The Book-Maker Regrets

In an idle moment with my beloved time-waster, often referred to in polite company as 'my wife' - now a self-styled Emotional Health Specialist by trade, because 'aromatherapist, reflexologist and EFT practitioner' seems far too cumbersome - we explored a key moment of my childhood.

The hotel today

It was during the winter of 1961. As a comfortable middle-class family, in the grip of never having it so good and keenly anticipating the benefits of the white heat of technology, we had just moved from a north London suburb to Belfast. We stayed in a small private hotel run by a gruff but good-hearted woman in the same tree-lined avenue in which we would buy our second red-bricked house. My parents were busy hunting our first house and lining up a suitable primary school for my sister, my brother and me. We kids had time to kill and time to get to know the few old ladies who lived there permanently.   

One day, I think I might have been reading through one of my beloved cowboy annuals in the lounge, when one of the bespectacled 'old dears' asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I told her proudly that I wanted to be a book-maker, whereupon the gaggle of old ladies giggled out loud. What was so funny? What was wrong with the idea of making books when I grew up? I expect I smiled awkwardly and they probably tried to explain to me the difference between a book-maker and a bookmaker, and I expect I took refuge in the Wild West of my annual.

The book-maker and his middle-class family

So maybe I was too embarrassed to mention it again if anyone else asked me about my ambitions. If I had have done, I doubt whether it would have been encouraged anyway by my parents, who wouldn't have considered it a serious occupation for a young man. Ironically, the sound of a typewriter was key to much of our childhood. Most afternoons, my mother would shut herself away in the parental bedroom and hammer out the pages of novels she wrote about the IRA under a pseudonym, no doubt because she had been persuaded by her parents that the life of an artist was not really the thing for a 'young lady'. The paintings of Belfast street scenes still hang in my parents' current home, but I don't know what became of those painstaking manuscripts. They're probably hidden away in a suitcase under a bed somewhere. Notwithstanding the pseudonym, I doubt if my mother ever sent one to a publisher, because she couldn't bear the anticipated rejection. And so, because parents tend to pass on the messages that they get from their own parents, she encouraged me to become a chartered accountant. Fortunately (and maybe subconsciously deliberately), I was useless at Maths.

So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut jr. (who was perhaps encouraged by senior Vonneguts) would have it. On such seemingly innocent moments as the Incident in a Small Private Hotel, whole careers and destinies hinge.  My best-est of best friends, for example, won a poetry prize sponsored by Queens University while still in the 6th form. But he never took his literary ambitions seriously enough to overcome the self-doubt that possibly derived from an unwitting childhood humiliation when he read out one of his creations to his parents. Oh Chollie... Chollie. He coulda bin a contender. He coulda bin the next Wallace Stevens... To use the hyperbole of our American cousins, he coulda bin ossum!

 It took me many, many years of bashful avoidance before I plucked up the courage to call myself a writer. Even now, however, I still qualify the term when people ask me to expand on the subject. Well, you know, most of it is writing e-learning to earn a living, which isn't ultimately the kind of writing I want to do... Blah blah blah. Obviously, I don't quite engage with the term 'writer': it doesn't fully describe what I really, really want to do.

Which is why I've decided to go back to that moment in the small hotel (without a wish-ing well...), move on from the unconscious humiliation and re-embrace the term 'book-maker'. It was good enough for a seven-year old, so it's good enough for an adult in search of something a little more inspiring than 'writer/journalist'.  And I shouted from the highest hill, I wanna make books!

Mother and child reunion

The wonderful thing about EFT - or Emotional Freedom Techniques - is that it doesn't simply re-visit key moments of pain, thereby actually reinforcing them as poor psychotherapy can do, but it allows you to shift the psychological block by repeating phrases that have personal meaning and by tapping on the body's psycho-dynamic energy points (otherwise known as 'meridians'). I know, I know... It all sounds too New Age to be credible. I was sceptical myself, but I've experienced how it can work and how it helped The Daughter through her annus horribilis, her first year at her 'school' far from the nest, how it helped transform the desperate tearful crisis calls into the determination and self-belief that enabled her to come out top of her class. Frankly, it was the sine qua non.

