The March Of Time

We hit the town, so to speak, on Friday evening. It was our dear Dutch friend Eric’s 50^th birthday and the multitudes assembled at Le Mortier clubbed together to buy him a ride in a hot-air balloon. It’s something of which he has long dreamed, apparently. Perhaps Alf, our aging hound, will run outside and bark at the self-same montgolfier as it floats across the horizon. Around the valley in 80 minutes – or so.

Up, up and away

It seemed like what it was: the first time in months that we have gone out together to attend one of the international parties that once eased us back into civilisation after the early years of self-imposed exile among the hill people. It seemed, too, like I have been incarcerated, stuck to the computer screen, for months on end while the spring and then the summer have slipped away almost unnoticed. So it was a kind of coming-out ball for both of us. We were separated within minutes of arriving at their organic smallholding with courgette quiche, a bottle of rosé and contribution for the montgolfier. Like meandering streams, we didn’t come back together for over an hour after our respective circuitous routes to the snack stall had taken us around various friends and acquaintances for a quick résumé of the past months.

People, it transpired, have taken up with new partners and sufficient things have been going on to make me feel glad to live in a kind of splendid isolation on one side of the valley while the other, it seems, has been busy turning itself into a kind of Place de Peyton.

Meanwhile, assorted children have grown up into barely recognisable adolescents (half child, half biscuit). Tilley the Kid, I explained to enquirers, was in England, getting her first taste of office life at my brother-in-law’s company. Sometimes you have to resort to a bit of nepotism in this life. It’s only for a few weeks. We are both hoping for a taste of romance, but that’s probably being fanciful. As a former office worker, I saw for myself how these things generally take time.

I was unable to explain this to Eric’s ageless mother, who collared me at one point. Since she speaks neither English nor French, we struggled to converse. Even with ‘O’ level German, Dutch sounds like Rowan Atkinson’s impression of a Nordic tongue. I smiled desperately and tried not to betray my terror of total incomprehension. In the end her husband came to the rescue and explained that they had heard from their son, the birthday boy, that our daughter had grown up into a fine young lady.

It hardly seems possible that a decade has passed since Eric’s 40^th, when his mother looked younger than he did and The Daughter was just a little girl soon to resume her primary education in a new school in a new town. She would have played with her peers 10 years ago as other kids did on Friday night who were then but babes in arms. How come a decade seems like an eternity to a growing child, but a mere puff of wind to a decaying adult? Even Leonardo Da Vinci couldn’t answer that one. 

The March of Time is turning into a quick step. The younger generation is revolting, ready to elbow us oldies off the sound system’s controls and take over the patch of grass outside Jan and Eric’s barn on which we attempted to dance once more.

Pistol-packin' Mama

Every day now, too, it seems that someone significant has passed on to the great Memory Bank in the sky. On Thursday night we watched a tribute to Mel Smith, who was just a couple of years older than I was when my future wife and I were watching Not The Nine O’Clock News on separate televisions. Then, with a heavy heart, I read of Karen Black’s demise – in her early seventies, of the inevitable cancer. I’m a sucker for squints and there was something so enchanting about her slightly boss-eyed looks. She plays a prime role in two films firmly lodged in my Top 20: Bob Raefelson’s Five Easy Pieces, in which she plays Jack Nicholson’s long-suffering and endlessly understanding girlfriend, Rayette; and Robert Altman’s Nashville, his brilliant satire of the country & western industry and American society at large. Big-haired Karen was perfect – and unerringly convincing – as Connie White, a Tammy Wynette type and rival of the fragile hypochondriac Barbara Jean, who keels over on stage and spends most of the film in a hospital bed under the solicitous eye of Barnett, her husband and manager. Maybe now that Karen’s checked in her mascara, a Freeview channel will show this hilarious film, which hasn’t seen the light of day for years.

So it goes. Karen Black did at least leave a lasting legacy, which is more than many. We mortals merely hasten once more to that ominous quinze août, which always has an awful air of finality about it. The holidaymakers pack up and go home, the evenings get fresher, morning dew reappears on what’s left of the grass and we find ourselves once more in a nocturnal no-man’s land, debating the respective merits of an extra blanket or a summer-weight duvet.

The only negative thing I remember about Eric’s 40^th birthday, a decade ago, was that my own 50^th followed not very long after. This means, of course, that his 50^th portends my 60^th: the dread day when it’s time to stop pretending and admit once and for all that you’re getting old.

A trip in a hot-air balloon sounds like a nice idea, but I’ve never been comfortable with heights. The thought of sitting in a basket powered by a gas bottle hundreds of feet above the ground smacks of suicide.

