July: How Would You Like a Hornets' Nest in Your Head?

I was all geared up to tackle it myself. I don't, however, own a beekeeper's costume and was a little concerned as to how to protect myself in the event of a full-on assault by a swarm of angry Asian hornets. When I voiced my half-hearted intention to do it myself, my daughter in particular was horrified.

'Dad, please. Don't do anything stupid.'
'But I've done stupid things all my life and I've lived to tell the tale.'
'Don't joke about it. Seriously, it's very dangerous.'
'I could wear that long black coat in the cave with Wellington boots and gloves and a paper bag over my head if I cut some slits to see through...'
'Stop it! It's not funny.'
'I'm sorry. Of course I'll take it very seriously and be very careful. I have no wish to be stung by an Asian hornet.'

It's a good job The Daughter wasn't here last summer when her mother was stung twice by a mere native frelon. She'd have been awake all night in sympathy, worrying whether her mother was going to pull through. As it was, she – my wife – didn't sleep a wink. She tried everything in her repertoire – essential oils, ice-packs, cider vinegar – but nothing worked, such was the pain. And so she groaned and moaned and tossed and turned her way all through a long night of torment.

Asian hornets are reputedly more virulent still than their bigger, yellower European cousins. They're about the size of a British wasp, but darker; more a shade of Frank Cooper's Orange Marmalade. Normally they nest high up in trees in what look like those Ikea Japanese-style paper lightshades. This time, though, they took a fancy to Our Lady's head. For the last few weeks, when we've sat outside on the terrace, we've watched with muted alarm as the insects have flown in with food for the larvae and disappeared down the sculpture's ear-hole. Occasionally one would emerge from her mouth and take off for the fields. They're reputedly not aggressive and Japanese Buddhist monks manage to live with them in peaceful co-existence, but we all found it very difficult to achieve a state of mealtime Zen under such circumstances.

One day I felt brave enough to try blocking the ear and the mouth with tightly scrunched kitchen roll, but it was gone by the following morning. For creatures that can kill a defenceless European bee in mid air, it was obviously a pitiful deterrent. They'd have simply bitten off as much as they could chew and taken the pulp to the larvae. Familiar as I am with the sound of wasps' nests, working under the eaves where they tend to create their strange cellular creations, I kept sticking my ear next to Our Lady's head for sounds of activity within. Nothing. Clearly, there was still time.

As a member of Pollinis, a small French association that lobbies for the bees in the French and European parliaments (against omnipotent multi-nationals like Bayer; good luck with that), I phoned their office in Paris for advice. A charming young woman didn't offer any, but referred me to some great new app on their website, where you can signal sightings of Asian hornets' nests. I went onto their site and dutifully filled in all the details: name, telephone number, location and so on. They never got back to me. Maybe they thought I was some merry prankster, intent on taking the piss. Maybe they thought that the new non-toxic heat-seeking missile thingy that they've developed might crack Our Lady's head wide open.

The next step was the local mairie. I telephoned Sandrine, the secretary – I'm determined to be on first-name terms, but she always calls me Monsieur Sampson – and dutifully gave her all the details, thinking that she might log them in some dossier to help the war effort. But she didn't, just gave me the name and number of someone in the sector who earns his living by fighting infestations of assorted insects. I phoned him up for advice. Could I deal with it myself? Would night time be the right time, when the whole squadron was at rest in their bunk beds?

'Non, Monsieur. C'est trop dangereux.'

He came the next morning. I stood at the side of the road to flag down his white van. He was a big strong country-type, physically better equipped than I am for any potential skirmish. I led him and his equipment to the terrace and indicated Our Lady's head. He looked at her in astonishment and checked whether I was absolutely sure. Right on cue, a lone bomber from 625 Squadron returned to base. No, I wasn't some callow, deluded Englishman. Yes, they were Asian hornets all right, but he'd never seen anything like it in all his born days. We should take a photograph, he suggested.

