Suits You, Sir

David 'Wide-Boy' Byrne

There are three suits in my bedroom wardrobe: there’s my David Byrne suit with the loud check and improbable shoulders that I last wore for my 50^th birthday party; there’s a beautiful oatmeal coloured woollen suit that I bought for 50 quid in a sale at Reiss in Covent Garden, which I haven’t worn since moving to France; and there’s my linen wedding day suit, another 50 quid Reiss sale job, whose jacket was purloined one morning in our old house when our very young child dressed up as Monsieur Petanque, a French rustic character she created out of the blue one memorable morning. I didn’t laugh quite so much when I discovered that she’d torn off a button, but I’ve forgiven her over time – even though I’ve failed to track down a replacement.

Periodically I look at my suits and maybe even touch them with a certain sense of nostalgia. Sensible people, like my wife, would have got sent them to the Croix Rouge by now, but I like to think that one day they will serve a purpose. I’ve already made a pact with my friend Dan that we will become dandies together in our dotage. Regardez! C’est Messieurs Sampson et Courtice, le Beau Brummel et le Beau Nash du Lot.

A dash of finery

I talk of suits this morning because I finally watched over the weekend the DVD bought in the July sales of Procol Harum live at the Union Chapel, Islington in 2004. I’ve long had a very soft spot for the finest of Essex. Briefly, during a misguided period as a schoolboy when my best mate and I believed that we were too cool for 7” singles, I perceived Procol Harum as a singles band and therefore rejected them a un-hip. But a long-haired ‘head’ at the Fridaybridge agricultural camp in the Fenlands waxed lyrical one summer about ‘the Procols’ to anyone prepared to listen. Prepared, I spent some of my hard-earned money on a couple of ‘two-fer’ albums of theirs on the Fly label.

It was a brilliant concert, even if Matthew Fisher the organist looked like a Fisher out of water, re-united with Gary Brooker, whom he would sue unsuccessfully a little later for a share of the considerable ‘Whiter Shade Of Pale’ royalties. Gary Brooker has a holiday home in the Lot and I caught him one memorable evening in Cahors, turning up as a special guest with Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings. It seems, though, that I missed him this summer, playing in concert with Andy Fairweather-Low.

An underrated Procol classic

Anyway, Geoff Whitehorn, the guitarist manfully filling Robin Trower’s considerable shoes, was sporting a T-shirt bearing the legend: Success is never having to wear a suit. I thought that was splendid. Enough to persuade me to overlook his unfortunate mullet hairdo and the Adidas sweat bands on his wrists.

It has enabled me to look differently at my underemployed suits. Maybe they can serve as a tangible vindication of the life of a countryman that I chose, quite against type, 18 years ago this September. Last time I was in London, I stayed with my most conventionally successful friend, who sold his shares in a PR firm and invested his money shrewdly. When we parted on the Saturday morning, he was bound for Craven Cottage, where he acts as a guide around the stadium of his beloved Fulham. He wore a beautiful Georgio Armani suit for the occasion and I watched him ride off, somewhat incongruously, on his scooter to negotiate the traffic. He’s in a state of semi-retirement now, but that immaculate suit will always serve as a symbol of his own brand of success.

Last week I had a visit from a young man who, like my friend on the scooter, is a politics graduate. But he has just spent the last five years in the Foreign Legion. As a reader, like many boys of my age, of C.P. Wren’s Beau Geste, I was intrigued. So while Tom quizzed me about the ins and outs of building in straw, I grilled him about his experience in the Legion. It seems to bear little resemblance to the stereotypical images of camels and crenellated forts in the middle of the desert. In fact, he spent a lot of time in and around the Lot – hence his interest in buying a land here on which to build a house of straw.

