d had a text to ask me to get there earlier than usual because they were anticipating a crowd… for Avatar 3. God help me.

Usually, my job is to stand at the door like a spare part, tear the tickets of the punters and wish them a cheery bon film. Not hard but kind of mortifying. This time, there was someone playing that vital role: a nice guy with a propensity to ‘swallow his words’, as they say here, which means that conversations are based on guesswork. It’s a recipe for non-sequiturs. My role… was to hand each punter with his or her very own pair of 3D glasses. If there’s anything worse than having to sit through Avatar 3, in French, it’s sitting through it in three dimensions. And if that weren’t bad enough, some people mistook me for someone who might know, and asked me whether they could wear the contraptions over their prescription glasses.

There was a 5-minute trial run after which anyone could return non-performing glasses for another pair. Mine were fine, so I was able finally to settle back in a chair to enjoy more than three hours of hell in 3D. It was like being dropped into one of those Roger Dean topographic album covers that he created for Yes and other such groups – only to discover that the blue people lived in a world even worse than our own. It was war, war and more war accompanied by the constant crescendos of a soundtrack that made sleep impossible. And just to put the old tin lid on it, without either French or English subtitles, I was totally lost. Yes, the 3D graphics were impressive, but you come to expect that in this age of computer-generated images. Personally, I’m still more impressed by the recreation of the Himalayas in the Pinewood studios for Powell and Pressburger’s 1947 film, Black Narcissus.

When the credits rolled, I was eager to fulfil the second part of my role: to open the doors and wish the punters a cheery bonsoir as they file away into the night. Daniel, the president of the society that operates the cinéma Uxello, reckoned that the film was maybe 20 minutes too long. I suggested that it was three hours too long. He regarded me wryly.

Two doses of purgatory in one day. Purgatory squared. I was far too late into bed and I let Daphne stay in recompense for my protracted absence. Normally, she jumps down off the bed when I put my book and glasses down and wanders off to her basket in the sitting room. I slept off my ordeal and she didn’t wake me till it was breakfast time. I made pancakes as compensation for the mental torture I endured for the common good.

One good thing came of it. Soon after, the association held their own gathering for members, featuring this time galette du roi as confectionery intended it. I still felt like a fish out of water, but there were a few people I knew and the conversation was less stilted. I told Evelyne, whose job it is to organise the staffing for each séance, a thankless task, that in future would she please consider me only for versions originales, with sub-titles for the hard of comprehending.

She apologised for allocating me to Avatar, as indeed she might have.

January: A Winter's Tale

At last, a real winter. It was even snowing here when I began this on Woden’s Day, the 7^th of yet another new year. We haven’t had snow in these parts for a few years. That’s the thing about climate change: you never know what to expect from one year to the next. From one day to the next, in fact.

Gisèle is delighted. She sells us eggs, butternut squash, potatoes full of untreated eyes and the best walnuts for miles around from her nearby barn. Bitter cold means death to the bugs and pests that make eyes in her spuds and generally make her market gardening problematic.

Unfortunately the big Yuletide chill didn’t come early enough for Daphne. A couple of days after Boxing Day she failed to greet me with her usual enthusiasm first thing in the morning. Her head hung low and she wouldn’t or couldn’t look at me. I wondered whether she’d had a bad reaction to the first of a new brand of chews the evening before, a present from her ‘godparents’, the Thompsons, on Christmas Day. Unable to eat her breakfast, I knew that something had to be seriously wrong. Daphne is the world’s greediest dog.  

On taking her to see Valérie at the vets’ in Martel, Sampsondottir and I learnt that Daphne had the pirose, as they seem to call the tick-bite disease in these parts. Despite the number of ticks we are forever removing, Daphne has never had it before – unlike her predecessor, Alfred Lord Sampson, who twice almost died from it – and we were beginning to think that she must have an in-built tolerance to the vile bloodsuckers. But no. Fortunately, we caught it early. Unfortunately, the injection of the antidote must be very painful. When wife and daughter took her back a couple of days later, they reported that they had never, ever seen an animal shake so much with fear.