I plugged his compressor in for him, he donned a cheap facial mask and approached the statue with his weapon of mass destruction. A few puffs of toxic powder, a couple through the mouth and a couple through the ear, and a few seconds later we watched as a few of the workers emerged from the ear-hole and fell to the ground. It was not something I took any pleasure in, because it was a reminder of how easily humans can kill anything that inconveniences them, but better safe than sorry in this case and at least it would give the local bees a fighting chance of making it through the summer.

The whole operation took about five minutes and he charged €70. His work is guaranteed and it took around half an hour to get here. Most of his day is spent on the road. I took the opportunity of asking him if he'd been stung and lived to tell the tale. Three times, he told me. Once just under an eye, which swelled up like someone who'd been in the ring with Mike Tyson (my analogy, not his). And was it worse than a sting from a native hornet? Not particularly. And was there anything you can do? Nothing at all, apart from cortisone (although maybe a courtesan could also help to alleviate the pain), unless you catch it immediately – in which case either an ice cube or the end of a lit cigarette. Cold or heat. 

So that's it. There are one or two lessons to pass on from the experience. If you have a statue on your terrace with a hollow head, block his or her orifices before it's too late. Use something other than kitchen roll to do so. Even if you think that you could co-exist with Asian hornets, remember that they are ruthless and deadly bee killers. And if you happen to get stung by one, you are unlikely to die, but locate the sting and put an ice cube on it for as long as it takes. I wouldn't recommend the cigarette heat treatment unless you want to end up with a longer-term injury.

And if you're a fearful coward, it's probably better not to attempt to do it yourself. Better to find a man who can.

June: 'Back to Life, Back to Reality'

Last weekend, the Saturday morning market in Martel returned to its customary medieval setting. For the previous three weeks or so, it had pitched up on the boules terrain underneath the sheltering plane trees. You entered through a makeshift checkpoint where it was advised to put some cheap and nasty chemical wash on your hands before following the hazard tape in an anti-clockwise direction to the exit via as many stalls as the shopping list demanded. Masks were obligatory.

Last weekend, the hand wash and the hazard tape were gone. Masks were at the wearer's discretion and there were as many without as with. Already, it seems, people are becoming more casual about it all. After a hundred days of effective solitude, they're desperate to get out and mingle. My childhood in Belfast taught me all I need to know about the way we adapt to a situation. One day the place was like most northern industrial cities, the next day there were armoured cars and soldiers in camouflage everywhere. To access the city centre, you had to pass through turnstiles to be frisked by a member of the military. Very soon it became the new normality. You simply adapted to the new restrictions placed on your everyday life. 

So if – and it's a very big 'if' – this current scenario is part of a master plan dreamed up by the omnipotent elite, reptilian or otherwise, and if martial law follows social mayhem triggered by the biggest financial meltdown since records began, then we will shape our daily lives around it. Artists and radicals will probably flee to wherever they can find refuge, as a whole generation of Brazilian musicians did when the military reigned in the late '60s and '70s, but the rest of us will stay put and get on with it.

Just what that might involve, I was discussing with my friend the tree surgeon while helping him prune the tops of some trees that were obscuring the view from their holiday home across the eastern Lot. Help in this case meant tidying up the debris, while he did the donkey work. He's a major conspiracy theorist. If he were American, he'd be a survivalist, holed up with his automatic weapons and tinned food in some underground bunker. We shared a picnic lunch together and were closer than social-distancing recommends. It's all bollocks to him, but there's still enough doubt within me to generate unease. Even with a friend that I've known for 20 years. Has it come to this?

Even kith and kin, for that matter. Tilley the Kid was restored to us mid-week. She travelled all the way here in a mask on various trains. Her mum was waiting for her at the clinic, but instead of running into each other's arms after a six-month separation, our daughter felt the need to take a shower and wash away any potentially lethal germs before the real mother-and-child reunion could begin. When the kissing and cuddling had to stop...

