July: The Golf War

Not long before the heat wave, on a chilly wet evening in Collonges-la-Rouge, I gathered with my fellow rootless compatriots for a concert in a restaurant on the main road. All summer long, it lures unsuspecting tourists to sit at one of its tables. In our case, it wasn't the food but the Honky Tonk Men that tempted us to step inside: American Steve on bass, Anglo-Iraqi Steve on guitar and vocals, French Guillaume on drums and Fred the Gaul, a septuagenarian lead guitarist who can fire off an educated solo at the blink of an eye.

The food was abominable. Enough to make me ashamed of my double nationality. I had a pizza with a base that resembled one of my mother's sickly pie crusts, may she stay forever out of the kitchen in the Afterlife. The Good Wife and our friend Sophie had omelettes filled with potatoes disguised as the advertised girolles. Evelyne and her husband Michel ordered a great big plate of chips that were caked with grease and uncooked in the middle. We're not talking Bootle here on a Friday night, but France: a country that still believes its cuisine is second to none.

As the band wound down and the evening hastened towards Bedfordshire, I sat with my friend Dan and heard about his new turntable. We made a date to spin some records together. I told him about my golf war, because I know that Dan has half a mind to take up the game. He's a natural, by all reports. I promised to take him for a round with one of my guest tickets some day. But can I do it to such a lovely chap? I'm beginning to discover what a vicious and spiteful game this is. Dan's still at the innocent, dewy-eyed stage of hitting the ball without worry or pressure; playing his natural game. I lost my innocence back in January, when I signed up for a year's membership based on one exceptional round of nine holes when the shoulders were loose, the mind was uncluttered and my eyes were fixed very much on the ball.

Ever since, I've been trying to get back to the Zone: a mythical place that the gorgeous Simona Halep inhabited for the hour it took to demolish Serena Williams in the women's final at Wimbledon. It all came so easily to her; it was breath-taking to witness. I'm clearly trying too hard. Not long after the concert and just a day or so into the heat wave, I went round the topographically-challenging course with John from Wisconsin and the two Richards, I and II. I played so excruciatingly badly that I've felt ever since like taking myself off to the golfing equivalent of a leper colony, there to live on nuts and berries and to hide from the gaze of my fellow man. Golf, I understand now, is a recipe for self-loathing every bit as virulent as Frederick Exley's, whose self-excoriating A Fan's Notes I've recently finished. Exley's frustrated literary ambitions and loathing of his fellow man turned him into an alcoholic, but eventually combusted in a book every bit as funny as Cuckoo's Nest and A Confederacy of Dunces. He and those close to him paid a heavy price, though, for his little piece of immortality. I try not to be a burden to mes proches.

My own subsequent fear and loathing was intensified by a fortnight of the kind of temperatures normally reserved for the Arabian peninsula. No wonder their collective demeanour sometimes mimics that of a French civil servant. When the thermometer goes way up over a hundred degrees, there ain't nothin' you can do. There are only so many clothes you can remove, so many shutters you can shut, so many glasses of water you can drink. A fan merely blows hot air at you. Flowers wilt and animals collapse. I felt grumpy and hope-less; my thoughts were constantly preoccupied with intimations of catastrophic droughts and raging wild fires. From 9am till 9pm, you're fit for nothing. And it's only going to get worse from now on in. Worse still if Boris Johnson, Baby Trump, wins the battle to lead Britain's unruly ruling party.

The recognition of things to come had us both gathered at a summit meeting across the table, earnestly discussing climate change and our options for the old and helpless stage of our old age. Should we sell up and go? If so, where? Back to England, where the summer sky is still usually cloaked in clouds? Or Norn Iron, perhaps, where it won't start seriously heating up for at least another century? Or should we rent a place by the sea and open our house up to summer lets? In the end, as per most summit meetings, we failed to reach a decision. So it goes and so we will burn and expire. 

