December: Chance Encounters of the Random Kind

I was on my way home for Christmas via Paris when I had one of those rare, magical experiences that made all that followed worthwhile. Well, just about.

With hindsight, it was madness to have gone to the music festival in Rennes, capital of Brittany and a million miles away from the comfort of my own bed. All for the sake of a paltry commission and a deluded ego. The auspices were not good: the press liaison officer informed me before leaving that my train back from Rennes to Paris on the Saturday morning had been cancelled. Hence my ride back – and my chance encounter – on the festival bus. I had a very valid reason for not shifting my arse, but for once I resolved to be optimistic. At my time of life, I should have known better. 

I encountered the striking hordes face to face in Rennes – and it was not a pretty sight. My hotel overlooked the big modern square that they must have constructed with demonstrations in mind. The Bretons, who don't necessarily consider themselves French, have a long tradition of dissent and disruption. On the Thursday, a national day of wrath when public 'servants' came out in force to voice their opposition to the latest attempt to reform the ridiculously complicated – and palpably unfair – retirement system, I could hear their riotous assembly in the square below, pumped up by a soundtrack of thumping electronic music.

Thinking nothing of it, I ventured out in the afternoon to pick up a takeaway from a nearby Lebanese that the Good Wife and I had discovered during our weekend in Rennes for France Magazine a couple of years ago. I found myself caught up in a madding crowd, trying to move against their momentum. Scary. I flattened myself against a wall to edge my way along between the buildings and the human throng. One or two looked at me as if I were completely mad and I growled my displeasure at them under my breath. Forcing my way to the back of the march, I saw for the first time the ranks of gendarmes with shields and full battle dress, blocking access to the Lebanese takeaway. Uh oh, I thought, I could get kettled here. Whereupon, I turned tail and allowed the crowd to carry me along in the opposite direction.

Across the main road and on the way back to the hotel, I watched with disbelief as a group of youths took a hammer to the window of an estate agent. No one seemed to turn a hair and I certainly wasn't about to confront them. Now look here, my good fellows, what on earth do you think this is going to achieve? What indeed? The following day, teams of white-van men were at work, boarding up broken windows everywhere and clearing up the debris of demonstration. No doubt the shopkeepers' insurance companies would pay, but it would mean higher annual premiums. Ironically, the estate agent's window was intact. Unbreakable glass unbroken. So the fighting anarchists had sprayed it with blue paint instead. Surveying the aftermath of humanity at its worst – mindless and multitudinous – only underlined the brilliance of Cole Porter's couplet: Use your mentality/Wake up to reality. What matters pension regulations to many of these people, decades from their retirement, when their world is facing an apocalypse of fire and flood?

I was right about the festival. There was a lot of hanging around and waiting – not helped by getting the 24-hour clock wrong on the second evening and turning up two hours too early at the Parc Expo, a vast tract of pre-fabricated exhibition halls next to the airport, each one big enough to house four or five thousand music fans. Somehow I bamboozled my logical mind into thinking that 21:45 meant a quarter to eight. Senility must be creeping in. I sat around, cold as an abandoned dog, till it was time to stuff some cotton wool in my ears and slope off to one of the three arenas to choose from in order to watch an act I'd pre-selected with the help of YouTube.

 

So, I was glad to be off on the Saturday morning, particularly as my poor wife's cough was getting so bad that she couldn't speak to me on the phone any more. There would be two stops before the festival bus's destination of Charles de Gaulle airport: one at a motorway service station and the other at the Porte de Vincennes, just off the périphérique. On the east side of Paris, whereas I needed to get to the west side for the night. No one knew whether any Metros or buses would be running. My heart was therefore heavy and full of the sorrows of this bedraggled winter as we set off, finally. We actually made a third stop, at Rennes' railway station to pick up a motley crew, whose garb suggested musicians from a far-off country.

On the road, I half-decided to hitch south and avoid the capital, if I could persuade the driver to drop me somewhere strategic. But the service station selected was of no use to me: it was northbound to Paris and before the confluence of the two motorways, one west to Rennes and the other south to Brive and beyond. So I wandered forlornly around the car park in search of a car with a 19 or a 46 number plate, someone heading my way who wouldn't mind helping a stray waif. Nope, all the plates bore the numbers of Paris and its surrounding departments.  

Outside the WCs, I spoke to one of the waifs who had boarded the bus outside the railway station. I asked him whether he'd been at the festival, but he didn't understand French. His English was passable, though, and I discovered that he was with a rap artist by the name of Edgar. Of course! He had put in a guest appearance on the new Nomade Orquestra album I'd recently reviewed, Vox Populi. So they were heading back to São Paulo, which kind of put my own journey in perspective. The musician pointed out their manager, who spoke better English.

