Party Animals

Yeeeeeeee-haaaaaaaaaa!

Last night saw another of my loopy friend Bret’s periodic Fêtes des Mecs. We boys of the ‘hood get together to party hearty, which usually involves ‘just hanging’ and doing a range of boyish things and being very, very silly. I usually go along, you understand, only to see some chums and observe the shenanigans. A man of my mature years has to behave with decorum. 

Last night, however, the theme was the Wild West. I haven’t strapped on a gun-belt now for almost half a century, so I was in a state of high excitement all week. As a small boy, I was obsessed with cowboys and Indians and barely a non-school day went by when I wasn’t wearing a hat and holster or playing with my Britain’s Limited Swappets. They were the loves of my early life, because you could interchange heads, hats, torsos, legs, gun belts, ‘kerchiefs and create your own custom-built miniature plastic cowboys. 

I went to Brive on Thursday afternoon to cruise the Troc-shops in the hope of finding the kind of Western paraphernalia that I’ve been missing for a few decades. I had this idea that some kid might have deposited his Winchester repeating rifle and/or Colt 45 for a modest prize. It was a vain hope: this is France, after all, and not the Panhandle of Texas. In the end, I dropped into an emporium that specialises in cheap Chinese tat, I found me a hat, a plastic pistol and a belt that might serve, and all for just over a fiver. 

The Fête de Mecs is a moveable feast these days. What started as Bret’s brainchild and solo venture has now been co-opted by committee. But it’s a committee that works. As Bret suggested – dressed up as Bretina last night, the big-hearted broad and bar room floozy – it’s a case of democracy in action. The chaps get together several weeks before the event to decide venue and theme, to design games and publicity materials and to build props.

'Howdy, stranger.'

Last night’s affair took place at a Dutch friend’s place about a 20-minute drive from here. His wife had gone away for the night to see a relative and had taken their three sausage dogs with them, presumably lest the hounds get caught up in the crossfire of a shoot-out. I arrived as the mysterious man in black, with black hat, black jeans, black shirt (‘sweet Gene Vincent…’) and black Long Rider coat that I bought years ago at Camden Market. It served me for appearances as Nosferatu at a friend’s firework party in Sheffield and as Keith Richards at Bret’s 40^th birthday party soon after moving to the Lot. Since then it has hung from a hook in our cave, waiting for just such an event as last night.

It has long been a dream of mine that one day I might push open a pair of swing doors and stride into a joint where the piano player would stop tinkling the ivories and everyone would fall silent. Beautifully as Dmitri’s barn had been converted into a barroom for the occasion, there were no swing doors. Moreover, this stranger in black was clutching a bottle of wine and a big bowl of rice salad I’d made earlier. It somehow detracted from my impact. Lee, the organic farmer, was serving behind the bar in squashed top hat and dirty apron. Moke, the furniture-maker, was dressed as the escaped convict featured in the Wanted posters all over the walls and wearing manacles made from bits of guttering and painted plastic chain. Dmitri, the graphic artist, was a sneering sheriff with a waistcoat and a twin-holster gun-belt that I coveted immediately. Nonno, the serial party-goer, was a Mexican in a serious poncho. And there were a few other hangers-on, who looked like the kind of men that would sell dud rifles to the Injuns. While we waited for Bret – who was in a bedroom upstairs, discovering the tribulations that women go through when putting on make-up – we threw firecrackers, staged shoot-outs and simulated agonisng death. 

There’s always an admission price – or frais d’entrée – to pay at these parties. Hell to pay, I call it, because it means drinking some dubious hooch of Bret’s devising. Over time, a merciful choice of grades has crept into it. Lee the barman, who understands that my capacity is strictly limited, advised the fire-water as the least ruinous option. You can’t sip with caution, but have to knock it back in one, as the taste is too foul to describe. I banged the empty glass down on the bar, but couldn’t fulfil another dream by sliding said glass along a great length of bar surface to the bartender, busy polishing his glasses with a dirty tea towel, because the bar was stunted and the surface hadn’t been polished to a suitable shine. 

Each guest last night received a starter-pack of five dollar bills with which to speculate in the games in the hope of accumulating enough cash to buy one of the handsome plastic prizes on display behind the bar. I won the kitty at the first game by throwing the only horseshoe that stayed on the pole, but I’m sure the sneering, crooked sheriff kept his share of the prize-money. Moke won the second game, which was to lasso with old electrical cable the cactus that someone had made with an off-cut of chipboard. Meanwhile, some badass had the bright idea of robbing the bar of its evening takings.

