October: Torn Curtains

October comes, October goes/Whither, weather, no one knows…

It’s an old children’s rhyme that I just made up. I’m an old child and another year older this month. Nevertheless, I quite like October. There’s always that element of surprise. Very often it’s golden, occasionally it’s prematurely grim.

We agreed that we weren’t being premature in taking down our external hessian curtains at the beginning of the month. It’s still warm here, but the heat has largely dispersed now. It’s already the third autumn that we’ve taken down each curtain in turn, shaken off the shield bugs that seem to like to cling to the sackcloth, folded it carefully and put it back in sequence in its big plastic box, one for the front porch and one for the mezzanine balcony. We had them made by a young ‘seamster’ (interestingly, there’s not a special word for a ‘sewing man’) in Martel. Some of them are looking rather the worse for wear, having been blown about by frisky summer winds, whereupon they tend to catch on sharp splinters of wood and tear. We shall darn them together this winter, like a pair of old prisoners mending mail sacks.

They saved us a degree or maybe two during the worst of the summer heat waves, but not enough to stop the interior temperature rising to a thoroughly uncomfortable level. We’re looking around for further protection before next summer, due to be even worse thanks to the El Niño effect, damn its tropical eyes. Surprise, surprise, I’ve had no reply from his worship the mayor after I sent him an article (translated, too) about a French hotelier who brought the temperature inside his hostelry down by four or five degrees by painting the roof of the hotel white. Maybe the idea of terracotta tiles being whitened by a lime-wash is too much for his worship to countenance.

My friend Paul popped over to talk to me about solar panels while the girls were away in Cap Ferret and while he and his wife were staying in their now-second home near the airport. We’ve had a ceiling fan fitted now, as quiet as a thief in the night, but we recognise that we might on occasions need to call on some air-conditioning – powered by the sun. Neither of us likes air conditioning. Quite apart from the environmental aspect, the cooling effect is about as subtle as a supermarket’s refrigerated cabinet.

Paul was an electrician during the family’s tenure in France and he installed all the electrics in Camp Street, but he was driven to despair by the French system that turns the self-employed into pariahs. He couldn’t continue to pay the swingeing social charges that meant he had to work all hours just to keep from going under (as Grandmaster Flash intoned, uh-huh-huh-huh-huh). The family moved back to England, Paul now works in an advisory capacity for a company specialising in renewable energy and new technology. I know far more now about solar technology than I managed to glean from the French providers that pitched their ideas and inflated estimates in a way that always seems designed to bamboozle.

So that’s one more task to add to a growing list of things to do this winter. We want to add an extra layer of insulation in the mezzanine area (not built of straw bales) to stop it turning into an oven when the thermometer goes way up and the weather gets blistering hot. And there’s the back balcony, which I’ve just started to repaint after 22 years of full-frontal weather from the north-east. Wonderful to behold, we’ve just had our first serious rain for several weeks, but it has stopped me in my tracks since the eye-wateringly expensive linseed-based paint demands two full days’ drying time. Rain is forecast for the next 10 days, but so far we’ve had no more. These weather-forecasters have got a lot to answer for sometimes, which reminds me… Next Wednesday evening, we’re going to the local cinema to see the new film about the role the meteorologists played in the D-Day landings.

Yes, despite all these jobs, we do manage to get out and about from time to time. The other evening, during my tenure alone in charge of house and animals, I was officiating at the cinema with Francine, a fellow Dionysien(ne)s (as we denizens of St. Denis lès Martel are known), for a new French documentary on the pernicious influence of the Italian and now Russian mafias in American politics. The United States of Mafia was very good and very thorough and thoroughly depressing. I (re-)watched soon after a profile of one of my favourite musical mavericks, Robert Wyatt. As Robert said, roughly, ‘I can’t understand it. There are so many good, kind people out there in the world, yet we’re always governed by complete bastards.’ Since that evening at the cinema, I’ve been in a state of Wyatt-like despondency. There are some good people out there, but all that accumulated goodness counts for little in the face of the evil committed by the smaller number of complete bastards.

