HOW TO CHANGE A TYRE

Di turned up, aged Mother in tow, on an expedition to Waitrose.  J decided to join them.  I saw them into the car which had, I noticed,  a flat tyre.  Not an auspicious start, I thought.

Now changing tyres is one of the few things I can do.  Ten minutes, I said.  I asked Di to pull the car forward and off the road. Unfortunately, off the road was on a slight slope.

We helped aged Mother, a week short of her ninetieth birthday, into the house.  “Would you prefer a cup of tea or a glass of wine,” I asked her.  “Whatever is easier for you, Pet,” she replies. She is the only person in the world that calls me ‘pet.’ Aged Mother hails from Cullercoats.

I poured the glass of wine and gave her a mince pie, apologising for its ramshackle appearance. I change tyres better - or so I thought.

Outside it began to rain. I put on a coat and loosened the wheel bolts.  One was a locking nut, necessitating a fruitless search for a tool.  Eventually Di called her husband and we discovered that the locking nut thingy lay in a glove box between the seats.  I undid the locking nut and removed it completely.

I then screwed up the jack.  The car rose.  All was going well when there was a crunch and the car subsided the jack now impossibly wedged under the car.  “I’ll get another jack,” I said. 

Now I was sure that in the the garden shed could be found two jacks with a third in our own car.  Rummaging in the shed produced no jacks. 

I looked in the maintenance book for our car.  Find the jack under the boot lid it said.  But when I pulled up the boot carpet, which appeared as though not designed to be pulled up, there was no secret jack compartment.  The rain fell faster.

I reported my failure to Aged Mother who was now on her second glass of wine. “I’m enjoying myself, Pet,” was all she said.

It was time to call the professionals.  This required another call to Di’s husband to dig out the relevant insurance.  I think he was watching some needle match.  Anyway he gave the impression of regretting the disturbance.  Aged Mother commenced a third mince pie.

The garageman rang to say he would be half an hour.  I wondered what that might mean in mince pies. Then he said he wouldn’t fit the spare unless it were correctly inflated.  Health and Safety, didn’t I know?  He rang off.

But what is the correct pressure, we asked? Aged Mother didn’t know, but wouldn’t mind another glass of wine.

Di rang a third time.  Eventually (when no doubt two vital goals and a penalty had been scored) came the news that 30 pounds might be reasonable.  We loaded the greasy tyre into my car and went to see Mr Jay at the petrol station. 

Jay’s air pump demanded 50p. Neither Di nor I had 50p. But Mrs Jay changed a pound in the middle of a helpful conversation about Bombay Mix.  The 50p inserted, the airpump clattered into reluctant life.

Nothing happened. Very little air came out of the pump: I could hold my finger over the valve with no problem.  The scale on the inflator wasn’t budging.  I went in search of Jay.  The pump died.

Jay, dear man that he is, has just has a kidney transplant. “It is the cold weather,” he explained  “you have to hit the inflator very hard against the wall. Then it will work.”  I pointed out that the pump had stopped.  “You need another 50p,” he said.

“It isn’t a fast pump. It is a slow pump.” Di looked incredulously at the beaten-against-the-wall-gauge:  it had now moved from 10 to 12 pounds.  “You see!” said Jay, disappearing.
The gauge crept ever so slowly up.  It was a very slow pump.

Back home we found the garageman fuming on the doorstep and about to go. He had arrived - in a vehicle that looked too small to accommodate his bulk let along his tools - in 20 minutes, not half an hour.  If looks could kill we would have been toast.

“There’s a nut missing,”  he spat out.  Luckily I had put the locking nut where it could be found easily.  “Never jack a vehicle in a hill,” he added, doing just that.  Di has a good line with angry men. “I expect you’re very busy,” she smiled.  “Flat out” he grunted in the first vaguely civil words to pass his lips. “Could do you a cup of tea,” I ventured.  But he had finished. Not in ten minutes but in two.  He raced away to his next job.

Aged Mother professed that she had had a most satisfactory afternoon, but J never got to Waitrose.

SO WHY NOT TURN CHRISTMAS ROUND?

'Tis the season to be jolly, as the old song has it.  Well, no, not really.  'Tis the season to be stressed would be more like it.  Still help is at hand for I hear the BBC has discovered a group of researchers who have carefully plotted the development of pre-Christmas stress and, most importantly, have calculated when it ends.  According to Radio 4, this is when the presents have been unwrapped and the dinner has been eaten: a time which occurs, so the researchers say, in the average household around five minutes to two o'clock on Christmas Day.

There is something in that precision, isn't there, that makes one instantly suspect that the researchers do not inhabit the same world as you or I?  I suppose there may be some super-efficient households in which everything is finished by five minutes to two; where the paper-hatted family falls contentedly into a stress-free sleep wearing their new slippers and smelling strongly of the less expensive offerings of the parfumiers (for I doubt those who finish their Christmas lunch at 1.55pm precisely, are in the habit of lashing out £241.95 for a 30ml bottle of Channel No 5), but I have never known any.

My own pre Christmas stress has been building up quite nicely as it happens and is now safely in the red area of intolerable pressure.   Somehow we have enjoyed five dinner parties in eight days, four of which have been given by ourselves involving considerable moving and rearranging of furniture and equipment.  The dishwasher and the cooker, both of about twenty years vintage, sigh almost audibly as they receive another load. Bless them!

As if this wasn't enough it has been Christmas card week and present ordering week and the week the car went in for its MoT.  It has been a week of thunder and hail and the week when the telephone crashed.  The car failed its test (it needs a new windscreen, the garage said helpfully) while the telephone needed, it turned out, a new junction box, the previous one having melted in the storm; both required me to be early on parade waiting for the requisite engineers to make a house call.   Meanwhile, our label customers have merrily been demanding ever more complicated jobs in ever shorter timescales 'before Christmas' so that we have been winding labels literally between the wineglasses and candlesticks.

With a week still to go I am nicely frazzled, with a sore tummy, and the irritating feeling of guilt you get when you receive a card from someone you have previously overlooked. There is still much to do: the car to be given another go at its MoT, and fourteen boxes to be shipped out in the direction of the sunny Seychelles. 

If the government wanted to do something useful it could employ me to give Christmas a makeover for the purpose of reducing stress levels in the population.  At the moment we all want to fit everything in 'before Christmas.'  That includes present buying, card posting, cake making, party giving, tree decorating, relative visiting and so on.  Everything has to be done at once and the result is the nation drowns in stress.  No wonder a sea of alcohol is required to survive the ordeal.

But then, after Christmas, nothing happens apart from the New Year hiccup.  Time is spare.  If only those empty hours could be moved into the 'before Christmas' slot.

So why not turn Christmas around? Recently, the 'Twelve Days of Christmas' have become ever more a reality.  So what if we moved Christmas back to the Feast of the Epiphany - from the first to the twelfth day of Christmas?  Christmas, the religious festival, could of course remain on 25 December, but 'The Big Day' would then be at the end of the holiday rather than at the beginning.  All the Christmas paraphernalia could be done in the holiday period itself thus ensuring that December's productivity and our collective sanity don't suffer as they usually do.

In our drama group it has become a tradition to celebrate Twelfth Night with some sort of festivity and a handsome frangipane Galette des Rois. This year the Rain or Shine Theatre Company are bringing their winter show Top Hats and Tinsel to Cowbridge.

The Twelfth Night tradition is one well worth reviving.  Interestingly I see in this week's Spectator magazine an article by Melanie MacDonagh recounting how women used to gather in the West of Ireland to celebrate the Epiphany with cakes and gossip in a celebration called Nollaig Beag - or Little Christmas.  These days though, she says, the custom is 'an opportunity for well-to-do urban women to meet up and drink in a hotel or a pub........a self-conscious kind of Celtic version of International Women's Day.'

Well - it's an excuse to bring out the Chanel I suppose, and it likes me better (to use a Shakespearean idiom) as a stress-buster than finishing the show by five minutes to two on Christmas Day.