A third game involved binding three hombres together so that they were facing different directions. The three-man crab then had three minutes to make their way up the steps onto the terrace and down the other side and across the lawn to a shelter where they picked up as many water-filled balloons as they could manage to carry over to the finishing post – without spilling the nitro-glycerine (represented by a plastic ball in a sawn-off polystyrene cup, which the middle one of the human triad had to hold by his teeth). Complicated – but they did it.

The final game involved crumpling up dollar bills and lobbing them across the bar room floor and into Bretina’s cleavage. I recognised that things were beginning their customary slide into post-midnight disarray and took my leave, which involved the very un-cowboy-like and very adopted-French-like business of shaking hands or even (gulp) double-kissing each and every person in the room. Dmitri had been firing up the family hot tub all evening and, much as I liked the notion of sitting in warm water under the stars, I just couldn’t be fagged with the effort of shedding my clobber unless it was to crawl into the marital bed. Besides, it was now pouring down with rain – and I sure-as-hell’s-flames mean pouring down. Nevertheless, as I left the shelter of the leaky barn, I spotted a single naked figure sprinting across the lawn towards the big wooden bathtub. Ya-hoooooooo!

These affairs normally go on into the wee small hours and involve floors and sleeping bags. Personally speaking, there’s no substitute for waking up in the comfort of my own bed. Soon after doing just that this morning, I shaved off my Clint-like stubble, cultivated over four days or more, not with a cutthroat, but with my disposable Bic razor.  

It feels good to be smooth-skinned again. Normal service has been resumed. It feels good, although perhaps – in the light of my Saturday night’s entertainment – a trifle mundane.

Back Home

Dear Mrs. Wynburn, I am sorry that Mark was unable to write his blog last weekend, but he was back home in the UK, celebrating his parents’ 60th wedding anniversary. I hope that he will be back in action soon. Yours sincerely, Stella Sampson (Mrs.).

My mum used to write similar notes to my gym teacher at primary school in Belfast, so I wouldn’t have to swim in the outdoor pool. I appreciated it at the time, because the water looked about as uninviting as the mid Atlantic in January. Had she not pandered to my distaste, however, my backbone might have toughened up at an earlier age – and I might even have learnt to swim properly. Our gym teacher, who had the gruff voice of a chain-smoker, employed an interesting education technique: she would lasso you around your middle and kind of tow you along through the icy water. I suppose it was one step up from ‘sink or swim’.

Anyway, now I’m the adult and my parents have reverted to childhood. Both are in their mid 80s and becoming increasingly dependent on their four children. Typically, my sisters bear the brunt of the burden: I live many miles away across the Channel, and my brother – a busy plumber who lives in a flat where the water from the sink drains into an old plastic rubbish bin dubbed ‘The Ganges’ – rarely finds the time to drive the 40 miles or so to my parents’ Southampton home. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would have said.

I do my bit whenever I go back home, but it’s little substitute for my sisters’ almost daily drop-in visits. My mum is getting more than a little forgetful these days and it seems that, every time I go home, I have to try to decipher the French national character for her and to pinpoint the main cultural differences between England and France. It does at least make you think about things that you tend to take for granted.

My dad and I can watch Final Score together and moan about what’s gone wrong with Arsenal, the team that he has supported since he was a little boy. With my limited knowledge of computers, I can also make myself useful by trying to fix glitches in his laptop, on which he orders groceries from Asda and talks to me on Skype. This time, for example, I installed about 50 Windows updates that he must have managed to park somewhere in cyberspace.

Cut the cake!

We gathered on Sunday last to celebrate their Diamond Jubilee. Given that my dad’s culinary repertoire is not wide and cooking for more than four would set his dodgy heart a-fluttering, and given that my mother is one of the worst cooks on earth, God love her, my sisters offered to do the cooking. They also brought with them glasses, plates and cutlery on the basis that home hygiene is suspect. The official line was that my parents wouldn’t have to worry about mess or washing up after we’d gone. They do, in fact, own a dishwasher – it came with the house – but have never used it for anything other than storing rags and shoe-polishing paraphernalia. They prefer to wash up with lukewarm water and ineffectual detergent.    