Still… there’s always the compensation of music. Whenever I stare too intently into the heart of darkness, I put on something by… well, Robert Wyatt and many another of his kidney, and I feel instantly better. The other evening, the Good Wife and I went to the Galérie Louie in nearby Strenquels for a concert. The gallery’s a converted barn just opposite the house where our friend Penny used to live. Her house and the barn were bought by an American psychiatrist from New York and his artist wife – and named after their pampered dog, Louie. Roger’s a lovely sociable chap who clearly thrives on bringing in outlying folk for exhibitions of art and the occasional music concert. On this particular evening, a duo called Baldango entertained a 100-strong throng, with a guest appearance by Seb Gutiez, son of another Paul, another friend whom everyone seems to know as the diminutive man who takes copious photos at parties and other events. While none of the three is well known, musically speaking, it demonstrated just how much talent there is outside the mainstream. Electrical Paul was driven to distraction by the French system, but at least it subsidises such troubadours as intermittents to continue ploughing their creative furrows.

Baldango will never be headline news. Indeed, there’s not much of that to tell you about – which kind of gives you hope, I suppose, that life may just go on under the seemingly inevitable right-wing regime from 2027 or when Russia invades the rest of Europe. In the wonderful world of dogs, Belle up the road, is pregnant again – by Ascot again. Our Dutch friends try to keep the two mighty Pyrenean mountain dogs apart when Belle is on heat, but Ascot apparently got in through a window and had his wicked way with her. I can’t help but think that it would be much more effective if they took one or both of them to the vet in Martel. Mind you, the pups last time fetched considerably more than our linseed-based paint cost, so…

Daphne the Terrierdor was fixed up after six months, but it was a terrible time of heat and raw flesh. We wondered what might have happened had she mated with some local Tom, Dick or Rover. Could we have sold her offspring as Terriermores, say, given social-media society’s thirst for new and exotic breeds? Even so, I suspect that people wouldn’t pay more for a scruffbag than for a litre tin of Swedish ‘wild sage’ linseed-oil-based paint.

One bit of hard news to impart is Mouchette’s demise. Mouchette was an old black mongrel who terrorised our Terrierdor. I think his nervous mistress might once have been scared of the ingratiating youthful version of our dog. Ever since then, Mouchette in protective mode would have a go at Daphne. It got to the point that she would stand stock-still at even a distant sight of her nemesis and refuse to move a step further, leading to all kinds of stratagems to avoid confrontation. Mouchette’s owners refused to believe that Daphne was terrified of their darling dog. Well, the darling dog is now six feet under, probably somewhere in their garden. Keep the dog far hence that’s foe to Daphne…

She still gets yapped at by Voyou the Pomeranian up the road and the feisty pair of Yorkshire terriers who come occasionally with their mistress to the little cabin hidden under the trees across the road, but Daphne keeps her composure and dismisses them with disdainful hauteur. Like us, she’s cooler now the worst of the weather is shifting to the southern hemisphere for the season. But the spectre of next summer looms large.

 

September: The Dowager's Demise

September didn’t begin too well. I sent my Amerikanische Freund in Brussels a little billet doux to tell him, a fellow film-buff and all-round good ol’ cultured boy, that I’d finally seen Shaft (He’s a bad mother… Shut your mouth!). I’ve owned the soundtrack ever since my teenage years, when someone gave me a lift to London from the ex-POW camp in the Fens, where we’d both been picking strawberries. Since this guy had been through university, I looked upon him as an elder and better, and hung on his every word. He told me that he’d played the soundtrack when revising for his finals. It had helped him, he was quite sure. Maybe with A-levels on the horizon, I felt it might help me, too. I’ve never regretted the decision to buy the double album, but have kept missing the film – until, that is, the evening of the final day of August. It hadn’t aged quite as badly as I’d feared. John Shaft, he sure was a baaad mother…

My friend replied to tell me he’d just got back from the vet’s, having put the family’s beloved snuffly French bulldog to sleep. There are few things worse in life. It was the wrong moment for talkin’ ‘bout Shaft. Not that long ago, I stopped our friendly local plumber in his van to ask him if he was happy with their solar panel installation and if so… He replied that he was on his way to the vet’s in Martel to put his old dog to sleep. One of those Australian sheepdogs that are really popular now, the dog was a lovely amiable creature who accompanied his master on his rounds. The plumber was clearly in a state of distress and I wanted the tarmac to swallow me up and disgorge me on our ‘lawn’ (without creating too much damage).

