15 October 2010

Oh The Young

My beloved Talksport radio programme has disappeared from my iPhone and so I’ve had to do with Radio 5 Live and Radio 4, as well as the feed from the San Diego police department which is a bit of a hoot when you hear what the police have to deal with over there – guys running about the streets naked, mad dogs biting everybody in sight including the police, errant husbands, and the usual drunks.

But generally, until I get Talksport fixed, I’ve been listening to the BBC radio and quite instructive it has been too. On Sunday when I was mowing the high terraces I was listening to an interview with the Secretary General of Amnesty International, Salil Shetty, an Indian who has spent his life working in aid organisations. 

He’s only been in the post since July but the interviewer, Kate Silverton, more usually seen on BBC TV news programmes asked him some searching questions, one of which was, ‘if you have someone in custody who had details of a plane bombing and your children were on that plane, would you resort to torture (one of Amnesty International’s big campaigning issues) to get the information needed to keep the plane, and hence your family safe?’  The answer was a bit vague but I think he said he wouldn’t advocate torture, even in those circumstances. Fascinating.

And then there was an item on car insurance for young drivers and how the premiums faced by kids who have just passed their driving test is becoming prohibitive. One young driver on the programme who was complaining about his £2,800 annual premium for his 2 litre car, shot himself firmly in the foot when he was asked if he would ‘downsize’ his car to get cheaper insurance. ‘No’, he said. ‘I like my fast car and even if I did downsize, I wouldn’t drive any slower.’ Talk about being an idiot!

This led me to think about when I used my dad’s car. It was a gleaming white Hillman Super Minx Estate with all the bells and whistles on (not the one in the picture). It was his pride and joy. I would spend hours every weekend with him, cleaning, polishing and servicing it.

He even let me drive it unaccompanied before I passed my test, albeit ‘only’ up to the shops to get him some cigarettes but very occasionally he’d let me use it to go to school where the parking was inside the school gates beside the teachers’ cars. Maybe this is why I felt persecuted by them – ‘my car’ was gleaming – theirs were battered old wrecks!

But not long after I passed my test I started driving like the usual 18 year old lunatics mentioned in the radio programme. I crashed the Hillman a couple of times and we had to scrape the money together to get it fixed.
And then one night I’ll never forget – I had a date. I wanted to use the car but there was a problem with the clutch and the weather was foul. My dad did everything to dissuade me from using the car but I was young, foolish and wouldn’t listen. Inevitably, the evening did not go well.

Driving down a steep hill heading into Largs I couldn’t see because of the fog, got too close to the side of the road and the car flipped over and rolled down the hill, turning over several times. Neither me nor my date (that was the first and last time I saw her !) were hurt, the police came, the car was totalled and I had to get home at 2am with my tail between my legs.

To say my father was upset was an understatement. His pride and joy was later dragged into a scrap yard, the insurance which was only 3rd party didn’t help and that was that. I wasn’t able to help him buy another car and he struggled he get another set of wheels which he eventually did.

So when the young drivers came onto the radio all saying they were paying  high insurance premiums because of the ‘wild few’, I felt pangs of conscience. My recklessness with my father’s car didn’t cost the insurance companies anything but it could have done and all because I was young, stupid and wouldn’t listen.

Guy – take heed.  

14 October 2010

What a Load of Crap

I was passing Thierry his first down payment for clearing the jungle the other day and I mentioned that he might find a few things I’d lost – several balls from the pool, numerous metal fence posts, some guttering, some garden tools and my fosse.

The fosse is that curious thing most French houses have if they’re off the beaten track – a septic tank, and I’d lost mine amongst the brambles – Rubus Fruticosis if you recall !

Now these things, Fosses, are supposed to be self ‘regulating’ in that in theory, if they’re working ok then they can be left for years – the good old bacteria do their stuff, the ‘grey’ water soaks away and you never need to get involved, but unfortunately, mine is a bit more complex than the normal installation and a couple of years ago when we had a major, and rather smelly, flood in the house, the cause was a blocked kitchen water pipe down at the fosse.