At a cinema in the Lot very near you

I’d forgotten to mention in my reply to his e-mail that I have resorted to asking visitors to buy a copy of my last remaindered book – to help me get rid of the box full that I foolishly bought with my author’s discount. While wondering how I would broach the subject, my charming and appreciative visitor produced a nice bottle of Cahors wine, which he’d thoughtfully brought as a peace offering. In the end I gave him a copy, happy to help out a fellow traveller on the road peopled with unsuited pilgrims.

Ironically, during my proper career, I never reached the dizzy upper echelons of the Civil Surface where suits are de rigueur. The few that I’ve owned in my life have been more fashion statements than uniform. My only realistic hope of wearing one here in my adopted country would seem to be at a restaurant. However, since we have more or less given up the hope of finding an establishment that serves up decent vegetarian food that hasn’t been whipped into a froth and wiped across a plate as a streak of edible colour, even that is looking increasingly unlikely.

Hey ho, then. It’s a countryman’s life for me. For now, my three suits will remain as unworn objects of desire for as long as the little pieces of cedar can fend off the moths. One thing’s for sure (now that the accursed hunting season is upon us once more): you’ll never catch me in the countryman’s olive-coloured uniform that goes with the peaked cap and rifle. If and when I sport a suit in my dotage, perhaps I shall take a cane on my walks with canine companion and with it I can fence off these menacing predators of our wildlife. A pox be upon you and your family, sir! Be gone in your 4x4 and never again darken these wooded paths! For I am Beau Sampson, defender of the Animal Kingdom!

Even hunters wouldn’t dare mess with a be-suited expatriate octogenarian.

Life Out Of Balance

Towards the end of a difficult stay in the UK, I had a Koyaanisqatsi moment on the motorway. You know: that film of time-lapse photography produced by Francis Ford Coppolla, depicting a world alarmingly out of balance.

Crosstown traffic

Maybe it was the cumulative effect of following Jane Campion’s bleaker-than-bleak thriller, Top Of The Lake. Nothing I’ve seen before has depicted quite so relentlessly mankind’s propensity to despoil paradise.

More likely, though, it was our family ‘holiday’. A long week of day returns to Southampton General hospital, a city within a city full of sound and furious activity signifying a collective battle against insurmountable odds. For all the laudable attempts of the National Health Service to promote the benefits of a healthy lifestyle, the forecourt was always crowded with patients wired up to portable life-support systems, nipping outside for a crafty fag. And there’s a Burger King in the ground floor ‘shopping mall’ to cater for visitors who get peckish at the bedside of their loved ones.

My mother has been inside this centre of industry for over six weeks now. My two sisters have been taking turns to bring our father in for three-hour visiting vigils. My brother, it seems, ‘can’t cope with hospitals’. Until recently, our mam was in one of the geriatric wards, quite happy in a way, sandwiched between a woman who berates the hard-pressed catering staff for bringing her food that she denies ordering, and a woman who has been plugged into a machine since a heart attack failed to carry her off to a better place.

Every afternoon, this woman’s daughter would sit by her bedside, holding the old woman’s hand while she punctuated her big sleep with groans that suggested life (of sorts). One afternoon, my wife placed an empathetic hand on her shoulder and gave her a naturopathic look – whereupon the poor woman burst into tears. She has been coming every afternoon since the beginning of June, with no real hope, but a strong sense of love and filial duty. Three times a day, a catering assistant brings food prepared in the bowels of the building. Three times a day, the untouched food is presumably scraped into a black bin bag. I calculated that if the wasted food from every hospital in the land were collected each day, it would feed the entire population of Scunthorpe. No wonder Britain’s national debt leads the world.  

Anyway, my mother was doing quite nicely thank you. Thanks to the miracles of allopathic medicine, she was prevented from slipping quietly away via the back door. They regulated her sodium level, reduced all the excess fluid that her failing heart couldn’t pump away and gave her the liquid nourishment that she was refusing to take in solid form. Visiting time was a matter of holding her hand, exchanging smiles and skirting the issue of what happens next.

