November: I Kissed My Dentist

I didn't mean to. Honest. French etiquette still confuses me and leads me to do ridiculous things on occasion. I was so ashamed that I didn't tell the Good Wife for a whole fortnight – and she's a therapist, so she can help with such matters. I finally blurted it out over breakfast one morning. She almost sprayed her coffee all over the floor. It wasn't quite as bad, I suggested, as my brother tipping his dentist during his callow youth, flush with cash from his job as a waiter.

How did it happen? I was on duty at our little local cinema in Vayrac, run by volunteers. It was my first evening on Caisse#2: the auxiliary who helps the more experienced Caisse#1 by tearing the ticket in half, handing one half back to the cashier and wishing the holder of the other half a cheery bonne séance. It's theoretically a little less taxing than my tour of duty at the local mairie, helping out at some European election.

Just as I was getting into the swing of things, I was confronted by a face that I knew vaguely. He looked at me and I looked at him in uncertain recognition. It was my dentist. Last time I'd seen him, in fact every time I'd seen him, he was in his surgical gear and masked up to the eyebrows. So it was a surprise to see him in civvies. We sort of shuffled slightly towards each other and maybe our right arms twitched in expectation of a handshake. But then I kind of panicked and proffered not my hand but my face in that gesture of familiarity or affection that French males go in for, one that I've never really been comfortable with. Familiarity is the operative word here. Does one ever know one's dentist well? Should one? I suppose it's quite an intimate business, prodding about in someone's mouth with a pick and a mirror, but then again one should probably respect and retain a certain professional distance. In any case, reader I kissed him – and as soon as I'd done so, I felt a complete Charlie. I also felt like apologising, but that would only have ramped up the degree of awkwardness. So I simply tore his ticket, wished him a bonne séance and then squirmed in my seat throughout the film that I struggled to follow. Mumbled French dialogue like French etiquette still defeats me.

I've said it before and I'll say it again... this kind of thing is so much easier on the other side of the pond. I recently returned from a week in the old country (which, according to Mrs. Angry in the seat behind me when the guard announced, very politely, that we would be 20 minutes late into Waterloo due to an earlier points failure near Basingstoke, is 'going to the dogs'. Hardly surprising, I guess, after umpteen years of conservative misrule). Back home, you simply embrace family and dearest friends and shake hands with the rest. Easy-peasy.

I was there to help my sisters with the onerous task of sorting out my father's stuff. No easy matter, since he was a hoarder par excellence (from whom I inherited the squirrel gene). After a very congenial evening in London with Tilley the Kid and her three female flatmates, I arrived at my dad's flat to find my sister Jo going through our paternal grandmother's collection of pewter, while sister Gina was examining with eyeglass and phone our maternal grandmother's collection of silver cutlery for anything genuine as opposed to electro-plated. My role, which I'd chosen to accept, was to sort out my father's music in its many guises – from cassette tapes to mouldy 78s – and the books that survived the sisters' cull after my mother died seven years before. The Brother was in Finland, taking delivery of a house by a lake that he and his partner (with the Finnish connection) have just bought for a song. So he couldn't be there for the other reason for my visit: to lay the urn containing our father's ashes next to those of our mother.

The two sisters have been hard at it for over a month. It has helped them to fill the big hole created by our father's sudden departure. Jo would visit him every day for a chat and a drink, hot or alcoholic. Gina would drop by every day except her three work-days. The task has brought them close together and helped to alleviate their grief. It isn't a big flat, but they have unearthed new treasures from deep in cupboards and inside cracked leather suitcases stored under the paternal bed: forgotten photo albums and paintings by our mother and paternal grandmother that didn't make it onto his walls. Next stop, our father's clothes. Jo feels awkward about something quite so personal, but I'm rather less sentimental about it. Not really believing in any kind of afterlife nor reincarnation, I feel that once you've gone, that's it: you've gone. Might as well give it all to people who want or need it.

In any case, his girth was a little more substantial than mine, and he was of a different generation for all his laudable desire to stay smart and trendy. As it was, I took back a few of his CDs, DVDs, records and books to add to the piles here, but most of it went in bag after heavy bag to the many charity shops of Romsey. Some were glad of them, some not quite so glad. Stuff is a many splendoured thing, but one can have too much of it.