We watched the three-part dramatisation of the Salisbury poisonings, which was harrowing in the extreme and made this whole coronavirus kerfuffle seem like child's play in comparison. Not the least harrowing aspect of it was the fact that such an appalling nerve agent could have been developed by human beans. Only creatures with a complete absence of compassion – and my friend would no doubt make a reptilian link – could have dreamed it up, then developed and tested the compound. Just thinking of it makes want to curl up in a dark corner and die of shame for my shared humanity. Anyway... this stuff was so much more contagious and virulent than any virus that the fact that only one person in Salisbury actually died from contact with it is nothing short of a miracle – and a testament to the dedication of the public officials who conducted the clean-up operation. As the Good Wife suggests, it's a damn good job that the Chief Public Health Officer was a woman. If man's instinct is to hunt, gather and fornicate, woman's instinct is to protect – and protect, this one certainly did. The dedication to duty of some people is remarkable. No wonder I managed only 15 years as a public servant. 

The new norm for the citizens of Salisbury must have been very, very scary. Here, there's still a vestige of fear, but the Chief Medical Officer or whoever pronounces on these things has now stated that France has got things under control, so it must all be OK. No worries, mate. The Good Wife has gone back to work – on a limited basis – and even massaged one or two clients. With masks on. We've been out on a hot afternoon at the home of friends for a yoga class under the sheltering lime tree. We've celebrated our joint 30^th wedding anniversary, again al fresco, with other friends. And Dan has been over here to play records – just as a friend would come over during primary school and we'd singalonga Beatles in front of my dad's gramophone. Tennis racquets for guitars (then, not now; I've put away foolish things). So, gradually, things here have been slowly getting back to some kind of normality. 

For how long? There's the rub. France has opened its borders, presumably for FOMO. Fear of missing out on the great tourist influx every summer. Pragmatic or unwise, homo sapient? Only time will tell, my son. Already the Chinese are heading back indoors. So will we even get the summer off before the next lockdown begins? Now that the football season has restarted – behind closed doors, which must be eerily weird – I think I'll have to resort to the clichés of football managers faced with pundits intent on extracting some rash prediction. At the moment, we're not even thinking of the title. We're just focused on one game at a time.

 

One match down and I'm back to checking the sports news again (and, in the process, glimpsing the global headlines. Already my dad and I have started bemoaning the ineptitude of the current Arsenal team. We spoke after their mid-week match against Manchester City and the pater familias sat there looking very glum in his reupholstered Parker-Knoll armchair draped in the Arsenal scarf I bought for him, curiously, at the local bring-and-dump emporium. Things weren't helped by the fact that he'd fiddled with the settings of his telly and he thought that his sound-bar was no longer functioning. He told me quite emotionally how much he depends on his technology, deep as he is into his form of self-imposed purdah. 

Actually and metaphorically, he and I are focused on one game at a time. I can't predict the future. I figure that if extra-terrestrial reptiles are in control of our destiny, then there's very little I can do about it. Rise and shine; take each day as it comes. Smile and like thy neighbour. Or how I stopped worrying and learned to love potential social breakdown...

So today, for example, I got back from the local shops and sat down in the sunshine on the back balcony, sipping a supplementary coffee while listening to The Hissing of Summer Lawns and flicking through the regional freebie to read about all the assistance being offered to local enterprises. It gave me a warm glow. Or was it the mid-morning sun? A darker thought furrowed my brow. Who the hell is going to pay for it all? And when?

May: Out on Probation

On Monday 11^th, we were let out of jail for good behaviour. We can now walk and shop for groceries without an attestation. I was glad to chuck it away and rather proud of the fact that I'd only needed to print two copies for the entire two months of confinement. A judicious use of pencil and rubber almost saw us both through to the bitter end. Finally, though, the paper gave out and the space in which you wrote the date and time became but a hole. From now until the next presidential pronouncement at least, we'll need an excuse-me note only for journeys of over 100km. As the crow flies, apparently – which is not that easy to work out even with modern technology. It'll be back to a compass and pencil to work out the perimeter of our new open prison. 

