December: A Matter of Nice or Not

At my primary school in Belfast, Mrs. Kerr A – to distinguish her from Miss Kerr B, who used to cycle to and from Downey House on an old sit-up-and-beg bicycle, often done up in a plastic headscarf for protection – taught us that the word ‘nice’ was anodyne and meaningless; there were so many more descriptive alternatives in the lexicon. She had a good point, although I would contend now that there are times when ‘nice’ fits the bill very nicely.

For example, on Eurostar during the return leg of our recent trip to London and Romsey, Hants., the French chef du bord addressed us as ‘dear passengers’. I thought that was very nice. Quite charming. I also had a very nice chat with the woman serving coffee. We conversed in French, so the subject matter wasn’t profound, but I conveyed our two coffees to Voiture 12 feeling warm about my fellow human beings – rare for a misanthropist.

It’s also very nice to realise that I have ‘followers’. It’s a lonely business being a writer, so it’s reassuring that some people out there actually read what you write. My friend David of nearby Nazareth, the Nazarene, is one. Although I haven’t yet worked out how to contact my legion of followers, he turned up one day at our front door with his dog Timmy and joined us for a walk around the locality. Since then, I’ve followed his bulletins about the state of exotic cakes in Lidl and what’s on offer in Noz, a kind of end-of-pallet shop that never ceases to surprise the casual shopper. It was once my source of inexpensive coconut milk, but things come and things go.

In recent weeks, the Nazarene has kept me up to date about the state of the road between here and Brive la Gaillarde. It was closed for almost two months for the usual winter repairs, but it opened again just before our recent departure for London. Driving through Nazareth en route for the station at a ridiculously early hour, I aimed a thumbs-up at my friend’s house: a kind of vehicular equivalent of an emoji, I guess. A good job we left so much time to find somewhere to park, because we couldn’t. Not a space to be found. On finding the station car park full, panic really set in. I drove around like a headless chauffeur, performing mad three-point turns until the reserve car park on the other side of the tracks offered us an 11^th-hour reprise. Unable to figure out the machine in the dark, the Good Wife noticed an open exit barrier, so I drove in the wrong way and parked (badly), and we high-tailed it with our bags for the 5.38am train to Paris Austerlitz.

All the way to London, I was beset by visions of our badly parked, ticketless car being towed away to the local gendarmerie. How would we liberate it on our return? How much would the fine be? What if the gendarmes had shut up shop for the day? Such concerns must have registered on my face when we met up with our daughter at a pub in Camden Town prior to a prearranged meal with friends at Daphne, a Greek restaurant chosen as much in honour of our beloved dog as for the 97% excellent reviews on Trip Advisor. Was I all right? Yes, I was fine. I promised to allay my anxiety for the evening.

We were a party of eight, gathered together to celebrate my transformation into an Old Man: the two of us, four of our oldest and dearests, plus daughter and guest. Gratifyingly a newish follower of my blog, Tilley the Kid brought shame and scandal on her old man by revealing how I had failed in my October piece to observe that the decade beginning in 1994 marked the onset of fatherhood. Like Mrs. Kerr A, God rest her pedagogic soul, she had a good point. How had I overlooked that a mere month after my 40^th birthday I was inducted into the hardest job in life: parenthood?

Daphne is a genuine Greek restaurant, with food as authentic as the attentive waiter’s accent. I gave up trying to understand the items on the menu in the babble of diners and ordered a fish meze to share with my wife. But that put the cat among the dolmades because we were sitting at opposite ends of the table. The waiter and Mr. Daphne the manager encouraged us to sit together for ease of meze-fication, but my long-suffering wife wanted to chat to her chums rather than her worry-wart husband of 34 years. In the end, our solicitous waiter requisitioned her share and presented it to her on a separate plate. A nice touch, I thought, which I reflected in my gratuity.

