The Killer Instinct

I felt for Sabine Lisicki yesterday at Wimbledon. So agonising was it to watch her agony that The Daughter went and cleaned the kitchen entirely of her own volition. There she was, that big blonde endearing German tennis girl, the nation’s new sweetheart, presented with a golden opportunity on a perfect summer’s afternoon to repay her watching parents for all the sacrifices they had made for their daughter in her youth… and she imploded.

Isn't she a sweetie?

Debs arrived half way through the second set after a busy morning in Brive. Chomping through an enormous sandwich that represented lunch, she surrogate-tapped for all she was worth for the poor suffering Aryan and briefly, miraculously, Sabine found her game and won three on the trot. But it was too little, too late. If the whole world had tapped together, we wouldn’t have created sufficient energy to stop Marion Bartoli, the delightful French eccentric, from fulfilling her imagined destiny.

I’ve been in love with Sabine Lisicki for a couple of years. Anyone who smiles as sincerely and as ingenuously as she does has got to be a genuinely nice girl. Fortunately, though, the cat-napping, cat-loving Bartoli – with her wry self-knowledge and endearing heft, a kind of Gallic personification of Betjeman’s Pam, Whizzing them over the net, full of the strength of five – is equally charming. I didn’t begrudge her for one moment her victory. She’d been here once before and wanted it more. She bounded off towards her box at the end like an ungainly teenager who has just won a school skipping contest.

Lisicki was the unanimous choice of the BBC pundits: after all, she had the big serve and the big shots, and she was riding the viewing public’s wave of gratitude for having eliminated the beastly Serena Williams. But they failed to take the mental game into account. Some are born with a killer instinct, some have it inculcated upon them and others wouldn’t recognise it if it passed them in the street. Debs wants to get in touch with Miss Lisicki to let her know how EFT (or Emotional Freedom Techniques) can help her conquer her nerves and give her a competitive edge. Dear Sabine, I watched with torment when your serve broke down and you cried as you looked in vain for somewhere to hide. I think I can help you… And why not? Look what the glacial Lendl has done for Murray.

I’m one whom killer instinct passed by. My sporting achievements were always tempered by a Lisicki-like failure to perform on the big stage. A surfeit of empathy doesn’t help. My natural instinct has always been to take my foot off the pedal rather than press home an advantage. Consequently, I’ve experienced that awful bowel-churning feeling that Sabine must have felt there on Centre Court, watched by millions: that feeling of wishing for some minor fracking-induced earthquake to create a chasm in the ground into which you can fall and curl up at the bottom in the foetal position.

When I found myself 5-1 up against Stuart Smith in the St. Polycarps Under-15 final, playing on the red clay of Finaghy, dressed in a lilac polo shirt handed down from a 2^nd cousin once or twice removed, a pair of yellow socks and my Slazenger Les Paul, I caught a faint whiff of victory and my head did the rest. Like Sabine Lisicki, I could find no hiding place as my game collapsed around my ankles like a pair of pants with perished elastic. It was mortifying. All you want to do is get it over with as quickly as possible.

It was one of the friendliest finals I’ve ever witnessed and it was lovely to see both contestants embrace so warmly at the end. But sportswomanship like this comes at a price. It was no contest and no spectacle. That would have demanded a fairer distribution of killer instinct. The day before, the metronomic Djokovic and big awkward Juan Martin Del Potro produced a match of such intensity and such indomitable passion that it left you as drained as the pair of them must have felt at the end of five sets.

A certain commitment to the cause

Still, yesterday I learned that the British and Irish Lions had conquered the mighty Wallabies in Australia. Whenever an Australian is beaten at any sport, I give thanks to the spirit in the sky, because it confirms that a killer instinct doesn’t always prevail. These guys, on both sides of the half-way line, are stark-staring mad. Not only prepared to kill, they are prepared to lay down their lives for team and country. They’ll throw themselves into a ruck without the slightest thought of concussion or paralysis. It does indeed make for a great spectacle, but I’m happier to let others die for the cause.

I glimpsed such madness as a teenager among my betters at school – and didn’t like what I saw. Which is why I was happy to shine in what was dismissively known as The Rabble. The trouble was, if you enjoyed yourself too much and shone too brightly among the ‘messers’ and the wasters, the teachers mistook you for someone with the necessary talent and attitude to grace one of the proper teams. On the few occasions when I played for a serious team, my self-belief would vanish like Sabine Lisicki’s and I’d drift around the field like a damp mist. Tackle, Sampson! The cry would go up. Er, no, thanks all the same. I don’t think I really want to risk injury…

And so ended my rugby career. Stillborn. I left it to the big boys and have continued to enjoy watching the likes of the Lions put their bodies on the line in the name of immortality. I’m very glad that the current crop made it without serious injury. They’ll be talked about by generations to come, which must be very nice, but I’m not sure if it’s really worth the sacrifices.

 
I like to think, as Marion Bartoli suggested, that Sabine’s opportunity will come again. We owe her big time, after all, for what she did to Serena Williams. With or without my wife’s assistance, maybe next time she’ll find her composure and play to her true ability. Jana Nvotna got her second bite of the Venus Rosewater dish after similarly falling apart. It would be so nice if Miss Lisicki acquires just enough, but not too much, killer instinct to follow suit. She’s such a sweetie.