We were quite hopeful of a grant of dispensation for a mission of mercy back to England, to snatch our daughter from her student house in Brighton and bring her back to the safety of her family home. Now, however, it seems that Boritz J has reneged on the British government's initial reciprocal undertaking to admit visitors from France and other European countries without quarantine. So, in the wise words of my philosophical mother-in-law who repeats her mantra almost every time The Good Wife telephones her, 'we'll just have to wait and see.' The Disunited Kingdom didn't get to where it's got today by failing to wait and see or to cross that bridge when it came to it. 

On Monday 11^th, I ventured out in the morning, further than I'd been for eight long weeks of... I'm sheepish to admit, a generally very agreeable period of being able to let sleeping dogs lie. A single red magnificent poppy had opened its petals in the garden for the occasion: either a good omen or a bad one, depending on your stance on the Great War. With the car loaded up with strimmer and assorted tool boxes for the bridge in Brive that now had to be (urgently) crossed, I drove first to nearby Meyssac for my appointment with the tattooed lady. The hairdresser whose name is hallowed in this household. 

I took a mask with me, but couldn't figure out how Laetitia could possibly sheer me with something hooked over my ears. Her tiny little salon on the corner of the street is normally packed to the rafters with men of all ages waiting their turn. But on Monday it was empty. However, on the way in I almost bumped into mein Amerikanische Freund, Steve. He had just been severely shorn and his face was covered with a mask. He looked startled to see me and it felt like an encounter with a gunman in a small lawless frontier town. Where the hell was that goddamn marshal when we needed him?

BEFORE...

The tattooed lady is working strictly by appointment now. There's no chance of getting too close to some old farmer in need of a trim. She had a towel and a bottle of hand-wash by the door and once she'd made an appointment with Steve for his daughter, it was on with my mask and down to business. She herself was equipped with one of those Perspex visors associated more with strimming the grassy verges of motorways than with hairdressing. I had to unhook my mask and clutch it against my face, so she could start around the ears. Then I re-attached it and sat back for the rest of the cut. Normally, she asks you what you desire even though my answer is always the same – short at the back and sides, leave a bit of length on top but quite a bit thinner please – but she was so clearly stressed by the whole palaver of disinfection that she simply set off straight away with a no. 2 blade. Had I not stopped her at a point I deemed right and proper, I'd have come out of there looking like Convict 99. 

My attempts to engage her in conversation and slow down the trajectory of the clippers seemed a bit forced; we usually chat easily and naturally. I did glean that the confinement has taught her that she has been working far too hard. It will be strictly by appointment for the future and an early finish come the afternoon. Likewise, lockdown has shown my wife a way of getting off the treadmill. For years I have urged her to work less. Yes, she'll earn less, but she'll also pay fewer taxes and charges. Ultimately she may even be better off – certainly psychologically and probably financially. Now at last she sees that it can be so.

AFTER

Serendipitously perhaps, I emerged from the salon with one of the most satisfactory cuts since I've been going to see the tattooed lady. That might have had something to do with the sheer weight of hair that I'd shed, but I felt a lot more presentable and more akin to my old normal self on the drive to Brive. Nevertheless, the whole experience spooked me and, by the time I got to the clinic – to discover that the grass in the garden and the side passage was 'as high as an elephant's eye' and that the French equivalent of a Saniflo was pumping grey water up to street level without cutting out as it should do – I was in an unnezzezzary state of discombobulation. 

If in doubt, eat. I figured that the best thing to do before crossing all the bridges before me was to have some lunch. A bowl of left-over weekend fridge-bottom soup. The whole experience of stepping back into the outside world, however, had lathered me into such a state that I could hardly get the spoon from bowl to mouth without slopping all my soup back into the bowl. What the fudge!? What was happening to me? I am a grown man; I understand that the only thing we really have to fear is fear itself. I am not even particularly afraid of contracting covid-19, because I have faith in my immune system, and yet my hand was shaking like a field of barley in a warm wet westerly wind. I could only think that it was the sensation of being a character in a film like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Stepford Wives, who scratches away at the superficial normality to find that something underneath is very, very wrong. Changed, terribly changed. 

