March: 'We will try to speak English just for you'

Did you know that our blood renews itself every hour via our kidneys’ filters? I do now thanks to the Good Wife, who is re-reading one of her textbooks on anatomy and physiology. She takes her work seriously. Isn’t the body incredible?

So clearly we need to revive our mind and spirit regularly. Since we’ve both been coughing up phlegm all winter long and since there’s nothing like a bit of sea air, we took a trip to Arcachon for a nice phlegmatic weekend at the end of last month. We’ve been before on occasions: Arcachon, just an hour west of Bordeaux, is our landlocked home’s nearest resort. We could have gone by car, but there’s the Bordeaux ‘Rocade’ to negotiate – admittedly a very tame version of the M25 or the Paris Périphérique – and at our times of life we like to let the train take the strain.

Leaving the cats with their basic but effective water-and-food dispenser, we dropped off Daphne with her godparents and her best friend Holly for a mini 'Hollyday' en route for Brive station on a beautiful Friday morning. The forecast suggested that the weather would deteriorate, so we took raincoats and umbrellas as if off to Blackpool for the weekend. Changing trains at Liborne – which made little sense to me since our connecting train was also stopping at Bordeaux – we both noticed a contemporary ageing couple with cases rather fuller than ours. I liked the man’s walking shoes, but we couldn’t spot the brand. Either they too were bound for Arcachon, we surmised, or they were heading for the airport to fly to Geneva in order to visit their daughter, her Swiss husband and their new baby.

The connecting train was a double-decker, my first time on such a feat of engineering. We ate our packed lunch and settled in for a journey to and then from the most beautiful city in France, stopping at just about every dormitory town all the way to Arcachon. A lot of new pricy-looking apartment blocks seem to have gone up since our last visit. I hope the agents immobiliers at Bigoras will warn clients that the fumes from the belching cheese or chemical works smell quite awful. I assured my wife that it had nothing to do with me.

At Arcachon, we spotted the couple from Liborne and followed them towards the centre of town. They turned off down a side street, bound not for Geneva but, judging by his walking shoes, a hotel more expensive than ours. The Dame had found a good deal at a Best Western near the port, a 15-minute walk down the beach-side boardwalk which is not designed for cases with wheels. The favourable reviews about breakfast had sold the hotel to us, but the receptionist, indeed everyone there, was charming and welcoming. I guess that’s one thing in Airbnb’s favour: hotels must be so anxious for your custom that staff go that extra yard to curry favour.

On the way back into town to check the lie of the land and identify a possible restaurant for that evening, we passed a little place with a promising tout compris lunchtime menu with a delightful sign in the window that made us both chuckle: We try to speak English just for you. How very kind. Perhaps lunch next day. We also laughed later to observe that the insalubriously-named D’Ompe bar publicised ‘Coktails’; presumably spirits with a pinch of white powder. A coktail or two might have intensified the pleasure of browsing among the sale goods lining the streets of the centre, a braderie organised to tempt the crowds for this February holiday weekend. We bought nothing but a string of garlic and a truly delicious chocolate-orange ice cream.

Back at the port with evening falling fast, we found a restaurant at the corner of a street that opened at 6.30 but, for some peculiar reason, didn’t start serving food for another hour. So we sat nursing a beer and chatting to a delightful young waiter about the season and the wonderful weather. He volunteered that he’d gone swimming earlier that day with a friend and, with his thumb and forefinger and an infectious cackle, he suggested that his wiener had shrunk with the cold to the size of a cornichon. We speculated later on his sexual inclination. Rare perhaps to find a heterosexual stranger ready to reveal such an intimate and self-deprecating detail of his anatomy. That evening, we chose Taika Waititi’s first film, Eagle vs Shark, on Mubi in our hotel room. How we laughed to see such quirky fun.