No, I think I might ask for a mixing desk or some other component for a sound system that I can take with me to parties. That way I can impose a little thematic coherence on the musical proceedings. Here come DJ Autokrat: he don’t stand for no interference, but he sho’ can party like it’s 19-99! And therein perhaps could lie my own legacy. It’s never too late to own a mobile sound system. You’re only as old as your dancing feet.

Holidayschmakers

There was I thinking that there might be time this weekend to mow what we laughingly refer to here at the Dog’s Meadow as ‘the lawn’, when along came an e-mail on Friday. It sat down beside me and frightened me clean away. Where was the article on truffles that I’d promised?

Curiously enough, I had been talking last week – to friends from Sheffield, who have now gone and departed, taking The Daughter with them in the car that I helped to pack so dexterously – about my frigid day at the back end of February earlier this year when I went on a chasse de truffes at and around the celebrated truffle market at Lalbenque, south of Cahors. Deadline, what deadline. It’s not coming out till late autumn. There’s plenty of time.

There's no negotiating a deadline, though

In fact, the deadline was back on the 22^nd July. These editors like their copy early. Wha’happen? I never miss a deadline. I do enough idiotic things in my life, but I pride myself in never missing a critical deadline. Something clearly must be malfunctioning upstairs. This fact was confirmed the other night when I woke up from a dream that involved a house in the mountains, where Godfrey Evans, the legendary Kent and England wicketkeeper, was the butler. Daughter, dog and I were out shopping in the vicinity for material for Tilley’s latest creative endeavour. I wouldn’t have worried so much had it been Alan Knott, another legendary Kent and England wicketkeeper, but Godfrey Evans was long before my time.

A brain cooked by extreme heat

So clearly the recent extreme heat has turned my grey matter. It hasn’t been quite as bad as it was in the ‘sauna-van’ during the Canicule of 2003, when I’m sure I could hear my brain bubbling away like a savoury Christmas pudding in the boiling fluid inside my cranium. The temperature hasn’t quite touched 40 degrees yet, but this is 10 years down the line. 10 years since I was plotting on copious minute ‘mind maps’ the great House Construction campaign of 2013-2014. I’m 10 years older now and even less equipped to cope with capital H Heat. 

And therein lies the rub. It’s age. It has withered me and custom is beginning to stale my infinite variety. This is why people seek to retire at around this age. I missed my deadline simply because I’m getting too old to attempt to juggle all these balls in the air at the same time. The Great Sampsoni has dropped a ball – and another! The audience lets out a collective gasp, and then a terrible collective booing echoes around the auditorium. The great juggler trudges off, tail metaphorically between his legs. As he removes the grease paint on his face in his dressing room, he realises with startling clarity that he must either reduce the number of balls he juggles, or pack it all in. 

So it is that I’ve come to the momentous decision – reached simultaneously by Corinne, the trusty and exemplary cleaner, who accompanies me every Friday morning in the holiday season – that I will no longer service holidaymakers during the rest of my allocated years. From here on in, I am committed to work only with nice people.  

It’s not that holidaymakers aren’t nice people perforce. Most of them are very nice people. Jolly good sorts. But, as in all aspects of life, it’s the nasty few who ruin it for everyone else. The current crop, a family of four slimy slugs from Liverpewel, the type with financial means in inverse ratio to innate class and with a deluded sense of their own importance in the Great Scheme of Things, are not at all nice. In fact, as I stood by the pool the other day while Ma and Pa reclined on their sun-loungers, running through their list of petty complaints and issuing their demands, I would happily have drawn my Colt 45 from my holster and shot them both dead. As I used to do as a little boy in London. Bang, bang! You’re dead. Quick and easy, and near enough to the pool to cope with any mess.

Independently of one another, Corinne and I came to our liberating decisions while tidying up their mess and making up every bed in the house – on the basis that, because they had paid for the whole house, they were entitled to every bed – for the second week of their stay. It would have been fun to put a deadly Australian pillowcase snake in each bed, but fortunately we don’t have such serpents in the Lot. Besides, one must try to be charitable. Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. feed the local stray cats. Perhaps their offspring will together come up with a last-minute invention to save the world.

Corinne has enough satisfied clients in this neck of the department and, for the moment at least – until my brain really packs up – I have enough real work on my plate, so we don’t need the money. If circumstances change, however, this time next year I may apply to can fruit at Andros, or swaddle myself in bandages and stand motionless in the market place at Martel in the hope that people recognise performance art when they see it, or simply lie back on a sun-lounger and live off the earnings of my favourite industrious wife. Anything but service Britain’s worst. Kow-tow, schmow-tow!

Pinker-than-pink pig

With that inspiring thought uppermost in my overheated cranium, I shall transport myself back to a time when the sky was blue, but it was cold outside and there were no teeming holidaymakers cluttering up my Saturday morning market. Now what was the name of that charming pinker-than-pink truffle-rooting pig…? Oh yes, Kikinou! Nothing too much wrong with my brain after all.

