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?