After a breakfast that lived up to all the favourable reviews on Trip Advisor, we headed for the beach without our coats and umbrellas. It had rained in the night, but the morning was a blue limpid miracle. Shedding our footwear to enjoy a cold, sandy pedicure, we walked as far as the point from which you can see across the bay to the lighthouse at the tip of Cap Ferret. Dogs and small children gamboled on the sand and parents tried in vain to stop their charges from getting soaked. We walked to the central market where we bought a picnic supper to eat in our room (so I could watch the Calcutta Cup rugby match) and we walked all the way back to the port to have lunch at a tiny café offering vegetarian food. Our hostess Colette’s haughty tabby cat sat on a chair by the door, as if vetting the clientele.

By the time we’d walked to town past some outlandish architectural confections and back along the sand again (with another chocolate-orange ice cream), the Dame’s phone app suggested that we’d clocked up something like 20,000 steps that day – and without the aid of a ‘coktail’. We slept well after the rugby and a quirky but forgettable Canadian film on Mubi again.

Sunday morning breakfast was every bit as copious and satisfactory as Saturday’s, and outside the day was yet more beautiful. The sea was like the proverbial millpond and the cloudless sky a deep shade of blue. A long walk along the sand and then a stroll along a promenade full of walkers, joggers and cyclists took us to the kind of authentic restaurant where the Good Wife could satisfy her oyster-lust. Being oyster-agnostic, I opted for a very fine fish soup. Afterwards, we went back to our favourite ice-cream parlour for a chocolate-orange dessert. Debs revealed that she had consumed her customary annual ice-cream allocation in one weekend.

SNCF in their habitual maddening SNCF manner had cancelled our train back to Bordeaux, but laid on buses. We decided to pick up an earlier one in case of mayhem on the Rocade. Well, maybe not ‘we’: the truth is that Nervous O’Sampson here persuaded his rather more optimistic and carefree wife that it might be a prudent idea.

In fact, it didn’t take much longer than the train, so we had an even longer wait at Bordeaux’s central station, as insalubrious as big-city stations always tend to be. Our bus driver was a genial chap, but his habit of stroking with one hand his white goatee ‘comfort beard’, as I christened it, while driving with the other alarmed me. He stopped at every little town en route for the regional capital, which involved tight roundabouts and two hands on the steering wheel. Bigoras still stank and I hoped that my fellow passengers wouldn’t think that it was me.

After enjoying the last of the day’s sun outside the station, after dismissing alcoholic beggars with a sad-eyed shake of the head and after polishing off the remains of our pre-rugby supper from the previous evening, we finally boarded our train to Brive on platform 9. It seemed a long journey back, but maybe we were tired out by all those steps. We got home late, but Otis and Mingus seemed fine and a dispenser almost devoid of croquettes told its own tale of an indolent weekend with little or no rodent-hunting.

As for the minds, bodies and spirits of their humans, they felt suitably renewed after a spring-like weekend of sea, sand, sun and superior breakfasts.

February: Dreams, Trains and Boo Hoo's Demise

Three weeks in England must have turned the Good Wife’s head. Now safely restored to the marital bed, the ‘best place on earth’, she told me about a dream she’d had in the night. She was being dressed for her new role as queen of England by Ralph Fiennes, but was worried that she didn’t have any white underwear to go with her regal robes. She has weird and wonderful dreams, and our local doctor, who’s on the same wavelength, has asked her to write them out for him and send them by e-mail.

Her dreams were one reason why I was so enchanted back in 1987, the year I fell in love. I even attempted a short story based on her dream of ‘Henry of the St. Islet’, but failed to capture the same ludicrous magic. I remember once she woke us both up one night in our Sheffield terraced house by trying to get me to sign a cheque imprinted on her back. No doubt an itch that she needed to scratch. We must have giggled helplessly for a quarter of an hour or more. We giggled again the other day to discover that Animals Asia now address her by the remarkably absurd new name of Mrs. Sampson-Horyseck. How did that happen? (I went, but couldn’t figure.)

The dream of the royal preparations was probably prompted by re-watching The End of The Affair, Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel with Julianne Moore and a young and horribly handsome Ralph Fiennes. That, perhaps, and our daughter’s recent work for a stylist, dressing the stars for certain red-carpet events. Isn’t it wonderful how the subconscious takes these snippets of reality and transforms them into the kind of mad, beguiling scenarios you could never make up in the cold light of day – unless of course you were Lewis Carroll or David Lynch?