Festival-ities

Now is the season of our music festivals, made glorious by this sun of July...

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: our French brethren and sisteren, often so modest and reserved at parties, unable to shake off the shackles of ‘correct’ behaviour, it might appear, except when behind the wheel of an automobile, do make exceedingly good audiences at music concerts.

And so it transpired again this summer. The end of July is the time here when local festivals normally clash. Perhaps the organisers of Africajarc and the Souillac jazz festival finally realised that this is a shame and that a percentage of their audience might wish to attend both. Perhaps they conferred and collectively bargained. Thus it came to pass that jazz and African music were served up on separate weekends in 2013.

Souillac on the Dordogne, pronounced approximately Swee-yack rather than the Solly-ack or something daft they once managed on one of those TV shows about buying property abroad, is an unprepossessing place. When the tourists aren’t here – for 10 months of the year – it exudes abandonment, like a local Detroit. But every year at about this time, a modest four-day jazz festival pumps the deserted town full of adrenaline. The weather is always balmy and the restaurants of the medieval quarter spill onto the street, packed with diners, busily eating and drinking Souillac’s fragile economy temporarily back into the black.

It all takes place in the vicinity of Souillac’s one incontrovertible treasure: an abbey originally conceived as a monastery, which dates back many centuries before Bunny Bolden supposedly invented jayazz. Me and the missus, we like to don our glad-rags and strut our funky stuff on the headline evening each year. Everything runs like clockwork and, while you wait for the concert to start on time, you get to sit in the place behind the abbey and watch its current residents, the swifts, dart and dive in search of insects to take back to their nests somewhere under the building’s extraordinary roof.

When night falls imperceptibly, the moon pops up over the perimeter and the lighting technicians’ filters create a lightshow worthy of the Tate Modern on the white stone walls of the abbey and the adjoining college of music. If the music’s as good as the ambience, it’s a bonus. This year, the young Cuban jazz pianist, Roberto Fonseca, and his sextet of bass, drums, percussion, guitar and Malian kora served music to make the spirit soar like the swifts. The kora for those who have never heard this heavenly instrument is a kind of West African harp that looks a little like a sitar. For aficionados of the jazz piano, young Senor Fonseca – a charming individual with a fine hat and a quirky French accent – plays like the immaculate conception of Hilton Ruiz, Chucho Valdes and Ahmad Jamal. The band were as tight as the lid of a vacuum-sealed jam jar and it was, we agreed in the car afterwards, one of the finest concerts ever witnessed in decades of combined concert-going. 

However… what never ceases to surprise the royal ‘us’ is just how vocal and demonstrative a French audience can be. By the second number there was a palpable bond between audience and performer. During a piano solo, when he quoted from ‘Besame Mucho’, the audience – much to Fonseca’s evident delight – burst into a spontaneous rendition of the classic. A heartfelt and noisy standing ovation was inevitable. 

On Friday evening, my friend Moke and I made the pilgrimage south to Cajarc for more kora. A whole evening and early morning, in fact, dedicated to the stirring music of Mali.

After a brief stop to check that the new arrivals had settled in at the holiday house I oversee – where I found them splashing around in the pool and making the kind of demands that branded them in my bad-book as nouveau riche – I followed my familiar favourite route across the causse, through a village called Espedaillac, which boasts a green and two ponds, down into the magical valley of the river Célé, up the other side and across another causse or limestone plateau, before the final twisting descent took us to the Lot valley and the little market town of Cajarc.

If France’s imperial history means that the emphasis of the four-day Africajarc festival tends to be on north and west Africa, never mind: the streets are lined by the stalls of an authentic and exotic enough market, and the air resounds with the thumping of djembés. In looking for a barquette of chips to fuel the marathon ahead of us, I bumped into the architect of Maison Sampson for the second year running. Monsieur Gilles Faltrept of Figeac, renowned for his plaited beaded beard, appalling teeth and the obscure cartoons that arrive occasionally by e-mail, complimented me on my sunglasses.

The Africajarc arena is a plot of otherwise unused ground between the former railway station and the river Lot. It accommodates the multitudes easily but uncomfortably. Either you stand in front of the stage (and wave your arms in the air like you just don’t care) or you sit on the precipitous slope and try to stop yourself from sliding down. It’s a good job that I love African music so much and can use my Songlines connection to blag a free press pass.  

