March: Changing the Guard

Spring has been hovering around these parts over recent days like a hesitant guest and on Saturday morning there was a renewed spring in my step when I handed over my keys to the nearby chateau. I have been a guardian, chatelaine, keeper of a considerable bunch of keys, call it what you will, for nearly a decade now. Yet the ceremony was not tinged with sadness. I came home feeling a few pounds lighter – physically and figuratively – and shared a ceremonial cup of coffee with my wife and daughter.

In truth, things have changed for the worse over the last couple of years at the big house on the bluff. My gainfully occupied wife – who had one of her rare samedis libérés this last weekend – has been urging me to give it all up and knuckle down to the business of creating a best-selling masterpiece She doesn't realise how hard it is. Much easier to procrastinate by means of little jobs in the deluded idea that you are doing something useful and topping up the family coffers.

The rot set in a few years back as gradually the English proprietors sold up to their French counterparts. Nothing wrong with that, in principle. Some of my best friends are French et cetera, and it's right and proper in a way that the building should be restored to its countrymen and women. It's just that the new owners of the individual apartments, almost without exception, are seeking to rent their property to holidaymakers over the summer months to recoup their annual charges.

This has complicated things. Previously, the Brits owned their apartments because they wanted to holiday in them during the summer. Consequently, they tended to come for a few weeks in August and for the rest of the year the place would be deserted. This meant that I could potter about with all my keys once a week in autumn, winter and spring, and twice a week in summer – the second visit providing an opportunity to don my headphones, empty my head and listen to music as I pushed my vacuum cleaner gently up and down the king-sized pool, with nothing but pH levels to concern me. Money mainly for old rope.

The rot was compounded by the decision of someone at AGESSA, the body that assesses and demands social charges from writers and artists, that I could no longer count my work at the chateau as the work of a writer. I had claimed for some time that, because I wrote a weekly inspection report and translated e-mails and such like, my work as guardian could sneak in under a writer's umbrella. And frankly why not? It makes life so much simpler.

However, those who have experienced the reality of self-employment in France will know that one of the barriers that holds back the entrepreneurially minded is the absurd notion that you can have only one string to your professional bow. Hence all the familiar problems in the construction industry, because a plumber can't tile and an electrician can't plaster and so on. Jacks of all trades like my Dutch friend further down the crest have to hush up their flexibility. Customers may know, but not the authorities.

Anyway, it didn't wash for 2014 and beyond, so I had to set myself up as an auto-entrepreneur purely for my work as a guardian (even though, farcically, I am registered – at the suggestion of the helpful woman at the office – as an 'editor', which smacks surely of a return to Square 1). Whereas before I was charged around 15% for this work, I am now assessed for social charges at almost 25%. Since I haven't put up my hourly rate since undertaking to guard the chateau, I suddenly found that I was losing a quarter of my income at a stroke. Rather than standing still, I was going backwards. Time to get out.

Particularly since I am now in receipt of a small monthly stipend as a former employee of Her Majesty the Queen. The strength of the pound against the euro has made this well worth having. However, the smart money is now on a dramatic devaluation of sterling in the currency markets, which could see parity with both the euro and the dollar – or even worse. Whereupon, I might have to re-evaluate the situation. God forbid, I may even have to paddle up river to Andros and make jam.

Now that The Daughter has got her heart set on a course of study at Brighton Art College following her recent successful interview, I may have to make a lot of jam. Fruit juice, too. The Good Wife is under the orders of her nearest and dearest to work less not more, for the sake of her health. Besides, spring is trying hard to get its foot in the door, so I need help in the garden. The grass is looking like a shag-pile rug (where it hasn't been dug up by our inquisitive Terrierdor). One man went to mow, but couldn't do it all.