The next day, Debs and I spent a good three hours in the restored and recently re-opened National Portrait Gallery. It was wonderful. I might have failed to find Henry Lamb’s remarkable portrait of Lytton Strachey, but we had a nice chat with a stranger about a humble black and white photograph of the playwright, Shelagh Delaney, who has always been overlooked in the critical acclaim for the Angry Young Men of the late ‘50s. It was tiring, though: we didn’t get further back than the Victorians before calling it a day, but once you’ve seen one Holbein, I guess, you’ve seen ‘em all.

By early evening, Storm Darren or Darragh or whatever was beginning to flex its gale-force muscles. In my day, they were just gales. No Gale Gail stuff, just a slate or two off the roof. Nevertheless, we boldly went by bus to the Angel, Islington – for a concert of Brazilian music at the O2 Academy. I wrote some publicity for Marcelo Frota, who calls himself MOMO. (with a full-stop), to mark his first London-based album. He and his band were supporting the legendary Azymuth (once famous in the days of disco for the epic ‘Jazz Carnival’) and Marcelo had promised to put us both on the guest list. Only he forgot. But a nice security woman took pity on a guileless pair of old fogies like us. She opened the door and let us in.

We met up with Marcelo on the way out during the (slightly tedious) main event and he told us that he’d spotted us in the audience mid-song and remembered with a start. OMG (or the Brazilian equivalent)! He’d been so busy rehearsing and was so sorry… The delightful singer-songwriter, who might have been the model of Morissey’s ‘This Charming Man’, revealed that he and the other four members of his band had been paid £300 for the gig. How could you possibly support a young family let alone pay for a cappuccino in London for that kind of money? We chatted about the possibility of a tour in France, where they place a higher value on culture.

The storm raged all weekend while we were at my sister’s lavishly Christmas-decorated house in Romsey, Hants. My excursion with a friend to Boo Hoo Records on Saturday morning was cancelled due to weather, so I had to content myself with a quick trawl of Romsey’s landmark charity shops and profit from the extra time with my siblings. Given my wife’s toxic relationship with her sister, I feel truly blessed by the mutual affection my two sisters and The Brother have for each other. I’m even prepared to forgive the two younger siblings’ votes for Brexit. And just to prove how magnanimous I am, I even bought the older sister’s Daily Mail for her on not one but two occasions.

On Saturday evening, the storm cut the power at the new home of my oldest nephew, the one I call Neff in honour of Walter, the infatuated life insurance salesman from Double Indemnity. Sampsondottir and I ended up playing pool with three of my great-nephews on their new table in their new games room by the light of their mobile phones. I like to think of myself as Paul Newman in The Hustler, but in all honesty their great uncle did not distinguish himself.

While on the subject of family matters, Mother Mary was expelled from her care home for persistent bad behaviour and moved to the nursing home near Banbury where she once worked as a nurse. She shall have a whole phalanx of qualified nurses to provide her with proper medical care and cater for her constant whims. And far away in the terrible war-torn Middle East, another dictator was expelled from his home. Even the Mail considered it more worthy of their front page than the latest revelations about some hapless TV celebrity. How comforted the Syrian survivors will be to know that their dashing prince and his British bride have escaped to Moscow unharmed, there to enjoy the spoils of their vile regime among fellow despots and psychopaths. One big happy family, in fact. But what next…? the headlines demanded.

Oh well, we missed the floods triggered by Darragh in the western reaches of our scepter’d isle. We made it back to Brive at the appointed hour – which still left the car to sort out. But lo! there it was, as badly parked as I had left it in my panic. More shame and scandal in the family: selfish parking is almost as punishable as dangerous driving in Sampson’s Book of Road-Rants (published by Penguin Books). I spoke to the button at the barrier and explained in my best French the circumstances – how it was night, five minutes before our train left etc. etc. – and the disembodied voice ended up trying her English out on me. Surely I wasn’t that abject or incomprehensible? But all’s well that ends well, as Willie the Shake once wrote. The barrier was duly raised and we drove off without having to pay a centime, thereby saving the price of the M.O.T. the next day.

