May: Promises that your body can't fill

I was reminded of a pithy lyric during my vinyl breakfast the other morning, sitting on the back balcony at the beginning of a glorious day (before the storms forecast for the next day), watching two hot-air balloons glide side by side over the landscape ('Watch out for that hill!' 'What was that? Can't hear you; the gas burner!' 'I said watch out for...!'). I don't think my significant others, wife and daughter would be any too pleased to know that I refer to it as my vinyl breakfast as opposed to, say, my family breakfast, but it's the one time in the day that I allow myself the stop-go luxury of playing records, as opposed to the less distracting requirements of the compact disc.

Anyway, it comes from Little Feat's live album, Waiting For Columbus, which I haven't played for quite some time. I wouldn't tend to play it in polite company, grubby Southern blues-rock being far too raucous for the tender matutinal ears of wife and daughter. The Good Wife had gone to Brive for a day of toil, while The Daughter was lingering in bed. I can't remember off-hand which song it comes from, but the gist of the lyric is 'You know when you're over the hill/If your mind makes a promise that your body can't fill.' Yes, I know it should really be 'fulfil', but Little Feat are American, so you have to forgive them their lexical transgressions. When it comes to the sanctity of the English language, Americans know not what they do. Besides, it wouldn't scan.

The sentiment seemed apt. I was sitting there nursing the last of my morning coffee in cupped hands, staring at the grass round the back of the house. As high as an elephant's eye once more. The private, unacceptable face of domesticity. Amazing what a bit of sunshine after the rain can do. I reckoned that if I really applied myself with my trusty Honda strimmer, I could tame that wilderness in half a day. But then I stopped to think. In the heat, even an hour at the helm of the strimmer leaves me a sweating, breathless wreck. It's work for a younger man now. Realistically, the best I could do would be to tackle it in several stages. Even then, I would be hobbling for several days after. When does this physical entropy start to set in? 63? Earlier? Maybe even in your 40s. Science hasn't answered the question satisfactorily. All I know is that it creeps up on you. One minute you can; the next minute you can't.

Soon after my vinyl breakfast, before the sun was too strong, would have been an ideal time for the initial stage, but there was a dog to walk, after which my brother phoned on What'sUp, as he calls it. He phoned me from bed, suffering the excruciating pain of gout in his toes. Our father who are't perhaps in heaven used to suffer periodically from gout. The Brother got the old fella's genes (and taste for alcohol), while I got our wiry, anxious mother's. We come from the same gene-pool, but physically we're like a butternut squash and a courgette. At least he's never become a pumpkin, for which he's probably got his work as a plumber to thank. He hoped to resume activities in a few days, but the prognosis didn't seem good.

We spoke of things corporal - a joint these days is not what it used to be – and horticultural. I told him about our terrible soil here, in which only grass, weeds, roses, lavender and sumac grow with any certainty. He knows even less about gardening than I do, but he suggested turning it over to cacti and tumble weed, which made a lot of sense to a reluctant gardener like me.

He knows a lot more about plumbing, being a man of the cloth cap and the pipe-bender. He's hoping to install a new bathroom in their flat. Whereupon, he can move the 'master bedroom' back upstairs, where nature intended it and where he can suffer future bouts of gout, enabling him then to tackle downstairs. It's only taken a little more than four decades to refurbish the place. The kitchen sink still drains into an old plastic rubbish bin christened The Ganges. When he's installed the kitchen, he intends to turn that old bin into a shrine and baptise himself in its murky, miasmic waters.

Before that momentous day, he plans to connect the posh new combi-boiler he installed five years ago to a network of radiators. So he and his long-suffering partner can have heating over winter at last. Only 40 years. Not bad for a plumber. It certainly puts my own recalcitrance into perspective. Particularly as he's the one with a gamut of practical skills that certainly didn't come from our gene pool. I can at least plead incompetence.

We talked, too, of mutual visits. He recognises that he has been somewhat dilatory in that respect. The last time he came here was for my 50^th birthday party a mere 20 years ago. I should really strike up a deal with him: I'll come and visit the new second home in Finland when and only when he comes here. (His partner used to live Finland, which probably inured her to the cold.)

