December: Suits You, Sir

For the last three weeks, I've been on my lonesome ownsome. If nothing else, it gives me the chance to finish the balsamic dressing I picked up erroneously in Lidl during the last Italian week. I wasn't wearing my glasses, so I hadn't noticed that the concoction was spiced with some kind of raspberry essence. The Good Wife, she of the hyper-sensitive nose that befits an aromatherapist, spotted it at once. Neither she nor The Daughter would let it anywhere near their delicate palates, but I don't mind it if diluted with virgin olive oil. So I feel that I'm using my time alone productively.

To continue the saga of the fallen mother-in-law, she has now been transferred to a cottage hospital in Keswick, so at least the absent women folks are allowed to visit her – every other day – but no one knows when she can return home. I'm far from confident that my kin can get back in time for Christmas.

Being a man on his own, inevitably one receives invitations from kind friends to come and stay or come and dine. Women, and particularly women of an older generation, seem to think that within days I'll be living like some hapless Dickensian character in domestic chaos with only bread and water for sustenance. My mother-in-law enquires frequently about my well-being, even conveying her thanks for allowing 'the girls' to go. I do try to be reasonable.

In truth, I'm much more comfortable with 'pink jobs' than 'blue jobs'. The house may fall down around me and my desk is a mess, but I make the bed, cook regular nourishing meals, do the washing up promptly and keep on top of the laundry. Nevertheless, I've already dined with old friends and spent a weekend away near Bergerac with newer friends, being shown around a part of the Dordogne valley that was hitherto fairly unknown to me.

Of course, I miss my co-habitants a lot, but am quite content on my own. I look upon periodic terms of solitude as a necessary part of life's rich tapestry. And anyway, how can one be truly alone when a dog and two cats depend on you for their survival? Being alone gives you a chance to 'get on' and 'catch up': two of the forces that drive me to keep my head down and stay on the treadmill of life. More importantly, perhaps, you can please yourself: follow your own rhythms and pursue your own activities without reference to anyone else.

So, the alarm goes off and I rise promptly at six ten – those ten extra minutes being a life-saver – in order to feed and water the animals, stoke the fire, soak my morning coffee in the way that my friend Winston taught me and make my hot lemon to take back to bed with Daphne. I catch up with some promos on my MP3 player while reading and/or writing my journal. Then I get up, perform my perfunctory ablutions and either have my breakfast or take the dog out for a walk or cycle ride, depending on the state of the weather. Once installed at my desk, I check the sports news and work on whatever project, musical or literary, is uppermost on my to-do list. The afternoons are generally given to dog-walking, yoga and cooking. I tend to make meals big enough for three days, so I spend less time in the kitchen and don't have to worry about spicing life with variety. I eat earlier than I do otherwise because it seems to agree more with the rigours of my digestion.

Evenings, I watch something live or recorded on the box. I've been making my way through Ken Burns' masterful 12-part history of jazz on disc for the second time, and I've watched all but one of the winter walks: half an hour of meditative commentary and stunning scenery. I retire to my bed early to read and catch up with promos once more on my MP3 player. Daphne joins me for an hour or so – until the moment when I take my glasses off. This is her cue to jump off and head for her basket. I tuck her in, close the shutter over the front door, turn the light off, wish the residents a happy and peaceful night and return to my bed and my appointment with sweet, restorative Lethe.  

So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut might say. Solitude has its pros and cons. On one hand, I can listen to music all around the clock, including some of those more 'difficult' items by the likes of Sun Ra's Arkestra, which might otherwise induce a look or a comment (even if very rare, it has to be said, as my co-habitants are remarkably tolerant creatures, understanding that I'm easier to live with if not deprived of my balm for the soul).

On the other hand, I have too much time and opportunity to stare into the heart of darkness at the core of human existence. Joseph Conrad understood that we need 'rivets' – the kind of mindless tasks that offer an alternative to immersing oneself in this all-consuming darkness. Too much reading and contemplation makes Mark a worried boy. Increasingly, I am smelling something rotten in the state of Denmark. Looking out at the collective madness that has gripped this world, I see a perfect storm of conditions that gave rise to Nazi Germany: collective fear fuelled by media frenzy; removal of dissenting voices; measures and legislation designed to curtail hard-won civil liberties; rising inflation; the threat of financial collapse.