I rarely remember my dreams, but dwell on more prosaic daydreams, some of which probably derive from scenes within half-remembered films that have long lodged in my cinematic subconscious. I suspect that elements of Shanghai Express and Night Train to Munich crept into my desire to take the sleeper from our local station to Paris. At the end of January, I was finally able to separate the reality from the romance.

The first practical issue was that of staying awake until driving down to the bourg to catch the 12.35 from Rodez. I set a precautionary alarm and idled away a few hours after dinner with some concert footage of Ella Fitzgerald and a fairly daft Anthony Mann western on a home-made DVD: A Man From The West, with the strong, silent, dependable Gary Cooper, the glamorous part-time jazz-pop singer Julie London, and the ever-mean Lee J. Cobb, reprising in another landscape his bullying role as Johnny Friendly in On The Waterfront. With time still on my hands and my bags packed beside me, I sat at our table and read the Asterix adventure my friend the Nazarene gave me.

At five past midnight, I could bear it no longer. I said my farewells to the cats, checked that the cooker was off and made my way down to the station. Earlier in the week I’d asked the secretary at the mairie if I could park at the Salle Mathieu just in case. I was equally pleased to hear her use my first name (a rare phenomenon in these parts) as I was to learn that I could. Needless to say, there were parking spaces galore at the station. So that meant another 20 minutes to kill in the reassuringly illuminated waiting room. A sensible fellow traveller joined me about five minutes before the due departure.

The train pulled in at the appointed hour. I got onto Voiture 22, the middle of three carriages, and waited for the conductor to check my ticket and show me to my couchette. He slid back the door to reveal a room barely bigger than a pantry, with five fellow travellers stacked one on top of the other in two parallel rows of three bunks. Fortunately, mine was a bottom bunk. The bulky young man in the corresponding bottom bunk across the paltry divide was still awake. He acknowledged my sotto voce bonjour with a sleepy blink.

I was soon disavowed of my crazy notion that I could unpack, slip into my pyjamas and park my slippers under the bed, primed for the inevitable trip to the loo in the wee small hours. Trying to get out of my coat while hunched up on my bunk conjured an image of Harry Houdini wriggling out of his chains in a subterranean coffin. Nothing for it but to park my bags at the foot of the bed, remove my shoes and lie down fully clothed. Did I say bed? It was more like a shelf in some Guatemalan prison cell. With neither curtain nor bedside light, I struggled to find the pillow and the sleeping bag provided, both encased in plastic. I made so much noise trying to extricate the pillow that I gave up on the idea of a sleeping bag and simply pulled my coat over me. With my feet propped on my bag at the bottom of my shelf, I lay back and let the rhythm of the railway lull me to sleep.

Inevitably, I awoke around five and made the long trek sans slippers down the corridor to the loo. On the way back, Amélie – our friendly conductress – announced that we were pulling into Limoges Benedictins. What the…? So was true, then, that the train dallies in Brive for an eternity, hooking up with another night train from Cahors or Toulouse. Back in my Guatemalan cell, Amélie proceeded to murder sleep by announcing every stop northwards to Paris. I probably succumbed to exhaustion for an hour tops half-past Orléans – to wake up un-refreshed sometime just after eight at Paris Austerlitz. Plenty of time to catch the Metro to Paris Nord, check in at Eurostar and get a coffee and croissant at Paul, the ubiquitous but tolerable cafeteria.

The rest of the trip was plain-sailing. I even made the connection at Southampton Airport for Romsey, where I would hook up with my itinerant wife at my sister’s. We were there for the 70^th birthday celebrations of my brother-in-law at the White Horse on Saturday night. And very nice it was, too, even if I felt a little like a distant planet on the edge of the local solar system, observing at several removes my siblings, nephews, great nephews and local family friends. We danced to a band calling themselves AKA, who had provided the music at my youngest nephew’s wedding a couple of years ago – my father’s swansong, God rest his soul. It’s somewhat bizarre to hear a semi-pro band tackle things like Sister Sledge’s ‘We Are Family’.

