August: Catch a Falling Star

Last night all six of us – husband, wife, daughter, dog and two kittens – sat out on the back balcony staring at the heavens. August is the month in which you can catch a shooting star or two, if you've got time on your hands and your wits about you.

Something like this

We stationed ourselves out there just as day was turning to night, right at the end of another hot day. For once, there was a bit more time than usual. The welcome weekend deluge meant that the watering wasn't quite so extensive. Already the meadows of the plain below look a tad greener. It's probably due to a vigorous growth of weeds, but the landscape no longer resembles the Serengeti like it did, say, two weeks ago.

Two weeks in another town... It's already almost that long ago that I took the Megabus to London to spend some time with my octogenarian father in his new apartment. The skies were largely overcast in Romsey, Hants and the temperature was neutral, so it was a blissful change to wear another layer over my T-shirts. The week away fortified my system and prepared me for more of the same on my return.

In this part of France, the night sky is almost as clear as it is anywhere in the land – except perhaps the Pyrenees, where they've positioned one of the most powerful telescopes known to astronomers (or so I believe). There is little or no light pollution here and when you're lying flat as we were and staring heavenwards, it's easy to imagine that you're in some space pod, off to explore new galaxies and to boldly go where no man – or woman, or dog, or kitten – has gone before...

The feeling of being sucked up into an intergalactic vortex was intensified by the remarkably appropriate music chosen for the voyage of the Star Ship Samponz by The Daughter: Volume 3 of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares. And my God, those female Balkan voices are indeed mysterious and elemental and ethereal. Everything in fact that a star-child could wish for.

They clearly don't know the answers either

All this astral travelling got us onto the subject of stars and galaxy. Could I explain the difference between a star and a planet? Not convincingly. Could I explain what a galaxy was? Well, kind of... Could I explain the difference between a meteorite and a shooting star? No, but I knew a man who could. In the absence of my polymathematical friend, Winston, I referred my fellow spectators to the Bill Bryson book that I brought back to France with me, just one of many trophies from my safari around the numerous charity shops of Romsey, Hants. A Short History of Nearly Everything would surely have all the answers, explained what's more in layman's terms of less than seven syllables. Good old Bill Bryson.

Actually, I found that particular book at the Saturday fête organised by the care home where my mother, RIP, passed her final year. Ten pence I think they asked for it. I also found one of those racing-green-coloured coffee cups and saucers for a pound to replace the cup that The Daughter smashed recently. No sooner had I got it back home unscathed than she managed to smash the saucer. Good old Supaglue.

Anyway, it's hopefully just a passing phase. My father had just come round to the idea that we couldn't go that afternoon because of the absence of taxis in Romsey, Hants – there was some big bash going on in the New Forest, which had claimed all available transport for hire – when my brother turned up on the off-chance, as he does every blue moon. He took us there and we watched our old dad in his element, glad-handing the nursing staff and dispensing his customary charm and bonhomie. We call him Mr. Wonderful. Me, I watched a demonstration of canine tricks, as a number of besotted owners put their pooches through their paces. My brother found it all a bit distasteful, but then he's not a dog owner.

We were out there on the balcony, I suppose, for less than an hour and in that time we counted between us seven shooting stars. Blink and they're gone. The tally surpassed our first attempt one memorably pellucid August night way back when we lived among the hill people. The Daughter was just a tot then and Alfred Lord Sampson had not yet come to protect us from hot-air balloons. That night the stars put on a show for free, but I don't remember counting more than five falling stars. The old lady across the road was no doubt peering at us from behind half-closed shutters and wondering what those odd anglais were up to now.

We are not overlooked now, which is a blessing. Nevertheless, the campers from Paris are out in force just down below. Our keen-eared daughter caught the sound of some awful French version of '(Reach Out), I'll BeThere', which offended her notion of good taste and no doubt interfered with the purity of the Balkan voices. She suggested turning ours up, but I was loathe to get into some amplified strife with the neighbours, particularly as they're only temporary.

Our discerning daughter came with us on Saturday night to see the first music concert of this summer. The Mauritanian singer-songwriter, Daby Touré, who has recorded on Peter Gabriel's Real World label, was appearing – incongruously – at a restaurant a mere 15 minutes from here. Beside the river Dordogne and beneath the floodlit village of Montvalent, which looked like a painted backdrop for a Victorian melodrama. As usual, the publicity was last minute and we didn't hear about it till a thoughtful friend sent me a photo of the poster she took on her phone.