Before the unwelcome drama, we’d enjoyed some beautiful ‘Family Walks’ (as our family-oriented daughter would surely capitalise them) including one from a nearby table d’oriéntation that offers the best view in these parts of the Dordogne way down below. It takes you as far as ‘the house on the hill’, as we know it: a house almost as big as a chateau that sits precariously on the very edge of the limestone cliff, overlooking a bend in the river where we go swimming in the summer. Many a time we’ve looked up at it and wondered how you get up close and personal. Now we know – and it was worth the wait.

The next day, if my journal serves me well, we were enshrouded in thick fog that didn’t lift till after lunch. The sun shone radiantly on the dwellers of the uplands. We’ve taken to walking backwards up our adjacent chemin rural. It was something I started as a lark, but I read subsequently that it was good for your back, legs and mental acuity. I don’t know if I’m any the wiser as a result, but it gave us a laugh and you don’t half feel it on your thighs by the time you reach the road at the top.

Anyway, on the way back from this particular walk, we stopped to marvel at the scenery at a point on the road up from Bonnard where hang-gliders have been known to leap into the Great Unknown. Looking down onto the plain beneath us, the landscape was cloaked in a winter-weight duvet of mist. A just-visible roof and conical tower made the Château de Blannard appear perched on the shore of some Alpine lake. I felt like that lone ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ by Caspar David Friedrich, staring out across nature’s ‘divine creation’, feeling blessed despite the minor irritations that I chose to live in the Land of the Gauls.

Today the snow lies hereabouts. It’s not exactly deep and crisp and even, but it’s incontrovertibly snow. Unfortunately, it arrived elsewhere in the land on Monday, when I took the Good Wife and our progeny to Limoges airport for their flight to Stansted. For once, I wasn’t fixed on catastrophes. The sky was so blue and so cloudless that I pictured an easy flight with birds’ eye views of the terrain below. But on the outskirts of the dreary city with little claim to fame other than porcelain, Tilley the Kid announced ‘Oh no!’ The flight had been put back from 4 till 8pm. And after that it all just got worse and worse.

Ryanair in its almighty commercial wisdom decided that the plane load of passengers should be transported by coach to Nantes. It took over an hour for said coaches to arrive and I knew that they would never make it for 8pm without the kind of driving associated with the Paris to Dakar rally. With a heavy heart I waited with Daphne till the pair of them squeezed onto one of the coaches; my poor innocent ‘girls’ boarding a magical mystery tour.

Back in the guilty comfort of a warm home, the texts arrived. They were stuck outside of Nantes on the motorway in a snowstorm. When they finally arrived at the airport, the flight was postponed till possibly the next day. No hotels, nowhere to sit and nothing to eat. Someone brought some blankets and bottles of water, but there weren’t enough to go round. My girls weren’t prepared to battle the hoards of cold, frustrated passengers and fortunately Tilley had travelled with the packet of grissini that Father Christmas left in her pillow case. Organic grissini. Santa is so very middle class.

Needless to say the chaos continued the next day. The flight was put back on several occasions and finally postponed till the following day. The girls managed to score a pain au chocolat to eat, but mercifully forewent a coffee, as several passengers subsequently reported food poisoning. From coffee!? They even managed to find a spot in an ‘e-conference room’ in which to sit and think nostalgically of home. ‘Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.’

Rather than wait for Ryanair to find them a hotel for the night, they managed to find one themselves in the city. They devoured some reasonably healthy Japanese fast food, slept a full and comfortable night and then ate a hearty breakfast. Ryanair has apparently agreed to pay reasonable expenses and graciously despatched tokens which they were unable to access on the app. Nor were they valid on a Ryanair flight. ‘Crasser and crasser, said Debo.’

Nevertheless, they got away early the next afternoon and arrived safely at London Stansted – even if they weren’t able to spend their tokens on the plane. We shall now see whether the company will reimburse them for their additional reasonable expenses. Perhaps it would all have been different if I’d pre-imagined all the catastrophes in my customary fashion. I blame myself.