A STORY FOR THEO - WATCH OUT FOR SEAL HOLES

A Seal Hole - with a Mole (I mean a Seal)

Christmas is coming. Our little grandson, Theo, came into the house yesterday and looked down the long hall into the sitting room where the newly decorated Christmas tree twinkled under a thousand and one lights and let out an excited 'Oooooooh'! His face lit up like a Christmas sparkler.

How wonderful to be not yet three and this  the first Christmas you remember.  something you really are seeing for the first time: trees and presents and candles and general festivity! He took the tree baubles in his hands, squeezing each gently.  I think he expected them to be balloons or tiny footballs.  Whatever was this wonder chez les grandfolk?

Still the excitement may have been too much for shortly afterwards he curled up in the big red armchair with his favourite soft toy - a Penguin.  The poor lad has not been terribly well, laid low by a bug, and has been hot and fretful with a hacking cough.  Yesterday he was better but exhausted.

So I sat with him on the arm of the chair and made up a story about Penguin, while he went in search of the land of nod.  As far as I remember it went like this. 

One wild Antarctic day, when the wind howled and the snow blew all around, Penguin was trudging home across the ice after a day’s fishing.  Slish, slosh, slish he went, for parts of the ice were melting.  Penguin hadn’t been very successful with his fishing: he’d fished all day and hadn’t caught a single herring for his tea.  He was sure to be scolded when he returned home. But the fact was that the herring were becoming fewer and fewer and the ones that remained had all grown devilish shy.
 
So his creel was empty, poor Penguin, at least empty of fish.  For with his fishing net (which all clever Penguins carry in their fur) he had caught some shrimpy little things, which can be quite delicious, but which are not the sort of thing to fill up a family on a cold, damp and windy evening.

Anyway, there he was, splish sploshing along through the snow and the ice and looking up at the sky and wondering whether he might have better luck tomorrow when suddenly, CRASH! and Gurgle! and Bbbb-otheration! He found himself up to his armpits (or rather his flipperpits) in seawater.  He had fallen into a seal hole. 

If I had been a rabbit, he thought to himself crossly as he struggled to crawl out of the water, I might have tripped over a molehill.  Moles and seals both travel around under the ground, though out on the ice, there isn’t any ground, if you follow me, and the seals have to make do with water.  But like moles they like to pop up now and again to take a good breath of fresh air.  So seals make holes in the ice into which respectable folk, minding their own business and not looking too closely where they are going, occasionally fall.  Bother! thought the Penguin again as he splashed water from his feathers.

He started again to waddle wearily homewards, looking down in case another seal hole should leap out at him unexpectedly, when he heard a cry behind him.  It was his friend William, who had also been fishing out on the ice. 

When Penguin turned around he saw that William was waving to him.  “Watch out for the seal hole!” Penguin cried.

   “What seal hole?” answered William.  But it was too late. There came a loud splosh and William’s dumpy little body disappeared from view.

    Penguin ran back to the seal hole just as fast as his little legs would carry him. He grabbed hold of William’s flippers and pulled and pulled, but William seemed quite stuck. Then suddenly, ‘pop!’ William shot out of the hole like a cork out of a champagne bottle.

    But what was this?  William was covered in fish!  There were fish in his creel, fish in his clothes, fish in his boots (William always wore thick waterproof boots). No wonder Penguin could hardly pull him out of the hole!  When he fell in he must have landed smack in the middle of a shoal of herring and when Penguin pulled him out the fish must have got trapped around him. Wasn’t that lucky?

    So to thank Penguin for saving him and rescuing him from the seal hole, William said Penguin could have some of the herring.  In fact there were more than enough fish for the two of them so in return Penguin gave William some of the little shrimpy like things, for Penguin always believed in sharing, and the two friends then walked home across the ice to the shelter of the mountain, singing fishing sort of songs and telling stories and meanwhile, KEEPING A GOOD LOOK OUT FOR SEAL HOLES!

(The photograph of the seal by the hole is from dougs-antartic-adventure.blogspot.com  via Google's Images for Seal Holes.  Use is acknowledged with thanks).

YES, BUT WHY REINDEER?

My good friend Frances, who hails from New York and often comments on this blog, regularly posts beautifully illustrated accounts of the great parades that march through that city.  These mark this national day, or that liberation or so and so's hard won rights.

In our little town this side of the Pond our parading is more limited. We don't have a Mardi Gras or a Carnival.  Britain lacks an independence day or a liberation day (never having been either dependent or liberated) and we probably think we have enough civil rights to be going along with.  Neither are we terribly diverse either ethnically or sexually or any other 'lly,' and in any case we are a pretty tolerant bunch; at least we like to think we are.

While our parading may thus be limited it isn't non-existent.  Each year at the end of November we hold the Reindeer Parade when Father Christmas, regaled in splendour in a four-wheeled sled, is pulled through the town by reindeer, showering, over all the children en route, largesse to be delivered on Christmas Eve via parental intervention, or so one hopes.  The scarlet gentleman is accompanied by a great flock of elves and pixies of varying ages and variously convincing appearance.  Brass bands of uncertain proficiency accompany the ensemble and the reindeer plod in a rather half-hearted manner from one end of the town to the other and back again, with everyone following in their wake.

The reindeer, in case you were wondering, are shipped all the way from Scotland at great expense and return to their farm after the event.  I don't know about you but I have always thought reindeer singularly unprepossessing animals.  They have a moth-eaten and downtrodden appearance, as if they know that their sole purpose in life is to be eaten by wolves.  Joie de vivre is a feeling quite unknown to them.

Moreover, they are actually much smaller than one imagines they should be and I think this lack of physicality must be a tremendous disappointment to children used to seeing cartoons of magnificent beasts the size of carthorses with noses flashing like a demented fire alarm.

Which makes me wonder who it was that decided that St Nicholas, or Santa Claus, should use these - of all creatures - as a propulsive force.  Horses would be much more energetic and, of course, considerably more visual.  Somehow I think the reindeer got the part without auditioning.

For instance, if you are beguiled by the thought of an animal from the cold snowy wastes, how about the moose?  With a little imagination you could visualise a gift-laden sled pulled through the sky by a giant moose whose antlers flapped like Dumbo's ears.  Indeed elephants might be even more majestic and you'd think,  now that the world's population had reach nine billion,  Santa could use some extra traction.  Or, to revert to the North Pole again and being ecological at the same time, a couple of polar bears would be most impressive with red scarves around their necks.

But Reindeer!  Well - fine for trudging through the snow and living on moss and providing hides for moccasins and tents - even acceptable for the occasional dish of stringy stew - but for racing across the heavens with names like Donner and Blitzen, surely not.  Reindeer are just not cut out for the part, I'm sorry.

Still, there we are.  Like it or not reindeer have cornered the Santa sled pulling market and are not about to be displaced, despite the generations of disappointed children whom I am absolutely sure would far prefer polar bears and elephants. (In fact left to themselves children would invent a far superior myth in which there were a whole family of Santas - one for each continent maybe - with superhero vehicles - why would you want a sled in Africa? - pulled by a whole zoological garden of different creatures).

Anyway we have digressed as we usually do.  The Reindeer came to Cowbridge last Sunday with Santa in tow and into the town flocked thousands upon thousands of people.  Cars were parked up to a mile out of town. In every roadway a steady stream of buggies, babies, Mums, Dads and excited children streamed down the hillsides into the valley bottom in the hope of seeing the reindeer and receiving a species of papal blessing from the man in the scarlet coat and a chance to remind him to bring the Nintendo rather than the X Box - if that wouldn't be too much of a bother - and please could an elf be sure to take out a pencil and write down the request to avoid bringing the wrong thing as happened last year which meant that Mummy and Daddy had to take Santa's present back to a shop and try to exchange it all at great expense.

Our little town houses about 5,000 souls.  Adding a further 25,000 and, what's more,  cramming them into the centre creates something that is a cross between a rugby scrum and the Black Hole of Calcutta. So, Frances, you will excuse me if I say I didn't attend this year's parade.  Instead I walked away from town and up to the Tump, there on a sunny morning to contemplate the Bristol Channel and the hills of Exmoor beyond.  I was quite alone with my visions of Moose and Elephants, Horses and Polar Bears and the parade they made in my mind was infinitely superior to the one below.