We all clubbed together to buy them the type of present my mother couldn’t file away in her ‘bottom drawer’. (My wife and I gave up trying to come up with practical, thoughtful presents for her after witnessing her converting the winter-weight tights we’d bought her one Christmas into ‘pop-socks’. The French would call it perhaps a ‘re-looking’. It was about as cack-handed as Mickey Rourke’s adventures with Botox.) The younger of my two sisters has an Italian partner and he has been working relentlessly on my father to persuade him that their telly needed updating. So we bought them a 26” Sony FST with stand that would just fit into its allotted space. My dad was very moved, but my mother – with three glasses of pink champagne inside her – was later heard berating the Italian partner, on the grounds that she liked the old telly and found the new one too bright, too loud, too big, too black and too vulgar. As my brother observed, ‘Good to know that the present was a success, then’. By the next day, though, she had tempered her views and the audio-visual re-looking was a fait accompli.

The following evening, I helped the older of my two sisters celebrate 30 years of marriage with her husband. It was a rather more muted affair involving dinner in their local pub, which underlined just how expensive it is now to eat out in the UK. Or the south of England, anyway. I sat opposite my younger sister, who told me all about her new hobby of researching family trees on the internet. My paternal grandfather’s grandfather, it seems, was a detective in Victorian London. I wondered about teaming up with Andrew Lloyd Webber to write a fabulously successful musical about the man. My sister promised to delve deeper.

After all this socialising, it was a relief to return to the peace and quiet of rural France. Getting back to my sanctuary meant travelling with Ryan (unf)Air. After all my diatribes about Mr. O’Leary’s airline, I found myself meekly checking that my one bag could sit inside one of their intimidating metal ‘guides’. At least the weight of my shame and hypocrisy didn’t tip things over the 10kg allowance. I had remembered not to wear boots for the trip across – so didn’t have to bear the indignity of removing my footwear – but forgot that a jar of aubergine pickle counts as a liquid. With a righteous scowl, I suggested to the customs man that he give it to someone who liked Indian cuisine. His reply that it would be thrown away didn’t improve my mood.

Since the running dogs didn’t confiscate my two packets of crumpets and my one packet of creamed coconut, I gave thanks for small mercies. Later, I gave bigger thanks when we landed safely in Limoges. We arrived 15 minutes ahead of schedule, which triggered that irritating recorded clarion call, so the airline can crow about its winning percentage of on-time flights. Alas, on queuing up to show our passports, the French officers were nowhere to be seen. We waited patiently, as good Brits do, for 10 minutes before a pair of lugubrious uniformed men showed up for duty. Welcome to France.

My brother and I collect specious strap lines (along the lines of Rotherham – another way of doing things) and it struck me that it’s maybe time for someone to come up with a one-line equivalent of the famous Gallic shrug. How about, for example, France – where we do not give a monkey’s?

Ah, it’s good to be back home again.

On Location

At the end of last week, my friend Tim the photographer and I went off on the road to ‘do a piece’ (as they say in the trade) for France Magazine on Najac in the Aveyron. It’s one of 10 villages in the department classified as plus beaux villages de France. The Aveyron itself is still referred to as one of France’s ‘best kept secrets’ and should be designated as l’un des plus beaux départements de France.

It’s only roughly two hours due south of here by deserted roads. Two hours nearer the Midi, two hours nearer the true south. It’s a different country down there. The scenery is not dissimilar, but in other respects it’s not at all like good old insular and inward-looking France Profonde where we live. 

It’s only two hours and yet I hadn’t set foot in the Aveyron for about 12 years. We were living in our old stone farmhouse and I was in the middle of painting a spare room on the first floor a fetching shade of orange, so my wife could have a place to ply her trade as an aromatherapist for the first time since our move from the U.K.

For my 40-something birthday, Debs presented me with a card on which she’d drawn a map to a house in the middle of nowhere. It was run by an English couple by the name of Wolf. Our daughter, who was about three or four at the time, referred to Mrs. Wolf – who cooked us a fine vegetarian meal on our first evening, which was memorable for being something other than an omelette – as Mrs. She-Wolf. Clearly, we’d been reading her far too many bedtime stories. We used their house as a base to explore the gorges of the river Aveyron and such wonderful places as Najac, St. Antonin de Noble Val and the stunning Cordes-sur-Ciel. It was a brief but re-vitalising break and yet we’ve contrived never to return. I guess France is such a big country and there are so many glories to behold.