My mood wasn't helped by the return of the Youth of Today. The young son of the Parisians who camp every August in the old house at the foot of the dog's meadow turned up with a mate in the parental car. Cue partying and thumping rap all through the night. I bumped into the Yoot when I was out walking Daphne in the cool of an evening. The son stopped the car for a personable chat and told me that, if the noise got too much, I should mention it to him. And so I did after the third all-nighter. I sleep through anything, but the Good Wife was sleep-deprived and due at the massage couch early the next morning. After a day composing my diatribe, I finally wandered down the chemin rural to confront the YoT. I could have said something clever and cutting – if there's anything worse than rap, it's French rap – but decided to keep it simple, stupid. (That's KISS to training officers and other purveyors of acronyms.) I told the son and his mate that it was a bit much, explained that we had to sleep with the door open because of the heat and that we could hear every sound because it rises up from their sleepless hollow – and they apologised. I thanked them for their understanding and left it at that. 

Since when, they've been as good as... if not gold, then let's say copper. No complaints. Which is not what I can say a propos the insect population. There's a virulent new breed of tick about, so tiny that it resists the grip of the plastic hook. Debs got one buried in the soft flesh of her thigh, impervious to the hook, the tweezers, the essential oils, the green clay, the needle – everything but a visit, finally, to the doctor. I picked one up the other day that sunk its mandibles into my belly. I must have caught it napping, because it came out easily with the tweezers and I flushed it down the basin into the murky depths of the fosse septique, where all manner of horrible creatures decompose with the household excrement.

And there are the flying mange-touts, as we call them, that get into the house to lurk in shady corners, only to leap out at you and give you apoplexy. They look just like the locusts that used to live in a tank in the biology block of my old school. Fortunately, they seem to come in singles or pairs, but not in swarms. Not yet, anyway. I had one on my desk the other morning and we stared at each other for a good minute or two while I decided how to tackle it. I was sure that I could see him sizing me up through his bulbous eyes. In the end, I went for the plastic goblet with a card underneath. Off it flew to feast on our wilting vegetation. 

Now, ironically after the extreme heat has dwindled, it's the flies that have been sent to plague me. They congregate in the kitchen and no matter how many I kill, the multitude is back within 10 minutes. I'm good with the fly swat; I have the reactions of a sportsman. My wife objects, but I sweep up the kill and I tell her that it's for her own good. If I didn't do it, could she possibly imagine hell that would be our kitchen? What a vile little creature the fly is. It flies around in search of something clean on which to secrete its bodily fluids, only to meet sudden violent death in the shape of a swot with a fly-swat. To paraphrase the great Curtis Mayfield's 'Billy Jack', Can't be much fun to be whacked, whacked with a fly-swat. Wouldn't it be nice to think that odious humans like Trump and BoJo might be reincarnated as common houseflies? 

Ah, what sport to swat the despicable! And what sport we've had to keep up morale. That epic final between the ageless Federer and the relentless Djokovic, who will surely overhaul the Sublime One's total of Grand Slams – but only by dint of persistence. And the cricket World Cup, whose final was probably the greatest game ever staged. The sheer excitement and tension and ultimate elation left me gasping on the sofa. I'm inclined, however, to start a petition that the trophy should be shared with New Zealand. What a great gesture that would be in the current climate.

And there's the British Open golf tournament still to come, now restored to Royal Portrush after nearly 70 years (of hurt?). I'm rooting for the Boy McIlroy of course, but not too hopeful that it won't be once more another accursed American. Me, I've been back to the scene of my degradation a couple of times already. It has been a little better, but only a little. I need a new golf swing (and a new fly swat, for that matter). Actually, a new upswing to my mentality would help the most. We've been watching George Clooney's attempt to do justice to Joseph Heller's Catch 22. I'm reminded of the doomed McWatt's words to Yossarian: something along the lines of With me, it's happy happy happy, dead. With you, it's worry worry worry, dead. McWatt was dead right.

June: Delivering the Goods

An occupational hazard of living in the French countryside – perhaps any countryside, for that matter – is the business of deliveries. An occupational hazard of living in France is the business of dealing with delivery companies. Les courriers. 

We order our whole-foods now from a company in England. It's still marginally cheaper than buying them from a magasin bio in France and it's much less sanctimonious. The only problem is getting the order before any perishables perish. And that means the stress and heartache of dealing with the delivery men. They're almost always men.

This latest order took almost a fortnight. During that fortnight, we were promised a delivery on several occasions. I say 'promised', but that's not any kind of promise in human form. You're informed by some automated e-mail. Waiting for the delivery to turn up – or rather, not turn up – means that you're confined to barracks for the whole day. Even walking the dog becomes a hurried short walk to the bins and back so that there's no possible chance of missing a white delivery van on the road. 