Back home and culpable on the pretext of looking after the animals, my job is to keep the home fire burning. Thus far, with carefully selected ‘overnighters’ and a little early morning kindling I’ve kept it going without a break for at least a fortnight. It’s not that we rely entirely on it with under-floor heating, but that doesn’t reach the mezzanine level where I’m currently spending a lot of time researching the development of UK television for a chapter in an academic book about the impact of the Fifties on life as we once knew it.

Well, I once knew it – kind of. The research has taken me straight back to my early days in Woodside Park, a tree-lined suburb near the end of the Northern Line, watching programmes in black and white and 405 lines on our first family telly. The announcers still talked down at you with plums in their mouths, so Andy Pandy danced around with Teddy on highly visible strings to the tune of ‘Endy Pendy’s coming to play, la-la-la la la-la.’ I preferred ‘Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men’ with Shlobbalopp the tortoise and Little Weeed, and ‘Rag Tag and Bobtail’, a trio of animated animal glove-puppets who did only what they could in case anything too adventurous revealed the operators’ hands above the primitive cardboard scenery. Did I actually Watch With Mother, or did she park my sister and me in front of the set while she took a well-earned rest from her chores?

Being a serious little boy, even then, I insisted on staying up for the nightly current affairs programme hosted by Cliff Michelmore, Tonight. The Good Wife and I recently watched the team’s documentary about the Big Freeze of 1963. What it lacked in sophisticated graphics, it made up for in the clarity of the information. It was a good team: Cy Grant might sing a topical calypso, Fife Robertson would sport a bushy beard and a deerstalker hat and speak with an easily mimicked Scottish accent, the easily mimicked Alan Whicker was still perfecting his curious, slightly stilted manner of speech pre-Whicker’s World, and Derek Hart and Kenneth Allsopp added journalistic gravitas.

Fond memories. I don’t watch current affairs programmes in my dotage; I find them too upsetting. Walking the dog, feeding the fire and mounting tracks backwards tend to keep my mind from wandering into catastrophic scenarios. Pardon me if I get on with my research into a bygone age when apparently we never had it so good.

 

December: History Lessons

December already. Another 12 months have almost ratcheted by, soon to be consigned to the annals of history. The March of Time!, as the stentorian voice-over proclaimed to preface each edition of the bygone newsreel.

AD 2025 will go down in the Gregorian calendar as the Year of the New Kitchen, with a few short trips to the motherland as appendices. Our days, though, have generally become those of the privileged semi-retired. Touch wood, both of us still enjoy sufficient mobility and good health to start each day, after breakfast of course, by walking the dog. We do it together now, on the basis that there is a less urgent need to ‘get on’ with our to-dos than there was a few years ago.

Just recently, our walks have been fog-bound, as the weather decides which way it wants to go. Sometimes we might get a glimpse of a deer bounding across a meadow as it races for cover in the next outcrop of trees. Usually, though, we see no one and nothing. The other day, however, the sun came out and everything turned unseasonably mild. We bumped into the bearded man with the adorable ageing collie whose path we cross from time to time, and, in determining exactly where we live, he gave us a fascinating lesson in local history.

In the days before our respective communes were created, isolated settlements such as an older version of our own were part of an area known locally as Quatre Pariches, its approximate territory linked to four churches and their parishes. The tiny nearby hamlet of Bonnard was even tinier then, excluding the area where Michel, the semi-retired sheep farmer, and his family set up shop. Down beneath the hamlet and all the way along the under-cliff of the limestone escarpment that separates the residents of the ‘crest’ from the dwellers of the plain below, apparently, you can find traces of ancient fortifications built either by the Gauls to keep out the Romans or vice versa. By this time, my French was beginning to pack up and I was itching to get on.

Still, these things are good to know. Local history is a microcosm of what happens nationally. The bearded man seems to have lived all his life in these parts, so he knows just about everyone and everything here. The Good Wife and I now also know that he lives in one of our favourite landmarks: the house with blue shutters and the two amiable donkeys. It’s a slightly ramshackle place with plenty of character, and a suitable dwelling for a man, we conjectured, who might have been a teacher during his professional life. 