Then I had a very fine lunch in Loch Fyne's restaurant with theatre friends and forgot, thankfully, all about the reindeer, while the 25,000 and, we hope, their satisfied children, trudged up the hill back to their cars. 

(The picture showing Santa, a couple of bemused children, an Elf and an Elfette and, if you look very closely, a sprig of reindeer horn (I told you they were unprepossessing) is courtesy of the website of our very fine local paper, the Cowbridge Gem, which, if you Google it, will tell you all practical details about the parade and why it is counted such a success).

A BOBBLE FOR CHRISTMAS

A similar Bobble.  You'll have to imagine this in orange

We are a month away from Christmas.  I know this because various members of the family start whispering about whether you have any ideas about what ‘x’ would like to find in their stocking, which leads inevitably on to what you would like to find in your stocking.  I am hopeless at answering.  What I would really like is either ridiculously expensive or completely inappropriate, or probably both.  Otherwise my wants are small, at least in the present department.

Some people are instinctive present choosers.  Without a great deal of thought or effort they go into a shop and buy a present both useful and a surprise.  Probably inexpensive as well for which, I think, you should get bonus points.  Any fool can be a success at present buying if money is no object.

My eldest sister is one such person.  She once bought me a woollen bobble hat - she was living in Shetland at the time - and the hat, though improbably knitted in orange and brown, was clearly modelled on the hats worn by the local fishermen and fitted snugly around the ears.  It was crowned with a large orange bobble and I remember it also had a flap around the base which could be pulled down during a severe inclemency so that the hat would cover everything north of the mouth. 

That it then covered the eyes would not have mattered.  You can’t really see anything anyway in a Shetland gale; it is hard enough to stand up, all you can do is to cower against the elemental forces of nature. Anyway, your hat wouldn’t blow away.

Living then as I did in the docile atmosphere of the home counties I was still glad to own such a garment and wore it almost daily.  In that game you play if you can’t sleep, where you rank your chattels in order so that if ever your house catches fire you know what to take first, it found a high place.

The hat wore out, of course,  as all things do.  The first casualty was the bobble. Mind you, I wasn’t sorry for I thought the bobble an unnecessary frivolity, particularly when coloured orange.  I suppose it might have been useful had I been engulfed by an avalanche, but that wasn't likely in Essex.

Minus bobble, the hat went on for a very long time before finally succumbing to moths.  I have a new one now but this doesn’t quite match the practicality of the old hand-knitted version.  It is also a light grey, which, while a tad less disreputable, is an unfortunate colour in the event of an avalanche.

Someone else once gave me a pair of Timberland gloves, fleece lined on the inside, tough without ever being bulky and made of leather,  soft as a second skin.  The sort of gloves that pilots used in the days before cockpit heating and when the dress code called for sheepskin jackets.  They, too, were a most effective present and worn till they fell apart.

But to revert to the pilots a moment.  Now that I come to think of it, I have never seen a pilot wearing  insulated headgear.  Why? You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that a pilot in a very cold plane (I am talking of fifty, even a hundred years ago) might need to wear something warm as a bearskin?

Yet if I remember correctly from those early films such as the one of Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic with his plane covered in ice, he wore no headgear at all, or just perhaps a leather helmet.  I’m sure a bobble hat would have been useful.

When did Lindbergh fly from New York to Paris? Was it 1929? Or 1927? Or 1925?  It is the sort of question that might well have cropped up at the Great Annual Rotary Quiz that took place in the Town Hall here last Saturday and to which le tout Cowbridge turns out.  The questions this year were harder than last and were full of such silly forced-choice questions which do not suit my mental mechanics at all.  CADS - our drama society - usually put in two teams. Last year we came fourth.  This year we came tenth, equal with the other CADS team.  Actors don’t like forced choices, you see. 

Still the annual late November quiz reminds you that Christmas is on its way and to turn your attention to serious present buying.  If in doubt I can recommend a hand-knitted bobble hat from Shetland and a pair of soft Timberland gloves, regardless of whether you are buying for old or young, male or female, town or country mouse.  You may be thought an old miser but you will have the satisfaction of knowing that the object of your affection will be warm this winter and probably safe in an avalanche as well.

(The picture shows a Shetland type Bobble Hat made by Barbour, courtesy of Sadler and Co.  For those desperate to know Charles Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris in the Spirit of St Louis in 1927.)

SAUSAGES, GREEN CHEESE AND THE BIG BANG

A simulated detection of the Higgs Boson particle

The moon, we learn, is made of green cheese - though what ‘green cheese’ might be is somehow never explained.  I suppose it is cheese that is green, but you never know.  Chinese seaweed is not seaweed at all but a kind of cabbage, or so they tell me, so green cheese might be a kind of rock.  But that aside what is everything else made of? 

When we stay at the Mill, down in the Auvergne,  it gets dark at night.  Proper dark.  Can’t see your hand in front of your face dark.  But look up and what you see are uncountable stars stretching in a dimly glowing carpet from one side of the heavens to the other.  Millions upon billions of tiny pricks of light. 

And in this vast uncountable universe what we can see is multiplied a million fold by what we can’t:  those stars in galaxies and nebulae that have travelled already too far and whose light no longer reaches us and whose presence can only be detected by radio beams.

Yet this vastness of stars and galaxies and planets and rocks represents less than one part in two- hundred-and-fifty of what is in the universe.  If, like the moon, everything we can see is made of green cheese, then that represents only what is left out upon the counter.  There remains a whole greater kitchen of comestibles locked away out of sight in cupboards and pantries.

Dark matter makes up three-quarters of the universe and dark energy a further quarter.  What are these two behemoths which take up whole store-cupboards of space?  Well, that is at least as good a question as the one about the green cheese, for no-one seems to know.  We know dark matter exists and roughly where it is, but we don’t yet know what it is. For all I know it may be made of green cheese too.  Or even blue, yellow or purple cheese.

The man who prompted these sudden reflections is Lyn Evans, who hails from just up the road in Aberdare in South Wales and is billed as the builder of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN just outside Geneva. Possibly you may have heard of the Large Hadron Collider or LHC for it has been much in the news.  It is a giant circular tunnel 27 kilometres long through which sub-atomic particles are accelerated with the aid of magnets to impossible speeds and then crashed into each other in the hope that they will break apart and so we shall be able to learn more about what you and I (and the green cheese) are made of.

Lyn Evans was giving the Anniversary Lecture at the Welsh Centre of International Affairs in Cardiff this week.  He spoke in a listed pseudo-Egyptian monstrosity of a building known as the Temple of Peace and Health that boasts some of the worst acoustics in the world.  Still, what he was saying was so fascinating that you could have heard a pin drop in the auditorium.

We are not made, he told us, of sugar and spice and all things nice, but of a whole family of creatures, fabulous as unicorns, fantastical as griffins with names like gluons, muons, quarks, hadrons, neutrons, photons, variously possessing mass, energy or electrical charge and sometimes none of these at all.  Out of such energised and vibrating soup come the paintings of Leonardo, the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Mozart.

One particle however is missing: the Higgs Boson particle. Like the dark matter (or perhaps the green cheese) we know - or we think we know - it exists and that without it all the gluons and muons and photons and quarks would simply fall apart.  It has been called the ‘God’ particle because without it there could be no matter or any living thing created. Yet like God himself no-one has yet found it.  The scientists have trod the path to Mount Olympus only to find Zeus and his tribe departed.

Hence the need to build this 27 kilometre tunnel and to collide hadrons in the hope that after the bang of the collisions scientists will be able to find Higgs Boson particles among the wreckage standing by the roadside, as it were, and scratching their heads.

What Lyn Evans will do then he didn’t say.  Presumably the things will be weighed and measured and then - because we have to return whence we started to the discussion of what the universe is made of - then the boffins can get to work again on how it all began: how exactly the Big Bang.....er....banged, all that time ago.