On telling another friend and fellow dog-lover about our mutual friend’s loss, he suggested that ‘dogs are with us for only part of our lives but all of theirs. We owe it to them to prevent them suffering at the end of their journey even if it hurts us.’ And how it hurts us. I read recently something written I forget by whom, an actor or comedian maybe, to the effect that he’d grieved longer and harder for his dog than he had for a departed parent.

Talking of lethal injections, I discovered this month that my local dentist has retired. I lost a filling a while back – part of my general entropy – and need someone to repair the damage. There are two new dentists at the local practice and the Good Wife dangled her pendulum to ‘dowse’ me in her mysterious way, her wonders to perform. Is this the better of the two dentists for Mark? The pendulum decided that I should opt for the female. When I finally got through to the practice, the receptionist offered me a slot at the end of September – but with the dentist rejected by the pendulum’s trajectory. How could I explain, in French, that my wife had dowsed me and…? So I told her simply that I preferred a female dentist. She pointed out, accurately, that the now-retired Dr. Garcia was a man. Nevertheless, I went for a later appointment with the female option. We shall see.

But back to dogs… No matter how it hurts, at least we can end their suffering. Here in the West, we can only do that for a human being in Switzerland (unless mercy-killing is practised secretly in somewhere like Albania) and only presumably if you’ve got enough money to pay the probably exorbitant fees. How my wife and I have longed to be able to end Mother Mary’s suffering: sitting alone in her nursing home, not speaking to anyone, denied most of her pleasures by immobility and a form of dementia, and dependent on a phone that allowed her to bombard friends and family with calls. We’d had to do the deed for her cat with a degenerative disease that was getting gradually worse, which was traumatic, but we couldn’t obviously do it for her.

And then one day towards the end of August, the call came from the senior nurse to suggest that Mother Mary was slipping into darkness. The calls had stopped for a few days and we were wondering. She’d stopped eating and the only liquid she would drink was red wine – but she would spit that out after a few drops. She was declining fast; so fast that Debs would surely be too late should she go over to England. Sure enough, she shuffled off two days later, half way through our breakfast on the back balcony. (The weather in August has been less brutal generally and has allowed us this luxury once more.)

I have a theory about her demise. For about the last year, my mother-in-law initiated her calls with earnest instructions for either one of us to phone the home and ask the nurse if she would take her by car – in her wheelchair – to Marks & Spencers, so she could buy some new shoes. The last time I spoke to her before her sudden departure, she sounded so desperate that she could hardly get the words out. ‘Please – phone the home – and ask – the nurse – to take me – in my wheelchair…’ She loved to shop; I think it kept her going. And maybe she came to the sudden realisation that this just wasn’t going to happen, whereupon she decided that enough was enough, the time had come, and – like the character in Henry James’s Wings Of The Dove – she turned her face to the wall, so to speak, and gave up the struggle.

Whatever the cause of death, her demise has thrown the household into a state of chassis. What with this and the heat and the tiger mosquitoes, I realised that I’d missed my monthly blog. It was bad enough being laid off for the month of August by the radio station. What’s happening, brother?

For the last decade or so, Debs has been at her mother’s beck-and-call, a kind of distance-carer between visits to the parental home where she was treated more like an unpaid servant. For many years there were the regular lists for Sainsbury’s online service and Wiltshire Foods and, more recently, the daily list of delicacies like prawn cocktails and chocolate éclairs and latterly garlic powder with which to flavour the intolerably bland food that the home served her.

And then suddenly it’s all stopped. The fixed phone has gone quiet; the messagerie is empty. All very strange and disconcerting. It’s already four years since my father died. I still miss him and our daily chats on Skype about music and Arsenal football club. I asked Debs if she misses her mum, but it’s too soon to tell. She told me that effectively she lost her 30 years ago – when her father died and her mother became a commanding, demanding dowager.