This particular protracted delivery involved three no-shows. Not even a note left in the letter box at the top of the lane to the effect that the delivery man was unable to deliver the goods. Which has happened in the past, even though the house is maybe 40 metres down the lane. Since the Good Wife made the actual order, she felt morally obliged to track it. This means going onto the courier's website to be blinded by spurious technical details that ultimately signify nothing. 07h45, Package arrived at depot. 08h30, Package loaded onto delivery van. 09h00, Delivery van left depot. 10h, Delivery man stopped at motorway service station for coffee and bowel movement... Und so weiter – until you arrive at some 'misspoken' conclusion like, 17h, Delivery man unable to deliver package. Reason: Client not at home.

As for getting a contact number, it's hard enough just to ascertain the name of the company. Nevertheless, the girl's good at online detective work. She found a number, any number. When she dialled it, I could hear the man on the other end of the line launch into some diatribe before she'd even opened her mouth. She held the phone away from her ear and gave me a significant look. A look replete with the accumulated years of dealing on telephones with personnel in France. Over that time, however, she has learnt – perhaps through her work, as well – to show the patience and stoicism of Job in the face of the most appalling rudeness. 'Monsieur,' she said, 'please do not shout at me before I have even had a chance to tell you why I'm phoning. Obviously you must be very stressed, but would you please calm down.'

With my own still limited vocabulary, in such a situation I am given to a fit of apoplexy, which simply renders me mute. I tend to put the phone down and either strike my head against a wall or cry. Hearing her calmly give the wretched specimen of humanity her mobile number and directions to get here, I was full of admiration and wonder. I wondered how come we chose to live among some of the rudest, most xenophobic and impenetrable people on the planet for all these years. And why, for that matter, did we decide to work here, where the self-employed are disenchanted and disregarded and taxed in real terms at a level higher even than in Denmark (or so I am reliably informed)? It wasn't, I believe, to subsidise the national health of a race of pill-popping hypochondriacs. 

Encounters with the worst of French customer service over the years have tended to provoke such soul searching. After a few deep breaths have extinguished the ire, we normally take a step or two back before doing something drastic like putting the house on the market. Wherever you live, you've just got to take the rough with the smooth. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

For all its shortcomings, Britain undeniably offers a much higher level of customer service. So our next port of call was the whole-foods company. Did they know that their chosen courier was quite so awful? They did. Without shaming names, they're a partner of Britain's very own Parcel Force. Of all their European partners, apparently, it's only the French partner with whom they've had any such problems. All the others, presumably, are as good as gold – or as good as Parcel Force. So that was reassuring. As a measure of genuine customer service, our interlocutrice awarded us 10 extra points to be redeemed against our next order. Ah, life could be so simple...

One of the unfortunate lessons we've learned in almost a quarter of a century here is that you have to get angry to get anywhere with 'these people'. No doubt that conard my wife encountered fired off his broadsides because he understands how the system works. Get the first punch in before the bastard customer hits you with the old one-two. Well, I'm happy to report that the Good Wife confounded custom and practice. She stayed calm but firm. She got a commitment to deliver the goods that Friday – when for once she was at home and I was in Brive. Half way through Friday morning, I received a text to say that we had our order. The right box at the right house. Before any perishables perished. 

The received wisdom here is that courriers are worse than useless and a source of endless frustration. Everyone moans about them. La Poste's own Chronopost is one of the worst. I have to say, however, that I've struck up a good relationship with the young guy who delivers Daphne's dog food. He rings me when he's 10 minutes away. I go and stand by the roadside. We shake hands and exchange pleasantries. I wish him luck as I wave him goodbye. I'm a happy man and Daphne's a happy dog. A very spoilt dog. It doesn't have to be beastly.

I can't for the life of me tell you what the name of this particular company is, but I have a sneaky suspicion that they might be a partner of some American giant. God damn! If there's anything I hate more than couriers it's giant American corporations.

