About This Time Eight Years Ago

How quickly time passes and how quickly things change. Eight years seems like a fairly long time, seen from both before and after. In the American sense of an 80% decade, eight years represents two presidential terms.

About this time, in January 2009, President Obama – the first black US president, itself a cause for celebration – was inaugurated. Four years of hope lay ahead of us. If we were lucky, we could make that eight. Coming after the catastrophic double-term of an ignoramus and a dunderhead, distinguished from his not-quite-so-inept father by a middle initial, the sense of promise was akin to that wonderful moment when the Iron Lady walked away from no.10, tight-lipped as she clutched her ubiquitous black handbag.

Back in 2009, we were acquainted with an American couple from the Bay Area in California, who had made a temporary home for themselves in Martel. Their son went to the same local primary school where our daughter served time. They invited us to an inauguration party in the house they had just finished renovating.

Since I'd been working all day with my friend Bret – doing some judicious coppicing in the woods and hauling out the branches for stacking and drying – I took him along for the ride. The girls were still in Brive. In those days, Tilley the Kid would hang around in the kitchen of the cabinet after school, waiting for her mum to figuratively finish off her last client, clean up and head for home. It would have been her first year at Arsonval, the big educational factory just behind the shopping centre now re-vamped as Les Passages.

Bret and I found the house near where it was supposed to be, in the same narrow street as the charming old boulangerie that has subsequently closed. The day room or whatever it is that Americans call the sitting room was up some dark wooden stairs on the first floor. It was a hive of expectant noise. Our hosts, Dan and Patricia, had laid out some canapés on a central table and hung a white sheet on an internal wall onto which they were projecting the images from what was probably CNN News.

Everyone in the room was drinking a cocktail christened an Obamatini for the occasion: gin and blue Curacao, I believe. Holding my glass tight enough to crush it as I fought off surging emotion in the name of manly decorum, I watched with everyone else there the new president's inaugural address. It was an incredibly measured and polished bit of oratory, almost up there with Martin Luther King in some respects. I know these things are written, edited, polished and rehearsed to within an inch of their lives, but you surely have to mean the words in order to sound so utterly convincing. The word 'responsibility' cropped up enough times to make you hope that this man's considerable intellectual energies would be channelled in a positive direction.

Even the most diehard cynic would probably agree that it was a magnificent speech. Everyone watching it must have felt that they were witnessing something quite historic. And when it was over, everyone cheered and applauded and raised their glasses of Obamatini to wish each other a 'happy new era'. Being tired out from my labours, afterwards I chatted mainly with the American contingent so I could stick to my mother tongue, and we speculated what that era might amount to.

On the way home, I realised that I was driving with a little less prudence than I would normally have done. It must have been the sole Obamatini I'd allowed myself. We got back about 8.15 and Bret went off to whatever temporary home he was living in at that time. I ate the dinner I'd prepared earlier with the girls and described what it was they'd missed earlier. After all the logging in our wood that Tuesday, I slept like a log all night.

My customary Wednesday morning found me waiting in the car for E. Leclerc to open. Parked under a street light so I could read whatever book I was half way through. Maybe without reading glasses. It was dark and wet and miserable. I'd dropped The Kid off at her school and made arrangements to pick her up at lunchtime. She left me in no doubt at all that I was neither to be seen nor heard. She'd rather come and find me than my coming to find her and thereby running the risk of being spotted by an inquisitive school friend. C'est ton père, Tilley...?

Between the shopping and the pre-arranged rendezvous, I went to the cabinet to try to unblock the loo. It was cheap and you get what you pay for. A narrow evacuation linked to an extraordinary cast iron waste-water junction in the cellar, compounded and compacted by paper-happy clients, constituted a recipe for disaster. Having tried and failed with a length of fence wire, I put the mop down the pan and used it as a kind of suction pump. It did the trick. I heard the blockage disappear into the main drain under the street. I felt so thrilled with myself that I bought a new music magazine. World Sound probably doesn't even exist eight years down the line.