I received an interesting e-mail linked to the alternative health review that we subscribe to. It outlined the eight criteria to identify psychological torture at the time of the Korean War. At the risk of censure, I'll use the masculine pronoun etc. for the sake of brevity. Isolation: to deprive the victim of social support to render him dependent on authority; censure or eliminate any information contrary to that provided by authority, and force introspection; reduce any capacity for mental or physical resistance; cultivate anxiety, stress and hopelessness by flooding the victim with worrying information, and threaten even more isolation if he contemplates resistance; offer the occasional reward or incentive in return for conformity and submission; 'prove' the futility of resistance in the face of a more powerful authority; debase the victim to a level of animal survival by withholding all non-essential pleasures; reinforce submission as a habit with useless and illogical directives. Ring any bells?

I've said enough. Any more and some Google-sponsored algorithm will scan these words, spot a dissenter and take down this blog and re-write my Wikipedia page (if I only had one). Anyway, I'd better get back to hammering rivets into the rusting hull. Time to make another vat of butternut squash soup. I'll sit at the supper table with a nice steaming bowlful, while humming along to Duke Ellington's 'In My Solitude'. Suits me, for the moment. Just so long as the moment's not too long.

 

Longevity Has Its Place

 

The other morning, there was a 'crazy baldhead' inside our cave. Actually, he wasn't at all crazy; he was a plumber, from Agen, the prefecture of the Lot et Garonne, a good two and a half hours' drive from here. It's just that I love that phrase that Bob Marley sung on one of the Wailers' best-loved songs. I forget which one. But he did have a bald head, this plumber from Agen. He drove all that way to service our water softener. After 17 years, I thought it was high time and, ever on the look-out for something that might go wrong in a life that's worryingly comfortable, I had convinced myself that it wasn't working as efficiently as it should. If, indeed, it was working at all. How does one really know, except for that gentle, loving touch of softened water on skin?

I asked him if he wouldn't mind if I hung around while he serviced the machine, because I might learn something useful in the process. He said he wouldn't mind at all. So I hovered in the background, making idle conversation to strike up some kind of rapport. It wasn't difficult. He came from up north, from Dunkirk, just about the furthest north you can go in France without stepping into Belgium. In fact, his somewhat unpronounceable name, Thuyssen, has a Belgian ring to it. They call the folk from up north les ch'tis; I can't tell you why, because I haven't seen the film, but it's a different country to what it is down south and they seem to have as much in common with their neighbours across the Channel as they do with the people of France Profonde. So we got on well and since my brother is a plumber, there's always a kind of vicarious affinity with these men in the trade – with the notable exception of the git who fitted out our water system when the house was built, may he decompose swiftly in some hellish bathroom.

Anyway... he told me how he happened to end up in Agen, famous for its magnificent aqueduct, its prunes and very little else. Wishing as a young man to get out of Dunkirk, as young men have done since 1940, he and his partner of the time found what looked on paper like a dream placement in the Corrèze, our own first port of call before moving to the Lot. His partner of the time found a nursing post in an old people's home and when he spoke to the mayor of the commune about the possibility of work as a plumber, the mayor virtually begged him to come. He would have more local clients than he could shake a pipe-bender at, the mayor would find him official communal work and the commune would provide them both with a house free of charge until they found a house of their own. It was almost too good to be true.

Over a Sunday lunch with his extended family, he revealed his good fortune and announced his imminent departure. That was great, someone said. But did he know anything about the Corrèze? No, in fact he didn't. Neither he nor his partner had given it much thought, thinking it was just some department down south. When they did their research, they discovered what it would mean to live as two young people in the Corrèze, the under-populated middle of nowhere. Very beautiful, of course, but the village in question was almost an hour's drive from the shops and the only night life to speak of would be to stand outside their borrowed house listening to the silence while marvelling at their unpolluted view of the Milky Way. Which is wonderful in its way, but wouldn't suit the young at heart.

So, reluctantly, they turned down the opportunity of a move to the pays vert, the green country. He ended up in Agen, a somewhat bigger place not too far from either Bordeaux or Toulouse. He and another partner, with whom he settled down and had a family, have now reached the stage of their lives where they're happy to live just outside the prune capital of France and enjoy the delights of the countryside. I knew what he was talking about. I've reached a stage of my life where all I really want to do is listen to – and write about – music. And watch films. And read books. And walk the dog. And cook a few meals with fresh vegetables from Giselle's barn. And enjoy the view of a morning, when the mist swaddles the valley below like a plumped-up duvet.

