We lit the first fire recently, in early October. It was
a damp, miserable weekend, so there was every excuse, but that was it. Once
lit, there's no turning back. Despite The Daughter's imprecations, we resist
for as long as possible, because the first fire symbolically marks the end of
summer.
A difficult one we had of it this year, what with the
drought and the protracted heat wave, but once the serious heat had died down
around mid August, we settled into a spell of the kind of customary weather we
associate now with the tail-end of a French summer: long warm days bookended by
a slight autumnal chill.
The Brother, as Flann O'Brien would have referred to him,
went back to Belfast with our younger sister at the end of August for the first
time in about 40 years. They certainly didn't go for the weather. When I spoke
to him on Skype about it, he waxed lyrical and passionate about the old place.
Yes, it had changed of course, and he barely recognised the back entry between
our house and the parallel avenue where we used to play bin-ball and race our
bikes in hazardous time-trials, but the people were still the friendliest
people on earth. They had both tried – and failed – to find someone, anyone,
who wasn't nice. Even the guy taking the tickets at the Titanic museum had
been utterly delightful. He told me that he could easily imagine going back to
live there again. Despite the weather.
Talking to him and hearing him enthuse about the kind of
society we had taken for granted, forgetting all the bullets and bombs, made me
come over all misty-eyed and nostalgic. It's not that we haven't encountered
friendliness and friendship during 20 years in France, but it has often been
hard work to get through to people. The sheer ingenuousness of Northern Irish folk
is a rare commodity. It's as if everyone walks around with a sunny disposition
and a Rory McIlroy bounce in their step.
I watched on telly a recording of Van Morrison's 70th
birthday concert on a stage set up in the middle of Cyprus Avenue. The camera
kept pulling back to pan over the immediate neighbourhood, a tree-lined part of
Belfast on the east side of town, and then over the giant crane of Harland
& Woolf's shipyard and beyond to the blue
remembered hills that encompass the city. Everyone looked happy and even
Van the Man, the old curmudgeon, was seen to smile. Once or twice.
We missed out on our customary dose of live music
courtesy of the July festivals this year, but right at the tail-end of August,
on two successive evenings, we caught two magical events that you would be much
more likely to encounter in rural France than in urban Ulster. A small
association dedicated to forging cultural links with Mali put on concerts of
Malian music in two neighbouring village churches.
The first one, in the village of Lissac on the edge of
the Lac de Causse not too far from the south side of Brive, featured a charming
slender dusky-hued chanteuse from
down Bamako way. She called herself Pam and her c.v. includes gigs as backing
vocalist to the likes of Salif Keita. She promised us an evening of jazz, but
apart from an affecting version of 'Cry Me a River', she revealed herself as a
fine singer of anything but jazz. It didn't matter a jot. She enjoyed herself,
the pick-up local band enjoyed themselves and the small but enthusiastic
audience packed into the vaulted church had a collective ball.
Pam turned up at Estivals the next night in one of those
extraordinary colourful headscarves worn in West African parts. She was invited
on-stage to sing on a couple of numbers by the World Kora Trio, a biggish name on
the world music circuit, who surely had no right to be appearing in a medieval
church in the middle of almost nowhere (were it not for the nearby Brive Vallée
de la Dordogne white-elephant airport). A Malian kora player, a French
percussionist and an American cellist, who introduced each number in an
accomplished French while the kora player re-tuned his exotic instrument.
The only wearisome note on such a memorable evening was
the reappearance of a local choir. They were charming and very competent, but
they ran through exactly the same repertoire of French, African and rock songs,
including a version of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' which was actually much more
tolerable than the pompous original.
At the end of the evening, everyone was invited for a bouffe laid on by the association on
trestle tables set up outside the church. Only in France! I would love to have
stayed on and chatted to the band, but it was late and the following morning
the Good Wife and I were getting up early to drive down to Toulouse to catch a
plane to Madge Orca.
I'd never been to the (in)famous Balearic isle before,
but Debs' school friend from her early days in Germany now lives on the island.
It's a mere hop over the Pyrenees from Toulouse. On the kind of clear day when
airplanes appear from down below as silver javelins in the sky, we were able to
see every crevice, every lake and every contour of the mountain range.
Katrin lives on the eastern side of the island, which
necessitates a drive across the parched interior. There are mountains, not
quite as impressive as those we had flown over, on the northern side of the
island and we visited some picturesque creeks, but generally I was disappointed
by what I found. It's an island generally loved by the Germans and our own tame
German friends here had recommended it warmly, but I couldn't quite understand
why.