Talking of plumbers and Terrierdors, I wish I'd had a (video) camera primed the other day. Had I been able to capture it on film, it would have gone viral and we'd have become a dot.com millionaire overnight. It was one of those really dismal days that have been a feature of this post-Christmas warm-wet-winter-with-westerly-winds. The earnest young plumber from down the road was working at the building site on the far side of the Dog's Meadow, helping to transform the Parisians' embryonic pool house (or pullewce, as our intermittent neighbour pronounces it) into a temporary holiday home. I was standing by our front door, on the phone to my sister, looking ruefully at the rain. Then I spotted the plumber looking rueful on our lawn. I cut short my conversation and went to see what appeared to be the problem.

It turned out that he'd made the mistake of playing with Daphne, who visits the building site from time to time in search of soiled tissues. She'd grabbed his plumber's wool and run off with it. Believing it the Game of the Century, she was resisting all his entreaties. Then I spotted our dog with a great bunch of the wool clamped in her jaws. Being the same colour as her fur, it looked like she'd grown the kind of bushy beard commonly sported by an eccentric peer of the realm. Laugh? Well, it probably doesn't sound that funny without an illustration, but I nearly burst a pipe.

Daphne! I spoke firmly to the pup and she put it down immediately, an exemplary but uncommon display of obedience which gladdened my heart. With profuse apologies, I retrieved the bunch of shaggy wool and rendered it unto the plumber – who may even have used it later that afternoon when mending a tap in this house. The one that was fitted with a spare egg cosy several years ago lest someone should try to turn it on.

That tap's another long-running to-do struck from my list. I'm hoping that, with spring on the way and without the guardianship of the chateau, there will be more time for all those similar niggling little jobs. There's a new cat flap to fit, for one. After a special showing of Suffragette at the local cinema to mark International Women's Day (and having ducked out of the subsequent discussion, which probably dragged on into the early hours), we got back to find that Daphne had thrust her head through the flap once too often. It lay on the mat outside and a howling wind blew through the house. I've effected a temporary repair with super-glue, but the prognosis is not good.

In preparation for the changing of the guard last Saturday, I sat down on Friday afternoon in our reading area and tackled another long-standing job. After years of chucking them all in a relegated rucksack – and then wasting far too much time trying unidentified keys in locks – I collected all the keys that the new man would need on one handy if oversized ring. Each one attached to one of those plastic tags that they sell in places like Brico Depot. Each one labelled with the number of the apartment and the name of the proprietor. A beautiful job, though I say it myself.

I should have done it years ago.

February: Comfort and Joy

February has long had significance. Since meeting the Good Wife of La Poujade Basse, in fact. For, 't'is the month of her birthday. And, since living in France, February also marks the turning point: when we begin to emerge from what always seems with hindsight to have been a long, hard, enervating winter. Not that this has been the case this globally-warmed winter, with its dreary nondescript weather and a lack of either sun or the kind of hard frost that put your plants at risk and kill off all the microbes.

This year's birthday was doubly significant, because The Daughter passed her driving test. And although I liked to think that she wouldn't need to drive in some Arcadian future where cars have become irrelevant, I have to admit that the effect on her self-confidence and self-esteem has been positive and immediate. The situation hadn't quite got to the point that it did for a friend of mine, who abandoned all hope at the seventh or eighth time of failing and took to driving around London without a license in an old Deux Cheveux whose ignition was wired to an old-fashioned light switch by the steering column. But after a couple of failures she was beginning to think of herself in terms of a SNAFU.

I remember passing my test at the ripe old age of 36 – after 36 lessons in fact, just to prove the old maxim that you need one for every year of your life – and the huge boost it delivered to my self-esteem. It was like graduating at long last into manhood. And I guess it's done the same for my offspring. At 21, she can believe that the new credit-card-style license is her ticket to the wonderful world of adulthood. Free at last! Free to drive as close to the car as it's possible to do. Free to overtake on blind bends. No, even though she's been instructed by a French driver, I'm confident that she has more sense.

Her confidence has been further lifted by two offers so far of interviews in the UK to continue her studies in textiles design. Which is great, apart from all the additional cost that incurs. Being a cheapskate who believes that students should act like students and not members of the Royal Family, I lobbied for Megabus. To London and back for £50. The Daughter wasn't sure and I wasn't sure whether her lack of surety was due to genuine fears or to a case of noblesse oblige.

