March: Heaven and Hell

Early March. It’s that miraculous time of year once again when the bushes and trees are in blossom. It doesn’t last long, alas, but while it does the countryside is a riot of colours: white, yellow, pink and deep red. The cherry trees take the floral biscuit; such a rich pink that you could harvest the flowers, whizz ‘em up in a blender and drink the results. (I’ve never tried it.)

I’ve taken to stepping onto the terrace outside the kitchen just to gaze in awe at the pair of plum trees that separate us from the communal track that leads down to our occasional Parisian neighbours. We’ve only ever had one decent harvest of plums – remarkably sweet yellow-green Reine-Claudes – but the white blossom is so dense that it looks in the early light of day as if it has snowed overnight. And the smell! A heavenly perfume pervades the surrounding air. (It took a nudge from the Good Wife before noticing it, I’m ashamed to admit. As befits an aromatherapist, her nose is as attuned to odours as my ears are attuned to sounds.)

For the lucky ones like us, particularly at this time of annual transition, life is a many splendoured thing. Unfortunately, there are constant reminders of what goes on outside the blossom-coloured bubble in which we live. On Sunday, for example, on our walk with Daphne and her best chum Holly, we passed a whole battalion of hunters congregating in their day-glo jackets just outside Patrick’s sheep shed. The cars and those big macho pick-up trucks with grilles at the back to confine the baying hounds within were parked higglety-pigglety all over the verges of the road. These good ol’ boys congregate with guns and dogs most Sunday mornings for the pleasure of killing as many innocent animals as they can flush out of the protective woods – and, what’s more, in the self-righteous belief that they are doing us all a favour because we would be overrun otherwise by deer and boars.

The scene put us both in mind of the Lord of the Flies dramatisation we are currently following on the Beeb. Golding’s idea for the novel was a stroke of genius: placing a band of boys on a tropical island without the moderating influence of women and seeing what develops. It’s been many, many years since I read it, so I can’t remember what happens, but already the battle lines are drawn: in the red corner, the odious Jack and his obsequious band of hunter-followers; in the blue corner, the reasonable and probably doomed Ralph and Piggy and the ‘Little’ns’, the ever silent majority. For the moment, the hunters are out for the blood of wild pigs, but I fear it won’t be long before the trainee psychopaths commit their first murder.

It’s a cliché or truism that most men are like overgrown children. If he gets off the island, someone like Jack will turn into the kind of cowardly charismatic bully that wields authority, either in industry or finance or even politics. Place him in a position of real power and you can see how easy it would be to incite a band of obsequious followers into doing his dirty work. It’s not too fanciful to extrapolate how this Sunday morning sport is really just a substitute for war. Big boys need their war, war and more war. What a depressing ledger of conflict it makes throughout the centuries, and all due to a surfeit of testosterone. With Grand Theft Auto and other such video nasties now to train the younger generations for indiscriminate havoc, there’ll certainly be many more such devastating conflicts to follow.

We walked on towards the farm. I resisted the temptation to slash some tyres (although, to be honest, I’d quite neglected to bring a Stanley knife for the purpose and, to be still more honest, I’m a yellow-livered coward who avoids unpleasantness). We did, however, discuss an audacious plan to solve this age-old problem of male aggression. Much as I disapprove of modern farming methods, there’s a lesson to be observed in the meadows. Look no further than the image of a herd of cows with solitary bull…

What if… every community on earth were female only, each limited to one male for the purpose of procreation? The male could be kept in some kind of cosseted seclusion, to be farmed out to any female particularly keen on having a child who has passed an emotional intelligence test. The male could go and stay with the female for a few days, or however long it would take to do the business and, in between vigorous bouts of craq-craq-biscotte, to carry out some useful woodwork or mend a dripping tap. I might be up for the role if my practical skills weren’t so negligible (although I’m frankly getting a bit too long in the tooth for anything demanding vigour).

Which does, I suppose, raise a number of key questions about this audacious plan. This peripatetic progenitive male would have to be carefully selected to meet the demands of the role. A big sturdy bull in a field with a healthy set of equipment is one thing, but this stud would have to be sufficiently handsome to attract the emotionally intelligent females; he’d have to be a Monsieur Bricolage type, a dab-hand at DIY; and he’d have to be intelligent enough to ensure that the progeny would benefit the community. And then there’s the problem of what to do with all the males who didn’t tick the necessary boxes. Ah… I begin to see where this audacious plan might lead. Somewhere uncomfortably near Hitler’s Final Solution. No, I fear we’re stuck with them.

After our walk, I turned on my dad’s old laptop and tuned in to the BBC homepage for a quick look at the headline mayhem en route to the sport. My attention was diverted by an article to the effect that there is a groundswell of desire, presumably on the part of more militant women, to rename certain parts of the female anatomy that were named after males. I never knew, for example, that fallopian tubes referred to an Italian anatomist by the name of Gabriele Falloppio. The Adventures of Falloppio… It has a certain Disney-like ring to it.

While I can empathise with the annoyance and even resentment that this must provoke in certain women, I can’t help but think that this collective energy would be better channeled into something more worthwhile and ultimately beneficial – like for example the foundation of a truly tooth-ful rather than tooth-less United Nations body that could stop wars before they start, or end wars swiftly where they already have.

Alas, I have neither illusions nor delusions. When I hear my ever-optimistic wife speak hopefully of a Golden Age, I know that she is living in Cloud Cuckoo Land. Its creator Aristophanes knew a thing or two about utopia and disillusionment when he was busy satirising society in the centuries Before Christ, back when the Greeks were fighting the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War. I studied that particular war for Ancient History at school and I still couldn’t tell you what it was all about.

As for what’s happening now in the Middle East, it’s not hard to imagine (unless you’re a moronic megalomaniac in charge of a military machine) that the genie is now well and truly out of the bottle. The consequences are likely to be wide-ranging and long-running. Unlike the beauty of the blossom around here, it’ll be very ugly and far from transient.

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!