April: Stand By For Action...!

... Anything could happen in the next half hour! The immortal words that begin each episode of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's Stingray. And anything could once those two big-eyed puppet lovebirds, Troy Tempest and Marina the mermaid, were dressed and ready for their next exciting subterranean adventure.

Me, I've passed two or three Action lorries just recently on our byways. A wake-up call on wheels perhaps. The lorries must have been taking trash to the store in Biars-sur-Cère. They're cropping up everywhere, like weeds. Where once there was one in Brive, there are now two. Action is a Dutch concern, a kind of up-market Poundland. Most of the stuff they sell is indeed rubbish, but it's good for LED light bulbs, silicone and mastic, and cheap but sturdy picture frames. I used to be able to buy organic nut butter at a plausible price, but it flew off the shelves.

Action, yes. Now that winter has segued into spring, all kinds of outside action is necessary to tame the rapid and miraculous growth that goes on all around. The Onions were here again recently and I was talking to Mr. O. on the phone the other day. He was waxing lyrical about the sudden, almost imperceptible change from the prevalent browns and greys of the surrounding oak trees to a vivid, succulent green when the new leaves unfurl. He never really notices back home, even though they live in a village and they have a big garden. From this moment on, the view through the woods to the road from my hot seat in the mezzanine becomes increasingly obscure. Where a week ago I could see the outline of a passing car, I can see now only a blur of colour.

As occasional visitors, like the magnificent crested hoopoe in early summer, Mr. and Mrs. O. tend to think that all is sweetness and light, all is an exciting adventure this side of the Channel. They rarely have anything good to say about post-Brexit England. But it's not entirely true of course – even if reading the periodic regional newsletter suggests that Occitanie is the most progressive part of France, with all kinds of laudable schemes gearing up to face whatever the future holds. It seems sometimes that we live in a bubble, but it won't take much to burst it.

The other Sunday, the Dame and I took advantage of the sunshine to take our dog for an afternoon constitutional. We bumped into Monsieur and Madame Delpy coming up the hill with their King Charles spaniel in tow – on a lead of course. Daphne is the only domesticated dog in these parts who gets to walk unfettered. Monsieur has a couple of sheep sheds in the nearby hamlet, while Madame teaches history and geography at the Collège de Martel. Our daughter was one of her pupils. Like a committed historian, she takes a keen interest in current affairs. She likes to share her views with her fellow catastrophist from England, so the Dame and I try not to linger too long in her company, as we leave it feeling depressed.

Sure enough, she soon told us about something that she'd read recently to suggest that France had three main sources of threat: religious extremism, climate change and Russia. Did I think that war with Putin was possible? I cannot tell a lie, much to my wife's occasional annoyance. So I said that it was absolutely possible. When you're dealing with a mad man, it will take a lot more to discourage him than a diminutive French president posing for the press with boxing gloves in a gymnasium.

But what can one do, other than sign up for the Ukrainian army? I didn't say it to Madame Delpy because I don't know the French translation, but perhaps rivets are the only thing. I've suggested as much to my daughter, but she's never read any Joseph Conrad, so I've put it in another way. She's understandably depressed in the light of everything going on around the world and by her inability to land remunerative creative work. Action for her is big and daunting and as the obstacles she piles up in her mind grow insurmountable, a sense of futility sets in.

I've urged action till I'm blue of hue. Not that grand daunting gesture, but those little repeated incremental acts. Keep busy, keep banging rivets into the damaged hull, as Conrad suggests, and one day that damaged hull becomes a functioning steamboat. So to speak. 'Rivets were what really Mr. Kurtz wanted, if he had only known it.' Work in other words. And in that work, that activity, 'the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others.'

I was talking about it to Christophe at a party recently. Not Heart Of Darkness, but keeping busy. Once a farmer, Christophe supplied the straw bales for this house. When we meet up, we often chat philosophically. He asked me how I was and what I was doing, and I told him I was well, touch wood. Keeping busy. He was also well, thank you, and keeping busy. Busy-ness is at the heart of his life's philosophy. The only way to stay on form, mentally as well as physically. The alternative is to sit on an armchair in front of the TV and gradually... he demonstrated the way one's body slowly reassumes the shape of an embryo. The autumnal opposite of what's just happened in our wood.