But then on Sunday night it all went pear-shaped. She got out of her bed in the middle of the night – a bed which surely should have been barred like a baby’s cot – and fell in a crumpled heap. She broke her hip. Thereafter, the holiday turned into a trip to Dante’s Inferno. It was the sudden silent and agonised facial contortions reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ that were the hardest to bear. Trying to impress upon someone the need to keep still is futile in the face of short-term memory loss.

View from a bridge

Perhaps fearful of American-style litigation, doctors and nurses clustered at her bedside. A huge bumbling surgeon called Freddy from somewhere like Slovakia, whom I had surely seen before in a Mel Brooks film, turned up to deliver a Ladybird guide to hip operations. 

The next day, my father went along for the long wait while she was in surgery with MP3 player and Sunday-best clothes, as if mentally prepared to say his last goodbyes. Since my mother weighs no more than a sparrow now, they gave her an epidural rather than risk a general anaesthetic for the insertion of the metal bolt or whatever it is they use to mend bones.

Somehow, against the odds, she pulled through. The next day’s vigil, however, was like a session with the Spanish Inquisition. Whenever the medical team came round to administer painkillers or to change her position in the bed, we were ushered into the corridor from where we could still hear her cries of No! No! Oh please don’t. All I could think of while holding her hand as she writhed in her bed was Doris Lessing’s maxim – that if all the suffering in the world were to give off a toxic cloud, it would pollute the universe.

Cousin Will with Jack the Lad

Since our escape to France, we’ve been steering The Daughter through some of the films on the comprehensive list sent by her college in preparation for Year 2. The other evening it was One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. When my namesake, Chief Will Sampson, snuffs the life out of a lobotomised Randle Patrick McMurphy, I couldn’t help but think that I should have administered the pillow to end my mother’s suffering. My sister Jo had felt the same impulse – but neither of us could face the prospect of the next ten years banged up in the high-security wing of HMP Parkhurst. Better to find some kindly doctor with a syringe full of something quiet but deadly.

It was on the M27 en route for the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry, when I had my vision. Koyaanisqatsi – if I remember correctly – is Hopi Indian for ‘life out of balance’. We were approaching the turn-off to Fareham, capital of the bleak no man’s land between Southampton and Porstmouth. Above us, a constant procession of cars, white vans and lorries crossed and double-crossed the motorway. Suddenly, briefly, it all seemed so aimless and futile. What on earth are we all doing here on this planet? Where are we going? Is it simply a matter of T.S. Eliot’s birth, copulation and death? 

Back home and a thousand kilometres or more from Southampton General orthopaedic wing, I was walking our dog the other morning down the rocky track that leads to the nearby hamlet. A car came reeling towards us. It was the farmer who feeds a colony of feral cats around the back of his house. Had I seen his flock of sheep? They’d wandered off and he’d had a call to say that they’d eaten all the lettuces in someone’s kitchen garden. I hadn’t seen them, but smiled inwardly at the thought of their campaign of vegetarian terror. While the sheep will wander, the world doth turn upon its axis. At least my own life in my familiar little world was back in some kind of balance.

The March Of Time

We hit the town, so to speak, on Friday evening. It was our dear Dutch friend Eric’s 50^th birthday and the multitudes assembled at Le Mortier clubbed together to buy him a ride in a hot-air balloon. It’s something of which he has long dreamed, apparently. Perhaps Alf, our aging hound, will run outside and bark at the self-same montgolfier as it floats across the horizon. Around the valley in 80 minutes – or so.

Up, up and away

It seemed like what it was: the first time in months that we have gone out together to attend one of the international parties that once eased us back into civilisation after the early years of self-imposed exile among the hill people. It seemed, too, like I have been incarcerated, stuck to the computer screen, for months on end while the spring and then the summer have slipped away almost unnoticed. So it was a kind of coming-out ball for both of us. We were separated within minutes of arriving at their organic smallholding with courgette quiche, a bottle of rosé and contribution for the montgolfier. Like meandering streams, we didn’t come back together for over an hour after our respective circuitous routes to the snack stall had taken us around various friends and acquaintances for a quick résumé of the past months.