Which was nice. Back home, we found both cats had endured their ordeal by food-and-water-dispenser. And among the post in the box next morning was a €20 voucher to be spent at the local Intermarché from the mayor and his team. Presumably because I have joined the commune’s officially old. To be nurtured and spoilt at Christmas. I wrote them an e-mail to thank them, in which I hoped I’d deserved such munificence and promised to spend it wisely. Give ‘em a little taste of that celebrated Breeteesh ‘umour to figure out.

I also found two invoices from FedEx for €13 each for the delivery of two promotional records from Universal Music. Which was not-so-nice. No doubt someone somewhere had slipped up on the notoriously complicated post-Brexit paperwork for such matters. It’s a rum state of affairs when one is charged almost as much for the only perks of the trade as the paltry fee received for writing the reviews. I shall probably put it down to experience and pay up. Trying to rectify it or claim it back would lead me into a Kafka novel. I’d end up topping myself or turning into a beetle. Win some, lose some.

 

November: Town Mouse & Country Mouse

The other morning at breakfast, I had a coughing-fit caused by muesli dust. If anything underlines the privileged middle-class life I lead it’s surely the notion of choking on (organic) muesli. It’s like admitting to people that my mum used to spank us kids when we got too much for her with a rolled-up copy of House & Garden. Perhaps I’d better explain the phenomenon quickly. Here's the thing (as they say), I was tipping the muesli into a big Kilner jar. With insufficient room for the entire contents of the bag, I tried to squeeze the air out before sealing the remains to keep the mites out – whereupon some residual dust went up my nose and down my trachea (or wherever), thus introducing dust into the lungs (presumably) and causing the spasms.

It’s just another part of the rich tapestry of life in the bucolic middle of nowhere. Like conversations with locals about mushrooms – the edible rather than the hallucinogenic variety. Recently, for example, on my way to the hustle and bustle of Martel market, I pulled up at Giselle’s barn to buy some eggs and whatever vegetables she had to sell at this late-season juncture, and found her chatting to his worship the mayor, who lives in the house opposite. I wished them both a cheery good morning and attempted to contribute some nugget to the conversation. Unfortunately, I score a D-minus mark and a note to see me after break, boy when it comes to fungi. It remains a mystery to me that people can get so fired up about the subject. At least it’s harmless, I guess, and doesn’t involving killing Mother Nature’s creatures.

My best friend missed out on such edifying matters during his recent visit here. Nevertheless, he saw enough – despite the miserable weather at the time – to pronounce that my life was good, to paraphrase Randy Newman: which felt like a benediction and made me proud, because My Man in Manhattan ostensibly leads such a rich cultural life in the city. Even so, Johnny Town Mouse always remembers the good times spent as a child at the farms of his uncles, one in county Fermanagh, the other near Portstewart on the north Antrim coast, during our time at school together in Belfast. He has lived in a basement apartment a short walk from Central Park West for even longer than I’ve lived in France, so respective visits to each other’s domain help to recharge the parts that other trips can’t reach.

He came bearing gifts including a conviction (the operative word) that Trump is toast. My friend is a deep thinker and extensive reader, so I took some heart from what he had to say, though still convinced that all the books in the world won’t halt the march of Fascism. 

Talk is easy for us. We are both the responsible eldest child of four (two boys and two girls) and were born exactly six months apart. We both live surrounded by books and music, both love the same kind of films and no doubt both agree that Hejira is Joni Mitchell's finest album. We have lived remarkably parallel lives a long way apart since going our separate ways at the end of our school days.

Face-to-face talk is so much easier than talk on a phone. In my case, I think I was unwittingly traumatised by my friend Satpol during my time in primary school in north London. A tall Indian boy who wore his black hair in two pigtails seemingly fashioned into the two handles of a jug or a vase, he had a wart on the palm of his right hand, but I didn’t let it spoil our friendship. One evening he phoned me, and my mum handed me the big black Bakelite telephone receiver. I didn’t know what to do or say, and I think he was equally perplexed at the other end. It was almost like trying to converse with a heavy breather. I realise now, of course, that he was probably just feeling lonely and needed to connect.

