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 11th-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 40th 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.