A Pair O' Teeth

I’m writing under pressure. All week long and several times already today, the power has fluctuated, despite all the expensive equipment that EDF installed about a year ago to assure its supply to isolated rural enclaves like this one. It hasn’t made a blind bit of difference. And every time the power cuts off, even momentarily, the computer shuts down. Completely. I’ve given up counting the number of times I’ve adjusted the digital clock on the cooker. I know now which combination of buttons to hold down without having to find and consult the instructions.

Yes, it’s getting like Lagos at the moment. NEPA, the great drummer, Tony Allen, called one of his albums. It’s a Nigerian acronym for never expect power always. Of course it’s not as bad as it must be in that teeming hellish megalopolis, but it’s wearing enough to make you appreciate a stable supply. On Wednesday evening I was racing against time to edit a weighty document for my brother-in-law, knowing that at any minute the computer was likely to shut down without warning – and stay shut. I made it, just, only to find that the pouring rain and the distant rumble of thunder had cut the internet connection instead. So I had to put the file on a USB key, take it to my neighbours’ house and send it via their computer. Only 15 short years ago, I might have turned up with a floppy disk that wasn’t floppy.

So after such uncommon stress, I’m rather looking forward to a pair o’ teeth this evening, or a pair-o, as it’s known in the trade. As you may or may not know, I am the ‘guardian’ of a nearby chateau. I guard it roughly once a week with my fierce security dog, Alf, not so much to ward off intruders, but just to check that nothing untoward has happened since our last visit. Those offering a pair o’ teeth are the most recent co-proprietors of the co-propriety: a charming couple from Brittany, who take a touching pride in owning an apartment in a gen-u-ine chateau, even if it’s a 19^th century version rather than one of the stunning medieval numbers that you see dotted around the countryside here, either nestling among trees on the edge of a promontory or parked grandiosely by the river.

Just one of many

We have a friend, in fact, who guards one of the more grandiose riverside properties. It’s a great gig: the chateau is owned by the creator of the greatest American TV drama ever to centre around a family of Mafiosi based in New Jersey with theme music by the Alabama 3. He rarely puts in an appearance, so the guardienne and her partner have the run of the place all year long.

But that’s beside the point, other than the fact that we guardians have somehow managed to avoid exchanging pairs of teeth since we’ve known each other. Maybe it’s because neither of us is French. Because this is a social device that works best either between French people or among an international group that includes one or more French people. The British tend to invite each other for ‘drinks’, which can be intimidating for hosts like us with a meagre drinks cabinet. It might be Art Deco, but the contents bear little resemblance to the kind of fully equipped bar run by some compatriots.

One of the nice things about a pair o’ teeth is that it doesn’t demand mulitple choice. Late last autumn, for example, our new neighbours – not the ones to whom I go with a USB key in stormy weather – invited us to drink a pair-o, which comprised a bottle of champagne accompanied by some moreish ‘canopies’. Very nice, too. What’s more, the social device fulfilled its function admirably. They don’t generally go on for too long – round about the two-hour mark tends to be the maximum. Just enough time to sound each other out and gauge whether the chitter-chatter would stretch for a full dinner date. We decided not – and they probably came to the same conclusion. Nice enough people, but few interests in common.

Canopies a-go go

Pairs of teeth, though, as the term suggests, generally come in twos. Reciprocation is the name of the tradition. We haven’t yet honoured our neighbours with an invitation, leaving it early last November that we’d get together some sunny evening when we could sit outside and soak up the sounds of nature. We’re still waiting for some sun. If the rain stops some time in August, we can get the neighbours over, ply them with a limited amount of classy alcohol and some canopies of our own devising, chalk off the obligation and that will be that. Thereafter, we can wave cheerily or exchange the time of day should our paths cross, secure in the knowledge that formal social niceties have been met.

This evening, we’ll pick up our other neighbours (the ones to whom I go with a USB key…) and take them with us to the chateau. Olivier is the gardener there, but they haven’t yet met his wife, whereas Debs and I have had the honour of eating Breton crab at their dinner table. After sampling reciprocal British fare here, perhaps they decided it would be safer to revert to the shorter, sharper social soirée. I’m quite glad that there’ll be extra company; there’ll be less onus on us to ‘perform’. My wife has the gift of the gab, so I can normally sit back and let her air her impressive French, but our host has got it in his head that I’m a bit of a wag because I once impersonated the poshest co-proprietor speaking French with a British plum in his mouth. I feel the pressure to come up with a new stand-up routine in a tongue that doesn’t come naturally to me, so end up going home feeling exhausted.

I suspect that they’ve invited all four of us because they’re drumming up allies for the ongoing war of words and sour looks. They’re the only French residents in the chateau and certain others have taken exception to the fact that they let out their apartment during last summer, their first summer since buying the place, to holidaymakers to help pay for the (considerable) charges. Cold shoulders and legal letters have ensued.