I would dearly love to visit him deep in the wooded Finnish countryside. Even or maybe especially in winter, as the house is well insulated and came with an efficient wood-burner. We could have a gay old time, drifting in a rowing boat on the nearby lake, or cracking jokes in the sauna (pronounced 'sowna', his partner snaps). The Brother on his day can be one of the funniest people on the planet. The next day, I brought to his attention on What'sUp that André Rieu's Maastricht by Moonlight was showing later on Sky Arts. I suggested it could be a tonic for his toes. Quick as a quip, he replied that it was the only thing likely to get them moving again, that it could be 'a Rieu awakening'. Well, it made me laugh.

The trouble is, my increasing dislike, even fear, of travelling has increased in inverse ratio to my decreasing physical powers. I don't know if this is a common symptom of advancing age. If so, the Good Wife has not been afflicted – although I have a few years on her yet. She still dreams of visiting distant places, which must make me a source of frustration to her.

So are my failing physical powers linked to my increasing discomfort with the prospect of travel? I'm not aware of any qualms about walking distances with heavy cases; it's more a psychological thing. The other day, my friend David of Nazareth, who's got a few months on me in our preparations for that 'certain age', sent me this cartoon by Robert Crumb. It's probably as simple as that: we are both less and less inclined to leave our respective houses these days. I'm too darn comfortable to bother with the serious upheaval of travel.

For the moment, touch wood, I'm not wracked by ague or gout. I don't yet need a Judy, like the Dickens character, to shake up me bones. But I suppose I ought to sign up for another overhaul in Cahors. I went about seven or eight years ago and they checked out my vision, my hearing, my prostate and such like. But the older you get, the less likely you are to emerge with a clean bill of health. Being an inveterate coward, I prefer to let sleeping dogs lie, health-wise. Perhaps not the wisest policy, but it's got me this far in one piece.

I take my cue from someone like Charles in the village down the road. He's in his mid 80s and seemingly as skinny and as lithe as a Kenyan marathon runner. He still tackles all the odd jobs that need doing around his property himself. The other day I passed by with Daphne on our morning constitutional and he was standing on a wall, cleaning out a gutter I think. I doffed my hat, figuratively speaking, to his exemplary self-reliance. He explained that it helped him to stay agile – although he now climbs gingerly down from a wall rather than jumping down. This seemed like a good gauge for the future. I'm still able to jump down from a wall of modest height; I'll know that I'm well and truly over the hill and unable to deliver on my mental promises when I have to climb gingerly down. 

The women folk have both gone to England now, leaving me to my own devices. The weather is due to be poor, which means that I'll have an excuse to leave the garden to grow in peace. I'll get back to some of my sedentary tasks, which have no doubt ruined my vision but spared my body. Twice each day, I'll pull on my jogging, lace up my baskets and head off with the dog for a bit of footing around the neighbourhood. Actually, I won't: le footing – or jogging as any sensible race would call it – has never been my style. I value my knees too much. What's wrong with a brisk walk? Or a spin on the bike? Talking of which... Daphne!!! Walkies...

 

April: Stand By For Action...!

... Anything could happen in the next half hour! The immortal words that begin each episode of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's Stingray. And anything could once those two big-eyed puppet lovebirds, Troy Tempest and Marina the mermaid, were dressed and ready for their next exciting subterranean adventure.

Me, I've passed two or three Action lorries just recently on our byways. A wake-up call on wheels perhaps. The lorries must have been taking trash to the store in Biars-sur-Cère. They're cropping up everywhere, like weeds. Where once there was one in Brive, there are now two. Action is a Dutch concern, a kind of up-market Poundland. Most of the stuff they sell is indeed rubbish, but it's good for LED light bulbs, silicone and mastic, and cheap but sturdy picture frames. I used to be able to buy organic nut butter at a plausible price, but it flew off the shelves.

Action, yes. Now that winter has segued into spring, all kinds of outside action is necessary to tame the rapid and miraculous growth that goes on all around. The Onions were here again recently and I was talking to Mr. O. on the phone the other day. He was waxing lyrical about the sudden, almost imperceptible change from the prevalent browns and greys of the surrounding oak trees to a vivid, succulent green when the new leaves unfurl. He never really notices back home, even though they live in a village and they have a big garden. From this moment on, the view through the woods to the road from my hot seat in the mezzanine becomes increasingly obscure. Where a week ago I could see the outline of a passing car, I can see now only a blur of colour.