He introduced me to a man called André, who indeed looked more like a manager than a raggle-taggle musician. We started talking about music, as one would, and I told him that I thought some of the best music in the world came from Brazil's biggest city. I dropped the name of an album I bought back in 2003: Alta Fidelidade by André Bourgeois and Mano Bap. Electro jazz from São Paulo via Brive la Gaillarde.

'But I'm André Bourgeois.'
'What!? You're André Bourgeois? That's just incredible. I keep that album with my favourites in the bedroom.'
'You really like it?'
'I love it. I always play "I love u" at parties.'
'It was the only album we made. I decided to leave making music to real musicians and manage their careers instead.'
'So you manage Edgar? Nomade Orquestra?'
'Not them, no. A singer called Céu...'
'Oh, I love Céu. Her version of "Concrete Jungle" – fantastic.' 

We wandered back to the bus together, both of us flabbergasted by the coincidence. André sketched his background: a Franco-Swiss who moved to São Paulo about the same time as I moved to France. He had a love/hate relationship with his adopted city, he told me. A vibrant but violent megalopolis, where you can never see the horizon. He and the band lived in a quartier by the sea, perhaps a little like Ipanema but uncelebrated in song. As for Mano Bap, he replied to my query, they'd met every day, seven days a week, for however long it was – a year, I think he told me – to work on their album, and he was now playing bass in a Frank Zappa tribute band. You couldn't make it up... 

Back on the bus, I moved upstairs from my seat down at the driver's level. There was clearly no chance now of jumping out somewhere to try my luck with the thumb. The band members were like hyperactive kids. 'Pancho Trackman' produced some funky sounds on a synthesiser not much bigger than a laptop computer and Edgar improvised words, and everyone laughed and clowned the rest of the way to Paris. They're like this all the time, André told me with a mixture of weary resignation and parental pride. 

I waved to my transient friends when we stopped at the Porte de Vincennes, clutching Edgar's CD as a parting gift. A music journalist who writes for Libération directed me to the Metro station, explaining that Line 1 would be running because the service is driver-less. I got off at the Champs Elysées, then headed for the Seine and speed-walked all the way past the Eiffel Tower as far as the Radio France building. I made it to my friend Sophie's flat just as our mutual friends were leaving for a concert in Montmartre. Their train back south had been cancelled, so they were stuck like me. They had planned to meet friends from London, who had sensibly decided to cancel their trip on account of the mayhem. While reading in my air-bed that evening, the thoughtful people at the SNCF sent a text to tell me that my alternative train home on Sunday had also been cancelled.

Next morning, I heard about the concert and the party afterwards, where they had found themselves sitting next to Jarvis Cocker. So we both had musical-themed stories to tell. Without a Smartphone to my name, I turned to my friends for help before they headed off in the rain for a lift home from the Place d'Italie they'd managed to secure. They booked me a BlaBlaCar for Monday morning at 9.30 from the same roundabout where I got off the festival bus the day before.

Meanwhile back at the ranch... Debs was getting worse. She'd had to cancel her clients for Monday and Wednesday. While clients fairly frequently cancel their appointments, things have to be really bad for the therapist to cancel a client. So the Doomsday scenario in my head became increasingly morbid. If I couldn't get out of this infernal city to administer to my wife, she might... 

Lying awake at 5 o'clock the next morning, with the rain beating down on the Velux window of the bedroom, it all felt like the plot of some sick deity. I was out of the flat by a quarter to six, prepared if necessary to walk all the way to the Porte de Vincennes. Such was the force of the vengeful deity's deluge that I got soaked in the 200 yards to the bus stop on the Avenue Mozart. After 20 minutes or so of wishing and hoping that I wouldn't have to traverse Paris on foot, a bus turned up. Getting off at the Arc de Triomphe, I wandered blindly in the dark in search of the Metro. I must have asked five or six people where it was. Each in turn pointed vaguely to 'just over there'. When at last I found it, my Metro ticket wouldn't work and I got stuck in the barrier. Having the figure of a Giacometti sculpture has its advantages. Somehow, I squeezed through. Waiting for my driver-less train, I realised that I must have used a used ticket. So I stood for the entire journey on the constant qui vivre, ready to duck out at the last second and wave smugly at the ticket inspector as Fernando Rey does to Gene Hackman in The French Connection.