Nor does the slightly tricky adolescent version of my daughter. She's a young lady now, who loves her parents so much that she doesn't mind who sees her socialising with them. She's a happy student enjoying a more liberal education system in a motherland that she's still just getting to know. So that's all good, to quote the deliciously glib catchphrase of W1A's harassed hero.

There's not much else good, though. Those contrasting photographs of the Washington inauguration crowds do not lie. How did we get from there to here in eight short years? What happened? Syria, a slow-burning financial crisis, a few hundred more terrorist outrages, a few thousand more elephants slaughtered for their tusks, a few million more acres of Indonesian rainforest burnt to the ground in the name of palm oil for colas, biscuits, breakfast cereals and choco-nut spreads?

But does that explain how and why we've gone from a cultured, educated man at the top, a family man with moral values, to an ignorant bile-fuelled cheating billionaire who wants to turn the clock back 50 years or so? It's the end of an ear. Left wing, right wing; swings and roundabouts; thrusts and counterthrusts; booms and busts; progressives and reactionaries. Just when you think you've taken a step forward, you spring back two. And doesn't it always seem to go that you never know what you've got till it's gone? In the name of my daughter and her contemporaries, as we naughty tittering boys used to sing in the morning assembly at school, Wise up, oh men of God!

December: A Dog's Christmas in Cumbria

'A cold coming we had of it, /Just the worst time of the year /For a journey, and such a long journey...' Such a long, long journey. And like T.S. Eliot's Magi during their arduous journey, there were at times voices singing in my ears, saying that all this was folly.

All those kilometres at such a hard time of year for the sake of a mother-in-law and a dog. Christmas! it's over 800 kilometres to the Tunnel, then another 600 or so via England's teeming roads to the wild north-west frontier. It may be slightly shorter when you go via Paris rather than Rouen, but they drive like creatures possessed the nearer one gets to the capital and the traffic can grind to a standstill for no perceptible reason. There's nothing on the autoroute north of Rouen, so I stuck to my route-map.

Like those Magi, we came bearing gifts to mark the birth of a child in some far-off time in some far-off land – only we bore them by comfortable polluting car (with boot immaculately packed by my good self) rather than by 'sore-footed' camel. We had our own beast in the back: not of burden, but of leisure. Daphne sat strapped into the back seat, surveying the landscape and periodically grinding her teeth on a bone of rawhide. Not a curse nor a grumble did we hear from our indomitable dog of the meadow.

Normally, we would take the ferry at Dieppe or Le Havre (and I still find it hard to credit that we go au Havre according to the French language), thence to Newhaven or Portsmouth and on for an overnight stop with family near Southampton. We were, however, reluctant for our Terrierdor to experience the anxiety of sitting in an empty car among other empty cars on a crowded car-deck while the ship ploughed its way across the Channel.

And so we committed ourselves to the extra kilometres and the extra cost of an overnight stay on the way up and the way down. But what are time and money compared to the comfort and equanimity of a mutt? We would have paid for 'silken girls' to bring her sherbet had it been absolutely necessary, but the resistant rawhide treat proved just what the vet ordered.

It was our first Christmas abroad in 20 years or so and only the second time we have driven our car onto a transporter-train at Le Tunnel to be whisked in a trice under the sea and out the other end. But first there was the presentation of our passenger's passport at an office that hadn't even existed the first time, back when your animals were seized and locked up in quarantine for months at a stretch, without even time-off for good behaviour.

It went smoothly enough, but I was rendered anxious, 'galled' even, by a little barking dog that was tied up to the desk and apparently abandoned. It coloured my experience of the administrative process, as did Daphne's refusal to pee or poo to order in some dark corner of the car park. We even paraded her around a purpose-built paddock with artificial grass, prepared if necessary for the ordeal of pooper-scooping with a black plastic bag. But why of course would she stoop to such abnormal behaviour when it must have felt to her like she was padding on carpet?