Our neighbours will no doubt be supplied with the details. Which means that I’ll be able to sit back and observe. This is my favourite kind of pair of teeth, when I’m not being ‘interviewed’. When I don’t feel that I’ve been asked there for a splash of colour. And what brought you to France, Mr. Sampson? You can understand it; I would be just as inquisitive if the roles were reversed. It’s just that sometimes I feel like a performing seal…

 
The only other bad thing I can think of about a pair o’ teeth is that it’s customary to bring with us a peace offering, some little and rather useless objet d’art perhaps. I can usually rely on my wife to come up with something suitable, but she was too busy all day Saturday. I’m going to have to sort something out myself before it’s time to go. So I’ll shut down the computer before the weather and the unreliable power supply beats me to it.

Bladder, Bowel and Back-Pack

I rather wish he hadn’t, but our young Australian houseguest reminded me at dinner last night that the longest day is fast approaching. He comes from near Adelaide, where night falls comparatively early, even in the height of the summer. As part of his grand tour of Europe, he has spent a couple of days on Skye, where the sun barely sets.

June is racing by in a frenzy of activity. I’m ticking off landmarks with depressing rapidity. Last week, old friends from London flew into our nearby white-elephant airport and we watched Rafael Nadal stroll through another men’s final at Roland Garros. It doesn’t seem long ago that I was watching a profile of two young great white hopes, due to play each other in their first French Open: Nadal v Gasquet. We all know what happened to the boy from the Balearics with the winning smile and the humungous biceps. And some will know what happened to the mercurial Gasquet, who never quite got his act together – despite his imperious backhand.

The clay-court shenanigans are over for another year. Meanwhile, nearer to home, our magnificent front-of-house rose, which still stubbornly refuses to reach the first-floor balcony, is in full bloom. It was The Daughter’s hope that she would be back home for the summer to see it in its pomp, but already it’s heavy with flower and bowed from the onslaught of all this unseasonable rain. Despite all the banana skins I have laid by its stem and despite all the stones I have spread to stop Myrtle peeing in its vicinity, the leaves are beginning once more to turn from a succulent green to a black-spotted yellow.

All is not lost, though. The climbing rose that we planted out back a mere three years ago is invading the side terrace. Every time I open the door, its perfume pervades the air, alive with the activity of bees that have thus far managed to survive the poisons of Big Aggro-Chemical. With luck and a fair headwind, the kid should be back in time to catch its grace and majesty.

Attack of the 50ft climbing rose

Her first academic year, the year of torture, is over. For all the desperate telephone calls and the familiar congenital plaints of I am not worthy, nor gifted enough, she waltzed through her ‘jury’ and came out top of her class. So she has committed herself to textile design and booked another two years, which means that her father will have to roll up his sleeves and commit himself to Work with a serious capital W. She’s enjoying some time off for good behaviour at present in the form of a stay oop north with her grandma. She stopped off to see her friend Alice, who’s finishing her first year at Leeds University. Tilley had more fun in two days in that dour Yorkshire city than she did in a whole year of gay Paree. I just seem to get on so much more easily with English people, she told me apologetically on the phone.

So, very soon it will be Wimbledon. They’re already in training for grass at the Queen’s Club. Before that: cometh my father’s 86^th birthday. He survived his operation thanks to the miracles of modern-day keyhole surgery. When I went to see him the following day at Southampton General, he was sitting up in bed looking chipper and explaining the procedure to my brother-in-law. I can’t even attempt to explain how they send their cameras and surgical equipment up through an artery and then fiddle, cut and stitch – or whatever it is they do – any more than I can get my head around the concept of storing music and photographs on a chip the size of a sliver. Suffice to say that he told me before I left for home that he felt fine – apart from a bruised bladder and a blocked bowel.

Subsequently, his wound – tiny enough – has started to weep. It’s nothing serious, but it means that one of my already hard-pressed sisters has to take him regularly to the local health centre for a change of dressing. Which means leaving my mother alone while he’s gone. She did her fair share of weeping while I was serving my time at Punishment Park. It’s bizarre how dementia befuddles your thoughts. At times, I found her wandering lost and confused on the first-floor landing, wondering perhaps where her ‘brother’ was and not knowing her eldest son from Adam. At other times, we would sit and have the kind of easy, intimate, natural conversations that I’ve never before been able to have with her. Up until those surprising four days of close proximity, I’d never quite managed to equate the woman I once described in a moment of frustration and rage as a psychological terrorist with the charming, entertaining and humorous woman that both my wife and my best friend have described to me. It’s as if the turmoil in her head prevents her continuing the uneasy role of ‘mother’ and she has reverted to her core being.

In moments of terrible lucidity, she would look into my eyes and ask me, Am I going mad? or They’re not going to put me in the loony bin, are they? Like George Washington, I cannot tell a lie. Yet I found myself skirting the issue in the manner of a seasoned politician and dwelling on the facts of short-term memory loss. But you know that she knows. Several times she told me sincerely that she wanted to die and, after nearly 85 years on earth as a card-carrying timorous worry-wart, you can understand why she must feel worn out by the strain of it all. And if they – or we – put her in the loony bin, then she surely will die. My father told me on his hospital bed that he missed her. Realistically, though, he is ill equipped to cope with someone so unwittingly demanding. Inevitably, the family talk is not happy-talk. It’s all about carers and sheltered accommodation and mobilising resources to keep someone alive who would really much rather pop her clogs.