Tim and I arrived soon after midday, so naturally enough the place was shut up and deserted. We found a pizzeria that was open and I realised with a start of recognition that I’d eaten there before. Just as the Madeleine triggered Proust’s remembrance of things past, so that pizzeria brought everything back for me. Strange, how memory works. The village had seemed reasonably familiar when we arrived. I knew that I’d been there before. But sitting down to eat in the pizzeria, suddenly weather, conversations, sights and sounds came pouring back in, as if a valve had been opened. We’d had an excellent pizza then and I had a damn fine pizza on Thursday. Cooked in a wood-burning oven, it was as cheap as chips and featured enough mozzarella to re-sole a workman’s boot.

After lunch, I’d arranged to meet someone outside the fortress that dominates every picture-postcard view of the village, which spreads along the spine of a promontory high above an incised meander of the Aveyron. Our guide was late and I started to fret immediately. No doubt I had got my wires crossed and noted down the rendezvous for the wrong day. We phoned our contact in the Tourist Office to ask for help. 12 years or so ago, we didn’t have a single mobile telephone in our family. Now all three of us have one. Sometimes they can be very useful.

The guide arrived and – this is where things started to become exceptional – she admitted that she had forgotten our date. She apologised profusely. But… but… that doesn’t happen in France. Well, it did and she gave us a fascinating tour of the ruined but impregnable fortress with its two-and-a-half-metre-thick walls and its elaborate network of defence mechanisms. Najac was right at the point where the King of France’s territories abutted those of the Duke of Aquitaine on one side and the Count of Toulouse on the other. Medieval France was certainly not designed for early retirement and coach trips. 

We met our contact from the local Tourist Office just outside the main gates after the tour. She was about half the age I had imagined from my telephone conversations with her: a complexion that suggested 25 and a demeanour, a dedication to duty and a body of knowledge that added up to 50. A quite delightful character, she guided us all around the nooks and crannies of the village, introducing us to a host of warm and welcoming individuals in whom she thought I’d be interested. In the boulangerie, for example, a woman who reminded me slightly of the American actress Lee Remick (circa The Omen, perhaps) told us all about the local tradition of baking giant fouaces (a kind of brioche) on some Saint’s Day, before heaping offerings from the shop upon us to take home to our families for Easter.

By the end of the afternoon, both Tim and I were exhausted from the effort (even now, after 16 years) of concentrating hard on a foreign language. We stayed at a local hotel, courtesy this time of the Regional Tourist Board, where everyone was equally friendly and equally welcoming. Dinner was fine, but surely it’s time that French hostelries grew out of this tiresome obsession with nouvelle cuisine. I had some fillets of river trout, which were lovely, but they came with one potato, one spoonful of frustratingly good ratatouille and a langoustine climbing out of a miniature glass Le Parfait jar. On closer inspection, I discovered that it had just emerged from a bed of rice.

That evening we watched the first of three documentary films that Paul-Henri Meurnier has made about Najac, its characters and its deliciously slow pace of life. Ici Najac: à vous la terre featured a slothful stationmaster – who would be sent packing further down the line to Cordes by his SNCF overlords, un-amused to witness such lack of industry – and a fire-breathing socialist woman of 104, who did that thing with her toothless mouth that Les Dawson used to do. 

The following morning, I did my final interview of the trip with a delightful man by the name of Najac – who makes hand-carved knives, including the best-selling Le Najac. I would like to own a Najac by Najac from Najac, but didn’t want one enough to pay €100 or so for it. Hand-crafted to last, though, and not (as he proclaims on his poster) ‘made in Asia by children’.

I got back home by early afternoon, elated and rejuvenated by my trip. The village is beautiful, but so are countless others here. It was more the people and the welcome we were given. Is there more Latin blood in the national corps down there, that much nearer the Midi? We were treated like VIPs, which is great for the ego of course. More importantly, though, I found an entire convivial community where everyone appeared content with their lot. It was enough to restore my faith in humanity. It was, too, a timely reminder to get out more and do more road trips and meet more nice people. I don’t want to turn into an irascible misanthrope. Someone with no teeth, perhaps, who does that thing with his mouth that Les Dawson used to.

Wot We Done At Earth Hour

Every year we try to celebrate the World Wide Fund For Nature’s ‘Earth Hour’. Celebrate is probably not the best word to use – respect, maybe, or observe. Because only a nihilist would want to celebrate a symbolic gesture designed to underline how close to the edge we have come in the last 30 years or so. 