People, it transpired, have taken up with new partners and sufficient things have been going on to make me feel glad to live in a kind of splendid isolation on one side of the valley while the other, it seems, has been busy turning itself into a kind of Place de Peyton.

Meanwhile, assorted children have grown up into barely recognisable adolescents (half child, half biscuit). Tilley the Kid, I explained to enquirers, was in England, getting her first taste of office life at my brother-in-law’s company. Sometimes you have to resort to a bit of nepotism in this life. It’s only for a few weeks. We are both hoping for a taste of romance, but that’s probably being fanciful. As a former office worker, I saw for myself how these things generally take time.

I was unable to explain this to Eric’s ageless mother, who collared me at one point. Since she speaks neither English nor French, we struggled to converse. Even with ‘O’ level German, Dutch sounds like Rowan Atkinson’s impression of a Nordic tongue. I smiled desperately and tried not to betray my terror of total incomprehension. In the end her husband came to the rescue and explained that they had heard from their son, the birthday boy, that our daughter had grown up into a fine young lady.

It hardly seems possible that a decade has passed since Eric’s 40^th, when his mother looked younger than he did and The Daughter was just a little girl soon to resume her primary education in a new school in a new town. She would have played with her peers 10 years ago as other kids did on Friday night who were then but babes in arms. How come a decade seems like an eternity to a growing child, but a mere puff of wind to a decaying adult? Even Leonardo Da Vinci couldn’t answer that one. 

The March of Time is turning into a quick step. The younger generation is revolting, ready to elbow us oldies off the sound system’s controls and take over the patch of grass outside Jan and Eric’s barn on which we attempted to dance once more.

Pistol-packin' Mama

Every day now, too, it seems that someone significant has passed on to the great Memory Bank in the sky. On Thursday night we watched a tribute to Mel Smith, who was just a couple of years older than I was when my future wife and I were watching Not The Nine O’Clock News on separate televisions. Then, with a heavy heart, I read of Karen Black’s demise – in her early seventies, of the inevitable cancer. I’m a sucker for squints and there was something so enchanting about her slightly boss-eyed looks. She plays a prime role in two films firmly lodged in my Top 20: Bob Raefelson’s Five Easy Pieces, in which she plays Jack Nicholson’s long-suffering and endlessly understanding girlfriend, Rayette; and Robert Altman’s Nashville, his brilliant satire of the country & western industry and American society at large. Big-haired Karen was perfect – and unerringly convincing – as Connie White, a Tammy Wynette type and rival of the fragile hypochondriac Barbara Jean, who keels over on stage and spends most of the film in a hospital bed under the solicitous eye of Barnett, her husband and manager. Maybe now that Karen’s checked in her mascara, a Freeview channel will show this hilarious film, which hasn’t seen the light of day for years.

So it goes. Karen Black did at least leave a lasting legacy, which is more than many. We mortals merely hasten once more to that ominous quinze août, which always has an awful air of finality about it. The holidaymakers pack up and go home, the evenings get fresher, morning dew reappears on what’s left of the grass and we find ourselves once more in a nocturnal no-man’s land, debating the respective merits of an extra blanket or a summer-weight duvet.

The only negative thing I remember about Eric’s 40^th birthday, a decade ago, was that my own 50^th followed not very long after. This means, of course, that his 50^th portends my 60^th: the dread day when it’s time to stop pretending and admit once and for all that you’re getting old.

A trip in a hot-air balloon sounds like a nice idea, but I’ve never been comfortable with heights. The thought of sitting in a basket powered by a gas bottle hundreds of feet above the ground smacks of suicide.

No, I think I might ask for a mixing desk or some other component for a sound system that I can take with me to parties. That way I can impose a little thematic coherence on the musical proceedings. Here come DJ Autokrat: he don’t stand for no interference, but he sho’ can party like it’s 19-99! And therein perhaps could lie my own legacy. It’s never too late to own a mobile sound system. You’re only as old as your dancing feet.