So, there's only one thing for it. Stand by for action! I've already fired up the strimmer and mown down the dandelions that pop their heads through the limestone chippings of our track. The Good Wife and I have launched another spring offensive in the war against weeds that can never be won. I've been travelling further and further up river, so to speak: penetrating the heart of darkness that lurks within the spreading sumac bush. It's another invasive weed in effect, but an attractive one, with young furled leaves as soft as kid gloves and red-hot pokers for flowers or whatever they are. Underneath it, though, is a tangle of horrors. As I contort my ageing body, inching deeper and deeper into the undergrowth with my secateurs, I keep expecting to come across Mister Kurtz: not the Marlon Brando travesty, but a Gollum-like garden sprite, with a face like a gargoyle and the body of a toad. My protective gloves are now as prickly as pin cushions. Gardening! It's all very well for Monty Don.

No matter how busy I keep myself, I can't seem to stop from peering into the heart of darkness. Like one of those morbid onlookers at the scene of an accident. Rivets work best if you're mind-less. It probably also helps to be a practical man and not someone who spends so long on a computer. Every day, for all my busy-ness, there comes that awful moment when I have to check my e-mails. My paternal grandfather once told me that he didn't like knowledge –  and it's probably what kept him ticking along till 97. I understand him more now. It's very seductive, yet I have to know what's going on, because I have to believe that some kind of action will have some effect. Won't it?

Not that the examples from around the world give you much hope. No wonder Our Kid is depressed. World leaders are busy clawing back on (admittedly unrealistic) net zero targets, while witless electorates vote for far-right despots who promise to make their country great again without explaining how making scapegoats of the immigrants who mostly keep their country ticking along will help to achieve that vapid promise.

OK smarty-pants, what would you do? Ah well, there you've got me. The Chilean singer Ana Tijoux suggests that we should celebrate the end of the world by dancing naked together. Well, I certainly love dancing, but I don't think I'll pass that on to Madame Delpy next time our paths cross. I might suggest to her that, since they can't seem to keep the peace, we could put the UN to work protecting wildlife from poachers and the environment from commercial interests. It may not stop the earth overheating, but it might give the WWF and Greenpeace some muscle.

Besides, some kind of action must trump (pun intended) inertia or despair. By heaven 'we shall have rivets!' Be done with these 'creepy thoughts'. I must commandeer my wife's diesel car and get off to the nearest Action and see if they've got any in stock. Oh, and an LED bulb for the lamp in the spare room, and maybe a new pair of thorn-free gardening gloves. Life goes on. For now. Shame about the nut butter, though; action demands an invigorating snack.

March: A Short History of Nearly Everything About This February

Yes, you guessed it, during the long train journeys of last month I read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Mind-boggling concepts aside, my mind was boggled by the sheer audacity of taking on such a project and making it all entertaining, beautifully written and just about intelligible. Concepts like the solar system will remain forever inconceivable: for all the sun's astonishing capacity to supply energy, it was notable that its lack this month caused both my solar watches to stop dead in their tracks. His book should be required reading in every school in every land. Had it been so for me in my schooldays, I may not have dreaded Physics, Chemistry and Biology as much as I did Maths. It's thanks to Bill that I now see science as something interesting and not just the province of weirdos with bad haircuts.

You need a good book on a train, and we decided to do our travelling by train rather than by road or air as a fairly feeble gesture to help our chronically ailing planet. We were to travel out on a Friday and back on a Friday, and therefore our journeys wouldn't be subject to French rail strikes that tend to happen on a Tuesday and/or a Thursday. But... we were travelling at half term. And what better way for the SNCF guards and conductors to ruin people's holidays than by laying down their tools on Friday through Sunday? Thanks to Bill Bryson, my design of an apocalyptic device to plant deep within SNCF HQ has now progressed beyond the conceptual stage.

