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.

 

May: Les Frères Sampson

My dream of being a poet vanished like a thing in a whatever… My thanks to my friend, bold Sir Edmond, for that little gem. I don’t quote it gratuitously, because it resonates with me. If I were serious about writing a masterpiece in the remaining time allotted to me, I wouldn’t have spent so much of the precious commodity these last few weeks re-painting the house’s external woodwork. I’d have employed some young able-bodied tradesman to do it while I sat inside composing my requisite daily 2,000 words.

It had to be done. It’s 22 years now since the original paint went on, a testimony to the endurance of the Swedish linseed-oil-basedpaint and an insight into why I paid over €50 per litre tin to renew it. When I applied it first 22 years ago, I was much younger and better equipped to do the job. And I had the help of a guy called Dave, who turned up with his mate Steve one day when we were still building the house. They had been sent here via some strange circuitous route that involved a Dutch woman called Angela. Dave and Steve were told about the Grand Designs coverage of the build and were hoping for a little vicarious publicity to help them launch their damp-proofing business after leaving the British army and setting up in France. Steve went back to England after a year or so, but Dave stayed on and became a friend. Both he and Angela are dead now. Dave was a bit of a thrill-seeker, who died while hang-gliding in the French Alps, smashed against a rock face by a rogue thermal. My friend Bret telephoned me with the news while I was shopping in Lidl and I was so shocked that I probably pushed my trolley down the middle aisle without looking at that week’s special offers. Poor Dave; he’s remembered fondly in these parts.

This time I had the help of The Brother. I promised him that I wouldn’t mention how many years it has been since his last visit to Camp Street. Suffice to say it’s been a long time. To be fair to the poor sibling, he’s finally packed in his career as a plumber, so he finds himself with time on his hands for the first time in decades. Reliable plumbers are never short of work, particularly in a part of the world where en suite bathrooms are de rigueur.

I picked him up from outside Limoges airport on a gloomy Monday, a lone figure in a Panama hat eating a sandwich. He’d left his flat at Guildford at around 2 o’clock in the morning to catch a flight leaving Stansted at some horribly anti-social hour. He revealed that the M25 is quite navigable in the wee small hours of the morning. We drove home down the A20, which is equally devoid of traffic at all times apart from certain weeks in high summer. Once off the motorway, I was surprised at how nervous a passenger he has become. I pride myself on being a careful driver, ever on the lookout for idiots and ever ready to take evasive action, but it underlined how we adapt to the different situations to which we become accustomed. I think nothing now of driving around the kind of narrow country lanes which seemed to make him flinch at every bend, but he will happily negotiate the A3, the M3, the M25 and all kinds of other white-knuckle drives that leave me a nervous wreck.

Anyway, the deal we struck some months back after high-powered negotiations was that Miles would help me paint our external woodwork and in return I would help him at a later date repaint his house in Finland. The fact that his house in the woods by a small lake is built entirely of wood caused an impasse in the negotiations. They might have broken down altogether had it not been for the brotherly love that has made working together in the past such a joy. The Brother is on his day one of the funniest people I have known. There but for fate and family background he might have written for The Fast Show. As it was, we spent time after dinner most evenings watching old Fast Show sketches on YouTube; the sillier and more idiotic, the better. I in turn introduced him to one of my favourites: the W.C. Fields short film about the harassed shopkeeper trying to meet an angry customer’s demands for kumquats while coping with Mr. Muckle, the irascible blind man with a lethal cane that smashes everything in its sweeping arc.  

The last time we worked together for any length of time was in the Corrèze. My reckless wife and I had bought a 17^th century farmhouse that was unfit for 20^th century purpose and Miles was recovering from a premature heart attack. For a couple of weeks or so, we had a hilarious time as Les Frères Sampson, a hapless pair of expatriate brothers trying to make a living in rural France. Faites votre problème, notre problème! was the slogan we would have painted on the side of our van. We thought it was very good and rather witty, failing to appreciate at the time that the over-literal French probably wouldn’t understand it because it wasn’t grammatically watertight. We had a lot on our plate, rectifying the hapless DIY of our vendor, Monsieur Malvestio. His most heinous crime against humanity was to lay a crazy-paving floor on the ceiling of the basement cave. Not only did it crack and disintegrate, but the weight of the folly caused the floor to sag like a tarpaulin after a downpour. And so, les Frères Sampson made the problem their problem, laying in its stead a beautiful floor of local chestnut parquet. (I use the third-person plural, but in reality I would stand around like an incompetent lemon, awaiting orders from my practical sibling: Do this, please; hand me this; cut this in half and so on.)

