My sister Jo has one of those Alexa thingies that sits on the work surface of her kitchen. She and her husband occasionally speak to it and it answers back or responds in kind. It also flashes up headlines, thoughts for the day and other messages. Walking past it the other morning, without my glasses on, I read – or thought I read – ‘Your life is incomplete’. This took me aback. When did these machines learn to be so ontological? Was the programmer someone concerned by the big issues of existence? In any case, it seemed a rather damning observation. Downright rude, in fact. Damned if I’ll ever let such a device into our house. On mentioning it to my sister, she explained (with the benefit of glasses) that it was her list that was incomplete. She uses it sometimes for shopping memos.
Even so… It was food for thought. AD 2025 seems to have been a particularly sociable one in retrospect. I was over in the motherland for about my fourth short visit of the year. This one was triggered by a brief trip in July to attend my friend Trevor’s 70th bash, where a plot was hatched with a mutual friend to spend time together in Trevor’s holiday home in Lyme Regis. At this late stage of our lives, there’s the nagging awareness that one’s life could be completed at any moment, so you have to seize these opportunities while ye may.
Besides, it’s a welcome break for my life-partner. Much as we enjoy each other’s company, absence does of course make the heart grow fonder. We both relish the occasional independence days, when you can please yourself without reference to the other. Mind you, it’s tricky to follow your own rhythms when you’re being bombarded by calls and constant lists of essential purchases from my mother-in-law, the Outlaw. Now that she has recently celebrated her 97th birthday, we both await the day when her life will be complete. Her longevity is not so much a triumph, more a testimony to sheer perversity. She’s been telling her daughter that she wanted to conclude proceedings since she turned 80. Although we’d both gladly offer our help, it’s not yet legal in the UK.
If this sounds cruel and heartless, you’re probably right. But there are extenuating circumstances. Debs labels as ‘abusive’ the barrage of calls, the constant complaints and the ceaseless lists of items to buy for her (chocolate éclairs and slipper socks figuring highly on most), and she should know after six decades’ experience. At least this year the birthday present was a resounding if brief success. Mother Mary has an imperious sense of noblesse oblige that makes her namesake, the wife of George V, seem reasonable. She is notoriously hard to please. One year, my wife’s sociopathic sister took the trouble to make her mother a bonnet in hand-spun felt for cold Cumbrian days. The Outlaw quickly relegated it to a cloth for her car windscreen.
Putting much thought into gifts is frankly futile. This year, Debs found a sparkly brooch in a Brive boutique for five euros. Though fearful that it would be rejected as a blatant fake, she and our daughter delivered it in person during a Mother and Child Reunion in September. The bargain brooch was a huge success. The best present her daughter had ever given her.
Said brooch was the talk of the nursing home, for a few days at least – until Mother Mary lost it somewhere in her room. As is her frequent wont. So assorted carers and cleaners were commanded to look for the missing brooch until Debs phoned the matron to reassure her that it was worth less than a packet of chocolate éclairs. When the search was called off, Mother Mary added another item to the daily list: would her daughter please phone the insurance company to find out if they would cover the loss of the brooch.
So anyway… I left the Good Wife to field the never-ending calls while I headed for England with our daughter. We left at an unspeakable hour for the 5.20am from Brive. All went well till Turenne Gare, where the barrier of the level crossing was down. We waited with the van and the lorry in front of us. And we waited. But the barrier stayed down. One of the drivers tried the emergency phone while the other attempted to lift the barrier. Still it stayed down. Panic set in. I turned off the main road to find our way by unlit narrow country lanes to wherever they might lead. Driving like a Finnish rally driver of yore, I somehow made it to Brive just as our train pulled in. Once the stress levels had sunk back below the danger zone, the Daughter and I settled back in opposite seats for the journey ahead. I felt her glare of disapproval as I buried my head in Mrs. Gaskell’s North And South. Funny, I fancied that I’d driven rather damn well.
However, she thawed by the time we reached London, and I was touched by her concern for her Old Man. I had to meet an expatriate Brazilian musician who goes by the name of MOMO. for an interview in the BFI’s café. Would I be OK walking from Waterloo to the British Film Institute? Should she accompany me and keep me on the straight and narrow? I confessed to having walked around London alone on many occasions; my life was hopefully not quite so near completion as she might fear.