As occasional visitors, like the magnificent crested hoopoe in early summer, Mr. and Mrs. O. tend to think that all is sweetness and light, all is an exciting adventure this side of the Channel. They rarely have anything good to say about post-Brexit England. But it's not entirely true of course – even if reading the periodic regional newsletter suggests that Occitanie is the most progressive part of France, with all kinds of laudable schemes gearing up to face whatever the future holds. It seems sometimes that we live in a bubble, but it won't take much to burst it.

The other Sunday, the Dame and I took advantage of the sunshine to take our dog for an afternoon constitutional. We bumped into Monsieur and Madame Delpy coming up the hill with their King Charles spaniel in tow – on a lead of course. Daphne is the only domesticated dog in these parts who gets to walk unfettered. Monsieur has a couple of sheep sheds in the nearby hamlet, while Madame teaches history and geography at the Collège de Martel. Our daughter was one of her pupils. Like a committed historian, she takes a keen interest in current affairs. She likes to share her views with her fellow catastrophist from England, so the Dame and I try not to linger too long in her company, as we leave it feeling depressed.

Sure enough, she soon told us about something that she'd read recently to suggest that France had three main sources of threat: religious extremism, climate change and Russia. Did I think that war with Putin was possible? I cannot tell a lie, much to my wife's occasional annoyance. So I said that it was absolutely possible. When you're dealing with a mad man, it will take a lot more to discourage him than a diminutive French president posing for the press with boxing gloves in a gymnasium.

But what can one do, other than sign up for the Ukrainian army? I didn't say it to Madame Delpy because I don't know the French translation, but perhaps rivets are the only thing. I've suggested as much to my daughter, but she's never read any Joseph Conrad, so I've put it in another way. She's understandably depressed in the light of everything going on around the world and by her inability to land remunerative creative work. Action for her is big and daunting and as the obstacles she piles up in her mind grow insurmountable, a sense of futility sets in.

I've urged action till I'm blue of hue. Not that grand daunting gesture, but those little repeated incremental acts. Keep busy, keep banging rivets into the damaged hull, as Conrad suggests, and one day that damaged hull becomes a functioning steamboat. So to speak. 'Rivets were what really Mr. Kurtz wanted, if he had only known it.' Work in other words. And in that work, that activity, 'the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others.'

I was talking about it to Christophe at a party recently. Not Heart Of Darkness, but keeping busy. Once a farmer, Christophe supplied the straw bales for this house. When we meet up, we often chat philosophically. He asked me how I was and what I was doing, and I told him I was well, touch wood. Keeping busy. He was also well, thank you, and keeping busy. Busy-ness is at the heart of his life's philosophy. The only way to stay on form, mentally as well as physically. The alternative is to sit on an armchair in front of the TV and gradually... he demonstrated the way one's body slowly reassumes the shape of an embryo. The autumnal opposite of what's just happened in our wood.

So, there's only one thing for it. Stand by for action! I've already fired up the strimmer and mown down the dandelions that pop their heads through the limestone chippings of our track. The Good Wife and I have launched another spring offensive in the war against weeds that can never be won. I've been travelling further and further up river, so to speak: penetrating the heart of darkness that lurks within the spreading sumac bush. It's another invasive weed in effect, but an attractive one, with young furled leaves as soft as kid gloves and red-hot pokers for flowers or whatever they are. Underneath it, though, is a tangle of horrors. As I contort my ageing body, inching deeper and deeper into the undergrowth with my secateurs, I keep expecting to come across Mister Kurtz: not the Marlon Brando travesty, but a Gollum-like garden sprite, with a face like a gargoyle and the body of a toad. My protective gloves are now as prickly as pin cushions. Gardening! It's all very well for Monty Don.

No matter how busy I keep myself, I can't seem to stop from peering into the heart of darkness. Like one of those morbid onlookers at the scene of an accident. Rivets work best if you're mind-less. It probably also helps to be a practical man and not someone who spends so long on a computer. Every day, for all my busy-ness, there comes that awful moment when I have to check my e-mails. My paternal grandfather once told me that he didn't like knowledge –  and it's probably what kept him ticking along till 97. I understand him more now. It's very seductive, yet I have to know what's going on, because I have to believe that some kind of action will have some effect. Won't it?