Holidayschmakers

There was I thinking that there might be time this weekend to mow what we laughingly refer to here at the Dog’s Meadow as ‘the lawn’, when along came an e-mail on Friday. It sat down beside me and frightened me clean away. Where was the article on truffles that I’d promised?

Curiously enough, I had been talking last week – to friends from Sheffield, who have now gone and departed, taking The Daughter with them in the car that I helped to pack so dexterously – about my frigid day at the back end of February earlier this year when I went on a chasse de truffes at and around the celebrated truffle market at Lalbenque, south of Cahors. Deadline, what deadline. It’s not coming out till late autumn. There’s plenty of time.

There's no negotiating a deadline, though

In fact, the deadline was back on the 22^nd July. These editors like their copy early. Wha’happen? I never miss a deadline. I do enough idiotic things in my life, but I pride myself in never missing a critical deadline. Something clearly must be malfunctioning upstairs. This fact was confirmed the other night when I woke up from a dream that involved a house in the mountains, where Godfrey Evans, the legendary Kent and England wicketkeeper, was the butler. Daughter, dog and I were out shopping in the vicinity for material for Tilley’s latest creative endeavour. I wouldn’t have worried so much had it been Alan Knott, another legendary Kent and England wicketkeeper, but Godfrey Evans was long before my time.

A brain cooked by extreme heat

So clearly the recent extreme heat has turned my grey matter. It hasn’t been quite as bad as it was in the ‘sauna-van’ during the Canicule of 2003, when I’m sure I could hear my brain bubbling away like a savoury Christmas pudding in the boiling fluid inside my cranium. The temperature hasn’t quite touched 40 degrees yet, but this is 10 years down the line. 10 years since I was plotting on copious minute ‘mind maps’ the great House Construction campaign of 2013-2014. I’m 10 years older now and even less equipped to cope with capital H Heat. 

And therein lies the rub. It’s age. It has withered me and custom is beginning to stale my infinite variety. This is why people seek to retire at around this age. I missed my deadline simply because I’m getting too old to attempt to juggle all these balls in the air at the same time. The Great Sampsoni has dropped a ball – and another! The audience lets out a collective gasp, and then a terrible collective booing echoes around the auditorium. The great juggler trudges off, tail metaphorically between his legs. As he removes the grease paint on his face in his dressing room, he realises with startling clarity that he must either reduce the number of balls he juggles, or pack it all in. 

So it is that I’ve come to the momentous decision – reached simultaneously by Corinne, the trusty and exemplary cleaner, who accompanies me every Friday morning in the holiday season – that I will no longer service holidaymakers during the rest of my allocated years. From here on in, I am committed to work only with nice people.  

It’s not that holidaymakers aren’t nice people perforce. Most of them are very nice people. Jolly good sorts. But, as in all aspects of life, it’s the nasty few who ruin it for everyone else. The current crop, a family of four slimy slugs from Liverpewel, the type with financial means in inverse ratio to innate class and with a deluded sense of their own importance in the Great Scheme of Things, are not at all nice. In fact, as I stood by the pool the other day while Ma and Pa reclined on their sun-loungers, running through their list of petty complaints and issuing their demands, I would happily have drawn my Colt 45 from my holster and shot them both dead. As I used to do as a little boy in London. Bang, bang! You’re dead. Quick and easy, and near enough to the pool to cope with any mess.

Independently of one another, Corinne and I came to our liberating decisions while tidying up their mess and making up every bed in the house – on the basis that, because they had paid for the whole house, they were entitled to every bed – for the second week of their stay. It would have been fun to put a deadly Australian pillowcase snake in each bed, but fortunately we don’t have such serpents in the Lot. Besides, one must try to be charitable. Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. feed the local stray cats. Perhaps their offspring will together come up with a last-minute invention to save the world.