In days of yore, a parent would simply say, You'll take the Megabus my girl, because it's the cheapest option and your parents aren't made of money. If you're going to be a student again, you have to learn to behave like a student. But, like 'wallin' up kay-atz', one doesn't do that sort of thing anymore. A modern day parent discusses options, listens, debates. What's more, if you're a worry-wart like me, you fret that parental insistence could lead to disaster. All those what ifs. What if she were to lose her portfolio in the hold of the coach? What if she were to be molested while waiting for her connection in Paris? What if the coach were to crash? What if the boat were to sink?

The fault would be mine. For putting my foot down. No wonder I tossed and turned during the night before tickets were finally booked. I'm not one for a nuit blanche, since my brain tends to shut down during the night and nothing will rouse me from my nocturnal recuperation till the alarm sounds the following morning. Knowing that I had to get up early only increased the pressure and further murdered sleep.

The following morning I drove my equally unsettled wife to a hotel on the river Lot for a surprise breakfast and a couple of hours in the hotel's centre of well-being. The surprise was somewhat diluted by my suggestion that she prepare her bathing costume. With further questioning, I caved in pathetically and revealed the truth. I cannot tell a lie. I certainly wouldn't have been any good under interrogation by the Gestapo.

I've discovered rather late in life that my part-time role as journalist can bring certain perks. Since I needed to feature a hotel as part of a forthcoming article on the Célé valley, I selected the Hôtel Le Saint Cirq because it sounded quite special. Just across the river from Saint Cirq Lapopie, one of France's most beloved of plus beaux villages, with a view of the tourist hotspot perched implausibly on its rocky promontory. Would he let us sample the breakfast and spa facilities in return for a spotlight in the magazine? Yes, he would.

We first viewed this glorious village back in '89 – in a dreamy crepuscular light at the tail end of a beautiful summer's day. We were scouting for a potential holiday home in my wife's old convertible Beetle, with a couple of bags and a tent in the lack of space between the back seat and the rear engine. Although we tend to take it all a bit for granted these days, it still seems improbably beautiful.

Even in the driving rain, which has barely let up since, the now familiar drive there – up from the Dordogne and then by near-deserted Roman-straight road from Gramat over the limestone causse and down to the secret valley of the Célé, where Butch and the Kid and the Hole-in-the-wall Gang once hid from the posse of Pinkerton men – the landscape has its own singular charm.

Which is just what the hotel's proprietor suggested. A charming man, he replies personally (I'd noticed with appreciation) to every comment on Trip Advisor, often in the most delightful English. The comments are almost unanimously glowing, which I understood immediately. The place is a converted farm with its own bonsai vineyard, a centre de bien-être with a vegetal roof and bedrooms housed in outbuildings with hacienda-style verandas.

The proprietor calls himself an iconoclast: because he will not compromise, even in the face of accepted practice. Everything is geared towards the idea of a bucolic retreat. There are, for example, no televisions in the bedrooms. This earned the place an extra star in our book, supplemented by half a star more when I noted the portable CD player by each bed, each equipped with a copy of jazz singer Melody Gardot's first album. Quel discernment!

I wanted to experience breakfast because it was flagged up as something special and because I've always considered breakfast, a long leisurely breakfast, as the most underrated meal of the day. For six months of secluded bliss, I once worked for an octogenarian aristocrat, who would linger for almost an hour at his big mahogany table and leave a litter of crumbs around his chair for the Filipino servants when finally he would wipe off his walrus moustache, crumple his napkin, fold his newspaper and shuffle off to the 'Muniments Rooms' for a morning's slow-motion work.

Debs and I sat by the window with a view of Saint Cirq through a curtain of rain. A fire roared in the hearth of a huge chimney breast. An ambient soundtrack of early jazz was a welcome and unexpected surprise. We didn't say no to our host's offer of a goats-cheese omelette to start the proceedings – and certainly didn't regret the decision. We followed it with a kind of traditional Quercynoise breakfast moderne: a slice of rustic French toast, a slice of his wife's pastis tart, a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and two cups of excellent coffee. We forewent the pâté and the red Cahors wine.