I made a pact with the vengeful deity that, if I got to the penultimate stop without a ticket inspector getting on board, I'd get out and walk to the Porte de Vincennes. I regretted it, because the rain was heavier and the distance further than I'd reckoned on. Still, a bargain is a bargain and, if dishonoured, I would surely die on the motorway south. Despite the extra walk, when I checked out my pick-up on the périphérique, it was not yet 7.30. Two hours before the nominal departure. The traffic below was moving at the approximate pace of a garden snail. 

A nearby café sheltered me for almost two hours of watching people pass by under umbrellas. A TV camera crew popped in periodically for a coffee and some warmth before re-mounting their motorbikes to brave the elements. Inside, a big-screen telly beamed the images they were taking of listless traffic. By the time I ventured out for my lift, both the rain and la circulation had calmed slightly. In fact, once off the périph and heading south, there were few cars on the road – which was just as well, as my chauffeur drove like the clappers through driving rain. I sat up front, simulating relaxation as I chatted to my host, while the other two paying passengers slept in the back: a woman from Gabon and a young Chinese student who had to meet someone at the Asiatic eat-all-you-possibly-can emporium near Carrefour, where I would catch my bus into town and pick up my car.

When I finally rolled down the track to Sleepy Hollow, I found my wife 'under the doctor'. Please could I go back out again to pick up some medication from the pharmacy? Debs never takes medication and she hadn't taken antibiotics since living in France, but was coughing so much she could barely say hello and goodbye. However, the wrathful god had seen fit to deliver me safe and sound to cook her dinner and administer succour. Later, I listened to Alta Fidelidade – just to check that it was as good as I'd thought it was. It was. Even my invalid agreed. I wrote to André Bourgeois to reassure him. 

He wrote back from his urban jungle to say hi and thanks for the feedback, which made him want to make more music in Mano Bap's living room. I wish.

November: Black and Blue

'What did I do to be so black and blue?' asks the existential hero of Ralph Ellison's unique novel of alienation, Invisible Man, referencing an old Louis Armstrong song. I use the word 'unique' advisedly. Ellison never managed another novel; the brilliance of his first must have weighed too heavily on his creative shoulders. 

What did my wife do to be so black and blue, I wonder? She went upstairs to fetch a towel for her shower and stubbed her little toe on a poof. If that sounds a trifle absurd, I should point out that the poof in question has a wooden frame on which she must have caught her toe. We bought it off our friends Keith and Miranda when they sold up and moved back to Ireland. It's big enough to accommodate both pairs of feet when we curl up on the sofa to watch a film. 

She made so much noise that I thought she dideth protest too much. Six days after the event, however, her left foot is badly swollen and the colour of something you might dredge out of a rock pool. The upshot is that she's walking with the aid of a crutch borrowed from friends. I drove her to work this morning and am planning to act as the company chauffeur for the next couple of weeks. Anything to keep her at the coal face, bringing in just enough dosh to keep us living in the style to which...

Now there's a thorny issue. When it comes to making money, we're a couple of air-heads. Whether or not it's our fairly feckless upbringing, but we both recognise a complete lack of acumen when it comes to making more money than we absolutely need. Perhaps it's partly to do with living in France, where wealth is generally discouraged socially and hampered politically. Both of us have the skills and experience to make more, but – faced with the prospect – we either lose it or give it away, or both. Result: an element of tension come the end of each month. Will we, won't we make it without going into the red? Thus far, we've managed it, but the ageing process brings a diminution of our powers and our value in the market.

Things have come to a head this month. My dear newly disabled wife has been grooming a successor for some time. She tries to pass new clients her way in preparation for a day when she can take her restored foot off the gas and prop it up on the poof a little more than at present. The trouble is that her reputation goes before her and, understandably I suppose, new clients want to see her rather than her colleague. For all the mentoring she provides (probably gratis), it doesn't remedy the situation. So she in turn consulted a mentor. An American one. Given Americans' propensity for making money, the advice was simple: put your own prices up. If people want to pay less, they can opt for the less experienced, less expensive colleague.

This advice has put Debs in a whirl. Can she simply put her prices up again after raising them six years ago (and ten years before that)? Is she worthy? Will she price herself out of the market? What if no one comes to see her? I wish I could advise her. I haven't put my own prices up since I started paying my income tax in France, over a decade ago. What's more, being a writer, I've seen my fee as a journalist slashed over time due to the impact of the internet. Where once I got £25 for a 200-word music review – a tricky, time-consuming business – I now receive £15. Squeezed margins, an undervalued profession, vicious circle, the way of the world and all that.