That was more than three decades ago. We had our middle age to look forward to and it didn’t seem too daunting a prospect. This time les Frères Sampson were two old men, still horsing around and feeding each other punch lines, but now competing to be solicitous: Mind your back; bend your knees; careful on that ladder etc. I always thought of myself as the Worry-Wart el Supremo, but The Brother’s anxiety has come on in leaps and bounds during the intervening decades. As we approach old old age, we are both keenly aware that life is just a lottery. Every supplementary day of reasonable health could be our able-bodied last. That outline of the care home on the horizon becomes clearer with every passing week. It was a good job that the hyper-expensive paint we applied during a week of erratic weather is supposed to last a good 15-20 years. I can’t see myself getting up a ladder as a nonagenarian.

Apart from the grab-handle that The Brother put up in the shower, maybe five times quicker than it would have taken me, for the visit of a friend from London who’s unsteady on his pins, I felt more of an equal partner this time. Age has granted me more of an equal footing on the ladder of life. Besides, it’s rare that anyone with a paintbrush in their hand could be branded as genuinely incompetent, and being the more slender of the two siblings meant that I could shin up the ladder, contort my body into unnatural positions and generally tackle the more challenging parts that the heftier figure can’t reach. So we got the work more or less done in the petite semaine available to us. There are a few small areas left to be done once our annual French tax return is submitted and once the weather settles down, but it looks good. I can step back and admire our handiwork, proud in the knowledge that this time it was a truly joint venture.

I delivered The Brother to Brive Vallée de la Dordogne airport on the Friday morning at a civilised hour before hurrying off to Bergerac to pick up the next two visitors from the Old Country. We promised each other that we wouldn’t leave it so long next time before spending more quality time together. Anyway, there’s all that paintwork in Finland in prospect. It could be later this year if our best laid plans slot into place. Another problem for Les Frères Sampson to assume and resolve. I’m looking forward to it. I like the Finns and admire their education system, their sense of national contentment, their prowess in ski-jumping and the way they fought off the Russians in the Winter War. They’re quirkier than the French – although an old friend told me a joke about them. How do you tell an extrovert in Finland? He’ll look at your shoes when he’s talking to you rather than his own. Try telling that to a literal Frenchman and gauge the reaction.

April: Let Sleeping Snakes Lie

There was a big black bank of cloud hanging across the horizon that morning. I should have recognised a portent when I saw one. Nevertheless, I wanted to check our water meter. According to our bills over the last few years, our water consumption has gone from as low as 28 cubic metres (shurely shome mishtake; maybe the counter got stuck during cold weather) to 127m³. So the price we have to pay for it has been equally variable. I normally stay away from the meter, because it’s underground and the hole is full of insects that proliferate under the polystyrene insulation that protects the meter from extreme cold. The water company usually sends an e-mail to urge customers to do this, thereby absolving themselves of responsibility. 

So... just a quick look to check the counter, compare it to the last official reading, do a calculation of sorts and evaluate whether there could be a subterranean leak somewhere between meter and house. I removed the first chunk of browning polystyrene – and put it straight back again when I saw something wriggle and slither. A snake! I’d disturbed its annual hibernation. And not just any snake. I’m not given to exaggeration – that’s the Good Wife’s province – but this was the biggest snake I’d ever seen outside a wildlife programme. It was, too, a rather beautiful snake, ringed with black hoops that seemed to oscillate as it slithered off into a dark corner of its bedroom. It was probably just a rather large grass snake and not a fugitive cobra from the local charmer’s wicker basket, but you don’t mess with a serpent rudely awoken from a season-long slumber.

All this I gauged in the fraction of a second it took for me to shut the lid. I decided there and then, remarkably calmly in fact, that I would read the meter another day. If something is leaking, so be it – and damned the expense! I went back inside to report the incident. My wife was on her phone, probably checking her next rendezvous with a client. When she’s on the phone, she’s good for nothing else.

‘I’ve just seen a giant snake, in our water meter,’ I announced casually.

‘Mmm-hmmm?’

‘No, that hasn’t landed, has it?’

‘What? Sorry, what did you say?’

‘I’ve just seen a giant snake…’

‘Oh my God! Where?’

‘In the water meter hole.’