Rather disappointingly he didn’t touch on what happened before the Big Bang - which has always seemed to me the more important question.  Something surely must have been frying in the pan before ‘sizzle, sizzle, sizzle, one went ‘bang.’’   Was our Big Bang a unique event?  Oh dear - you’ve got me worried now.

CLAZZAKIN'S CARPET

Clazzakin's Carpet

Thanks to all the good folk who sent welcome and heartfelt wishes last week for my recovery. I am mended I am glad to say and no longer feel as though your man with the scythe is out there in the vicinity searching for my address.  I have given up reading articles on medical catastrophes and am back in the land of the hale and the hearty, though my knees, inexplicably,  have begun to hurt and I am sure a hypochondriac must be able to make something of that.

Despite those of you who urged me to abstain from whisky or aspirin, and certainly from both at the same time, I have to say that this combination seems about the most effective remedy known to medical science.  Of course, I don’t take much of either.  A glass, or at the very most two modest glasses,  of whisky and then with water and no more than a couple of dispersible aspirin - and the aspirin before the whisky - is all it needs to feel well again, for a few hours at least.

It doesn’t help however to find yourself as I did last weekend being invited to lunch and dinner parties on the same day by generous friends with restricted calendars when I didn’t feel like eating very much more than some light scrambled egg on toast.  Especially aggravating as well when I am trying to lose some of the pounds that I added on holiday before Christmas and the New Year put them back on again.  We have an invitation to spend New Year in France, which, if the past is anything to go by, will mean a splendid party of oysters and champagne and pretty much non stop eating from seven until eleven.

Over Christmas it will be my turn to provide the grub for family and various guests who won’t be content, either, with scrambled egg.  I’ve just been given what sounds a magnificent recipe for a soup called Pho by a blogging friend who lives in Seattle.  A beef broth with slices of beef and spiced up with ginger and cinnamon and chilies. Onions and other vegetables come into it too. I might well try it on them; I’m intrigued by the name ‘Pho.’

By Christmas, too, I hope to have finished and printed a children’s story that presently goes under the working title of Clazzakin’s Carpet.  It is a story about flying carpets and where they come from (Persia); and why they fly and what they carry on them when they do (Persian cats - obviously - but not Kings or Camels); and one little girl’s effort to make her grandmother’s carpet take to the air.

The story has been superbly illustrated by another blogging friend and I am now putting it together in the software offered by the people at BLURB, who will print the book and in colour too.  But the job of fitting illustrations and text together and assembling both within page borders; of getting the paragraphing and spacing correct is both tedious and time-consuming. It is work that must go on for every illustrated book that is ‘designed,’ but which few of us, I suspect, ever think about. Writing the story is infinitely easier and in future I think I shall stick to that.

Another friend emailed this week inviting me to a talk by a clerical gentleman who gives spiritual advice to various official bodies In Wales and whom I have met on other occasions. The talk -  or rather sermon for such it was - unfolded in the town's magnificently restored early nineteenth century Baptist Chapel into which previously I had never set foot.  A most beautiful building full of theatrical potential with its boxed pews and balconies.  ‘We are all migrants,’ he said soulfully, his hands clasped together, ‘though some of us are more recent than others.’  True enough, though whether the sentiment helps the price of eggs, I know not.

I don’t normally attend sermons in chapels (indeed, this was a lifetime first)  but such events are all part of life’s rich tapestry and my presence there might even have given me valuable Karma points in the event that my present feeling of well-being proves no more than a remission.  Pascal’s bet and all that.

Which French philosopher reminds me that last night I saw ‘Midnight in Paris’ - a most wonderful film about a young American in Paris with a nostalgia for the past. Nostalgia becomes reality when he travels in a 1920’s Peugeot ninety years back in time to meet Hemingway, Picasso, Dali, Cole Porter and Gertrude Stein (among others). About as believable, of course, as flying carpets, but hugely enjoyable.  Philosophic too, and very funny.  I’ve always enjoyed Woody Allen.

GRIM REAPING

I have been pretty much ill all week with one of those sicknesses that come on so gradually so you don’t realise that you are ill at all, until you start to feel better.  I blame the aeroplane on which we flew back from Rodez after our visit to Le Moulin du Clout two weeks ago.  They are always full of bugs which incubate for a week or ten days before breaking out into something international.

I begin to know that I am ill when half way through my afternoon's work I feel a compelling urge to pour a glass of whisky and perhaps take a couple of aspirin for good measure.  That makes me feel better in the short and the long term but not in the medium term for the whisky (and aspirin too) ravage my febrile stomach and liver which is ‘le point faible’ of my anatomy and the place for which any bugs that may be circulating head directly and without passing ‘go.’

In this state therefore of more or less perpetual indigestion and general wretchedness, I happened a day or two ago to read an article on the cheerful subject of pancreatic cancer, much in the news recently as the slayer of poor Steve Jobs on the keyboard of one of whose beautiful products I am even now typing .

Apparently, if you get pancreatic cancer, there isn’t much that can be done and you had better start putting your affairs in order and not embark on any long books.  The trouble is that you don’t know that you’ve got it - because the symptoms aren’t obvious - until it has got too much of a hold for anything worthwhile to be done.  This is clear from the survival rates which haven’t improved at all over the years.  The good news is that it is a rare form of cancer and makes up only 3 per cent of all cancers. Statistics are on your side, even though they didn’t help Mr Jobs.

As it happens my dear Mother died of pancreatic cancer.  I was going to write ‘dear old,’ but she wasn’t old at all, being only 54 when she died.  According to the article this isn’t helpful to her offspring for the disease runs in families.  This constituted, said the article, one formal indicator that I, too, might succumb.  It then listed five further indicators: to my horror three of these five might well be said to apply to me.  Oh dear! 

Which is why, of course, if you are a hypochondriac like yours truly, you shouldn’t read about these things as you only end up depressing yourself.   Fortunately, while you can’t do anything about your family, most of the other warning indicators can be avoided or corrected by living and eating in a sensible way and in my case not eating foods and drinking liquids that irritate the nether regions, wonderful though the taste and effect of a glass or two of cold white wine may be on a summer’s day - though surely, I tell myself, one must be able to make the occasional exception - otherwise one simply gives up on life. 

In any case, I remind myself, what really did for Mama was not pancreatic cancer out of the blue but a cancer that just happened to be looking for a home and chose the pancreas faute de mieux.  For unhappy reasons, best known to herself, she developed in the later stages of her life a powerful addiction to alcohol, tobacco, strong coffee and Alka-Seltzer, together with a powerful resistance to exercise and looking after herself.   Living with a ferocious and belligerent Siamese cat called Ohio (one half of Baltimore and Ohio - she had an absurd tendency to name her cats after American Railroads) didn’t help either. 

Nor did the Grim Reaper have to wait too long on the doorstep. In fact she was sitting up in bed, quite merrily, smoking a cigarette only half an hour before she died, leaving me and most of her family half a day’s journey short of wishing her well. 

Still, in the midst of death we are in life, for it is confidently reported that young Theo has a sibling on the way.  Just as he was Topaz before he arrived, so the parcel in the post, as it were, has been called variously Peanut and Butterbean.  Maybe it will turn out to be twins, though I suspect in these days of acute medical advance that we should have known were that to be so.  Grandparents can’t obtain contraception against grandchildren, can they?  Or some other form of home protection and sanity insurance? 

APPLES AND TROUT

The Tumbrel - Pour Encourager Les Autres

I’ve been gardening and feel quite proud.  Yesterday I made six apple grafts taking cuttings that I had made from trees at the Mill and sticking them into stubs of branches on the apple trees here.  I watched a little video on YouTube that showed you how to do it.  Mind you, like so much else, seeing an expert cut, slice and bind with all the right tools and knowing exactly what he is doing, is one thing; doing it yourself without the correct equipment is another.  But still I have six grafts: five on apple trees and one on a pear for I had taken a quince cutting and read somewhere that pears are grown on quince root stocks - so why not vice versa?

Anyway the whole exercise was an experiment, a bit of fun.  I am not overly worried if they grow or not.  For good measure I brought home a quince sucker and that should grow and if it doesn’t produce quinces at some future date I had always graft pears on to it.