If I put up my prices, no journal would have me. Writing e-learning is more competitively remunerated, but I choose to work for one employer only now: a lovely ethical man, who pays my invoices on time without so much as a how-many-hours-did-that-take-you?, I have no wish to interfere with his bottom-line. However... I get to eat some fine cheese once a month for my ongoing column with France Magazine, I get to keep the CDs that I review for Songlines, and there is the occasional jaunt. 

Early next month, for example, I shall be travelling to Rennes to cover the TransMusicales festival: a kind of nursery for upcoming global artists. The likes of Björk, Portishead and Amadou & Mariam have used it over the years as a stepping stone to a bigger stage. With accommodation and travel paid, plus customary pittance for the final product, it bolsters my self-belief. So I've said affirmative of course, but the whole of France will be going on strike on the 5^th, the day after I travel and I don't know whether there's any prospect of getting home. Besides, at my age, the thought of all that hanging around waiting for bands to perform has rather lost its glamour. The one band I really want to see – the Minyo Crusaders from Japan, a huge outfit that plays traditional Japanese music with salsa instrumentation – won't be on stage till 5.30 in the morning. I did that once in Den Haag when I was a lot younger, for heroes of jazz rather than unknowns, back in 1986 or whenever it was, and it nearly killed me.

Anyway, my wife eventually decided that she would follow the American woman's advice. She tried it out the other day at the end of a Skype session with a client. Asked what her fee was, Debs quoted the new fee. No humming and hahing, no justifications, just a bare-faced statement of fact. The client took the hit without a murmur. I guess it's the phenomenon of high-end retail: a customer seeking quality will sniff at anything too cheap. The moral being: if you don't value yourself, who else will?   

So the Good Wife is raising her prices: for one-to-one sessions and for training courses. After all, women in particular – and I'm sure I don't risk the wrath of #MeToo for suggesting such a thing – will think nothing of paying good money to sort their hair out. Isn't it reasonable to expect to pay an equivalent to someone who helps them sort their lives out? We shall see. Will her protégé – her amanuensis, as the peerless W.C. Fields might have described her – now have all the clients and the all the work that she can cope with? Will my wife have priced herself out of the market? Will we be able to pay the mortgage right up until April, '21, when the place becomes ours? 

I don't know, but I'm happy to ferry valuable, limping cargo from here to Brive and back again for as long as it takes for a broken digit to mend to find out the answers. The role of part-time chauffeur will help to build my portfolio of domestic duties and justify my limbo-like existence. What did I do to be so slack and askew?

Barry 'n' Bergman

A riveting documentary on Ingmar Bergman the other evening taught us that his name is pronounced Beer-man by his fellow Swedes. It was shown as part of a double bill with The Seventh Seal, which I haven't seen for decades. Perhaps not since the Exeter University film club, where I'd go to late-night noisy projections of classics with my friend Jacqui, who'd promptly fall asleep soon after the lights were dimmed. I'm looking forward to seeing the film again; this time on a sofa with The Good Wife (a potential film title there that Beer-man overlooked), who'll probably fall asleep after 20 minutes or so. After 25 minutes, I'll probably give up nudging her and carry on regardless.

In fact, we both drifted off momentarily during the documentary, but then Beer-man does that to you. His generally dark, despairing and strangely hypnotic films are not necessarily enjoyable, but always compelling. Rather like the man himself, it would seem, whose films are essentially about himself. Learning this made me feel a little better about writing essentially about my own life. Stick to what you know, they say – and living as I do in splendid isolation, who or what else do I really, really know?

Not that I would compare myself in any shape or form to Beer-man – thank the Norse gods. The man was driven and utterly ruthless. He neglected his wives and his children in pursuit of his art. He suffered constantly with stomach ulcers and such like and was never what you would describe as happy or content. And yet one of his wives, the actress Liv Ullman, still spoke of him through her tears with the utmost fondness. The paradox, I suppose, of great artists: you can't live with 'em, but you can't live without 'em. 

The gloomy one's output was certainly prodigious. In 1957 alone, we learnt, he made two unalloyed masterpieces, The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, and produced four stage plays. How is that humanly possible? No wonder he had ulcers. He – and some of those around him, it seems – paid quite a price for his immortality.

I'm rather glad that my father, John Barry Sampson, bears no resemblance to Beer-man. He might behave at times with old-age hauteur, but at least he remembers the names of his progeny. Remarkably compos mentis for one so ancient, he can still dredge up details of films and big-band jazz. His longevity is totally unexpected. Given his long-term heart condition, the only reason he got to be 92 is surely his almost Dickensian indolence. He is the very model of the world's laziest man. Dickens would have depicted him sitting in an armchair by a fire, sporting a smoking jacket and one of those brimless hats worn by the likes of Sean O'Casey. The Ageing P incarnate, receiving a succession of solicitous offspring.