My astrological twin and I have no such trouble. I’m more of a listener than a talker, but when Johnny Town Mouse is here, I can give as good as I get. I can pull out a record from the shelves or find a Corgi car in its original box or wax lyrical on the craftsmanship of a plastic cowboy wielding a lasso on horseback and know that my enthusiasm is both mutual and entirely comprehensible. For all the talk about aches and pains and the ageing process and what's going to happen to our records when we die, all the talk about our hopes for at least another two decades of active service and dreams of leaving a lasting legacy, either as a writer or a stinking-rich philanthropist, it was like being a kid again. It always is. We didn’t stop nattering from morn till night. The Good Wife looks upon it as having two husbands in one house.

Our only real point of divergence, probably due to our contrasting environments, is his propensity to sit up late into the night, sometimes delving deep into YouTube rabbit holes, while I like to retire to the ‘best place on earth’: bed. There comes a time when you have to switch off and shut down: like a TV set in the days before 24-hour schedules for addicts and night-owls.

Of course, I sat up late with him on the night of his departure. I’d found him an inexpensive ticket on the night train from St. Denis près Martel to Paris Austerlitz: a first class berth on a couchette that would allow him to sleep all the way, then find his leisurely stress-free way across town to Charles De Gaulle airport and thence direct to JFK, and all for less than a 50-euro note.  

We sat up till after midnight listening to music and pouring over an old school magazine from our time together as teenagers with big dreams, reminiscing about pupils we had known and loved (or not). Neither of us featured in any of the photographs, since we were and are both serial non-joiners. He got a mention for his part in the Russian society, while I got one for earning a point for our House in the annual sports event. I suspect that even then our big dreams were tempered by a healthy dose of ironic self-awareness.

I took him down to the local station in plenty of time for the 12.50 train, still a bag of nerves after my wife’s experience with the same night train: cancellation, non-appearance of replacement bus, hasty trip to Brive to find what we would find. But no, this time there were others reassuringly waiting on the platform, and the train from Rodez rolled in on time. The two mice embraced warmly and my Man in Manhattan showed his ticket to one of the three controllers (one for each carriage) and got on board. Johnny Town Mouse was on his long, long way home, leaving the Country Mouse bereft.

But only temporarily. My life is good. This rural mouse has friends in the vicinity with whom he can walk in the woods and miss all the mushrooms, revel in the night sky, moan about French drivers and even spin a record or two, just as his urban equivalent can play poker with pals, go and see some jazz at the Village Vanguard or classical music at Carnegie Hall, and pop into the local thrift store for yet more books and music. Jealous, moi? Well, perhaps a little envious on occasions. But each to his own domain.

I heard from him later that morning. In true SNCF fashion, they’d double-booked his bed. When he opened the door of his couchette, he found a young woman occupying his berth. She, it transpired, had booked on the train leaving before midnight, while I had booked on the train after midnight. Two trains, yet one and the same. SNCF Connect disconnected. Being a polite and reasonable man, my twin didn’t take advantage of the situation, but merely excused himself and took an unoccupied bed. 

I should have warned him – to approximate what the cop tells Jake Gittes in Chinatown, Forget it… it’s France. And thank God, because I wouldn’t want to leeve in Amereeka now. How long will my Man in Manhattan tolerate living under a sociopathic convicted felon as President, backed by his bully-boy storm-troopers who like to ride around in heavily armed pick-up trucks? Far from Trump being toast, I fear it’ll be the rest of us. I’d better keep the home fire burning for Johnny Town Mouse.

October: Still Hanging About

Any year that ends with the number ‘4’ is a deeply significant one for me. A lot of hoo-ha attaches itself to the accompanying birthday, then a few years down the line you wonder what all the fuss was about. In ’74, I was a student deluded by self-importance. In ’84, I thought I had matured into manhood, only to discover that I still didn’t know doodly-squat. In ’94, I believed I was on the threshold of a sensible middle-age, but moved to France the very next year to begin my life over again. In ’04, I embraced middle age. In ’14, I felt that 60 was the portal to old age, only to learn that there were a few good years still left in me.