When I’m not out walking or transporting leaves from our track and taking them to a part of the garden where they might do some good, I’ve been masquerading as a proper journalist this month. In other words, not simply reviewing music in splendid isolation, but actually talking to some of the musicians who create it. I’m not entirely sure why, but I tend to shy away from these encounters: not because I’m reluctant to make a connection with human beings, but more because of my technophobia, I guess. My First Lady does all the donkey-work in setting up calls on her Zoom account, but I still fret lest things go wrong and I’m left mouthing or waving at my interviewee because one of us can’t hear or see the other.

Everything, however, ran perfectly smoothly, I didn’t make a twerp of myself, and I enjoyed my chats with two quite delightful individuals. It’s good to talk. Wasn’t that the slogan of British Telecom a few decades or so ago before social media transformed life into one big universal chit-chat?

Jaime Ospina is an expat Colombian based in Austin, Texas, a verifiable ex-(music)teacher and full-time musician, mainly with the party-hearty cumbia group, Superfónicos. We talked about his inspiring ‘Feeding Souls’ initiative, whereby he (and others who have joined) will go into elementary schools on Friday lunchtimes to bring a different kind of sustenance to pupils. He sets up in the school’s ‘cafetorium’, an auditorium doubling up as lunchtime refectory (similar, I imagine, to my old senior school in Belfast), where the kids eat their sandwiches or whatever food they’ve brought with them. ‘I could see at first hand,’ Jaime told me, ‘the joy of the kids as they come up after their lunch and see what’s going on – and they find the connection between movement and sound. Music is not something sterile that comes from speakers; there are actually humans involved in its creation.’ The first time he experienced this, it got him ‘thinking how great things like this should happen as often as possible, especially in these times when horrible things are happening.’

I discovered, although I knew already, just how difficult it is for a musician to make a decent living in this era of Spotify. Live music should be a right, Jaime underlines, and not a privilege for the well-heeled few who can afford today’s ticket prices. He has a dream – of world denomination. ‘Feeding Souls’ could become a worldwide phenomenon, nourishing the souls of school kids, prisoners, inmates and all who are denied live music, and nourishing the musicians who are paid to go into institutions and perform.

It was the kind of conversation that made me feel that I was performing a useful service in helping to disseminate such positive and inspiring ideas. Not long after this, I had another such conversation, but this time more of a history lesson, with Roger Glenn. Roger’s an octogenarian, who has recently brought out his second solo album after a lifetime in the business and more than half a century since he released his debut, apparently a difficult and dispiriting birth. He’s one of two musical sons of Tyree Glenn, who played trombone with Cab Calloway’s orchestra during the Swing Era, and later trombone and vibes with Duke Ellington, before becoming a studio musician for radio and TV and ultimately joining Louis Armstrong’s All Stars. Roger’s dad taught him to play the vibes, just one of 18 or more instruments that he plays. Thrillingly, I discovered, he played vibes for flautist Herbie Mann, flute for vibraphonist Cal Tjader, and both for Dizzy Gillespie. What’s more, he played flute (un-credited initially) on Donald Byrd’s seminal Black Byrd.

Roger was very keen to talk and I was maybe even keener to listen, so I lost the thread somewhat of the interview, but gathered enough material for an article that will help publicise his solo album, My Latin Heart. Like Jaime Ospina, he needs all the help he can get. The album has been very well received, but he calls the physical CD a mere ‘calling card’. He’s hoping to bring it out in vinyl soon, which will probably sell somewhat better than the CD, but there’s little money to be made from the tangible product in a virtual world. He needs to perform live in order to push the album, but that demands the kind of personal investment that he can’t make without a struggle.

So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would have said. Such matters may be a trifle depressing, but it is good to talk (my garrulous First Lady should know). You never know what you might learn. Talking of which, I learnt on discovering an envelope in our letter box up the track that all septuagenarians and over receive a plastic card from the commune that you can redeem at the local Intermarché for upwards of €10. The exact amount is a surprise.

Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas, one and all!