It has been so wet that I haven’t had a chance to get on with this grafting job and my cuttings have sat embedded respectively in an apple and a quince since leaving the Mill last Sunday.  At least one had expired, or maybe it was dead before I started; so when the sun came out yesterday I hurried outside to do the job.

Of course I had no suitable grafting goo with which you protect the graft after you have made it.  So I used the first thing that came to hand which was Polycell flexible and waterproof filler, specially for bathrooms.  Apart from being white rather than black it has exactly the same rubbery, gooey look of the stuff in the YouTube film.  It can’t be poisonous, can it? if you use it in bathrooms?  Anyway we shall see come the spring.

An Apple Graft - Perhaps Not a Good One

I blame Rosie for my enthusiasm, plus a restless desire to experiment inherited from long hours alone and unsupervised as a child.  I once tried making cider but found, as you do, that it is remarkably hard to extract juice from an apple unless you first cut it into small pieces, which is hard  unless you have some sort of mechanical device like a great stone wheel in a trough and a horse to pull it.

I must have been about twelve.  Cutting the apples with a knife was boring.  But then I had the wonderful idea of simply squashing the apples that had already fermented and gone brown of which there were a great many in the apple store. What I produced looked like rough cider in every way.  It even tasted like a species of cider.  But it was of course undrinkable, being acid to a degree.

Down in the Cantal they produce with their mountain of apples something that looks very similar to my effort - a muddy, grey, brown brew which tastes infinitely better than it looks and is served in plastic juice bottles at one euro a litre.  They give you a wrap of roasted chestnuts with it as well at no extra cost - chestnuts being another commodity of which nature has delivered an abundance.  The cider isn’t particularly alcoholic and at the little cider festival we attended the hardened drinkers at the bar were all drinking beer.  But you don’t want anything to make you legless when you are sitting out in the sun enjoying the scenery, do you.

The real trouble with going to France of course is that I put on weight at the rate of a quarter of a pound a day.  I have more appetite than at home and of course the food is better.  On this recent holiday I had the best trout I had ever tasted at a little hotel not far from Maurs.  Outside, in the sunshine, stood a tumbrel, looking as though it had just conveyed Marie Antoinette to the guillotine.  Inside the trout were cooking, or maybe even being caught for the hotel Patronne said she kept the fish in a pond. Certainly, they tasted fresher than daisies.  Whether they had been grilled, baked, or deep fried, I wasn’t sure, but anyway they came covered with garlic and cooked to perfection.

I asked the Patronne how she made the loose bones crumble and melt, but she wasn’t telling.  ‘It’s an old Auvergnat recipe.’ she said, smiling mysteriously.

Anyway, whatever she did I don’t think it involved apples.  If my grafts take we shall have here at least some of the dozen or more varieties of apple at the Mill.  And maybe even a Quince too.  We shall need to wait for spring for a result.

D'ARTAGNAN AND THE AUTUMN COLOURS

D'Artagnan's Birthplace near Lupiac (Gers)

'J'adore' said Caro waving her arms, 'les couleurs d'automne.'   We were sitting at table in her great and almost medieval hall, restored to great beauty and perfection and which doubles (or triples or quadruples) as kitchen, dining room, living room and study, all in one elegant space.

We had in fact just come in from the west facing balcony beyond which the sun had set far away over the misty hills leaving the sky filled with the same golden autumn colours as the leaves that tumbled all around.  Even the champagne seemed to take on an autumn hue.

Caro was by now stirring the most wonderful soup.  'It's a universal phrase', she said. 'Whenever you are in difficulty, or don't understand something, you can always reply - with suitable gestures - that you simply love the autumn colours.'  As always, I thought,  the phrase seems to lose something in translation.

Well, there we were. We had just arrived that very afternoon from the grey cloudiness of Britain into the warm autumn sunshine of the Cantal - somewhere, incidentally, that is a little larger than Norfolk but with only 149,000 people, despite having its own respectable ski resort at Le Lioran and being only a couple of fast hours driving from the Mediterranean.  Moreover, the Departemental capital, Aurilliac, even has more sun than Toulouse, according to the weather statistics.  Despite this, the Cantal ranks with the Creuse and the Lozère as one of the three most depopulated French Departements. 

And it was once English around six hundred years ago.  That anyway was the point I hesitantly put to Den who is Caro's other half. (The two of them together are a walking encyclopaedia).  In the boom years for the English Raj in France, after Henry V had done the business at Agincourt.

There's a castle just down the road - just a ruin now - that changed hands, amicably, too, according to Den, with one side marching out and the other side marching in.  But whether it was the French who were quitting or the English, Den didn't know.  For certainly it didn't remain English very long and in a few short years during the disastrous reign of the mad Henry VI all English France was lost (apart from Calais).  The hundred years war won, only promptly to be lost and the loss then triggering the Wars of the Roses.

What you learn from Shakespeare and Phillipa Gregory!  Whose latest fiction 'The Lady of the Rivers' is, to my mind, a great read, particularly if you have Wikipedia beside you.  The book is a fictional life of Jacquetta of Luxembourg, Mother of Elizabeth Woodville ('The White Queen') and great-grand-mother of Henry VIII. 

For some reason Den and Caro advise me also to enter the realm of historical fiction, cutting my teeth, as it were, by translating Alexandre Dumas' novel, 'The Three Musketeers,'  which was last translated into English, apparently, 150 years ago and therefore needs reworking for our text speak age.   I have always counted this a wild project but something seems to be telling me it isn't.

You see we visited my other sister, during this stay, who also lives down in the Gers in south west France (where it is not so sunny as in the Cantal).  In fact it rained on only the second day we were there.

'I know,' Sarah said brightly. 'Why don't you go off and visit the D'Artagnan Museum, it's only ten minutes away in Lupiac.'  And so we did.

D'Artagnan must be one of the few people in history to be more famous for his fictional exploits than his real ones.  But yes, he was the Captain General of the King's Musketeers and he did arrest and guard the rogue Finance Minister, Nicolas Fouquet - who some think was the man behind, or rather inside, the Iron Mask, and he did die at the siege of Maastricht in course of a rather unnecessary bit of heroics.  And yes, he was born in a little manor house just outside Lupiac, though sadly this is now privately owned.

The Lupiac museum is in a chapel in the town and is full of film posters and book editions.  The audio commentary is a bit hit or miss, switching alarmingly from one subject to the next.  But still worth seeing on a wet afternoon.  I now have background should the translation ever get off the ground.

Nor was this the last time I met him. For it seems the man is ubiquitous. Opening the Spectator on returning home, I see a picture of Milla Jovovich dressed as Milady de Winter.  Yes, yet another remake of The Three Musketeers is out and showing at cinemas nationwide. This time it includes airships.  Deborah Ross' review is scathing: 'All for one, one for all, but, mostly, one to skip.'

I do wonder whether the world really needs a new translation, with or without airships.  'J'adore les couleurs d'automne,' as D"Artagnan might himself have said pensively.

HYDRAULIC EXPERIMENTS

A Happy Theo and Sand Castle Building Bucket

You know it is autumn, don’t you, when you come out of your front door, or through a garden gate, and blunder straight into a spider’s web.  It only seems to happen at this time of the year and both spiders and webs seem different to those you find at other times.  The webs are finer and only catch the light when it reflects obliquely off their gossamer threads  They look like proper spider’s webs too - as though designed in some Disney studio - and the spiders are brown and camouflaged, not black.

Our grandson Theo, now past two and a half, has a mortal fear not of spiders but of their webs and spots little threads here there and everywhere that have to be removed before he will venture anywhere near.  This can make progress around the garden - or even parts of the home - rather slow.

What he does like are the adventures of Shaun the Sheep, one of Aardman’s comic creations for children.  In one episode Shaun is dancing an Irish jig on top of a washing machine for a reason that need not detain us here. Theo is fascinated and has been attempting to emulate Shaun on top of the ottoman.  To encourage him I showed him a video clip of Riverdance.  Michael Flatley would be a revelation, I thought, and so much more agile than me.   Alas not so.  Young Theo prefers the plasticine sheep while I have become, unlikely as it may seem, a teacher of Irish dancing.  It must be my grandmother’s genes.

