FRIDAY STAIRS

Every Friday, just in time for elevenses, my day brightens when I hear the Spectator magazine plopping through my letterbox to land on my doormat with a rustling thud. Quickly, I rush downstairs to meet it.

Like most periodicals these days the Spectator comes with a full compliment of high-end advertising material wrapped up in an irritating plastic bag. Having no money for cars or jewellery, no figure for the couture and frankly no inclination to travel to exotic destinations, the glossy leaflets make a swift exit towards the recycling bin. I try to lead a sustainable life.

The magazine itself is a different matter. I embrace it eagerly and creep up the stairs to my office with a newly-made mug of Yorkshire tea, hoping to be spared the plangent jangle of the telephone for the next quarter of an hour.

If this sounds as though I am enjoying something illicit, well that is correct. The Spectator, friends tell me warningly, lurks deep on the right of the political spectrum. It is true that some of its readers probably wish for a return to some Hercule Poirot world of the 1930s when anyone not born in Britain was classed as alien. But that’s the readers, not the writers.

It is also true that some of the magazine’s opinions irk. I come from a respectable Liberal background. My mother used to tell anyone who cared to listen that she was a teller for the Liberals in General Elections, with an authority that made this lowly office seem as elevated as cabinet rank. My sister became a local Liberal councillor. I still pay my subscription and receive regular, if these days unheeded, summons to by-elections.

I wonder though if I am not drifting rightwards with age. Is this why I read the Spectator? I now get impatient with bureaucracy and am annoyed at the fecklessness of so many who should know better. I am Irritated by our present day ‘blame culture’ in which no one seems to want to show any personal initiative or shoulder any responsibility.

I am driven mad by the Kafka-esque excesses of Health and Safety which make teachers (apparently) wear goggles if they need to affix a notice using drawing pins. And when the little wooden cylinders that we blood donors used to twiddle when donating are taken away on the grounds that they might harbour germs.

Being a simple and independent soul running the smallest of small businesses, I view the burgeoning myriad of quangos and regulatory bodies and the committee management needed to co-ordinate and sustain their work, with the greatest suspicion. I ask how can we possibly afford for every decision to be made and documented in accordance with rules devised by someone else? Best practice has not only become unaffordable, it has stifled good practice. We are actually going backwards and as taxpayers we are paying through the nose for it. So anyway it seems.

But back to my office at the head of the stairs and the tea and the magazine, which I am already leafing through for the cartoons. For I haven’t come to love the Spectator for its politics but for its cartoons, its quirky blogs on life (Low Life, Real Life, High Life, Slow Life) its book reviews and its jarring articles by Rod Liddle who has a unique way of arguing a case which leaves me scratching my head and wondering seriously about my own opinions. And that’s good.

Mind you, I haven’t always loved the paper in this way. My present desire is only the culmination of a three year courtship. When it first arrived - I am not sure that I didn’t gullibly sign up to the flattering blandishment of a free subscription one sunny and carefree day and then couldn’t summon up the effort to cancel the direct debits - the paper would sometimes lie unopened and unread on top of the filing cabinets until thrown away in a clear out weeks later. It was only gradually, almost with reluctance, that I started to read bits here and there.

I suspect Matthew Parris may have been responsible, a writer whom I always read faithfully in the more mainstream ‘Times’ and whose style I admire. He writes fortnightly in the Spectator and is always thought provoking, interesting, humane.

Bit by bit I have come to love these quirky challenges to my intellectual and political perspective. Today I can’t say I read it all for some of the heavier political articles seem to me just ill thought out, even silly. There is so much grinding of political axes that you cannot see the ironwork for the sparks. But that doesn’t matter if you are prepared to take the rough with the smooth and to look forward to an interesting thud on your door mat each Friday, secreting yourself away for a moment at the top of the stairs.

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.

SURROUNDED BY BUTTERCUPS

I am lying in the meadow surrounded by buttercups, In my supine position underneath the walnut tree they are now taller than I am. The strong sunshine of late May filters through its young leaves, dappling the grass and the wild flowers. I have taken my top off and chew idly on a long stem of grass, enjoying the sweetness. The sunlight warms my back just as the grass scratches my front. Close by I hear the Mill stream which babbles and tumbles beneath the deep green branches of a medlar tree, now covered with spring blossoms, each like a Tudor Rose.