The death is just the beginning. The Good Wife has gone to England now to organise all the details of the memorial service up in Cumbria equipped with the eulogy we wrote together, telling among her memories of the time when we took her out of her unloved final house in her wheelchair, pushing her up the road as far as the gate to the Fells. All the way up, she waved a royal wave this way and that to unseen neighbours either side of the street. Debs said to her, ‘Mum I don’t think there’s anyone watching.’ ‘Well,’ her mother replied, ‘someone might be’.

After the service, after taking tea with the last of her friends and relatives still on this earth, she and our daughter will scatter the dowager’s ashes from the top of Murton Pike. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. When Debs asked her mother whom she wanted most to see on the other side, she cited Omar the cat we’d had to put to sleep. So it goes…

There’ll be someone to see about adding the salient details to her husband’s tombstone and the solicitor to instruct about the elongated process of probate before finally my life’s partner feels able to relax into her new status as an orphan and describe how her mother’s death has touched her. It’s a strange business, this matter of death, the one sure thing about life itself. One minute you’re here, and then you’re gone. Who knows where?

Anyway, I’ve drawn the long straw on this occasion. I get to stay at home to look after the animals and keep the garden alive. We had a few substantial downpours in August and the surrounding countryside looks remarkably green considering. That’s the wonder of nature, the wonder, too, of existence and its passing.

 

July: Blowing Hot and Cold

Earlier this month, we swapped the murderous heat and an apocalypse of flies for the cooler climes – and the midges – of the Scottish Highlands. I’d heard that Avon’s Skin So Soft protects wee timorous tourists from the little winged blighters, but where do you find an Avon Lady in this digital age? Ding dong! Customers calling…

We left full of ifs and maybes. If temperatures continue to rise, which they will, can we carry on in this beautiful outpost of civilisation? If not – and the stifling experience of the preceding weeks suggested that we couldn’t – could we really re-adapt to Britain after more than 30 years away? England? It would have to be the north – but how far north? Scotland? It’s a long, long way to go. Roughly 2,000kms we calculated from the Lot to the lochs of the north-west. And let’s be honest, even in a post-apocalyptic world, the climate up there will still be shite.

So, with heavy hearts and Daphne the Terrierdor billeted for the full fortnight with Thompson & Thompson, the godparents, we left Laetitia the Tattooed Lady with four pages of notes (which she probably didn’t read) in charge of the cats and the plants, the hi-fi and the wi-fi. Poor thing, the house was depressingly hot and still not free of the flies that flew in, probably from the cow sheds up at the farm, and quite literally blackened our kitchen ceiling and the floor of the terrace outside. For the first time in our sustainable married life, we had resorted to toxic fly-spray. Strands of sticky fly-paper hung here and there like sickly ectoplasm, and the beer, wine and syrup traps I normally set for Asian hornets turned solid with flies within a few hours.

Whichever route you take, it’s a long way from here to Calais; it’s a long way to go. But we got there in good enough time to mingle with the Ch’tis, as the northern hoi-polloi are affectionately or pejoratively known, and enjoy a barquette of chips on the beach. Calais, however, is a dump and the Ibis ‘Style’, where we stayed for the night, anything but stylish.  

Nevertheless… The breakfast wasn’t half-bad and set us up for the day: a long day’s journey to the North. After the technological miracle of the Eurotunnel, surely adapted from an H.G. Wells story, I boldly and bravely took the first leg – to face my traffic demons. Reader, I survived the Dartford Tunnel and the M25 shaken, stirred, but unscathed. It was as hot as France much of the way up the A1, until about Leeds, whereupon the clouds arrived and the temperature dipped. We could have taken a detour to explore places like Selby, Staithes and Saltburn, which my phone suggests are pleasant places to live, but Father Time was against us and we had to reach Corbridge before sun-up.