Our host loves his brocantes. The whole place is furnished by his quirky finds. A pair of old wooden shutters, for example, hides the computer on his desk. Old metal postal sorting shelves now house the keys to the bedrooms. An enamel railway poster reminds guests of a time when a branch line served this valley east of Cahors. The foyer of the spa is dominated by an improbable coloured-glass belle époque glass chandelier. Taste with a dash of humour.

We had the spa to ourselves all morning long. A swim, a sauna, a hammam and an olfactory shower with four settings – from something like Caribbean rainstorm to Arctic mist. With the absence of company, I tried in vain to master the breast stroke. My therapeutic wife thinks it might be due to the trauma of swimming lessons in the Ormeau Baths, Belfast.

In any case, we resolved to come back to this fabulous hotel, as paying customers, next time we had a special anniversary to celebrate. In the meantime, the hotelier would receive an informed and sincere review and we would take home with us a cotton bag, a pair of disposable flip-flops and a tangible feeling of well-being.

Back to reality. Later this month, I must pursue our application for dual French citizenship to cover our backs in the event of a Brexit. The certificates have been duplicated and translated at not-inconsiderable cost. Now, I learn, we are faced with the prospect of an exam to test our French. Singing La Marseillaise is clearly no longer sufficient. €110 a time. Times two. My wife's French is much better than mine, but she has examinophobia. While I can't really speak the language for toffee, I write it reasonably well thanks to our antiquated education system. So maybe the smart money's on me for a pass mark. In which case, the Good Wife will get her citizenship as a conjoint.

What a performance! as my maternal grandmother was given to exclaim (à la music hall comic, Sid Field, I believe). Imagine the outcry if the British tried to foist such a thing on its immigrant population. Yet the French get away with it without, it seems, a murmur of protest. Which is why, even if I pass my exam and earn my dual nationality, I shall probably still root for all the other home nations in the Six Nations rugby tournament, which started up again this month. Even the old enemy, Scotland. It makes no sense at all.

January 2016: Soup of the Moment

The 2^nd January was a very different kind of day this year. Last year, my mother's funeral was blessed with a clear blue sky, but jings! was it cold. Inside the little country church, a small congregation shivered in unison. Later, in the car park of the oldest tea room in Romsey, where we had a brief restrained wake, I mimed a swan landing on a frozen lake as my legs almost went from under me on the black ice.

This year, the temperature was autumnal and the rain was constant. My brother, my two sisters and I guided our fragile father along the muddy track through the church yard to our mother's grave. It was the first time I'd seen the headstone. An elegant unpretentious stone slab with a classic stone cutter's font that bears the legend Peace at last. The older of my two sisters and I wanted the rather more wry and ambiguous Free at last! (with exclamation mark).

I'd left my wife and daughter to their own post-Christmas symbiotic devices to nip over to the UK – by airplane for once, rather than by interminable road or rail – to spend a bit of time with the Aging P and to celebrate New Year at my sister's annual party. The marking of my mother's death was incidental but felicitous. I don't intend to make a habit of it, but I figured that the first anniversary has a symbolic importance.

As it happened, my sister Jo caught a humdinger of a cold. Unable to face the food preparation involved, the event was called off and New Year came not with the pop of prosecco corks (seemingly the drink of choice for the Waitrose sorority) but with the damp squib of an early night. Snug in my sofa bed, I couldn't even be bothered to watch Jools Holland. And while I enjoyed the bells of the abbey, I didn't get up to watch the fireworks over Romsey.

Bah! Humbug. I hate New Year anyway. I'm not the sort to jump into a fountain and frolic with fellow revellers. It's just the passing of another damn year, and another reminder of all that I failed to achieve during it. On top of which, it's one year nearer the day when my account will be closed and signed off with a dismissive Could have done better. File under 'Dilettantes'.