We stayed in Katrin's hacienda-style house, typical of a
simple indigenous architecture befitting a landscape divided by stone walls and
dotted with olive and almond groves and those splendid cacti that bear
less-than-splendid fruit. She has a well within her enclosed garden, which
allows her to water copiously her impressive array of dwarf citrus trees,
gnarled mature olive trees and a spreading carob under whose black hanging pods
we sat at a big stone table to take most of our meals.
It also allows her to keep her grass unnaturally lush. It
was strange thick knotted grass, like no grass I have ever felt with my hands
or laid on with a book, like the artificial grass that I imagine they must use
for dry ski slopes and other sporting pursuits. Katrin's brother, crippled by
MS and confined to a wheelchair, lives nearby, right opposite Sir Harry
Secombe's old holiday home overlooking the Mediterranean, and his lawn was even
thicker, like a tightly woven carpet, and it all seemed as unreal as a set for Thunderbirds!
Since it hadn't rained on the island to any significant
degree since Easter, the lush private lawns we saw on our walks with the
ball-playing dog to the beach and back seemed worryingly wrong. In fact,
apparently, the island is surprisingly damp. Certainly in winter, when Katrin
annually has to fight off eruptions of mildew. The humid heat, though less than
what we had known here during June and July, probably around the low 30s, was
utterly enervating. At night we slept and sweated underneath a quietly whirring
ceiling fan. It was all we could manage to spend most of our days sitting in
the shade of the carob, reading our books. And what a luxury that continues to
be. Instead of the customary ten minutes at the end of the day before the book
crashes to the floor to remind you to turn off your bedside lamp, I was able to
devour in a few sittings Bill Bryson's Mother
Tongue, his fascinating book about the development and spread of the
English language.
Walking back early one afternoon from a creek where
Katrin had taken us to go swimming (or, in my case, dipping my toes while the
girls and Sacha the dog made for the horizon), the Good Wife of La Poujade
Basse came over all unnecessary. She clung to my arm for support, overcome by
the heat and the brilliance of the sun. And yet, the island's population is doubled,
even trebled, for maybe half the year by legions of tourists who seem to want
to peg out on plastic recliners in the concrete compounds of hotels which offer
the kind of all-in deals that are ruining the local economy. They soak up the
sun till they're red of face and bulging of midriff.
It was a fine, relaxing holiday, but I was glad to get
back to Toulouse and pick up the car. On the way home, however, Debs started
complaining of an excruciating pain in her colon. She went back to work for a
day and then took the unprecedented step of cancelling clients. When friends
from Sheffield came to stay, she arose from her sick bed to greet them with an
exuberant hug – and promptly burst into tears. It turned out, we later learnt,
that she had somehow contracted both pneumonia and an E.coli bacterium.
Our local doctor, a homeopath by trade, was seriously
concerned. He arranged for blood and urine tests and I was despatched to the
local Pharmacie to get what I think
was called a USB jar, something anyway in which to collect a sample for an examen urinaire. She didn't let on
straight away to her solicitous husband and her anxious daughter, but the
readings were off the scale. The equivalent degree of radioactivity would have
disabled a Geiger counter.
Stoically, she refused antibiotics in favour of a Rip van
Winkle's worth of sleep, essential oils, a single homeopathic remedy and
bottles of Vichy water. Within a matter of a few days, she was significantly on
the mend and the test readings were back to a level usually associated with
human life. The panic was over, but only then did I discover that the
mysterious malady was in fact pneumonia, the dread disease that my mother
taught me to fear as a child. Wrap up
warm of you'll catch pneumonia... (And
then you'll die, was the implication.) I guess medicine has moved on apace
since I were a lad.
Thus went the end of another summer. A little more
dramatic and varied than late summers of yore. Malian music, a Balearic
holiday, death-defying disease and visits to and from the homeland. Not to
mention an eclipse of a 'blood-moon', which we were roused from our slumbers to
witness through our bathroom window by Daphne's barking. Normally she's quiet
at night and tucked up tight in her basket, but clearly rare celestial
phenomena derange her blithe canine soul.
And then the mornings and the evenings became colder and
the leaves on the trees began to yellow and we lit the first fire in our France
Turbo. I get the impression these days that I am measuring out my life in
scoops of croquettes for the animals. Time to order another 10 kilo sack. And
will there be time to order another before Christmas, after which we'll be snuggling
into the deep mid-winter? But in a few more sacks' time, the spring will be
with us if we're very fortunate and the two kittens will have grown into
neutered males, content we hope to stick close to the house instead of
wandering off into pastures new where untold dangers await. Life! It's a cycle,
eh?