Corinne has enough satisfied clients in this neck of the department and, for the moment at least – until my brain really packs up – I have enough real work on my plate, so we don’t need the money. If circumstances change, however, this time next year I may apply to can fruit at Andros, or swaddle myself in bandages and stand motionless in the market place at Martel in the hope that people recognise performance art when they see it, or simply lie back on a sun-lounger and live off the earnings of my favourite industrious wife. Anything but service Britain’s worst. Kow-tow, schmow-tow!

Pinker-than-pink pig

With that inspiring thought uppermost in my overheated cranium, I shall transport myself back to a time when the sky was blue, but it was cold outside and there were no teeming holidaymakers cluttering up my Saturday morning market. Now what was the name of that charming pinker-than-pink truffle-rooting pig…? Oh yes, Kikinou! Nothing too much wrong with my brain after all.

Festival-ities

Now is the season of our music festivals, made glorious by this sun of July...

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: our French brethren and sisteren, often so modest and reserved at parties, unable to shake off the shackles of ‘correct’ behaviour, it might appear, except when behind the wheel of an automobile, do make exceedingly good audiences at music concerts.

And so it transpired again this summer. The end of July is the time here when local festivals normally clash. Perhaps the organisers of Africajarc and the Souillac jazz festival finally realised that this is a shame and that a percentage of their audience might wish to attend both. Perhaps they conferred and collectively bargained. Thus it came to pass that jazz and African music were served up on separate weekends in 2013.

Souillac on the Dordogne, pronounced approximately Swee-yack rather than the Solly-ack or something daft they once managed on one of those TV shows about buying property abroad, is an unprepossessing place. When the tourists aren’t here – for 10 months of the year – it exudes abandonment, like a local Detroit. But every year at about this time, a modest four-day jazz festival pumps the deserted town full of adrenaline. The weather is always balmy and the restaurants of the medieval quarter spill onto the street, packed with diners, busily eating and drinking Souillac’s fragile economy temporarily back into the black.

It all takes place in the vicinity of Souillac’s one incontrovertible treasure: an abbey originally conceived as a monastery, which dates back many centuries before Bunny Bolden supposedly invented jayazz. Me and the missus, we like to don our glad-rags and strut our funky stuff on the headline evening each year. Everything runs like clockwork and, while you wait for the concert to start on time, you get to sit in the place behind the abbey and watch its current residents, the swifts, dart and dive in search of insects to take back to their nests somewhere under the building’s extraordinary roof.

When night falls imperceptibly, the moon pops up over the perimeter and the lighting technicians’ filters create a lightshow worthy of the Tate Modern on the white stone walls of the abbey and the adjoining college of music. If the music’s as good as the ambience, it’s a bonus. This year, the young Cuban jazz pianist, Roberto Fonseca, and his sextet of bass, drums, percussion, guitar and Malian kora served music to make the spirit soar like the swifts. The kora for those who have never heard this heavenly instrument is a kind of West African harp that looks a little like a sitar. For aficionados of the jazz piano, young Senor Fonseca – a charming individual with a fine hat and a quirky French accent – plays like the immaculate conception of Hilton Ruiz, Chucho Valdes and Ahmad Jamal. The band were as tight as the lid of a vacuum-sealed jam jar and it was, we agreed in the car afterwards, one of the finest concerts ever witnessed in decades of combined concert-going. 

However… what never ceases to surprise the royal ‘us’ is just how vocal and demonstrative a French audience can be. By the second number there was a palpable bond between audience and performer. During a piano solo, when he quoted from ‘Besame Mucho’, the audience – much to Fonseca’s evident delight – burst into a spontaneous rendition of the classic. A heartfelt and noisy standing ovation was inevitable. 

On Friday evening, my friend Moke and I made the pilgrimage south to Cajarc for more kora. A whole evening and early morning, in fact, dedicated to the stirring music of Mali.

