She’s Definitely Trying To Kill Me

This is an open letter out to everybody out there. If I kick-the-bucket, as the saying goes, my wife is most definitely to blame. Please report her to the Gendarmerie.

What other conclusion can I come to? There is a determined effort on her part to kill me off. I’m sure you’ll agree when you hear what she’s been up to.

Firstly – she’s trying to work me to death.

It was only a few weeks ago that she was threatening to get some workers in to clear the ground down below our house (or should that be ‘her’ house?), commonly known as the jungle. Now these guys generally charge about 14 euros an hour and working 8 hour days would cost me the princely sum of 112 euros per day or 560 per week, and of course, there would need to be two of them so they could talk to each other, have company during lunch etc, so that would be in excess of 1100 euros per week. Now I was quite prudent in saving for my pension but hey, I’m no Fred Goodwin!

And so, with that threat hanging over me and having read recently that if the council come and clear the ground to prevent bush fires they charge 30 euros per square metre, which would total 75,000 euros, I’m working my socks off every day to try and transform the jungle into something resembling an English rose garden – ha!

By about lunchtime, I’m absolutely knackered. I reek of smoke from the burning bush (there must be a biblical story here somewhere?), my back is killing me from all the bending down I have to do and I’ve nearly incinerated myself several times when I throw petrol onto the smouldering fire to try and relight it.

Secondly – she’s trying to get me to smoke myself to death!

I’ve never been a ‘proper’ smoker. I generally have maybe 2 or 3 a day unless I’m at a barbie or a party when I’ll maybe have a few more. And, I’m lucky in that if I don’t have any cigs, I just stop. I know I could crawl over to Tan and Angie’s and beg them for one – but I don’t – well not very often! I could drive into the village and buy some – but I don’t.

And so despite the fact that my few daily cigarettes, generally with a glass of wine or when I was on the phone to my brother, was my one daily luxury, J used to moan – sorry, nag. In fact, if nagging was an Olympic sport, J would be a triple gold medallist when it came to my smoking. But last December when the anaesthetist was ‘interviewing’ me prior to my little op, he asked if I smoked. I could see the look of delight in J’s eyes as she anticipated the rollicking I was about to get when he heard my answer, but all he said was, ‘two or three cigarettes a day – that’s homopathic’, which no doubt meant in some French literary sense that he wasn’t at all worried.

And so, I’ve managed on my two or three a day and some weeks I’ve not had any at all, like last week when J was in Cyprus. No stress, no harassment – no cigarettes were required!

So given all that, what are we going to make of J returning from her little jaunt to the eastern Med with 100 cigarettes for me? I’ve never had so many in my life. And they’re Marlboro Red – real killers, so to speak. And now she’s saying to me – ‘why don’t you go and have a sit down on the terrace darling and have a cigarette’. What’s going on?

Thirdly – chocolate poisoning.

I’m no great sweet eater. I like the occasional biscuit with my mid-afternoon cuppa but I don’t really need sweets in my life. If there’s a bar of chocolate about, not very likely with three chocolate eating locusts in the house, I’ll have a square or two, but the thought of munching my way through a whole bar, just fills me with something bordering on disgust.

So there’s definitely something evil going on when J, in addition to my little ‘gift’ of the cigarettes, plops the biggest bar of chocolate you’ve ever seen in your life, on the table and says, ‘here you are darling – a little present for you’.

Now given that if J worked in Cadbury’s they’d be bankrupt within the week on the basis of missing stock, giving me, I repeat, giving me, a huge bar of chocolate, definitely has some ulterior motive behind it.

She wants me out of the way! Watch this space.

A Long, Lost Skill

I’m an enthusiastic bodger. I’ll try fixing anything but there are unpredictable results. I once took my father-in-law’s outboard motor apart and once I’d reassembled it, there were enough parts left over to start a spares shop!

I’ll try plumbing, which usually results in a flood and I’ve had so much electric current through me when rewiring houses or adding lights or sockets, that it’s a wonder I don’t have permanently curly hair.

I’ve built patios and even a pool house but J has had to get the builders to finish them off and cover up my handiwork which, once they’d finished, cost me a fortune – the exact opposite of what I was trying to achieve in the first place.

I’m ok with cars as long as it’s nothing to do with the engine and I’ve even been known to repair the dishwasher until it literally blew up a few weeks ago. Whether the cause of the explosion was down to my fiddling, I don’t know.

So where am I going with all this ? Tonight I was watching a fishing programme and the guy was showing a selection of flies he was planning to use and it reminded me of a skill I once had which is probably now a lost art.

