June: Very Important Visitor

 

I did myself a mischief again. This time it was pulling ivy off a wall. She's a big girl and I tried to talk her down, but she wasn't having it... LOL, as The Daughter would say. Laugh or lollipop? Arf, arf, as the Viz comic characters might put it. When our neighbour confronted my wife about our ivy across the wall at the clinic in Brive, she was apparently taken aback by The Good Wife's sheer reasonableness. Of course we'll get rid of the ivy, she volunteered. You will? the woman asked, quite taken aback by the lack of resistance. Well yes, I'll ask my husband to come and do it as soon as possible. And of course, I was as happy to oblige as indeed I was when I last pulled ivy off the wall some six or seven years ago. Since then the re-growth has been phenomenal. Ivy had covered the entire wall.

In actual fact, it wasn't so much the act of pulling ivy off our neighbour's wall, more the constant bending down to pick up the pieces and stack them temporarily on the flower beds. Thus, for a good week I was shuffling around painfully like a very old man. That's what you get for trying to be a good citizen.

Talking of whom, our president came to Martel one Thursday morning with his very important and very expensive entourage as part of his fact-finding tour of our neck of the woods. Or was it simply to glad-hand the new mayor of Martel, a dentist by trade, who is I'm told a committed Macronista. Macron in Martel, I ask you! En route for Cressensac to see her accountant for her annual review, Debs noticed all the gendarmes milling around our little town and figured that it was a little excessive for the customary stop-check-and-fine traffic exercise.

I didn't go to line the streets and cheer and wave my mask, or indeed slap our president's face and incur a four-month prison sentence. There was no need. El presidente popped in to see me before the official business of the day. He'd heard of this local-radio DJ, living in a house of straw, who was taking his name in vain. So he dropped by to check me out and make sure that I wasn't a dangerous free-radical.

'Hello, Monsieur Président,' I greeted him.
'Bonjour Prézident Markon,' he retorted with a glint in his eye.

We didn't shake hands and we remained masked, for the sake of political protocol. I ushered him inside while two substantial bodyguards waited outside on the front porch. Daphne barked them a broadside, but they were unmoved, standing stoically on the qui vivre in their dark suits and dark glasses. I offered Monsieur Macron some muesli, but he'd had a breakfast fit for a dignitary earlier in Saint-Cirq Lapopie. But he wasn't averse to another coffee.

'Oo la! You've done your back in,' he observed, as I shuffled over to fetch the kettle.
'Yes, pulling ivy off the wall. Actually, more the constant bending to pick up the pieces.'
'Ah, Average White Band, n'est ce pas?'
'That's right! The white album. I didn't know you liked them.'
'Oh yes,' he smiled. 'My wife and I often dance around the Palais d'Elysée ensemble to the Average White Band or Earth Wind and Fire.'
'That reminds me. Must play 'Let's Groove' on my show sometime. I could dedicate it to you, if you'd grant me the honour.'
There was a sharp intake of presidential breath. 'Not sure. Better not. I think I'd rather you kept our little meeting a secret entre nous. And while on the subject...I don't know that I'm entirely happy about you employing a corruption of my name.'
'Oh, nothing disrespectful,' I assured him. 'Just a little gentle irony. A bit of that celebrated Breeteesh humeur.'
'Ah yes, I know it well. You like your sense of irony. It's not something that we French understand too well.'
'Yes, well, I've lived here for more than 25 years now. It's something I've come to appreciate.'
He chortled in a Gallic way. 'Mon-tee Pytton, typical Breeteesh n'est ce pas?'
'Arguably. But no,' I reiterated, 'Certainly nothing disrespectful – even if I would care to take issue with certain policies of yours.'
He knocked back the last of his coffee and stood up suddenly, as if summoned by an alarm signal. 'Another day, peut être. I must arise and go now and go to the town of Martel. Merci pour le café. I hope your back gets better soon.'

With that, he patted our dog's head and signalled to the pair at the door, who accompanied him to the limousine parked beside my 107 on the drive. They turned with some difficulty on our somewhat restricted turning spot and Daphne and I watched them head up the drive. Give my regards to the dentist! I cried, but I don't think he heard me.

Shame he couldn't stay longer, but I guess the affairs of state are more pressing than a little tête à tête with an impostor. I'd have liked to ask him if he'd seen My Octopus Teacher, which we'd all watched a couple of nights before. One of the most beautiful and astonishing films I've ever seen. A worthy Oscar winner. It's all about the relationship between an octopus and a world-weary, burnt-out South African film maker, who would go scuba-diving  every morning in the cold rough waters somewhere by the Cape of Good Hope. Over the course of a year, he created a bond with a solitary octopus based on mutual fascination and burgeoning trust. The most moving and tender relationship you could ever imagine between a man and what was essentially an aquatic mollusc.

I would dearly love to have an octopus living under our spreading sumac tree rather than the resident brambles. If not an octopus, then a family of hedgehogs or even a toad. But the brambles have it once more, even though at the end of winter I got down on my back – in a sounder state at the time – with the secateurs and cut those hoary old weeds right down to the ground. Begone, brambles! And for a couple of misleading weeks, a battle seemed won. But not the war. Never the war. Cometh the spring, cometh the new shoots. Brambles are like bad neighbours. They never go away and can make your life a misery if you allow them to upset you.

I am not now nor ever have been a gardener. Nor am I much of a political theorist. But it strikes me, as I think about the tenacity and proliferation of ivy and brambles, bindweed and dandelions, all those relentless weeds that constantly threaten to choke the life from the beautiful, transient flowers that my wife plants with customary optimism on our barren soil here, all those weeds are like the lowest politicians throughout the ages. All those ruthless, ambitious, self-interested men (and it's almost always men) who keep on cropping up to overrun any flowering dissidents, reformers and prophets intent on leaving a legacy.

Maybe I'm stretching a point here. Perhaps I'd better just stick to strimming (once my back is back to normal) – taming those flaming weeds for another week or two. Still, it was nice to have a very important visitor, even a stiff one in a formal government-issue suit. I don't get around much any more.