Low life

My mother has various chronic illnesses and finds it almost impossible to remain both immobile and awake during the day. At night she can’t sleep owing to hallucinations caused by her Parkinson’s medication. I think she is also subject to a general delusion that the house is overrun with mice. There is hardly a drawer

On Sunday morning we went, Oscar and I, to a vide grenier in the ancient, picturesque Provençal village. Vide grenier means ‘open attic sale’ — which is the French equivalent of our car boot sale. Oscar had €20 with which to buy homecoming gifts for his Mum and her partner, and his three half-siblings. The

My grandson and I are reprising the 1968 film The Swimmer. Burt Lancaster is an advertising executive at a pool party who attempts to swim eight miles home via his affluent Connecticut neighbourhood’s outdoor swimming pools. We don’t have a pool, but our friends are generous with offers to use theirs. Our aim is to

‘We are always waiting for somebody,’ observed a vexed British journalist. Usually it was me they were waiting for, but this morning I had boarded the tour bus on time and I tutted along with the righteous. While we waited I picked up the driver’s copy of that day’s edition of El Pais. On the

Valencia was a furnace. During the short ride from the airport, the taxi driver supplemented his chat about the weather with a photo on his phone sent by his father-in-law. His father-in-law lives about an hour away. The photo showed a bus stop on a deserted street. Attached to the bus shelter was a temperature

The hen party was seated at an outside restaurant table under the plane trees when I arrived. They sat with straight backs conversing normally, looked cool and lovely, and everything appeared seemly. Yet it was now ten o’clock on their first night on tour. They seemed unusually glad to see their chauffeur; apart from this,

Up on the fifth floor the wind was like thunder. Wild gusts shook the window glass so violently I thought it might smash, which lent the occasion an unexpected drama and significance. I couldn’t entirely shake off the faint and appallingly egotistical suspicion that the universe strongly approved, or strongly disapproved, or something. My digestive

I got up, made a pot of coffee and sat and read the paper. A churchgoing charity worker had stolen enough money from a 102-year-old woman to buy three properties in the UK and to consider buying a village in Spain. Nearly one in three court cases at magistrates’ courts fails to go ahead because

‘Yours?’ I said to the woman watching the mechanic poring over the latest-shape Renault Mégane for faults. (I was waiting to have a word with the mechanic about my Clio.) ‘Yes. I don’t like it,’ she said. ‘All my life I’ve driven German cars, and then I got this one, and I just can’t get

French supermarket cashiers won’t be hurried. Nor will their customers, many of whom seem caught out by a bill at the end, then laboriously write out a cheque. This might be a contrarian French anti-capitalist attitude (‘no, Monsieur: time is not money’),   which is wholly admirable, of course, except when I’m in a tearing hurry

‘Get ready for the stink,’ said Oscar as we walked up the concrete ramp to the entrance of the ape house. As we pushed through the swing door, the smell of herbal manure and the humidity were momentarily overwhelming. Once our eyes had adjusted to the darkness, we saw the usual crowd gathered in front

My latest bed partner is a seven-year-old lad. That first night we slept together in my double bed, I hardly got a wink. Vivid dreams made him lash out at me in his sleep with kicks and flailing arms. In the morning I opened my eyes and his clear blue eyes, three inches from mine,

‘Jeremy, I want you to sit here next to me — unless you’re frightened of me?’ We were briefly introduced at her father’s funeral party; otherwise our hostess and I hadn’t met before. We were about to sit down in her recently deceased father’s house, which she has inherited, and this, she said, was her

Chez Frank is a popular local boar-hunters’ bar, tobacconist and general store at a lonely crossroads in the forest. It also serves daily lunches of no-nonsense French country food. There’s no menu; you get what you’re given. You like it or lump it. The chap who first told us about Chez Frank, now dead and

I was sitting between mother and daughter on the sofa, and we were having a ‘wee night’ as Glaswegians put it. Having a wee night roughly means ‘celebrating’. Yesterday the daughter finished the final exam of her English degree. On the low table in front of us were three gin and tonics, two packets of

‘Emmanuel Macron est le plus grand con du monde,’ said the elderly gent taking the vacant seat on my right at the Marine Le Pen rally last week. He had slicked-back white hair, a little hog’s-bristle moustache and broken-down white trainers. Plus grand means ‘biggest’, du monde means ‘in the world’, and con means, well,

I went to a barbecue. Everyone was patient and well disposed towards the silent, depressed, two-toed sloth in their midst. The eye contact told me that I was included in the conversation but it was also understood that I need not contribute. They comprehended and they sympathised. If I didn’t want to, there was no

When I was depressed 20 years ago, the (then) new antidepressant drug Prozac sorted it easily. It took six weeks for it to lift me up and I stopped taking it after four months. I experienced no side effects and lived happily ever after, believing that the episode was a one-off. Marvellous. Back in January,

I ran for the airport terminal shuttle bus; the doors shut behind me as I skipped on. I sank into a seat beside a young chap who was turned sideways and chatting with the fellow behind him, who was leaning forward. They were speaking in English, quietly, about Melania Trump. The chap beside me was