It is only a symbolic gesture, so I can’t get very excited about it. No matter how many millions all over the world turn off their lights during the hour in question, we’re always going to be in a small minority. I can’t imagine, for example, the da Silva family, holed up in some shack in a Rio de Janeiro favela, would have enthusiastically cut off their intermittent electricity supply for an hour so that… what, exactly? So that the Powers That Be will be sufficiently moved to decree that enough is enough? Mankind will be responsible, will be good.

Even though I was raised on a diet of The Lone Ranger and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., I do not alas believe that good will ultimately overcome evil. History teaches me otherwise. My belief system is debilitated by a conviction that, whatever we do and however we strive to redress the balance, the forces of darkness will have their evil way. It looks pretty bad to me at present. And where are the goodies, who can lead us to salvation? Where are Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King jr. when we need them most? Oh yes, assassinated by the baddies.

But – as Alan Shearer punctuates every pronouncement he makes on Match of the Day – I still believe that it is a far, far better thing to do something, no matter how futile, rather than nothing at all. And so on Saturday evening, the 31^st March 2012, the Sampson family observed Earth Hour.

And it was rather nice this year. One of the best things about the global gesture is that it makes you appreciate just how dependent we are on electricity for entertainment. Much more so now than when I were a lad, what with com-pewters and them big, big tellies. So it’s a bit of a challenge to dream up some old-fashioned form of entertainment for an entire hour.

We cheated slightly. By a clever use of synchronisation, we had a late but welcome candlelit dinner. All those night-lights (or should I say nite-lites?) from Ikea came into their own. Our table was festooned with little glowing flames, like a whole colony of lightning bugs. Well, perhaps that’s a little fanciful, but the effect was lovely. My wife (‘Have I told you about my wife…?) served us up with a delicious plate of spaghetti enlivened by a sauce of her own invention, sprinkled with shards of parmesan from Lidl and supplemented by a salad of tender shoots, grown by Bio Woman from Martel market, washed, spun, chopped and dressed by my good self. 

Afterwards, the three of us – still at table, still lit by flickering candles – played three games of Chinese Chequers. Dismiss this simple traditional board game at your peril. Our daughter explained some exciting new variations on the standard leaping manoeuvre that a friend had taught her: variations which opened up whole new worlds of pattern-making. It was fun, even without the background music that provides the soundtrack for our lives here.

The hour went so quickly that, before we knew it, it was ten minutes past the moment when everyone puts their power back on and creates such a surge in demand that we are plunged back into darkness. But that didn’t happen because we Sampsons were a little late. There was plenty of time before we needed to turn on the telly for a 90-minute Arena documentary on the extraordinary life of Dr. Jonathon Miller.

So Earth Evening went out on a high with a fascinating profile of this modern-day Renaissance Man. I knew that he can heal people and make them laugh, I knew that he presents TV documentaries, writes books and directs plays and operas, but I didn’t know – curse him – that he also creates rather good original art. The extraordinary thing is that, as he nears the end of his rich and diverse life, he still regrets sometimes that he didn’t stick to being a doctor.

It’s a terrible thing to live with regrets. I try not to do it myself, but it isn’t always easy. It’s one of the reasons why we choose to observe Earth Hour. No matter how toothless the gesture proves, I would forever regret it if we did nothing to try to halt the inevitable. And I think now that I might also regret it if I didn’t find time regularly to play Chinese Chequers with my wife and daughter.

Alf 4 Hamlette

This Saturday evening, as she does from time to time, Hamlette came to stay the night. Her owners, our friends Paul and Jill, had decided spontaneously to celebrate their 19^th wedding anniversary in nearby Martel. 

Hamlette, as you can probably deduce, is a kind of accident of birth. In other words, Hamlet became Hamlette when he became a she. I said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side…

In fact, the walks are the worst of it – for reasons that will become clear. In all other respects, Hamlette is welcome in our home. Even Myrtle doesn’t mind her. Myrtle was once chased up the flue of our wood-burning stove by a black dog that bounded into the house and created consternation. I had to go up to the mezzanine, lean over the wooden handrail and gently remove the terrified cat from her perch. Ever since, black dogs represent the work of the devil. But Hamlette is a Golden Retriever and tan dogs, like our Alf, are good dogs.

We like to think that Alf and Hamlette are friends. We also like to think that, by telling him a few times in advance that ‘Hamlette’s coming to stay’, our dog will keenly anticipate her arrival. ’Just for a few hours, maybe, it will give him something other than his daily two meals and two walks to look forward to.