It’s ready for cutting this field: to make hay for the winter. I say field but it’s more the size of a small paddock - or even a great lawn. Tear-shaped, it is hemmed in on two sides by the curve of the busy stream and on the other by the tree-lined track along which the mules, the only animals strong enough for these hills, used to plod with their cargoes of flour and walnuts for grinding in the Mill. No doubt the animals would enjoy a momentary rest in this paddock before the return journey, munching the same grass as I am munching now.



I am reminded of revising for my ‘A’ levels in just such dappled sunlight, lying semi-naked under a weeping ash. I am no longer revising for my exams, of course, though I am still trying to commit words to memory. Before me lies the play text of ‘Art,’ and I am learning my part. But my memory, once sharp, is now dull. Over and over I go, but to little effect.

Idly I count the wildflower species. I make it ten - that is ten that are actually flowering with something that is recognisably a flower. Biggest are the penny moon daisies, but then come the campion, coltsfoot, dead nettle, white and purple clover, dandelion, ladies mantle and of course the buttercups. Deep in the grass the little speedwell nestles, flecking the green tangle with a fairy dust of blue.

The fauna is there as well. No sooner am I settled but a spider crawls across my page - going where I want to ask him? A bee, of some indistinct family, buzzes around the buttercups, followed at a safe distance by an equally indeterminate species of fly. Is the fly cleaning up, I wonder, after the bee? Above me, I note a hover fly in hover mode. It appears to be watching me, but when it sees me looking it zigs away, backwards. Forwards, backwards - if you are a hover fly I don’t suppose it makes much difference.

Now, here comes a butterfly. It is of medium size, orange with many brown spots, almost too perfect to be anything but a man-made Chinese creation. It flutters about elegantly from flower to flower, slowly and without effort. Some species of fritillary, I suppose. If it has noted my presence in its field it has not shown any sign.

The crickets hunt me too. Across the field their endless rhythmic chirping creates a comforting ambiance. One can never feel lonely in a field of crickets. But they do have a habit of edging closer and as I persist with my futile line learning I can hear one somewhere near my feet, or so I judge. It sounds horribly loud and like a lawnmower.

I glare angrily, for he is disturbing my concentration. He quietens, but starts again as soon as I turn back to my book. He must be watching me, this cricket. No doubt there are birds watching him, or trying to. But if so I don’t see any. In this forested country, we hear a constant distant twitter of birdsong, but they are wary creatures. Too many guns, I suppose. Only the big flecked buzzards show themselves clearly as they wheel in the high sky, riding on the thermals that rise up the sun-warmed rocks.

All afternoon I have been collecting wood with the tractor. It’s a heavy task, sawing down the young shallow-rooted oaks killed by the heat wave of three years ago and bringing them back to the Mill’s great barn for firewood. Besides oak we pull chestnut, hazel and alder trees out of the river or from where the winter’s floods have left them high on the river bank. We fill the tractor’s box - it must hold about a ton - and then drive home again the tractor lurching and rolling on the uneven ground.

It’s a muscle-aching task and perhaps that’s why I want only to lie somnolent on this grass with the late afternoon sun warming my back and the cuckoo calling gently in the woods, dreaming of the herby pastis I took this elevenses instead of coffee, or the glass of chilled rosé from the slopes of Provence that I shall have shortly on the terrace, when the sun goes in.

These days there's no trouble at t'Mill!

CAERPHILLY AND THE SLEEPING HABITS OF THE FRENCH

Stung out of my blogging laziness by Jane who is blogging on roller-coasters somewhere in the exotic Florida never-never land even as I speak, I can only tell you that I have boringly spent a deprived day in that mecca of the wilderness otherwise known as Llandrindod Wells: you know where you have to exit the hotel to find a two bar mobile phone signal and where, some years ago, I was reliably informed, by no lesser authority than the Mayor, that tourists flocked because nothing ever happened there after 7pm and therefore that they could go early to bed safe in the comforting knowledge that they would not be disturbed.