It wasn’t a particularly pleasant job and when Thierry uncovered mine the other day, he never thought to mention to me that it was bubbling all over the place. It was only when I ventured down into the cleared land to inspect it that I discovered that the kitchen fosse (we have a kitchen section and a linked ‘other’ section) was once more the culprit. Congealed fat and all sorts of other gunge which goes down through our waste disposal system had completely blocked the input pipe and it had to be cleared – and what a horrible smelly job it was.

At least now it’s done I can forget it for another couple of years, but now the land has been cleared I’ll be able to see it bubbling from the terrace if another problem occurs!

And as I was up to my elbows in all sorts of unspeakable gunge, I thought back to when J and I were looking for our first house together in the Windsor area. After numerous fruitless viewings, we finally found a beautiful cottage where the garden ran gently down to a lake where I could fish, the station I used to travel into London from was only five minutes away and despite the fact that it was under Heathrow airport’s flight path, that didn’t bother us because our previous rented house had had that problem. It was idyllic.

And then the estate agent said, ‘of course this house has a septic tank.’

That was it for me. “I’ll never buy a house with a septic tank”, I said and walked away from my dream home. How times change.  

PS – the picture shows a typical single-system fosse installation although what the duck is doing in there, I don’t know. There is a theory that if the fosse stops working efficiently, you throw a dead rat in which starts the old microbes and bacteria going again, so maybe that’s what the duck is for!

13 October 2010

Old Pierre is Dead – R.I.P.

Old Pierre's House Up The Hill

You remember old Pierre – he’s the old guy up the hill who used to watch me every time I did something on the terraces or when I was up the large oak tree trying to cut bits of it down. He was always chastising me for various things – planting palm trees on the terraces, spraying weedkiller in the lane or even worse, when I let weeds grow over the markers which show the border between his land and mine. Sacre bleu! But then when I asked him for advice on something, he’d spend ages talking to me, not a word of it in English, and then go off and get me something to make the job easier.

He was probably typically French in that respect, quite difficult to get to know, fed up with all the Brits and Germans surrounding him in his 100 year old cottage, but when he was in the mood, he was quite amiable.

Pierre was in his 80s and had a double knee replacement a few years ago but still made the effort to wander around his terraces watering his plants and making sure I hadn’t pilfered any of his wood. I believe he and his wife who survives him spent at least 4-5 months each year in their Paris house so I reckon when he came back down south he had all that Parisian angst ready to unleash on me, particularly when the builders decimated the area next to his land.

‘You can’t run your water pipe along the lane, my wall will fall down’, was the cry one day (in French of course). Pierre wanted me to run the mains pipe all the way from the bottom road which would have cost thousands but in the end the builders ignored him and of course his wall continued standing.

‘That’s my tree, you can’t cut it down’, was another statement he made. I showed him the plans which quite clearly showed it was my oak and once he’d reluctantly accepted that fact, he was ok, even giving me permission to go onto his land to make the job easier and not many Frenchies allow you to do that.

‘Your weeds are growing over the boundary marker – please clear them away’, was another, regular diatribe, and you need to understand the paranoia that the French have with their boundaries to understand that one!

And then earlier this year he just disappeared. A young guy started cutting his grass which was a sign that all was not well and the house was shut for long periods and his lovingly tended fig trees started to go yellow in the summer heat.

I suspected he’d either had a serious illness and was convalescing in Paris or worse, that he’d passed away. It was very strange that he hadn’t been seen wandering around his beloved terraces and if you think it’s odd that we didn’t know what had happened to our neighbour then it’s a difficult situation. Not once in ten years has his wife spoken to us and as far as I know, not once in ten years did Pierre talk to any of my family, yours truly excepted.

It was when I ran into old Gunther (the German up the hill) last Saturday that I stopped and asked him about Pierre and was told the sad news. Apparently he was ok one week, the next he’d been diagnosed with Kidney Cancer and a few weeks later, he passed away.

I’ll miss the cantankerous old bugger.  

12 October 2010

You Don’t Get This in a Newspaper

Well, what I mean is that you wouldn’t find what’s in the URL link below in a paper newspaper or a hardcopy newspaper or newsprint, or whatever you want to call it.