February generally belongs to my Good Wife and February 2024 was no exception. The still-radiant Aquarian turned 66, a time to think seriously about hanging up her essential oils and massage couch. The Daughter had organised on our behalf a special and secret late-birthday treat for her towards the end of the month at Sadlers Wells, London. Only our destinations – first to Brussels to see old friends from the Corrèze and thence to London – were known to the birthday girl. Rather like the time I 'took her' from Sheffield to Robin Hood's Bay on the North Yorkshire coast. I couldn't drive at the time, so had to sit in the passenger seat and give road directions. Drive, he said...

Her 66^th birthday was deeply symbolic: she decided to sell the clinic in Brive that has served her so well for almost 20 years. While the physical massage (and there was a time when she couldn't use that word for fear of upsetting the medical mafia here), while that will go, she will carry on the EFT face-to-face with clients thanks to the miracle of Zoom (which Bill didn't get around to explaining).

Anyway, we were on our way back from a summit meeting with our appointed estate agent, when Debs received an alert from SNCF to tell her that our train had been cancelled. Credit where credit's due, they had given us more than the customary 24 hours' notice. Life has taught me to be thankful for small mercies. Quick as a flash, she looked up an alternative for the day before. (I was driving.) Two seats available on the 17h59 train to Paris. First class for no extra charge. Book 'em! the driver cried. Too late! Gone in a nano-second. And then there were two more. Second class, but an €8 supplement to pay per passenger. Now how do you figure that? The compounded indignity! The French rail company moves in mysterious ways, its miseries to perform.

And so it came to pass that the intrepid travellers left their cosy home a day earlier than planned. The cats would have to endure the food dispenser for a day extra, and the dog would have extra playtime with her best pal. Thus it was that we arrived in Paris just before 11 bells on Thursday night. Since Line 5 of the Metro was out of action, we took the bus to the Gare du Nord. Three buses, in fact, since two of the drivers decided to clock-off before their ultimate destination. We spent the night in a dreary hotel bang opposite the terminus. Another hundred bucks plus to circumvent the guards and conductors, curse their generous occupational pensions.

The next day, the incessant rain of February rained some more and, on our way by foot to a little West African vegetarian restaurant we identified for lunch, my sole, like my soul, came adrift. My favourite Palladium boots. How could I possibly walk around Paris, Brussels and London with a right boot that thought it was a flipper? I don't know if it had something to do with all the North African men clustering mysteriously outside a building of indeterminate but perhaps religious purpose, but as we turned the street to find our restaurant... lo! A miracle. There, before our very eyes, was... a cobbler! What are the chances?

I cannot, with my hand on my heart, recommend to you West African veggie cuisine. You would have to like tasteless root vegetables prepared blandly. But I can recommend that saintly cobbler. An application of glue and 15 minutes in a shoe-mender's vice and hey presto! That right boot of mine held – all the way back to the Gare du Nord, all the way to Brussels, all the way to London and all the way home again.

And we did a lot of walking. In the rain. Paris, it always seems to me, is overrated. Brussels was a gas: not a pretty city, but a lively multi-cultural one with a great tram system and terrific music venues that could theoretically (one day) accommodate refugees from the French countryside. London is cripplingly expensive and far too big, but a lot of fun with a daughter for a guide.

Soon after arriving in London, she took us to – and I paid for – Bubala in Soho for a Middle Eastern vegetarian feast that was possibly the tastiest meal I have ever eaten. After our late lunch, we walked all the way from Soho to Sadlers Wells, past a bevy of barbers around Tottenham Court Road advertising haircuts for less than the price of the service charge in Bubala. Since my hair was shaggy and we had time to kill, I urged the female sex to tarry while I popped in to see Herr Kutt. Tilley the Kid wouldn't hear of it. I would come out looking like a geezer. So discretion got the better part of valour.

Though a native of London, it was my first-ever visit to Sadlers Wells. The Good Wife once worked there in her youthful prime, ushering punters to their seats and selling white and 'non-white' coffee. Her birthday treat was a performance of Pina Bausch's Nelken. Carnations. Modern dance; her favourite choreographer. From our prime seats in the circle we looked down on a stage 'planted' with silk carnations. The madness and audacity of the venture seemed to rival Bill Bryson's. I didn't know what to expect, but came out of the theatre blown away by the ambition and, surprisingly, humour of the piece. 