Back when I was about 13 or 14 my whole family was fishing mad – well the males were. My grandfather was a committed fly fisherman whilst my uncle John was a spinner (lure) enthusiast. My cousins, as well as my father and myself preferred throwing a worm into the river and just lying down on the bank waiting for a bite.

One day, and I’ve no idea where it came from, I found a large box in the house, absolutely filled to the brim with all the materials you would need to tie flies. There were feathers from hundreds of different birds, some quite exotic and probably illegal. There was a variety of silk threads and tinsels in glorious colours, and all sorts of wax for waterproofing the threads used to tie the flies. Finally, there were the vices to hold the hooks and literally thousands of hooks of all sorts of shapes and sizes.

Now, I’m not person known for intricacy. My philosophy is that if you can do a good job in 40 minutes why take 1 hour to do a fantastic job? Maybe that’s why the dishwasher isn’t functioning, but when I found this box of materials, I was fascinated.

I bought some magazines containing patterns and started tying flies, and amazingly, even my earliest efforts were praised by my grandfather who could spot a badly tied fly a mile away. A few months later he was actually asking me to tie specific flies, which was probably the greatest compliment he could pay me. Such was my enthusiasm for my new found skill that I would rush back from school, complete my paper round in record time and then spend hours tying flies. I suppose today’s equivalent is when Guy rushes home from school and  is on his laptop before he’s even taken his jacket off.

Unfortunately, after a couple of years of my fascinating new hobby, the box of materials was sold without my knowledge. I have no idea where the box originally came from, but I came to realise that it contained a lifetime’s collection of everything you needed to tie flies. Recreating it was an impossibility, and so a skill was lost.    

By the way - the trout fly shown in the picture is a Teal Blue and Silver ....... just in case you wanted to know.

Life After Retirement

When I got a job as a sales manager in IBM, I inherited a bunch of youngish sales guys who would disappear off to pubs and clubs with astonishing regularity. I also had a much older guy, John, whose most obvioust act of anarchy was to sit down and have a coffee in the lounge instead of at his desk!

It was clear to me quite quickly that there was no point in allocating John the entrepreneurial accounts where the client wanted to be taken ‘out on the town’ at regular intervals. The Bank of England and government accounts were much more suited to his style of selling – and he was pretty successful at it too.

A few years later, when John was probably about 58 and only a couple of years away from retirement, I was told by my director to reduce headcount and with the incentives on offer, John was the outstanding, although highly reluctant, candidate. I remember to this day, asking John to come into my office and suggesting that he ‘consider early retirement’.

John loved his job and was quite devastated about the suggestion that he should leave, but after a couple of hours of looking at the numbers, it was clear to me that John could retire on basically the same salary he’d been on, at least until his normal retirement age of 60. To me it was a no brainer, he could end the stress of having to make monthly targets – to John it was the end of his highly successful career.

After John left IBM, followed by myself about a year later, we kept in touch. John and his wife, Jill, would send their regular Xmas card and I would see John at our annual IBM reunion. John and Jill also visited us in Tourrettes. It was during these infrequent bouts of contact between us that I came to learn that John was an authority on the architecture and restoration of church organs. Indeed, he’d written a book on the subject which came to be regarded as the ‘bible’ for those interested in this topic.

As each year passed and we met up in London at the annual reunion, it seemed that John was busier and busier being consulted on a variety of organ building and restoration projects, one of the largest of which, was Worcester Cathedral, a picture of which is at the start of this blog.

Now in his 78^th year, John is Chairman of the British Institute of Organ Studies, has developed a website, is just about to start work on the commissioning of a new organ in St Mary le Bow in Cheapside in the City of London,  is working on another in Leipzig, Germnay and is lecturing at Oxford University. Needless to say, his latest book is selling well. He makes me feel totally lethargic!

At the time, leaving IBM seemed to be the end of a career and an unwanted, enforced retirement, but in retrospect, I’m sure John thanks his lucky stars that he was just that bit older than the other guys.

Whines About The Pines

I’m talking about Pinus Halepensis. Currently it is covering everything with its trademark yellow pollen dust. Everything - cars, swimming pools, terraces and roads. Even Shadow has traces of it on him because he moves so slowly.

It’s just one of several irritants which come out of the sky down here and that includes Eastenders and Coronation Street!

In the summer the Sirocco winds come from the south. They’re lovely and warm – the trouble is that they usually come with a couple of hundred thousand tons of sand in them which is dumped on you when it rains. The sand is worse than the pine pollen because it is heavier and more difficult to get rid of. In your pool, it causes havoc, turning the water a cloudy green colour and can take up to ten days to get out of the filter system. It settles in terrace joints and becomes muddy the next time it rains by which time you’ve forgotten its origins and wonder why everything is dirty. The sandy rain is the single reason I bought a metallic gold coloured car. When it rains sand overnight, cars look as if they’ve been mud wrestling and the car jet-wash stations, which you can find on virtually every corner in France, have queues forming at them. The French may thrash their cars to death but they do like them to be clean when they fall apart!