There'll be plenty of time for all that this month. The girls have taken the tests and driven all the way to Calais and thence to the damp north-west of England, there to undergo quarantine in a Cumbrian farmhouse, take more tests and try to sort out my recalcitrant mother-in-law. I would have gone with my wife of 30-odd years, but she had one of her presentiments and I know her well enough to heed her presentiments. As it transpired, her mother had another fall while they were on their way, a particularly bad one this time. She has been taken to Carlisle hospital for an MRI scan and a prognosis, which means that the Good Wife's presence there is yet more essential. Despite my own worries about the drive north up the traffic-choked M20, M25, M11 and A1, they had a trouble-free trip. What's more, the sun shone and didn't stop shining till they got to the A66 at Scotch Corner, whereupon it started raining as they drove across the wild moors. They don't call Cumbria the wettest part of England for nothing. Incidentally, they stopped at a roadside farm shop to buy a cabbage. I forgot to ask them how they cooked their cabbage and whether they enjoyed it. I believe there was an order from Sainsbury's waiting at the rented farmhouse, so they had something to accompany their cabbage.

As for the water softener, the 'crazy baldhead' was quite amazed by its longevity – particularly since he'd never seen such a dirty one in all his born days. He said that if it had been housed in our kitchen and serviced regularly, it would have done exceptionally well to have lasted 17 years. But lodged in a dirty old cellar without any attention other than a regular dose of salt... well, it defied all logic. Had it really been 17 years since the Kinetico representative called to hand us over our unit and pose for the Grand Designs publicity opportunity, which was of course cut from the final programme? Yes, 17 years during which the house has settled and weathered. Time next to renew the linseed-oil paintwork.

The man from Agen took our unit to bits, washed all the parts and put it all back. While we waited for it to re-fill, I made us a cup of coffee and sheepishly offered him a chocolate-coated rice cracker as an accompaniment. I explained that he might find the experience resembled eating flavoured polystyrene, but he gamely took one and pronounced it not bad. Then came the crunch: the test of the water to deduce whether or not the unit was still functioning properly. I waited with baited breath as he dropped some drops into the plastic phial of softened tap water. Well, doctor? Yes, not bad. The reading suggested that it was still working acceptably. Not quite as efficiently as it might have done 17 years ago, but all things considered...

I sent him off on his merry way with directions to his next port of call and a promise that when our machine is finally consigned to that great landfill in the sky, he will be the man I contact to supply and fit a new one. The latest models are, he informed me proudly, even more efficient after 17 years of research and development. So now we have a water softener that looks positively pristine, even if it's on its last legs. That's one less thing to worry about. Now I can concentrate on my poor beleaguered wife and her poor broken-down mother.

October: Thank You Letter

Dear Uncle Eric and Auntie Pauline,

Thank you very much for the cheque you sent for £5. It was very kind of you. I shall probably go crate-digging with the money, looking for records or CDs. Not that I need any more, but you know how addictions are.

How are you? I am very well, thank you. I had a very nice birthday, even if the weather was pish. Sorry, maybe I shouldn't say that word. It's Northern Irish. But it was miserable, even though the sun has been mainly shining ever since. How is it there? All three of us took Daphne out for a walk on my birthday, even though it was raining. We had to give our shaggy dog a good towelling when we got back home. It was so cold that I had to light a fire. It was the first of the season and it meant having to clean the chimney. I didn't do it from above, though, because the rain makes the roof very slippery and I might have fallen to my death. It was worth the effort, because the house was nice and cosy and everyone appreciates a roaring fire.

This birthday I got some nice presents (yours included, thank you again). Here is a picture of the present Deborah has commissioned from a friend of my sister Jo's. Her name is Vickie Wells and she's a sculptress (although I should say sculptor because we don't distinguish between the sexes any more, ha ha), and she specialises in gargoyles. This is a gargoyle of a fur-less cat and he or she will probably live on the front porch when we get him or her – to ward off evil spirits. I think you'll agree that no bad people will want to come anywhere near the house faced with such a fiendish cat!! Anyway, I am very much looking forward to taking delivery of the sprite. Eventually. I will have to think up an appropriate name for him or her. Maybe Cliff or Rebecca or something like that. Or something a bit more grandiose, like Orson or Vita.

My daughter gave me a set of four special glasses for drinking coffee out of. Apparently, the French drink their espressos out of glasses. I didn't know that, did you? I've always drunk mine out of something made with china. The trouble is, I always add a cloud of milk, so it's not a real espresso. I'm using goat's milk now, because it doesn't separate like soya milk and I've discovered that you can buy half bottles in Intermarché, so there's no risk of the goat's milk going off if kept in the fridge. Not that Otis minds. He's so crazy about the goat's milk that he'll drink it even if it's on the turn. I give him a little bit in a ramekin on top of the washing machine in the pantry, so his brother doesn't hear what's going on, because Mingus is far too fat as it is. 