But a technique's only as good as the person who employs it. Which is why I've decided to stop waiting around for the Grauniad to discover me and offer a lucrative contract for a weekly column, and hitch my love of language to my wife's personal wagon and help her explore new territories. Go west, young man!

Which is why I'm going to suspend La Vie En Straw for now and concentrate on my next, proper book: Bloody Murder On The Dog's Meadow (an account of the year of living dangerously during the construction of a straw-built grand design). And produce the EFT Weekly each weekend in partnership with my wife. Because health matters... (and emotional health is surely the key to physical health).

Thank you, gentle readers, for sharing my thoughts over time, coherent and incoherent. And, in the words of Razzo, the wonderful character created by Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, A'm invoytn ya to read our joint production as from next weekend on a web page very near to this cinema.  

A French Film

I read something sometime recently that made me groan with the inevitability of it. Something about the decreasing popularity of French films in France. French audiences are demanding instead, quelle surprise, more fodder from the Big Country of philistines across the Atlantic. More bounce to the ounce, presumably: more guns, more explosions, more chases and other frenzied action, more brutality, more clichés.

It’s not that French film makers are immune to clichés. Judging by the posters and the blurb, plenty are riddled with them. But when they’re good, there’s still nothing quite like a French film. Movies like Un Air de Famille, for example, where we watch a group of beautifully observed individuals just interacting subtly and naturally, often warmly and humorously, where plot points and character arcs are so integrated into the whole rich tapestry of cinematic life that you don’t even notice them. France seems like one of the last places on earth where the indigenous film industry still bears an immediately recognisable stamp. So maybe not for much longer, then.

Last weekend it seemed that my wife and I stepped into a French film and became characters in a drama that unfolded around the 60^th birthday of the friend I mentioned in the last post. His premature senility, as it was once known, lent the scenario the poignancy that the scriptwriter needed to lift it out of the commonplace.

Intercut with scenes of the preparations – and, being France, of course there would be some succulent close shots of food being chopped and cooked – is disparate footage to bring some of the players to the house where the drama will unravel. The now bearded good-looking son flying in to Lyon airport from his latest posting in Budapest; the daughter and her new partner speeding south from Normandy via Paris in a TGV; a car load of chattering friends from Bordeaux; another friend cycling down the Canal du Midi; a pair of expatriate Brits on the deserted A75, the ‘Meridian’ that cuts a swathe across the Massif Central from Clermont Ferrand to Bézier and Montpelier. The landscape they drive through looks notably dramatic under an ominous sky, which threatens to rain on the host’s parade. There is a glimpse of the distant viaduct with the lights on top of its seven huge pillars blinking in the gloom, followed by a closer look from the Air de Repos at the monumental structure’s giant strides across the valley of the Tarn.

Journey’s end is a fairly typical well heeled house of the Midi – with a big veranda at the front sheltered by a vine laden with grapes the colour of rosé, a gravel courtyard that separates the house from a discreet fenced-in pool and boules court surrounded by little outhouses where the wood and the wine are stored. The abundant grapes and a huge flowering oleander testify to the year-round mildness of the climate.

On arrival, the guests go up in dribs and drabs to one of the bedrooms, where the photograph album compiled by the daughter in the weeks leading up to the party is laid out on the bed. Among the bygone images of family and friends are some of the 50^th birthday celebrations at the summer house by the Atlantic. The proof of the time-lapse is there in the characters’ silver hair and the wrinkles around their eyes. How we have all aged! Moist-eyed with nostalgia, they write their testaments to friendship in white ink on black paper and studiously avoid sentiments like, So sorry you’ve gone off your rocker prematurely, because we had some great times together in the past when you were all there and we could share a proper conversation.

And then, like many a French film of yore, out come the first of the aperitifs that will mark the next two days. As glasses are raised, the host takes his English friend’s hat off his head and puts it on his own, then promptly forgets all about it until his wife, now wearily accustomed to such pranks, removes it and returns it to its careful owner. After the initial aperitifs, the women – because it’s always the women who do the socially responsible thing – bring out the various dishes they have been preparing all morning long. While the host’s solicitous female entourage checks to ensure that he is remembering to eat, his male friends either josh him or avoid having to stand next to him with nothing really to say.

