February: The Square Root of Purgatory

During the not-so-merry month of January I turned into a hermit crab: one of those solitary creatures that quietly goes on with its own business without fuss or distraction. David Attenborough would know whether this description applies to a hermit crab, but given its name and the habits of crabs, I reckon it probably does.

In my solitude… apart from listening to Duke Ellington, I’ve been able to get on while the Good Wife has been in England. She’s been working like the proverbial Trojan, tying up all the loose ends of her mother’s house sale and then helping Sampsondottir move down the Windrush line from Crystal Palace to Honor Oak, where we trust her life will be rendered a little easier. Why did the Trojans have a reputation for hard work, by the way? It was industrious Greek carpenters who had to hammer and saw night and day to make a wooden horse big enough in which to hide a small army. I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts… a crumb of A-level Latin that lodged in my cranium.

So yes, I’ve kept my head down and ploughed my lone furrow while I’ve been on my own: reading more books and listening to more music than I did as a student, making meals that last for three days so there’s more time for getting on, walking the dog twice a day, watching a film or two and finishing my chapter on the development of telly in the 1950s. Nevertheless, there comes a time in every hermit crab’s life when it has to emerge from its hiding place and merge with the mainstream. I did it twice in one day mid month and both times it led me to purgatory. Nothing too South Sudan, but on both occasions I wished I’d stayed in my lair.

It was a Saturday, a time when many a human bean shakes off the shackles of work to go shopping in town or go to a football match to yell blue murder at the referee. In my case, I had an invitation from His Worship the Mayor to go down to the Salle Mathieux to partake of a slice of galette du roi and drink a verre d’amitié. I had a sneaky suspicion that the gallette in question would not be the flaky-pastry-with-almond-paste variety because the commune would only have sufficient funds for the unappetising brioche variety, and the thought of drinking a cup on a Saturday afternoon with my fellow communards fills me with fear and loathing, but as a perennial outsider I thought it might be politic to show my face and glad-hand the mayor and his team of élus.

The invitation was for four o’clock. Not wishing to be too English about my punctuality, I figured that five past might be a suitable time. People are usually late in this neck of France. Not on this occasion, not when free food and drink are involved. I found the salle packed with natives, all hanging around in anticipation. Unable to face the prospect of shaking everyone’s hand while wondering whether to kiss or not to kiss, I did what I usually do and sidled over to a familiar face for some vacuous conversation that leaves all parties feeling awkward and embarrassed.

I reckoned on half an hour, an hour tops, and then back in good time for the football results, but we didn’t sit down at the tables until almost five. I stuck to Patrick, a near neighbour who’s a good sort, with a sense of humour, but there’s only so much you can say about your respective dogs. Then my heart sank. His Worship took the microphone. True to form, he rambled on for at least half an hour, introducing the various associations in the commune and handing the mike to a representative so that he or she could ramble on for a bit more. Following this, it was time to introduce all the newcomers to our rural idyll and hand the mike to them so that they, too, could ramble on a bit more. Fair play to the man, the gesture showed public spirit and a splash of emotional intelligence, but the football results were pressing and I wanted my customary bottle of beer and bowl of peanuts because late Saturday afternoon is one time in the week when you can act like a real man.

By the time the bottles and the galettes were placed before us like an act of feeding the five thousand, I felt so like a fish out of water that I poured myself half a beaker of Brittany cider and cut myself a slice of brioche without even asking. And, readers, it was every bit as bland as feared. Still, with a mouth full of cake, you don’t need to worry about conversational pleasantries. At last the time came to overcome my reluctance to draw attention to myself, say a few desultory farewells, shake the hand of his Worship and thank him for the invitation, and high-tail it out of there with a profound sense of relief. Hey ho, the communal life is clearly not for a hermit crab.

Back home, there was barely enough time to catch the classified results, rustle up a snack supper and leave Daphne with a chew and some encouraging words about not being too long, before I was off for a second dose of purgatory – like two spoonfuls of cod liver oil as a child. That evening, I was on cinema duty in Vayrac and I’d had a text to ask me to get there earlier than usual because they were anticipating a crowd… for Avatar 3. God help me.

Usually, my job is to stand at the door like a spare part, tear the tickets of the punters and wish them a cheery bon film. Not hard but kind of mortifying. This time, there was someone playing that vital role: a nice guy with a propensity to ‘swallow his words’, as they say here, which means that conversations are based on guesswork. It’s a recipe for non-sequiturs. My role… was to hand each punter with his or her very own pair of 3D glasses. If there’s anything worse than having to sit through Avatar 3, in French, it’s sitting through it in three dimensions. And if that weren’t bad enough, some people mistook me for someone who might know, and asked me whether they could wear the contraptions over their prescription glasses.