Since I got my iPhone just over a year ago, I can count on the fingers of one hand, the number of times I’ve forked out for a paper in the newsagents. Generally, I would pay my €2.50 for my Daily Mail and then before I got more than a couple of pages in, Ashley and Ian (my lunch buddies) would appear and the paper would be put aside and never lifted again. It was a total waste of money, but now I’m in the 21st Century, I can browse the papers at random and it’s all free on the internet.

Well, not quite. One of my newspaper bookmarks was ‘The Times’ but quite a few months ago they started charging for accessing their pages on the net and since then, I understand their on-line readership has virtually vanished. I noticed the other night they were offering a full month’s access for £1, which doesn’t sound bad but that’s just the introductory fee. I haven’t even looked up the normal charges so incensed was I at them charging for on-line news.

Apparently though, according to some learned commentators, reading the news on the internet will eventually do away with newsprint but personally, I can’t see it happening – not until they have WiFi on the London Tube (underground) and when you’re flying. Then we’ll all be carrying our ‘Kindles’ or ‘iPads’ around with us. Until then, there will still be a market for that horrible newsprint which covers your hands in ink.

Anyway, what I started off saying was that for those newsprint lovers out there, you’d never see photographs like those in the URL below. This is a regular feature in the on-line Daily Telegraph, but some of the articles are better than others – one last week  was ‘Stars Out and About ’, generally female stars caught without make-up which I wasn’t terribly interested in, but last Friday’s feature was amazing.

Have a look and don’t let the ‘body parts’ reference put you off. There’s nothing you’d recognise anyway. One thing for sure – I’ll be putting a copy of picture number 12 in the kids’ bathroom to make sure they thoroughly wash their hair – I’m starting to itch already!  


The picture at the top is the foot of a house fly. Its foot!

11 October 2010

Knobbly Potatoes

I had to go to the bank on Friday to withdraw some loot to keep the gardeners happy and I popped into the Midi to see if anybody was there. J had been threatening to go with Janie (Ashley’s missus) and there’s usually somebody else I know sitting having lunch on a Friday so I thought I might join them. As it turned out, there was nobody I knew – well nobody I knew to talk to – plenty of familiar French faces from the village, but nobody I could instantly strike up a conversation with.

Now, since I left my brother’s house last Monday morning, I’ve been off the alcohol and cigarettes, and amazingly, after only a week, I’ve managed to get into a pair of Levis which had been consigned to the ‘extra tight’ section of my wardrobe. I felt really good and so when I got to the Midi and the barman/owner, Coco, got out my usual pack of Marlboro Lights and a glass of wine, I had to refuse – well I refused the wine!

Then I thought about it. Was my new sylph-like body down to the lack of smoking or the lack of wine? Being a totally analytical person, I thought it would be stupid to give up two of my pleasures if only one of them was to blame so I took the cigarettes and passed the wine back. Coco’s face was a picture, but a look of absolute incredulity crossed it when I asked for a glass of water (I can’t smoke without a liquid drink) and wandered outside to sit at a table.

Christine, the waitress came up, gave me a peck on both cheeks, asked me if I was eating and did I want my usual jug of wine whilst I chose what I would be ordering. I said I would not be eating but could I have another glass of water – no wine.

She sat down in the chair opposite me and looked really concerned. ‘Are you ok? she enquired. ‘I’m fine – I just want a glass of water today ’, I replied. And in a manner which summed the situation up better than any words could, she just got up and wandered off shaking her head.

So I sat and sipped my water, smoked a cigarette and looked around.

Right beside the Midi, indeed, they share the same terrace, is a small florist/vegetable shop and it’s so expensive that they must only sell to tourists who sit in the bar, have a few glasses of vino and then think it’s a good idea to support the local economy.

It’s an old lady who runs it and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody buy anything from the shop and looking at the things for sale and the prices, I’m not surprised. There are a couple of other veggie shops in the village square so she’ll only sell things when the other shops are shut. The tomatoes for sale were covered in bluish spots which indicated a good soaking in some sort of pesticide, the potatoes were green and so misshapen it would have taken a skilled potato peeler operator at least ten minutes to get round the knobs and protrusions and her plants were three times the price you would normally pay.

Poor old soul but she’s been there as long as I remember so she must sell something. Maybe that’s where J shops !!!!