This year I brought with me an old blanket largely allocated to the dog and a pensioned-off pillow. We found a spot with some other friends on some higher ground where the slope is gentler, just underneath a few rows of occupied benches that Véronique dubbed ‘the tribune’. And there we sat to listen to a Malian poet, to watch short films made by students from Bamako, to listen to the irritating banter of the co-presenters (a colourful version of Ant and Dec), and to watch the long succession of acts: a Touareg vocal group from the Sahara, specialising in those amazing blood-curdling yodel-shrieks; Pedro Kouyaté, a kora player with the gruffest singing voice known to man; the kora maestro, Ballaké Sissoko, backed by a group of two acoustic guitars and a simply wonderful balofon (wooden vibes) player; the extraordinary actress, dancer and singer, Fatoumata Diawara, the undoubted star of the show; and Mamani Keita, who had the unenviable task of following ‘Fatou’.

By the time Ms. Keita came on, looking incongruously like someone who might have just made a guest appearance in Coronation Street, there were spare seats to be had in the tribune. From up there, you can see the whole stage and peep over the perimeter fence to see the river itself. It was past two by this stage and, after four of Mamani’s numbers, we decided to call it a night. We trudged off for the car. Being a creature of habit, I leave it in the same spot every year, primed for a rapid exit.

 
They were still there at the front of the stage, bobbing about and waving their arms in the air like they just didn’t care that it was way past their bedtime. French audiences, eh? Sacré bleu! You gotta hand it to 'em.

Of Little Mice And Big Men

I’m just reading through a personal message from the White House as Daisy chomps her way through a mouse she must have brought in last night and left as a love-token in the vicinity of my chair. It’s a dreadful noise, the sound of teeth on bone and gristle. 

The amicable letter signed Sincerely Barack Obama is quite a good one. A well-paid wordsmith clearly spent a good few hours constructing elegant paragraphs in a friendly, understanding voice that ultimately signifies very little. The President’s ghost wrote to me in response to an on-line petition urging the Big Man to pull his presidential finger out on the subject of climate change.

‘For the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change.’ Well there you are then, I knew I could trust the man. We can tell our children that everything’s going to be all right. The world is not going down the pan after all, because the American President is personally going to see to it that the United States of Consumption will cut its emissions. Now I can go outside without a care in the world and play croquet with the cheap-and-cheerful set I bought from Herr Lidl the other day.

I can’t be too hard on the man. After all, he was good enough to write back – and, let’s face it, letter-writing is a dying art these days. I remember going to a party given by some American acquaintances to celebrate the new president’s inauguration. They rigged up a big-screen telly and created a cocktail they christened Obamapunch for the occasion. Everyone was in high spirits (no pun intended) and it was an uplifting assembly of cosmopolitan folk. Yer man gave an assured and rousing address from behind his bullet-proof screen, and everyone cheered him on, happy in the knowledge that, at the very least, he was much more intelligent than the previous incumbent.

However… meeting the agenda on his oval desk was always going to be a tall order: save the world, while ending the inextricable struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan, revitalising the economy and wiping a few trillion off the national debt. So I enjoyed the spectacle for what it was and went home after a few heady draughts of optimism with few illusions.

Sure enough, nothing much has changed. True, the American acquaintances have swapped their lovingly restored house in Martel for one of those beautiful Regency-style houses, once the combined homes and depots of rich wine merchants, overlooking the Gironde in Bordeaux. But rather than doing something truly radical, like fitting solar panels to every roof in the country, the American government, like just about every other government, continues to fiddle while the planet burns. For all his elegant suits and elegant words, the slick orator is effectively powerless in the face of concerted lobbying, vested interest and political intransigence. 

Was there ever a time when you could trust a politician? If so, it must have ended roughly with the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. If there’s any honour left, it’s an honour among thieves. Just like professional cricketers, in fact. The first test of the current series for the Ashes has been riveting, but spoiled a little by the failure of Stuart Broad to ‘walk’ when he knew that he’d edged a catch to the slips behind. He was half way through contributing to a stand that might yet prove to be the decisive factor in the match. 

To walk or not to walk, that is the question? The debate was raging in the mid 60s, when I was an avid reader of my monthly mag, The Cricketer. The English team was only just emerging from an era of Gentlemen v Players, a time when only amateur ‘gentlemen’ were allowed to captain the plebeian professional players who made up the majority of the eleven. It was the gentlemanly thing to do, to walk if you knew you were out. Even then, though, there were many – often Australian, professional to a man and generally contemptuous of any trappings of a class system synonymous with British imperialism – who would stand their ground until the umpire raised his finger. Let’s not forget, too, that any who walked potentially faced the wrath of their team-mates.

The issue was not as simple as it sounded. I found this out as a cricket-crazy kid. I was playing in a game on some far-off field, just trying to get my eye in when I played at a ball outside my off stump and there was a loud appeal from the wicketkeeper and slip fielders behind me. I wasn’t sure whether I nicked it or not. So I stood my ground and waited for the umpire. Since he was a spare from our own team, he didn’t give me out. I played on for a few more balls until the inevitable happened and I drove over a straight ball, which shattered my stumps. But I think in my heart of hearts that the earlier delivery probably did touch the edge of my bat. To this day, I am haunted by the fact that I didn’t walk. I did the wrong thing, knowing it wasn’t right.