But back to Pinus Halepensis. I’ve never seen so much yellow dust. I actually marked it in my Outlook calendar last year to remind me this year, not because I’m nerdy but so that I don’t do the annual terrace jet-wash until after the yellow dust has fallen.

Sure enough, the day Outlook said it was supposed to start, it began falling and has been drifting around ever since. This morning was amazing. There was a slight breeze which was just strong enough to lift the pollen into clouds but not too strong that it dispersed it. It was as if there were several fires in the area but instead of the acrid white/blue smoke, there were swirling clouds of golden yellow dust.

Luckily, and very, very strangely, although I am extremely allergic to Cyprus pollen dust, the Pinus Halepenis pollen does not seem to affect me, so that’s one good thing about it. The other is that at this time of year when the oaks have lost their leaves, the pine trees are still green, giving the valley sides at least a 50% covering of vegetation.

I spoke about ‘irritants’ at the start of this blog and Pinus Halepensis is the cause of another, much more severe irritant – the Processionary Moth Caterpillar, so called because just about this time of year, the caterpillars descend from the pine trees and travel in a head-to-tail procession, sometimes 10-15 metres long.  Each caterpillar is covered in 63,000 poisonous hairs which can trigger allergic reactions and conjunctivitis if they are touched. Even if they are not handled, the hairs can break off and be carried in the air. If inhaled, they can trigger severe asthma attacks and in extreme cases, they can even trigger anaphylactic shock. They are particularly dangerous to young children who may pick them up due to their attractive colouring and patterns, and to cats and dogs, who may have to have parts of their tongues removed if they inadvertently touch them with their mouths.

Over the winter, the caterpillars build white, silken nests in the pine trees and this is the clue as to their whereabouts. Cutting the whole branch off, soaking it in petrol and burning it is the usual remedy to kill these pests, although I have taken a nest apart after 30 minutes of fierce flames only to find the innermost caterpillars still alive and thinking, because of the warmth, that spring has sprung!

It may be idyllic down here but we have a variety of problems coming from the most unlikely source.  

 

The Wind In My Hair

I was off to a lunch yesterday in Villefranche. Marj and her partner, James, had invited a pile of friends down to their villa overlooking the bay from high up on the hill. It was a fantastic view, the curry was amazing (yes – curry) and the sun shone most of the time.

As J was in Cyprus and the kids were with their father, this was a great opportunity to get the Alfa out, get the hood down and set off on the open road. I know it might seem a bit irresponsible to talk about speed but any engineer will tell you that a car needs a good wanging occasioanally, and it was my intention to get the right foot down and clear the cylinders of all the gunge which results from short, slow trips.

Those who know my area will also know that until you get past Vence, speed isn’t really a possibility but to get behind a car doing 25 km per hour (that’s a pedestrian 15 mph !!!) for the 3 miles into Tourrettes wasn’t a particularly good start. When it pulled off into the village car park I waved it an adolescent ‘goodbye and good riddance’ and looked forward to the open road.

It wasn’t long before I got to the péage (toll) and the motorway beckoned. I paid my 60 cents and slammed the foot on the accelerator and found three Porsches in my way. Now, as you know, Porsches don’t give way to anything or anybody, especially to an old grey guy in an old grey car and they kept me behind them all the way along the 5 miles of the A8 until I got to the airport where I could pick up the Voie Rapide which is a sort of Nice bypass.

This has a 70 kmh speed limit which is pretty slow for a road which pedestrians are not allowed anywhere near and yes, there it was, the ubiquitous Renault Twingo dawdling along at precisely 70kmh. Could it have pulled into the inside lane – yes. Did it – no ! I don’t like undertaking because French drivers are quite unpredictable and the word also has the smell of death to it so I just kept my distance behind it as the guy no doubt marvelled at how quiet the road was. No bloody wonder – everybody was stuck behind him!  

As I sauntered through the few streets of eastern Nice before I hit the Grande Corniche (the high road along the coast), I encountered a car which stopped at a green light to let a passenger out, a car which stopped in the single lane I was in to look in a shop window, and the cars who stopped on the roundabout to work out which exit to take. The thought of actually going round the roundabout until they work it out, seems to escape them. These are the drivers who look in their rear-view mirrors and wonder at the carnage behind them, completely oblivious to the fact that they caused it!

A few minutes later I was on the Grande Corniche and heading up into the hills behind Nice. The road was empty, the Alfa was running as sweet as a nut and it was idyllic……. then the rain started and I looked a complete idiot, driving with my roof down!