May: Be Nice, Be Kind

Although a healthy dose of culture is just what the doctor orders from time to time, it's always good to be back in the parallel world of what a friend calls 'Shangri-La'. For all the interminable to-dos, there's a calmative sense of unreality about the place. Only the other morning, for instance, Daphne and I were on the return leg of the first of our twice-daily round trip when we encountered the sturdy carthorse from the field by the bins clip-clopping ponderously down the road towards us, followed by a very slow-moving car. I'd been chatting to the poor solitary creature only 20 minutes prior to this revelation. Perhaps the electric barrier had failed and he had decided to wander off in search of companionship.

I remember a huge muscular horse pulling a milk float in our north London suburb during my earliest years, but once they went electric the sight of a horse in an urban street became as rare as rag-and-bone men. Despite the reassurance of the woman in the car that the owner had been contacted, I didn't see my redoubtable mate since crossing him on the road. The awful thought was that he might have clip-clopped his ponderous way down to a main road where the drivers are less patient than the woman in the blue car.

So... we'd been talking for years about a trip to the Brighton Festival in May. Alack, there wasn't much on of any note in the very year we chose to go. The organisers published their programme late and we had to book early to avoid disappointment and obtain train tickets at a sensible price. At least a very long train journey for two is part of the package, offering a rare chance for mutual snacking and protracted reading. Having decided last month that I could and would re-read E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, I had to ingest it in 20-page bursts. So intense it was that only by interspersing calming doses of MP3 did I recover enough mental strength for the next exhausting chapter.

We broke our journey in Crystal Palace: a suburb of south London now voted the best place to live in the Metropolis. Or some such specious accolade. We stayed in one of two houses in the street with a yellow front door. Curiously, the other house belongs to recent friends from the parallel world of rural France. Asked by our hostess to select from the huge menu of culture, we opted for the new Stanley Kubrick exhibition at the old Commonwealth Institute in Holland Park, now the refurbished Design Museum. A nice building, but the permanent collection was a little sparse. No such paucity, though, when it came to the Kubrick. We went round it in three hours, only because we were all flagging. With a pinch of meth-amphetamine, we might easily have managed five. So much to see, so much to read, so much to ponder. Seeing his extraordinary attention to detail made it clear just why Leon Vitali – the subject of a fascinating documentary on Kubrick's 'film worker' – would devote his prime years to slaving for an artistic genius. 

The next day, the three of us went down to Brighton by train. In my childhood, when TV programmes were also sparse, they would fill gaps in the schedule with little film-ettes, like the potter's wheel that turned a lump of clay before your very eyes into something recognisably pot-like. My favourite was London to Brighton by train in a minute. The viewer rode with the driver in his cab and journey flashed by at the speed of a passing Superman. 

At Crystal Palace station, we witnessed a young American father of three make an asshole of himself by berating the ticket vendor on account of some credit card that wouldn't function. His three children watched their father – in shorts over Lycra leggings, I should add – with bewilderment, while their mother (presumably accustomed to such dull-witted demonstrations) said nothing. I had to bite my tongue. Now look here, my good man. I know you Americans think you own the world, but what sort of example do you think you are giving to your children? With more confidence in my physical prowess, I would have swung into action and nutted the tosser. As it was, we behaved instead with compensatory civility to the man behind the safety glass. An African gentleman, I believe. Later, on the train, I looked at our tickets and realised that I'd probably paid far too much for our return journey. Keeping up appearances can be a costly business.

Brighton has changed, terribly changed, in the 30+ years since I met The Good Wife there back in the year of the great hurricane, which ripped through the town and uprooted many of its finest trees. For a start, it's officially a city now. Back in my day, it was a good place to be a student, but it wasn't as it is now Studentsville, UK. Every ten paces, there's a vintage clothes shop or a vegan café, or both. The streets throng with youthful and seemingly privileged life. There were and presumably still are two infamous sink estates, but they were generally out of sight and out of mind until I went to work in the Unemployment Benefit Office. Whatever possessed me? Nowadays, you can't escape the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. In trying to avoid their eyes, you risk tripping over all the homeless people cocooned in crusty old sleeping bags and propped up against shop windows. 