I was a kid at the time, and I like to think that I would have been bigger about it if it had happened when I was a man. So when I’m tempted by Friday’s incident to decry the boy Broad as a brat, I have to remind myself not to be a hypocrite. In any case, Broad has to live with his conscience (if he’s got one). He may even be remembered as the morally suspect bloke who did the wrong thing: the other side of a coin that shows an untarnished image of the great Australian wicketkeeper-batsman, Adam Gilchrist, a Boy’s Own hero if ever there was one, who walked without hesitation in defiance of the team ethic. 

Perhaps I’ll write to my new friend, Mr. Obama, and see what he makes of it all. Americans don’t understand cricket, so I won’t mind too much if I don’t get a reply from him or his White House wordsmith. I’d rather he thought to write to Mrs. Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, assuming the great singer left behind a widow when he growled his last a couple of weeks ago. Bobby was a big man in many senses of the word. He may never have been quite as famous as the likes of B.B. King, because the only instrument he had was his voice. But what a voice! Bobby was to the black American blues tradition as Frank Sinatra was to the white American popular songbook. 

If President Obama isn’t going to leave a solar-powered legacy, he could do worse than decree a national Bobby Bland Appreciation Day. We need our heroes – and heroines – more than ever in troubled times. We need the walkers of this life.

The Killer Instinct

I felt for Sabine Lisicki yesterday at Wimbledon. So agonising was it to watch her agony that The Daughter went and cleaned the kitchen entirely of her own volition. There she was, that big blonde endearing German tennis girl, the nation’s new sweetheart, presented with a golden opportunity on a perfect summer’s afternoon to repay her watching parents for all the sacrifices they had made for their daughter in her youth… and she imploded.

Isn't she a sweetie?

Debs arrived half way through the second set after a busy morning in Brive. Chomping through an enormous sandwich that represented lunch, she surrogate-tapped for all she was worth for the poor suffering Aryan and briefly, miraculously, Sabine found her game and won three on the trot. But it was too little, too late. If the whole world had tapped together, we wouldn’t have created sufficient energy to stop Marion Bartoli, the delightful French eccentric, from fulfilling her imagined destiny.

I’ve been in love with Sabine Lisicki for a couple of years. Anyone who smiles as sincerely and as ingenuously as she does has got to be a genuinely nice girl. Fortunately, though, the cat-napping, cat-loving Bartoli – with her wry self-knowledge and endearing heft, a kind of Gallic personification of Betjeman’s Pam, Whizzing them over the net, full of the strength of five – is equally charming. I didn’t begrudge her for one moment her victory. She’d been here once before and wanted it more. She bounded off towards her box at the end like an ungainly teenager who has just won a school skipping contest.

Lisicki was the unanimous choice of the BBC pundits: after all, she had the big serve and the big shots, and she was riding the viewing public’s wave of gratitude for having eliminated the beastly Serena Williams. But they failed to take the mental game into account. Some are born with a killer instinct, some have it inculcated upon them and others wouldn’t recognise it if it passed them in the street. Debs wants to get in touch with Miss Lisicki to let her know how EFT (or Emotional Freedom Techniques) can help her conquer her nerves and give her a competitive edge. Dear Sabine, I watched with torment when your serve broke down and you cried as you looked in vain for somewhere to hide. I think I can help you… And why not? Look what the glacial Lendl has done for Murray.

I’m one whom killer instinct passed by. My sporting achievements were always tempered by a Lisicki-like failure to perform on the big stage. A surfeit of empathy doesn’t help. My natural instinct has always been to take my foot off the pedal rather than press home an advantage. Consequently, I’ve experienced that awful bowel-churning feeling that Sabine must have felt there on Centre Court, watched by millions: that feeling of wishing for some minor fracking-induced earthquake to create a chasm in the ground into which you can fall and curl up at the bottom in the foetal position.

When I found myself 5-1 up against Stuart Smith in the St. Polycarps Under-15 final, playing on the red clay of Finaghy, dressed in a lilac polo shirt handed down from a 2^nd cousin once or twice removed, a pair of yellow socks and my Slazenger Les Paul, I caught a faint whiff of victory and my head did the rest. Like Sabine Lisicki, I could find no hiding place as my game collapsed around my ankles like a pair of pants with perished elastic. It was mortifying. All you want to do is get it over with as quickly as possible.