So any 'celebration' as such took place on a mild wet Saturday. My younger sister, Gina, brought a potted plant to lay at the graveside, Jo sprinkled wild flower seeds around and my brother laid a single arum lily at the foot of the headstone. I read another of my mother's poems: a delightful childhood memory of a trip across north London to see a distant aunt with the disquieting habit of weeping at the drop of a lace hanky. Written in the vein of Stevie Smith and Sir John Betjeman, she called it 'Aqua Erratica'. When I've finished digitalising her verse, I shall send a sample to Faber & Co.

After this ad hoc ceremony, we betook ourselves to a public house for some muffled chatter and a spot of luncheon. The Little House at Home, or something of that nature, with its thatched roof and a door for 16^th century dwarves, is my father's favourite pub in Romsey. He can just about totter there on the arm of a sister with a stick passed down via my former father-in-law to drink a pint of London Pride or Stella, his favourite lager as it bears the name of his wife of 60-odd years.

They reserved a table for five by one of the leaded windows, where we could eat, drink and be a little merry without disturbing the other diners. When he's not seriously depressed or seriously drunk, my brother has a quick wit and a comic's timing and we had fun with the language in which the menu is written. It's good, simple food described in the kind of flowery prose that's de rigueur since TV chefs became the new rock stars.

Wondering about 'Soup of the moment', I volunteered to go to the bar to find out what it was at that precise time. The woman described a roast butternut squash and pumpkin concoction. Sounded good, but I couldn't resist asking her whether it was liable to change. 'Oh no no; it's the same soup all day.' Well, I thought it was funny, but I went back to the table feeling slightly ashamed for flaunting my sarcasm.

The soup when it came was delicious. As was the main course and the dessert. It was all unpretentious, attractively 'plated' and copious without being intimidating. And it was, too, I felt, rather better than I might have found in an equivalent kind of hostelry in France, supposedly the home of fine cuisine. Whether it's due to TV stars or Michelin stars or both, we seem to have become obsessed with the look of our food. It's rarely good enough now, for example, to serve well-cooked vegetables. We have to froth, drizzle and de-construct them. If we worried half as much about the source of our food, we might not be in quite the mess that humanity finds itself in at the moment.

Last Thursday night, the three of us went to see a documentary film called Demain (or Tomorrow in English currency): the laudable project of a group of young French film makers who wanted to show the global disaster scenario in a more positive light by focusing on some uplifting attempts to pull back from the precipice. In general it showed the French to be earnest, the Americans to be awesomely enthusiastic, the British to be more than a little barking and the Scandinavians to be the most enlightened people in the world.

The cinema at Vayrac was packed and there was hesitant, desultory applause at the end of the film, which suggested that the message had struck a chord. I'm not quite sure how we or they are going to contribute meaningfully to saving the world. I can't alas see how boiling less water in kettles or even banishing Nutella from our collective kitchens will preserve what's left of Indonesia's natural world, but the film at least showed that there are pockets of humanity determined to demonstrate another way of doing things.

I'm particularly fascinated by the post-apocalyptic case study of Detroit: the way that the city effectively died with the old automotive industry and how it has attracted a new breed of pioneers who are helping to green the desolate city by planting market gardens everywhere, which will soon produce enough vegetables to feed its citizens. As a couple of old former assembly line workers said, it's hard work – but it's life-enhancing.

My father's comfortable first-floor flat has a little balcony. He likes his new residence so much that he draped some blinking lights around his balcony this Christmas. My mother, unlike the rest of her family, had no time for Christmas and my father's more festive inclinations have re-surfaced after decades of repression. It would be nice to think that, now that the lights have come down, he would plant tomatoes, basil and courgettes on his balcony and help to turn Romsey, Hants. into a kind of Todmorden, West Yorks. (where residents with the backing of an enlightened council, have planted every public and private space imaginable).

But Romsey is far too cosy and privileged and my father, God love him, is far too indolent. After our lunch, we steered him slowly along The Hundred, as the main street is so quaintly named, towards his home of less than a year. We bumped into a couple of his fellow residents, a pair of widowed women of a certain age who have already succumbed to his charm. One of them introduced herself to me as his drinking partner. Cue much merriment...