Despite the dark and the rain at the other end, manfully I volunteered for the next leg of the journey. It was a matter of necessity – a matter, as Joseph Conrad might have put it, of immersing yourself in the 'destructive element' – because a refusal to get back on your bicycle after a spill is a recipe for phobia. The last time I'd driven in England, I'd been so traumatised by the sheer volume of traffic on the M6 that I now doubted my ability and courage to drive in the motherland.

I was wrong. Look mum, I can do it! After the first 20 miles or so of intense speeding traffic on the M20, the circulation returned to my bloodless knuckles. The M25 was easy-peasy all the way to the Dartford tunnel – for which I'd bought a one-way ticket thinking that the return across the bridge was free (in an era when nothing is free apart from the NHS and newspapers handed out at railway stations). At the Stanstead Services, where you could have reached out and touched the air traffic above, the Good Wife took over and took us to the Grantham Travel Lodge. There they like pets so much they charge you £20 for letting them sleep in your bedroom.

The following morning, I got up early to walk our doughty passenger around the darkened industrial park and the empty early-morning shopping centre that went by the name of Downtown. Cue Pet Clark, trigger pet's waterworks. There was even a bowel movement to report – on the hitherto unexplored grass behind our lodgings. What a good girl!

Later we mounted up, hollered our yee-hahs and took the car if not as far as Montana then all the way to Wetherby on the A1. Which offered further evidence that I could drive in England, even up a busy arterial road in daylight. The road that, before motorways, was once the most dangerous trunk road in the kingdom. Bathed in balmy wintry sunlight as far as the A66. as soon as we crossed the border into beautiful wild and windswept Cumbria, the rain came down like a Monsoon curtain. The North West welcomes careful amphibians.

Only 10 minutes from our destination, we ran into a very British traffic jam. The kind that goes absolutely nowhere for hours. It was, we surmised, either flooding on the road or an accident. So we followed some army boys from Pippin Fort and backed off the dual carriageway and down a slip-road in search of an alternative route to Appleby. Unfortunately, so did half the cars in Cumbria and the minor roads around those parts are barely wide enough for single-file tractors. There followed a nail-biting circuitous journey back to the A66 where, further on up the road, we discovered that the traffic was moving once more.

Thereafter, though, Christmas 2016 was characterised by a lack of incident. True, we couldn't find the little station, later that same day, when we went to pick up Tilley the Kid, who'd travelled north to join us by Megabus coach and via that most scenic of train journeys, from Leeds to Appleby-in-Westmoreland. So her eagerly anticipated mother-and-child reunion and (or maybe more pertinently, dog-and-child reunion) were tantalisingly delayed. True, too, that our pre-festive shop in Penrith was almost washed away by a deluge of Walt Disney dimensions. Otherwise, incident-free.

Because my mother-in-law now lives in a converted chapel no bigger than a shoebox, we rented for the week a cottage just a brisk windblown walk away across the Fells. Right next door to a working sheep-farm and hard up against the Fell-side, it was perfect for our needs. The Kid could comfortably sleep with Daphne in her room and there was a fully decorated tree in a sitting room that offered a view right across the Eden Valley (when weather permits visibility). It was a far cry from the 'villages dirty and charging high prices' that gave the Magi such a hard time of it.

There was even a hot-tub on the terrace outside the kitchen door – because apparently every cottage for hire should now have one if they want to compete for paying guests. Ah, there once was a time... Readers, we used it. Not once but thrice. And twice it triggered the strange sensation that comes from sitting in bubbling water waving at the gnome-like farmer next door as he roars past in his quad-bike. On the starry night after Boxing Day when we swapped a George Michael tribute for a quick nocturnal plunge, we discovered that night time is the right time for a hot tub.

Above all, our stone cottage afforded my wife the chance to re-discover her childhood roots. On with the waterproofs and off she would yomp across her beloved Pennines with our skittish dog, who needed no invitation to run off and inspect the odd cadaver of a sheep that had given up its relentless battle against the elements. Quite apart from giving her mother the kind of Christmas for which absence makes the heart grow fonder, this was I suspect the real reason we made the epic journey there and back. The Emily Brontë in her northern soul.