I’m back at home now and for the time being I can simulate my filial duty by Skype. The perils, irony and sadness of old age aren’t something that our young Australian back-packer needs to worry about. He’s flush with the energy and optimism of youth, and looking forward to getting back to his family and fiancé in South Australia after all the weeks of his Grand Tour of Europe. He’s due to marry his sweetheart named Tegan in October and is talking already of two children and playing with them in a garden while he’s still young enough.

Cade by rose

Cade is a devotee of Grand Designs, who’s bought the book, the t-shirt and the DVD. He’s watched our programme, he tells me, about 30 times and he has vague plans of building a home for his family-to-be in straw. So he contacted Debs by e-mail and asked cheekily if he could come and see us while flitting around Europe. We like cheeky individuals in this house, particularly with dollops of youthful charm. How can you refuse such chutzpah? Debs proposed a deal of dinner, bed and breakfast and a starter-pack tutorial for some nominal charge – and then departed for England. Dinah Washington would surely have been mad about the boy and I know that I’m even now far too fond of him to raise the matter of filthy lucre.

For one so young, he’s sorted his life out with enviable clarity. He’s already raised the money to buy two houses to let in the environs of Adelaide and already learned that time is more precious than money. On the back balcony over a protracted breakfast this morning, he sketched his plans to pay off the loans before term and start building the modest family home of his dreams with the profit.

I’ll take him down to the station, so he can catch his train to Paris and thence, early tomorrow morning (charmingly), to Luxembourg. I’m tickled pink because I’ve never met anyone in my life before who actually wanted to visit Luxembourg. I’ve made him promise to e-mail me his impressions of the principality.

 
In return, I’ll give him a signed copy of my book that was remaindered before it brought me my fortune, and forgive him the indiscretion of reminding me that the 21^st June is just around the corner.

Mission Of Mercy

‘Tis with a heavy heart that I sit down to write on this misty morning, for I must arise and go soon and go to the land of the Angles and the Saxons once more. Not that I have anything against my native land, but to get there involves travel – on which I am not keen – and this visit also involves babysitting my parents to give my beleaguered sister a break.

My father, soon (hopefully) to achieve the grand old age of 86, goes in to hospital in the middle of week for the operation that has been waiting for several years to happen. The surgeon will be operating to remove, or whatever it is they do these days, an aneurysm at the back of his neck. If you ask me what an aneurysm is, I’d simply have to quote the dictionary definition: the morbid dilation of an artery. Since that artery feeds his brain, they’ve been keeping a close watch on it and have decided that it’s now or never.

He has supposed to be getting himself in training for the op. This doesn’t mean visits to the local gym to lift weights and jog on a treadmill. No, the prescription simply means to put one foot in front of another for a period of, say, 20 minutes in order to convey himself, without electrical or mechanical assistance, around the block. Despite our nagging, he has managed to find various excuses for not doing as the medical experts suggest.

You see, by night my father is like any other rather noisy slumbering octogenarian, but by day he slips into his corduroy trousers and buttons up his shirt to become… The World’s Laziest Man! Somehow he has survived this long on earth without motivation, drive, desire, curiosity, hobbies or interests. To be fair, he likes music, but he doesn’t like anything that he hasn’t already liked for about the last 70 years. He is very good at sitting in chairs and he consumes copious amounts of Coronation Street. Give the man his due; he has taught himself to use a laptop, so he can order the weekly shop from Asda without having to get in the car, so he can check on the fortunes of Arsenal, and so he can chat to me on Skype. He can also create something not entirely unpalatable in the kitchen. His hand was forced, probably quite soon after he wed, on discovering that he had married… The World’s Worst Cook!

In less fragile times just a few short years ago

Every afternoon for the last 25 years or so, come rain or come shine, my father has retreated to his bed, where he stays for around three hours at a stretch. I am not accustomed to visiting him in his bed, because he is not to be disturbed. But this time, I shall have to get used to it. If, as is the trend, the NHS kicks him out of his hospital bed the day after his operation, I shall be there to bring him regular horribly stained cups of tea and sympathy.

My heart is particularly heavy because I shall be staying at my parents’ house rather than my sister’s for the first time in aeons. My mother is now in the first stages of Alzheimer’s and she gets seriously panicky if my father goes anywhere for even an hour. It’s a very rare occurrence, of course, but this time he’ll be gone for at least a couple of days. So I shall be there to quieten her.

My mother’s madness is a self-fulfilling prophecy. She has been in training for most of her life. If you children don’t behave, your mother will end up in Purdysburn was a regular refrain when my three siblings and I were growing up in Belfast. Purdysburn was the local ‘loony bin’: a big Victorian building set back behind a perimeter wall that kept out curious children. During holidays in Bath at our maternal grandparents’ house, our mother would throw periodic wobblies and threaten to throw herself into the Kennet and Avon canal. We took it with a pinch of salt, but our grandmother would be very disconcerted and spend days ruminating about what it was she must have said. 

