July: Strange Days of Summer

Yesterday was the quatorze juillet. We were cordially invited to join the ceremony down at the mairie. A fellow communard delivered it the other day in a white van. The mutt did her nut because there must have been another dog in the van, presumably of the hunting genus. Although I didn't know the man from Adam, I recognised his beard and have probably spotted him in these parts, dressed in camouflage gear and sporting a rifle. We didn't go. It's just another excuse to drink a verre d'amitié (a glass of alcoholic friendship) and we wouldn't have been honouring any dead other than those who stormed the Bastille over two centuries again.

What happened to all that revolutionary spirit? On Monday evening, the nation was addressed by President Micron in his customary suit from Man at C&A. Despite his reassurance some months ago that vaccinations would not, he repeated not, be obligatory, he announced swingeing new measures that will 'encourage' mass inoculation. He and his medical advisors are introducing a new passeport sanitaire to be shown in cafes, restaurants, cinemas and even trains. So anyone who exercises their right to refuse a vaccination for whatever reason will effectively be forced to wear the equivalent of a Star of David to mark him- or herself off from the rest of society.

As the screw is turned and our civil liberties are gradually removed, you would hope that mobs of angry revolutionaries would storm the presidential palace. Instead, within hours of the announcement, people have been queuing up in their thousands to book appointments with the needle. Who can blame them really? Living in a city, you'd be excluded from public transport and unable to get to work, let alone from drinking your sorrows away in a bar or chatting with a friend over a coffee and croissant on some boulevard of broken dreams.

Nevertheless, when the Good Wife read out the gist of the address on her phone, the three of us felt angry and frustrated enough for our own private revolution. We were at the local cinema to see Nomadland, which was every bit as good as claimed: a film, also, about society's excluded ones, not by dint of health, but by an economic system that continues to tolerate the acquisition of billions by the tiny but powerful few. Without so much as a murmur, it often seems. Frances McDormand was fantastic. Good luck to the wandering kind that she portrayed so poignantly.

That was Monday evening, the glorious 12^th July. New friends from Ulster with whom we passed a splendid afternoon recently told us that the hard-line Prods of the province were busy building bonfires to light that same evening. One in particular in East Belfast, a poor area where the Protestant and Catholic communities live on top of each other in uneasy acquiescence, was apparently several storeys high, big enough to create a conflagration that could easily turn into an urban wildfire. The police felt powerless to do anything about it lest their intervention opened up a can of worms. The worms are still there, though, writhing and wriggling just beneath the surface.

Just as, in fact, the old attitudes on the mainland still prevail. The ignorant few – or are they really so few? – are still trying to deny the obvious, that modern British society is a multi-racial one. 'No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs.' My heart sank on Sunday night, watching the final of the European Championships go to extra time and then to the inevitable penalties. Then, after Rashford and Sancho missed their penalties, the final chance was handed to the 19-year old Bukayo Saka, a lovely lad who plays, what's more, for my team, Arsenal. Of course his shot would be saved. I didn't mind so much that England lost to Italy, not after all the media hype and the national nonsense about football coming home, what hurt was the certainty that Saka and his other two team mates would receive messages of hate on social media. And so it inevitably came to pass. Sure, we shouldn't get so hung up about social media and sure, there were many more messages of sympathy and support, but how distressing that anyone courageous enough to take on such a burden of responsibility should be abused for the colour of their skin.

Earlier in the day, just to compound the misery, our daughter's good looking Italian contender with the massive serve lost in four sets to Djokovic in the Wimbledon men's final. None of us bothered watching because the inevitability of a Serbian victory far outweighed the faint possibility of an Italian upset. I keep telling myself that he's a decent enough human being, but I just can't help disliking the man. Is it the fact that his haircut makes him look like a human Action Man? Is it the robotic nature of his game, which transforms him into a Yul Bryner character from Westworld? No matter how hard and how often you attempt to stop him in his tracks, he just keeps on getting up. John McEnroe did a little piece about how someone who will never be a crowd favourite should nevertheless be respected for his brilliance. Bugger that. Given his 'wolf energy' and his attentive team of fitness trainers, he will probably dominate proceedings for at least another three years and end up with 25 or more Grand Slams. He'll be the chosen GOAT, but give me an artist like Federer rather than a machine any day of the Wimbledon fortnight.