It was free to diners and a mere €3,50 to folk like us who came for the music alone. A major artist for a price like that; it didn't make any sense. But he was playing with a personal friend, who played a violin-shaped bass guitar not unlike Paul McCartney's, so I guess he was doing it as a personal favour. The audience was a right motley crew that included one of the women on the cash desks at Intermarché whose name, I now know, is Valérie. But Daby played his heart out until the end, when the heavens opened and a blocked gutter created a puddle on the floor that crept steadily nearer to his equipment.

Before we left, the girls persuaded me to go up and thank him. Which I did. Daby beamed and so did I. His star is probably still rising rather than falling, but one forgets that even people in the public eye can find positive feedback as pleasant to receive as it is to give. We drove home very slowly, partly because of the strength of the downpour and partly to avoid all the frogs.

My sister and her extended family arrive this weekend. There are no concerts scheduled, but the four small boys are going to love the animals and we adults might find some more quiet time to sit out again on the balcony and gape at the firmament. It's recommended.

July: Hotter than the New Arrivals

And the heat goes on... Shades of 2003 – except now there is some shade, deep within the house in the darkened 'master bedroom'.

Hotter than July. We're now on red alert in the Lot – along with the other departments in south-west France – so there's no more watering allowed. We've been quite liderally scraping the bottom of the barrels. With no more water in the rain butts to scoop out with our watering cans, we can remove them from their plinths, slosh out the sludge at the bottom and turn them up to dry out, ready for the next inundation. If it comes. There was rain forecast at the weekend, but an overcast morning soon turned into a sunny day. So... we must watch the garden along with the surrounding vegetation die off and hope that it will come back in milder climes.

This is the kind of summer that makes you question your wisdom in setting out camp so far south. Surely we'd have been better off in Brittany, where the winds off the Atlantic make for changeable and more tolerable conditions. But my wife's not having it. If we are ever to move to the seaside, it must be somewhere near Sete on the Mediterranean, because the sea is warmer. But so is the ambient temperature, isn't it? No, I won't stand for that. If global warming makes up its mind to subject us to hotter and drier rather than milder and wetter summers, I think Scandinavia's the place. Besides, it's an enlightened society. Generally speaking. Nice people, the Danes, the Swedes and the Norwegians. Even the Finns – if it weren't for the endemic alcoholism and a cuisine that's reputedly based around potatoes and porridge. I might have got it wrong.

Anyway, it hasn't happened yet. Climactic and financial meltdowns are still just shapes looming on the horizon. For the moment, we've been focusing on keeping cool and inducting the new arrivals. It hardly seems possible that Otis and his half-brother Mingus arrived just over a week ago to complete Team Sampson once more. It seems like at least a fortnight that we've been watching them tumble around like kittens are given to do. Daphne has fallen for young Mingus in a big way and we have to keep a close watch lest she try to drag him around by his ear. The Daughter gets a little stressed by it all and we try to reassure her that they will work out their own rules. After all, her mother's old dog, Max, used to carry his favourite kitten around in his mouth.

Mingus (left) and Otis (right)

They came to us via our first friends in France. Régine ran the bar/restaurant in a nearby village, while Bernard worked for France Telecom pre-privatisation. They took us under their collective wing and did more than anyone to ensure that the new arrivals from far-off Sheffield survived the first few difficult years among the hill people of the Corrèze. Régine had to give up cooking due to a rare and debilitating illness, but she re-invented herself as a cookery writer – to find regional fame and, if not fortune, then a modest income to supplement Bernard's retirement pension.

Having moved to Marcillac on the edge of the Haute Corrèze, they journeyed significantly down to Brive the weekend before last to deliver the kittens to my lady's cabinet and check out our currently vacant apartment for their delightful daughter, Charlotte, who lived for a time in Southampton with friends of my sister's children and who learnt impeccable English and a wider perspective on life. They liked the apartment and we love their two kittens.

Otis and Mingus seem to have adapted very quickly to life in a comparatively luxurious animal-loving home. And why wouldn't they? All the love they can manage, all the water they can drink, all the food they can eat and all the litter they need to scrape and scatter for me to empty in some brambly corner where Daphne can't get to the... No, I won't even go there. Disgusting things, dogs.

Watching all three animals sleep through the worst of the afternoon heat makes you realise that they – and we – were never meant to contend with such temperatures as we've been witnessing this July. These are Spanish temperatures. Moroccan, even. Down in those parts, they sensibly take siestas. We, alas, come from a different culture. Spurred on by the good old Protestant work ethic, I have tried to soldier on at the computer. But I may as well have retreated to my bed, given what I have managed to achieve. You can't think straight, let alone create. Heat like this saps the will to live and it doesn't surprise me that so many of our older citizens have given up the ghost.