Back in his flat, we hung around for an hour or so and reminisced about childish affairs. The following day, I flew back to Limoges from Southampton and helped to take our jolie sapin de Noel down for another year.

My sisters go in, separately, almost every day to check on our father. He's happy enough and quite enjoying his solitary routine. At six every day, he pours himself – and sometimes perhaps his drinking partner – a stiff dry Martini and sits down to watch BBC News highlights of the soup of the moment on his huge flat-screen telly. Growing harder and harder of hearing, he plans to buy some Sensaround speakers this year. They will be linked by wi-fi to his laptop in the next room, where his playlist performs from morn till night for subliminal company.

With the end in sight, my father has turned consumer with a vengeance. Next Christmas, I could buy him a virtual reality headset.

December: Spring hopes eternal

So there it was, Merry Christmas; everybody having fun. But not the polar bears. The warmest December on record will not help their chances of survival. And not my mother-in-law.

Up there in Cumbria, the rain has raineth every day. She lives on the edge of the Pennine Fells. Her nearby market town of Appleby-in-Westmoreland has been flooded to within an inch of its life. Despite the visit of a concerned Prince of Wales, she wonders whether her little red-stone town will ever recover from these inundations. And just when they thought that the rain might have eased up, down it came again with such force over Christmas that she couldn't even 'nip' to the garage and back for a few potatoes.

Meanwhile, any hint of rain has been studiously passing us by here in deepest France. The local farmers are still taking water from the Dordogne for their winter crops. But what are the winter crops? During our traditional Boxing Day walk with the Jackson family and friends, my American friend Steve pointed out the bushes blooming with those lovely springtime blossom-flowers the colour of raspberry sorbet.

Maybe the unnatural weather accounts for the flu that laid me low at the beginning of the month. It hasn't been cold enough to kill off all the bugs and germs and the residual flies that are still clustering in the angle of the mezzanine ceiling. My octogenarian father swears by the flu jabs he has at the beginning of every winter, but we don't do vaccinations in this household. My immune system normally keeps me healthy, but this year – for the first time in ages – I spent four consecutive days in bed and have been coughing ever since. It's not right. I am not a number, I'm a healthy man!

At least the enforced lay-off gave me a chance to read, as opposed to merely dipping my toes into books. In my sick bed, I polished off a hefty biography of the extraordinary Mitford sisters – who drove their long-suffering straight-laced parents to distraction and back – and Bill Bryson's brief but fascinating book about Shakespeare. But I'm still looking at the spine of Anthony Beevor's intimidating history of the Spanish Civil War. Looking but not touching. But when, Lord, when?

Once on my feet again, there were the regional elections to contend with. There were posters everywhere in Martel, but being an outsider and not understanding the political system of my adopted country, the faces and parties they boosted meant absolutely nothing to me. Deprived of the vote here and deprived of the vote back home – and therefore the right to have my say about the great 'Brexit' debate – all I could do was hope that those given the right to vote would exercise it with due care and diligence.

Being a student of history, I have the privilege of being able to play in advance – in certain situations – the hindsight card. Inevitably, given the atrocities in Paris the month before, voters did what voters will always do and cast their votes in protest for the extremists. Sure enough, the Front National swept to the fore across the regional board. But the impenetrable French political system being what it is, the second round gives voters the chance to organise and cast their votes strategically. This kept the fascists out. For now. But for how much longer, Lord, for how much longer?

Ah well, there's always music. The news desks didn't report the event in November, because they were far too busy with the appalling goings-on in Paris, but it was also the month when I splashed out on a decent new record deck. So December saw me re-discovering my old records and learning that the Prophets of Analogue are right. Nice clear digital sound is not analogous to the warm embrace of analogue sound. Listening to a well produced record album on a good sound system is, as my dear wife so acutely suggested, like listening in three dimensions rather than two.