We've had so much Monsoon rain of late, no doubt diverted by global warming from the west coast of the U.S.A. and Canada, that the woods are full of wild mushrooms. Country folk emerge from the trees with carrier bags full of girolles and cêpes. Like billionaires, they jealousy guard their secrets and never dream of sharing their haul with anyone. The three of us walked the dog late one morning, walking very, very slowly through the damp woods in an effort to spot edible mushrooms among the undergrowth. We found some girolles and a faux cêpe and made an omelette for our lunch. On the whole, I'd rather eat mushrooms than insects. The day must come, but not yet – although we are considering changing Daphne's croquettes to a new French brand made with insect protein.

That same day, the Daughter spotted an enormous caterpillar just before lunch. It was green and the size of a pea pod, and probably the equivalent of a T-bone steak in terms of its protein count. Since it was wriggling its way over to the flower bed and seemingly intent on a feast, I went to fetch the dustpan and brush with the idea of moving the beast to the middle of the field. When I came back, it had gone, nowhere to be found. It could reappear in a few days as the kind of king-size butterfly you might find in the Costa Rican rainforest. Or some flower-devouring superbug. Strange Days, as the Doors once entitled an album of theirs.

 

June: Very Important Visitor

 

I did myself a mischief again. This time it was pulling ivy off a wall. She's a big girl and I tried to talk her down, but she wasn't having it... LOL, as The Daughter would say. Laugh or lollipop? Arf, arf, as the Viz comic characters might put it. When our neighbour confronted my wife about our ivy across the wall at the clinic in Brive, she was apparently taken aback by The Good Wife's sheer reasonableness. Of course we'll get rid of the ivy, she volunteered. You will? the woman asked, quite taken aback by the lack of resistance. Well yes, I'll ask my husband to come and do it as soon as possible. And of course, I was as happy to oblige as indeed I was when I last pulled ivy off the wall some six or seven years ago. Since then the re-growth has been phenomenal. Ivy had covered the entire wall.

In actual fact, it wasn't so much the act of pulling ivy off our neighbour's wall, more the constant bending down to pick up the pieces and stack them temporarily on the flower beds. Thus, for a good week I was shuffling around painfully like a very old man. That's what you get for trying to be a good citizen.

Talking of whom, our president came to Martel one Thursday morning with his very important and very expensive entourage as part of his fact-finding tour of our neck of the woods. Or was it simply to glad-hand the new mayor of Martel, a dentist by trade, who is I'm told a committed Macronista. Macron in Martel, I ask you! En route for Cressensac to see her accountant for her annual review, Debs noticed all the gendarmes milling around our little town and figured that it was a little excessive for the customary stop-check-and-fine traffic exercise.

I didn't go to line the streets and cheer and wave my mask, or indeed slap our president's face and incur a four-month prison sentence. There was no need. El presidente popped in to see me before the official business of the day. He'd heard of this local-radio DJ, living in a house of straw, who was taking his name in vain. So he dropped by to check me out and make sure that I wasn't a dangerous free-radical.

'Hello, Monsieur Président,' I greeted him.
'Bonjour Prézident Markon,' he retorted with a glint in his eye.

We didn't shake hands and we remained masked, for the sake of political protocol. I ushered him inside while two substantial bodyguards waited outside on the front porch. Daphne barked them a broadside, but they were unmoved, standing stoically on the qui vivre in their dark suits and dark glasses. I offered Monsieur Macron some muesli, but he'd had a breakfast fit for a dignitary earlier in Saint-Cirq Lapopie. But he wasn't averse to another coffee.

'Oo la! You've done your back in,' he observed, as I shuffled over to fetch the kettle.
'Yes, pulling ivy off the wall. Actually, more the constant bending to pick up the pieces.'
'Ah, Average White Band, n'est ce pas?'
'That's right! The white album. I didn't know you liked them.'
'Oh yes,' he smiled. 'My wife and I often dance around the Palais d'Elysée ensemble to the Average White Band or Earth Wind and Fire.'
'That reminds me. Must play 'Let's Groove' on my show sometime. I could dedicate it to you, if you'd grant me the honour.'
There was a sharp intake of presidential breath. 'Not sure. Better not. I think I'd rather you kept our little meeting a secret entre nous. And while on the subject...I don't know that I'm entirely happy about you employing a corruption of my name.'
'Oh, nothing disrespectful,' I assured him. 'Just a little gentle irony. A bit of that celebrated Breeteesh humeur.'
'Ah yes, I know it well. You like your sense of irony. It's not something that we French understand too well.'
'Yes, well, I've lived here for more than 25 years now. It's something I've come to appreciate.'
He chortled in a Gallic way. 'Mon-tee Pytton, typical Breeteesh n'est ce pas?'
'Arguably. But no,' I reiterated, 'Certainly nothing disrespectful – even if I would care to take issue with certain policies of yours.'
He knocked back the last of his coffee and stood up suddenly, as if summoned by an alarm signal. 'Another day, peut être. I must arise and go now and go to the town of Martel. Merci pour le café. I hope your back gets better soon.'