We wondered what Daphne made of this curious trip: into the car, out of the car; into one house, out of another. Through a tunnel darkly, not once but twice. All the way back, her view and our visibility were shrouded in thick stagnant fog. It was indeed 'the very dead of winter'. A hard home-coming we had of it, even on empty French roads. But there was Otis, waiting for us round midnight on the front porch. And there inside the house, his canine sparring partner found once more the familiar half-chewed wicker basket where she spends more than half of her life.

Oh! what joy it was to be home again and to climb once more into 'the world's most comfortable bed', as our PR company has labelled it. We slept the deep restorative sleep of Lethe. The river of forgetfulness. A hard going and returning in some respects, but we could rest now and be thankful. We had given an old woman the kind of Christmas that she has, reputedly, been yearning for. And we had given my hard-working wife the opportunity to walk the dog across her beloved untamed Fells.

Whether or not the dog felt that it was quite worth the disruption, however, remains to this day a mystery.

November: Heading South

We often find ourselves crossing the Massif Central at this time of year en route for the gentler climes of the Midi. Probably pure coincidence, and certainly nothing to do with migration, since we're committed to a genuine winter hereabouts, but maybe something to do with the end of autumn and the last chance to get away before hibernation. Given recent global events, it seemed particularly appropriate to flee and forget about things for a few days.

Two years ago, the Good Wife and I set off on the second part of what seemed like a Jules Verne-style adventure to drive and document La Méridienne: the amazing autoroute that roughly bisects the Massif on its way south from Clermont Ferrand to Beziers. It crosses some of the wildest, most dramatic countryside in the land, and, thanks to President Giscard d'Estaing's instinct for immortality (and apart from the toll over the Millau viaduct), you get to see it all for free.

Getting there is the only drag. We followed exactly the same route as we did two years ago – in roughly the same weather conditions: wild, windy and wet. Up to Gramat and across the causse to Figeac, and then down to and alongside the river Lot to the anomalous mining town of Decazeville, and then on through the Aveyron to Rodez and beyond.

Whereas our custom is to traverse all its roundabouts and leave Rodez perched on its hill, this time we decided to stop there and visit the new museum dedicated to one of its few famous offspring: the artist, Pierre Soulages. If there's any place in this beautiful part of the world less welcoming than Rodez, it's Rodez in the rain. Rather like Tulle, the capital of the Corrèze, but without its discreet charm, Rodez is heavy, sombre and more than a little oppressive. Not unlike the canvases of Pierre Soulages, in fact: an artist now in his 90s, whose palette is mainly black and the sickly brown of walnut stain.

Actually, we didn't get to visit the collection until the return leg. By the time we'd driven round and around trying to find a way into the tantalising car park, it was 11.30. No, a ticket to the museum would not entitle us to free parking, and no, the museum would not be open between 12 and 2pm. Screw that for a game of soldiers, we decided. Good old French public hospitality. So we followed up a look at the monumental cathedral with an exceptionally good snack lunch in the new Michel Bras-serie, the famous three-star Michelin chef who has almost achieved the impossible: by making vegetarian cuisine respectable in the land of the force-fed goose.

When, finally, two years ago we joined the A75 at Sévérac-le-Château, the wind was strong enough almost to rip the door from the car on stopping to visit Les Messieurs at the service station. This time around the weather wasn't quite so dramatic, but still angry enough to transform the sublime scenery of moorland, rocky peaks and deep river gorges into a lost world, uninhabited save for a few wandering wild-eyed characters clad in tattered sack cloth.

Nothing, not even a glimpse of the lights at the top of the nine pillars of Norman Foster's architectural masterpiece, winking in the distant gloom from the top of the 900m Col d'Engayresque, prepares you for the viaduct that bestrides the valley of the Tarn high above the town of Millau. When first we came this way, one November almost 20 years ago, it was maybe not even a sketch in an architect's notepad. We missed the customary bottleneck linking the two disconnected branches of the motorway, because we hit Millau in the middle of the night on our return from a trip to Provence to meet a famous aromatherapist who would, my wife hoped, reveal the mysteries of setting up a practice in France. She didn't, and Debs ended up doing it all the hard way.