Between the midday meal and the evening buffet, people sit under the vine and smoke and chat about their families and interim developments, or wander over to watch a noisy gaggle of men while away the afternoon over repeated games of boules. Some of the pluckier guests follow the lead of their hostess by taking a swim in the pool that is surprisingly cold. But isn’t this the Midi, where swimming pools stay ever warm to compensate for the density of the people and their motorised traffic, for the Mistral and for the arid terrain?

With the advent of evening, more food and drink emerges from the bottomless kitchen to cater for the influx of les jeunes: the nephews (plus partners and offspring) of our host, who has by now retreated indoors to watch some match on the telly and to find a little quiet time in order to recover from being present for so many visitors. Very small children scoot about on plastic pedal vehicles. An angelic boy, who could have been lifted from an Italian Renaissance painting, burns his finger on the motor of his dad’s motorbike in the road outside and the strange English woman succours him with lavender oil and then a demonstration of EFT, which tempts others to try its apparent magical powers on their own deep-seated wounds.

Meanwhile the very old have arrived to add a fourth generation. The elegant mother of the host’s cousin and daytime carer (and his wife’s best friend) looks dapper in her navy blue suit and a trifle disorientated by the sheer number of guests. And as the host’s own father introduces his new partner to the multitudes, words are not needed to underline the poignancy of an octogenarian greeting a son and only child who is incapacitated with Alzheimer’s Disease.

The floodlights come on as the young men take on the older men for one last epic encounter at boules before the evening celebrations begin in earnest. The English couple secretly hope for a good dance to some good music, but the acoustic guitars have already come out and people settle down with their drinks under the soft lighting of the veranda to sing along to the poetic music of Georges Brassens and the less poetic music of lesser heroes from their youth. And there are stilted attempts to SingalongaBeatles, but only the two English guests know all the lyrics to ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Hey Jude’.

The film could end here or, after the violent nocturnal storm that somehow holds off until the other side of midnight, with the tearful departure the following morning of her father’s doting daughter – but it would need some kind of revelation or resolution that would cast light on why the host has been stricken with Alzheimer’s at such an early stage. Real life prevails in this case and people drift away, car by car, after the final round of drinks and food on Sunday. Back to the quotidian. And being real life, mysteries are unresolved and questions are unanswered.

Cue music and credits... 

FIN 

Heading South

We’re heading south soon, the wife and I – not because we’re a pair of migratory birds at heart, but because a friend is celebrating his 60^th birthday. And it’s not just any old friend, or any old birthday. This is one of our very first friends here in France; we go back nearly 18 years. It’s important that we’re there because this particular friend – a very kind, but vaguely troubled soul – was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a couple of years ago.

I remember my first perplexing brush with premature Alzheimer’s. I was 19 at the time, working in a stately home as an assistant archivist during my year off between school and university. It wasn’t the earl himself, a seriously eccentric octogenarian, given to writing little messages (or billets doux, as he called them) on scraps of old envelopes in spidery handwriting that had to be deciphered by his permanent secretary. It was the mother of a school friend.  

I’d travelled north from Stafford to Liverpool and caught the boat across the Irish Sea to Belfast. It was the first trip back after the family’s return to England, so I was excited about seeing my girlfriend of the time and a whole host of old chums. (And what a splendid word ‘chum’ is: another word, like ‘wireless’ and ‘charabanc’ that’s crying out for a revival.) Ian and his brother David lived on the other side of the back entry that divided our two parallel tree-lined avenues. My kid brother and I would blow up old Airfix model airplanes with them and play two-a-side ‘binball’ in the car park of the architects’ practice, so-called because we used dustbins turned on their sides as goals.

Ian wasn’t in when I called round – after being kicked out of my girlfriend’s house by her mum when she caught us snogging on the parental bed – and his dad let it be known with equivocal looks and vague asides that something was up with his wife. On the way to the loo, I bumped into her in a dark corner of the house where the boys used to hang their coats after getting back from school. She said not a word and smiled strangely at me, and her far-away look suggested that she’d gone off with the fairies.

With a start and a sense of foreboding, I recognised that same look in our friend last time that he and his wife dropped by to see us when they were staying with old friends in the Corrèze. Everyone at the time was looking for logical reasons for his forgetfulness and his strange behaviour. He had, after all, a quite high-powered job and stress went with the territory. But by the time I witnessed that vacant look, it was clear enough that the game was up.