The thing is, though, we were remarkably well-behaved children – with the possible exception of my younger brother. He was our mother’s shoo-shoo, probably because he was and is so like our father, and he could get away with murder. Our mother’s withering looks or savage assaults with a rolled-up House & Garden magazine meant nothing to him. While my father went out to simulate work at Tilley Lamps, the family firm, my mother would shut herself in her bedroom to hide from her children and paint pictures of Belfast street scenes or hammer out novels on a portable typewriter. She would read portions of them to her disinterested offspring, but would never send them off to a publisher. She lacked all necessary self-belief.

Once as a bolshy teenager, when my mother complained of how weary she was, I had the temerity to suggest that she didn’t actually do anything that she didn’t like doing. If there were jobs to be done, they were generally done by her children (with the possibly exception of my brother, due to his ability to get away with homicide). This was not a diplomatic move on my part. The maternal looks and barbs grew ever more withering for at least a week.

Looking less beleaguered

We lived, therefore, in a kind of tree-lined genteel squalor. But it’s nothing to the squalor that my parents live in now. My sister has been in on two occasions with a cleaner-friend of hers. With a packet of disposable gloves and probably the kind of double-nosed gas marks that Walt and Jessie wear when they’re cooking up crystal meth in Breaking Bad, they’ve blitzed the place – partly for my benefit. There’s still a way to go, apparently, but at least it’s no longer like one of these freakish places you see on Channel 4 reality programmes. Britain’s Most Unsanitary Octogenarians!

So thanks to their efforts, I’m not dreading the visit in terms of my physical comfort or personal hygiene. It’s more the prospect of what I’ll find when I get there. My mother has become alarmingly frail, it would seem. Withering in another sense of the word. At least, madness has made her as gentle as a lamb. All she needs is some food that won’t trouble her intolerance to gluten and plenty of cuddles. It’ll be like cuddling a sparrow, but otherwise shouldn’t be too difficult.

My sister has asked me if I could bring something with me to aid our father’s recovery. Since he doesn’t read and doesn’t listen to music that he doesn’t know, I think sleep will be the best bet. He’s very good at that. If I get any time off for good behaviour, I’ll hunt down CDs in the charity shops of Romsey and script a few e-learning screens on the laptop that I’ll have to take with me in the one bag I'm allowed by the generous people at Ryan Air. In any case, I’ll let you know how it goes.

I shall arise and go now…

Pleasing The Punters

We’re due to go to a rockabilly festival this weekend in the little town of Alassac, north of Brive, where we bought some bathroom fittings for our first house in France many moons ago and had our first run-in with a shop assistant over the vexed issue of customer service.

It’s not so much a festival, in the Isle of Wight sense of the word, more an early animation d’été: a summer spectacle designed by an enterprising commune to pull in a few tourists. Only a little one – in the vanguard of the big ones that turn July and August into a festive blow-out. Neither of us are great fans of rockabilly, which treads the dangerous demilitarised zone between rock ‘n’ roll and country & western (with all them good old boys in pick-up trucks and their big-haired cow-eyed gals singing about affairs of the heart). However, our friends, the Three Steves, are playing there and they play a good mix of rockabilly, rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm & blues.

I forget what they call themselves – something like the Head Honchos or Rancho Notorious, or… something actually not very like that at all. So we think of them as three guys named Steve: American Steve, who slaps a mean double bass and tries out the beautiful vintage guitars he imports from the States; Steve Jay, a professional musician imported from Malvern, who lays down a rock-solid beat on drums and plays keyboards when called upon at parties and more intimate gigs; and Steve Michaels, who plays a beautiful Fender Stratocaster and shares my penchant for such lesser known R&B minstrels of the 1950s as Roy Brown, Wynonie Harris and Bull Moose Jackson (who famously sung about his big ten-inch… record of the blues).

Rockabilly and music of that kidney seems to be quite popular in these parts. There’s an annual C&W festival at Gramat, the capital of the limestone causse, which probably attracts the folk who drive tractors and distil their own eau de vie from pears or plums. Rockabilly gives couples the opportunity to dance le rock, which is a watered-down, rather polite and strangely charming version of Lindy-hopping. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the 90%-proof version – you can catch a Hollywood-friendly genre in the film, Hellzapoppin’! – but it was one of the wonders of the mid-20^th century world. Couples, mainly black and quite lithe, would throw each other over their backs and through their legs and cavort like human dodgems ostensibly without permanent damage. In le rock, Monsieur et Madame hold each other at arms’ length and proceed to do a fairly gentle push-and-pull roughly in time to the music. It’s all very civilised. 

Anyway, the appalling weather has hung a big question mark over the weekend. It was the talk of the town at the market on Saturday morning. A mere ten degrees, the egg-man pointed out. Old man Thomas suggested that Friday’s brief respite from the rain represented our summer and it will soon be winter again. They say it’s due to the melting polar ice cap. I prefer to think of it as Mother Nature’s vain attempt to try to correct the imbalance and top up the water table before the apocalypse really kicks in.