However, incorrigible obsessive that I am, the high-spot of my visit was neither the party nor dinner in Soho to celebrate the Good Wife’s birthday a couple of evenings later, but my trip to Boo Hoo Records in Southampton with my equally obsessive friend John, who celebrated his 80^th birthday a few days before my brother-in-law turned officially old. Boo Hoo is run by another octogenarian, a man called Barry with an encyclopaedic knowledge of music particularly from the era when John sang with a ‘60s ‘beat band’. Hit with an excessive water bill for what amounts to nothing but a sink and a seedy loo, he’s decided to hang up his stereo equipment. Which meant that there were great piles of records selling for a pound. Being a generous man who bases his prices on an out-of-date catalogue rather than Discogs, he was happy to ‘do a price’ for anything from the permanent collection that we took to his cluttered counter. The pair of us flicked feverishly through separate piles, pausing to show one another this or that record of interest, fuelled by a kind of collector’s adrenaline. After a couple of hours in Barry’s Aladdin’s Cave, we both came away with a pile of records bought for less than a £20 note.

Boo Hoo occupies the ground floor of a dowdy, nondescript little building in a rather tawdry part of Southampton near the football stadium no doubt earmarked for re-development. No one, I’m sure, will be mad enough to take it over. John and I said our goodbyes and good lucks to Barry and a few days later I was happy to get home to Camp Street, France, with my precious cargo in its bulky Sally Army bag. But I’m sad, as John must be, to think that I’ll probably never see its like again in what’s left of my lifetime. Boo-hoo…

January: Sorcerers, Doctors And Philosophers

It can be spooky being married to a sorcerer – or sorceress if you’ll pardon me distinguishing male from female. When The Daughter left for London after her restorative Christmas sojourn, her mother packed her off with a jar of some very nice chilli for her dinner left over from the evening before. Conscious of self-fulfilling prophecies, she didn't mention that her 'blip' during the night – a period of one or two hours when she wakes up and reads her Kindle to get back to sleep without disturbing me – was due to a dream of chilli con calamity Sure enough, Our Kid sent an SMS from the Gare du Nord to say that she'd dropped the bag containing the chilli and the jar had smashed.

Yes, I know, it’s hardly Nostradamus; nevertheless, I know well enough after 30-plus years of marriage to take note of her presentiments. If she were to tell me not to take the car to Brive, for example, there's no way that I would hit the road. I don't profess to understand the work she does with energy and the body's meridians because it’s all a bit alien to me, but while massaging or otherwise treating a client, some potent image will often pop into her psyche that will frequently resonate with the other person and open up new paths to explore. It might well involve looking into the genetic baggage that we carry around with us and thus help to unblock whatever might be holding us back in life and/or redress a psychological imbalance due to some trauma, major or minor, experienced or inherited.

I might sound biased, but the work she does can often reach the parts that other therapies cannot. Which is good for her clients and good for The Dame, because her work is fulfilling and rewarding. Which is good for me in turn, because the income she brings in supplements my monthly payments from His Majesty King Charles III and keeps the household happy and buoyant.  

What's maybe not so good sometimes is that I have become keenly aware of the baggage I carry around with me from childhood (and earlier, my wife will contend) and the consequent idea that if anything’s holding our daughter back in life it could be… me! Me and my genes. Oh, the guilt, the guilt. No wonder I put off parenthood for as long as I did.

Perhaps such awareness is a good thing. It certainly behoves me (to paraphrase a line from a John Cale song) to keep a close watch on this health of mine, physical and mental. The former is simpler to address than the latter, even if daunting at my time of life when each new mysterious blemish on my skin or a cough that goes on too long could presage the end of the line.