Which is why mid month, with time to kill before I picked up The Daughter from the airport on her return from a sojourn in Sheffield, the city of her birth, I spent three happy hours or so browsing through the extraordinary record collection of a tiny shop in the centre of Limoges. The couple who run it want to retire after a lifetime's dealing in vinyl. Rather than knock 50% off their prices, though, they cling on to the notion of value, like co-captains on a slowly sinking vessel. My guide and I both relieved them of a few over-priced items, but – judging by the lack of clients all morning – it will be many, many years before they clear the stock at current prices and head for pastures new.

With Tilley the Kid back in the fold, we could start concentrating on Christmas. Despite her perennial Yuletide enthusiasm, though, we were hopelessly late this year. Our cards didn't arrive from the UK till the middle of the week before the Big Day. Like a Dickensian scribe, I knuckled down to the job of writing out newsy messages and addressing envelopes. They were signed, sealed and posted the next morning and – for all the talk of last posting days back home – they mainly reached their destinations in the St. Nick of time. However... our friends in the Alps received a card destined for Sheffield and our friends in Sheffield received a card destined for the Alps. That's Christmas for you.

Meanwhile, back in Paris, our leaders were busy reaching an historic deal on the climate, which will save the world and ensure that no more species are extinguished. Why not put the current climatic confusion down to El Nino and get on with the business of eating, drinking and being merry, safe in the knowledge that once more a collective of caped crusaders has nudged us back from the brink of catastrophe?

And that's just what we did. But a gentle word of warning: 11am on the 23rd is not a suitable hour for a trip to your local Lidl if you want to buy mini blinis and a pack of their finest Scottish smoked salmon. Somehow I filtered out the sound of a plague of humanoid locusts winging their way to the supermarket while I was languishing over a demi-tasse of coffee. Still, I did manage to pick up a mini chocolate Panettone for my wife's stocking and some mixed nuts for our daughter's. Next year, I shall be under starter's orders rather earlier.

And then it all came and went – as it always seems to do. I started early on Christmas Eve with a trip down to the prefecture of Cahors to register with a government agency as an auto-entrepreneur in order to pay some more social charges for an element of my work that was not accepted last year by the government agency to which I pay my social charges as a writer. The young woman who filled in my details was very charming and surprisingly helpful, so I spared her a diatribe on the hidebound and mystifying complexities of the French administration. Besides, it was Christmas and she was pregnant.

Back home in time for a mid-morning coffee and seasonal pain au chocolat, I joined in the preparations for our annual Christmas Eve soirée with a circle of local chums. Despite a resolution to delegate more this year and provide less in the way of canapés, there was still enough to do to occupy the three of us right up to zero hour itself. And then the house was full of noise and activity for a few hours before people petered away into the night and we could get down to the business of tidying up, wrapping presents, filling pillow cases that serve now as more capacious stockings, and watching the last recorded half hour of the Master Chef final – which my namesake won with his remarkable sang froid and Kandinsky-like artistry on a plate.

Post-high society, we could enjoy a quiet guilt-free family Christmas. Just the three of us plus cats and dog, who managed to single out her present from under the tree and drag it away while we were cooing over a new calendar of 1930s railway posters. Since a new rope to tug was hiding 'neath the paper, one could hardly discipline her for such un-orderly impatience.

We set a new record by staying in our pyjamas, till after midday, before dressing for the serious business of preparing lunch. Pea soup, nut roast with all the trimmings and our daughter's uncommonly delicious chocolate tart. And since there was nothing as usual on the telly, as a post-prandial treat we watched Joseph Losey's magnificently uncomfortable The Servant, with Dirk Bogarde and Sarah Miles never finer.

Thus disappeared Christmas in a flash for another year, with not a squabble, not a full-blown family argument in sight. Small is often beautiful. December is fizzling out and too soon the New Year will be upon us with another round of resolutions to ramp up the guilt during the year to come. Mind you, with my feet tucked up in new fleece-lined slippers, I feel almost equal to anything that life can throw at me. And they'll come in handy if and when this precocious spring gives way to winter, come the dark days of JanuFeb.