One compensation of mid July is normally the British Open. But our digibox that converts the satellite signals into images gave up the ghost and we had to await the visit of Satellite Stu on Wednesday afternoon. He put things right. Typically it expired at a time when there were three excellent films to record on Film Four. And at a time when I normally allow myself a few hours on the sofa to watch the gentle, sedate events on the golf course. It's St. Andrews this year, too. The filthy weather mocked our parched and ailing landscape, but provided one of the most exciting competitions for years. Alas, it was won by an American and not a European.

However, I did manage a round of golf one Monday morning on a new course that a passionate fan of the game has created out of old farmland, presumably with the money he must have made from selling his business. My friend and fellow Packers fan, John from Madison, Wisconsin, took me there and lent me his new-generation clubs. And because John is getting a little too old for dragging a bag of clubs around on foot, we got to hire one of those electric buggies, which was almost as much fun as riding a dodgem car.

It was my first round of golf in 12 years and I didn't disgrace myself. Not altogether, anyway. I hit a few shots sweetly and sunk a long putt and, despite the searing heat, it was a lot of fun. At one point, teeing off on the fourth hole, another buggy came racing towards us. It was the owner, bearing two cups of black coffee on a tray. Most of it had spilled on the tray, but I very much appreciated the gesture. Nor would he let us pay for our slopped coffees, because it was the quatorze juillet. Only in France, eh?

As we arrived at the green for which we were aiming, we chanced upon a pair of hoopoes. It's seemingly weeks since I last saw or heard one of these exotic birds. They flew off towards the surrounding woods on our approach. Like I am, they're probably looking forward to the end of this month. Normally, I do not welcome August, since it augurs the end of summer, but lower temperatures are forecast. If only it would rain.

Rain, rain, rain/Beautiful rain...

20th – 27th June: The Bob Marley Test

Gunther's parents dropped by the other day to say goodbye on their way back to the UK for another few weeks. Daphne was so keen to see her Ridgeback friend that she jumped into their big black van and proceeded to pee on Darryn's jeans.

Darryn was more concerned, I think, that I didn't seem my usual self, whatever that may be. Perhaps I had an air of distraction. I reassured him that it wasn't, touch wood, some life-threatening disease, but simply that I had a bit of paid work last week. Work does terrible things to me: the responsibility of creating something for someone, for money, brings me out all over in stress. It consumes my thoughts and saps my creativity. I just don't know how people do it, week in, week out. Particularly when there's commuting involved. I guess because they have to.

My sister Jo was out here last weekend, another one of the family who was never suited to the world of work. We must have taken our lead from our indolent father. Unfortunately, the spoons in our mouths with which we were born were stainless steel rather than silver. We were therefore obliged to work. I lasted a little longer than she did – clocking up a big 15 years in the Civil Surface, enough to earn a small monthly retirement pension which supplements my career as a dilettante.

Jo managed about a year in a building society in Bath, notable for an implausible sickness record. Then she clocked up another year or so in London at the Ministry of Defence, before finding a thoroughly unsuitable job as a statistics manager for a cosmetics company. Since she had no Maths to speak of, it was an extraordinary appointment that still mystifies her. In those days of blatant sex discrimination, I expect it had something to do with her long blond hair. The business of trying to bluff her way through the role took its toll and brought her out all over in stress. I believe she lasted less than a year.

Fortunately, both of us landed on our feet. She found her Great Provider and I found mine, although in both cases the provision took time and involved some hard times – through which we played our respective parts: she as a mother of two boys and me as a writer without portfolio and an itinerant training and learning thingy in those dark distant days when we were trying to find our feet among the hill people of the Corrèze. Jo's principal occupation now is buzzing about, looking after our father and making sure that her family and friends are all right. It's rare when everyone is all right at the same time, so when someone's not, she tends to break out all over in stress.

Neither of us, unlike our dear father, is lazy. In fact, The Daughter is always telling me to step off the treadmill to 'chill out'. But both my sister and I have to keep moving, have to keep busy. I have no problem with that. Things have to be done and I'm not one to shirk the doing of them. It's just that serious paid work brings me out in a cold sweat, I suppose because I have to justify my enormous fee.

I'm not counting my work as coach of the English women's football team. I do that on a voluntary basis. Guiding them to the world cup semi-finals is payment enough. Writing an article is fine, too, perhaps because the fee bears so little relation to the time put in that you end up feeling like you're doing them a favour. After all, newspapers and magazines depend on content for their continued existence.

