July: Party Back in Time

Whether it had more to do with the attritional effect of constant bad news – the fall-out from the Brexit stupidity; another horrific terrorist attack in France; the relentless slaughter of the world's remaining wildlife; renewed hostilities in Sudan und so weiter – I don't know, but I felt an overwhelming sense of sadness the day after the party.

It was a nice party, too. All three of us had been dreading it slightly in the car on the journey up and over the hills to our first French stamping ground. When we arrived at the little station building that was converted into our old commune's Salle de Fêtes, we were a little reluctant to get out of the car. It was an old friend's 60^th birthday party and we hadn't seen her and our mutual friends for over a decade. The last time my wife and daughter set foot in the building, they had been pointedly snubbed by the mayor and his entourage. We think it was because someone had worked out that we were the ones who crossed off one of his cronies from our supposedly secret ballot papers.

The match-chewing mayor is still the mayor of the commune and our closest mutual friend is still one of his elected élus. We had been happy to give her our vote and she it was who secured the salle as venue for our friend's birthday party. She also revealed that the family from hell (who had provoked our electoral displeasure) had moved out of our old village and into the neighbouring commune, no doubt to make other people's lives miserable. Their son apparently is working his way into politics on the far right.

Everyone we encountered seemed so much older or almost unrecognisably grown-up. The first friendly face we encountered was the birthday girl's youngest daughter, who used to be Our Kid's best friend in those far-off days of école maternelle and primaire. The long curly hair I remembered had been shorn. She looked rather chic in her short Jean Seberg gamine style, but I couldn't help hearing the Brian Wilson song inside my head. Where did your long hair go...?

We had arrived early with the idea of being able to talk to our hostess before all the guests piled in. She looked if anything a little younger and a little happier despite the dispersal of her girls and the break-up of her marriage. We were rather surprised to find her ex there, too, all smiles as usual and busy playing boules with the early-birds. Hopefully, we wished, the breach was in the process of healing.

In fact, our friend kept disappearing – to check on details for the party and a little later to go and change – and we ended up chatting to a couple from the Creuse, who had come to visit our house during construction and gone away and built themselves a straw bale house of their own in the middle of nowhere. We compared satisfaction ratings and happiness evaluations.

French parties continue to unnerve me, partly because of my continual lack of comprehension. I'm just about all right one-to-one or as one of a foursome, say, but anything more than that and I start to drift away and get lost in the general babble. I don't stray far from my wife or daughter in case I should need their help with a translation or two. Hanging back on the edge of one particular group, I kind of half-understood an anecdote about our daughter making presents to give to fellow children at the party held in our honour the evening before our departure for pastures new. Why, I wondered, would she make a fly for one particular kid? It was only much later that I worked out that the woman had said mouchoir rather than mouche. A handkerchief made more sense than a commemorative fly.

In such circumstances, it can be a lot easier to forego stilted small-talk for some helpful task like washing up or putting food on the table. I hadn't doubted for one moment that there would be lots of food to take from the kitchen to the table in the party room. The doubt, though, is whether there will be enough of it for vegetarians. Promising looking tarts and savoury cakes are often laced with bacon bits. I suggested to The Daughter that she label our culinary contribution as a tarte végétarienne. That would be sure to put people off and leave sufficient for us.

Quite the contrary. At least four guests asked my wife for the recipe. They might have been queuing up all evening for instructions had not the musicians started their concert. The last time I had seen our hostess' elder daughter torment her violin had been many years before when she was little more than an earnest tot. It was clear that the years of higher musical education have left their mark. She performed as part of a trio of friends from Poitiers, where she now lives, and they made genuinely beautiful music together.

We all watched with undivided attention, seated at the U-shaped table arrangement that enclosed their temporary stage. It didn't and couldn't last too long, because it was already 10 o'clock and the bouffe simply had to begin. I never fail to marvel at the French capacity for food. Foolishly, I had thought that the table full of tarts and nibbles that I had helped to stock would have sufficed. But no. That was just an entrée. There would be a plat principal, a cheese platter and dessert – to be finished no doubt by coffee. Somewhere along the way, there would be champagne to sup, presents to offer and even a little dancing. All of which added up to an exodus in the wee small hours of the morning.