With that, he patted our dog's head and signalled to the pair at the door, who accompanied him to the limousine parked beside my 107 on the drive. They turned with some difficulty on our somewhat restricted turning spot and Daphne and I watched them head up the drive. Give my regards to the dentist! I cried, but I don't think he heard me.

Shame he couldn't stay longer, but I guess the affairs of state are more pressing than a little tête à tête with an impostor. I'd have liked to ask him if he'd seen My Octopus Teacher, which we'd all watched a couple of nights before. One of the most beautiful and astonishing films I've ever seen. A worthy Oscar winner. It's all about the relationship between an octopus and a world-weary, burnt-out South African film maker, who would go scuba-diving  every morning in the cold rough waters somewhere by the Cape of Good Hope. Over the course of a year, he created a bond with a solitary octopus based on mutual fascination and burgeoning trust. The most moving and tender relationship you could ever imagine between a man and what was essentially an aquatic mollusc.

I would dearly love to have an octopus living under our spreading sumac tree rather than the resident brambles. If not an octopus, then a family of hedgehogs or even a toad. But the brambles have it once more, even though at the end of winter I got down on my back – in a sounder state at the time – with the secateurs and cut those hoary old weeds right down to the ground. Begone, brambles! And for a couple of misleading weeks, a battle seemed won. But not the war. Never the war. Cometh the spring, cometh the new shoots. Brambles are like bad neighbours. They never go away and can make your life a misery if you allow them to upset you.

I am not now nor ever have been a gardener. Nor am I much of a political theorist. But it strikes me, as I think about the tenacity and proliferation of ivy and brambles, bindweed and dandelions, all those relentless weeds that constantly threaten to choke the life from the beautiful, transient flowers that my wife plants with customary optimism on our barren soil here, all those weeds are like the lowest politicians throughout the ages. All those ruthless, ambitious, self-interested men (and it's almost always men) who keep on cropping up to overrun any flowering dissidents, reformers and prophets intent on leaving a legacy.

Maybe I'm stretching a point here. Perhaps I'd better just stick to strimming (once my back is back to normal) – taming those flaming weeds for another week or two. Still, it was nice to have a very important visitor, even a stiff one in a formal government-issue suit. I don't get around much any more.

May: Anti-Bodies

 

May-time is grey-time with lots of rain revitalising the garden that the women folk have been busy planting, and the talk on everyone's lips in these parts is mass inoculation. To vaccinate or not to vaccinate, that is the question. For the moment, we still have the luxury of choice – and we're busy exercising ours in this household: an admission liable to get this blog pulled in the current climate of hysteria. Some of the more scientific experts who contribute to the Alternatif Bien Etre newsletter to which we subscribe have already had some of their articles and findings taken down as heresy. Others have been burnt at the stake.

There seems to be a little more choice being exercised here than across the Channel. The other night, there was a programme on Channel 4 ludicrously entitled something like 'Jabbed! Britain's Great Vaccination Triumph'. The whole population, it seems from abroad, is so desperate to get back to the old normal of shopping and travel that mass indoctrination is stoking this triumphant mass inoculation. My sisters, for example, use guilt as their weapon: You must get vaccinated or we'll never conquer this virus. But will their jabs fight off the next variants to arrive and are they indeed unwittingly promoting them?

The recent Hartlepool bi-election underlined just how compliant the great British public has become, prepared to overlook the recent accusations of sleaze that seems to accompany every modern-day administration, whether red or blue, in order to fall in line with the ruling class. Boris the Buffoon, the architect of this great vaccination triumph, reassuringly appears to know what he's talking about because he says it with the conviction of someone who has been reared to believe that he comes from a superior class, born to lead. The Lord Aberdeen or Salisbury of his time. I read something in a financial article recently that suggested that he may yet prove to be the greatest EVER British prime minister. That seems to be a tad hyperbolic, but maybe they know something that I don't. Maybe the clownish exterior is a clever guise fashioned by a remarkably shrewd and ambitious brain. Max Hastings, his former editor at the Daily Telegraph, would beg to disagree.