It was one of the friendliest finals I’ve ever witnessed and it was lovely to see both contestants embrace so warmly at the end. But sportswomanship like this comes at a price. It was no contest and no spectacle. That would have demanded a fairer distribution of killer instinct. The day before, the metronomic Djokovic and big awkward Juan Martin Del Potro produced a match of such intensity and such indomitable passion that it left you as drained as the pair of them must have felt at the end of five sets.

A certain commitment to the cause

Still, yesterday I learned that the British and Irish Lions had conquered the mighty Wallabies in Australia. Whenever an Australian is beaten at any sport, I give thanks to the spirit in the sky, because it confirms that a killer instinct doesn’t always prevail. These guys, on both sides of the half-way line, are stark-staring mad. Not only prepared to kill, they are prepared to lay down their lives for team and country. They’ll throw themselves into a ruck without the slightest thought of concussion or paralysis. It does indeed make for a great spectacle, but I’m happier to let others die for the cause.

I glimpsed such madness as a teenager among my betters at school – and didn’t like what I saw. Which is why I was happy to shine in what was dismissively known as The Rabble. The trouble was, if you enjoyed yourself too much and shone too brightly among the ‘messers’ and the wasters, the teachers mistook you for someone with the necessary talent and attitude to grace one of the proper teams. On the few occasions when I played for a serious team, my self-belief would vanish like Sabine Lisicki’s and I’d drift around the field like a damp mist. Tackle, Sampson! The cry would go up. Er, no, thanks all the same. I don’t think I really want to risk injury…

And so ended my rugby career. Stillborn. I left it to the big boys and have continued to enjoy watching the likes of the Lions put their bodies on the line in the name of immortality. I’m very glad that the current crop made it without serious injury. They’ll be talked about by generations to come, which must be very nice, but I’m not sure if it’s really worth the sacrifices.

 
I like to think, as Marion Bartoli suggested, that Sabine’s opportunity will come again. We owe her big time, after all, for what she did to Serena Williams. With or without my wife’s assistance, maybe next time she’ll find her composure and play to her true ability. Jana Nvotna got her second bite of the Venus Rosewater dish after similarly falling apart. It would be so nice if Miss Lisicki acquires just enough, but not too much, killer instinct to follow suit. She’s such a sweetie.

A Pair O' Teeth

I’m writing under pressure. All week long and several times already today, the power has fluctuated, despite all the expensive equipment that EDF installed about a year ago to assure its supply to isolated rural enclaves like this one. It hasn’t made a blind bit of difference. And every time the power cuts off, even momentarily, the computer shuts down. Completely. I’ve given up counting the number of times I’ve adjusted the digital clock on the cooker. I know now which combination of buttons to hold down without having to find and consult the instructions.

Yes, it’s getting like Lagos at the moment. NEPA, the great drummer, Tony Allen, called one of his albums. It’s a Nigerian acronym for never expect power always. Of course it’s not as bad as it must be in that teeming hellish megalopolis, but it’s wearing enough to make you appreciate a stable supply. On Wednesday evening I was racing against time to edit a weighty document for my brother-in-law, knowing that at any minute the computer was likely to shut down without warning – and stay shut. I made it, just, only to find that the pouring rain and the distant rumble of thunder had cut the internet connection instead. So I had to put the file on a USB key, take it to my neighbours’ house and send it via their computer. Only 15 short years ago, I might have turned up with a floppy disk that wasn’t floppy.

So after such uncommon stress, I’m rather looking forward to a pair o’ teeth this evening, or a pair-o, as it’s known in the trade. As you may or may not know, I am the ‘guardian’ of a nearby chateau. I guard it roughly once a week with my fierce security dog, Alf, not so much to ward off intruders, but just to check that nothing untoward has happened since our last visit. Those offering a pair o’ teeth are the most recent co-proprietors of the co-propriety: a charming couple from Brittany, who take a touching pride in owning an apartment in a gen-u-ine chateau, even if it’s a 19^th century version rather than one of the stunning medieval numbers that you see dotted around the countryside here, either nestling among trees on the edge of a promontory or parked grandiosely by the river.

Just one of many

We have a friend, in fact, who guards one of the more grandiose riverside properties. It’s a great gig: the chateau is owned by the creator of the greatest American TV drama ever to centre around a family of Mafiosi based in New Jersey with theme music by the Alabama 3. He rarely puts in an appearance, so the guardienne and her partner have the run of the place all year long.

But that’s beside the point, other than the fact that we guardians have somehow managed to avoid exchanging pairs of teeth since we’ve known each other. Maybe it’s because neither of us is French. Because this is a social device that works best either between French people or among an international group that includes one or more French people. The British tend to invite each other for ‘drinks’, which can be intimidating for hosts like us with a meagre drinks cabinet. It might be Art Deco, but the contents bear little resemblance to the kind of fully equipped bar run by some compatriots.

