Jeremy Clarke

We were eight for dinner on New Year’s Eve: four men and four women with a combined age, I would guess, of around 500. A quarter of the company — two of the men — had been officially diagnosed as suffering from one form or another of dementia. We whose brains still neatly fitted the inside of our skulls were instead prey to all the usual anxieties, delusions, depressions and addictions typical of those wealthy, late middle-aged English people who exist in the strange limbo of expatriation. We sat there facing each other across the dinner table on the last day of the year, knackered, it’s true, each drifting aimlessly in a private universe of his or her own devising.

The Airbnb accommodation at Paddington, chez Mohammed, was a fourth-floor room measuring about nine feet by five. As well as having a single bed, this small space was extraordinarily well equipped, with a wardrobe, huge fridge, sink, draining board, ironing board, microwave oven, kettle, two electric hobs, a set of saucepans and enough cutlery and crockery for a select dinner party, and a television set. The room’s heat, which came from an unidentifiable source, was tropical. The mattress had a couple of broken springs and was horribly filthy, but the sheet covering it smelt freshly laundered and for just £22 a night I was well pleased.

At the turn of the century, I started a diary. I’ve mostly typed it on old typewriters, bashing out a sheet of A4 like a hyperactive muppet, without giving any forethought to what I am going to say. The pleasure I get from the daily typed entry is partly mechanical. When the page is done, I punch two holes in the side of the sheet with an antique lever punch, shove it in a box binder and forget all about it. In 18 years I have filled five box binders. The only people interested enough to read my diary have been female members of my family. They read it when I’m out and they don’t even bother to put it back where they found it. Now and again I recognise a cryptic comment alluding to something they’ve read there.

I entered the cave house carrying groceries and panting from the climb to find an old hippie woman displaying rugs to Catriona. Evidently Catriona had narrowed her final choice down to the two spread out on the red floor tiles. She and the hippie were silently contemplating them. One was about six feet by four, the other four by two. ‘What do you think?’ said Catriona. ‘Very ethnic,’ I said. ‘From where?’ The hippie woman asserted ‘Cappadocia’ rather too hastily for my liking. ‘They’re kilims,’ said Catriona, brightly and knowledgeably. Top of the class, she informed me that a kilim is a traditional prayer mat or wall decoration decorated with symbols and coloured with natural dyes.

Three of us on a cold metal bench waiting for the bus. It’s almost dark. Winter arrived yesterday and we are frozen. Next to me sits a small, moon-faced woman wearing a brown beret. Her spectacles are missing an arm. She is wearing unlaced plimsolls with no socks, a thin black skirt and an anorak with no padding. Her shopping bag appears to contain rubbish. She has been waiting since ten o’clock this morning. Next to her is an old man wearing pathetically flimsy, broken-down trainers. His bony knees are outlined by the worn-out cotton of his trousers. His face is ashen with cold. He’s been waiting since noon. I’ve been waiting two hours. We are waiting for the coach to Nice. I’m hoping to get to Nice airport to catch a flight to Bristol.

Evenings, I sit in a chair facing the cave interior and Catriona lies on the new sofa facing me (and, behind me, the window). Neither of us likes telly much so we read. She is currently consumed by a biography of Gerald Brenan; I’m enjoying The Unfree French, which is a history of the German occupation and the Vichy government. The cave wall is light brown and pitted and striated by a river that once cascaded over it. The rock is stable and perfectly dry and according to one’s imaginative mood resembles either a gigantic petrified bath sponge or Arizona viewed from a light aircraft.

The monument to this French village’s war dead is a plain white stone block with the head of a grizzled old French infantryman chiselled on top. His big capable hands are gripping the block’s edge, as though he is peering intently over the parapet of a trench. On Sunday we assembled around him to honour the 53 local men, from a population of 1,800, who lost their lives in the first world war. Schoolchildren queued at a microphone to sing out their names. A ladies choir sang a plangent song about Verdun. The state bell tolled for 11 minutes. The major made an interminable speech in the rain. Everybody sang the Marseillaise. Around 300 people turned out (beneath about 100 umbrellas) from a winter population the same size as it was 100 years ago.