Whatever. It certainly won’t please the punters. We have now entered the time of the season when pleasing the punters becomes paramount. The first of the season arrived at a house very near to this cinema this weekend. As always, it was a last-minute booking, which means that everyone stops doing what they’re doing in order to mount a tireless clean-up operation. When the news broke, I was trying to get my head around an incredibly opaque and turgid official document in order to extract the salient points and dress them up in the kind of transparent, engaging and exciting fashion that every modern e-learner demands of their on-line training. Already battling against a tight deadline, I had to drop everything to mobilise the staff (notoriously hard to get these days, as you know). On Friday I was helping the cleaner inside the house with the beds and the windows. The next day I was helping the pool man pull back the winter cover in the unlikely event of any sunshine warm enough to entice the punters into the water. And re-cleaning the windows with a product from Intermarché that doesn’t smear the glass. Blimey missus, you should see what I should see when I’m cleaning windees!

Later in the day, I returned to the house with my best obsequious face on to meet and greet the first of the punters. I showed them what’s what and pointed out all the special features laid on by the thoughtful owners for their delectation – the set of boules, the library of free DVDs from Sunday newspapers, the better-than-usual range of discarded books, the array of parasols, the solar-powered twinkling lights around the pool to turn each evening into a romantic adventure, the travel cot for parking babies under the shade of the spreading oak trees while the adults play ping-pong, the welcome pack (which has become a little less welcoming this year due to the stealthy creep of inflation and the rigours of the Great Recession) and so on. All in a patent attempt to compensate for the lack of the one special feature that every punter wants and every owner cannot guarantee: good weather.

Over the last few years, I have become so accustomed to bending over backwards that I might have embarked on a new career as The Amazing Rubber Man if the stress of it all and the fear of appliances breaking down and the concomitant bad marks and/or unfavourable comments in the visitors’ book didn’t keep my body quite so rigid.

They asked me if the pool were heated. I touched my forelock and genuflected in the manner of a messenger delivering the news unto Caesar that his armies had been routed by the Visigoths. But maybe the owners will consider it for the future… Expectations seem to have risen in line with the innovations of the digital age. Once, a DVD player would have been a big deal. Then the telly had to be linked to a satellite system. Now a lack of wi-fi in every room triggers a teenage glower. Soon there’ll be a groundswell of opinion to suggest that heating the obligatory pool should be standard. 

It doesn’t have to be thus. My friends Stuart and Gabrielle have done quite nicely, thank you, with their Brittany Country Gite linked to their permaculture lifestyle in the Breton countryside. Holidaymakers can hug the woolly black Ouessant sheep or pet the personable pigs instead of lazing by a pool. 

They're black, cuddly and adorable!

 
You can generally tell what people want by their car. The current punters drive an Audi. I’ve got nothing intrinsically against Audis, and they’re nice polite middle-class people from Middle England. But Audis, BMWs and the like make me nervous. These Audinistae have got a sweet little 15-month old daughter who’s into everything, so it’s not going to be a relaxing holiday if the weather keeps them inside all week long. I didn’t suggest the rockabilly festival, but maybe I could help the situation by lending them my impenetrable document. A few sentences of all that bureaucratic guff would lull the child to sleep and give the parents some time to enjoy a few discarded novels.

Strawberry Fields

Up river in Beaulieu this weekend, they’re celebrating the annual strawberry festival. You’d never know it; the weather’s currently more in keeping with root vegetables. That won’t deter the crowds. It’s one of those events that features a superabundance of food: in this case, a flan big enough to feed the five thousand.

Please, sir. Can I have some more?

This makes it roughly the 18^th time we’ve managed to miss the festivities. It’s not that I’ve got anything against strawberries – other than that tasteless variety they grow under plastic in Spain to sell under plastic in supermarkets. Quite the contrary. I just have a horror of any kind of seething mass of humanity, whether congregating to sample this year’s harvest or, as they do in Lewes each November, to light fireworks in the streets and cheer on men mad enough to rush about with burning barrels of pitch on their back. Ever since the last of those particular spectacles I witnessed as a student in Brighton, I’ve preferred to stay far from the madding crowd.

It was our recent visitor – my wife’s friend and EFT mentor – who inadvertently reminded me of another reason for spurning the strawberry festival. Gwyneth was telling me about her subscription to eMusic and showing me some of the stuff she has downloaded onto her iPhone. I happened to notice some Van der Graaf Generator tracks. It turned out that we share a love of that ponderous band, whose gloomy albums came out in the early ‘70s on the Famous Charisma Label. A thinking person’s Led Zeppelin, she described them. Music for self-harm, I would prefer.

‘Love’ is perhaps too strong a word in my case. I managed to kick the habit when I grew out of my anguished teenage phase, but kept their albums as some kind of mementos mori. At the time, though, I was such a fan that, in the absence of a lyric sheet with my copy of Pawn Hearts, I borrowed a friend’s and painstakingly transcribed in tiny hand all of Pete Hammill’s (many, many) words onto the inner sleeve. 

What, pray, has this got to do with strawberries? There is a connection. It’s to do with a group of intrepid sixth formers who, for two summers, took the overnight boat from Belfast to Liverpool and thence, via trans-Pennine train, to an ex-POW camp near a small town called March in the Fens. The landscape was as flat as it is around Chartres in northern France, and on certain fine summer’s days you could see the spire of Ely cathedral in the distance.