This time, however, there’s no kidding. Seventy is o-l-d, old. I have definitely stepped over the threshold into what will prove to be either the penultimate or the final act: I wake up every morning, despite my new indecently expensive pillow, to find that my body hasn’t regenerated itself overnight, but merely aches anew. My neck, my shoulders, my lower back… Entropy has well and truly set in. Everything is winding down and slowly but surely disintegrating. Friends urge me to go in for an M.O.T. and I will take advantage of the departmental medical board’s kind offer of a free overhaul, promise, but there are so many body-parts to go wrong at this age that it’s a journey into fear…

Like the Caisse Primaire Assurance Médicale, or whatever it might have changed its name to in recent times, I try to act preventively and responsibly. First thing now, before feeding the animals and turning on the wi-fi (for heaven’s sake), for example, I try to remember to hang for a minute or so from underneath the stairs to the mezzanine level to prevent my bones from fusing. It’s the self-help alternative to Smallweed’s periodic command to his long-suffering wife in Dickens’ Bleak House, ‘shake me up, Judy.’

For the last few years, I have been approaching the stage of life where one does a lot of mental arithmetic. Everything these days seems to involve a subtraction from a hundred – the absolute maximum life expectancy – to calculate how many years are potentially left, supposing that you survive illness, disease, accident or rising summer temperatures. If I make it as far as ’44, will I still have the will to push on for a century? My lifelong passion for cricket has taught me that this is the right thing to do, but what if I’ve been consigned by then to an old people’s home? There are only so many communal singalongs that a person can tolerate.

Yes, the will to live. It’s a stage in your life where those you have known, whether personally or by repute, have given up and/or are dropping like flies. A dear friend from my days as a deluded self-important student at Exeter University recently passed on the news that a mutual friend of ours had topped himself. Apparently, he’d had problems with the demon drink and had lost the resolution to keep going. I was very saddened by the news. True, I hadn’t seen him in decades, but he was the first fellow student I met when my father delivered me and my youthful impedimenta to my hall of residence. He had smiled warmly and spoken with the air of a well-seasoned public-schoolboy. Always unfailingly courteous and charming, there was nevertheless something slightly nervous about him. On hearing the news of his premature demise, I immediately wondered whether he’d suffered some kind of abuse at public school that he had never confronted. Perhaps drink was his way of trying to blot it out. And when that doesn’t work…

But enough of such sad news, already. There’s quite enough of that kind of thing in the daily headlines. Since we’re on the topic of maturity, let me update you on recent developments around this house, which reached the age of 20 this summer. The walls of straw seem to be holding up nicely, despite the recent coloured lime-wash that rapidly turned as white as chalk, and the unmanageable garden is maturing nicely. This coming winter, we will no longer have to squelch over muddy grass to the front door, because Damien (our putative family retainer) finally turned up only two years after his original estimate to lay a long and winding path to the porch. Until the newly scattered grass seeds carpet the exposed soil between the limestone pavers, the path will be known as ‘the giraffe’. Passing friends and callers have admired it and I wish that I could have informed them that it was all my own handiwork. If I’d done it myself, I know only too well, it would have looked more like a brontosaurus than a giraffe.

I have to say, it was well worth the outlay. I often pop out onto the porch to admire it and, secretly, I have re-discovered the childish joy of trying to get from A to B without stepping on the lines. I have even attempted a return journey to the end of the line in slippers, just to prove to myself that I can do it without them getting wet or muddy. The march of civilisation goes on apace.

With the imminent arrival of sister and brother-in-law for my birthday, I mowed our lawn of weeds either side of the new giraffe – just to accentuate the new, clean look and to complement the pansies that the Good Wife has planted in pots in honour of the visit. My brother-in-law keeps their garden as immaculate as my sister keeps their house and, although we live very differently and believe that ‘when in Rome…’, you feel obliged to pull out all or at least some of the stops.