Actually, their behaviour suggests little more than a familiar indifference. They acknowledge each other and one will follow the other into the house for a quick guided tour, but there’s none of the hysteria that occurs when my friend, Adrian the tree surgeon, drops by with his faithful dish-mop dog, Polly.

It’s only when you take the two tan dogs out together for a walk that you realise why. Sex. Pure and simple. Even humans find that that sexual attraction can compromise a friendship. The strange thing is, though, Alf was genetically modified at something like four months old. The operation occasioned one of only two times in his otherwise happy life when he has had to wear the cone of shame. It wouldn’t have been quite so degrading for him had we lived here on ‘the dog’s meadow’ (as our daughter christened our plot of land), with only the cats to witness the inverted plastic light shade he had to wear for almost a fortnight. But we lived in a village at the time and it destroyed his social credibility overnight. He had a kind of friendship, about which we weren’t really happy, with the volatile Alsatian that ruled the neighbourhood, but Argo afterwards spurned him like an untouchable. 

So what I’m driving at is: Alf has been denied the pleasures of the flesh. Unlike the randy little Jack Russell at the nearby farm, who wanders off for days at a stretch in search of hot female bottoms, Alf has never known a) what it’s like to sow his wild oats and b) how to do it. We tell horrified, disbelieving locals that he has led a more contented life as a neuter.

Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth

And yet… when you take the two of them out on a walk together, you realise just how indelible that genetic imprint is. At first they trot along side by side by Sondheim and you think, Ah don’t they look sweet together. But every few yards he’ll stop to demonstrate his ardour for Hamlette (if you catch my drift). Her back legs are getting rather arthritic now and the bounce in her step is no longer so pronounced, but she still has a an IQ that’s as pleasingly low as that of a chaffinch and she must come across to our Alf as the canine version of Jayne Mansfield (may God rest her unfortunate soul).

Happily, the longer Hamlette stays here, the less urgent becomes Alf’s need to do the hokey-cokey. However, on Saturday evening, it was apparent that they haven’t seen each other all winter long. It’s not Hamlette that minds. She just patiently and uncomplainingly lets her tan companion go through his cack-handed manoeuvres. No, the discomfort is more the dog-walkers’. I take pride in the fact that Alf doesn’t need a lead, that he sits quietly by the side of the road when a car passes and that he does his business discreetly off-piste. It’s shameful and mortifying to witness our good boy air-humping Hamlette. 

And to see the way that Hamlette lies back compliantly and thinks of Pedigree Chum reminds me uncomfortably of the indignities that women the world over must go through in the name of testosterone. ‘Down boy!’ I tell him. ‘It’s just not nice. Dogs of your schooling don’t do that sort of thing.’

Hamlette went home this morning, when Paul and Jill dropped by after their 19^th anniversary adventure to find all three of us still in our nightclothes, lingering as ever over our traditional Sunday morning breakfast. More shame. I had intended to take the dogs out before breakfast, but couldn’t bear the thought of all that embarrassing hello-folks-and-what-about-the-workers business. Maybe by the next time that Hamlette comes to stay, Alf will be that much older and wiser. Mind you, remembering the way that my 94-year old grandfather used to embrace my wife, nothing is guaranteed.

Self-indulgent Saturday

What do you do when you suddenly find yourself with time on your hands and a million jobs to do? I can tell you what I do – in the great tradition of writers faced with a sheet of blank paper, I prevaricate.

It comes as a shock to the system, when you’ve spent the last couple of months solid, slaving over a hot keyboard and/or rushing around like a blue-arsed fly fulfilling all kinds of obligations, to discover that time for once is not pressing. I even toyed with the idea of making a carrot cake – to try out a recipe I found on The Guardian’s home page and to fulfil a family joke. It’s not a very witty one, but whenever someone proposes a hot drink, the other adds: Yes please, and I’ll have a slice of carrot cake with it. To which the enquirer ripostes: I don’t think we’ve got any left. Well, I told you it wasn’t very witty. Anyway, I haven’t yet made the carrot cake, because my wife and daughter have a thing against raisins.

There’s something to be said for the routine of regular work. For one thing, it means that you haven’t got time for all those other hundreds and thousands of jobs that need doing, so you can shift them to the back burner without fear of reprisals. On a more metaphysical level, there’s also the advantage that it stops you examining the state of the human condition. Rivets, as good old Joseph Conrad might have had it. In other words, mundane routine keeps our thoughts away from The Heart of Darkness. I suppose that’s why some people, faced with the delicious prospect of retirement, go rapidly to pieces. Our work has come to equal our worth. Without it, we start questioning our value in society.