Boris and his type have been at it for centuries. Recently, I've been immersed in a momentous tome called Pax Britannica, a snapshot of the British Empire at the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, written by Jan Morris – James Morris in the Sixties when it was written, the first high-profile sex-change, as we referred to it then, rather than trans-whatever. I forgot where I picked it up, maybe one of Romsey's charity shops or the English-language section of the local recuperation emporium, but it's been languishing on the shelves with menace for quite some time, waiting for someone with the courage to pick it up and delve inside. It's a beautifully written compelling tale told by a Welsh historian, full of pomp and circumstance. It's a remarkable tale of how a tiny island nation came to govern a quarter of the world's land mass by having the gall and sense of superiority to poke its nose into other countries' business – to protect its trade routes and to bring civilisation and its own religious values to heathens everywhere. Somehow, a legion of bumbling buffoons and stuffy bureaucrats managed to govern an empire that stretched from Ireland to New Zealand via the Indian sub-continent and a huge chunk of Africa. Staggering. Little wonder really that Old Etonians continue to govern a populace still given to believe in parts of the kingdom, like Hartlepool, that Britain is still Great.

Great because of or in spite of our betters? I picked up a couple of nuggets that seem to encapsulate the intellect of the ruling classes. A Queen's regulation of the day decreed that 'field officers entering captive balloons are not required to wear spurs.' Perhaps Victoria was advised here by the Duke of Cambridge, who once remarked to an eminent British general, 'Brains! I don't believe in brains. You haven't any, I know, sir!'

Meanwhile on the continent, the vaccination programme is half-baked. In the tradition of the French Revolution, the populace tends to be rather more sceptical about its leaders' pronouncements. I feel less sheepish here than I might 'back home' in admitting that we choose, while we can, not to submit to the needle. Ordinary people like Giselle, the Vegetable Lady, and Michelle, the Snail Woman, are scandalised by the notion of a vaccination passport, which might prevent them from travelling, eating out in a restaurant or attending a public spectacle. It is, they protest, an erosion of our civil liberties, the most fundamental of which being our right to choose. I resisted the temptation to quote, but there's an Afrobeat outfit from the Auvergne of all places. In the opening track of a CD they released about five years ago, they sing 'We are living in a collective madness...' Such prescience!

Of course, I had no right of choice as a child. I was inoculated against just about everything – TB, polio, diphtheria, scarlet fever, tetanus, the works – because my parents and my school said I must be: mainly by needle, occasionally by an impregnated sugar lump and generally at the doctor's surgery. As far as I know, I suffered no mishaps other than a faint impression on my upper left arm of the vicious multi-needle stamp of the BCG vaccination, which occurred – If I remember correctly – in a church hall on the Creagah Road, Belfast. But who knows? And because we don't know, I'm reluctant to roll up my sleeve. I realise that vaccination probably did more than anything to stamp out a terrible disease like polio, but Salk & Co. spent years in its development and I'm not convinced that Big Pharma has been equally diligent in the rush to bring their new products to market. Besides, I know a little more than I did as a child about the role of sanitation, nutrition, antibodies and the immune system in helping to ward off illness and disease. I've followed the precepts of the Good Wife for the last 30 years or so. We managed to bring up our child without vaccinations and, touch wood, she's barely had a day's illness in her young life.

So I'm sceptical for now in the best tradition of my mother, God rest her departed soul, who was once sceptical about the claims of the manufacturers of Thalidomide when she was suffering from morning sickness while carrying around a young boy-child in her womb. I refused an opportunity to run a training course in Senegal a decade or so ago, because I didn't want to be vaccinated against yellow fever and other such tropical diseases. For the moment, I'd rather take my chance with the virus itself. If I live to regret the decision, then at least it's a decision I chose to make.

In any case, right now my worries are more focused in the short-term on keeping our hornet traps replenished and emptied before the act of removing the top becomes life-threatening, and on our new underground cistern, which has still to fill despite all the recent rain we've had. It's been a time-consuming and expensive venture, part of the master plan for self-sufficiency, and its apparent failure only underlines that I wasn't born to project-manage, let alone lead. I'll leave that to ambitious types like Macron and Boris, the blonde-haired buffoon (or Machiavellian mastermind), glowing at this moment in time with Britain's great vaccination triumph. Now where did I file that NMB Afrobeat Experience album...?

April: Mellow Yellow

It's that yellow time of year again, full of colour and promise. The meadows are carpeted with dandelions. I've made my first and probably last futile attempt to strim the heads off the garden variety before they go to seed and propagate still more of the infernal weeds. We keep missing the chance to pick the leaves for salads before the flowers appear. The roots are reputedly very good for the gut, but trying to dig them up is heart-breaking and in any case the concoction tastes as foul as the stuff of morbid intestines.