West of Darlington, we crossed the Durham/Northumberland borderland, a beautiful unexplored part of the country periodically blighted by run-down and forgotten former mining settlements like Bishop Auckland, where English flags hung from windows in support no doubt of the football team but also the kind of right-wing political firebrands who feed on the ire of such communities. Corbridge by contrast is a pleasant, rather genteel little town that lacks only charity shops and a sign to indicate that it is the Birthplace of the Good Wife.

Crossing the beautiful Northumberland moors the following morning and into the Lowlands of Scotland, the temperature took a further tumble. Under an ominous sky, we skirted Edinburgh and headed west for the Trossachs. On driving through Callander, I reminisced about Dr. Finlay’s Casebook. Each Sunday en famille, we would watch Doctors Finlay and Cameron (and arch-rival Dr. Snoddie) bring succour to the sick of Tannochbrae and its environs under the strict eye of their housekeeper, Janet – a kind of Presbyterian prototype for Mrs. Doyle of Father Ted fame.

We never saw Ben Nevis. We rolled down Glencoe to Fort William, nestling supposedly in the shadow of Britain’s highest peak, but low-lying cloud shrouded everything in a damp blanket of invisibility. I had underestimated the size of Scotland. Our destination, Kishorn, not far from Lochcarron across yet another mountain pass, lay a further three hours to the north along main roads narrow enough to make me flinch in the passenger seat from oncoming traffic. Our ‘Kabin’ for four nights, a kind of prefabricated outhouse a kind of prefabricated outhouse priced as something quite remarkable, was a handy enough base from which to explore the area and did at least come equipped with Skin So Soft.  But the cold and the wet prevailed and even much of the legendary train trip across the Highlands was obscured by cloud, while destination Inverness was a resounding anti-climax. Only sunny Shildaig and overcast Plockton truly illuminated our stay. No, we agreed, we couldn’t live so far from civilisation as we knew it.

Quite by chance, we booked a night in Helensbrugh, west of the bonny banks of Loch Lomond, for a night en route to Cumbria and the south. The sun almost came out in the birthplace of John Logie Baird, but otherwise… Until, that is, we discovered that it harbours Hill House, the stunning Art Nouveau family house designed for the publisher William Blackie’s family by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret MacDonald. The house is now, temporarily, encased in a remarkable wire-mesh cage prior to re-rendering in something other than the cement that C.R.M. foolishly specified. As a result, the exterior looks more ancient and weather-beaten than fin de siècle modern, but the interior is so stunning that it almost moved us both to tears.

Cumbria, Mother Mary’s former stamping ground before being removed to her current custodial residence for superannuated crackpots, usually means Lakeland rain. But the two days and nights we spent with friends from Sheffield were so balmy and blissful that I was tempted to move there lock, stock and barrel full of Lotois walnuts. Sitting by the bountiful raspberry canes beside the brook at the foot of their gorgeous garden was about all that you could wish for in life. But that same picturesque brook bubbles over in winter, threatening both garden and cottage with flood water. Hmmm. Perhaps not. Not at least with seedy Penrith, ‘Gateway to the Lakes’, as the nearest urban hub.

We left Cumbria with hearts heavy once more, knowing that from here on south the traffic would be like a Los Angeles freeway. We paid the toll to go around Birmingham in comparative peace and reached Banbury on the M40 without fatal accident. It was time to visit Mother Mary in her custodial residence for crackpots: a first time for me. Very nice, too, and staffed entirely by the kind of big-hearted women who could get together and save the world if they weren’t so busy looking after residents waiting around to die. Mother Mary was just getting ready to glare at the daughter who has probably single-handedly kept her going this last lost decade when her face lit up to spot her ‘favourite [only] son-in-law’. How she loves the male sex, poor deluded fool that she is. Since the sun was shining, I pushed her around the beautifully tended gardens, oh so tempted to do a Bette-Davis-as-Baby-Jane and let go of her wheelchair on the grassy knoll.

Debs took me to see the nearby village of Eydon and the imposing house in which she spent some of her unhappiest teenage years. A charming enough place, it’s the personification of Middle England: totally out of our price range and populated by clones of David Cameron and wife. Sorry, Lord and Lady Cameron. We spent the night with an old friend of the family, an eighty-something character who spends most of her spare cash on daily newspapers. The Mail and the Telegraph for a balanced view on life.

