HOW TO THROW A PARTY

This week I attended a party. My neighbour, Annie, had just turned 60 and she was entertaining the neighbours and a few friends. We were 10 altogether - a happy and intimate number for a party - large enough to be interesting but small enough for everybody to feel part of single group. The invitation said come at 6.30 for canapés, cake and champagne. So we did.

Different people have their own party ‘style.’ For my father, whose parties I observed fascinated from the shrubberies of childhood, the important thing was to create an atmosphere.

On one occasion he placed white candles in little bowls of water all over the back lawn. They flickered as the sun went down transforming the whole garden into a giant birthday cake for Jacqueline, then a current French water skiing champion, who was an improbable guest.

What the elegant Jacqueline, who must have been learning English, thought of this I have no idea. Sitting there on the fringes, sipping my one dilute glass from the great fruit-laden punch bowl, listening to the guests, one of whom hailed from the South American Pampas, it was all quite impossibly romantic. The image of that summer evening has remained with me ever since.

Perhaps from this came my love of fire, particularly outdoors. A torch burning in the night, reflected in the water of lake or river, still excites a feeling of romance - of a new, free and heightened world out their in the blackness beyond the flames, in which anything might be possible. Even a bonfire in the cold November darkness triggers much the same mystery and magic; spells and cauldrons and whizz-bangs.

Still, one of the difficulties with parties is knowing properly not how to start them but how to end them without the conclusion being an anti-climax. How to begin a party is relatively easy; but how to end it happily when palates are jaded, bellies full and lids perhaps beginning to droop is not.

I know this is the case with my own parties around the dinner table. Lack of party confidence, I suppose, propels us towards big meals: nibbles, starters, mains, dessert, cheese and coffee, with various wines as appropriate.

The first hour when people are sitting in the sun, munching on olives and pistachios, enjoying a chilled beer or a glass of rosé are wonderful. But the mood and the conversation become heavier with the calories and ever larger amounts of alcohol are required to keep afloat. Although guests tend to be effusive in their thanks, too often I wonder if they are not really retiring hurt.

One of our frequent guests, who was also present at Annie’s party is Linda, who, in some past life, must have been a grand society hostess. By some magical osmotic process people from all walks of life and of all ages just arrive at her house in the evening where there is often some impromptu party going on.

She has the curious knack of creating an ambiance from no more than a twinkle of an eye and which makes very different people reach out to each other like long lost friends. It would be impossible to imagine a group of men huddled to talk about sport and another group of women gossiping in her house.

How this happens I do not know for apart from a few olives and crisps and of course wine - Linda chooses her wines carefully and well - she never prepares for these events in any way. Yet they are all superb.

But of all the party givers I know, I think that my neighbour Annie has to be the best. It helps that she is French and cooks superbly. But she is also an attentive hostess. She also makes a point of never drinking anything but champagne. As a result on her sixtieth birthday she looked not at day over 40 and as slim and svelte as she was long ago.

She serves food - even at a dinner party - only a little at a time. So that you really think that that plate of canapés was both the first and the last. And then just when you are convinced the party must be over another plate appears, freshly cooked and spiced. More champagne appears, another ice bucket.

Time passes seamlessly as the plates of spiced chicken, olives, delicate prawns, smoked salmon, are brought down the garden to where we are sitting by the summer rhubarb and wisteria. The champagne flows and although we have arrived at 6.30 we find that it is 11.30 and quite dark before we are saying our good byes to the company. Somehow, I calculate, I must have drunk the equivalent of a whole bottle of champagne, yet I feel neither more than pleasantly merry nor bloated with food.

For five hours we have teased each other, made jokes, created fantasies, set the world to rights, heard travellers’ tales, swopped books and recipes and stories of woe - but mostly rejoiced in our own eclectic company. It was, I have to admit, a very good party.

Dongling in La France Profonde

Ever since lightning struck maliciously at the Mill two summers back changing in a smoky instant our Livebox into a deadbox, we have lacked a broadband connection on holiday. It’s simply not worth re-installing and maintaining the connection. Nevertheless, to live without broadband these days is becoming miserably impossible.

Quite apart from the need to respond to urgent enquiries from our small business back home, broadband is essential these days to settle arguments over the dinner table (I’ll just Google that) even indeed to prepare dinner in the first place, the WiFi laptop having long since displaced the stained recipe book as the fount of knowledge on matters culinary.

My good friend Rosie, has partially overcome this broadband problem by buying a dongle - a little rectangular box of electronics that plugs into your computer and gives you broadband through a mobile phone signal.

I say partially because, being a water mill and at the bottom of a steep forested valley, the Mill is just about the only place in France out of range of a mobile phone mast. No matter, climb out of the valley and there you are.