Not that the examples from around the world give you much hope. No wonder Our Kid is depressed. World leaders are busy clawing back on (admittedly unrealistic) net zero targets, while witless electorates vote for far-right despots who promise to make their country great again without explaining how making scapegoats of the immigrants who mostly keep their country ticking along will help to achieve that vapid promise.

OK smarty-pants, what would you do? Ah well, there you've got me. The Chilean singer Ana Tijoux suggests that we should celebrate the end of the world by dancing naked together. Well, I certainly love dancing, but I don't think I'll pass that on to Madame Delpy next time our paths cross. I might suggest to her that, since they can't seem to keep the peace, we could put the UN to work protecting wildlife from poachers and the environment from commercial interests. It may not stop the earth overheating, but it might give the WWF and Greenpeace some muscle.

Besides, some kind of action must trump (pun intended) inertia or despair. By heaven 'we shall have rivets!' Be done with these 'creepy thoughts'. I must commandeer my wife's diesel car and get off to the nearest Action and see if they've got any in stock. Oh, and an LED bulb for the lamp in the spare room, and maybe a new pair of thorn-free gardening gloves. Life goes on. For now. Shame about the nut butter, though; action demands an invigorating snack.

March: A Short History of Nearly Everything About This February

Yes, you guessed it, during the long train journeys of last month I read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Mind-boggling concepts aside, my mind was boggled by the sheer audacity of taking on such a project and making it all entertaining, beautifully written and just about intelligible. Concepts like the solar system will remain forever inconceivable: for all the sun's astonishing capacity to supply energy, it was notable that its lack this month caused both my solar watches to stop dead in their tracks. His book should be required reading in every school in every land. Had it been so for me in my schooldays, I may not have dreaded Physics, Chemistry and Biology as much as I did Maths. It's thanks to Bill that I now see science as something interesting and not just the province of weirdos with bad haircuts.

You need a good book on a train, and we decided to do our travelling by train rather than by road or air as a fairly feeble gesture to help our chronically ailing planet. We were to travel out on a Friday and back on a Friday, and therefore our journeys wouldn't be subject to French rail strikes that tend to happen on a Tuesday and/or a Thursday. But... we were travelling at half term. And what better way for the SNCF guards and conductors to ruin people's holidays than by laying down their tools on Friday through Sunday? Thanks to Bill Bryson, my design of an apocalyptic device to plant deep within SNCF HQ has now progressed beyond the conceptual stage.

February generally belongs to my Good Wife and February 2024 was no exception. The still-radiant Aquarian turned 66, a time to think seriously about hanging up her essential oils and massage couch. The Daughter had organised on our behalf a special and secret late-birthday treat for her towards the end of the month at Sadlers Wells, London. Only our destinations – first to Brussels to see old friends from the Corrèze and thence to London – were known to the birthday girl. Rather like the time I 'took her' from Sheffield to Robin Hood's Bay on the North Yorkshire coast. I couldn't drive at the time, so had to sit in the passenger seat and give road directions. Drive, he said...

Her 66^th birthday was deeply symbolic: she decided to sell the clinic in Brive that has served her so well for almost 20 years. While the physical massage (and there was a time when she couldn't use that word for fear of upsetting the medical mafia here), while that will go, she will carry on the EFT face-to-face with clients thanks to the miracle of Zoom (which Bill didn't get around to explaining).

Anyway, we were on our way back from a summit meeting with our appointed estate agent, when Debs received an alert from SNCF to tell her that our train had been cancelled. Credit where credit's due, they had given us more than the customary 24 hours' notice. Life has taught me to be thankful for small mercies. Quick as a flash, she looked up an alternative for the day before. (I was driving.) Two seats available on the 17h59 train to Paris. First class for no extra charge. Book 'em! the driver cried. Too late! Gone in a nano-second. And then there were two more. Second class, but an €8 supplement to pay per passenger. Now how do you figure that? The compounded indignity! The French rail company moves in mysterious ways, its miseries to perform.