Riot in Cell Block #9

 

It was a camp called Friday Bridge and we would sleep in the big Nissen huts that used to house the Italian prisoners of World War 2. Imagine, a dormitory full of teenage boys! We were there to pick strawberries and – in the management’s hope, I guess – spend the results of our back-breaking piece work in the communal bar, where we Belfast boys would drink a foul brew called barley wine and sing impolite rugby songs. Fortunately, I was more motivated then – as now – by an insatiable appetite for music. Faced with a choice between barley wine and the LPs I could buy when I got to London, well… it was no contest.

Inevitably, there were drunken shenanigans. There was one night… Maybe it was the conclusion to the day when a crowd of inmates gathered around an open window to watch, on a television within, David Bowie perform ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops – in bright orange hair, knee-length boots and a quilted jump suit. I went to bed reasonably early to get a good night’s sleep in preparation for another day’s hard slog in the strawberry fields, only to be woken up by Stinker McCallum and a group of drunken cronies, insisting that I get out of my lazy bed to sing ‘The Sash my father wore’ with them. I was tired and not sufficiently sectarian to know the lyrics of the Orangemen’s battle cry, so I told Stinker to leave me to sleep in two words of one syllable. It was not the most diplomatic way to handle the situation. Stinker started hitting me; I hid under the bedclothes; and a new friend of ours from Manchester jumped out of his bed to fight the good fight of the dormant. I can’t remember how it ended. I suspect I still sat beside Stinker the following term in A-level English.

The work was grim and poorly paid: the kind that these days might be carried out by gangs of illegal immigrants. Weekly work rotas would go up on the notice board at the weekend and you’d congregate early each morning, waiting for a ride on a flat-bed truck or a tractor trailer to Farmer This or That’s endless fields. The lucky ones might be allocated to the canning factories or to the potato sheds, where you would stand all day at a conveyor belt removing stones and clods of mud from the procession of spuds that passed by en route for the sacks. I did that once. Every time I closed my eyes for the next 24 hours or so, I saw potatoes dancing about inside my head. 

We usually got there several hours after the gypsies, who started around six, worked at a Formula 1 speed and then packed it in at lunchtime. You’d take your buckets, wander off to the serried rows of soft fruit, get down on your hunkers and then shuffle off towards the horizon like a toddler with a full nappy. Eating the occasional pesticide-enriched strawberry or periodically taking a full bucket off to get weighed and emptied punctuated the boredom. At the end of the day, you’d exchange your tokens for real money – to be spent, by the diehard boozers, on barley wine.

Second time around, all the xxxx beds ended inevitably in tears. On the last night, things got out of hand and all the beds in our particular punishment block found their way outside. The head honcho turned up with some security muscle and ordered the boys from Belfast off the premises. As part of a small group, pretending not to be scared by the shrieks of the animal kingdom on that pitch-black night, I remember lugging my heavy case across fields and along interminable roads as far as March railway station.

I think I travelled to London with Billy Ellison, a sensitive ‘yoot’, who mumbled almost inaudibly and parted his long hair when it flopped in front of his face, like someone opening curtains. A year above me, he would later go off to Cambridge, only to be last seen begging on the streets of Belfast. We travelled by train and then by bus. When it stopped for 10 minutes or so at Peterborough coach station, I nipped into a record store to buy a copy of Pete Hammill’s hot new solo album, Fool’s Mate. It was a kind of rapid aperitif to a lazy afternoon with headphones on a floor cushion at the first Virgin Record Store in London, where I spent my hard-earned lucre on things like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and Pharoah Sanders’ Deaf Dumb Blind, my first jazz record. 

So you see, much as I enjoy eating the local strawberries that are now beginning to appear at Martel market, the memory of the hard labour involved in picking them has given me another compelling reason for avoiding the annual fruit fare in Beaulieu.

As for Van der Graaf Generator, Gwyneth told me that – like so many blasts from the past – they got back together again, went on the road and produced a live album or two of golden greats. I’ll give them a miss.

Desert Island Day

Made it Ma, top of the world! The James Cagney character then blew himself up at the top of a water tower to exit with style in an apocalyptic explosion. My own idea of making it, Ma, is rather less spectacular, but equally far-fetched: to receive a phone call from the BBC, requesting my presence on Desert Island Discs.

Being a compulsive list-maker, I’ve never had any trouble coming up with Top 10 pieces of music, books, films, paintings, finest football midfield players or whatever. Tell me about your fifth selection then, Mr. Sampson. Well, Roy, it’s a classic example of a memorably melodic three-minute pop song: ‘I Saw The Light’ by Todd Rundgren. (I only quote this particular choice because I was prompted last week by The Guardian home page to watch a video on You Tube of a slightly corpulent Todd performing a new version of his song with a slightly corpulent Daryl Hall and other friends at his Hawaii home.)

And so I wouldn’t have any difficulty in pinpointing my Desert Island Day, the best day of my life. As a young kid, it might have been the day at the end of Primary 7 when I finally beat Albert Jordan to the coveted First Boy prize. That kind of thing was important to me in those days. I was quite competitive then.