The rally drive proved to be the worst part of the trip – along with the execrable weather. After a congenial session with MOMO., I caught a train to Dorset and stayed overnight with friends near Sherborne. They drove me to Lyme the next day and that evening Trevor and I took a walk along the promenade and down the venerable wind-lashed Cobb, while Our Mutual Friend, who has trouble with his legs, waited in the warm. We returned with a bag of shopping, drenched from head to foot. After a restorative supper, we watched the first of six episodes of the delightful and charming Leonard & Hungry Paul, which sustained us over the next three evenings. I even warmed to Julia Roberts’ incongruously American voice-over.
The next day, rather less torrential, we visited the Lyme museum, one of those delightful private institutions (whose one-time curator John Fowles ties with Mary Anning, the Victorian palaeontologist, as the town’s most famous resident) that warm the cockles of your heart long after the visit. Our Mutual Friend and I talked dogs with the woman on shop duty and he found her a photo of his beloved former pooch, a huge black Russian beast that looked exactly like a pantomime bear, so big that it would sit in a chair like a human.
Since the weather relented the next day, Trevor took his two nervous passengers to Exeter, our alma mater. Due to an urgent call of nature, I popped into Wetherspoon’s for the first time in my life and found it packed with old people. Another old friend of mine met us for lunch in the lee of the city’s ruined castle, where she and Trevor discovered their own mutuality: the same school in Ealing and even perhaps participation in a school play or two. After lunch, we drove around our old campus and reminisced like a trio of superannuated undergraduates.
Our Mutual Friend’s tale of Bob Marley took the biscuit. For much of my life, I’ve dined out on the fact that I saw Bob Marley & the Wailers live – at Exeter University, for God’s sake. How could that be? Well, our Social Secretary was a wheeler-dealer who managed to procure a whole welter of notable acts for campus concerts (including John Cale, the Kinks, Todd Rundgren and Chick Corea’s Return to Forever to name but four). To procure Bob’s services, he agreed to provide a weight of grass for the dressing room. Since OMF and the SS were friends and OMF had the temporary use of a car, he was inveigled into driving to a house of ill repute in London. On returning to his car with a big bag of ‘erb, OMF noticed a suitcase on top of his car with the word BOMB spelled out in decorative studs. Being a time of IRA activity in the capital and taking no chances, OMF phoned the police from the house of ill repute. The police duly arrived. OMF waited with his illicit goods at a safe distance from both house and car while they removed the suitcase and very gingerly opened it up… to find nothing but old clothes within. It was the work of some merry pranksters. Nevertheless, the law duly thanked OMF for his sense of social responsibility and sent him on his way. After returning the temporary car to his father, he procured a lift back to Exeter with his aunt and uncle, who were going his way.
Safely returned to college, OMF handed over the bag of grass that had been burning a hole in his pocket – to be thanked sincerely for his social irresponsibility, but neither rewarded by a cut nor invited to visit the Wailers and the iThrees in their dressing room. OMF contented himself with the chance to see them, presumably stoned out of their Rastafarian heads, deliver the kind of concert that rendered our student lives complete.
The following day’s torrential rains brought flooding to Wales and other places, but mercifully didn’t prevent me reaching my sister’s in Romsey and thence London. On Eurostar, in between deep dives into Mrs. Gaskell and The Birth of BeBop, I reflected on all the water that’s flown under the bridge since those heady days of youth. Had we been born little more than a century ago, we’d all three be six feet under now. I hope that we might have another chance to enact The Old Ones and crack the kind of puerile jokes more in keeping with The Young Ones, but you can’t count on anything once past A Certain Age. I’m lucky to have made it this far relatively unscathed and felt doubly lucky to be greeted by wife and dog at journey’s end.
I was tired out the next day by all the travel and the reading and a habit of waking up at French time, 5.30 each morning, during my absence. But the Good Wife offered me a slice of chocolate and hazelnut cake she’d made to go with my afternoon tisane. She doesn’t bake many, but it was the very best, most sumptuous cake I could have wished for. My life was complete.