Back on French soil, I do worry about the day when my poor daughter has to deal with my stuff. Corgi toys, plastic Cowboys & Injuns, books, records, CDs, tapes, DVDs and a collection of underused tools. Virtually no one wants that kind of stuff now; they can have it virtually. Maybe even tools one day.

Oh well, she's a big girl now. Once, when she was very, very small, I took her to the école maternelle in Espagnac, a village near our former hamlet of Courbiat in deepest Corrèze. Our friend and near neighbour Corinne, her institutrice, was there at the gate to welcome her charges into the playground. I kissed her on both cheeks as was our custom. Then I noticed the gaggle of young mums hanging about after delivering their own infants, and I thought that I couldn't kiss Corinne and ignore all of them. So, driven by panic and a warped sense of etiquette, I went around the group methodically giving them a double-peck on both cheeks. I didn't know any of them from Eve. They looked a little startled and I felt more than a little gauche.

Back then, I had an excuse. I was new to the game. I really had little excuse for kissing my dentist. When my wife had recovered her equilibrium post-confession, she told me her rule of thumb post-Covid. Don't shake hands and certainly don't kiss unless you're absolutely sure that it will be welcome. I guess that makes things a lot easier, but it's a slight shame. I'm all for traditions if they don't involve blood. French etiquette may be mystifying to outsiders, yet there's something quite charming about it.

 

October: Out On Bales

I met a man the other day who's a retired inseminator. His son has been re-surfacing our drive after 20 years of ravages by time and rainstorms. He explained that his father would travel around the territory inseminating cows, but there's little call for it now, given that small-time farmers are increasingly calling it a day and the big farms that remain tend to have their own resident bulls for the deed.

I witnessed an inseminator at work a few brief years ago on a dude ranch on the Plateau de Millevaches while working on an article for the late-lamented France Magazine. Wearing a disposable glove, the man in question pushed his hand up one of the horse's back passages, half way up his arm. It was a most uncommon sight and not one that I would necessarily wish to repeat. The retired inseminator seemed happy to have quit the profession and ready to help his son as and when needed – in this case by fetching and carrying lorry-loads of limestone chippings from the quarry near Martel.

While they were hard at it, I was second-coating the front-of-house with a lime-wash from Lakeland Paints in Cumbria, part of the consignment of five tins that I boldly smuggled through customs in August. It's been ten years or more since the last lime-wash: a proper home-made one with lime, water and colour. Mix well and apply. Getting an even colour, however, is a bit of a lottery and, having turned a daunting age this month, I decided to cheat. What it added in money, it reduced in effort. The Good Wife wasn't too happy with the new colour at first, but a second coat has turned a lemon shade into the hickory colour we decided would look smart. Next time, we'll order a colour sample, although by the next time I'll have one foot in the grave.

So it's been all go this month. I haven't let up for a moment, given that the temperature is ideal for a lime-wash: somewhere between about 5 and 20^o, if I remember correctly. I was even out there, up a ladder, on a Sunday morning: the tranquillity of this beautiful autumn shattered by the baying of hounds and periodic gunshots. I've signed several online petitions begging our jumped-up miniature president to ban hunting on a Sunday. Having lost so many votes in the last election, however, Monsieur Macron will be reluctant to upset the hunting fraternity. Every vote will be precious to him, no matter how moronic.

Lime-washing per se isn't so bad, not with an MP3 player and our little Anker sound-bar at least. It's the ordeal by mosquito and climbing rose that turns the air blue. The mosquitoes are a legacy of a ruinously hot dry summer. The minute they see my bare legs, they get the taste for blood. I suppose it's my own fault, wearing shorts, but it's a question of pride: I refuse to let the little bastards drive me into jeans. So it's a power struggle. And if the insects don't get me, the vicious climbing rose at the back of the house almost certainly will. Even so, once the sun gets too hot around midday, you can retreat indoors, show off your battle scars proudly, and glow with a sense of satisfaction at another stage of a job well done. It's been a fortnight already and, by the time I finish, the endurance test will have been longer than the Tour de France. The Big Question is, though: will I have enough paint?

Underneath several coats of lime-wash and an inch or so of lime render, our straw bales seem to be doing pretty well after a couple of decades. Maybe even as pristine as my friend Bret's. I took a morning off the other day to go and help my original co-baler move and stack his bales in readiness for the next stage of his build.