We sat opposite another old friend of our daughter's from her primary years. Physically, she was not that much taller than she was back then, but in every other way she'd grown astonishingly: smiley, witty, bubbly and charismatic, she had blossomed into a pocket bombshell. If she'd been around in the 1940s, she would be a Forces' Favourite whose face would have been painted on the sides of tanks and bombers. Now an aesthetician and masseuse, she has built up a clientele within Tulle's alternative bohemian circle. Her repartee kept us entertained till the moment I whispered to my wife that we really had to leave.

With a couple of dogs to liberate back home, we had a good opportunity to offer our premature excuses. Having slaved away for her guests, the birthday girl was now sitting opposite her two aged parents, which somehow didn't seem quite right. It was after 11 o'clock by now, so surely it was time to let her hair down. Maybe later – just before she went off to prepare the early-morning French onion soup for stragglers.

It's about an hour's drive back home, yet it feels like a journey from one country to another. There was plenty to talk about in the car and we agreed that it hadn't been the ordeal that we had feared. A swell party indeed.

So why so sad? It wasn't as if anyone interrogated us on Brexit or made us feel in the slightest bit unwelcome. Maybe it's not to do with all that bad news from the outside world. Maybe it's more like waking up after a long, long sleep full of engrossing dreams to look at yourself in the mirror and register the shock of physiological change. So much time has passed and you weren't even aware of it until this confrontation with the truth. Maybe it's because it underlines just how firmly a chapter of your life has been closed. A chapter when you were younger and more robust and your child was but a little girl – who was turned into an adult while you were distracted with all the other business of life.

June Too Soon

So here we all are, hanging on a knife-edge. On the 23^rd of this month, we shall be tuning into the national news via satellite – a thing which of course we don't very often do – to see whether the ayes or the nays have it. That's yes or no to leaving Europe and, at the moment, it looks suspiciously like it's the ayes who will prevail.

There are valid points on both sides of the argument, but since the Brexit camp seems to be stocked full of entrenched conservative politicians, contrarian economists and the kind of football yobs who were provoking all and sundry in Marseille with their brainless chants, I'm inclined to vote for a far-from-perfect centralised bureaucracy crying out for concerted reform.

The European Union has at least promulgated important change in areas like the environment and animal welfare – areas about which the other camp rarely give a monkey's, since the only thing that seems to stir them is the spectre of immigration. The idea of Britain going it alone in a modern world overseen potentially by Putin on one side and Trump on the other is frankly horrifying. Let's just go back to Palmerston's day of gunboat diplomacy and see whether we can make Britain great again by gobbling up new colonies.

Without a vote, we three can but wait and see – and hope that rational thought will prevail at the 11^th hour. It'll be a close-run thing and I'm not banking on it. I had high hopes of being able to deliver our paper-weighty French citizenship dossiers before the 23^rd. I imagined that we'd maybe have to book up our appointments with Grand Frère in Toulouse about a week before, but Tilley the Kid delivered a bombshell the other day. No block of three available till the back end of August.

Clearly, there are many more people than I would have credited applying for French citizenship. In getting in early, my hope was that it would earn a few plus points from the adjudicators. It would show them that it wasn't a simple knee-jerk reaction to losing our EU membership rights. Ah oui, these Sampson family have clearly thought about all these carefully. Admeet them? D'accord, très bien. The rubber stamp descends with a brusque thump.

So this, too, is out of our hands. Nothing more to be done apart from checking and double-checking that every single certificate and attestation is included, so that there's no excuse for rejecting our applications on a technicality. At least it means that I can get on with other things. I've embarked at last on a long-nurtured musical non-fiction project and have set myself a target of 60 days in which to finish it.

