BEANS

Well - for the moment at least - here comes summer. Or, perhaps more accurately, here comes summer again. For I seem to remember the first month of summer being quite respectable. Indeed the enamelled reproduction of a French nineteenth century thermometre recorded about 30 degrees against the cool shady wall of our front door - as high as that late summer of a few years ago when the good people in Gravesend found themselves privileged to melt, in a record temperature of over 100ºF.

At any rate I was watering the garden then virtually everyday so the last month of almost continuous rain has provided some relief, if only to my water bill.

Now with the re-arrival of the sunshine I shall have to start watering again! Not that I completely ever stopped watering, even in the rain, for I have a tub full of runner beans growing against a wooden fence and close to the north-east facing gable wall of the house. Hardly a propitious position, I thought, when I decided this was the only spot I had left to put them, but then you never really know until you try.

This peculiar location is sheltered from the south-westerly rains by the house and from anything else by an enormous flowering currant bush. Nevertheless the bean tendrils have crept skywards, first up poles and then up odd pieces of string and are now busy cropping furiously all over the roof of the shed. They lie though in a rain shadow so the leaves are perpetually curling up and sagging and I have to go out incongruously in the pouring rain to water them.

You can, according to the 1970s self-sufficiency guru John Seymour, feed a family of four for a year on an acre of beans. I always find this a useful thing to know and regularly retail the information at parties when the conversation turns yet again to house prices or the prospects for the next football season. Nor do I imagine that were you an inventive cook your family would ever be bored, so many and varied are the different types of the family leguminosae.

But, seriously, a pea, eaten fresh from its pod, ripe and succulent, is one of the great tastes of nature; then there’s houmous and dahl, made from wonderful lentils and chick peas. These are at least honorary beans. Soy beans, of course, keep you young, containing as they do all sorts of phyto-hormones to keep you healthy and stop your hair and teeth falling out.

And even without their accompaniment of white sauce young broad beans are so tender and tasty as to make you feel you could live on them forever. But why deprive yourself of white sauce when beans will give you both flour and an acceptable range of dairy substitutes if you speak to them nicely?

Although I have had the fortune to be a quarter of a fine family of four I have never, fortunately or unfortunately, possessed an acre of land and so have never been able to put the John Seymour theory to the test. For the last 18 years I have indeed possessed only something the size of a large pocket handkerchief and therefore my bean production has been accordingly curtailed.

I do though produce sufficient beans to provide for a dish that has become a semi-signature; one that I first learned to cook one French summer in a rather bohemian establishment (the police where always turning up in Inspector Clouseau-like wagons with corrugated sides; while on the hall table stood a handy bowl of condoms in the sort of position where other residential establishments might have offered Imperial mints). It tastes particularly good outdoors on a summer evening, the cooked beans now appropriately watered by a light crisp or sparkling wine.

Once I cooked this dish for 80 students at another bohemian establishment this time in Norway, where Younger Daughter was undertaking some species of charitable training prior to being sent to build latrines in darkest Mozambique, where she caught but thankfully survived malaria. She came home safely, though minus her hair, sacrificed to the mosquitoes presumably.

Indeed so bohemian was this establishment that I ended up playing competitive hockey for Denmark (against the United Kingdom), something that I don’t think I ever did before, or since. I blame it on a £5 Ryanair ticket to Aarhus.

But you have, I know, even less interest than I do in hockey. You are waiting for the recipe. So here we go! The dish is called ‘Madame Martin’s Beans’, she being the eponymous patronne of the establishment the police were so interested in. When she was not catering for her visitors her métier was that of a family planning counsellor so her bowl of condoms were merely a sign of her stock-in trade.

The dish should be a big dish, big as you like. Imagine a heaped and steaming bowl, like a paella but without the mussels and crayfish entrails. It's mainly potatoes - par-boiled and then cut small and sautéed in butter. You can use any old potatoes, you don’t have to use your best quality, waxy Charlottes. It doesn’t matter if they crumble. Anyway you sauté the potatoes in a big hot pan with a lot of garlic (the key word is lot) and other herbs like rosemary and majoram. Add plenty of sea salt, of course, and black pepper. Don’t add the herbs or garlic too early or they will just burn up.

Now add your beans, about a quarter or a third by weight compared with the potatoes. They should be green beans - runners, or sliced haricots verts. These cook quickly and can be cooked by stirring them into the sauté-ing potatoes. Don’t over cook them. Al-dente is excellent, but this is a most forgiving dish that absolutely anyone can cook.