Albert Jordan was the ground-keeper’s only child. He lived in a house that looked like it was made of marzipan, about 25 yards from the school itself. Our first house in Belfast backed onto the playing fields. We kids dug a hole underneath the railings, so we could slip underneath and play in the grounds. During the summer holidays, I would slip through the hole – which his father would keep filling up with stones – to play tennis or two-man cricket with Albert. My friend was a talented southpaw and I could never beat him at tennis or bowl him out at cricket.

So it was wonderful to get that First Boy prize after several years of trying. Somewhere among my memorabilia is a fading black-and-white photograph from the Belfast Telegraph of me, grinning like a loon, sandwiched between Anne Kissock and Jane Rutherford, the object of my young heart’s desire. We were all supposedly pouring over my prize: a history book written by Winston Churchill. My glory, though, was tempered by the fact that the journalist (as usual) got a salient detail wrong. The paper printed that we were pupils from P5. I’m not 9; I’m 11, for God’s sake!

Still, it was a good day. But not the best. I know which day I should choose. It was the day our daughter was safely delivered into this world. I’d long muttered darkly that if it were a boy, I’d leave him as the Spartans used to do on some bare, craggy mountainside – to see whether he had what it took to survive to manhood. So I was greatly affected by the sight of what the consultant referred to as a healthy wee gurrell.   

In truth, though, I was too agitated fully to revel in the moment. It wasn’t so much the matter of child’s sex, as the fact that she was delivered by caesarean section and I was perturbed at my wife’s bedside by all the antibiotics they were drip-feeding into her (the mother’s) system. At that point in both our lives, we were a little obsessed by the health of our immune systems, and so I was concerned that the antibiotics would undo all the results of following the Fit For Life diet, a book first introduced to me by James Moody, the great American tenor saxophonist, at a concert on the Brighton seafront, a day or two after the hurricane of 1987.

So not that particular blessed day. No, pop-pickers, number-one-it’s-Top-of-the-Pops occurred 23 years ago today, the 5^th May. It was the day, not unlike today in fact – a warm early summer’s day that unravelled under a limpid un-Sheffield-like blue sky – when I married my wife in Bakewell Registry Office, Derbyshire.

The weeks before had been pretty stressful, organising the catering, the party (in the church hall at Tideswell, a delightful village in the Peak District) and accommodation for family and friends. We’d almost agreed to call the whole thing off. In the time-honoured fashion, we separated the evening before the event. While I was enjoying in our terraced house the company of my best man and his wife, who had flown over from New York, my estranged wife was holding court in her mother’s temporary lodgings in Tideswell – and resisting, in fact, her mother’s last-minute attempts to warn her daughter off tying the knot to a man with few prospects and suspect moral character. Her father, in his irascible wisdom, had stayed at home as if to underline the words of a Gerry Rafferty song: Her father didn’t like me, anyway.

We met up the next morning down by the river in Bakewell, surrounded by a gaggle of family, friends and local ducks. My peerless bride arrived in her open-top bottle-green Beetle, which she and her best woman, Vicky, had cleaned and festooned that morning. It was the first time that I’d seen the mustard coloured trouser suit of which her mother so strongly disapproved. Vicky had hennaed her hair a dramatic shade of red that bled onto her outfit. Together, the pair of them set the tone for a wedding that the registrar would describe as very, em… modern.

Surrounded by friends and family and relieved of the responsibilities of organisation, our mutual joy was so unconfined that the registrar had to demand a little decorum and attention half way through the service. After the handful of unofficial photographers had snapped us in groups great and small among the roses of the public gardens by the roundabout, we de-camped to the church hall in Tideswell, which the vicar had had painted specially for us. Presumably this cost rather more than the £15 we had paid him to hire the place for two days. 

We ate a sumptuous meal prepared by the two charming male friends of my boss at the time, who looked a little like a diminutive version of Freddy Mercury. My mother and mother-in-law complained conspiratorially about the background music I’d prepared for the occasion and my best man let slip a four-letter word within earshot of my white-haired grandfather at the conclusion of the speech he reckoned he’d screwed up. In the absence of her irascible father, the bride was given away by her avuncular friend, Graham, whose speech was as funny as his appearance at a party a year or so later as a worryingly convincing Dusty Springfield.

The parents and everyone else over a ‘certain age’ disappeared for the party that evening in the same village hall and we danced until the wee small hours. Anyone still in the area met up late the following morning for an Indian lunch at the restaurant across the street where we lived. Debs and I then took off for our honeymoon in the house in the Corrèze we’d bought the year before, to be followed by my brother and his girlfriend. Being of a more practical nature than I, my kid brother – a plumber then and now in Guildford – was going to look at our 17^th century folly and diagnose whether anything could be done with it.

And did we have any inkling at the time that, 23 years further down the route nationale of time, we would be living within straw walls an hour’s drive from our nuptial destination? Reader, we did not. I was pretty damn sure, however, that 23 years later I would still be looking back with a broad smile on the day that I would select without hesitation to relive time and time again on my desert island.