So now you know how the sole of my boot was saved by a young Parisian cobbler. But, oh capricious irony, when we got back home to Camp Street... No, not the boot, that was still roadworthy, but I found another copy of Bill Bryson's book on our shelves. My mind these days is increasingly muddled. I grow old... I grow old/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Ah well. Anyone want a spare copy of A Short History of Nearly Everything? Requests please on a postcard...

 

February: Happy Sad

January was one of those months, as it often is. A happy sad month. The title incidentally comes from a Tim Buckley album, a singer-songwriter of my youth, but one with whom I never quite clicked: his music, like the voice that many found angelic, seemed to meander, straining for a tune. Both he and his son Jeff met tragic ends long before their allocated time on this earth would have normally expired. Tim died of a heroin overdose at 28, while Jeff, the son that he barely ever saw, drowned in the Mississippi at 30. One of Tim's earliest songs was entitled 'Grief In My Soul', so I guess his life was more sad than happy. But at least he – and Jeff – left durable legacies.

I've given up making the kind of New Year resolutions probably necessary in order to leave a durable legacy. Now it's more a matter of survival: hoping that the incipient aches and pains won't turn into fully qualified arthritis; that 2024 won't be the year that I develop tinnitus in my other ear; that that new mole on my neck won't demand deeper examination; that the occasional shooting pains inside my cranium are merely linked to muscle tension.

But don't get me wrong: my month of January was far more happy than sad, which is I suppose the general state of a perennial melancholic. Life makes me sad, but I'm determined to enjoy it while feeling sad. Despite all that's going on, and despite the customary post-Christmas anti-climactic feel that always colours the first month of the year, how can you feel too sad if your child is staying in the bosom of her family?

For all the minor exasperations – like her slavish adherence to recipes that suggest, for example, you roast six cloves of garlic prior to adding them to your sauce – The Daughter, Tilley the Kid, is a joy to have around. She's forever affectionate and often caustically funny, and it's just generally good to have a fresh perspective on things that challenges the old familiar ways – even if her youthful outlook and physical beauty contrast starkly with one’s own flagging resources and sagging physique.

The trouble with children, though – and I'll wager I'm not the first parent to notice this – is that nothing underlines more the relentless march of time. Haven't you grown! And once they're fully grown physically, you watch them growing mentally, emotionally and in all other ways, watching with a mixture of anticipation as they retrace your footsteps along the continuum of time and trepidation lest they make similar mistakes and experience the same kinds of disappointments and frustrations.

But the trouble with children, too, is that they can't stay children forever. Much as you'd love to hide them away in your own cosy nest from any slings and arrows out there, there's an unspoken recognition on both sides that a month in the country is quite long enough. Any longer and there would be serious questions asked in the house. Did we carry out our role properly? Did we do all that we could? Where did we go wrong? So back to London she had to go: for the next phase of her young life. And when they go, of course, it leaves a gaping hole. Absence makes the heart grow heavier.

And another thing. Around my daughter's current time of life, there were regular weddings to attend, and cards to open announcing the arrival of this or that healthy bouncing babe. Now it's deaths and funerals. Last month, another good friend was ferried across the river Styx. Our friend Howard in the words of e.e. cummings 'sang his didn't he danced his did' and departed far too early. We knew how life-threatening his illness was, but it was still a shock to hear that he'd gone. Not long before, over morning coffee and in my naivety, I believed that he was coping quite well with the treatment, that there was a chance of recovery. I clung to the case history of Wilko Johnson, Dr. Feelgood's manic and hilarious guitarist, who'd been given a death sentence, but then granted a reprieve of several years by a Cambridge surgeon. But no...