Rosie bought her dongle in Britain, which posed another problem - not technical this time, but financial. With charges for log-on and roaming the British dongle is hideously expensive to use abroad.

So I thought I would go one better and cleverly buy a French dongle to use in France, which operation I had thought would be easy. Well you would wouldn’t you in these days of internet? I had reckoned without the pervasive tentacles of French bureaucracy.

Still in Britain my first hopeful stop was Orange’s French website. There I recognised just the thing, advertised at a mere €9 (£8.50), pay-as-you-go with two hours of internet access included. ‘Could I buy this,’ I asked the helpful enquiry line? ‘Yes,’ they said, provided we can deliver it to you in France. Just fill in your details and we’ll despatch it to the Mill forthwith.

But ‘the details’ included, as an obligatory field, my city of birth and its ‘département;’ I was born in Edinburgh, I told the enquiry line and despite the best endeavours of Napoleon, Mid-Lothian was not a ‘département,’ the last time I looked. ‘Just enter 99, then,’ came the reply. So I did. Obvious really!

I filled in my credit card details as well and duly clicked on the ‘place order’ button, only to receive a message that the site was ‘presently’ unavailable. As I groaned away at this setback, up popped a helpful text box that said ‘I’m Julie - can I help you?’ or words to that effect. ‘Yes,’ I said, clicking and sending. ‘Julie’s’ response was then to crash my computer.

Now I have a Mac and it takes a virtual earthquake to crash a Mac, but Julie managed it three times. Whenever I laboriously filled in my details and tried to order my dongle, ‘Julie’ would pop up like a siren from the ‘presently unavailable’ site luring my poor Mac on to the rocks of cyberspace.

When I told the help line, they suggested I bought my dongle in an Orange shop in France.

So there I was in in the beautiful medieval town square of Figeac, famous for being the birthplace of Champollion, the hieroglyphic decipherer, queueing up to buy my dongle in the ultra modern ‘boutique Orange.’

They would be glad to help they said, and yes they had plenty of dongles in stock. However I should have to pay €39 but, no matter they would refund €30 to my bank account. ‘Do you have a French bank account?’ asked the assistant. Er.....no!

In that case, she said rolling her eyes, I can’t sell you a dongle. We have to identify you through your bank account and a British one wouldn’t do.

It was why the website was ‘presently unavailable’ she added almost apologetically.

Things were starting to take on a Pythonesque tinge. This is the European Union, I wanted to say. Where we are all encouraged to move about and work freely across a vast single market and you won’t sell me a pay-as-you-go product without a French bank account?

I was raging. Orange had told me I could have a dongle. I had promised people I would be available on email. Time was passing. I sat down at a café table to ponder, head in hands and near to tears in sheer frustration.

I had brought the Mac with me to the Orange shop. Something made me open it - but what was this? The emails were flooding in. The gods had relented. Maybe I didn’t need the dongle after all. Wonderful! Well, up to a point.

We learnt subsequently that most libraries in France provide free public WiFi - though not all the time. Don’t bother trying in the evening - or on a public holiday. Nevertheless, provided I could find a library during working hours I could reasonably hope to connect with the wider world.

This had some advantages. I spent a very happy hour working on despatches from the further flung parts of my little empire while sitting in the open-air under the chestnut trees, outside the library in the pilgrimage fortress of Conques which we happened to be visiting. But I needed something closer to home.

Searching for the library in Maurs, and rehearsing my tale of dongle-woe to Rosie and her husband, a kindly Englishman interrupted our conversation. ‘Try SFR,’ he said. SFR being an alternative provider of mobile telephony. But of course there was no SFR shop. At least not in Maurs.

Still the next day we were bound for Cahors, a town large enough for us to be reasonably assured of finding an SFR shop. And there I actually succeeded in buying an SFR dongle, though not before completing a mountain of paperwork with the photocopier pressed into service and no less than three sets of documents to be sent off in due course, including two by me.

Why? This was a pay-as-you-go dongle. No contract. Why do they need to know all my details - identity, addresses, bank, copies of invoices, barcodes and so on? The transaction must have taken a good half an hour and cost three times more than chez Orange - if, that is, I had managed to buy a dongle chez Orange. Moreover, I was still faced with this silly system of having to pay them twice the cost of the product and then having €30 returned to me through my bank account, a procedure in which I had little faith at all. Still, at last I had my dongle.

But still the gods had not finished toying with me. The dongle came with instructions - nicely illustrated computer screens in both PC and Mac versions. Unfortunately, when I plugged it in after the three hour wait that I had been advised would be necessary the screen that my computer threw up did not correspond at all to any of the screens in the pamphlet. Worse, the computer was asking for a password, which I had not been given.