And so it came to pass that the intrepid travellers left their cosy home a day earlier than planned. The cats would have to endure the food dispenser for a day extra, and the dog would have extra playtime with her best pal. Thus it was that we arrived in Paris just before 11 bells on Thursday night. Since Line 5 of the Metro was out of action, we took the bus to the Gare du Nord. Three buses, in fact, since two of the drivers decided to clock-off before their ultimate destination. We spent the night in a dreary hotel bang opposite the terminus. Another hundred bucks plus to circumvent the guards and conductors, curse their generous occupational pensions.

The next day, the incessant rain of February rained some more and, on our way by foot to a little West African vegetarian restaurant we identified for lunch, my sole, like my soul, came adrift. My favourite Palladium boots. How could I possibly walk around Paris, Brussels and London with a right boot that thought it was a flipper? I don't know if it had something to do with all the North African men clustering mysteriously outside a building of indeterminate but perhaps religious purpose, but as we turned the street to find our restaurant... lo! A miracle. There, before our very eyes, was... a cobbler! What are the chances?

I cannot, with my hand on my heart, recommend to you West African veggie cuisine. You would have to like tasteless root vegetables prepared blandly. But I can recommend that saintly cobbler. An application of glue and 15 minutes in a shoe-mender's vice and hey presto! That right boot of mine held – all the way back to the Gare du Nord, all the way to Brussels, all the way to London and all the way home again.

And we did a lot of walking. In the rain. Paris, it always seems to me, is overrated. Brussels was a gas: not a pretty city, but a lively multi-cultural one with a great tram system and terrific music venues that could theoretically (one day) accommodate refugees from the French countryside. London is cripplingly expensive and far too big, but a lot of fun with a daughter for a guide.

Soon after arriving in London, she took us to – and I paid for – Bubala in Soho for a Middle Eastern vegetarian feast that was possibly the tastiest meal I have ever eaten. After our late lunch, we walked all the way from Soho to Sadlers Wells, past a bevy of barbers around Tottenham Court Road advertising haircuts for less than the price of the service charge in Bubala. Since my hair was shaggy and we had time to kill, I urged the female sex to tarry while I popped in to see Herr Kutt. Tilley the Kid wouldn't hear of it. I would come out looking like a geezer. So discretion got the better part of valour.

Though a native of London, it was my first-ever visit to Sadlers Wells. The Good Wife once worked there in her youthful prime, ushering punters to their seats and selling white and 'non-white' coffee. Her birthday treat was a performance of Pina Bausch's Nelken. Carnations. Modern dance; her favourite choreographer. From our prime seats in the circle we looked down on a stage 'planted' with silk carnations. The madness and audacity of the venture seemed to rival Bill Bryson's. I didn't know what to expect, but came out of the theatre blown away by the ambition and, surprisingly, humour of the piece. 

So now you know how the sole of my boot was saved by a young Parisian cobbler. But, oh capricious irony, when we got back home to Camp Street... No, not the boot, that was still roadworthy, but I found another copy of Bill Bryson's book on our shelves. My mind these days is increasingly muddled. I grow old... I grow old/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Ah well. Anyone want a spare copy of A Short History of Nearly Everything? Requests please on a postcard...

 

February: Happy Sad

January was one of those months, as it often is. A happy sad month. The title incidentally comes from a Tim Buckley album, a singer-songwriter of my youth, but one with whom I never quite clicked: his music, like the voice that many found angelic, seemed to meander, straining for a tune. Both he and his son Jeff met tragic ends long before their allocated time on this earth would have normally expired. Tim died of a heroin overdose at 28, while Jeff, the son that he barely ever saw, drowned in the Mississippi at 30. One of Tim's earliest songs was entitled 'Grief In My Soul', so I guess his life was more sad than happy. But at least he – and Jeff – left durable legacies.

I've given up making the kind of New Year resolutions probably necessary in order to leave a durable legacy. Now it's more a matter of survival: hoping that the incipient aches and pains won't turn into fully qualified arthritis; that 2024 won't be the year that I develop tinnitus in my other ear; that that new mole on my neck won't demand deeper examination; that the occasional shooting pains inside my cranium are merely linked to muscle tension.

But don't get me wrong: my month of January was far more happy than sad, which is I suppose the general state of a perennial melancholic. Life makes me sad, but I'm determined to enjoy it while feeling sad. Despite all that's going on, and despite the customary post-Christmas anti-climactic feel that always colours the first month of the year, how can you feel too sad if your child is staying in the bosom of her family?