So there was a funeral to attend – just a couple of days before The Daughter caught the train back home-for-now. It was a beautiful day for it; 'unnaturally warm for the season' (a cliché ever since we stopped getting snow). We headed south on almost deserted roads to Capdenac Gare, which is actually just across the river Lot and therefore in the neighbouring Aveyron. Leaving nothing to chance, we got there 45 minutes early, giving us time to take a first look at Capdenac-le-Haut, one of les plus villages de France. And it is.

And since we were still too early for the ceremony, we stopped off for a coffee in one of the few bars open on a Monday morning. Pushing open the door, we both did a silent double-take. 'Did you see what I see?' Debs asked, once seated at a table. I did. Both of us had thought immediately that the man in the corner, working with his back to us on a laptop computer, was some avatar of Howard: the same stocky physique, the same shiny bald head. Next time I looked, he'd gone. It wouldn't have surprised me if he'd vanished in a puff of smoke or with a rush of chilly air.

It was a simple, dignified ceremony, with immediate family and a few close friends. A young be-suited Frenchman led the service in English with a charming accent. We were invited at one point to take a little time to remember Howard silently in our thoughts. I remembered the kind of friend who would call a spade a spade. If you'd done or said something to offend him, he'd tell you that rather than leave it hanging around unsaid like a bad smell. But should you ever be in trouble, you knew that he would help you out without a murmur. He was kind and as caustically funny as Our Kid can be. Friends like that are rare, to be treasured and sorely missed.

His body lay in a simple coffin of what looked like unvarnished poplar. We were also invited to take a marker-pen and write him a message on the bare wood: a nice touch and one which I might copy when the time comes, because I'm a notorious copycat. An even nicer touch was to end the ceremony with (I think) Prince Buster's version of 'Enjoy Yourself'. It was Howard's favourite song. How it would've appealed to his mordant and irreverent sense of humour, concluding what tends to be a po-faced service not with a hymn but with some Jamaican ska. 'Enjoy yourself (it's later than you think)/ Enjoy yourself while you're still in the pink...'

I won't copy that one – I've already decided on my own funereal music, which will include Miles Davis's 'So What' (even if some may not get the joke) – but it was a happy way to conclude a very sad event. For three minutes or so I for one wore a big smile on my face. Yes, happy sad. As Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Band suggested, 'Life's like that, isn't it?'

January: André Rieyeuch's Winter Wonderland

At the risk of sounding ungracious, I'd describe Christmas 2023 with my mother-in-law as 'challenging'. It's a long, long way from the Lot to Cumbria, but the journey wasn't the worst of it. Nor was it the 'outlaw' herself (as my pal Dan might call her), the brunt of all those jokes of past comedians. She can be utterly exasperating, but can also be – at times – quite sweet. No, the most indelible souvenir, longer lingering than driving down the A1 in the aftermath of Storm Whoever, was something I witnessed on Christmas Eve TV, stretched out on the floor of the outlaw's suffocating, overheated sitting room. It seemed to confirm that we are on Talking Heads' road to nowhere.

But that's getting ahead of myself. We had to get there first. A wet coming we had of it and an even wetter going. French motorways are a doddle; you could almost drive them in your sleep. But even less-travelled routes like the autoroute between Rouen and Calais can be hostile when you add darkness, rain and holiday traffic into the equation. This much I can tell you about Calais, where we stayed the night in a B&B that smelled suspiciously of powerful air-fresheners: its centre boasts a fine-looking belle époque theatre.

We arrived at our destination later than scheduled, just as a rainy night in old Westmoreland was falling. One forgets what a difference an hour makes. In Cumbria, you cannot forget the rain, which raineth seemingly every day. Once tucked up tight inside the outlaw's converted chapel, our first task was to inspect the contentious all-singing, all-dancing chair – like the one that Frasier's irascible dad sat in throughout the sitcom – that my well-meaning wife had bought from a friend whose father had just died. It hadn't worked since the contentious delayed delivery. Several assorted carers had checked it over, and the octogenarian proprietor of Appleby's electrical shop had been consulted. To no avail.

