October comes, October goes/Whither, weather, no one knows…
It’s an old children’s rhyme that I just made up. I’m an old child and another year older this month. Nevertheless, I quite like October. There’s always that element of surprise. Very often it’s golden, occasionally it’s prematurely grim.
We agreed that we weren’t being premature in taking down our external hessian curtains at the beginning of the month. It’s still warm here, but the heat has largely dispersed now. It’s already the third autumn that we’ve taken down each curtain in turn, shaken off the shield bugs that seem to like to cling to the sackcloth, folded it carefully and put it back in sequence in its big plastic box, one for the front porch and one for the mezzanine balcony. We had them made by a young ‘seamster’ (interestingly, there’s not a special word for a ‘sewing man’) in Martel. Some of them are looking rather the worse for wear, having been blown about by frisky summer winds, whereupon they tend to catch on sharp splinters of wood and tear. We shall darn them together this winter, like a pair of old prisoners mending mail sacks.
They saved us a degree or maybe two during the worst of the summer heat waves, but not enough to stop the interior temperature rising to a thoroughly uncomfortable level. We’re looking around for further protection before next summer, due to be even worse thanks to the El Niño effect, damn its tropical eyes. Surprise, surprise, I’ve had no reply from his worship the mayor after I sent him an article (translated, too) about a French hotelier who brought the temperature inside his hostelry down by four or five degrees by painting the roof of the hotel white. Maybe the idea of terracotta tiles being whitened by a lime-wash is too much for his worship to countenance.
My friend Paul popped over to talk to me about solar panels while the girls were away in Cap Ferret and while he and his wife were staying in their now-second home near the airport. We’ve had a ceiling fan fitted now, as quiet as a thief in the night, but we recognise that we might on occasions need to call on some air-conditioning – powered by the sun. Neither of us likes air conditioning. Quite apart from the environmental aspect, the cooling effect is about as subtle as a supermarket’s refrigerated cabinet.
Paul was an electrician during the family’s tenure in France and he installed all the electrics in Camp Street, but he was driven to despair by the French system that turns the self-employed into pariahs. He couldn’t continue to pay the swingeing social charges that meant he had to work all hours just to keep from going under (as Grandmaster Flash intoned, uh-huh-huh-huh-huh). The family moved back to England, Paul now works in an advisory capacity for a company specialising in renewable energy and new technology. I know far more now about solar technology than I managed to glean from the French providers that pitched their ideas and inflated estimates in a way that always seems designed to bamboozle.
So that’s one more task to add to a growing list of things to do this winter. We want to add an extra layer of insulation in the mezzanine area (not built of straw bales) to stop it turning into an oven when the thermometer goes way up and the weather gets blistering hot. And there’s the back balcony, which I’ve just started to repaint after 22 years of full-frontal weather from the north-east. Wonderful to behold, we’ve just had our first serious rain for several weeks, but it has stopped me in my tracks since the eye-wateringly expensive linseed-based paint demands two full days’ drying time. Rain is forecast for the next 10 days, but so far we’ve had no more. These weather-forecasters have got a lot to answer for sometimes, which reminds me… Next Wednesday evening, we’re going to the local cinema to see the new film about the role the meteorologists played in the D-Day landings.
Yes, despite all these jobs, we do manage to get out and about from time to time. The other evening, during my tenure alone in charge of house and animals, I was officiating at the cinema with Francine, a fellow Dionysien(ne)s (as we denizens of St. Denis lès Martel are known), for a new French documentary on the pernicious influence of the Italian and now Russian mafias in American politics. The United States of Mafia was very good and very thorough and thoroughly depressing. I (re-)watched soon after a profile of one of my favourite musical mavericks, Robert Wyatt. As Robert said, roughly, ‘I can’t understand it. There are so many good, kind people out there in the world, yet we’re always governed by complete bastards.’ Since that evening at the cinema, I’ve been in a state of Wyatt-like despondency. There are some good people out there, but all that accumulated goodness counts for little in the face of the evil committed by the smaller number of complete bastards.
Still… there’s always the compensation of music. Whenever I stare too intently into the heart of darkness, I put on something by… well, Robert Wyatt and many another of his kidney, and I feel instantly better. The other evening, the Good Wife and I went to the Galérie Louie in nearby Strenquels for a concert. The gallery’s a converted barn just opposite the house where our friend Penny used to live. Her house and the barn were bought by an American psychiatrist from New York and his artist wife – and named after their pampered dog, Louie. Roger’s a lovely sociable chap who clearly thrives on bringing in outlying folk for exhibitions of art and the occasional music concert. On this particular evening, a duo called Baldango entertained a 100-strong throng, with a guest appearance by Seb Gutiez, son of another Paul, another friend whom everyone seems to know as the diminutive man who takes copious photos at parties and other events. While none of the three is well known, musically speaking, it demonstrated just how much talent there is outside the mainstream. Electrical Paul was driven to distraction by the French system, but at least it subsidises such troubadours as intermittents to continue ploughing their creative furrows.
Baldango will never be headline news. Indeed, there’s not much of that to tell you about – which kind of gives you hope, I suppose, that life may just go on under the seemingly inevitable right-wing regime from 2027 or when Russia invades the rest of Europe. In the wonderful world of dogs, Belle up the road, is pregnant again – by Ascot again. Our Dutch friends try to keep the two mighty Pyrenean mountain dogs apart when Belle is on heat, but Ascot apparently got in through a window and had his wicked way with her. I can’t help but think that it would be much more effective if they took one or both of them to the vet in Martel. Mind you, the pups last time fetched considerably more than our linseed-based paint cost, so…
Daphne the Terrierdor was fixed up after six months, but it was a terrible time of heat and raw flesh. We wondered what might have happened had she mated with some local Tom, Dick or Rover. Could we have sold her offspring as Terriermores, say, given social-media society’s thirst for new and exotic breeds? Even so, I suspect that people wouldn’t pay more for a scruffbag than for a litre tin of Swedish ‘wild sage’ linseed-oil-based paint.
One bit of hard news to impart is Mouchette’s demise. Mouchette was an old black mongrel who terrorised our Terrierdor. I think his nervous mistress might once have been scared of the ingratiating youthful version of our dog. Ever since then, Mouchette in protective mode would have a go at Daphne. It got to the point that she would stand stock-still at even a distant sight of her nemesis and refuse to move a step further, leading to all kinds of stratagems to avoid confrontation. Mouchette’s owners refused to believe that Daphne was terrified of their darling dog. Well, the darling dog is now six feet under, probably somewhere in their garden. Keep the dog far hence that’s foe to Daphne…
She still gets yapped at by Voyou the Pomeranian up the road and the feisty pair of Yorkshire terriers who come occasionally with their mistress to the little cabin hidden under the trees across the road, but Daphne keeps her composure and dismisses them with disdainful hauteur. Like us, she’s cooler now the worst of the weather is shifting to the southern hemisphere for the season. But the spectre of next summer looms large.