With all this rain, I won't be side-tracked by strimmer and mower, but can sit back and watch the grass grow while I endeavour to spurn the temptation of the European football championships held, this time around, in my adopted country. With England already throwing away two precious points against dem Russkies, I'm banking on a giant-killing act from Norn Iron. Alas, this time there are no Danny Blanchflowers, Jimmy McIlroys or George Bests. Not even a Norman Whiteside or a Gerry Armstrong. Failing them, I'll root for the Welsh. And then the French.

We're rapidly approaching the half-way mark in June and have yet to see any semblance of a summer. Even the weekly barquette of local strawberries I buy from Martel market have shown little sign of sweetness. Not enough sun, you see, I can pronounce with the certitude of a countryman. Normally I'm in shorts and bare feet from about the beginning of May, but periodically I've been reaching for my fleece-lined slippers to keep my tootsies warm.

Whether this estival absence will worsen or improve my mood come the longest day remains to be seen. It's a time when I customarily go into mourning for all the beauty of spring that has just passed, but maybe the hope of warmer weather to come will give me the strength to ride out the depression and come out fighting for July. Anyway, spare a thought for the poor Sri Lankan cricketers forced to take on the hardened English in sub-wintry conditions. They must be dying for home.

It will hurt The Season of course. People like James Heath and Louise Baker, whom I met for an article on vegetarianism in France (surely a non-starter, you might protest) rely heavily on the few months of the tourist trade to keep going for another year. It's even harder for them, since they took the courageous (and some might say insane) step of opening a vegetarian restaurant here in rural France – thereby at least halving at a stroke their throughput of potential customers.

With The Daughter armed to the teeth with her mother's grown-up camera, we met up for lunch in the enchanting garden of their concern, Le Jardin de Cabrarets. It serves as restaurant, afternoon tea room and bed & breakfast, so they've got their work cut out. Cabrarets is an extraordinary little village that nestles under the scarred limestone cliff that circumscribes the rive droit of the Célé, not far from its confluence with the Lot. It depends largely on the renowned and remarkable Grottes de Pech Merle for its tourist trade.

Talking to them about the motivation behind their resuscitation of a restaurant that had lain fallow for a couple of decades, it was clear that they weren't crazy, just young and fearless. Pioneers. Five years ago, perhaps, when they first opened for business in 2011, I might have pronounced them clinically insane, but it seems now that there is some evidence to back my gut feeling about a recent gastronomic shift. Encouragingly, for example, most of their customers are actually French.

My research took me to the AVF (the Association Végétarienne Française) and I felt so buoyed by my discussion with their president that I became there and then a fully paid-up member of their community. There is such a strong vegan and vegetarian movement among the young, for example, that a district of Paris around the Gare du Nord has earned the appellation 'Veggietown'. It seems that 3% of the French are vegetarians now (compared to about 0.3% when we first moved here) and 10% have stated that they would like to be.

For once in my cussed pessimistic life, I felt positively optimistic about the future. It's not just Albert Einstein who recognises that a change to a vegetarian diet is the only way to ensure our survival on a planet teeming with billions of human beans. Currently 70 billion animals are slaughtered every year worldwide to feed us. Yes, 70 billion farting farm animals. Imagine the quantity of methane gas produced.

There won't have been many ethically or environmentally motivated vegetarians among the legions of football fans who came to France to do battle in the streets of Marseille. Yes sirree Bob, the spectre of the English football hooligan has raised its ugly shaven head yet again. But this time they have met their match in the form of a new breed of super-yob from Planet Russia, where their posturing putain of a president offers his foot soldiers the very model of modern machismo.

Enough alliteration already! What was that I was saying about optimism? Look upon the news pictures ye mighty and despair. Look upon the weather for that matter. Ridley Scott's depiction of the future in Blade Runner (be it director's cut or not) is looking increasingly prescient.

May: Family Affairs

We heard the news in the car, en route for the Good Wife's expert comptable not far from the white elephant that thinks it's an international airport. I was heavy with guilt, born of fussing too long over figures to be declared to the fiscal authorities.