 

November: Incomplete Lives

My sister Jo has one of those Alexa thingies that sits on the work surface of her kitchen. She and her husband occasionally speak to it and it answers back or responds in kind. It also flashes up headlines, thoughts for the day and other messages. Walking past it the other morning, without my glasses on, I read – or thought I read – ‘Your life is incomplete’. This took me aback. When did these machines learn to be so ontological? Was the programmer someone concerned by the big issues of existence? In any case, it seemed a rather damning observation. Downright rude, in fact. Damned if I’ll ever let such a device into our house. On mentioning it to my sister, she explained (with the benefit of glasses) that it was her list that was incomplete. She uses it sometimes for shopping memos.

Even so… It was food for thought. AD 2025 seems to have been a particularly sociable one in retrospect. I was over in the motherland for about my fourth short visit of the year. This one was triggered by a brief trip in July to attend my friend Trevor’s 70^th bash, where a plot was hatched with a mutual friend to spend time together in Trevor’s holiday home in Lyme Regis. At this late stage of our lives, there’s the nagging awareness that one’s life could be completed at any moment, so you have to seize these opportunities while ye may.

Besides, it’s a welcome break for my life-partner. Much as we enjoy each other’s company, absence does of course make the heart grow fonder. We both relish the occasional independence days, when you can please yourself without reference to the other. Mind you, it’s tricky to follow your own rhythms when you’re being bombarded by calls and constant lists of essential purchases from my mother-in-law, the Outlaw. Now that she has recently celebrated her 97^th birthday, we both await the day when her life will be complete. Her longevity is not so much a triumph, more a testimony to sheer perversity. She’s been telling her daughter that she wanted to conclude proceedings since she turned 80. Although we’d both gladly offer our help, it’s not yet legal in the UK.

If this sounds cruel and heartless, you’re probably right. But there are extenuating circumstances. Debs labels as ‘abusive’ the barrage of calls, the constant complaints and the ceaseless lists of items to buy for her (chocolate éclairs and slipper socks figuring highly on most), and she should know after six decades’ experience. At least this year the birthday present was a resounding if brief success. Mother Mary has an imperious sense of noblesse oblige that makes her namesake, the wife of George V, seem reasonable. She is notoriously hard to please. One year, my wife’s sociopathic sister took the trouble to make her mother a bonnet in hand-spun felt for cold Cumbrian days. The Outlaw quickly relegated it to a cloth for her car windscreen.

Putting much thought into gifts is frankly futile. This year, Debs found a sparkly brooch in a Brive boutique for five euros. Though fearful that it would be rejected as a blatant fake, she and our daughter delivered it in person during a Mother and Child Reunion in September. The bargain brooch was a huge success. The best present her daughter had ever given her.

Said brooch was the talk of the nursing home, for a few days at least – until Mother Mary lost it somewhere in her room. As is her frequent wont. So assorted carers and cleaners were commanded to look for the missing brooch until Debs phoned the matron to reassure her that it was worth less than a packet of chocolate éclairs. When the search was called off, Mother Mary added another item to the daily list: would her daughter please phone the insurance company to find out if they would cover the loss of the brooch.

So anyway… I left the Good Wife to field the never-ending calls while I headed for England with our daughter. We left at an unspeakable hour for the 5.20am from Brive. All went well till Turenne Gare, where the barrier of the level crossing was down. We waited with the van and the lorry in front of us. And we waited. But the barrier stayed down. One of the drivers tried the emergency phone while the other attempted to lift the barrier. Still it stayed down. Panic set in. I turned off the main road to find our way by unlit narrow country lanes to wherever they might lead. Driving like a Finnish rally driver of yore, I somehow made it to Brive just as our train pulled in. Once the stress levels had sunk back below the danger zone, the Daughter and I settled back in opposite seats for the journey ahead. I felt her glare of disapproval as I buried my head in Mrs. Gaskell’s North And South. Funny, I fancied that I’d driven rather damn well.

However, she thawed by the time we reached London, and I was touched by her concern for her Old Man. I had to meet an expatriate Brazilian musician who goes by the name of MOMO. for an interview in the BFI’s café. Would I be OK walking from Waterloo to the British Film Institute? Should she accompany me and keep me on the straight and narrow? I confessed to having walked around London alone on many occasions; my life was hopefully not quite so near completion as she might fear.