Once the diagnosis was confirmed, he took early retirement and they moved south from Paris to somewhere near Avignon, whence they had started out together on their professional peregrinations. We met them when he was based in Tulle and his wife was the institutrice at our daughter’s first school in the next village from our former home, in the Corrèze. She was – and probably still is – a creative teacher and a great motivator of young children. In some ways, Tilley couldn’t have had a better start to her education, but she and her mother have subsequently discovered – in sessions to explore the roots of the psychological trauma that the French system has inadvertently created in her – that it was precisely this start that triggered the mental blocks, which consistently stopped her believing in herself. When she turned up at école maternelle, she found that everyone spoke a language that she couldn’t. Some children, blessed with a precociously positive spin on life, might have told themselves that they were unique, because they could speak a language that no one else could. But our daughter learnt that she was different and wasn’t up to it, and so spent the rest of her schooling trying to convince everyone in her reticent way that she was indeed worthy.  

Anyway, our friend’s wife was also my wife’s first aromatherapy client, so she helped get the ball rolling in more ways than one. Unfortunately, they didn’t stay long in Tulle. Our friend was transferred to Toulouse and thence to Montluçon, a God-foresaken dive on the northern edge of the Massif Central, before winding up his career in Paris. We’ve kept in touch and enjoyed many of those magic mo-ments that Perry Como sung about: his 50^th birthday among a host of fans and admirers at the converted school house they co-own on the Atlantic coast; we sole Brits cooking vegetarian curries for all the assembled die-hard meat-eaters; applauding a big red summer sun as it slipped gradually away behind the horizon over dinner al fresco at a beach-side café; a perilous kayak trip down a rocky half-empty river during the canicule of 2003; a guided tour of the Marais in Paris; his tales of Tipitina and the other clubs he visited to imbibe the music of New Orleans during a youthful road trip around America.

So it’s going to be a poignant affair, as we haven’t yet witnessed the deterioration that has taken place during the two years since their last visit. The contrast between his 50^th and 60^th bashes will be stark. Since music is still something that strikes a chord, we’ll go bearing some T-Bone Walker and a nice compilation of New Orleans R&B, but whether he’ll know that it’s from us – or even remember who we are – remains to be seen.

It’s a long way south to Avignon and another salutary reminder of what a big country France is. Still, the journey will give me my first opportunity to see Norman Foster’s monumental bridge that spans the Tarn at Millau. It’s the first time I’ll have driven down the A75, which runs south from Clermont Ferrand to Montpelier and Bézier across the wind-blasted heaths of the Massif, for what seems like an eternity. Last time, our daughter was a tot in the back of the car, and we drove down to visit some celebrated author and aromatherapist whom Debs met at a conference in Sheffield. We were received in the elegant mas where she lived and practised. We came away somewhat frustrated with non-specific advice that amounted to something like, If you build it, they will come. The rest, as they say...

Stopping briefly at a service station to stretch our limbs in the dead of night half way back across the blasted Massif, I vividly remember an almost ghostly sensation of geographical emptiness. Since then a lot of water has flown over the bridge, as Mr. Malaprop, an ex-boss of mine in the Civil Surface, was given to say.  All that temporal distance may no longer register in the mind of our friend, but it certainly will with his wife, his beloved son and daughter, and all his many friends who will be gathered to celebrate another milestone on the way to our common destination.

Panic In Detroit

What do you do on a miserable prematurely cold Sunday when ominous clouds threaten rain? Well, there are my neighbours’ peaches to gather, home-grown tomatoes to pick, papers to file and some solitary mess to tidy up before my travelling wife gets home. That’ll do for a start.

But what do you do if you live without prospects and with the rest of your life stretching ahead of you in the bankrupt post-apocalyptic city of Detroit? The schools are closing and the great automobile factories, once the only real source of legitimate employment, have been abandoned to human scavengers and creeping nature.