There’s little I can do about the lawn of weeds, however. While wielding my little Lidl electric mower, I was thinking of ways I could market it. Watching the adverts in between the marvellous screwball comedy The More The Merrier on Talking Pictures the other evening, it seems that you can sell anything if you’re artless enough. You, too, could have a lawn like ours. Just sow the seeds and scatter and watch those multifarious weeds take over. Simply send a cheque for £75 made out to Grassmyarse Ltd. Money back within 15 days if not delighted… I don’t think so. Never mind, it looks lawn-like for a moment.

It’s the garden that may well prove to be the death of me – to use my mother’s hyperbole. If anything other than osteoporosis or senile dementia drives us out of our house and into an easy-to-run flat, it’ll be the garden. Never knowingly horticultural, my failing body will make it even harder to maintain order in the years to come. We joke about a family retainer, and nothing could be finer in the state of Carolina, but we know that the financial family planning makes it a pipe dream. We’ve discussed the idea of offering board and lodging to a young WOOF-equivalent, but do we really want to share our house with a stranger? We did that for seven years when we lived in Sheffield and it wasn’t always easy. Once or twice it nearly ended in bloodshed. Mind you, the most trying offender was… French.

So then… What next? What does the future hold in store for an aged man and his ageing wife? Bobby, I don’t know…, as James Brown told his Famous Flame, but whatever it is, it’s got to be funky. I’m hoping that the regular yoga, dog-walks and stair-hangings will keep me reasonably limber for a little longer yet. I still believe I could dance all night (if they only let me), and until the day when I’m confronted by tangible evidence that indeed I cannot, perhaps it’s best just to carry on in the belief that you can and see how far that gets you.

Hmmmm. Perhaps I’ll turn to philosophy in my old age. That’s something you can do in bed, isn’t it?

September: Colette, Courgettes and Dodgy Barbeques

How good it is to be back on dry land, in a manner of speaking. After the exigencies of England in early August, I’ve appreciated even more than usual the beauty and riches of the French countryside. Peace and quiet. Heck, until this weekend there was a blissful week-long hiatus when the house phone stopped ringing. Mother Mary, the Outlaw, dropped her mobile phone down the loo. Some cur must have dried it out for her with a bowlful of rice.

Talking of water closets, I’ve appreciated being on one level again, too. Yes, there’s a mezzanine level where we have our TV and I keep my LPs, CDs and cassettes and my ailing desktop computer, whose speed these days is the equivalent of a shuffling nonagenarian with a Zimmer frame, but we had the good sense to put the bedrooms on the ground floor when designing and building the house. For a fortnight in England, I was taking my life in my hands whenever I got up for the regular nocturnal pee. The stairs at the tiny Airbnb lodgings were so steep that the steps were those alternate duck’s feet, or whatever they call them. It’s much easier and safer at home.

August passed by without any prolongation of the severe heat that The Daughter experienced while she was looking after things during our absence. It rained a bit and now September has started where it may finish, with mornings so cold that I’ve had to put on long trousers, gloves and jumper in order to give Daphne her morning constitutional. You feel a little sorry for the holidaymakers, but hey… that’s all part of life’s rich tapestry. A propos of holidaymakers, the Parisian neighbours – beside and below – have gone back to the big city now. But not before we discovered that yer man next door (who shall remain anonymous to preserve his modesty) apparently likes to operate the barbeque in the nude. Perhaps to Madame’s excitement. We can’t make out whether she wanders around in the nip or whether she’s wearing a flesh-coloured bikini.

In any case, they were both suitably clad when they invited the three of us and Lawrence and Sophie from down below and Sylvie and Olivier on the far side of the putative nudists for their annual good-neighbour bash. We all brought along a bottle and a dish for a bit of à la bonne franquette (I believe that's how it’s spelled). And very nice it was, too. We’d all been a little dreading it, because these affairs can be rather awkward, but it passed off rather congenially. The Parisians talked about the recent Olympic Games in their city and about the wonders of the produce at this time of year. Sophie and I go to the same vegetable stall at Martel market and she was enthusing about how cheap it was compared to Paris. And how much better the quality.