After a brief stop to check that the new arrivals had settled in at the holiday house I oversee – where I found them splashing around in the pool and making the kind of demands that branded them in my bad-book as nouveau riche – I followed my familiar favourite route across the causse, through a village called Espedaillac, which boasts a green and two ponds, down into the magical valley of the river Célé, up the other side and across another causse or limestone plateau, before the final twisting descent took us to the Lot valley and the little market town of Cajarc.

If France’s imperial history means that the emphasis of the four-day Africajarc festival tends to be on north and west Africa, never mind: the streets are lined by the stalls of an authentic and exotic enough market, and the air resounds with the thumping of djembés. In looking for a barquette of chips to fuel the marathon ahead of us, I bumped into the architect of Maison Sampson for the second year running. Monsieur Gilles Faltrept of Figeac, renowned for his plaited beaded beard, appalling teeth and the obscure cartoons that arrive occasionally by e-mail, complimented me on my sunglasses.

The Africajarc arena is a plot of otherwise unused ground between the former railway station and the river Lot. It accommodates the multitudes easily but uncomfortably. Either you stand in front of the stage (and wave your arms in the air like you just don’t care) or you sit on the precipitous slope and try to stop yourself from sliding down. It’s a good job that I love African music so much and can use my Songlines connection to blag a free press pass.  

This year I brought with me an old blanket largely allocated to the dog and a pensioned-off pillow. We found a spot with some other friends on some higher ground where the slope is gentler, just underneath a few rows of occupied benches that Véronique dubbed ‘the tribune’. And there we sat to listen to a Malian poet, to watch short films made by students from Bamako, to listen to the irritating banter of the co-presenters (a colourful version of Ant and Dec), and to watch the long succession of acts: a Touareg vocal group from the Sahara, specialising in those amazing blood-curdling yodel-shrieks; Pedro Kouyaté, a kora player with the gruffest singing voice known to man; the kora maestro, Ballaké Sissoko, backed by a group of two acoustic guitars and a simply wonderful balofon (wooden vibes) player; the extraordinary actress, dancer and singer, Fatoumata Diawara, the undoubted star of the show; and Mamani Keita, who had the unenviable task of following ‘Fatou’.

By the time Ms. Keita came on, looking incongruously like someone who might have just made a guest appearance in Coronation Street, there were spare seats to be had in the tribune. From up there, you can see the whole stage and peep over the perimeter fence to see the river itself. It was past two by this stage and, after four of Mamani’s numbers, we decided to call it a night. We trudged off for the car. Being a creature of habit, I leave it in the same spot every year, primed for a rapid exit.

 
They were still there at the front of the stage, bobbing about and waving their arms in the air like they just didn’t care that it was way past their bedtime. French audiences, eh? Sacré bleu! You gotta hand it to 'em.

Of Little Mice And Big Men

I’m just reading through a personal message from the White House as Daisy chomps her way through a mouse she must have brought in last night and left as a love-token in the vicinity of my chair. It’s a dreadful noise, the sound of teeth on bone and gristle. 

The amicable letter signed Sincerely Barack Obama is quite a good one. A well-paid wordsmith clearly spent a good few hours constructing elegant paragraphs in a friendly, understanding voice that ultimately signifies very little. The President’s ghost wrote to me in response to an on-line petition urging the Big Man to pull his presidential finger out on the subject of climate change.

‘For the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change.’ Well there you are then, I knew I could trust the man. We can tell our children that everything’s going to be all right. The world is not going down the pan after all, because the American President is personally going to see to it that the United States of Consumption will cut its emissions. Now I can go outside without a care in the world and play croquet with the cheap-and-cheerful set I bought from Herr Lidl the other day.

I can’t be too hard on the man. After all, he was good enough to write back – and, let’s face it, letter-writing is a dying art these days. I remember going to a party given by some American acquaintances to celebrate the new president’s inauguration. They rigged up a big-screen telly and created a cocktail they christened Obamapunch for the occasion. Everyone was in high spirits (no pun intended) and it was an uplifting assembly of cosmopolitan folk. Yer man gave an assured and rousing address from behind his bullet-proof screen, and everyone cheered him on, happy in the knowledge that, at the very least, he was much more intelligent than the previous incumbent.