My daughter also gave me a little packet of my favourite chocolates from Eric Lamy, which is by common consent the best chocolatier in Brive. It's quite incredible how many chocolatiers there are in Brive. Almost as many as there are hairdressers!! They were very nice, but now they are history – even though I tried hard to be reasonable. My daughter also baked me a special cake in the afternoon. A chocolate cake! The recipe was Nigella Lawson's, so if you're familiar with the celebrity baker, you can imagine how rich it was. That too is history now. My friend Dan came over on Saturday morning to play records with me and he had the last piece with a cup of coffee. He agreed that it was delicious. It was incredibly nice, but now I've got a mouth full of ulcers. Too many sweet, rich things do that to me. It's very painful and it has been my cross to bear ever since I was a little boy. Deborah thinks that something very significant must have happened to me at an early age, but I can't remember what. Maybe it was the time I broke a window, playing cricket in my bedroom. My mother was not best pleased!!!

This birthday, I also got two bottles of champagne: one from my mother-in-law and the other from our tenants in the flat above the clinic in Brive. It was very nice of them. They've moved on to somewhere near Bergerac, which is a great shame because they were the best tenants we've ever had and no trouble whatsoever. But they've become good friends, so we shall see them again because they want to settle somewhere in Nouvelle Aquitaine. We only drank one bottle of champagne between us – as aperitifs before a very nice fish pie that my dear wife cooked for us as a special treat. I only had two glasses of champagne, but I was quite squiffy. I don't have a very big capacity for alcohol, which is probably just as well. What's yours like? Mind you, my dad still has a stiff gin every day at G-Time, which is 5 o'clock your time. It doesn't seem to have done him any harm. Nor did it do his father any harm. He had two stiff gins every day and he lived till he was 97. It was either the gin or the two or three prunes he had most days with his breakfast.

After dinner, we listened to music and danced a bit or watched a film before bed. I can't honestly remember. Maybe it was the champagne. Or maybe it's because I'm losing my marbles, ha ha. I hope you haven't lost yours yet. I find that with every birthday that passes, my short-term memory gets worse. What was I saying? It does worry me sometimes, though. You don't know whether you're coming or going. Now where did I put my glasses?

What else did I get? Oh yes, my dad gave me a cheque to spend or save or both. I bought a drawing on card by an artist called TirzahMileham called 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun'. Maybe you know the song by Cyndi Lauper, or maybe not because I believe you like classical music mainly. It was part of an 'Art to Roam' initiative by the International Fund for Animal Welfare in conjunction with an Australian auction house. The art works on offer were all by artists with social or health issues and half the money goes to the artist and the other to support the IFAW's work in helping to save African elephants. I really like it and can't wait to frame it and put it on a wall here, but the artist lives in England and it's complicated to send anything to France these days because of Brexit, so I'll probably get her to send it to me c/o my dad. He's already looking after my Britains Limited cowboys and Indians. (Except I shouldn't really say that word now.) One day I'll be able to travel back to England and relieve him of my stuff. Bloody COVID. Bloody Brexit. Sorry, I shouldn't use that word. Better than the F word, though!!! Did you vote for Brexit? You probably did because you must be as old as the hills now and everyone old voted for Brexit – apart from my dad and my mother-in-law, too, actually.

Never mind. It didn't stop me from enjoying my birthday. Thank you again for the cheque. It was very kind of you. I hope you stay well and survive the coming winter.

Love, Mark xx

 

September: Tomorrow is Not Guaranteed

 

Once you get to 'a certain age', you start to look back on your time on this earth and think about 'life's great lessons'. A major one, I find, is that you can never rest on your laurels. Just when you think that things are ticking along nicely, along comes something or someone to drop you right in the thick of it. Things have been ticking along quite nicely, thank you: it has been a summer made glorious by an occasional sun that hasn't been too hot, and watered frequently by rain reminiscent of all those wet summers back home. Apart from an irritating ticklish cough, which I put down to an airborne allergy rather than emphysema on better days, I haven't been too troubled by thoughts of premature death. But then suddenly... I found myself the potential hero, or rather protagonist, of a Kafkaesque novel.

I was just about to shut down the computer to watch the cricket highlights and took a last look at the e-mails in one of the three accounts that overwhelm me. Just in case there was anything urgent to attend to before the evening's relaxation. I noticed something that I would normally ignore as a scam. It appeared to come from someone who worked in the office for the protection of minors. The return address looked plausible, there were no dodgy links to click on and there was a pdf attachment that I could scan before opening. The body of the message, in French of course and therefore slightly impenetrable, seemed to suggest that I had been found guilty of some kind of child pornography. What the...?!? My weary heart skipped several beats.

