Low life | 19 April 2018

A week ago I plucked my eight-year-old grandson Oscar from the bosom of his rumbustious young family and took him on an orange aeroplane to Nice, and from there up into the hills of the upper Var to spend 11 days in our breeze-block shack. His second visit. On his first, last August, the temperature hit 45 degrees Celsius and we were roasted alive. This one, though, was relentlessly cold and wet and the mop and bucket were in constant use in the living room. Confined to barracks, we played Dobble, a card game akin to snap, but more complicated and requiring sharper wits. Several games of Dobble revealed beyond all argument that grandad’s dementia was much more advanced than had previously been thought.

The rain and grandad’s dementia did not, however, prevent us from going out to dinner one evening. Boring for an eight-year-old, potentially, I thought, but perhaps a useful introduction to the social classes existing an ear-poppingly four or five levels above his own.