Better certainly than our usual disappointing harvest from our own little bit of horticultural paradise. The apples were covered like the roses in black spot and really only fit for stewing. The bountiful crop of pears has refused to ripen, even in paper bags on the window sills. The three peach trees – one of which I have now pronounced dead – yielded (count ‘em) seven peaches. The Swiss chard was severely coppiced by passing deer, although now re-growing vigorously. The chilli peppers have done well, but aren’t very hot. We had two stripy aubergines, a few yellow courgettes and two enormous green ones that I unearthed from a canopy of protective leaves. Yes, they make good soup, but it makes more sense to pay a market stallholder for all the effort involved.

Since the Night of the Neighbours went so well, we decided to invite the fully clothed variety from down below for an evening soon after the sans culottes had gone back to the big city. We have more in common with them. Lawrence and I tend to like similar music and, bless him, we came bearing a three-record set of King Cole Trio sides for Capitol. His Swiss friend’s father-in-law had recently died and left behind a legacy of old vinyl from which he chose the gift for me. He’d filled his boots, so to speak, and doesn’t tend to go back as far in time as I do, so I was delighted and not a little touched. A splendid time was had by one and they have invited us back for their next visit south-west.

They, too, have gone now, as have the girls. They’ve left me for 10 days in Athens and on Hydra, the isle just off the Peloponnese where Leonard Cohen once lived in the hippie heyday. It’s a long-promised mother-and-child reunion to celebrate Our Kid’s imminent 30 years on earth and to give the Good Wife a well-earned rest. Hopefully not from her husband, I should add, but from the demands of her all-consuming mother. The human succubus. So I’m marking time at home until their return. I have a few commissions to use as an excuse for my own private stay-cation, but in truth I love my home and surroundings and enjoy being with the cats and dogs and able to follow my own rhythms.

There’s always tons to do, tons to read, tons to watch and tons to listen to. Feeling a little more French, a little more bi-national than I normally do, I’ve just finished two short novels by Colette: Chéri and The Last of Chéri, a Penguin bequeathed by my Francophile mother. I thought it was about time, since Colette is a bit of a local darling around these parts. During part of the war, she sheltered in her daughter’s lodgings – one of the twin châteaux of nearby Curemonte, another of les plus beaux villages of these parts. Her daughter, Colette de Jouvenel, while not nearly so well known as her mother, is actually a fascinating and admirable character: a journalist, feminist and active resistant, who sheltered the children of deported Jews (among others) in her (then) dilapidated château.

But back to her mother…The translator had and did a hell of a job: the writing is very descriptive, often poetic and flowery and sometimes hard to follow, but surprising in its candour. The books were published in the 1920s and, in an age of euphemisms and suggestion, they tackle subjects like bedrooms and nakedness and desire – sex in other words, and what’s more between a young man and a considerably older woman – with refreshing frankness. But then of course, France has always been another country altogether: something confirmed by re-watching Philip Kauffman’s Henry and June, based around a possibly fanciful triangular relationship between Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller and June Mansfield, his wife at the time of his sojourn in 1930s Paris. Steamy and ever so slightly daft, I decided that two viewings is quite enough, thank you.

Well, the upside of September is that there’s little probability of life-endangering heat now. The downside is the start of the hunting season. Just before the girls left me to my own devices, we had our customary evening constitutional en famille with Daphne. It was ruined by the spectacle of baying hounds chasing a terrified boar across the bottom of the neighbours’ field, which reminded me of all those American convict films involving fugitives from the law pursued by a ballistic pack of bloodhounds. One of those hideous Amerikanische pick-up trucks with a hood to contain said baying hounds within then passed us on the road. The Good Wife pleaded with me not to give them the finger. She was quite right. I’m not built for violent confrontation or even mild altercation. Certainly not here in this green and pleasant land where courgettes grow to the size of barrage balloons.

Just to return briefly to the subject of Colette in conclusion. On the phone the other day, The Brother offered me his theory of the four stages of a human being's life cycle: excited, bored, bored rigid, rigid. It describes Chéri's indolent life to a tee. No time for that here; I must be getting on...