He once met the Duke of Edinburgh at a trade show (strangely enough in Sweden, if I remember correctly), but otherwise has never achieved anything of note – nor ever particularly wanted to. He is happy to sit in an armchair garlanded by the Arsenal scarf I bought him, listening to music through the Bose sound bar his solicitous offspring bought him for his 90^th birthday. And he is quite happy for other people to do for him what he can't be bothered to do for himself. Such solipsistic laziness can be highly exasperating. Geniality, however, 't'is generally his middle name. When he finally decides to hang up his walking stick for good, he will be remembered affectionately by friends and family alike.

Recently he has adopted the strap line of an old music hall hero of his, Billy Bennett: Almost a gentleman. A few weeks ago, my brother and I took our wannabee gentleman patriarch to the beautiful town of Great Malvern for a visit to see his old school. Although we had to endure the overgrown child's occasional tantrum – when for example he decided that he didn't like the curry he ordered in an Indian restaurant because it had coconut in it and he doesn't like coconut even though the menu, which he probably couldn't be bothered to read properly, stated clearly that a key component of the curry was coconut – most of the time his enthusiasm and evident joy was delightful. 

Under the terms of the agreement, we hired a car comfortable enough to transport his aching bones for 100 miles or however far it was, while he footed the bill for the posh hotel. The focus – and the highlight – of the visit was the guided tour of his old school on a gloomy Sunday afternoon. The Pater and I had set up the visit by e-mail (his draft, my spelling corrections) and we waited in the lee of the main Gothic building for the arrival of our guide, who had driven up from an Old Boys' football match somewhere in Surrey to keep his appointment. We had all pictured a stiff, slender and very sober individual, but were delighted to find a jolly, rotund man with a sense of humour that stimulated the kind of banter on which we Sampson males thrive.  

With a backdrop of the Malvern Hills, whose beauty inspired Elgar (for one), the buildings and the landscaped playing fields occupy around 250 acres. Malvern was and is a well-heeled spa town, and wealthy businessmen sponsored the building of the school in the 19^th century. In my dad's time, it was a boys-only boarding school; these days they've had the good sense to admit girls and day pupils, whose well-heeled parents can find the requisite 40 grand or so in annual fees. The cricket pitch would grace the County Championship and the general facilities are second to none. This kind of education should be available for all, I observed. Yes, but the money that would entail, our host replied. Well, we seem to find it for missiles, I countered. And so education continues to be the poor relation to warfare.

My father was actually at Malvern for just over a year. My grandparents sent him there at great personal expense so he would be far from London's theatre of war. But the school was requisitioned by Telecommunications and Radar and my dad was forced to slum it at Harrow – right back in the thick of things. While at Malvern, he boarded in no.4 House. It's now occupied by girls, whose house mistress is an attractive jolly-hockey-sticks type only too pleased to show my still flirtatious father around. How strange it must have been for him to see the place after almost 80 years: decidedly more comfortable and relaxed than it was in his Spartan days. Their common room was equipped then with a table and chairs; now there are carpets, sofas, cushions and a television. There is, a school video suggests, a clear link between the happy pupil and a pupil who's achieving.

By this stage, the old man was getting breathless from his unaccustomed exertions. We sat him down on a bench under a tree with a view over the cricket pitch, where once he had kept wicket with little talent and moderate enthusiasm. Behind him was the heraldic statue at the foot of the stone steps leading up to the main Gothic building. In my dad's day, only prefects had the right to take this route. In his day, too, only an amateur 'gentleman' player had the right to captain the England cricket team. Our 'great British nation' was founded on such arrant absurdities.

Next day, we took our charge back home to Romsey the quick way via a coffee stop near Marlborough at a roadside cafe that welcomes bikers, truckers and, it seems, Old Malvernians. Tired out by his exertions, he took himself off to bed for the afternoon. The Brother headed back to Guildford with the hire car, while I did a final trawl of Romsey's charity shops. 

Our weekend away underlined just what a fortunate and privileged life our father has led. At least he has the good grace to acknowledge that he has been dealt a much better hand of cards than most. He's a lucky man, but I consider myself lucky to be able still to exchange on Skype views and news about the Arsenal. Even if he was never able to give me a leg-up into the wonderful world of film, he taught me to be polite and punctual, and to love music and animals. I'm eternally grateful for that.