Meanwhile, the dongle just kept blinking its little light, looking all white and smart. Efficiency itself if it would only work.

Oh dear! I tried loading the CD that came in the pack. That seemed to do more harm than good. Mac was now throwing up a complicated message telling me that there was an error reading the ‘statement heading message,’ whatever that meant.

I went back to square one and rebooted. The error message disappeared, but the screen insistently demanded a password. My eyes brimming with frustration I typed in at random my Mac password.

And behold! The dongle which had been blinking lazily went suddenly into overdrive, flashing like a thing demented. Windows appeared and disappeared on my screen telling me that data were being downloaded and installed. Suddenly it was all done. We were in touch with the world. I felt as though I had climbed Everest!

There was still the little problem of accessing a signal at the Mill. But there’s a back road that leads up the mountain towards Mourjou. Half way, almost enveloped by the spring flowering yellow broom, is a convenient ledge from where you can look out over the adjoining valley. There, on a little hillock, stands the ruined Chateau de Merle.

Merle means blackbird in French and Blackbird Castle is perhaps not a bad name for the site of a mobile phone mast. Sitting on this ledge I found a signal.

The picture shows me in this bucolic wilderness, looking, I think, at Purple Coo. Needless to say I still have yet to receive my €30 of ‘rémise.’ But at least I have a working dongle.

KIDNAPPED BY EVENTS

A very long time ago, when foreigners visiting Britain were known as aliens and had to report weekly to the local police station and when anyone arriving on our shores would have to queue up to be greeted individually by a man dressed as an admiral, with gold braid on his black uniform, and given a monolingual notice to read surmounted by the Royal Coat of Arms and headed ‘Have You Anything to Declare;’ in the days of the British ballistic rocket, ‘Blue Streak,’ and a putative British fighter called TSR2 billed as the Spitfire for the 1960s; when Bernard Levin was still writing for the Spectator, I found myself incarcerated for three days in a French geriatric hospital.

I haven’t bothered to see the film about Benjamin Button, but the trailer suggests that he lived his life backwards, being born old and dying young. A sensible order, if you ask me, for, as we all know, youth is wasted on the young and far better to give them old age instead. Whether I tolerated my spell among the geriatrics better at the age of 18 than I may do at the age of 80 I cannot say - if you’re still around, maybe I can let you know.

It came about like this. With a rather tall, bespectacled but timid friend, who for the sake of argument I shall call Graham, I found myself booked into one of those Youth Camps in the south of France at a place called Lézignan-Corbières. We were to travel down by train: we had tickets from the Gare d’Austerlitz, but first we thought we would look up a friend in Paris. Then we found we had time to spare and after ambling rather pennilessly around the city for a while decided to spend the night uncomfortably under one of the bridges of the Seine.

I confess this was my idea - and not one of my better ones. For some reason, probably not unconnected with George Orwell, spending the night under a bridge in Paris seemed, at that juvenile age, impossibly romantic. It beckoned like any rite of passage.

But as always on these occasions the reality belies the illusion. We were cold, the bridge was smelly, the air damp and humid, drunks paraded up and down, dogs sniffed. It was to put it at its simplest, not a good night. Graham to whom I had sold the romance slept not a wink. Indeed he was most extraordinarily put out.

Still, he didn’t jump ship and we made it to the station the next morning and an electric train hurtled us south. The weather was hot, the carriage crowded. Nevertheless, there was much to observe in the changing countryside and the people who squeezed in and out of the compartment whenever we halted.

It must have been around early afternoon and the hottest part of the day when I noticed a secondary reason for Graham not speaking to me: he had collapsed and was catatonic. By degrees the other occupants of the carriage noticed it too (this wasn’t England after all) and began to fan him with their newspapers and pinch various parts of his anatomy. As he failed to respond their voices rose in a babble of sound of which I understood not one word.

Or rather there was in fact one such word - ‘appendicitis!’ - a cry shrieked over and over again by a plump lady in a spotted dress. I wondered should I pull the communication cord: but to what point?

Luckily, however, the train began slowing and in a couple of minutes we arrived at Cahors.
Here events proceeded way beyond my control. The stationmaster arrived, or maybe it was the guard, or even both. Graham was manhandled off the train by the crowd and laid out like a corpse on some sort of parcel barrow.

All around people surged forward to look, to cross themselves and to look skywards. Somebody went to telephone someone. I tried to explain that we didn’t have any money, certainly not money for urgent hospitalisations. This may have seemed callous but I never really thought Graham was seriously ill. How could he be?