Even though I was pretty damn sure that we were declaring everything to be declared down to the last centime, because the system of family parts and tax credits and what have you is so darn incomprehensible, my daydreams are haunted by the idea of that fateful knock on the door. Grave men in uniform, there on account of some heedless transgression to put the cuffs on me and lead to the French equivalent of a Black Maria parked in our drive.

It's probably as ludicrous a notion as my wife's fear that she had failed her TCF, her Test de Comprénsion Français. Our friendly neighbourhood factrice had handed over our post for the day and Debs guessed that the big brown envelope would be a notification of her result. She ripped it open without so much as a by-your-re-cycling. Like all official documents here, the content is not immediately apparent. Yes or no? Hit or miss, jury? It was, I gathered, rather difficult to say.

We figured out, though, that they wouldn't have sent an attestation for anything other than a pass. Later, the Daughter helped decipher the finer detail. Her adventures in the wonderful world of French education have equipped her well for such work. The C2 for the oral element was the best mark she could've obtained and meant that she spoke like a native. The B1 for the written comprehension was a dodgy pass that meant she had been right after all to fear the dull dialogue on which was based the 26 questions.

So now comes the real hard work: the assembly of our collective family French citizenship dossier, with copies and translations of a whole raft of documents to prove that we are whom we claim we are. And this hinges on our comprehension of the guidelines that accompany the intimidating application form. My goal is to complete, collate and deliver everything to the authorities in Toulouse well before the 23^rd June – when my dad celebrates his 89^th birthday and Britons vote for or against the Brexit.

The process of handing over our intimidating file of documents to unsmiling bureaucrats also triggers imagined angst. I'm absolutely certain that they're all trained and geared up to reject dossiers for the slightest transgression. As a former civil servant myself, I know the score. Keep files on the move. Never let them settle like dust on your desk. Pass it on or pass it back. Monsieur, where are the reply stamps to the value of €8?

Was it like this in the old days? Surely it was easier. Surely procedures were more transparent. To help me find the answer, this month I started the formidable second volume of David Kynaston's epic history of post-war Britain, Tales of a New Jerusalem. I found a hardback copy of volume 2, Family Britain, in the Oxfam bookshop in Romsey and hauled it back home across the Channel with the aid of ropes and chains.

My anticipated wallow in nostalgia presents a few practical problems. Since I usually only find time to read – and read slowly – in bed, it means signing up for the long haul. Several months at least, I shouldn't wonder. And since I can't do what I usually do and let my book drop on the floor before turning off my bedside lamp lest the weight of this book wakes the rest of the household, I must prop myself up with pillows to read it – thus risking a potentially wakeful hiatus between the decision to stop reading and the onset of blissful sleep.

Not to worry; I'm sure another visit to the world into which I was born will be well worth any such minor tribulations. What's immediately apparent is how well every diarist wrote, even the so-called down-trodden lower classes, whose education would have no doubt been curtailed by the imperative of work. Everyone could turn a decent intelligible sentence. Even on the on-line Grauniad these days, the comments left by readers are so breathless and mystifying in their complete lack of punctuation that you wonder how anyone of a certain generation manages to apply for let alone hold down a job.

But, ah... that far-off genteel world of a north London suburb, with its horse-drawn milk floats, coalmen in their protective leather 'backing hats', surreptitious visits next door to watch with friends Robin Hood and other programmes on the banned ITV channel, the lodger on the other side with his noisy racing-green 3-litre Bentley that dated back to the dawn of motoring, Watch with Mother and Tonight with Cliff Michelmore on the green Ekco television, the maternal grandparents round the corner and the paternal grandparents an epic journey away on the southern suburban fringes of London, the weekly Topper with Beryl the Peril and others of her kidney, primary school at the bottom of the road, summer holidays by steam-driven train to the south coast...