There was a 5-minute trial run after which anyone could return non-performing glasses for another pair. Mine were fine, so I was able finally to settle back in a chair to enjoy more than three hours of hell in 3D. It was like being dropped into one of those Roger Dean topographic album covers that he created for Yes and other such groups – only to discover that the blue people lived in a world even worse than our own. It was war, war and more war accompanied by the constant crescendos of a soundtrack that made sleep impossible. And just to put the old tin lid on it, without either French or English subtitles, I was totally lost. Yes, the 3D graphics were impressive, but you come to expect that in this age of computer-generated images. Personally, I’m still more impressed by the recreation of the Himalayas in the Pinewood studios for Powell and Pressburger’s 1947 film, Black Narcissus.

When the credits rolled, I was eager to fulfil the second part of my role: to open the doors and wish the punters a cheery bonsoir as they file away into the night. Daniel, the president of the society that operates the cinéma Uxello, reckoned that the film was maybe 20 minutes too long. I suggested that it was three hours too long. He regarded me wryly.

Two doses of purgatory in one day. Purgatory squared. I was far too late into bed and I let Daphne stay in recompense for my protracted absence. Normally, she jumps down off the bed when I put my book and glasses down and wanders off to her basket in the sitting room. I slept off my ordeal and she didn’t wake me till it was breakfast time. I made pancakes as compensation for the mental torture I endured for the common good.

One good thing came of it. Soon after, the association held their own gathering for members, featuring this time galette du roi as confectionery intended it. I still felt like a fish out of water, but there were a few people I knew and the conversation was less stilted. I told Evelyne, whose job it is to organise the staffing for each séance, a thankless task, that in future would she please consider me only for versions originales, with sub-titles for the hard of comprehending.

She apologised for allocating me to Avatar, as indeed she might have.

January: A Winter's Tale

At last, a real winter. It was even snowing here when I began this on Woden’s Day, the 7^th of yet another new year. We haven’t had snow in these parts for a few years. That’s the thing about climate change: you never know what to expect from one year to the next. From one day to the next, in fact.

Gisèle is delighted. She sells us eggs, butternut squash, potatoes full of untreated eyes and the best walnuts for miles around from her nearby barn. Bitter cold means death to the bugs and pests that make eyes in her spuds and generally make her market gardening problematic.

Unfortunately the big Yuletide chill didn’t come early enough for Daphne. A couple of days after Boxing Day she failed to greet me with her usual enthusiasm first thing in the morning. Her head hung low and she wouldn’t or couldn’t look at me. I wondered whether she’d had a bad reaction to the first of a new brand of chews the evening before, a present from her ‘godparents’, the Thompsons, on Christmas Day. Unable to eat her breakfast, I knew that something had to be seriously wrong. Daphne is the world’s greediest dog.  

On taking her to see Valérie at the vets’ in Martel, Sampsondottir and I learnt that Daphne had the pirose, as they seem to call the tick-bite disease in these parts. Despite the number of ticks we are forever removing, Daphne has never had it before – unlike her predecessor, Alfred Lord Sampson, who twice almost died from it – and we were beginning to think that she must have an in-built tolerance to the vile bloodsuckers. But no. Fortunately, we caught it early. Unfortunately, the injection of the antidote must be very painful. When wife and daughter took her back a couple of days later, they reported that they had never, ever seen an animal shake so much with fear.

Before the unwelcome drama, we’d enjoyed some beautiful ‘Family Walks’ (as our family-oriented daughter would surely capitalise them) including one from a nearby table d’oriéntation that offers the best view in these parts of the Dordogne way down below. It takes you as far as ‘the house on the hill’, as we know it: a house almost as big as a chateau that sits precariously on the very edge of the limestone cliff, overlooking a bend in the river where we go swimming in the summer. Many a time we’ve looked up at it and wondered how you get up close and personal. Now we know – and it was worth the wait.

The next day, if my journal serves me well, we were enshrouded in thick fog that didn’t lift till after lunch. The sun shone radiantly on the dwellers of the uplands. We’ve taken to walking backwards up our adjacent chemin rural. It was something I started as a lark, but I read subsequently that it was good for your back, legs and mental acuity. I don’t know if I’m any the wiser as a result, but it gave us a laugh and you don’t half feel it on your thighs by the time you reach the road at the top.

Anyway, on the way back from this particular walk, we stopped to marvel at the scenery at a point on the road up from Bonnard where hang-gliders have been known to leap into the Great Unknown. Looking down onto the plain beneath us, the landscape was cloaked in a winter-weight duvet of mist. A just-visible roof and conical tower made the Château de Blannard appear perched on the shore of some Alpine lake. I felt like that lone ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ by Caspar David Friedrich, staring out across nature’s ‘divine creation’, feeling blessed despite the minor irritations that I chose to live in the Land of the Gauls.