Julian Temple does seem to make exceedingly good documentaries. I have long championed Oil City Confidential, about Dr. Feelgood and life in Canvey Island, Essex. Requiem For Detroit? last week was equally fascinating. Somehow it managed to be both profoundly depressing and strangely uplifting. As one of the commentators suggested – it might have been Mitch Ryder, who once sang with his group, The Detroit Wheels – there’s only three ways of making money for many of the inhabitants: drugs, dog-fighting or stripping the abandoned buildings for scrap metal.

And yet… young pioneering people are turning up, as they did in the San Francisco area during the 1960s, because they look upon the awful ghost town as some kind of land of opportunity. It may take a strong dose of lateral thinking, but you can just about envisage the place as some kind of microcosm of the post-industrial world. Rampant vegetation is swallowing up the legacy of the population explosion that turned Detroit into the fourth biggest city in the USA.

It’s an irony of the cycle of life that the city was populated by immigrants from the Deep South, who gave up their subsistence livelihoods as sharecroppers to work on the car assembly lines of Henry Ford and others of his kidney. Unemployed car workers are now finding that they can make some kind of living by turning over what little land they have to agriculture. Selling fruit and vegetables can bring in around $500 per week, someone suggested. What a great notion to think that one day Detroit might become the first kind of post-industrial urban farm, where produce is grown in diverse smallholdings rather than huge mono-cultivated mid-western style farms.  

This weekend, I went to Vayrac instead of Martel for my fruit and vegetables, bought from stallholders who grow produce that tastes of something other than fresh cucumbers. After depositing last week’s holidaymakers’ laundry at Le Pressing, I sat outside the Bar Tabac with an intense coffee and waited for my friend, Bret. Judging by the voices at the tables around me, the only people daft enough to sit outside on such a dreary morning were English immigrés.

When Bret arrived, he rolled me one of his cigarettes, because he knows me well enough to recognise that I make a pig’s ear of an operation that is thankfully still a rarity in my life. I told him about the documentary, as I know that he too likes to look at life in its historical context. We talked about the notion of actual and moral bankruptcy. Despite the fact that Detroit has suffered what amounts to a Hurricane Katrina in slow motion, it seems that there has been no injection of emergency capital to help bring the place back to life. And yet, he told me, they are building or have built a new stadium for one of the city’s sporting teams at a cost of 300 million dollars or so. The profits, of course, will find their way inexorably into the owner’s already deep pockets. At any time, too, he can presumably move the whole operation – as often happens in the States – to another city prepared to offer a better deal.

The director, Julian Temple, talked to a group of men – all of whom, I think, had already spent time in prison – who were working for a programme or an organisation all about responsibly removing recyclable scrap from buildings, as opposed to stripping them of anything saleable to leave them in a state of imminent collapse. These men spoke openly and surprisingly eloquently of the mayhem that they had once created when idle and the new sense of purpose they had discovered when given a positive occupation.

Meanwhile, we read, President Obama’s credibility is compromised by his inability to engineer the latest US-sponsored war in the Middle East. Why is it, we wondered, that Roosevelt was able to cement his place in history by mobilising armies of the unemployed in the name of a New Deal and yet it won’t wash in the 21^st century at a time when, more than ever, we need direction from visionaries of principle? It’s heartbreaking to think of how much money could be diverted from the military to the educational ledgers.

I went home with my fruit and vegetables, musing on such troublesome thoughts. In the evening, I went to Martel with some other friends for a pair of music concerts in the market place. The event was part of a weekend festival linked to the national journées du patrimone. The rain poured down, but even though the stage lighting revealed the fine spray that blew in through the open sides, the extraordinary roof structure kept us all dry.

A big enthusiastic crowd responded noisily to a group called Mellino, whose origins lay in Les Négresses Vertes of late 20^th century fame, and even more vociferously to Flavia Coelho, a Paris-based Brazillian chanteuse with spray-on jeans, big hair and an immense smile. The temporary flooring over the cobbles moved like a localised earthquake with the impact of bouncing humans.

Afterwards, we all went home in our convenient four-wheeled killing machines. Henry Ford was a thoroughly unpleasant man with a lot to answer for. But at least he had the clarity to see that his brainchild of mass production would end up being the death of us all. I’m lucky not to live in the segregated communities of Detroit, whose divisions he helped to create. Martel is thousands of miles away in more ways than a geographical one. Nevertheless, there’s a lesson in its terrible decline that applies to us all.