Bretland lies across the valley and every time I venture to the other side, I get hopelessly lost. I haven't got a SatNav in my car and will probably never have one because I prefer to study maps and fix a destination in my head. It doesn't always work. I asked for directions in readiness, but he sent me one of those Google pins, which only confuse me the more. As Howling Wolf once sang, 'I asked for water and she gave me gasoline.'

Sure enough, I was there or thereabouts in good time for the rendezvous at ten. I then proceeded to get hopelessly, tearfully lost. I toured the immediate area, driving up hill and down dale; turning round and trying another unmarked side road, and finally bumped into Bret and a trailer full of straw bales around 30 minutes later. I helped to unload them while Bret directed the stacking operation. Handling the raw material of our house brought it all back. For years they have been out of sight and out of mind, but here they were again: the giant Weetabix biscuits held together with two parallel lengths of twine. Bret's have been in storage since pre-Covid days, but they were every bit as dry and as crisp as ours were after the canicule of 2003.

It took around two hours to get them solidly stacked and then covered with what appeared like an enormous plastic tablecloth. I should mention that working with a chain gang of usual suspects under Bret's watchful eye was a rather more efficient and well organised operation than the current British government. I generally keep my head out of the news for the sake of sanity (although hearing that James Corden was called a 'tiny cretin of a man' is a positive tonic), but one can't escape the daily headlines about U-turns and endemic incompetence. It's hard to believe that the Conservative party can survive such a monumental cock-up. One has to hope.

In the meantime, I was dismayed to find an e-mail or two from the Conservatives among the hundreds and thousands requiring my attention. But how on earth did they find their way into my in-box? I can only think that it was some misdirected attempt to contact the new clueless prime minister and urge her to do something to benefit the majority rather than the over-privileged few.  Wasn't life so much easier in the days before e-mail, by the way? Once I stop lime-washing, I can return to the really pressing matters of state, such as deleting unwanted messages.

While striding around on top of Bret's bales, helping to pull the giant tablecloth over them to keep out any rain that winter might bring, I made some flippant observation about being born to bale. When the time comes to account for my achievements over the course of a lifetime, the only solid thing I can claim – apart from my contribution to a baby girl – is this one family house of straw. It requires a certain amount of upkeep and maintenance, but don't they all? Lime-washing is fairly long and arduous task for a sexagenarian, but on the whole I reckon that protecting your bales beats thrusting your hand up a cow's fundament.

 

September: The Party's Over

It would please me to think that the title this month was an ironic nod to the demise of the Conservative Party now that the elders have voted for another Thatcher-lite strong woman to tackle the party's divisions and the nation's short-term needs at the expense of any long-term strategy to address the kind of issues that are no doubt perceived as less urgent, but no. It's a reference to the demise of my ancient father, who finally shuffled off to Buffalo last week at the age of 95, two short of his father's record, and five short of the century that he had set his heart on. He would have loved to receive the royal letter and preside regally over a gin-soaked party to celebrate the centenary of his birth way back in June,1927. It's hard to conceive that someone could have occupied a space on this earth for so long.

My old dad was a bionic man, held together with NHS interventions and expensive medication. In the end, one of the parts that maintained him gave out and his aneurism ruptured. We all knew that he could go at any minute, nevertheless it came as a shock when it happened. A bit like that favourite old Bosch dishwasher that finally packs up after two decades or more of service. It happened very quickly. The first I knew about it was a call from the older of my two sisters, his daily monitors and guardians, from her husband's car on the way to the hospital. It was in all probability, she told me, the Big One. The point of no return. He had used his emergency hotline that morning and was found by the medics rolling about in agony on the floor of his bedroom. Apparently, they observed him for an hour or so before deciding that he should be taken to the A&E department of Southampton 's main hospital. Protocol dictated that neither sister was allowed to accompany him.

Obviously, it was too late and fairly pointless for me to hop on a plane and try to get there in time. In fact, I'd only recently got back from a week in Romsey, Hants. Fortuitously, the same sister had asked me if I'd consider coming over to stay in her house and look after her two cats, Peggy and Polly, during an extended-family holiday in Falmouth. So I spent a delightful week of cool weather, a respite at last from the ferocious heat here in the Lot, visiting my father every day; doing a bit of shopping here and cooking there for the pater familias (the nabob, as my friend Winston dubbed him); taking him out as and when on a slow shuffle around his territory; watching the test match between England and South Africa together; and even enjoying our team Arsenal's victory over Bournemouth. We even had the rare pleasure of my brother's company for a few days. No one could make the Old Fella laugh like my brother could. Apart from the breathlessness that even a slow shuffle could provoke, all seemed fine and I'd begun to believe that making three figures was more likely than not – given his general good luck in life.