It was, yet again, the machinations of UNESCO that drew me to those parts: we have members in North Wales and South Wales and therefore Llandrindod - Parish of the Trinity in English - represents approximately equal misery for all. The ‘Wells’ part of the name seems to be a kind of Victorian fiction to which towns in these parts (Llanwrtyd is another) are much given to adding to their titles as a extra species of embellishment for those for whom 7pm is a watershed behind which lurks the devil and alcohol.

Even more misery for me, in fact, as I had to divert in the rush hour traffic to Caerphilly to collect an otherwise immobile member. Do try to visit Caerphilly, once in a lifetime, for it is indeed a surreal experience. The closest thing I can find to describe it is that painting by Magritte of a businessman with an apple for a face who ends life being played by Piers Brosnan in the Thomas Crown Affair.

Well, Caerphilly is just an ordinary town, a very ordinary town in fact in the best tradition of urban Welsh ugliness, but there - in its not so muffled middle, by the pump and the town clock and the welfare hall in widows weeds, almost frisking with discomfort as if it had sat unexpectedly on a thistle, sits Caerphilly Castle, the second largest moated castle in Europe (after Windsor seeing you ask). Golly it’s huge when set among the pharmacies and pound stores and the Harold Wilson Industrial Estate

This morning with the sun shining down out of a grey and damp sky, Caephilly castle looked exactly as if must have done 460 years ago when Oliver Cromwell blew it up - well not all of it, that would have taken a minor weapon of mass destruction, but at least one of its towers, which remains cracked and leaning to this day.

So there we are, Caerphilly, and I am asking myself how can I possibly make the retreat to what I wanted to write about which was the sleeping habits of the French. I am like an actor who knows they have gone wrong on stage and is desperately trying to ad lib with lines approximately appropriate to the plot and resisting the temptation to invent something totally bewildering such as ‘Yes, darling, but have you actually read the story of the Plantagenet Parakeet?’

I fear that there is no easy way back, so like a car racing towards a crevasse just please close your eyes and grit you teeth and....... there we are - the French spend more time sleeping and eating than most people and also live longer, according to a fresh study by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

With an average of almost nine hours per day, "the French spend more time sleeping than anyone else in OECD countries," the survey unveiled last Monday (4 May) shows.

The French are followed by the Americans and the Spanish, with both nations sleeping around eight and a half hours per day.

At the other end of the scale, with an hour less than the French, Japanese and Korean people sleep the least among the 30 member countries of the OECD, at around seven hours and 50 minutes a day.

The French, who are known worldwide for their culinary skills, also "devote more time to eating than anyone else and nearly double that of Americans, Canadians or Mexicans," the OECD, says.

They spend more than two hours a day eating, followed by the New Zealanders and Japanese, who also spend close to two hours daily at the table.

In Italy, which is another country with a worldwide culinary reputation, and Belgium, people spend around one hour and 50 minutes a day eating.

Spaniards, Germans, Poles and Swedes also spend more than an hour and a half a day eating, while Finns, Norwegians and Britons spend the least time at the table (around one hour and 20 minutes).

Their way of life seems to have an impact on French people's life expectancy, since they are among the top three nations living the longest, together with the Japanese and Spaniards.

An average Japanese woman lives to almost 86 years, while a man lives to 79. French and Spanish women live up to 84.4 years, and men 77.3 and 77.7 years respectively.

Hungarians are the European OECD nation to live the shortest lives, with women's life expectancy at 77.4 years and men's at 69.

The survey, called "Society at a Glance," also looked into leisure time in 18 of the 30 countries where data was available.

It found Norwegians spend the most time on leisure – around 27 percent of their time, followed by Finns, Germans and Belgians who all spend around a quarter of their time on their favourite activities.

There were gaps between men and women's leisure time however, notably in some countries.

In Italy, men have around 80 minutes more a day of leisure time than women. By contrast, Norway appears to be the most equal society in that respect, with men and women having practically the same amount of leisure time.

Most of that time people spend watching TV, listening to the radio or on "other leisure activities," while attending events and practicing sports remain rather unpopular, taking not more than six to seven percent of people's time.

Visiting or entertaining friends is also a popular free time activity, especially in certain countries.