And then serve. That’s all! Hot filling and tasty - what more could you want. And you still don’t want to live for a year on an acre of beans?

SEVEN ADJECTIVES

Like others, and somewhat to my consternation, I have been tagged by Little Brown Dog to name seven adjectives with which to describe myself. Goodness! But where to start?

My first thought was simply to borrow the seven that LBD had chosen for herself. Most seemed to apply to me and had the advantage of being rather less negative than the ones I would otherwise tend to choose for myself and which would undoubtedly have been the same severe condemnations that generations of authority figures have left ringing in my ears: lazy, unfocused, sad, vain, delusional, could do better, and so forth.

Left to its own devices my self-image does have a tendency to drift off into the realms of outer darkness. In this it resembles the family silver which also turns black without a regular polish. One of the advantages of blogging is that it allows you to remind yourself who you really are. I am constantly surprised.

Still, plagiarising LBD’s eclectic crop of adjectival matter wouldn’t have made very interesting reading so, having a flash of inspiration, I telephoned to Elder Daughter, to ask her opinion. “Give me seven adjectives,” I said, “ to describe myself, straight off the top of your head.”

Having worked for The Body Shop, having indeed trained Gok Wan in his younger days, she is used to coping with all eventualities. Without breaking step she reeled off the following seven:

Fun
Intelligent
Happy (most of the time)
Eccentric
Funny (in the sense of having a capacity to amuse)
Young at heart
Sensitive

“There, is that seven?” she asked.

“They’re all very positive,” I said, hesitantly.

“Well, what do you expect?” she replied.

“Isn’t ‘Fun’ the same as ‘Funny’?”

“No! ‘Fun’ means you are playful, you’re not stuffy, you join in, you let your hair down, you participate, you don’t shrink into a corner. Whereas ‘Funny’ means that you amuse - you tell stories, make jokes, invent, make us laugh.

“Oh!”

At this point either she or I had to run away to make supper so I shall have to fill in her take on the other adjectives.

Intelligent - well, yes, I suppose so. I had a ‘good’ education (courtesy of the grants that were available in those days) and I like intellectual things. The house is full of books and papers. I enjoy writing. I enjoy learning about things - history, geography, climate, people, language. I am fascinated by politics and debate. I like to think I have made some original findings in the field of Neolithic Archeology. I am grateful that I have the opportunity (and some minor talent) for acting and occasional opportunities to travel.

Happy - of all seven adjectives on her list ‘Happy’ is the one that I am least comfortable with though she did qualify it by saying ‘most of the time.’ I am uncomfortable because I prefer to think of myself as irrepressibly sad, driven by some distant longing for another world - but that, I tell myself, is really just a Byronic impulse; I am still a lost teenager at heart. While maybe I would like to be sad and wistful, in reality I am, as she says, ‘Happy,’ whether I like it or not.

Eccentric - I can trace a gene in my family from my great aunt, through my father, through me and my eldest half-sister and on to Younger Daughter, which causes our eccentricity. This is a charming madness that makes us just slightly different to others: square pegs in round holes all. This is both a curse and a blessing. A blessing because it makes us original (and therefore not boring) but a curse, too, because there are so many times when all you want to do is to belong, to be unobtrusive, to sink into the anonymous background. And yet whatever we do, wherever we go, we are condemned to being somehow different.

When her natal friendies are having coffee mornings, supporting each other in each others houses, what is Younger Daughter doing? Taking young Theo (born February ‘09) on tour with the circus, spending four months in an elderly caravan and even more elderly transit van traipsing the highways and byways of Europe.

Funny - I suppose I do have some minor capacity to amuse. Maybe that is because I find it so tedious to be seriousness. Mild facetiousness enlivens every conversation. I do tell stories, invent, make things up. I create fantasies. At parties I enjoy telling jokes badly (for jokes are actually much funnier when told badly for the joke is then you struggling to tell the joke rather than the joke itself). I enjoy nonsense verse and children’s stories and retailing these on inappropriate occasions. But I am also a shy person and I suppose being funny is a defence against timidity.

Young at Heart - and head and body and legs and arms and face and hair! Actually I am very proud of my hair which still retains its natural colour, though not, sadly, its original volume. I can still run faster than Elder Daughter (and probably Younger Daughter too). But yes, I have no difficulty in adjusting my mental age downwards from where it seemed to get stuck at the age of about 17 so that I can play easily with small children, or, at the other end of the spectrum, with the very old. I find the techniques are exactly the same. Its adults that I always have difficulty with.