It's finding the content that's so difficult. There was a case in point during the week. I received an invitation from the assistant editor at Songlines to come up with something for their 'Soapbox' slot. Something, anything. Therein lay the problem. I could rant about environmental destruction, cruelty to animals, political chicanery, corruption, corporate tax avoidance, the ivory trade, Monsanto, iPhones for toddlers etc. till the cows came home, but not about music. Apart from the likes of thrash or death metal and industrial techno (if such a genre exists), it's one of the few consistently positive aspects of life on earth. What could make me remotely angry about it?

Finally, it was my sister who inspired me. In a negative way. In so far as she personifies a complete lack of musical curiosity. When we were growing up in Belfast, she was – and still is – a big fan of Cat Stevens, or Yousuf Whatever, as he now calls himself. One day, some years ago, I happened to mention his Island label stable mate, Nick Drake. She'd never heard of him. What!!? Never heard of the tragic troubadour, who drowned himself as a young man, in despair perhaps at ever finding an audience for his gorgeous melancholic songs. It was a situation to be remedied.

I bought my sister a Best Of one Christmas to introduce her to someone I felt sure she would love. How could she not? Sometime later, I mentioned on the telephone a documentary on Nick Drake that they were showing on BBC Four. She'd still never heard of Nick Drake. Next time, I resolved, I'd buy her something safe – like a bar of fancy soap.

As many do, she fails my Bob Marley test. In other words, someone says they like reggae because they like Bob Marley. But if you mention the likes of Burning Spear or The Mighty Diamonds or even the other two Wailers, you get a blank look. It always works. Anyone can try it; I don't have a patent (yet). Pat Pending.

You might be thinking: Is this really worth ranting about? Isn't it just snobbery or elitism by any other name? In the great run of things, you'd probably be right. Perhaps the editorial team will reach the same conclusion. But it seems to me to be symptomatic of a general lack of curiosity about life itself. How we stick to the safe and familiar, things often associated with our youth, and turn our backs on what's new and different and maybe just a little uncomfortable.

Anyway, I'm going to climb down off my soapbox, because we were all culpable in missing the Fête de Musique last weekend. I got my article written and despatched, but we didn't go to Brive to mingle with the throng in search of sounds unlimited. Shame and scandal in the family. Maybe I for one was too busy mourning the passing of the summer solstice. It's all downhill from here till the fading light of autumn.

Soon after the solstice come the sales. I made my customary biannual pilgrimage to Cultura, where I snaffled another ten CDs to satisfy my musical curiosity. My Great Provider doesn't mind: she knows that it keeps me happy and gives her more material for her daily return journey to Brive. But storage is becoming a problem. There may yet come a time when we have to build a straw-bale extension to the house. A pleasure dome will I decree, with a music room fashioned for its ambient temperature and perfect acoustics...  

My paid work went well enough. The client approved. For now, the stress has lifted and I can get back to my perma-pottering. But it may well lead to more, which in some ways is a good thing – if I'm going to build this pleasure dome, for instance – and in some ways not so good, because it will heap on the pressure and lead to another outbreak of 'not my usual self'.

Forty-degree heat is forecast for the week ahead. Somehow my provider will have to find the strength to massage bodies in that kind of temperature. It's the first week of Wimbledon, too. I watched a fascinating documentary at the end of the week about Arthur Ashe, which brought back wonderful memories of how he slew the obnoxious Jimmy Connors in 1975 with a lethal combination of grace and guile. He was a great guy was Arthur. He spent his brief allotted time campaigning for the underdog. Incredibly, in this era of the fearsome Serena Williams, he remains the only black man ever to have won Wimbledon.

Oh, and I managed to download Windows 8.1 last week quite by accident. My, what a life full of surprises.

10th – 13th June: When Daphne met Gunter

Blogger saves Lot from crippling drought...

Great job, Sampson! In writing about the dry weather last week, I precipitated a week of downpours and storms. Nothing too violent either, but plenty of rain, rain, rain, beau-ti-ful rain to fill up the rain butts. A friend with an underground cistern that was just about running on empty told me that it filled up entirely one wet night. That's 20,000 litres. That's some rain storm.

Holidaymakers won't thank me, of course, but farmers, gardeners and nature lovers the department over have been leaving presents for the family outside our front door. Modestly, I told well-wishers that it had really had nothing to do with me, that this meteorological instability is all part of the wonderful world of global warming. I don't wish to see straw effigies of myself in fields and gardens. Personality cults can be very dangerous things.