Three years ago we were given a bag of skunk, Catriona and I, provenance Glasgow. It was one gigantic dried bud wrapped in polythene. Cannabis in any shape or form usually renders me paranoid, especially if I smoke it in company and there is conversation. I’ve come to hate it. The delusion is always the same: I become unconvinced by my persona, which seems to have been chosen at random from a number of equally eligible candidates, and now feels like a flimsy, hackneyed mask. If the paranoia intensifies, I fall under the further illusion that everyone in the room’s personas except mine are as ingrained as oak rings, and that the ludicrousness of my papier-mâché one is transparent to all. The last time I smoked cannabis was three years ago.

I apologised, was gladly granted an indulgence, and on Sunday I packed a small bag and reached into a drawer for the passport. I was going back to the cave house in the Provençal village. Back to France and the French and to speaking my trousers-on-fire French. Salut! Tu vas bien? Viens m’embrasser, mon petit chou. Back to a country where, as Barbara Cartland put it, you can make love in the afternoon without people hammering on the door. Back to village bells clanging off the hours of the day, back to early rising and trying to be witty, or at least sentient, in French with the insanely jolly woman in the village bakery at a quarter to seven in the morning. Back to the flaking morning croissant and strong coffee and eating outside — always eating eating eating.

My reactionary first world war reading jag continues. The literature is vast, but so is my capacity and fascination. I began reading systematically, then went in search of thrills. Typing ‘my top ten first world war books’ into a search engine has also been a wonderfully fruitful source of leads. Space, and probably your boredom threshold, won’t allow me to list mine. I want to stick my neck out, however, and give a cheer for two books by liaison officers: one a Anglophile Frenchman liaising with the British, the other a Francophile Englishman liaising with the French. As one might imagine, both books are tragicomic. Emile Herzog was the son of a textile tycoon. In the first world war he served as an interpreter, then as a liaison officer.

East of London the Thames broadens dramatically to a surreal waste of mud and sewage-coloured water lined with shipping-container dumps. Here, a row of expensive apartment blocks commands the view as if it were the Loire valley. At 11.30 on the morning of the Friday before last, anyone looking idly out of a window of one of these might have raised an astonished eyebrow. For in the water below, manoeuvring strenuously against an ebb tide and a Pentecostal wind to position her stern against a shipping buoy, was a beautiful, red-sailed, century-old Thames sailing barge. Crowding her deck, moreover, and enterprisingly clad in tweed and waxed cotton, some wearing ties, was a curious assembly of passengers.

I told Oscar to wait outside and I went in and said to the barman: ‘Would it be all right if my grandson came in to watch the football?’ ‘Of course,’ he said. My notion that children aren’t allowed in pubs must be a quaint one because his harassed, hardworking face creased into a bemused smile and a man seated at the bar laughed. We had four screens of various sizes to choose from: one behind the bar, one above the pool table, one above the fireplace and one fixed to the wall at the end of the bar. About a dozen customers were half paying attention to the screens above the fireplace and devoting the other half to obscenity-laden conversation. The swearing in this intensely local bar was unselfconscious, unemphatic and universal.

Once the house move was completed, Catriona’s oldest and best Scottish friends, two of them, came to stay for a week. Now that Catriona lives in France they see each other but infrequently. A seven-day female catch-up feast did not appeal to me. Neither would a shadowy male presence about the house appeal much to them, I imagined. An unenlightened point of view, perhaps. But gender is more sharply defined in Scotland than south of the border. The lassies are proud of their lads’ outrageous, even ludicrous, masculinity, but they sympathise with each other more. Scottish gender begs to differ. So I planned to bugger off back to England the day after they arrived and leave them to it.

