One begins to hear talk of the forthcoming presidential election here which takes place in three months. It seems unnecessary. Hollande will win, the interest comes in whether he wins in the first round or, if not, whether Le Pen could frighten the pants off everybody by going through to the second round. The most striking characteristic of the next President seems to be that he’s very nice. Even though Jimmy Carter was the only other politician with that as his main virtue, it’s surely worth a vote. With hindsight it seems perfectly likely that an elephant trap was dug to catch out DSK in New York in order to remove him from the election, but it availed Sarko’s heavies naught. He is doomed whoever his opponent.
I fed a local some coffee this morning. He has a friend, bald, who can easily fit a steel tie to the wall in front of my sinking terrace to prevent further movement. And the gendarmes turn up regularly to bollock the sorcière’s grandson to make him demolish the adjacent par-built garage. Eventually the prefect himself will arrive and if it’s not gone by then the grandson will be plein dans la merde. We exchanged a complicit smile of satisfaction at the prospect. Your French has improved, I was told, but you have need of a French woman to hurry things along. I asked him to provide. And that guy down the road is a voleur. He works for the Council and for years has been nicking jerry cans of heating oil. He has only just stopped doing so because too many people knew what he was up to. Shock/horror, I agreed. Frost and snow is forecast for next week. This is a pain because I’ve just planted the sorcière’s geraniums and shall have to cover them.
Three men and a truck turned up below the house yesterday. They decamped, dug a hole, poured in concrete and stuffed in a post which held a lieu-dit, one of the ubiquitous and uniform signs that mark a small patch of land that may contain nothing, or a single house or farm, or perhaps two or three. This particular sign had fallen down and had lain by the roadside for the 18 months that I’ve been here. It says ‘chateau’ and points to the overgrown footpath that leads to the chateau. It’s magically unnecessary, pointless and daft. Nobody is supposed to go down the path. Nobody should ever need to go down the path. Anybody who does go down the path will find nothing but fierce brambles protecting the gently decaying building which is private property.
I did the airport run this morning and – Bang! There were the Pyrenees. It wasn’t that clear a day but they were as crisp as I’ve seen them, floating above a layer of yellow smog from the pretty manky factories on the plain at their foot.
We were out to dinner last night and I found a very smart pair of shoes in my cupboard before going out and couldn’t think why I never used them. I put them on and found out why. They have leather soles and on the wooden floor upstairs and the tiles down, they sound as if I’m about to break into a tap dance. Drink was taken over dinner which forced my visitor to make a run for the loo in the night. He tripped over a chair and reduced it to kindling. I heard the crash but assumed it was just my head.
I hate having my hair cut, largely because it seems a complete waste of time and money. In Scotland I had it cut by Turks, apparently a national speciality. I would go in three times a year, show a rheumy eye, and get charged pensioners’ rate of £6. Here an old fart in a nearby town with a concoction sitting on his head like a superannuated Bee Gee charges me €17 which I consider outrageous and makes me wait with nothing to read but tedious magazines about La Chasse. I did try Natalie somewhere else whose price was much the same but, with nothing better to do, she flitted round me primping for hours and had the gall to offer to cut my eyebrows. I had never before given a moment’s thought to my eyebrows but now I sometimes find myself looking at them with faint worry, wondering if they’re mildly deformed. But my visitor has cut his own hair with a micro lawn mower for 20 years. I have bought one and got him to shear me today. Never again shall I visit a barber.
I’ve just taken my guest down the road to photograph the interior of a roof. It may seem an odd object of curiosity but out here such things are remarkable. With most old farmhouses, the builder seems to have started off with the exterior walls and, once those were up, he had to work out how to cover the span between them. He will have plenty of timbers but very few will be very long or of the same dimensions. He’ll get so far, then put in a short vertical piece of tree trunk with half a dozen beams projecting from it. So the finished result will have a plantation of these studded at random intervals supporting an uneven cat’s cradle of rafters. Once the shell is complete, he will fill up the interior with primitive portacabins to provide accommodation for both livestock and their owners which sit incongruously beneath the cavernous loft thus created.
A white van turned up opposite when I was busy planting the sorciere’s geraniums and things began to be shipped out into its interior. We had a drink locally and apparently most of the contents had been dumped by the poubelles. They included a porcelain lavatory which seemed in fine order. How does one have something like that to dump? I can understand having spare bulbs, but not spare bogs. As can happen here, the lunchtime drink dragged on until 6 and it was fortunate that home was no more than half a mile away.
My neighbour’s door was flung open just as my visitor and I returned from a run to the supermarket and a fiercely hissing pressure cooker was rushed out into the street. I was summoned in to admire the finished touches to the new kitchen and then joined in a communal moan about the Grandson. They’re very happy to see the back of Granny but that’s only half the battle since the Grandson is even worse. He was a little shit even before his car crash but they glued his skull back together after it and he’s been abominable ever since. He’s sole prop of the house now and it’s considered highly unlikely that he would ever sell it which would be the ideal outcome. I floated the idea of a lynching – un lynchage, which show the strange byways that my French lessons sometimes take. My neighbour and his daughter thought this sounded very appealing but his wife was not particularly enthusiastic.
I’m feeding half a dozen folk Hen Thing tomorrow. The secret ingredient on this occasion is maple syrup since I’ve found a plastic bottle of the stuff which went out of date on 13th April 2004. It should be nicely matured by now.
My visitor is an antique furniture buff and I’ve been able to put him to good use in polishing furniture after he disparaged the quality of my shines. I usually, actually very rarely, squirt some aerosol on and give a friendly stroke, but the pro spends half an hour per square foot and expends much muscle. I don’t think he’ll have time to attack the clock which, to my eye, gleams like the setting sun but he tells me it is not good enough. I suspect the secret ingredient that actually produces the shine is the sweat from his brow – a bit like spit and polish.
The social tectonic plates of this community shifted today which felt rather odd since they had always seemed immutable to me. The sorciere tottered over early in the morning in great distress. At midday she was leaving the village for good, first to hospital for a month during which time she would have an operation, then into a home some 15 miles away where, she said, she would spend the rest of her life. A friend turned up to transport her at the due time and I went over to bid farewell and ended up with half the contents of her garden which, sometime, I will have to replant. The friend gave me a most alarming run down of the dreadfulness of her grandson who will be the sole inhabitant of the house from now on.