In among the sophisticated electrical doings underneath the seat, Debs and I found two cables that seemed to have come apart. After reunification, behold! Press a button on the accompanying handset and the contentious chair could perform its gymnastics: up, down; back and forth; recline, decline; foot-support going up, foot-support going down. Debs attempted to give her mother a lesson in self-manipulation. Not easy. Not only is the old dear quite deaf, but also so heavy-fingered that she has broken several phones in the last couple of years in her impatience to phone someone, anyone, when bored between visits from carers or neighbours.

Who knows what might happen if she were let loose with the zapper? What hazards might lurk? Mind you, after listening to all the crass remarks about being more comfortable in her old armchair (after all the litany of complaints about the Big Chair's non-arrival and then its non-functioning), the idea of her jabbing irritably at the zapper and catapulting herself across the room to crash into the opposite wall seemed something devoutly to be wished. Longevity had its place for Dr. King, but there's a big but in the equation...

Fortunately, dear understanding friends from our days in Sheffield had lent us their beautifully restored holiday cottage a safe 20-minute drive from the house of wounding complaints. So we were able to slip away at the end of each trying afternoon to find refuge in an oasis of sanity. Each morning we lingered longer and longer over breakfast.

We did allow ourselves half a day off to travel on the stunning Settle to Carlisle train line, across the famous Ribblehead viaduct and the windswept, rain-lashed Dales to Skipton for a visit to the Oxfam bookshop and a chance to do some shopping for stocking fillers. Skipton has been surveyed as one of the happiest places to live in England and, even in the rain, one could see why. It has a down-to-earth, attractive charm and its inhabitants seemed uniformly friendly. Its Oxfam bookshop is a treasury of fine reading matter.

Anyway... came Christmas Eve. I drove to Penrith to meet the London to Glasgow train and greet Tilley the Kid on a windswept, rain-lashed platform. After a spot of tea and Christmas cake, it was the outlaw's dearest wish to watch her beloved André Rieu's 'Winter Wonderland' on Sky Arts. Never let it be said that she misses one of his innumerable televised concerts. So we duly obliged. None of us had ever seen the inheritor of the easy-listening mantle passed down by the likes of Mantovani, James Last and Bert Kaempfert. As we watched aghast, with mouths agape, it became increasingly clear that the genial Dutchman has monetised that mantle TO THE MAX!

Superficially, at least, you can understand why my mother-in-law loves the cheery conductor. He's a man for one thing. Hers is a generation of often house-bound women who worshipped their men and forgave them their every transgression. Now that I've 'grown on' her, I myself can't do anything wrong – especially after cooking her a risotto last April with some of her frozen scallops that needed eating. I repeated the trick over Christmas and she loved it so much that she attributed everything lovingly cooked and served up by her daughter to me. The Man. At the further risk of sounding ungracious, I was both embarrassed and just a little outraged.

Yes, 'superficially': there's the rub. But it's not just the anodyne nature of the spectacle, there's a disturbing note of megalomania in the way that the genial raconteur keeps referring to his orchestra and his winter palace in Maastricht. Maybe that's why I kept imagining Vlad Put, Ben Muss and A-dolf H. in the vast audience, gaily clapping along with the gathered throng, beaming from ear to ear as the conductor and his proprietary orchestra served up the kind of pap that helps to mask all the ills of the world.  

But we endured the entertainment and it certainly gave us something to talk about. We got through Christmas, too. The outlaw told us that it was her best Christmas EVER and it would be ungracious, churlish even, to hope that we never, ever have to do it again.

All was well at home. During our absence, it was mild and wet. I spoke with my brother, who spent his Christmas in Finland. He understands completely the unease that André Rieyeuch creates – unlike our two sisters, who went to see the maestro at the O2 or some such mega-venue in London. He, too, reckons that Adolf Hitler would have loved him.

On Boxing Day, he had sent a video on WhatsApp of the season's white-out. All around his new second home was an all-encompassing whiteness. Like the icing on a Christmas cake. Trees, lake, ground, in eerie suspension under a blue, cloudless sky. Apart from the creaking of his footsteps on the virgin snow, the silence was total. A true winter wonderland. Just before he and his partner left for Helsinki for the flight back to England, the temperature fell to -24^oC or some such Polar level. The cold is finally on its way.