Sensitive. Yes, I have to confess to a weak and febrile nature. I am horribly sensitive - I hate violence and aggression of any sort. I cry in films at anything remotely heroic or romantic. I am constantly ‘saving’ animals even pests. I will spend ten minutes chasing a fly out of the window rather than simply swatting it. I hate upsetting people and am always thinking that I am in the wrong. But I am also sensitive in other ways - to colours and tones, to textures, to shapes and sizes, to touch, to an ambiance, to the wonder of the natural world.

So that’s my seven. I’ve ‘come clean’ How about you? I see Preseli Mags has tagged everyone. So, there’s no escape.

TAMING THE SHREW

True love! That’s the answer, isn’t it? And if Kate and Petruchio find true love then all the business that passes between them, the eponymous ‘Taming of the Shrew,’ is so much hot air for them and amusement for us. For unlike some ‘Shrews,’ this was a happy, if hard-bitten, romantic comedy that can leave everyone content.

Yes, it’s ‘Rain or Shine’ time again: that wet fortnight at the beginning of July when the strolling players come westwards and southwards into this little corner of our land sometimes this side of the Welsh border, sometimes that, depending on which night you turn up.

Yesterday they played in Chepstow Castle, that most magnificent pile of masonry beside the River Wye that pre-dates even the earliest of Shakespeare’s history plays. As usual the performance was al fresco (we might as well start early with the Italian seeing as ‘the Shrew,’ like so many of Uncle Will’s creations, is set in Lombardy). As usual, this is Shakespeare played, one imagines, ‘as she was writ’ that is to be rumbustious, comic, full of business - verbal pyrotechnics for the masses, all overlying one or two more serious themes.

The serious theme here of course is the extent to which a wife should obey her husband - indeed - to what extent should a husband bend a wife to his will? “I will have my property,” says Petruchio as he throws Kate over his shoulder and rides off after a precipitate wedding. Kate, of course, resists, as she has spiritedly resisted everything that has come before in her life.

That duel of spirits is indeed the axis on which the play turns. But here Shakespeare takes us back to a world with which his audience would have been entirely familiar, but of which most people today are entirely ignorant - the world of falconry. Petruchio likens Kate to a hawk that must be ‘manned’ - a singularly appropriate description in Kate’s case - and through lack of food and sleep be made to sit with docility on his master’s fist.

Anyone reading TH White’s marvellous book, ‘The Goshawk’ can relive that author’s experience as long night follows long day while the Goshawk of the title - a Kate by any other name - sits sullenly on his fist bating savagely at every opportunity. Following the old methods he does not feed the hawk, nor let it sleep, but instead reads to it - Shakespeare as it happens. He rewards the bird when it is still, but until the hawk accepts him, he does not sleep nor eat himself, his only sustenance being a glass of whisky and more Shakespeare. It is an epic battle of wills: man against bird.

‘The Taming of the Shrew’ is thus this ‘man against bird’ story transferred to the human sphere and the question is: who will really win - how should the play end? Three couples share the ending so there are endless possibilities for a director. Let me not therefore tell you how this production ends but only say that the Director, James Reynard, who also plays Petruchio to Charlotte Kingsford’s magnificently haughty Kate, is endlessly creative and there are twists, surprises - and laughs - galore.

Of all the plays ‘Rain or Shine’ have done in the past few years this is certainly one of the best performances yet. Wonderfully slick, beautifully spoken and acted - extravagant in its physical comedy - but also eminently believable.
As an audience we may have been windswept (but dry at least, indeed the sky was practically cloudless) by the stiff breeze that rolled up the river and swirled around the castle battlements, demolishing part of the minimalist scenery before the play had really even begun. We may also have been a thin audience, for many people would surely have been put off by the surfeit of rain over recent days and in the great space of Chepstow’s Middle Bailey our response and applause must have sounded painfully weak and unappreciative.

Nevertheless, like true professionals the company carried on strongly, putting every ounce of energy and not a little physical discomfort into the proceedings.

A really super show - and worth going out of your way to see. Only do remember to wrap up well. The weather can be most unkind after the interval even if it doesn’t rain. Don’t be afraid of overdressing. Leave the dashing about in flimsies to the cast.

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.