It was a privileged world for a middle-class child (only threatened by Teddy Boys and the coming disruption of a move to Belfast) and there were distant echoes of it the other night when I sat up late to watch the Young Jazz Musician of the Year Final on BBC4. The five finalists seemed to come uniquely from very privileged families – and most of them from London. Two indeed came from the same family. There were intimate shots of music nights in the Ridout family living room. The family that plays together clearly stays together. There was dad on jazz guitar, mum on piano, the youngest lad on drums, oldest lad on tenor sax and 15-year old sister on trumpet. They don't make 'em like that anymore.

Another 15-year old, with the telltale first name of Noah, played a number associated with the great romantic pianist Bill Evans with a poise and sensitivity way beyond his tender years. Julian Joseph, the chairman of the panel, a pianist himself whom I once saw in concert at The Leadmill, Sheffield, now doubled in size to the girth of an Oscar Peterson, liked his style but informed us that the unanimous winner was... the young Ms. Ridout.

When interviewed and asked how it felt, the winner in her endearingly frumpy evening gown giggled nervously and said it felt cool. As well it might. At 14 or 15, I dabbled with the trumpet but got no further than 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star'. Even that was a stretch. And even though Stevie Wonder hadn't written it at the time, the idea of bringing off an effortless version of 'Golden Lady' would have been fantastical.

One wonders how her talented big brother will cope with little sister's victory. They look a close-knit and loving bunch, the musical Ridouts, but you never know with families. All those rivalries and petty jealousies.

What have you done with my flugelhorn?

I haven't touched your flaming flugelhorn.

Oh no? I know you! You've had it in for me since...

Infamy, infamy!

Get lost!

You hum it, I'll play it...

April: Endurance Tests

Whan that Aprille... The miraculous month has delivered yet again. There's a riot of buds and new leaves going on. After the annual tour of inspection, I'm delighted to announce that the perennials have proved hardy once more and that the new gingko tree has survived its first (albeit disturbingly mild) winter.

A present from our next door neighbours – to mark either our 20 years in France or 25 years of marriage, I'm not sure which (though the smart money's on the latter) – I planted it personally in an exposed spot where the wind from the north howls around the corner of the 'master bedroom'. I've been troubled by its perceived delicacy since the leaves yellowed and fell around late November.

I'd been under the misguided impression that it was an evergreen, but apparently not. The misunderstanding probably derives from my still limited comprehension of the French language. Just like the old days, in fact, when I used to invent news heard on the radio alarm clock from snippets of information that I did actually understand.

No, the gingko or maidenhair tree is definitely deciduous and the yellow leaves are a sight to behold in places like Tokyo, where it is the official tree. I guess the tree must have been on show at our local cinema during the screening of one of the more charming and delicate films we've gone to see this season. Les Délices de Tokyo is one of those lovely foodie films, like Babette's Feast and the brilliant Big Night, that centres around our love of nutrition.

In this case, the subject is dorayaki. I learnt that they're a kind of pancake sandwich filled with a frankly unappetising red bean sauce. The plot, such as it is, involves the poignant working relationship between a disaffected short-order dorayaki cook and an old woman with a winning way with sweet beans. Her deformed hands are the clue to her dark secret: that she has spent much of her life in a local leper colony.

Of course, when customers get wind of this, the sudden craze for dorayakis falls off as suddenly as it boomed. And the old woman must give up the part-time job that has brought her so much unexpected fulfilment at the end of her life. So... there were many dorayakis and many beautiful yellowing gingko trees in evidence. And really, there's no reason why our new gingko shouldn't have survived this perturbed winter, since it's the last surviving relative of what fossils suggest are the oldest tree on earth.

The gingko is budding. And the grass is growing at a phenomenal rate thanks to the seasonal mix of sun and ferocious showers. My afternoons are mapped out for at least the next two months to come. Mowing and strimming, strowing and mimming. And weeding all those tenacious mauvaises herbes. The other weekend I even glued our fragile fruit trees in an attempt to ward off the annual attack of the kamikaze ants. But then came an April shower to wash away the glue, which I must now re-apply during a settled sunny spell.