Three-toed and proud of it

Personally, I’ve always hated work. Had I been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, I would have spent my life reading, writing and making music compilations. Once the family seat had been handed down to me as oldest son, I would have turned it into a sanctuary for endangered species and spent the rest of the livelong day chatting with the animals. Unfortunately, the spoon in my mouth at birth had Made in Sheffield embossed on its stainless steel handle. So I’ve been driven ever since by the Protestant work ethic and, in adulthood, by the need to earn a crust.

Yesterday, though, I took an executive decision to indulge my indolent inner self by watching two rugby matches – consecutively. However, the decision rapidly triggered a chain reaction of guilt. No sooner did I get back from the Saturday-morning market in Martel, than I changed into my worst work clothes, strapped on my wife’s head lamp that she keeps by the bed in case she wakes up in the middle of the night and needs to read to get back to sleep, gathered up some plastic ties from Aldi and crawled into the vide sanitaire beneath the house to finish the pipe lagging I’d started the weekend of the Big Chill. 

It wasn’t pleasant, but it was good penance. Once I’d made lunch with some leftover brown rice in the fridge, I’d finished the self-flagellation and was ready for my afternoon of self-indulgence. Yesterday it was the culmination of the 2012 Six Nations tournament: three matches choreographed for maximum drama to conclude at Twickenham in the early hours of the evening. The schedulers, however, hadn’t reckoned with Wales winning the Grand Slam by late afternoon. Which meant that the final match, between England and Ireland, was meaningless. Nevertheless, I commanded The Daughter to walk the dog and settled down on one of our outsize cushions with a packet of crisps and Daisy the cat on my lap to see whether a resurgent England could vanquish the Irish. Despite the rain and an oval ball that slipped about like an errant bar of soap, they could and did. Convincingly. Even though a childhood in Belfast has conferred on me honorary Irish nationality, I was happy. 

The self-indulgence should have concluded with the final whistle. But no. Sometimes the sloth inside surprises me. It shouldn’t. After all, I am still the same person as the child who used to park himself in front of the old black-and-white telly to watch Test match cricket during summer holidays. Ball by literal ball. Voluntarily I would watch the likes of Geoff Boycott and Ken Barrington compile their painstaking centuries. By the time Chris Tavaré was in his pomp – or maybe I should say his shell – some years later, adulthood had taught me that you can’t afford to do this if you want to get things done.

So when, after dinner, my wife proposed a family film, I didn’t say no. Poor thing, she had been working all day, so who was I to deny her some self-indulgence of her own? Thus it was that I clocked up five hours on the telly when I should have been filing papers, finishing my wife’s website, lagging yet more pipes, repairing a leak, pruning plants or even making a carrot cake. I told myself it was less self-indulgent than the rugby, because we have a duty to start working our way through a great big accumulated pile of movies.

We watched a worthy attempt to film David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars. The novel was one of three we both read during a winter of snow-themed reading matter: The Shipping News, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow and Cedars. The DVD was going cheap at the annual Saint Denis lès Martel brocante. It was beautifully staged in authentic, exquisite Pacific North-West locations, featured some fine performances from the likes of Max von Sydow, but it was just a tad… stodgy. 

Stodgy is an adjective that I hope won’t apply to my carrot cake when I finally make it. I have proposed cutting up dried apricots as a substitute for raisins, but my daughter is still not happy. I’ve told her to be open-minded about dried fruit. There’s plenty of time for prejudice once you become an adult. So I shall arise and go now and attempt to make this cake, because I’m of a mind to turn a self-indulgent Saturday into an entirely hedonistic weekend. Work? Ptui! I spit upon the concept.

Party Girl

As parents of a teenage daughter, we’ve long held this touching belief that French teenagers have a much more responsible attitude to alcohol than their contemporaries across the water. I’m here to tell you that it ain’t necessarily so.

I couldn’t quite understand my daughter’s misgivings about going to her friend’s 16^th birthday party on Friday night. She had worked hard on her various half-term projects for most of her holidays, so surely she deserved a little fun. Invited to spend the night, I could drop her off on Friday evening and her mum could pick her up on the way back from work early on Saturday afternoon. The venue was the friend’s parent’s holiday gîte, so the ‘kids’ could party like it was 1999, free from the custodial influence of adults.