Turks spend around 34 percent of their time "entertaining friends," making them the most "sociable nation," followed by New Zealanders (24%), Canadians (21%), Americans (16%) and Koreans (16%).

Europeans come out as much less generous in that respect, with people in Germany and Spain spending not more than four percent of their time "entertaining" or visiting their friends, the OECD says.

All of which (after the Caerphilly bit!) I have taken word for word, with only the occasional comma inserted, from the pages of EUobserver, so let it not be said that I am not doing my bit for greater integration, especially if means that we end up like the French - sleeping for nine hours a day and eating for two. And that is exactly what I shall be doing, all being well very shortly - and in the Auverne too.

I knew there was a reason for the 35 hour week if really you looked for it.

MEME or ME-ME-ME

I have been tagged by Jane to write about myself - hence I presume the word ‘meme’ (Me-Me!). As usual I have written too much. I’ve tagged a few others below. I’ve included for fun a couple of husband and wife pairs.

What are your current obsessions?

In days gone by, no variety performance was complete without the man who put dinner plates on a high vertical wire and spun them around. The gyroscopic effect enabled them to defy gravity; the plate thus stayed balanced on the wire. Or not as the case may be. Clearly the object was to see just how many plates and wires could be erected, the performer continually having to rush around rescuing the early plates as they slowed and began to wobble, giving them a deft flick, that would ensure another minute or two of life.

Being self-employed, running a business, house and garden and with a variety of voluntary interests like UNESCO and acting, my life often resembles that sea of plates. I am governed by a long to-do list and its complement of unremitting deadlines. In the background is the constant need to manage cash - will there be enough in the bank to pay for the stock orders this month? By how much will expenditure increase next year? How much do I need to earn from writing? What can be fitted into the day? When can I learn my lines? Let’s move this to the evening - do that on the train; get up early to do the other. And so on. Those plates are my obsessions.

What are you listening to?

Radio 4, when I’m not doing something that requires concentration. I love the midnight news. Classic FM, if I’m reading in the evenings.

Which item from your wardrobe do you wear most often?

If the government really wanted to reduce carbon emissions, and to generate employment, they would give me a grant towards replacing my 20 year old central heating boiler such that the fuel savings would pay the net cost within a couple of years or so. They could reclaim the money afterwards by charging me more tax - which they will do anyway - but presumably my ongoing fuel savings would be enough to pay this. We should all then benefit: me, the climate and the government.

As it is I can’t afford the investment to raise the efficiency of my boiler from 60 per cent to 90 per cent. So I have to reduce my heating and wear more clothes, which brings us to my most worn wardrobe garment. Which is a padded gilet: my Christmas charity shop present from Younger Daughter in 2007. I still wear it almost every day. It cost £5 and the cost per wear must have been reduced by now to about twopence.

First spring thing?

I’ve always been a country person. Though born in a city I grew up on a small farm. Ever since I never been really happy unless I can walk on grass; over moors and hills certainly, but mainly just through fields.

So for me spring is that eruption of new grass that begins in mid-April. The field grass grows three inches in a week and the insects buzz around the early wildflowers. Sit on the bough of a low tree and you can survey a scene that must have been repeated year by year ever since farming began: the rolling grass-covered hills, bursting with spring life. It always fills me with energy and hope.

What's for dinner?

Probably a salad starter, rocket, olives, feta cheese, followed maybe by pasta or some such and after some fruit or cheese or rhubarb from the garden

Planning to travel to next?

Thanks to our dear friends Rosie and her husband we are off again to France next month to stay once more at ‘The Mill,’ with its walnut trees, deep down in the Auverne. Spring will have long arrived there. The chestnuts will be in full leaf. Even the walnuts, the latest of trees, will be bursting into leaf.

I have always loved France and quite frankly would be content if I never travelled anywhere else. I was semi-offered a trip to the Smithsonian Festival in Washington DC this summer, though it now looks as though I won’t be going. I am not the slightest dismayed. The thought of jet lag (from which being a bad sleeper at the best of times I suffer greatly) compounded by a hot, humid and crowded city outweighs the attraction of novelty. I prefer the shady comforts of an outdoor lunch in an Auverne village and to walk in solitude over the fields of Wales.