April is the month when I also bring out the Honda strimmer from its long hibernation in the cave. Ah, my trusty tool! The ancient Japanese ceremony of the first ignition is always a tense affair. Will it, won't it...? This year, in fact, it didn't. Once I might have been inclined to kneel beside it and weep. Maybe even plunge a sharpened kitchen knife deep into my bowels. But during my 20-year relationship with this essential gadget, I have learnt a thing or two. I took out the spark plug, cleaned it off, gently pulled the string a few times, even added some choke. And hey presto!

Thanks to the precision of Japanese engineering, the grass around the house is looking shorn and tamed for a few days. Notwithstanding the unwelcome rain, the immature fruit trees are in blossom. The ants have not yet climbed over the corpses of their dead colleagues to get at the succulent petals or whatever it is that attracts them. The irises are resplendent, the rose is in leaf and climbing fit to flower and all, horticulturally speaking, is currently well.

It's a good job that my age exempts me from the French comprehension test that my fluent wife had to sit in connection with our application for dual citizenship. Our daughter is also exempt, thanks to her baccalaureate. And not just any old bac, but vingt sur vingt. 20 out of 20 for her French oral. So I asked her to double-check that I hadn't misunderstood the guidelines. Yes, she confirmed, it seems that sexagenarians and above are exempt. Presumably we don't need to converse, we just sit and dribble.

Thank the president, too, judging by my wife's feedback. It was a glorious morning when I drove her to Limoges for her TCF at the CNAM. Her test de connaissance français at the... whatever CNAM stands for. There was just an early hint of indignation in the air. She was paying €115 for the privilege of sitting an exam to prove that she had a basic comprehension of the language in which she has been working for nearly 20 years. It's not right; just not right. Shouldn't the mere fact of having endured without the assistance of the state in the land of the bigoted bureaucrat be enough?

After hunting in vain for a Lidl in which to replenish our dwindling supply of Parmesan cheese and Greek yoghurt, I sat and read in the reception area of the CNAM, a grim building of dark airless corridors characterised by the click-click of high-heeled shoes. It was after midday. Our little fancy that the appointed time of the exam was test enough had been exposed as a gag. (If you phoned up to query that a French exam could possibly start at midday, you passed.)

My wife emerged grim-faced at around 12.30, the only obvious British expatriate among a clutch of Africans and West Indians. Well? She shook her head. The oral went well, as it would for someone with such a gift of the gab. She introduced herself for a couple of minutes, then prepared and delivered a kind of verbal role-play, all of which was recorded for some faceless examiner.

But the written test was a lot harder than expected. You listened to a conversation between two people talking quite rapidly about a subject as dry and as dull as industrial output, then answered 29 multiple choice questions in 25 minutes. One wag quipped that this contravened equal opportunities legislation. The po-faced adjudicator said she would pass on his comment.

Not knowing the pass mark, Debs thinks she might have failed. Which would be a travesty, since she is as fluent as fluent can be. We will know in two to three weeks. It's true that industrial output doesn't coche her boxes, but maybe she has done better than expected. If she does fail, however, she has determined not to sit it again. My fine upstanding spouse will not be paying another €115 to be humiliated.

Let us now praise resolute women, the world over. But before we do so, I feel I must mention The Secret in Their Eyes. Every now and then you start watching a film and you know that it's going to pass multiple tests of time. I watched with mounting excitement this Argentinean film about an unsolved murder and its repercussions on the lives of those involved in the case. Two hours or so later, I felt like I had been dragged through a car wash backwards. In the process of wringing out my emotions and hanging them out to dry, José Campanella's film, which unbeknownst to me had won an Oscar for best Foreign Film after it came out in 2009, reminded me why cinema is probably still the greatest art form of the modern age.

In between those sweet showers of Aprille, while I await a dry spell for my next attack on the remaining wild grasslands behind the house, I should really be knuckling down to the business of writing a crime thriller to beguile audiences the world over. Or finishing the current e-learning project. Or gluing the fruit trees. Alas poor day-dreaming dilettante, I knew him well...