When I saw it first – three years ago, on coming south for the 60^th birthday of our friend's late husband, who would die tragically of premature Alzheimer's – we got out at the adjacent visitors' centre to take it all in and shoot countless photos. I'd read all about it – and heard of its splendour from my wife, who'd been this way solo the year before that party – but seeing it in the flesh was akin to the thrill I felt of gazing on the Grand Canyon.

As we drove across the platform – under which, at its highest point, you could fit the Eiffel Tower – we speculated about the good citizens of Millau below. Do they, we wondered, wake up each morning and give thanks to the mighty edifice visible from every street corner? If not, they should. Not only has it taken away all that traffic, noise and pollution, but it has also become a landmark that puts an otherwise nondescript town firmly on the map. Here stands proof that mankind doesn't have to despoil the natural world in its relentless drive to modernise.

On the other side of the viaduct lies yet more wild terrain. Depending on the weather, the Causse du Larzac could be either the backdrop for one of those cheap Republic westerns of the 1950s or, as it was last Thursday, a kind of windswept lunar landscape fit for neither man nor beast – apart, that is, from the sheep that roam among the rocks nibbling at the scrub vegetation that presumably adds the fort to the Roque of the indigenous cheese.

Two years back, we stopped for a look at La Couvertoirade, a kind of miniaturised Carcassonne, founded and fortified by the Knights Templar. And just as it did two years ago, on emerging from the tunnel that leads motorists off the Lazarc plateau and into the Midi, the sun broke through to light up the vertiginous plunge down through the mountains towards the river valley far below and thence the Languedocian plain abutting the Med.

It's a different world down there. Even if we could afford it, I'm not sure it would suit. There's the sea of course – if you can ever penetrate the urban sprawl to get there – and the milder climate. But a denser population brings heavier traffic. And although here's little danger of sudden frosts and no need to bring in the oleanders, a Mistral blew on the Saturday and the wind-chill factor was significant. I can do without wind in any form.

That evening our friend took us to Avignon for a trip to the Utopia cinema to see a film called Captain Fantastic, in which Viggo Mortensen's character raises his six children in the dense forest of Washington State. Circumstances inevitably lead to a clash between his set of values and the 'normal' values of an overfed, processed, de-sensitised and wasteful society. It's very good: sometimes funny, sometimes sad and always poignant. And always eerily relevant in the light of current affairs.

On the return leg, we drove back along the coast towards Montpelier and some angry black clouds hanging very symbolically above the overlooking mountains. Sure enough, the weather deteriorated as we emerged at the top end of the connecting tunnel – and became increasingly spiteful the nearer we got to home. Across the Larzac plateau, my wife entertained me by reading excerpts on her phone from The Guardian's commentary on the fifth day of a gripping test between England and India – in which no less than four Anglo-Asian cricketers contrived to underline the benefits of a multi-cultural society.

But then we graduated from the comfortable world of sport to a deeply uncomfortable litany of the incoming president's stated policies: evict the immigrants, build a wall, frack the land for all it's worth, wriggle out of the Paris Treaty, punish women for having abortions... How could a sentient electorate have voted for someone even less qualified than Ronald Reagan to run the world's most powerful country? As if we aren't in enough of a mess without creating even more. No wonder I'm pessimistic about mankind's ability, for all its technological acumen, to clear it all up. A British architect and a team of French engineers and navvies can put up one of the greatest bridges ever conceived, but when it comes to putting our heads together globally to clean up the oceans or save the African elephant...

It's what remains of the environment and its wildlife that I fear for the most once the Trump troll gets to park his big butt behind the desk in the Oval Room. The idea's more depressing than Rodez in the rain. My wife turned off her phone and we soothed our souls with some unchallenging bossa nova. They say (as always) that it's going to be a hard winter. Leonard Cohen has already succumbed. One thing's for sure: it's going to be a struggle for survival and it won't be the meek who inherit the earth.

(Black and white photographs by my chumly Dan Courtice of Penn Graphics)