When we said our goodbyes, he and his 'companion' Anne, from one of the flats on the floor above his, were ensconced together for their nightly dose of TV. It was a Coronation Street evening. My father had overdone the gin for his regular 5 o'clock G-Time slot and had topped up his glass with what my other sister couldn't manage to finish, so he was well and truly plastered. He managed to get up, however, and accompanied me along the corridor to his front door for an affectionate farewell hug. Little, of course, did I realise that it was The Long Goodbye.

Eventually, my siblings were allowed to be there with him, once he was installed in a side room off the main ward: a last little bit of the good fortune that followed him like a faithful shadow throughout his life. I had spoken of death and dying several times with him in recent times, so I knew that his ideal departure was being at the centre of things in his deathbed at home, surrounded by his loved ones enjoying an impromptu party. One of them might lean over and ask 'Has he gone yet?', whereupon my father would smile and open an eye and tell them 'not yet'. Alas, the bed was a hospital bed and he didn't have a full complement of children, but my brother popped out to get him a gin and tonic from Tesco and my tech-savvy sister Gina managed to find some Frank Sinatra music on the tablet he'd brought with him.

However, and despite the fact that they gradually upped the level of pain relief, he was in much more pain than he or we would have wished. Nor did he ever properly regain consciousness. But right at the end, he asked about all the indistinct human shapes by the window. There was a man in a hat, apparently, who may have been his own father (who sported a bowler throughout his career as a company secretary). And my sister told me, too, that he lifted his hand to greet someone: 'Hello, darling! What are you doing here?' We suppose it was our mother, come to fetch him after his seven-year swansong as the Viceroy of Romsey and lead him off to the Afterlife. I'm not a religious nor even a particularly spiritual man, but such mysterious things are undeniably spooky. Someone with a more scientific bent would probably find an explanation, but I prefer that the mystery should remain inexplicable.

It was just before midnight, three days after what would have been my mother's 94^th. He and both my sisters had visited the grave only three or four days previously. My sister Jo left me a WhatsApp message to read the next morning. My wife pointed out that I am now the titular or putative head of the family, which is a salutary thought. I'm not sure what duties the role carries, but I'm determined that it won't change me.

One thing, of course, it will behove me to do is to read a eulogy at the funeral service, which will take place in Romsey Abbey, a suitably august venue for a nabob. They asked if we would like a death knoll to be rung, but we all agreed that it would be far too sombre for what we intend to be a celebration of his life. Afterwards, we are gathering in La Parisienne, just across the road from his official residence. It was his watering hole of choice and the staff loved him and treated him with a mix of deference and jocularity.

The old boy's hearing was shot, but he still loved nothing better than to banter with family and friends. It was his general good humour and perennial charm that made him so popular and I felt very proud to hear how the many friends he made following his move to Romsey, Hants. will miss him. I'll have no one now with whom to analyse Arsenal's efforts on Skype every weekend during the football season. Typically, they lost 3-1 to the old enemy, Manchester United, just days after his departure. At least he'll be spared this indignity.

August: Mighty Maximus

We don't get many visitors from across the water these days, winter, summer, autumn or spring. Perhaps custom has staled our finite variety. Perhaps the hellish heat of July and August has understandably put people off. Or maybe friends and family of our vintage are simply too busy fulfilling their new-found grandparental duties – something which we haven't (yet) experienced. So, it's just the two of us, as Bill Withers once sang. (Bill's dead now, but his music lives on. Still Bill, it strikes me.)

However, we do have an intermittent visitor in the field up the road near the communal bins. Maximus is a monumental horse. We gave him that name because he's a big boy in every eye-watering sense of the word. For a while, we thought that the sight of our blonde daughter was what excited him, but she's not here now, so it's more likely that it's fantasies of some golden sun-dappled mare as he nibbles on the blasted heath of his field. There can't be a single blade of nourishing grass left in the heat and dust of this parched summer. But at least he gets a bale of hay and a vat of water in the shade of the trees at one edge of his triangular field. Which is more than you can say for the poor creatures that seek shelter in the woods.