The Indian summer has been so beautiful that when I took Theo to the beach yesterday the atmosphere was quite Mediterranean.  The same dry wind, warm light, and featherdown softness to the air, not however set against the parched pines, sand dunes and purple hills of the south of France, but against a peculiarly British backdrop of grassy hills in a new flush of greenery and the magnificent autumn colours of oak and ash leaves.

The sun hangs low now, even in the afternoon, which makes it seem as though this were the evening and we would be shortly returning for a later supper rather than a five o’clock tea.  All most confusing.  Not that it bothered Theo who engaged himself in numerous hydraulic experiments around sandcastles and the power of the incoming tide. Unfortunately, they are lost to posterity for I left my camera at home.

Watching the waves crashing on the rocks and the tide racing up the channel I cannot help wondering why the powers that be stick turbines in the thin air on the tops of our moorlands, where from time to time they stand idle and becalmed and even when the wind is blowing don’t generate much electricity anyway.   Why not put the turbines in the sea? Obviously not the same turbines, but the tide in this channel is heavy and fierce and above all predictable. A few marine turbines could generate more renewable energy than all the white stalked monsters that disfigure our landscape. And, would do so invisibly, too.

The hot weather also means that we haven’t yet had a chance to experiment properly with the new heating system, kindly installed by British Gas recently.  In addition to the central heating we have an open fire in the sitting room which we have never used much because the room promptly fills with smoke.

When we were in Gascony last week my sister told me of the various stratagems she had employed to stop her big open kitchen fire from smoking.  The answer, it seemed, was to eschew grates and large logs and instead to build the fire directly on the floor. Our fireplace is a minnow compared to her great whale of a beast but the idea seemed worth trying and two friends invited for dinner provided a reasonable excuse to despatch the grate and light a fire directly against the fireback.  And yes, it worked.

The papers are full of the collapsing euro and how lucky we are not to have joined the single currency, but I am not sure if this isn’t a question of beams and motes.  Buying euros for our trip I couldn’t help noticing that the external value of sterling has declined by over 20 per cent since the euro’s launch, while our level of inflation is running at twice that of countries like France and Germany.  Personally I’d rather we were in the euro than out of it - it would make Gascony a lot cheaper for one thing -  but the indignity is that whereas once we would have been welcomed with open arms, now we should need a very long period indeed to get ourselves back to that position.  This doesn’t seem like making the right decision (to stay out) to me.

VISIT TO GASCONY

The House

When we stepped out on the tarmac at Toulouse, the heat almost knocked us backwards.  I had dressed as for a damp, autumnal weekend in Wales, my bag filled with warm clothing suddenly it seemed ‘de trop.’

A text arrived from my sister: she had, like some Carthaginian general, just ‘entered’ Toulouse and would arrive shortly.  I collected some euros from the dispenser - in my experience, the cheapest way of buying small amounts of currency - and sat down to wait.  The airport is thankfully well-air conditioned.

Soon we were bowling along country roads, west and south towards the afternoon sun and, as the roads became narrower and the turnings off more frequent, finally arrived at our destination, a journey of nearly 1000 miles accomplished between a late breakfast and an early tea.

Compare this with the mid-eighteenth century when Talleyrand was journeying from Perigord to Paris on the Bordeaux stage coach.  In his memoirs he says the journey took 17 days - but as this works out at a travelling speed of only 4 miles an hour - it seems unlikely.  No doubt it seemed like 17 days though; the EasyJet flight seemed like 17 hours at times.

The Upstairs Gallery running from the back of the house to the front

My sister lives in a French country house of infinite charm and beauty. But the house is a work in progress, indeed has been a work in progress for the last four hundred years. It has grown like topsy from a small farmhouse to resemble the enormous pile of the Mas Lunel, depicted in Rose Tremain’s novel ‘Trespass.’  And of course as soon as one bit is done up another bit falls down.

In the days when it was built people hadn’t heard of bathrooms. Even the Palace of Versailles wasn’t built with bathrooms and guests answered calls of nature in any convenient cupboard or landing.  With luck the servants might clean up.  So getting to the state rooms entailed the negotiation of what was in effect an indoor farmyard.

This being the twentieth century, my sister’s house of course does have a bathroom but the previous owner (who only used the house in the summer), built the bathroom in an annex on the far side of the barn through which - in an echo of Versailles - it is now necessary to traipse avoiding the detritus from pigeons above your head and ducks around your feet.

Lucky it wasn’t winter, I thought to myself, when the snow apparently blows in through the roof tiles and lies thick inside.  Still plans are afoot to change all this.  And if not, well, they say suffering is good for the soul.

But sitting outside in the September sunshine, with the poultry happily milling about, with four pigs in the wood (carefully named Ham, Pork, Bacon and Sausages, lest anyone become too fond of them) and a pair of cows in the meadow (named less carefully Daisy and Bubble though they too are destined for the freezer at some point), I feel only the warmth on my face and bucolic bliss hanging like the famous gardens of Babylon about me.

This is Gascony and Gascony is famous for being a place where you eat largely and well. The kitchen is big enough to take a table for twelve and we were nine when we sat down to lunch on Saturday, the guest of honour being a retired Brussels interpreter with a fund of amusing anecdotes about language.

The Kitchen

Later he told me there was a statue in the next village of Tossaint Louverture, the former Domincan slave who first led one of the few successful slave revolts in history and later became a general in Napoleon’s army.  We went to see it.  History oozes from the villages of France as from the pores of a wet sponge.

On our way there or perhaps to somewhere else, we met the old woman to whom my sister takes her excess of ducks, which breed in the Gascon sunshine with astonishing rapidity and nest in the trees.  She charges 2 euros a duck to do all the nasty work of killing, drawing, feathering etc and even has a little stun machine so that the duck doesn’t know what is happening until it finds itself full of sage and onion.

She asked me, in a broad midi-accent, whether ‘I was in France?’  I think she meant did I live in France, but for some reason I could only answer her literally.  So I told her I really didn’t know; it could be Bulgaria. 

It wasn’t very funny then - indeed it was incomprehensible, neither she nor my sister knew what I was talking about - and it seems even less funny still when written down.  Bear with me.

And then, hardly before we had arrived we were off again and whizzing home where, inevitably, it was pouring with rain.

 

A METAPHYSICAL SANDWICH

As it was a special day, an anniversary, I put my red gilet over my scarlet pullover and sauntered out into the sunshine for my daily ten minute circumnavigation of the neighbourhood.  It's my usual prelude to starting work.  Immediately, an old man in a white sun hat hailed me.  I see this man frequently, usually with a long train of Yorkshire terrier behind him.  He pointed to the sun.

To be fair it was visible, which has not been the case for quite a time.  I like to think that as the day was special it had decided to put in an appearance, as a young lad might saunter into the back of a catering tent in the hope of picking up a cream bun.  It sat there smiling against the blue autumnal sky.

"Is this summer?" my man asked to no-one in particular.  The Yorkie having no answer proceeded to water a pile of fallen leaves on the pavement. The fallen leaves suggested a negative answer. I felt I should hedge my bets. "You never know," I said.

It wasn't exactly a witty discourse.  We both must think of something more original to say.  But it's not always easy at that time of the morning when I would be quite content not to speak to anyone. Some enterprising soul could perhaps make a name by producing a phrase book which gave people a set of handy opening gambits and suitable responses. 

I was thinking of this when later this fine day I was sitting on the bench at the top of the Tump looking out over the flat land that stretches to the sea, beyond which rise the hills of Exmoor.  Above these in turn a line of white clouds floated.

One of those days when you could see everything, when the light is crystal clear - Porlock, Minehead - hard to believe they are further away from me than Calais is from Dover.