The rally drive proved to be the worst part of the trip – along with the execrable weather. After a congenial session with MOMO., I caught a train to Dorset and stayed overnight with friends near Sherborne. They drove me to Lyme the next day and that evening Trevor and I took a walk along the promenade and down the venerable wind-lashed Cobb, while Our Mutual Friend, who has trouble with his legs, waited in the warm. We returned with a bag of shopping, drenched from head to foot. After a restorative supper, we watched the first of six episodes of the delightful and charming Leonard & Hungry Paul, which sustained us over the next three evenings. I even warmed to Julia Roberts’ incongruously American voice-over.

The next day, rather less torrential, we visited the Lyme museum, one of those delightful private institutions (whose one-time curator John Fowles ties with Mary Anning, the Victorian palaeontologist, as the town’s most famous resident) that warm the cockles of your heart long after the visit. Our Mutual Friend and I talked dogs with the woman on shop duty and he found her a photo of his beloved former pooch, a huge black Russian beast that looked exactly like a pantomime bear, so big that it would sit in a chair like a human.

Since the weather relented the next day, Trevor took his two nervous passengers to Exeter, our alma mater. Due to an urgent call of nature, I popped into Wetherspoon’s for the first time in my life and found it packed with old people. Another old friend of mine met us for lunch in the lee of the city’s ruined castle, where she and Trevor discovered their own mutuality: the same school in Ealing and even perhaps participation in a school play or two. After lunch, we drove around our old campus and reminisced like a trio of superannuated undergraduates.

Our Mutual Friend’s tale of Bob Marley took the biscuit. For much of my life, I’ve dined out on the fact that I saw Bob Marley & the Wailers live – at Exeter University, for God’s sake. How could that be? Well, our Social Secretary was a wheeler-dealer who managed to procure a whole welter of notable acts for campus concerts (including John Cale, the Kinks, Todd Rundgren and Chick Corea’s Return to Forever to name but four). To procure Bob’s services, he agreed to provide a weight of grass for the dressing room. Since OMF and the SS were friends and OMF had the temporary use of a car, he was inveigled into driving to a house of ill repute in London. On returning to his car with a big bag of ‘erb, OMF noticed a suitcase on top of his car with the word BOMB spelled out in decorative studs. Being a time of IRA activity in the capital and taking no chances, OMF phoned the police from the house of ill repute. The police duly arrived. OMF waited with his illicit goods at a safe distance from both house and car while they removed the suitcase and very gingerly opened it up… to find nothing but old clothes within. It was the work of some merry pranksters. Nevertheless, the law duly thanked OMF for his sense of social responsibility and sent him on his way. After returning the temporary car to his father, he procured a lift back to Exeter with his aunt and uncle, who were going his way.

Safely returned to college, OMF handed over the bag of grass that had been burning a hole in his pocket – to be thanked sincerely for his social irresponsibility, but neither rewarded by a cut nor invited to visit the Wailers and the iThrees in their dressing room. OMF contented himself with the chance to see them, presumably stoned out of their Rastafarian heads, deliver the kind of concert that rendered our student lives complete.

The following day’s torrential rains brought flooding to Wales and other places, but mercifully didn’t prevent me reaching my sister’s in Romsey and thence London. On Eurostar, in between deep dives into Mrs. Gaskell and The Birth of BeBop, I reflected on all the water that’s flown under the bridge since those heady days of youth. Had we been born little more than a century ago, we’d all three be six feet under now. I hope that we might have another chance to enact The Old Ones and crack the kind of puerile jokes more in keeping with The Young Ones, but you can’t count on anything once past A Certain Age. I’m lucky to have made it this far relatively unscathed and felt doubly lucky to be greeted by wife and dog at journey’s end.

I was tired out the next day by all the travel and the reading and a habit of waking up at French time, 5.30 each morning, during my absence. But the Good Wife offered me a slice of chocolate and hazelnut cake she’d made to go with my afternoon tisane. She doesn’t bake many, but it was the very best, most sumptuous cake I could have wished for. My life was complete.