So it was that I went to Souillac (by car; no powerful presentiments) one damp misty morning just before Christmas for a medical M.O.T. (or contrôle technique), a truly splendid service offered by L'Assurance Maladie of the Lot. They have an infrequent outpost there at the EHPAD (or state-run old people's care-home) just off the main drag. It's a rabbit-warren of sterile strip-lit corridors and it was just as well that I left myself plenty of time to find where exactly they'd set up shop. On tracking them down, I handed in my jam-jar sample and confirmed some details in the questionnaire I had to bring with me, then took my place among about 20 other punters in what could have been an activities-room for the inmates – cards, board games, nothing too strenuous. And there I sat and waited for my name to be called.

In true French fashion, once I'd given my armful of blood for analysis, I qualified for a complimentary breakfast: orange juice, a plastic pot of apple compôte, a little pack of dry biscottes with gelatinous apricot jam and a half-decent cup of coffee. All a bit processed, but I wasn't complaining. Afterwards, I saw a doctor who wired me up to her machine that monitored my heart patterns (I think), followed by a quick trip to the dentist (a charming woman who urged me to see my local dentist about a broken filling) and rounded off by a brief consultation with an avuncular male doctor who questioned my lifestyle, read my blood pressure and listened to my heartbeat. All was well in the state of Denmark, he concluded. We chatted about the folly of Brexit and he sent me home with a kit to test for colorectal cancer.

So that was good. As for my mental health... My in-house therapist worries that my state of misanthropy has become more entrenched over time, and that she has lost a part of her life’s partner. So I let Dr. Debs book me an appointment with our local doctor the other side of Christmas. And that’s OK: it’s not as if she sets out my clothes for the day on the marital bed.

For many years, our doctor and the Good Wife co-counselled each other about their respective work. They would have long, deep conversations often built around the esoteric books of the neo-theosophist, Alice Bailey, whose copious writings were supposedly channelled telepathically via a 'Master of Wisdom' referred to as 'The Tibetan'. It's not really my cup of tea; I'd rather talk about records.

Our local doctor is a good and quietly remarkable man: not just because he finds the time for surgeries in general medicine as well as homeopathy, his speciality, but also because he listens forensically to his clients and works prodigiously long hours as a consequence. Any reluctance to make an appointment myself is born of past experience: a session can last well over an hour and involve the kind of acute questioning that taxes my limited language skills and powers of concentration. As an inveterate fence-sitter, it makes me uncomfortable to be put on the spot.

I went along like a good boy, armed with a good book. No need: he came to fetch me at the appointed hour with the customary sincere hand-clasp. We sat down on either side of his imposing desk and... we talked. And talked. He asked me whether it was I or Deborah who initiated the appointment, and I cannot tell a lie. Whereupon, we spoke of many things esoteric, philosophical and perhaps even neo-theosophical: pessimism and optimism, the state of the world and the follies of mankind, the cycles of history, the power and role of the creative artist, spirituality and lack of belief. I had the feeling that he was looking into my soul, but with a certain humour. If, for example, I responded suitably to an idea he threw in to twist a perspective, he would laugh his endearing, little-boy, shoulder-shaking laugh.

After the trial by philosophy, I lay down on his couch while he checked my pulse in the Chinese medicinal way, which apparently allows him to gauge the health of my vital organs. And very good, too, he announced eventually. After which, we returned to the imposing desk so he could search for the appropriate homeopathic remedy while I twiddled my thumbs, then wrote out a cheque for €35 (part of which will be reimbursed by the Assurance Maladie du Lot). Pretty damn good value for an hour’s consultation. I can’t help but feel that the NHS is missing a fund-raising trick.

In conclusion, I thanked him for the food for thought he’d given me, which tickled him pink and triggered the shoulders. I’m not sure how much that food for thought and the Pulsatilla remedy for anxiety have helped, since I contracted flu not long after. On leaving, I told our delightful doc that I’d probably feel better mentally once my daughter felt more settled. ‘But have you thought,’ he chuckled, ‘maybe she’ll feel better when you feel better?’ Now that’s what I call a médecin-philosophe, a true doctor of philosophy.