One of the nice things about a pair o’ teeth is that it doesn’t demand mulitple choice. Late last autumn, for example, our new neighbours – not the ones to whom I go with a USB key in stormy weather – invited us to drink a pair-o, which comprised a bottle of champagne accompanied by some moreish ‘canopies’. Very nice, too. What’s more, the social device fulfilled its function admirably. They don’t generally go on for too long – round about the two-hour mark tends to be the maximum. Just enough time to sound each other out and gauge whether the chitter-chatter would stretch for a full dinner date. We decided not – and they probably came to the same conclusion. Nice enough people, but few interests in common.

Canopies a-go go

Pairs of teeth, though, as the term suggests, generally come in twos. Reciprocation is the name of the tradition. We haven’t yet honoured our neighbours with an invitation, leaving it early last November that we’d get together some sunny evening when we could sit outside and soak up the sounds of nature. We’re still waiting for some sun. If the rain stops some time in August, we can get the neighbours over, ply them with a limited amount of classy alcohol and some canopies of our own devising, chalk off the obligation and that will be that. Thereafter, we can wave cheerily or exchange the time of day should our paths cross, secure in the knowledge that formal social niceties have been met.

This evening, we’ll pick up our other neighbours (the ones to whom I go with a USB key…) and take them with us to the chateau. Olivier is the gardener there, but they haven’t yet met his wife, whereas Debs and I have had the honour of eating Breton crab at their dinner table. After sampling reciprocal British fare here, perhaps they decided it would be safer to revert to the shorter, sharper social soirée. I’m quite glad that there’ll be extra company; there’ll be less onus on us to ‘perform’. My wife has the gift of the gab, so I can normally sit back and let her air her impressive French, but our host has got it in his head that I’m a bit of a wag because I once impersonated the poshest co-proprietor speaking French with a British plum in his mouth. I feel the pressure to come up with a new stand-up routine in a tongue that doesn’t come naturally to me, so end up going home feeling exhausted.

I suspect that they’ve invited all four of us because they’re drumming up allies for the ongoing war of words and sour looks. They’re the only French residents in the chateau and certain others have taken exception to the fact that they let out their apartment during last summer, their first summer since buying the place, to holidaymakers to help pay for the (considerable) charges. Cold shoulders and legal letters have ensued.

Our neighbours will no doubt be supplied with the details. Which means that I’ll be able to sit back and observe. This is my favourite kind of pair of teeth, when I’m not being ‘interviewed’. When I don’t feel that I’ve been asked there for a splash of colour. And what brought you to France, Mr. Sampson? You can understand it; I would be just as inquisitive if the roles were reversed. It’s just that sometimes I feel like a performing seal…

 
The only other bad thing I can think of about a pair o’ teeth is that it’s customary to bring with us a peace offering, some little and rather useless objet d’art perhaps. I can usually rely on my wife to come up with something suitable, but she was too busy all day Saturday. I’m going to have to sort something out myself before it’s time to go. So I’ll shut down the computer before the weather and the unreliable power supply beats me to it.

Bladder, Bowel and Back-Pack

I rather wish he hadn’t, but our young Australian houseguest reminded me at dinner last night that the longest day is fast approaching. He comes from near Adelaide, where night falls comparatively early, even in the height of the summer. As part of his grand tour of Europe, he has spent a couple of days on Skye, where the sun barely sets.

June is racing by in a frenzy of activity. I’m ticking off landmarks with depressing rapidity. Last week, old friends from London flew into our nearby white-elephant airport and we watched Rafael Nadal stroll through another men’s final at Roland Garros. It doesn’t seem long ago that I was watching a profile of two young great white hopes, due to play each other in their first French Open: Nadal v Gasquet. We all know what happened to the boy from the Balearics with the winning smile and the humungous biceps. And some will know what happened to the mercurial Gasquet, who never quite got his act together – despite his imperious backhand.

The clay-court shenanigans are over for another year. Meanwhile, nearer to home, our magnificent front-of-house rose, which still stubbornly refuses to reach the first-floor balcony, is in full bloom. It was The Daughter’s hope that she would be back home for the summer to see it in its pomp, but already it’s heavy with flower and bowed from the onslaught of all this unseasonable rain. Despite all the banana skins I have laid by its stem and despite all the stones I have spread to stop Myrtle peeing in its vicinity, the leaves are beginning once more to turn from a succulent green to a black-spotted yellow.

All is not lost, though. The climbing rose that we planted out back a mere three years ago is invading the side terrace. Every time I open the door, its perfume pervades the air, alive with the activity of bees that have thus far managed to survive the poisons of Big Aggro-Chemical. With luck and a fair headwind, the kid should be back in time to catch its grace and majesty.