When it did get through, she seemed more perturbed than I’d been, although she, too, recognised that it had probably been a grass snake. We’ve both become quite sanguine about snakes after 30 years or more of country living. I go by my wife’s maxim that we’re surrounded by them outside the privacy of our own home, but they’re probably more afraid of us than we are of them. Nevertheless, I have on occasion lifted a stone to find a sleepy viper shading itself from the glare of the sun. Those little critters are small but perfectly poised to jab you with poison, whereupon you have to rush out to the nearest pharmacie for an antidote before you die. A grass snake is about as long as a whip and as thick as a saucisson: the stuff of childish nightmares, but I believe (and I cannot testify for sure) totally harmless. You see the poor creatures from time to time squashed on a road, looking like a length of perished rubber.  

Country living, if nothing else, prepares you for the vagaries of nature. About this time of year, the ants begin to mass like marines, ready to invade. Every spring we have several Ho Chi Minh trails, as we call them – in the kitchen, in the reading area, in the bathroom. If they become too invasive, we resort to those round plastic things with tabs that you snap off to activate. The ant wanders inside looking for booty, attracted no doubt by some artificial hormone, then returns to the nest to contaminate its colleagues with some lethal insecticide. We try not to use them. After all, we’ve made peace with the wasps. Every year, they nest under the eaves of the mezzanine and/or in the concave roof tiles. I gave up trying to obliterate them years ago in favour of diplomacy. I step outside onto the top balcony and make a deal with their leaders: Listen, we’ll leave you alone, if you leave us alone. Thus far, it has worked and, to extend the metaphor, the price of oil hasn’t rocketed.

The mites in the pantry, however, are not so ready to deal. They’ll be out soon, ready to plague us for another year. The situation seemed to improve last year when I moved our annual 5kg bag of walnuts from Gisèle down to the cave, to hang from the ceiling by a hook. Nevertheless, we’ve learnt to store all foodstuffs in tightly sealed jars and to fix nasty sticky papers around the pantry to entice the little bleeders with some other brand of artificial hormone. Changing the papers is not a job that I relish. There’s no way that you can peel back the protective paper once affixed to the wall without getting sticky stuff all over as you try to stop them coming away from said wall. Few things in life are guarantee to put me into such a foul humour. 

In our time here, learning to live in harmony with nature, I’ve dealt with a viper in the house (involving a long period of deep reflection and the inelegant use of a cardboard box) and my poor wife has been stung twice in one evening by a hornet, thus murdering sleep for the entire ensuing night. Our dog attends to the mice brought in by the cats, but I’ve not yet learnt to be phlegmatic about flies. Tics regularly attach themselves to cats, dog and occasionally humans (often in the least accessible places). Giant green grasshoppers, mange-touts as we call them, sneak in during high summer, then scare the wits out of you by taking off without notice and landing right beside you. Punaises, or shield bugs, have the same tendency to alarm and also come with the horrible smell of almonds past their sell-by date.

But country life has taught us to adapt, survive and live mainly in harmony with our natural surroundings. City life, by contrast, does not generally equip one for the hazards of nature. Trouble can arise when urbanites visit the countryside expecting all the predictable facets of suburban life. When I looked after a couple of holiday homes in the area to supplement my wages as a writer in the days before Her (now His) Majesty’s Government decided to pay me monthly for being old, there was a family from south-east London that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Mike Leigh play… Not long after settling them in and showing them the ropes, I was summoned one evening to face a barrage of complaints from Mother, Father and Grandmother, provoked by an invasion of flies. They took me outside and showed me the back wall of the house where, for some reason best known to themselves and certainly not in this case the lure of an artificial hormone, local flies had gathered en masse. They took it as a slur on the cleanliness of the house. I sympathised with them and grovelled abjectly, but there was really little to be done. If you live in the middle of nowhere, there will be flies. Yet they honestly expected me to call the French equivalent of Rentokil to spray the entire wall with something noxious. By the time I made my apologies and slinked away, I was ready to slap them, one and all.

Similarly, wasps will gather around a swimming pool in search of water. What realistically can you do? In the other house I managed, some nouveau riche Liverpudlian toe-rag gave me a dressing down in front of his (rather more pleasant and probably abused) wife as if I personally had summoned the wasps to disturb his post-meridian aperitif by the pool. Were it not for the fact that he was nearly twice my size and would probably deck me, I would have expressed a wish that he would die soon.

I’ve spent half my life in various big cities and the other half in the heart of the heart of the countryside. Both have taught me some important life-lessons. Among others, city life taught me how to use public transport, which areas to avoid at night and where to find the best music bargains, but I’ve actually learnt many more practical lessons since Iiving in the countryside. This recent one I feel compelled to pass on: never check an underground meter till spring has passed. Let slumbering serpents snooze.

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.