Neither my wife nor I worried a jot about the implications. After all, she’s been to a few overnighters with friends from school and there has never been a question of shenanigans. We’ve dropped her off with her sleeping bag and comestibles, secretly rather hoping that she and her pals might all let their hair down for once. Just a little. These French ‘yoot’: they seem such a responsible bunch, busy training for a premature adulthood.

Maybe the moral high ground occupied by parents has obscured from view my own youthful transgressions, but curiously I have never really stopped to make the link to my own experience of teenage parties. They seem so far back in the past now that they’re hardly relevant. But now that I remember, surely I should be more worried about my daughter more than I have been. Drink, drugs, underage sex, appalling behaviour, irresponsibility a-go-go. She’s got my genes. It doesn’t bare thinking about.

Back in Belfast at the end of the ‘60s and the beginning of the ‘70s, my sister and I used to be part of a crowd of middle-class party-animals. We’d gather at a predetermined spot of a Saturday night – admittedly in a suburb that was safer than most – and either head for a party that we knew about, or wander the tree-lined avenues in search of a party that we didn’t (yet) know about. Armed with bottles of Strongbow or Woodpecker cider and Dick Turpin or QC wine, and flagons of home-brewed ‘jungle juice’ that tasted suspiciously like paint-stripper, we’d turn up, tune in to whatever was going down and turn on to whatever illicit substances were available in whoever’s house had been foolishly abandoned by trusting parents for the evening. 

I still blanche to think of one particular evening when my girlfriend’s parents returned prematurely to find all available floor space taken up by a writhing mass of hormonal humanity, either snogging at carpet-level or crashed out and propped up against a wall for support. I was upstairs when the lights went on, dressed in my girlfriend’s mother’s fur coat, either in the loo or the parents’ bedroom. All I can remember is opening a first-floor window, climbing onto the windowsill and hanging on by the gutter just above me as I swayed above the back garden below – until someone arrived and suggested that I might be better advised to climb back in and face the music. Anyone who knows the story of how Robert Wyatt of The Soft Machine ended up in a wheelchair for the rest of his life will recognise the folly of such a manoeuvre.

Every Saturday night, somehow we would have to make our way back home and slip into the family home and into our beds without drawing undue attention to ourselves. I can only imagine that the walk home was enough to sober us up sufficiently to avoid detection. Either that or my parents were as naïve and as trusting as I seem to have become in my time.

We, the parents, were at a party of our own last Friday evening. We left early because Debs had treated eight people that day and had to get up early the next morning for more. There was a text message from our daughter to ask if I could come and get her. What a shame, I thought. Obviously she hadn’t managed to let her hair down and wasn’t enjoying herself. So I dropped my tired wife off at home and drove off to pick up The Daughter.

As soon as I got there, I understood immediately why she wouldn’t have enjoyed herself. This party was different to others that she has spent happily among the company of school friends. There were… boys. If there’s anything worse on earth than teenage boys, it’s drunken teenage boys. I remember only too clearly how gauche and generally awful I must have been at a similar age in a similar condition. I caught one unsteady youth in my headlights, prowling around outside the house like a sexual predator. 

Locked in an embrace with some spotty Francois (or whatever the French equivalent is of Herbert) was the birthday girl. She released herself at once to greet me in a voice that was too much louder than normal to suggest anything other than partial inebriation. Hard as she probably tried to disguise it, I could see the look of relief on Tilley’s face when she saw me. She followed me to the car. Both of us were sensibly in bed before midnight.

It all came out in the wash the next day, once my wife had got back from work. That’s the way it works in this household: our daughter tells her mother, usually – unless otherwise requested – on the implicit understanding that it will be edited if necessary and passed on to her father. Apparently it was a boozing party, with whisky and Malibu high up on the menu. The party dinner came to naught, because her friend’s mother forgot the cheese for the raclette and then the boys, who started throwing food as soon as they arrived, added beer and lead pencils to the water in which the potatoes were cooked.

A whole scene going, in other words! But not the kind of scene favoured by my daughter. I have a rough idea why she’s so disdainful of teenage boys, but can’t imagine where she got to be so sensible about alcohol. I’m very relieved that she is and only hope that she manages to retain this equanimity once she becomes a student in the UK. Obviously French kids aren’t quite the sensible creatures I had previously imagined, but they’re positive angels in comparison to their British counterparts. Lord protect this thy child from the follies of her father…