However… meeting the agenda on his oval desk was always going to be a tall order: save the world, while ending the inextricable struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan, revitalising the economy and wiping a few trillion off the national debt. So I enjoyed the spectacle for what it was and went home after a few heady draughts of optimism with few illusions.

Sure enough, nothing much has changed. True, the American acquaintances have swapped their lovingly restored house in Martel for one of those beautiful Regency-style houses, once the combined homes and depots of rich wine merchants, overlooking the Gironde in Bordeaux. But rather than doing something truly radical, like fitting solar panels to every roof in the country, the American government, like just about every other government, continues to fiddle while the planet burns. For all his elegant suits and elegant words, the slick orator is effectively powerless in the face of concerted lobbying, vested interest and political intransigence. 

Was there ever a time when you could trust a politician? If so, it must have ended roughly with the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. If there’s any honour left, it’s an honour among thieves. Just like professional cricketers, in fact. The first test of the current series for the Ashes has been riveting, but spoiled a little by the failure of Stuart Broad to ‘walk’ when he knew that he’d edged a catch to the slips behind. He was half way through contributing to a stand that might yet prove to be the decisive factor in the match. 

To walk or not to walk, that is the question? The debate was raging in the mid 60s, when I was an avid reader of my monthly mag, The Cricketer. The English team was only just emerging from an era of Gentlemen v Players, a time when only amateur ‘gentlemen’ were allowed to captain the plebeian professional players who made up the majority of the eleven. It was the gentlemanly thing to do, to walk if you knew you were out. Even then, though, there were many – often Australian, professional to a man and generally contemptuous of any trappings of a class system synonymous with British imperialism – who would stand their ground until the umpire raised his finger. Let’s not forget, too, that any who walked potentially faced the wrath of their team-mates.

The issue was not as simple as it sounded. I found this out as a cricket-crazy kid. I was playing in a game on some far-off field, just trying to get my eye in when I played at a ball outside my off stump and there was a loud appeal from the wicketkeeper and slip fielders behind me. I wasn’t sure whether I nicked it or not. So I stood my ground and waited for the umpire. Since he was a spare from our own team, he didn’t give me out. I played on for a few more balls until the inevitable happened and I drove over a straight ball, which shattered my stumps. But I think in my heart of hearts that the earlier delivery probably did touch the edge of my bat. To this day, I am haunted by the fact that I didn’t walk. I did the wrong thing, knowing it wasn’t right.

I was a kid at the time, and I like to think that I would have been bigger about it if it had happened when I was a man. So when I’m tempted by Friday’s incident to decry the boy Broad as a brat, I have to remind myself not to be a hypocrite. In any case, Broad has to live with his conscience (if he’s got one). He may even be remembered as the morally suspect bloke who did the wrong thing: the other side of a coin that shows an untarnished image of the great Australian wicketkeeper-batsman, Adam Gilchrist, a Boy’s Own hero if ever there was one, who walked without hesitation in defiance of the team ethic. 

Perhaps I’ll write to my new friend, Mr. Obama, and see what he makes of it all. Americans don’t understand cricket, so I won’t mind too much if I don’t get a reply from him or his White House wordsmith. I’d rather he thought to write to Mrs. Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, assuming the great singer left behind a widow when he growled his last a couple of weeks ago. Bobby was a big man in many senses of the word. He may never have been quite as famous as the likes of B.B. King, because the only instrument he had was his voice. But what a voice! Bobby was to the black American blues tradition as Frank Sinatra was to the white American popular songbook. 

If President Obama isn’t going to leave a solar-powered legacy, he could do worse than decree a national Bobby Bland Appreciation Day. We need our heroes – and heroines – more than ever in troubled times. We need the walkers of this life.