It's raining again this morning. It was raining yesterday evening when I went out with a quiche and a bottle of wine to Bret's latest Fête des Mecs. Guys' party night. There was only a handful of us, which might have had something to do with the weather. We almost lost Dimitri. He got as far as St. Michel de Bannières and turned back in alarm when he saw the storm clouds over the Dordogne. He's in the middle of re-roofing their barn and got back just in time to stop the wind from stripping away the enormous tarp stretched over the framework of the roof. Such was its power that it blew away the rocks to weigh down the tarp like mere pebbles. As in another scene from Days Of Heaven, during a quarter of an hour of atmospheric turmoil he was left single-handedly wrestling with ropes in the driving rain to stop the whole caboodle being blown into the next department.

The roof was saved and he got there in one piece with his pasta salad and Cuban cigars. I'd turned up an hour before, the first guest to arrive, to help Bret with his last-minute preparations. It gave me a glimpse into his unique culinary methodology, based entirely on experimentation that defies any recipes known to humankind and any acceptable combinations of foodstuffs. At one point I found myself frantically chopping garlic cloves as fast as he could peel them. He can be a little too liberal with garlic for my taste.

A small turn-out meant fewer games and more chance to chat with people I see only from time to time when I emerge from my hermit's cave. I even smoked my first cigar in about three years. Not one of the full-bodied Cuban critters, but one of the little cigarillos that Bret had bought thoughtfully for our mutual Dutch friend. It was rather enjoyable, but I discovered this morning that my clothes smelt of tobacco. Much water has flowed under many bridges since the last time I was compelled to jettison clothes for this reason.

In talking to Lee, with whom we have years spent in Brighton in common, I also discovered that we have a mutual experience of Bath. As a kid in Belfast, I used to go there every summer with the family to stay with our maternal grandparents. As refugees from The Troubles, the family even ended up living there for a few years. I used to drink in the same pub as Lee – the Hat & Feathers in Walcott – in the days when I would wander lonely as a teenage cloud down to the more edgy, alternative district of the Georgian city in search of sympathetic company.

Lee got married in the same registry office as my sister did. Apparently, he and his wife both had long dreadlocks at the time. When he cut them off in order to move to the Corrèze and become an organic farmer, he discovered what a joy it was to feel a pillow under his head again. Bearing dreadlocks, he told me, was rather like living with a carpet over your shoulders. He told me how to grow them (not that I'm thinking of it at this unsuitably late stage) and dispelled the myth that you shouldn't wash locks lest you wash away the oils that keep them together. It was all very enlightening in a Bunny Wailer kind of way.

Our Flemish friend, Kim, turned up late with a nephew in tow from his recent trip back to the homeland. Which would have been just fine, only the nephew commandeered Bret's laptop to assault us with a selection of death metal music or whatever label it goes under these days. I must be getting old, because I found myself mouthing phrases like Can't hear yourself think. My grandma used to say that about the Rolling Stones. But I couldn't. Conversation was impossible. Kim suggested that we win back the laptop, but I'd forgotten my reading glasses and the screen was just a blur. When everyone moved upstairs for games, I figured it was time to cut and run. With my quiche dish and Bret's orbital sander, I found my way to my car at the bottom of the drive in the after-midnight pitch black darkness by the sound of my footsteps on limestone chippings.

When I got back home to my old familiar sane and safe house, the girls were tucked up tight in their beds. There was just the matter of removing Daphne from the foot of the 'master bed' and returning her to her basket, before discarding clothes that smelt of cigar smoke.

There were fun and games earlier in the week, during a respite from the rain, when Darryn and Leanne turned up with their new hound, Gunter. It's his first visit from England to their building site on the other side of the valley. Gunter's a Rhodesian Ridgeback. He's an impressive beast, already double the weight of our Terrierdor, despite being a month younger than she is. I was a little nervous at first when Daphne met Gunter, and not just because they flattened the last of the irises (they needed cutting back anyway). But Daphne's a game young thing and she kept coming back for more, despite the frequent yelps of fearful pleasure.

Eventually, they found a kind of common ground based on a mutual respect for each other's physical capabilities. Next time they meet, presumably they can carry on where they left off and won't need to go through any unsettling preliminaries. Gunter will be 40kilos or so by the time he's fully grown and that's a lot of weight to fall on a fragile ribcage.  

The rain has stopped now and it will be interesting to see how the weather next week responds to my posting. If the sunshine returns, as I hope it will, there may be more gifts laid at our front door. Fruit and vegetables will do very nicely, thank you very much (if you're asking).