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