I did my strimming and made the garden look reasonably presentable. I cleaned and disinfected the shower tray where the waste water had backed up and left a very unsanitary film of something evil and grey, and decided to leave the faulty sanitation device until next time. Let no man say unto me that I am not prepared to leave a bridge uncrossed in times of high dudgeon. I packed up the car and high-tailed it out of there, back to the familiarity and safety of our open prison. 

As for that terrible seizure of fear that gripped me at my soup, I experienced it again later in the week. During an idle moment, I clicked on The Guardian home page: to find image after image of people in masks and panic on the streets. As the actress Jane Horrocks has said, the only way she has stayed sane during this time has been a studious avoidance of news bulletins. I did right to steer well clear of it all, even if it smacks of ostrich behaviour. The mere sight of those images induced an immediate restriction in my chest, the like of which I haven't experienced since the asthma attacks I suffered in my late teens and early twenties. Fear Eats the Soul, indeed Herr Fassbinder. 

Since then, we've both been out on a couple of occasions more – including our first social engagement since March on Sunday. A long dog-walk with friends followed by dinner à quatre. And it was lovely, even if we didn't feel able to embrace. French society revolves around a custom of handshakes and pecks and – when the citizens are feeling particularly exuberant – hugs, so it will be a tragedy if the virus of fear eliminates all that. At least Martel market re-opened on Saturday morning and, even though the idea of wearing masks in the open air seems a trifle absurd, little by little we are acclimatising ourselves to the 'new normality'. As for what will happen and where it will all end, I'll just have to dig into my mother-in-law's compendium of profound maxims for an answer to that one.

April: Still Life

Late in the afternoon of Good Friday, I drove over to Giselle's barn to buy whatever vegetables she had on offer. There wasn't very much, but she'd saved me half a dozen eggs, so the journey wasn't wasted. Snail Woman was there, her face half-covered in the kind of bandana I used to wear when I was a cowboy. Giselle admits us one at a time into her 'shop', so I dutifully waited my turn outside and joined in the conversation, which was predictably dominated by coronavirus. Last summer in the height of the heat wave, I would ask Snail Woman about the health of the molluscs she breeds for eating. The poor creatures suffered as we all did from the relentless heat.  

When she emerged and I prepared to go in, the conversation turned to traffic. On the way there, I hadn't passed a single car on the main road, which can be a little busy at that time of day – just as well, because my indicator has packed up again. My Noddy car suffers terribly from condensation in damp weather, which affects the little metal contacts that make the lights flash. I haven't had to swab down the windscreen from the inside for weeks, but the humidity has done its damage. Anyway, I learnt that two people aren't allowed in the same car at the same time. Debs and I had speculated about driving to Brive if the Airbnb enquiry turned into a booking. It didn't. We'd have been fined by the gendarmes, it seems, if they had stopped us. It's OK in the current climate to sleep with your partner, but not to drive with him or her.

Is that not utterly ridiculous? As indeed are many things right now. In Paris, for example, the poor citizens are not allowed out between 10am and 6 or 7pm, I forget which, but it surely means that everyone will emerge at around the same time, thereby running a far greater risk of contact with their fellow cell mates. I've subsequently heard on the grapevine that it's aimed at 'le jogging', but it's still enough to make you believe that my friend the tree surgeon is right when he says that 'its total bullshit, man!' He's a big-time conspiracy theorist, who sees all this brouhaha as a man-made plot to establish a new world order of fearful, compliant citizens who'll be too scared to protest any more. Who knows? He may just be proved right. I didn't stop to ask him about the absence of 'chem-trails' in the sky and what it signifies.

Who comes up with such decisions? Perhaps a committee – with panic on the agenda. Not, I would imagine, an individual who has taken the time to think it all through. Time is what we have on our hands at present, even if ultimately perhaps not. Nevertheless, the Good Wife and I still find there aren't enough hours in the day. She asked me over lunch on the front porch the other day how my perception of life has changed after a month of incarceration. Well... not a great deal in some respects. Perhaps I'm using the hours available to me in a more measured way, not trying to get everything done in a single day as before. Probably in recognition that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow will predictably offer more of the same. 