After a further two visits to the luxury waiting home the next day, we headed for London to visit our queen, Sampsondottir, in her palatial studio flat. Having faced my demons on the M25, I was happy to let my good wife negotiate the traffic of London, while I sat and fumed about the route that our French SatNav chose for us. Si possible, faites demi-tour… We steered clear of the Central London congestion charge, but opened up a can of worms in trying to pay Transport for London its emission charge for the temerity of breaching the suburbs in a diesel car. Would they, I wonder now, have tracked our foreign number plate down to this happy homestead in the Lot? Born in London (despite the disappointing lack of blue plaque), I’m nevertheless surprised why my flesh and blood should choose to live in such a dystopia.

All of which left the final three days in Romsey, Hants. – and a chance to visit sisters and brother, nephews, great nephews and under-nephews. And… the Oxfam bookshop. I love Romsey’s majestic abbey and its plethora of charity shops and it’s kind of nice to feel tucked up in the bosom of my family, but we both agree that it’s probably not where we would choose to end our days. Too darn hot and too darn South of England.

It is, however, quite close to Portsmouth, gateway to our long drive home. We spent one final night away, in Ouistreham, at another Ibis Style. Being port-side, this one pretended that its bedrooms were cabins. We got to our ‘cabin’ after an interminable queue at Passport Control (Si possible, faites demi-tour…) just in time to catch extra time of the World Cup final. Spain scored the only goal and vanquished the histrionic Argie-bargie scoundrels. The win for football pleased me as much as the fact that an American golfer didn’t win the British Open. I may have recently developed a floater in my left eye, something to do with degeneration of the ocular membrane, I believe, but these little victories have helped restore my will to live a little longer on this earth.

Back home at last, it may be too darn hot once more and the garden is nought but a blasted heath, but the flies have gone. Incidentally – and mirabile dictu, as the Romans might say – although we agreed on a 5 out of 10 overall mark for the holiday, we didn’t see a single midge. No need for Skin So Soft. So it’s (cue Soul II Soul) back to life, back to reality… We’ll stay where we are for now, we’ve decided, and start preparing for the summer of ’27. Time to drop the shutters.

June: Many Unhappy Returns

May has long been my favourite month in France. The countryside is a riot of colour and the general green of the vegetation is so lush and succulent that you could imagine yourself a grasshopper. The month demands that you take the time to be still and just appreciate the sheer beauty of nature at its zenith – before black spot claims the roses and the heat and dust of summer burns everything to a flammable crisp. Open the door first thing and the chorus of bird song is positively deafening. Standing on the threshold of global disaster, you feel glad to be alive.

The merry month of May is always somewhat tarnished, though, by having to submit an annual tax return. It’s not that I mind particularly paying tax – and if we lived in a socially responsible country like Denmark, I’d probably rejoice in it, secure in the knowledge that my money would be channelled towards the common good rather than weapons of mass destruction – no, it’s the thought of how unfair the system is: the fact that those with the most means in this life will put themselves in the hands of some clever accountant, skilled in the dark arts of playing the system (for the benefit of Mr. Shite).

What’s more, given my lifelong fear of authority – parents, teachers, gendarmes, tax inspectors et al – I’m followed around all month by a shroud of guilt, in the way that Charlie Brown’s pal Pigpen would kick up a little blanket of dirt wherever he walked. The guilt is psychosomatic, triggered by the fear that I’ve missed something or made a mistake in my calculations. One evening there will be a knock at the front door. Monsieur Sampson? Je suis l’inspecteur des impôts. Je voudrais parler avec vous… Actually, it’s more likely to take the form of one of those awful official letters that occasionally land in our mail box, bringing dread and consternation.

This year the guilt was niggled by reading articles in The Connexion, France’s very own Anglophone newspaper for expatriates. In this era of artificial intelligence(or AI to the cognoscenti), the authorities, I read, are using it to analyse photos taken from above by satellites or helicopters to identify outbuildings as yet undeclared and liable to the infamous ‘shed tax’. I checked online to see what could be seen on Google Earth and, sure enough, there quite clearly is the little structure we put up to channel rainwater into our underground tank – a socially responsible act, I’m sure you will agree, that might nevertheless be subject to another of the stealth taxes in which this country specialises. Oh, the worry, the internal turmoil!