The Tump is a copse, I suppose. Beech trees this side, sycamores and chestnuts the other. None very old - a hundred years perhaps at the most.  The leaves are already turning.  As I come up here almost every other day I ask myself when did this happen?  But then autumn comes upon you sneakily, don't you find? I mean as someone said once: one week you are pottering in the garden until nine o'clock and the next it's dark at seven.  One week the leaves are pristine and green, the next they are shrivelled and brown and being shredded in the breeze.

Who planted these trees and why? My guess is there have always been trees here for thousands and thousands of years. A sacred place, a mystical place a junction of Neolithic tracks.  A place to get ones bearing and to eat ones sandwiches - which presumably the Neolithic people ate, too.  Bread and autumn jam and perhaps even butter too.  Not much changes in the basic culinary world. 

As I sit on the bench, still in my scarlet gilet, I eat my own metaphorical sandwich which turns out to be not so much metaphorical as metaphysical.  I am struck with the thought that there seems to be a lot more going on in my mind that is observed by my consciousness and, what's more, the window provided by this consciousness seems to be getting smaller all the time.

It's been a troubling time lately: there's been a death in the family and a lot of stress.  I can consciously feel this stress; I know it is there. If my consciousness were wider I might indeed see it.  Or so I think.

Years ago I could listen to the radio and read the newspaper, but now I can only do one or the other - my consciousness isn't wide enough to embrace both.  And then there's the supernatural - always strong in a place like this, which my consciousness, limited as it is,  can't grasp at all. Yet I can sense this is exactly the sort of place to set pendulums swinging; where you might find a ghost of some fine member of the fairy folk flitting in and out of the beech trees in the gloaming.  Where a rainbow might end and where you might bury your own crock of gold.

There is much we don't see - or some of us don't see.  The mayor told me she once saw a whole group of men dressed in eighteenth century clothes crossing the road, not so far away.  She stopped the car for them to cross, believing them to be actors out for a night's pantomime.  But then they just vanished.  Boom!  There are more things in heaven and earth than are told of in your philosophy, Horatio.

The picture shows the north (inland) side of the Tump.  You'd need to look to your right from where the photographer is taking the picture to see the sea.  He seems more interested in the communications masts.  But you can see also the old Neolithic trackway which continues in a straight line almost to Port Talbot in one direction and Llantrithyd in the other.  I fear the communications masts with their high energy radiations would drive away any passing fairy folk.

WALKING TO MOSCOW

Grave of Jacques Danois at Varengeville

On one of the graves lay a bouquet of fresh flowers, carnations mainly, still in their florists’ wrapping of cellophane.  The card gave the sender’s name as ‘La Légion d’Honneur,’ the French order established by Napoleon in 1802 and still extant, at which time the man inside the tomb would still have been a young man of twenty-two.

He is now a ‘Chevalier’- the lowest rank of the order but still reflecting great merit and he died, so the inscription said, on 20 August.  The flowers had no doubt been left that day as they would have been left most years since Jacques Antoine Danois succumbed to the ravages of time back in 1857. In 154 years that is quite a lot of carnations.

We were in the graveyard of the church at Varengeville-sur-Mer, a sturdy medieval edifice at the edge  of the gigantic line of limestone cliffs that forms the coast of northern Normandy.  The cliffs are unstable, so we are told, and are eroding at the rate of a metre a year. By the 200th anniversary of his death, therefore, Danois may have fallen into the sea, taking his carnations with him.

He wouldn’t fall alone either for a great many other respectable folk are buried in this graveyard, including the painter, Georges Braque.  Indeed, there are so many painters, poets, musicians, writers, soldiers here that the place is beginning to resemble a mini Piere La Chaise, the great Parisian cemetery of the famous. All it lacks is some idol of the modern age, consumed by excess at some pitifully early age.

Danois certainly didn’t die young, though it was hardly for want of trying. In fact he was 77 before he finally packed it all in.  Which considering that he walked all the way to Moscow in the heat and disease of a Russian summer and then all the way back again in the cold and starvation of the Russian winter, is surprising.  Not only that but he hacked his way as an infantry man through many of Napoleon’s greatest victories as well as some of the awful stand-offs and defeats like Borodino and Leipzig. By rights he should have been dead many times over, sliced in two by a cavalry sabre or blown to pieces by an artillery piece, starved or drowned or frozen or diseased.

But somehow he cheated death for 14 years after which he appears to had enough of the business of laying waste to Prussia, Austria and Russia.  No doubt he thought that he had tempted fate enough. Having finally been raised to the rank of sub-lieutenant and granted everlasting status as a ‘Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur,’ he packed it in and became, because I suppose he had to do something, a tax inspector, back in Varengeville, his home town.

How very French, I thought, looking down at the tomb. I don’t suppose that in Britain even the Duke of Wellington still gets flowers on his anniversary.  If he does, I don’t know of it.

But what I really struggle to comprehend, standing there in the sunshine with the blue sea beyond,  is the idea of walking to Moscow, carrying your tent and belongings, firearm, cartridges, clean underwear and sandwiches with you.   The distance - to Moscow and back to Paris - is over 3,000 miles.  That’s like walking from Land’s End to John o’ Groats five times back to back.

Today if you walked from Paris to Moscow, even in relative comfort putting up in bed and breakfasts and with sufficient money to eat a decent cooked meal once a day, you would become a minor celebrity and be invited to appear on Big Brother.  Channel 4 might even give you a documentary.  But to do it as a soldier?  Imagine the number of times his boots must have needed repairing! Incredible!   Danois deserves his flowers, I thought, as I took his picture.  He’s the sort of thing I listen too on Radio 4 while printing labels, but brought to life here and weirder than fiction.

This bank holiday escape from printing and labels to an old university friend in Le Havre continued to Veules-sur-Mer, the next town along the coast and home to the shortest fleuve in all France - all 1,194 metres of it.  (Une fleuve flows into the sea, whereas une rivière flows into a fleuve, my friends tell me).  In this short one kilometre length, engineers managed to build five water mills though only four remain today, none of which are working. To build five mills in a kilometre of river seems almost as incredible as walking to Moscow, if you ask me.

Of course, I may have been dreaming.  For we passed a Statue of Liberty in the middle of a roundabout at Ourville-en-Caux  It was painted sky blue.  Somehow it seemed more improbable still.

Blue Statue of Liberty at Ourville

REVOLVING HEELS

I discovered the other day that the man who began the company that became Norwich Union Insurance - and later Aviva - developed an idea for shoes with revolving heels.

Or maybe they were boots with revolving heels. I’m not sure. Anyway I gather the idea didn’t catch on, though I am not sure why. Heels are always the most vulnerable part of the shoe and if the heel could rotate, well it might wear down evenly across its surface, though eventually, presumably, leaving a protruding pin in the middle of the heel which might do serious damage to a polished floor.

Since those very early days I’m not sure that any more work has been done on heels though a cobbler could perhaps rapidly put me right on that. Whether work has or hasn’t been done, heels still seem to wear down apace and that is without any serious walking.

And when I think of serious walking I think not of people in boots with trousers tucked into their socks, striding upwards over the Brecon Beacons, but of William Gladstone who thought nothing of a twelve mile hike from Chester to Hawarden carrying a suitcase or more probably one of those large bags that bear his name. His shoes must have worn out quickly and I suppose the cobbling trade in those parts must have been profitable.

Three or four times a week I trudge up the local hill above the town here in pursuit of exercise and it is on such treks that my brain, let off its humdrum leash, begins to rehearse such thoughts. Are they valuable? I don’t know. They seem to be the counterpoint to the ‘useless’ knowledge that schools used to try to drum into the heads of sixth formers whose minds were otherwise engaged with ‘A’ levels and university entrance papers. The phrase ‘Useless Knowledge’ (or something very similar) figures prominently in Alan Bennett’s play ‘The History Boys.’

Is 'Useless Knowledge' - useful? After all, it seems to be a question that many people in and out of education have spent a long time worrying about. The fact that you can’t define useless or useful seems no hindrance to the debate. Nor in fact does the fact that the useful versus useless dimension is but one aspect of the question. I’d prefer to pose the question: is useless knowledge fun? Does it contribute to human happiness? That seems a more relevant line to debate.