Deprived of my bicycle by parliamentary decree, I'm now walking the dog on alternate mornings. Walking her through the woods, which generally don't accommodate ageing cyclists, gives me the chance to commune more with nature. Even with headphones on to catch up on music promos, I still feel in the thick of the natural world. Today the eerie bark or mating call of a deer infiltrated the big brassy sound of Seun Kuti and Egypt 80. I've seen and derived encouragement from nature's remarkable ability to heal itself – the photos of clear skies over hellholes like Delhi and Bangkok are remarkable – but I'm not convinced that this strange state of stasis will morph into some kind of environmental golden age (unlike a certain eternal optimist on the other side of the marital bed). Any long-term recovery depends on mankind allowing it, and while commercial interests are at loose in a world governed by despots, with humans continuing to reproduce like rabbits, I don't give Mother Nature much chance of any kind of long-term recovery.

The longer we've been locked down, the better the resident optimist has been coping. She confessed that going out to work four days a week gave her a chance to escape from de-stabilising thoughts of the garden and her paper work, both of which she believed herself incapable of negotiating. Without the escape route, she's had to confront her demons. Just lately, she's spent many a happy hour toiling in our concrete garden (after a month without rain), and she's pretty well up to date now with her admin. Every morning, she finds time to practise the piano and her yoga sessions are apparently more 'meditative' than ever they were before. Despite the freeze on work, she's still been tapping away like there's no tomorrow – on Zoom rather than face-to-face and mainly for free, doing her bit to allay the fears and distress of individuals and groups. She is the very model of a modern miracle-worker.

As to how others are coping in these hard times, I can only comment on the family across the water. Our daughter's got herself an app for her phone and she and her housemate walk five or six kilometres in an attempt to clock up however many thousand steps it takes to satisfy the youth of today and fitness fanatics in this digital era. Her other housemate – the one who managed to get back to the family home in time for confinement – sent them a care package for Easter: a loaf of homemade sourdough bread, some cookies she made and some chocolate rabbits.

Easter came and went here without so much as a chocolate egg or a hot cross bun (two-a-penny, two-a-penny – but not alas in France), although we enjoyed pancakes with a melted square of dark chocolate on the morning of Easter Sunday – and very nice they were, too. Back in Cumbria, my mother-in-law made herself a batch of buns for Easter, decided that they needed a glaze, then burnt her saucepan to death in attempting one. Apparently, the buns weren't particularly nice in any case. Now her sorely tried daughter has had to find and order her a new stainless steel two-litre saucepan online.

Meanwhile, down south in Hampshire, one sister is in splendid isolation because of health issues, still carrying out her part-time work from home three days per week and busy at other times indulging her passion for genealogy. I haven't asked her whether she opens her window each week to clap for NHS workers. My other sister is allowed out. Instead of spending two or three hours per day with our father, she meets him for a quarter of an hour or so each day in 'The Exercise Yard', three times around the flats in which he's self-isolating for a longer life. I've been busy taking up the slack on Skype, generally now two sessions per day. My old man, love him as I do, is not to be confused with the 99-year old war veteran who has raised several million pounds for the NHS by walking up and down his garden with a Zimmer frame. 

With more time on her hands, my sister is re-discovering married life because my brother-in-law can't go off on business travels. They're taking long walks together and it's possible that their new plague routine will dampen their desire for foreign travel. My brother, meanwhile, has made a wardrobe and may be drinking rather less each evening, now that he's not getting back at the end of each day, worn out by the life of a plumber. But it's not guaranteed.

So it's not all doom and gloom for the lucky ones in this time of La Peste. Easter is already a thing of the past, but here in Shangri-La, the butterflies are fluttering around the mass of mauve flowers on the lilac nearest the house, we've had the best crop of purple irises in years and the trees are bedecked once more in enough succulent greenery to hide us from the road that leads to what tenor saxophonist Bill Perkins dubbed 'Civilization and Its Discontents'.