For all the minor exasperations – like her slavish adherence to recipes that suggest, for example, you roast six cloves of garlic prior to adding them to your sauce – The Daughter, Tilley the Kid, is a joy to have around. She's forever affectionate and often caustically funny, and it's just generally good to have a fresh perspective on things that challenges the old familiar ways – even if her youthful outlook and physical beauty contrast starkly with one’s own flagging resources and sagging physique.

The trouble with children, though – and I'll wager I'm not the first parent to notice this – is that nothing underlines more the relentless march of time. Haven't you grown! And once they're fully grown physically, you watch them growing mentally, emotionally and in all other ways, watching with a mixture of anticipation as they retrace your footsteps along the continuum of time and trepidation lest they make similar mistakes and experience the same kinds of disappointments and frustrations.

But the trouble with children, too, is that they can't stay children forever. Much as you'd love to hide them away in your own cosy nest from any slings and arrows out there, there's an unspoken recognition on both sides that a month in the country is quite long enough. Any longer and there would be serious questions asked in the house. Did we carry out our role properly? Did we do all that we could? Where did we go wrong? So back to London she had to go: for the next phase of her young life. And when they go, of course, it leaves a gaping hole. Absence makes the heart grow heavier.

And another thing. Around my daughter's current time of life, there were regular weddings to attend, and cards to open announcing the arrival of this or that healthy bouncing babe. Now it's deaths and funerals. Last month, another good friend was ferried across the river Styx. Our friend Howard in the words of e.e. cummings 'sang his didn't he danced his did' and departed far too early. We knew how life-threatening his illness was, but it was still a shock to hear that he'd gone. Not long before, over morning coffee and in my naivety, I believed that he was coping quite well with the treatment, that there was a chance of recovery. I clung to the case history of Wilko Johnson, Dr. Feelgood's manic and hilarious guitarist, who'd been given a death sentence, but then granted a reprieve of several years by a Cambridge surgeon. But no...

So there was a funeral to attend – just a couple of days before The Daughter caught the train back home-for-now. It was a beautiful day for it; 'unnaturally warm for the season' (a cliché ever since we stopped getting snow). We headed south on almost deserted roads to Capdenac Gare, which is actually just across the river Lot and therefore in the neighbouring Aveyron. Leaving nothing to chance, we got there 45 minutes early, giving us time to take a first look at Capdenac-le-Haut, one of les plus villages de France. And it is.

And since we were still too early for the ceremony, we stopped off for a coffee in one of the few bars open on a Monday morning. Pushing open the door, we both did a silent double-take. 'Did you see what I see?' Debs asked, once seated at a table. I did. Both of us had thought immediately that the man in the corner, working with his back to us on a laptop computer, was some avatar of Howard: the same stocky physique, the same shiny bald head. Next time I looked, he'd gone. It wouldn't have surprised me if he'd vanished in a puff of smoke or with a rush of chilly air.

It was a simple, dignified ceremony, with immediate family and a few close friends. A young be-suited Frenchman led the service in English with a charming accent. We were invited at one point to take a little time to remember Howard silently in our thoughts. I remembered the kind of friend who would call a spade a spade. If you'd done or said something to offend him, he'd tell you that rather than leave it hanging around unsaid like a bad smell. But should you ever be in trouble, you knew that he would help you out without a murmur. He was kind and as caustically funny as Our Kid can be. Friends like that are rare, to be treasured and sorely missed.

His body lay in a simple coffin of what looked like unvarnished poplar. We were also invited to take a marker-pen and write him a message on the bare wood: a nice touch and one which I might copy when the time comes, because I'm a notorious copycat. An even nicer touch was to end the ceremony with (I think) Prince Buster's version of 'Enjoy Yourself'. It was Howard's favourite song. How it would've appealed to his mordant and irreverent sense of humour, concluding what tends to be a po-faced service not with a hymn but with some Jamaican ska. 'Enjoy yourself (it's later than you think)/ Enjoy yourself while you're still in the pink...'

I won't copy that one – I've already decided on my own funereal music, which will include Miles Davis's 'So What' (even if some may not get the joke) – but it was a happy way to conclude a very sad event. For three minutes or so I for one wore a big smile on my face. Yes, happy sad. As Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Band suggested, 'Life's like that, isn't it?'