Best thing you ate or drank lately?

Having been raised on a pig farm I grew up with a great fondness for pigs. They are the most intelligent of animals and generally diligent, clean and respectful folk. If only pigs could learn to grow soft coats, to remain the size of piglets and above all to procure padded feet rather than pointed trotters, I am sure we should never have started to eat them.

Indeed, for many years in fact I didn’t, cringing at the conditions in which these wonderful animals were raised. Then came the movement for outdoor-reared, organic pork and I confess I have succumbed. Last night I feasted on organic pork sausages, bought in the farmers’ market, and made with prime meat flavoured with chives. With them went a most unusual and flavoursome country wine from the deep south of France, which some kind guest must have left as a calling card. Mas des Deux Frères it called itself.

Last thing you bought?

From a charity shop Monmouth: a book about how to tour vineyards.

Flower of the moment?

I would say nasturtium, for which I have a likeness almost as fond as for organic pork sausages, but, of course, they are still at the toddler stage - bravely shoving a couple of leaves above the bare earth in promise of all those vermilion trumpets to come. So I better say geranium, my next favourite flower, particularly when scarlet. I bought some a week ago in town. Already they are in full bloom.

They have a particular resonance for I remember, aged about 4, being taken by my father to paint a picture of a nearby house outside which scarlet geraniums were blossoming. My painted geraniums looked almost like the real thing, I thought. At least from a distance.

Favourite ever film?

I hate such questions. In fact I hate choosing in general. There is so much to enjoy. Besides films you enjoy at one time, you may not enjoy on another. Some have repeated watchability - Casablanca, for instance - but I have never been as thrilled by that film as by watching Jungle Book, with its elephants, rubies, tigers at the age of 7. Or so moved as by the dreamy romanticism of ‘Un Homme et Une Femme’ or Dr Zhivago, which I first watched in a cinema in Hannover, snuggled up in the darkness. Or even Lawrence of Arabia, which triggered a lifetime of admiration for Peter O’Toole and a general infatuation with camels.


Care to share some wisdom?

One of the best pieces of advice I have ever had - though I have to confess it is not always easy to apply - is to find yourself good professionals to assist you on your voyage through the high seas of life. Good doctors, good dentists, good solicitors, good accountants, good architects and so forth. Sadly, most professionals are not good. Too many are in the profession for the money, or for a career, instead of being dedicated to their client and most, in my experience, are simply not half as competent as they think they are, at least in the sense of having the common sense to see the big picture and to understand your agenda rather than what they assume automatically would be good for you.

If you were a god/goddess who would you be?

As at least part of my life is in communications I had better say Mercury; besides, I’ve always fancied those winged anklet thingies. For the greater part of my life I have laboured under the delusion that if one only concentrated one could step of the bottom of a stair and remain floating. I guess Mercury would have been able to do that with a little flutter of his heels. Unfortunate, though, if he ever got cramp.

If I were allowed a second shot, however, I would say Cybele, who appeals to my dual nature. She was one of the minor goddesses. Even so she was the mother of King Midas, and as a young and extravagant woman had the panache to drive a chariot pulled by lions. On a Turkish holiday her chariot harness broke. It was fixed by a farmer named Gordius, who had a sideline in untiable knots. In recognition of this the ever extravagant Cybele made Gordius a King (or maybe it was Prime Minister) and in another extravagant gesture liberated northern Turkey to give him something to rule over. She called the land Phyrigia: no doubt because it was very hot.

Being a timid and retiring soul, I have rather fancied Cybele’s extravagant streak and the ability to create Kings and liberate lands on the scale of an American President. And to bear a son with the incidental ability to turn things into gold, would, I have to say, come in most handy when faced with the ugly coincidence of paying the VAT bill and needing a new boiler.


Rules of the meme.

Respond and rework. Answer questions on your own blog. Replace one question. Add one question. Tag 8 people. OK, I’ll tag the following (though if it’s a pain or a chore, just smile sweetly - or curse me roundly - and move on…)

Westerwitch
Happy Snaper
Faith
ElisabethM
Little Brown Dog
Un Peu Loufoque
Jackofall
Pondside
Lampworkbeader

Apologies if you have been tagged already!