It's official. The table-tennis season is over. This
weekend, in a biting wind, my wife and I folded our blue table and put it under
wraps for another winter. It has joined the wood under tarps to protect it from
the elements to come. Debs finds that the tail-end of our track looks like a
building site. We have discussed the situation and conceived of a little
straw-bale shelter with a single-pitch roof to echo the parent roof above my
head. It will require drawings and a déclaration
des travaux for a start-off, but we can say that the project has now officially
gone into pre-production.
While on the subject of productions, we've watched half
of a film about the making of King Kong.
That's the Peter Jackson version with Naomi Watts as the maiden in the hand of
the oversized gorilla. I've never had much yearning to watch the film itself,
satisfied as I am with the clunky original, but I picked up a double production
journal on DVD in Cash Converters for a derisory 50 cents, thinking it might
shed some interesting light on the film-making process.
I was not wrong. Not only has it cast Peter Jackson himself
in a very positive light, given a valuable lesson on how to mimic the
extraordinary New Zealand accent (with its transformation of, say, yes into yiss and film into furlm), but it has also underlined the
mind-boggling attention to detail involved in creating the modern blockbuster. You
realise the significance of those endless credits that roll past at the end of
a film. Just how many people did it take to create Skull Island out of
polystyrene, or 1930s Manhattan in plywood, or a jungle using models and
computer technology? The film industry is just that: a veritable industry.
We've reached December 2004 and the point at which the
whole teeming multitude of cast and crew breaks for Christmas. We're not there
yet this year, but it's coming on fast and strong. Arriving soon on platform 5, en provenance de Toulouse, the Yuletide
shebang. Calling at all stations for Paris. All aboard! We had intended to
celebrate Christmas on the other side of the Channel for the first time in
years, but hadn't reckoned on the decrepitude of our poor dog. The Daughter is
desperate for an extended family Christmas, but I've experienced a few in my
time that have gone dangerously wrong. So it shall be another child's Christmas
in the Lot this year.
If Alf makes it that far, it will be his approximate 14th
birthday, which just about makes him a centenarian in human terms. On Saturday
morning I wasn't sure whether the old boy would still be here when I got back
from Martel market. All day long, he would wander outside, then come back in
for a minute or two, limp to his water bowl and then back out again. I watched
him through a window, sniffing the air and wandering aimlessly like a trembling
and bewildered soul. He seemed to prefer to curl up outside in the cold than
inside by the fire. It seemed to me that he had sensed his imminent departure
for the Promised Park and couldn't equate this with his role as guardian of the
family home. They say that animals have out-of-body experiences towards the
end, as if they are able to send their souls off on voyages of discovery to
report back on the afterlife.
This lasted all day long and I couldn't settle any more
than he could. I am prepared for his death, so long as it's a natural one when
his time has come, preferably of course in his sleep. But when it seems that he
is perturbed, even suffering, you wonder whether you should be making that
phone call to the local vet. As it happened, his mistress did some 'surrogate
tapping' for him after she'd finished her day's travails. I know from personal
experience that EFT can work wonders, but am still sceptical about this
surrogate notion. Nevertheless, Alf settled almost immediately and went to
sleep for the evening. Indoors.
So there was no need to cancel our Moke Memorial Dinner
on Saturday evening. Our friend Moke is going back to the UK after
approximately seven years in France. I've lost count already. He bought a
renovation project in a beautiful spot overlooking the hills around the red-stone
town of Meyssac. He bought it, though, just before the bottom fell out of the
French property market. Over the years, he has laboured – sometimes it seems
like Sisyphus, with one finished job only leading to another, bigger one – to turn
the house into something suitably saleable to meet the demands of the current
market. Now, finally, he's done it. A couple from Paris will benefit from his
handiwork and an attention to detail worthy of a Peter Jackson film.
So the house is sold and the debts repaid. It has been
hard, relentless work. But the seven or so years over here have represented such
a rich and rewarding experience – particularly at a social level, with
countless new friends among the local and international community – that he is
already talking of buying a pied à terre
that will allow him to divide his future time between London and the Corrèze.
We had hoped to meet up with him again late on Sunday
afternoon when Debs and I decided to take in the annual Christmas market in
Meyssac. Moke, however, was too busy finishing off some finishing touches
before the sale goes through early next week. So it was just the two of us who
wandered through the thronging alleyways of this delightful market town. The
whole place was aglow with fairy lights and we were particularly taken with the
use of old lampshades all the way down one of the busiest thoroughfares. It's
probably a little late in the day to start a collection for our own festivities.
The commercants
oversaw their wares in little temporary wooden huts, which now seem de rigeur for municipal Yuletide
markets. Despite the crowd, I wondered just how many people were opening their
wallets to support their local craftspeople. I felt their pain as people
perused and then passed on by. I suspect that most spare cash was spent on
waffles, candy floss and rides on the little merry-go-round in the square.
It was all very nicely done and the locals had clearly
done their bit to guarantee a good time for one and all. Some of them had even
dressed up in medieval garb to take part in tableaux
vivants depicting scenes from local life long, long ago – when Christmas
was a religious rather than a commercial holiday. It was cold, though, and it
worried me that they were outside and not moving – like our poor dog. One
wouldn't want the arrival of colds and flu to coincide with the coming holiday
and the end of 2014 AD.
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