Any reading I did only served to cloud the issue. It was clear that I should go and see someone – but whom, without opening up a can of worms? I toyed with his worship the mayor, who had been down our way in his big yellow machine of destruction only a few days before to shred the overgrowth either side of the chemin rural that leads down to the house of our intermittent Parisian neighbours. He and I have a reasonably good working relationship: I dispense a bit of old-style British charm in return for his tacit understanding that I am essentially honest and harmless. I’m pretty sure that he clocked our construction on a previous slash-and-churn mission and said nothing, even though he knew and I knew that we were supposed to declare the work and await the official authorisation before starting it.

Better perhaps not to unsettle the status quo. So I decided to test the new France Services facility in Martel, where supposedly I could get information about all kinds of official business without having to betray my name, address and serial number. It’s quite a new service, presumably designed to help the public find their way through the tangled web of l’Administration. No doubt, too, to improve its awful public image. They, the functionaries who work for the faceless conglomerate, have a lot to learn about service, so it would be interesting to gauge how they’re managing.

I went one overcast morning to the gaunt little building that used to house the local treasury before online payments of public bills became the only option. My hopes were not high. Sure enough, the office was still closed five minutes after the supposed opening time. A notice on the door said something about exceptional closing that afternoon. Perhaps some colleague’s birthday celebrations, demanding an extra hour or two in the local restaurant, followed by a recuperative siesta. I was about to turn on my heels when another customer arrived followed soon after by a functionary with a key. He questioned us both about our needs – but not in a how-can-I-be-of-assistance? way, more of an aggressive what-the-hell-do-you-want? manner.

Once inside his domain, his comportment seemed to thaw somewhat and I felt slightly less of an intruder. However, he soon made it clear that he knew as little as I did about the regulations and directed me instead to someone at the Martel mairie, an expert in the field. Well, fair enough in some respects. Better to admit your limitations than to fudge it with hot air and bluster.

So I went up the hill to my next port-of-call. The woman at the misnamed Welcome desk indicated a gloomy room backstage where a middle-aged bespectacled man sat behind a desk. He looked up with an expression that said, Yes? What is it? Feeling like a pupil hauled up before a teacher after school, I tentatively stated my case. He went straight onto the defensive. No, no, no. He couldn’t possibly help me. I needed to go to the mairie in St. Denis les Martel, because every commune was different. You had to treat every application individually according to the specifics of the local cadastral plan blah blah blah. I stood my ground. Surely, I suggested, he must know what the regulations state in broad terms. He regarded me like an irritant that wouldn’t go away of its own accord. Reluctantly, he gave me the information I had hoped to hear: If a construction is under 20m² and open to the elements, then you don’t have to pay the taxe d’amènagement, or shed tax.

I left the Jobsworth to his paper-pushing in peace. Needless to say, I thought of something more suitable than my meek words of thanks after the event. Oh to be an Oscar Wilde or some such doyen of repartee! I’d have pumped myself up to my full, commanding stature and addressed that human bean thus: ‘My good man, I too was once a civil servant. We learnt very early on the importance of civility towards the public, who – let us remember – pay us our handsome salary via their taxes. I bid you, sir, an unhappy evening and a wretched week ahead.’

Reader, I left that mairie fuming, full of dark thoughts to share with the Good Wife on my return. Why had we chosen to live among these dismal, rude and humourless people? And then I looked out upon the green and pleasant landscape below…

Well anyway, I got my answer. If I am questioned about our wooden construction, I can quote the regulations. I shouldn’t now be fined thousands of euros. What now worries me is that they may ask me when it was authorised, when it was finished, where is the paperwork and so on? I can try fudging it, but if they are feeling particularly vindictive, could they demand that we take it down?

May has segued into June. The tax return has been lodged. It’s all over for another year. Time once more to focus on the matter of surviving the three hottest months of the year.