Many are bivouacked along the main shopping street that runs down to the Pavilion from the Clock Tower. There are two big banners suspended across it for the duration of the Festival. One says 'BE NICE' and the other says 'BE KIND'. Lovely sentiments in a world increasingly without compassion, but how do you give alms to one and not the others? Late one evening, down near the seafront, I witnessed a gang of foxes darting past traffic and down side streets in their quest for something to eat. It struck me that these poor lean creatures, like the human caterpillars on the streets, are the pariahs of today's society.

My friend Tony was a nice man, and very kind. He died in 2017 of a virulent cancer after spending the last decade of his life in a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis. According to his widow, he remained positive to the end and barely ever expressed a word of self-pity. I saw him a few weeks before the end and could hardly bear to look upon his face and body ravaged by terminal illness. We stayed in their tardis in the Lanes. Although you walk straight from the street into their sitting room, the narrow house goes up and up, with shelves on every available wall space crammed with Tony's cultural artefacts. We slept in a room with swathes of Frank Zappa CDs and books by and on William Burroughs. Tony was a beatnik at heart, who should really have grown a beard and recited poetry with cymbals on his fingers.

With few Festivalities in prospect – other than a visit to a synagogue near the now decrepit Hippodrome where Max Miller would perform his 'blue' routines, and an exhibition of Stephen Jones' outlandish hats in the Royal Pavilion, the most outlandish architectural folly of them all – we took The Daughter and Min the Schnauzer with us on the train to Hassocks for a walk to the woodland cemetery where Tony now lies at rest in the lee of the Downs. We sprinkled petals of flowers past their display date on his modest grave and Carol lit some incense sticks while we stood and quietly contemplated the meaning of life. Afterwards, we walked up to see the Jack and Jill windmills close-up for the first time. Tilley, Min and I later ran back down the steep grassy slope as if in a scene from a French film with Jeanne Moreau.

The walk back to the station took us past the mouth of the tunnel that swallows speeding trains and spits them out at the other end. Another landmark and another folly, the tunnel entrance has been embellished with the facade of a fortress, crenellations and all. That moment just before the plunge into darkness was probably my favourite part of the old monochrome dash from London to Brighton. It is, I realised, an incredibly busy line.

'It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry.' From what cranial recess did Dylan dredge up such a title? I don't know, but our eventual return trip to France took a train or three. We arrived in Brive at midnight on the dot. We were both all read out from hours on the parallel rails. I finished both The Book of Daniel and Nick Kent's memoir of a rock journalist, Apathy For The Devil, grabbed as light relief in a Brighton charity shop. You don't get to read like that even here in the parallel world. 

Now I've embarked on Dig Infinity!, a biography of Lord Buckley from Tony's collection. It's a rambling, discursive, stompin' 'oral history' with contributions from the likes of Robin Williams, Ken Kesey and George Harrison. Since it was my learned friend who hipped me to His Lordship, the jive-talking raconteur, it seemed the most appropriate choice on being asked to select a memento from his library. Buckley was a nice man, apparently, if as crazy as a finger-poppin' coot. No one had a bad word to say about him. Not even Ed Sullivan, whose spendthrift friend reputedly owed him $300,000 at the time of his death. That's one hell of a lot of money even now, and quite some test of friendship. 

By the way, my friend the redoubtable horse has been found, I have now discovered. Some kind soul has thought to put him in a bigger field, with a herd of Limousin cows. They don't seem to have much in common and the presence of so many four-footed females doesn't appear to have stirred the creature's mighty stallion-hood, but at least he's got company. Other than flies.

Let me finish this month's protracted ramble with some germane words of wisdom from Buckley's 'church of the living swing'. 'I'll tell you what we have to do, you see. We have to spread love... People of this nation have got to learn to be kinder, more gracious... They must be more generous. The people who have things who are living next to people who haven't got things should give them some of the things that they have. We have to learn to give more. We have to learn to tighten, to magnetize this nation by love in this coming fight that we're in.'

April: Lightly Simmered Weeds

Only the other day, I was driving along the bottom road in the direction of Brive. The SNCF vans were out in force for the work on the level crossings along this single-track stretch of railway between St. Denis lès Martel and Quatre Routes du Lot. Some hugely expensive and ultimately doomed operation, no doubt. Between the raised railway line and my car, I spied the little bent man I see from time to time, walking determinedly with the rolling gait that comes with his deformity, and with a furled umbrella tucked under his arm. He walks at quite a lick for someone with such a natural disadvantage. But where he walks to and where he walks from, I don't know. 