Had I been a cobbler I could perhaps have written a technical blog about mending heels, which I doubt would have interested anyone outside the cobbling fraternity; and I would look silly learning about such technical aspects and trying to regurgitate them if I weren’t a cobbler. But anyone can write about revolving heels and can imagine the eccentricities of direction they might imply. That seems infinitely more fun and in these days of economic drift - someone suggested we might be in this mess for the next twenty years - fun is perhaps all we have left.

THEATRE THOUGHTS

Some of you may know that I adapted (with her very kind permission) one of Rose Tremain’s award winning radio plays recently and we put Temporary Shelter on the stage here at our little theatre in July.

I am pleased to say that it was a success. We had full or almost full houses and the feedback was excellent. For that credit must go to the original author who created a great show. Nevertheless, the amount of work that went into the adaptation was considerable, writing and re-writing lines and juggling their positions (is it better if he says this before she says that?) Moreover, moving from a radio to a stage show involved creating a whole complex choreography.

Even after the play had been performed I knew I would have to do another re-write: certain things work in performance and other bits don’t. When you hear lines spoken and actions acted, you look at what you’ve written anew. So you polish and improve - or anyway try to. At least I do

The Drama Committee have now asked if I would do another Rose Tremain adaptation next summer and I have been giving some thought to this. All depends on finding something suitable and.......she giving her permission.

The work that kept bouncing before my eyes was ‘Restoration’ perhaps her best known novel which won a variety of prizes when it first appeared in 1989 and was short-listed for the Booker prize. Restoration is a wonderfully creative and inventive novel - a theatrical creation if ever there was one. I knew it had been made into a film....but a play?

All the same as I turned it over in my mind, wondering how I might put this scene on the stage, or that; mulling over what characters I would need, how the action might divide into acts....and so on. I realised it would be difficult with our small and ageing group of actors and the limited resources of our stage and theatre. (The novel embraces a mental institution and the Great Fire of London - but, what ho! - playwrights like a challenge!). I had inner doubts (was I being wise even to think about it?) but, floating in my brain, remained a burning desire to try.

Part of the reason, I knew, was my feeling for (and indeed identification with) Merivel, the seventeenth century physician and fop, who is the main protagonist of the novel. For in many incidental details - to do with our mothers, our education, our early professional lives, the parallels between this literary creation and myself, despite three intervening centuries, seem uncanny.

I won’t go into all that here now but let me give you another, which I have only just realised. The surname I use as a nom de plume is Somerville - you will see that word has Merivel embedded in it, and practically in plain, too; while my email address - fensomerville (@hotmail etc) - is an anagram of ‘Lens of Merivel.’ (The Fens also happen to be where Merivel is exiled). Is this serendipity or what?

Of course, all this means nothing at all. It is pure coincidence and would not lead me to write a better or a worse play. All the same it is interesting don’t you think? Besides I know I am not in any way really the same character as Merivel. I cannot, for instance, as he can, fart at will. Not that I have seriously ever wanted to, you understand.

Still I learned yesterday that Restoration has in fact already been adapted for the stage, and professionally too - so probably a lot better than I would ever be able to do it. So that avenue is closed. At first this disappointed me - but then I knew I was relieved. A great burden of making elegant bricks without much in the way of straw had been taken from my shoulders. Thank you Francis Matthews and the Salisbury Playhouse

Old Merivel, however, refuses to go away. He is sitting in the back of my mind having sneaky ideas. Farting, too, probably.

Picture shows the Chapel at Peterhouse, Cambridge, a building familiar both to Merivel and Me

THE HOUSE WHERE THEY PROMOTED DISQUE BLEU

The imagination plays tricks, does it not? There is more going on inside the brain than is dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio! Even inside a tired old box of grey matter like mine.

My sister has been married forty-years and her children had kindly organised a surprise party for her to take place in what is now the family home of her eldest daughter. We were invited too and last week we stayed chez our eldest daughter in Frome en route across England to the fastness of East Anglia. Sleeping on the sofa bed I dreamed a dream of being taken in a bouncy small bronze-coloured car to see the place 'where they promoted Disque Bleu' - that being a brand of French cigarette common about forty years ago. Why I was being taken there I was not told: dreams don't always provide much by way of explanation.

So there I was sitting on the leather back seat of this car while in front rode a man and a woman with thick black hair. We drove down an avenue lined with plane trees, the sun shining and hot, the road dusty and eventually we came past a tall red brick house at the end of a row. It looked like the house of some mid-nineteenth century industrialist, imposing but in a rather grim sort of a way, with a great bay window and next to it a forbidding black front door towering above broad stone steps.

Although mainly built of brick, and therefore red, the architect had specified stone facings and mullions for the windows. At some point it had also been divided into two - 'the place where they promoted Disque Bleu' being thus semi-detached. Only one half of the house thus boasted a confectionery of advertising slogans, none, this being the modern age, had anything to do with tobacco.

Le voilà shouted my companions as we sped past looking now for somewhere to park; but I knew as soon as I had seen the house that I had been there long before. I had visited this very house. I could describe to you what lay beyond those stone steps and forbidding front door; what you could see inside that bay window.

I knew that the interior, as that of so many French houses of the period, would be dark and gloomy and smelling of that mixture of garlic, coffee and black tobacco so typical of France. Inside the room with the bay window, a large enough ‘salle de jour’ incidentally, was, and perhaps would still be, a café-style bar taking up much of the space. Someone had tried to reproduce a café in this front room.

When I had been there before I’d taken a beer and sat down on one of the nondescript chairs at a small table and lit a cigarette: Disque Bleu in all probability for it had been at the time that everyone smoked. I remember no other visitors, the bar had been empty except for the gruff man with an apron who had poured me my beer and who appeared to be ‘le patron.’

I had been there some minutes when from somewhere in the interior arrived a sharp-suited fellow with a little attaché case. He too had been smoking and he talked fast and quickly to the ‘patron,’ occasionally looking round and lowering his voice as though he were discussing business of a kind that visitors shouldn’t hear. He drank pastis, I seem to remember, and wore a Trilby, and looked like a cross between Humphrey Bogart and Jean-Louis Tritignant.

Someone even then had told me then that this was the house from which the entire marketing operation for the cigarette company was run - it seemed unlikely, but looking round the walls I could see faded photographs and certificates that looked, I supposed like those you might expect to find in some under used board room, faded photographs and the odd curling and yellowed certificate. Perhaps I had arrived in the town and someone had said I could buy a drink there and I suppose I had gone in the hope, if not the expectation, of some largesse of cigarettes. But none was to be forthcoming. I left and forgot the episode. Maybe I had been about eighteen or twenty at the time.

But now the memory came back with a start as the driver found a parking slot and skidded the car deftly into it. I got out. The man and woman talked animatedly, but not to me, but I followed them back down the hot and empty road with the light dust blowing on the wind. Looking up, I saw a paper sign high on a gable end, black and white. It read LOT . I wondered if that was where we were. But the letters might simply have been the first three or the last three letters of a longer word. I didn't know and it didn't seem to matter.

And I was never to learn either. For at that point I woke up.

Now I was back in England and time had rolled forward to the present. We were off to my niece's house in Suffolk which had once belonged to my brother-in-law's parents. I had, it is true, once been there briefly during the time it had been left unoccupied and semi-derelict, its steps and terraces overgrown with weeds, its timbers ravaged by rot; That had been perhaps about twenty years before. I had forgotten completely what it looked like other than we approached it via an avenue of trees. Still this is an imposing house. Built around 1850 - the same age as my French house - and it is built of red brick. Moreover the mullions around the windows are stone and there are steps up to the door.

But if my conscious brain had forgotten this house, my unconscious brain clearly hadn't. Indeed, it had remembered it on cue and bolted it into my dream. I was even being driven, too, for younger daughter, who has dark brown hair, was driving. It is all uncanny and spooky. But who was the fellow in the Trilby that looked like a cross between Humphrey Bogart and Jean-Louis Tritignant? And where is the woman with the thick black hair?