Wednesday morning is the time when I hit town. Once a week, I give my eyes the morning off and leave my nice comfortable home. I take my daughter to school in Brive, do the week’s shopping, then find a parking spot and saunter till midday, when it’s time to pick her up and bring her back home.
‘Sauntering’ often involves a visit to the remarkable music library, where I try to spend as much time as possible to recoup some of the horrendous local taxes we pay for my wife’s clinic. This Wednesday, though, I treated myself to one final visit (honest) to the multi-media shop for a last rootle through the sale bin.
I figured it this way: I could either spend €1,70 on a miniature cup of coffee in the old-world comfort of Café Bogota, which would taste good and give me the brief sensation of being perfectly at one with the world, or I could spend a solitary euro on yet another CD that might afford me everlasting pleasure.
No contest. I’m utterly incorrigible. I’d clocked a disc the week before, which – in a gesture of supreme self-discipline – I’d put back, because I’d already gathered ten and was reluctant to spend more than ten euros of my wife’s very hard-earned money on something frivolous for me.
It was still there, which meant that no one had had the curiosity to part with a euro to find out whether it was as good as it looked. How come? You surely couldn’t lose at that price. It’s called Yellow Daffodils; it’s by a beautiful leggy black woman from Malawi called Malia, who looks like she would sing about interesting subjects rather than rant about bitches and motherfakirs; there’s a song by Duke Ellington, a song endearingly called ‘Purple Shoes’ and a guest appearance by the Swiss jazz trumpeter, Erik Truffaz.
And it proved every bit as good as I had hoped. One of those albums, in fact, where you can tell within the first few bars that you’re in for something special. What’s more, the wife and daughter like it as much as I do, so I plundered the family coffers to bring joy to the family.
Earlier this week, we watched a classic western by Anthony Mann that I’d somehow managed to miss all my life. The Naked Spur, with James Stewart, that splendid villain, Robert Ryan, and Jamie Lee Curtis’s mum, Janet Leigh. It’s a classic clichéd tale (of a man on a mission to catch a baddie and bring him back to stand trial) made remarkable by stunning cinematography, three-dimensional characters and suitably good acting.
You take Jimmy Stewart so much for granted that you forget what a compelling actor he was. Seemingly without even trying, he could do equally well the sappy hero of all those Frank Capra films, the muddle-headed nincompoop of Harvey and, in this case, the irascible, tortured man-with-a-past. Unsurprisingly, long before the end, Janet Leigh was starting to soften him up, good and proper.
We also started re-watching John Byrne’s brilliant Tutti Frutti. Last time we tried, the Glaswegian dialect proved too much for our Tilley. However, since she wants to go to art school in Scotland, we suggested that it would be as well to attune herself to the vagaries of the accent. Tutti Frutti more or less gave the world Robbie Coltrane, Emma Thompson and Richard Wilson, not to mention Maurice Roëves as the band’s pompous guitarist, Vincent Diver, or “VD”, as engraved on the cigarette lighter given to him by his pubescent looking girlfriend. The dialogue is scintillating and very funny and it seems criminal that the only award it ever won was for John Byrne’s credits.
Now as one week segues into another, I’m preparing myself for the marathon of the Superbowl on Sunday night/Monday morning. A very kind man from Madison, Wisconsin – a lifelong fan of the Green Bay Packers, who owns a holiday home near here – sent me a souvenir magazine, which I’m busy devouring in preparation for what Americans like to think of as ‘the greatest show on earth’. If the Packers win, I shall be in a very good humour all week. If they lose, I’ll try not to be grumpy for more than 24 hours.
Aaron Rodgers and the boys know what they have to do.
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