Sometimes I've seen him wearing a 'hi-vis' waistcoat, but not recently. Maybe he has shed it since the gilets jaunes have brought the accessory into disrepute. I wonder about his life. I get the feeling that he goes out on a long circular walk every day, come what may and whatever the weather. He's either invalided out of or retired from full-time employment. What else does he do in life, this man on the road to nowhere? Is he visiting a paramour? Does he have a wife at home, waiting to greet him on his return? 

I'm home, dear! J
Ah, just in time for lunch. Did you enjoy your circular walk?
Not bad, not bad. I stopped off at the gypsy camp for a chin-wag. What's for lunch?
Belly pork and frites with a little salad composé fresh from our garden.
Sounds delicious. Merci, ma chère.

This is a dangerous time of life. Next birthday, I will be 65 – which will make me unofficially a pensioner, now that the official age has been raised to 66 plus. Just as 21 has remained the landmark even after the legal coming-of-age was downgraded to 18 a few decades back, for me and my generation it will ever be 65. I remember when both of my grandfathers retired. One minute they travelled to the City to work each day, and the next minute they were at home full-time. Pottering in the garden, solving crosswords, serving drinks, going to Sainsbury's and such like. I probably asked at the time What's retired? and was probably told that it meant that you didn't have to go out to work anymore. So I might have deduced from this that between the ages of 21 and 65 a man worked and after that he got to do nothing of any import.

When I passed 60, friends from the old home gave me a plastic cover for my Sheffield bus pass when the time came. Later this year, I can apply for something to go inside it. Not that there'll be anything for free in this country, though. The French are notoriously 'thrifty', for all the recent promises of our young president in his latest fruitless attempt to boost his ratings.

Freebies aside, I am more immediately concerned by the dilemma of when legitimately one can stop focusing on the future and derive succour from the past. This was triggered specifically by a novel. After many hints and much persuasion, I persuaded The Good Wife to read The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow: a brilliant novel based on the public execution of the Rosenbergs during the anti-Communist US witch hunts of the 1950s. She loved it. So I've been thinking, Can I now at this time of my life ignore what's still to be read to re-visit a novel that I last read over 40 years ago? A novel that actually prompted me to speak up for once during an academic seminar. A novel that has been on my list – which includes things like John Kennedy Toole's madcap A Confederacy of Dunces – of books that I want to read at least once more before it's time to go.

Although neither requires such an investment of time remaining, it's a similar thing with music and film. For years I've hoarded re-viewings of things like The Wild Bunch for that mythical day when I finally knuckle down to some serious creative work tempered by leisure devoted to the best of the past. Musically, I am still driven by the search for the lost chord: that quest to find something new that will blow my socks off, rather than admitting that I have all that I can possibly listen to and simply re-cycling what has already blown my socks off first time around. My brother is given to ask me, How long would it actually take you to listen to every piece of music on your shelves? He knows it irks me. You might as well tell a junkie to stop because the memory of the first fix ought to suffice. But he's right. Probably about 10 or more years. Non-stop.

So shall I finally give in to temptation and read that Doctorow novel again? Après ça, perhaps, le déluge. Will it represent a line drawn in the sand, and if so does it suggest that one's time is effectively up? The challenge of old age, it seems to me, is to ward off ossification by continuing to learn and to embrace new experiences. Without that, the Brexit mentality is all that's left. Staying active rather than passive is surely the thing. 

Hell. Do you know what? I'm going to re-read The Book of Daniel and be damned. If I follow it with A Confederacy of Dunces or a repeat viewing of The Wild Bunch (the director's cut arguably doesn't count), I'll know I'm in trouble. But maybe it won't come to that. Perhaps I'll be able simply to read it, discuss it and then get on with something new until the next time I'm overpowered by a need for re-discovery. Ah! Maybe the crux of the matter lies in that very word: re-discovery; an active not a passive impulse. So perhaps I'll be OK after all. Just so long as I don't start taking myself off every day on a circular head-down walk with no particular place to go.

I'm home, sweetheart!
Oh good. Just in time for lunch.
Mmm. What are we having today?
A velouté of lightly simmered weeds from the garden.