So I took a look at the pdf, as I still had a couple of minutes before the cricket. It was in French and couched in official language and therefore yet more impenetrable, but it appeared to come from the head of an office linked to Interpol. It had what looked like a genuine watermark, and it outlined my transgression: either I had downloaded images of child pornography or I'd been engaged in online conversations with impressionable minors or some such heinous act. Now of course I knew that there had to be some mistake, that someone somehow must have stolen my e-mail address and used it in the course of these vile goings-on, but I'd read too many novels and seen too many films of the type where the protagonist suddenly finds himself accused of something he hasn't done and must somehow prove his innocence to overturn a guilty verdict. It's never easy.

Feeling too discombobulated to fully enjoy the rare pleasure of watching cricket on the telly, I decided to record them for my later delectation when my head was a little clearer, and I joined the girls for a crepuscular walk with our dog. Just to the communal bins and back. It was a glorious evening, calm and free, a holy time quiet as a nun (to paraphrase old Bill Wordsworth's words) and the bats were flitting about just above our heads. My head was full of the accusation. How was I going to approach this? Apparently I had 48 hours in which to state my case. My daughter wondered why I was quieter than usual. I smiled at her bravely and started composing an e-mail response. I was an Anglo-Français old enough to know better, I lived a good and reasonably useful life with the woman to whom I'd been married for over 30 years, I was the father of one female adult child and the whole idea of child pornography was abhorrent to my nature. So shurely shome mishtake. 'May I assure you, sir or madam, of the sincerity of my distinguished greetings'... blah blah blah. Well, it might not constitute the kind of jury-swaying address delivered by someone of the gravitas of, say, Jason Robards jr. or Charles Laughton, but it would do for a start.

Notwithstanding this sudden tectonic ontological shift, I slept well that night because I nearly always sleep well, and I was convinced of my innocence. I had no reason to feel guilty. Did I? No, surely not. I hadn't yet mislaid my marbles. Nevertheless, I awoke next morning with trouble on my mind. I went to the market in Martel, wondering what would happen to me if I didn't reply within 48 hours. After all, I really should do a little research into these supposed prosecutors before I risked any personal domestic information falling into the wrong hands.

So, once I got back with our vegetables and cheese from the cheese man and assorted groceries for the week ahead from Intermarché, I turned on the computer and did some rudimentary research on the government site indicated in the correspondence. Each time I typed in the name of the various officers involved, all kinds of stuff came up, but mainly apparently triggered by the individual's first name. That I didn't find anything about any one of them didn't necessarily reassure me, as their names would surely not be in the public domain given the sensitivity of the subject matter and the potential danger of reprisals.

Further research revealed a telephone number available to the public – but would there be anyone there on a Saturday? If I waited till Monday, my 48 hours would be up and then what...? Would they send a car for me? Would they come in plain clothes or some kind of uniform? What would I say to my wife and child as I was led away in handcuffs? How would I reassure our barking dog that it was all right, that daddy would be back soon? And I would, wouldn't I? As soon as they interrogated me in whichever office they were taking me to, and as soon as they realised that I was essentially a good, responsible citizen even if I was against enforced vaccination and I'd built a structure to capture rainwater without declaring it to the authorities. Yes, they'd soon know that it was all just shome sherious mishtake.

Then, I stumbled upon some French newspaper article thrown up by a 'search with substance' on the Lilo search engine. It appears that the switchboard of this mysterious government office has been jammed by the wrongly accused. I read that if I'd replied to the e-mail I received, I would have received a follow-up plea-bargain proposal: if I paid something like €18,000 euros, then charges would be dropped and they'd forget all about it. Now, you'd really have to have something bad on your conscience to agree to that kind of deal. 

With my private drama now concluded, I told the Good Wife what had been troubling me for the last 36 hours or so. 'Oh that!' she said. 'I got one of those. I deleted it straight away.' You live and you learn. I should add it to my list of life's enduring lessons. Delete all dodgy e-mails as scams. So... I could  get back to deleting the hundreds and thousands clogging up my in-boxes. I can laugh about such idiocy now, but of course here in the privileged West, such potential miscarriages of justice happen only rarely. Which is why I'm a fully paid-up member of Amnesty International. People are languishing in jails the world over, guilty until proven innocent, but with no opportunity even to prove their innocence. Perhaps that's my number one lesson of life, my Top of the Pops: tomorrow is not guaranteed, so' just be thankful for what you got.' Others aren't quite so lucky.