Easter has been and gone with the best of the fruit blossom. The exceptional record-breaking temperatures have dipped suddenly. At night, they sink below zero, cold enough surely to damage the summer harvests. Nevertheless, I've been for my spring haircut. The winter thatch has now gone, shorn in a matter of five minutes by the Tattooed Lady. She was due to attend to Tim, Steve and me outdoors last week on an afternoon when the thermometer went way up to 27 degrees or thereabouts. But she didn't turn up and I found out in her tiny salon on market morning in Meyssac that one of her 15-year old cats had died that worryingly hot afternoon. I paid my money, she stamped my card and told me that the next cut is a free one.

We've had our first asparagus of the season. On Good Friday, after spinning some records with my friend Dan and stocking up on necessities from Lidl's organic range for the April lockdown, the third one now in France (a lockdown lite, we are told), I went to Giselle's nearby barn towards the end of the afternoon for the week's vegetables. She goes in for the white variety, as the French seem to do. We all prefer the thinner green spears in this household, but Giselle sells off-cuts and misshapes cheaply enough for risottos. Tilley the Kid made an excellent one for dinner on Easter Saturday.

When I got there, Giselle was bantering with Snail Woman, who seems to be her only other regular customer at present. Not for much longer, it would appear. As soon as the current confinement is declared over and travel is legal once more, she and her husband are off in their converted camper van. She's another tattooed lady: something faded and blue winds its way around both arms. It looks a little home-made, unlike the multi-coloured sleeves of my coiffeuse. For quite a solid well-rounded woman, she speaks with an incongruously child-like voice. She told Giselle and me that the next day would be her last day of selling her prepared snails at Martel's Saturday morning market. Presumably, the snails on her farm will be released back to nature when she and her man take off in their van.

The plan is, she explained, that they will drive to Italy and Greece to test the conversion's credentials. Apparently, we discovered, the pair of them have been working on it for most of the winter months, taking a regular white van and putting in everything including the kitchen sink for a comfortable life on the road. The next stage of the plan is to travel with it by cargo ship to South America, then spend however long it takes exploring the entire continent: south, north and Canada. She suggested that she has been to Colombia before. I was tempted to ask about the music scene there, but didn't want to spend the rest of the day buying our vegetables. She's clearly a dark house, Snail Woman. Well, blonde actually. There was I, thinking of her as a pleasant enough soul who spent her days de-toxing snails, before killing them (as humanely as possible, one hopes) and preparing them for sale at her market stall with parsley, garlic, butter and whatever else is involved. But no. I see her now in quite another light. I suspect that she and her husband moved down here from Paris with other baba-cools seeking the good life, or the slow attitude as the French call it, here in the middle of nowhere. Well, I takemy hat off to her. The well travelled French citizen is rare in these parts.

She must have been out east as well. She talked about Vietnam and how the French are regarded in the Orient – as moaners and thieves. Giselle shrieked with laughter, as she tends to do rather disconcertingly. Yes, she admitted, she could understand the moaning bit. But thieves? I couldn't see it either, and suggested that people here generally seemed pretty honest in my geographically limited experience. Snail Woman looked at me and made a face behind her mask and shook her head. No, it had some substance, she offered.

Eventually, she paid her dues and wandered off with her basket to the immaculate Berlingo she parks in the same space every week, outside the mayor's bedraggled cowshed. Without further ado, I bought our veg from the limited supply currently on offer: onions, potatoes, a bag full of salad greenery, a bag full of Swiss chard, some assorted asparagus bits and a dozen of her finest eggs. The chickens are laying again.

As for my wife and I, for all my questions about the conversion of the van, we're not going anywhere. Our wayfaring days are over, particularly now that the final payment has gone out on the clinic. Le cabinet de Deborah Sampson est à nous. We drank a bottle of finest champagne on the Saturday evening to celebrate the 15 years of monthly payments and running repairs that the process of ownership has involved. No sooner did the money leave the account than we received a speculative letter from the Century 21 estate agency prospecting for property. 'It's the time to profit from a market that has never been so dynamic!' A slight case of commercial hyperbole, one wonders?

In any case, 't'is the season to be mellow and we intend to be independently yellow for a while, to sit back and bask in the glory of true proprietorship. Time will tell what we can and cannot do now that 900 euros won't appear in our debit column each month. For now, spring has well and truly sprung.