True, he had the nervous and inhibited sort of disposition of the bad travelling companion and he had refused any sort of sustenance during the 48 hours he had been in France; no doubt believing that the French were given to doing strange things with food and - as Bernard Levin once put it - in olive oil too. No doubt Graham thought that in the absence of bangers and mash he would be well-advised to delay the awful moment of contaminating his alimentary canal with any alien nourishment for as long as he possibly could.

But trying to explain in elementary French to a group of excited adults that it is most unlikely that there is anything wrong with your friend and that the reason he is now catatonic is that his blood sugar level has fallen to zero because of his inability to appreciate French food and that if only someone were to give him a good old cup of English tea with milk and two sugars and perhaps a doughnut he would begin to revive.

But on that platform in the hub and press of country folk it was hard to make oneself heard let alone understood and then, behind me, a whistle blew and the train glided out of the station and with it the lifeline to a secure and ordered séjour in this foreign land.

Now some species of medical orderly in white overalls materialised from somewhere and commanded the throng to bear the patient into the back of something that bore a remarkable resemblance to a hearse. They did so. I was told to climb in and we were off, klaxon blaring, I knew not whither. I might have been kidnapped. Indeed, in a sense I was.

By this time Graham was indeed beginning to show signs of life again, gradually returning to consciousness, but hardly had we begun our journey than we stopped and were being bundled this time into the cool grey vault of a building that seemed to be remarkably full of nuns.

Several of these took hold of him heaving him on to a stone slab. They loosened his trousers and prodded him gently as though he were a pudding. The doctor would come, they said re-assuringly. When? I asked. They didn’t know. Gradually the nuns went back to doing what nuns do. I sauntered out into the street.

A barrow man was selling peaches; great, fresh, juicy yellow peaches for next to nothing. Realising that my own blood sugar level might not exactly be buoyant, I bought a kilo and began eating them one after another, the sticky juice dripping down my face and hands.

Back in the hospital. I lost track of time. Graham was asleep now. All seemed quiet. Everyone had gone. I looked around. This seemed to be some kind of hospital, but if so it was a hospital without doctors. Indeed it was a hospital without much of anything, it seemed.

Eventually a doctor did come of course. He examined Graham cursorily and decided that he had fainted due to low blood sugar. He set up a sucrose drip and departed. With luck, I thought, we could catch the evening train - but the doctor had told the nuns apparently to keep him under observation for three days. Three days! So the nuns came back and together we him on to one of the wards.

It was then that I discovered that this was some species of geriatric establishment. All the patients were old men in various stages of decrepitude. Apart from one who was - a Spaniard, as I later found out - a man in his forties who wore a very English flannel dressing gown and slippers and who had something wrong with his kidneys, though he seemed in no degree incapacitated or even in pain.

Everyone looked at us rather strangely, but after a few hesitant seconds simply reverted to their games of cards or looking out of the window. For all I know we were the third English teenagers they had seen that week.

The nuns secreted me away somewhere, finding me in a little room to myself, about which I don’t have much recollection, but we took our meals with the inmates on the ward. A bell would ring and the patients would shuffle out of their beds. The nuns would place a great pitcher of wine on the communal table and one of those great round coarse loaves of industrial size. With the bread and wine came a soup or stew or casserole, poured thickly onto a shallow plate and eaten largely with lumps of bread.

The first day I sat there, without cutlery, watching the patients pull out great hooked clasp knives from the pockets of their dressing gowns. With these they stabbed at the improbable cuts of meat or squished the sauce into their bread. But I had no such knife and it seemed a long time before I managed to make this known. I think I had expected to be given a clasp knife too, but when the grumbly serving nun came back from the kitchen she offered me a perfectly ordinary table knife and spoon. I was quite disappointed.

With nothing to do during the day I used to wander around Cahors, and over the medieval fortified bridge across the river Lot that you see at the top of this piece. I was often in the company of the little Spaniard. He bizarrely spoke even less French than I did, and no English at all. I spoke no Spanish. Nevertheless, we enjoyed each other’s company talking, I seem to remember, about bull-fighting about which I knew at least as much as can be gathered by an impressionable child from one of Hemingway’s lesser known works. He talked in Spanish and I responded in English. We made a lot of gestures.

At the end of three days Graham was deemed well enough to travel. We bade goodbye to the nuns and thanked them and I said ‘adios’ to my little Spaniard. We shook hands in turn with the inmates whose sentence would no doubt be devoid of any satisfactory ending. And we made for the station.

And I never returned to Cahors until, that is, last month, when I walked over that same bridge and through those same streets, now much changed from those of my memory. Nevertheless, if you look hard enough I am sure in July you will find those same peaches, succulent and sweet to eat beside the river Lot - deep, green and wide on its endless meandering journey to the sea.