Maximus the mighty, or Max to his friends, is an Ardennais: a draft horse with an incredibly stocky body and thick legs given to pulling things like carriages. It's probably the breed they use in Perpignan for collecting household rubbish now that the town council has done away with their dustcarts in an effort to enhance their green credentials. He and his type no doubt resemble the horse that Harold Steptoe and his father kept in their yard for their rag-and-bone trade in Galton and Simpson's beloved sitcom. Hercules was his name.

Given the parlous state of the vegetation and Maximus' stoic solitude, we take him oddments from the fridge to supplement his diet. Carrots when they're in season and just recently the yellow variety of courgette. Or an occasional apple from one of our two undernourished trees, if I can find one that hasn't been hollowed out by insects or birds. He sees us coming and plods over wearily to say hello and find his reward. Both of us are still just a tad wary of horses – so much power in one mighty creature – but we know him so well now, we can get up close and personal without the slightest flinch. You can stroke his velvet-smooth, chestnut-coloured flanks and even nuzzle his huge head. The only irritation he ever seems to feel is with the flies that constantly bother him. Earlier in the summer, there were black clouds of the genus shite-hog, the type that invade your house and turn the kitchen into a germ zone. They seem to have flown off to die or propogate, and now it's another species, less numerous but given to stinging you, then coming back to sting you again.

When I contemplate his life and think about the suffering caused by heat, drought and flies, it prompts me to ask, What's it all about, Alfie? The three certainties of life on planet earth, according to T.S. Eliot anyway, are birth, copulation and death. I doubt whether Maximus remembers much about his birth and I'm not sure whether he knows much about his Ma and Pa. Perhaps it's the memories of the occasions when he's been lent or hired out to sire the next generation of Ardennais that get his giddy-goat, sex-wise. As for death, I'm almost certain that he won't be thinking about his mortality and what he's going to do with himself when he gets too old and weary to haul carriages and such like. He won't be worrying about how to make himself useful while he waits around for the curtain to fall. He won't be worrying about wars in Eastern Europe, rising inflation or the imminent collapse of the banking system.

In that respect, I suppose, he's quite a lucky big old horse. Nevertheless, his solitary existence does get you wondering whether there's any point to it all when push comes to shove. It's probably pointless even to try to figure out this conundrum at the core of life. Some people do extraordinary things as an ontological diversion, like the guy who was given the chance to take a penalty for his beloved Everton in a friendly match, as a reward for delivering essential supplies to the Ukraine in his own car. Others, like Keith Richards, whose mighty autobiography I was reading until recently, just immerse themselves in bouts of sheer hedonism. But most of us simply get on with the business of getting through life.

Of late, I've been focusing my thoughts on a strategy for staying sane and healthy in the extreme heat of a world warmed by roughly two centuries of the Industrial Revolution. As my Amerikanische Freund, Steve, pointed out at the weekend, temperatures in the 30s translate to the 90s in the old currency, while the late thirties and early forties – to which giddy heights the thermometer has risen frequently this summer – translate to a hundred plus. In Iraq they've been giving workers time off work because the temperature has nudged 50 degrees, for heaven's sake. When she was a little girl in Germany, the headmaster at Deborah's primary school used to announce 'Hitze frei!' (or heat break, I think) and they would all troop off home because the temperature in the classrooms was hitting maybe the mid twenties. That shows the progress we have made over the last five decades.

Anyway, after a month or more of practice, we've got it down to a fine routine. Up at six; open all doors and windows to cool the house; drop shutters and close doors at the back around nine, when the sun starts to radiate; close shutters and apertures around midday when the sun has moved to the front; work in the morning before the mezzanine becomes an inferno; hide in a darkened house for the entire afternoon before raising shutters and opening all apertures again around eight, when the sun's power has diminished. It's a peculiar thing, though, that our bedroom at the end of the house is the coolest place in the house for most of the day, but it becomes the warmest place at night. It doesn't stop me from enjoying a night's unconsciousness, a system re-boot, but it does alas disturb the Good Wife's sleep.

In the years to come, people might look back affectionately as a time when temperatures only reached 40 degrees. When we built our house, we projected that we might finish our days here. But we didn't factor in the heat. We've been discussing tactics like hanging lengths of sailcloth from the highest beams to provide an extra layer of protection from the sun. Anything, in fact, but air-conditioning, which is and will be contributing to further rises in temperature. Nevertheless, I see the writing on the front and rear wall. If there's any one thing that will prompt me, us, to plod off like Maximus for pastures new, it's the heat of things to come.