I have a friend here in this French village to which we moved just over a week ago. He is a veteran foreign correspondent, still working but also spending time tending his beloved garden, olive grove and small vineyard, from which he bottles and labels about 450 bottles of red each year. He is a proud journalist of the old school, which is to say that he is sober and serious when in pursuit of his story, and neither when not. With his fund of unprintable stories, his undiminished zest for current affairs, and his 450 bottles cooling under the stone stairs of his 18th-century house, he is the best possible company.

Moving day. The contents of a hillside shack to be moved four miles to a cave house perched high on a cliff above the village. The cave house’s only access from the road below is a steep, narrow and stony footpath. Three removal men for the job: me plus two French day-labourers. The elder of the Frenchmen, Philippe, was 67. I called him Philippe Phillop because that’s what he wore. He is a patriotic Parisian and his character, I would say, is the Parisian equivalent of a chirpy cockney. The same ready wit, the same cynicism born of urban poverty. He did not, however, find my nickname for him as amusing as I did, not even after a laborious explanation. The first time I met Philippe, in a bar, he told me his life story.

The long table was set out under four beautifully pollarded plane trees festooned with coloured lanterns and red balloons. Twenty party guests. Above us the clear night sky was brightly peppered with stars. Three and a half years ago, Catriona fled to France with a broken heart and shattered confidence. She returned to the village where she had spent family holidays in happier years; an expat family friend had offered his empty villa as a refuge. In that lonely time she used to stand at the bedroom window and look out at those pollarded planes, bare and dripping in the rain, and wonder what was going to become of her. It was winter and as wet, cold and miserable as Provence can be. One day the housekeeper paid a visit. Ruth had done the same once — fled with nothing.

I’d missed the train, and the next was due in 45 minutes, so I popped into the nearby salon for a haircut, two months since the last one. Half Price Monday for Students, it said on a board outside. Inside, three women attended to three female heads in a spacious salon with the doors and windows flung open to the warm air and the view of the long-stay car park. I was directed to a chair, and presently a woman came bounding through a door, exuberantly, like a chat-show host bounding down the studio steps to wild applause. She was slim and tanned with strong-looking legs, aged about 50. ‘And how are you today?’ she yelled, as if I were deaf as well as old. Gawd help me, I thought. Here, clearly, was the loudest, chattiest and most socially confident woman on the firm.

I was present in the room when Oscar encountered his father for the first time since returning from his fortnight in the south of France. Oscar doesn’t see his father often. I hoped that his father would be pleased to see his son and would kindly ask him how his holiday went. And if, as I hoped, he did ask how the holiday went, I wondered which of his holiday memories Oscar would describe to his father, and in which order. There was plenty to choose from. For a start there had been the extraordinary weather. Would he tell his father about the terrible heat and the car always like a furnace when we first got in, and driving everywhere with the windows down, and the breeze coming in as hot as a hair dryer, but at least the air was moving.

The Villa Carnignac art gallery is located on a Mediterranean island off the French Riviera called Porquerolles. Purpose-built to show off billionaire hedge-fund executive Edouard Carnignac’s modern art collection, the gallery opened in June. Monsieur Carnignac hung out at the Factory with Andy Warhol in the 1960s, is a freedom-loving, polo-playing child of the counter-culture who famously paid for an advertisement displayed in the leading papers of Europe on the same day urging former president Hollande to lay off taxing the rich. The off-shore location of his art gallery is vitally important. You don’t visit Villa Carnignac because you can’t think of anything better to do on a Wednesday afternoon. You journey there, imbued with a pilgrim spirit.

The entire Alpine village, contemptuously dismissed recently in an online tourist guide as a nondescript centre of old peasants and old dogs, was gathered under an awning in the single street for a festive lunch. Oscar and I squeezed along between long rows of perhaps 100 bent backs to the only pair of empty chairs remaining. The tables were covered with disposable paper covers; everyone had brought their own plate and knife. As we sat, our immediate neighbours greeted us with vinous geniality. They were a matriarchal middle-aged woman, a mournful girl aged about 13 with thick lenses in her spectacles, and two young men with comically drunk faces. Everyone was drinking dark pink wine decanted into old-fashioned glass-stoppered bottles.