Attack of the 50ft climbing rose

Her first academic year, the year of torture, is over. For all the desperate telephone calls and the familiar congenital plaints of I am not worthy, nor gifted enough, she waltzed through her ‘jury’ and came out top of her class. So she has committed herself to textile design and booked another two years, which means that her father will have to roll up his sleeves and commit himself to Work with a serious capital W. She’s enjoying some time off for good behaviour at present in the form of a stay oop north with her grandma. She stopped off to see her friend Alice, who’s finishing her first year at Leeds University. Tilley had more fun in two days in that dour Yorkshire city than she did in a whole year of gay Paree. I just seem to get on so much more easily with English people, she told me apologetically on the phone.

So, very soon it will be Wimbledon. They’re already in training for grass at the Queen’s Club. Before that: cometh my father’s 86^th birthday. He survived his operation thanks to the miracles of modern-day keyhole surgery. When I went to see him the following day at Southampton General, he was sitting up in bed looking chipper and explaining the procedure to my brother-in-law. I can’t even attempt to explain how they send their cameras and surgical equipment up through an artery and then fiddle, cut and stitch – or whatever it is they do – any more than I can get my head around the concept of storing music and photographs on a chip the size of a sliver. Suffice to say that he told me before I left for home that he felt fine – apart from a bruised bladder and a blocked bowel.

Subsequently, his wound – tiny enough – has started to weep. It’s nothing serious, but it means that one of my already hard-pressed sisters has to take him regularly to the local health centre for a change of dressing. Which means leaving my mother alone while he’s gone. She did her fair share of weeping while I was serving my time at Punishment Park. It’s bizarre how dementia befuddles your thoughts. At times, I found her wandering lost and confused on the first-floor landing, wondering perhaps where her ‘brother’ was and not knowing her eldest son from Adam. At other times, we would sit and have the kind of easy, intimate, natural conversations that I’ve never before been able to have with her. Up until those surprising four days of close proximity, I’d never quite managed to equate the woman I once described in a moment of frustration and rage as a psychological terrorist with the charming, entertaining and humorous woman that both my wife and my best friend have described to me. It’s as if the turmoil in her head prevents her continuing the uneasy role of ‘mother’ and she has reverted to her core being.

In moments of terrible lucidity, she would look into my eyes and ask me, Am I going mad? or They’re not going to put me in the loony bin, are they? Like George Washington, I cannot tell a lie. Yet I found myself skirting the issue in the manner of a seasoned politician and dwelling on the facts of short-term memory loss. But you know that she knows. Several times she told me sincerely that she wanted to die and, after nearly 85 years on earth as a card-carrying timorous worry-wart, you can understand why she must feel worn out by the strain of it all. And if they – or we – put her in the loony bin, then she surely will die. My father told me on his hospital bed that he missed her. Realistically, though, he is ill equipped to cope with someone so unwittingly demanding. Inevitably, the family talk is not happy-talk. It’s all about carers and sheltered accommodation and mobilising resources to keep someone alive who would really much rather pop her clogs.

I’m back at home now and for the time being I can simulate my filial duty by Skype. The perils, irony and sadness of old age aren’t something that our young Australian back-packer needs to worry about. He’s flush with the energy and optimism of youth, and looking forward to getting back to his family and fiancé in South Australia after all the weeks of his Grand Tour of Europe. He’s due to marry his sweetheart named Tegan in October and is talking already of two children and playing with them in a garden while he’s still young enough.

Cade by rose

Cade is a devotee of Grand Designs, who’s bought the book, the t-shirt and the DVD. He’s watched our programme, he tells me, about 30 times and he has vague plans of building a home for his family-to-be in straw. So he contacted Debs by e-mail and asked cheekily if he could come and see us while flitting around Europe. We like cheeky individuals in this house, particularly with dollops of youthful charm. How can you refuse such chutzpah? Debs proposed a deal of dinner, bed and breakfast and a starter-pack tutorial for some nominal charge – and then departed for England. Dinah Washington would surely have been mad about the boy and I know that I’m even now far too fond of him to raise the matter of filthy lucre.

For one so young, he’s sorted his life out with enviable clarity. He’s already raised the money to buy two houses to let in the environs of Adelaide and already learned that time is more precious than money. On the back balcony over a protracted breakfast this morning, he sketched his plans to pay off the loans before term and start building the modest family home of his dreams with the profit.

I’ll take him down to the station, so he can catch his train to Paris and thence, early tomorrow morning (charmingly), to Luxembourg. I’m tickled pink because I’ve never met anyone in my life before who actually wanted to visit Luxembourg. I’ve made him promise to e-mail me his impressions of the principality.

 
In return, I’ll give him a signed copy of my book that was remaindered before it brought me my fortune, and forgive him the indiscretion of reminding me that the 21^st June is just around the corner.