Today the snow lies hereabouts. It’s not exactly deep and crisp and even, but it’s incontrovertibly snow. Unfortunately, it arrived elsewhere in the land on Monday, when I took the Good Wife and our progeny to Limoges airport for their flight to Stansted. For once, I wasn’t fixed on catastrophes. The sky was so blue and so cloudless that I pictured an easy flight with birds’ eye views of the terrain below. But on the outskirts of the dreary city with little claim to fame other than porcelain, Tilley the Kid announced ‘Oh no!’ The flight had been put back from 4 till 8pm. And after that it all just got worse and worse.

Ryanair in its almighty commercial wisdom decided that the plane load of passengers should be transported by coach to Nantes. It took over an hour for said coaches to arrive and I knew that they would never make it for 8pm without the kind of driving associated with the Paris to Dakar rally. With a heavy heart I waited with Daphne till the pair of them squeezed onto one of the coaches; my poor innocent ‘girls’ boarding a magical mystery tour.

Back in the guilty comfort of a warm home, the texts arrived. They were stuck outside of Nantes on the motorway in a snowstorm. When they finally arrived at the airport, the flight was postponed till possibly the next day. No hotels, nowhere to sit and nothing to eat. Someone brought some blankets and bottles of water, but there weren’t enough to go round. My girls weren’t prepared to battle the hoards of cold, frustrated passengers and fortunately Tilley had travelled with the packet of grissini that Father Christmas left in her pillow case. Organic grissini. Santa is so very middle class.

Needless to say the chaos continued the next day. The flight was put back on several occasions and finally postponed till the following day. The girls managed to score a pain au chocolat to eat, but mercifully forewent a coffee, as several passengers subsequently reported food poisoning. From coffee!? They even managed to find a spot in an ‘e-conference room’ in which to sit and think nostalgically of home. ‘Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.’

Rather than wait for Ryanair to find them a hotel for the night, they managed to find one themselves in the city. They devoured some reasonably healthy Japanese fast food, slept a full and comfortable night and then ate a hearty breakfast. Ryanair has apparently agreed to pay reasonable expenses and graciously despatched tokens which they were unable to access on the app. Nor were they valid on a Ryanair flight. ‘Crasser and crasser, said Debo.’

Nevertheless, they got away early the next afternoon and arrived safely at London Stansted – even if they weren’t able to spend their tokens on the plane. We shall now see whether the company will reimburse them for their additional reasonable expenses. Perhaps it would all have been different if I’d pre-imagined all the catastrophes in my customary fashion. I blame myself.

Back home and culpable on the pretext of looking after the animals, my job is to keep the home fire burning. Thus far, with carefully selected ‘overnighters’ and a little early morning kindling I’ve kept it going without a break for at least a fortnight. It’s not that we rely entirely on it with under-floor heating, but that doesn’t reach the mezzanine level where I’m currently spending a lot of time researching the development of UK television for a chapter in an academic book about the impact of the Fifties on life as we once knew it.

Well, I once knew it – kind of. The research has taken me straight back to my early days in Woodside Park, a tree-lined suburb near the end of the Northern Line, watching programmes in black and white and 405 lines on our first family telly. The announcers still talked down at you with plums in their mouths, so Andy Pandy danced around with Teddy on highly visible strings to the tune of ‘Endy Pendy’s coming to play, la-la-la la la-la.’ I preferred ‘Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men’ with Shlobbalopp the tortoise and Little Weeed, and ‘Rag Tag and Bobtail’, a trio of animated animal glove-puppets who did only what they could in case anything too adventurous revealed the operators’ hands above the primitive cardboard scenery. Did I actually Watch With Mother, or did she park my sister and me in front of the set while she took a well-earned rest from her chores?

Being a serious little boy, even then, I insisted on staying up for the nightly current affairs programme hosted by Cliff Michelmore, Tonight. The Good Wife and I recently watched the team’s documentary about the Big Freeze of 1963. What it lacked in sophisticated graphics, it made up for in the clarity of the information. It was a good team: Cy Grant might sing a topical calypso, Fife Robertson would sport a bushy beard and a deerstalker hat and speak with an easily mimicked Scottish accent, the easily mimicked Alan Whicker was still perfecting his curious, slightly stilted manner of speech pre-Whicker’s World, and Derek Hart and Kenneth Allsopp added journalistic gravitas.

Fond memories. I don’t watch current affairs programmes in my dotage; I find them too upsetting. Walking the dog, feeding the fire and mounting tracks backwards tend to keep my mind from wandering into catastrophic scenarios. Pardon me if I get on with my research into a bygone age when apparently we never had it so good.