Low life

‘ESTA refused,’ said the email from the official website of the US Department of Homeland Security. Franklin Roosevelt once said that the saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities — a sense of humour and a sense of proportion. This refusal, presumably on the grounds of a 40-year-old conviction for possession of amphetamine sulphate, showed neither. And why now? After all, they’ve let me in three times before. The first time was to LA. The early part of the morning of my first day in the United States was spent doing pool aerobics with about 20 of the fattest women in America and we laughed our heads off as our tidal waves nearly emptied the pool.

In France, or in Provence at least, polite rule number one is to say hello. You must offer a distinct ‘good day’ or ‘good day, ladies and gentleman’, for example, when joining the queue in the baker’s or at the post office, or when getting on a bus or entering a bar. A nod or a wink just isn’t enough. Neither is a self-effacing silence. ‘Bonjour’ is the password. Since I have discovered it, I have been jovially saluting everyone right, left and centre. The inexplicable hostility I used sometimes to encounter in shops has stopped, and moreover the French have revealed themselves, incredibly, to have a fine sense of humour, which is roughly the opposite of my impression before I began to say hello indiscriminately.

By New Year’s Day I’d had enough of festivities. Instead of getting out of bed, I turned over, put my face to the wall and refused all offers of food, drink and conversation. I kept this up throughout the day and into the evening, when I had to get up to go to the toilet. Asked for an explanation of such childish behaviour, I blamed the wind — a cold, violent Mistral that had been blowing since Christmas Eve. The cypresses were still twirling and bowing the next day. Though not yet restored enough to dance the Gay Gordons, I felt a bit more sociable, and in the evening we went out. A neighbour, Professor Brian Cox, had invited us over to his house to play the board game Escape From Colditz.

As I stood there, I was reminded of the man of no fixed abode who, several years back, aged 68, made it into the local paper charged with shoplifting. He’d failed to steal a bottle of champagne and a hat to the value of £75. In court, the magistrate had inquired as to the brand of champagne. On being told that it was Pol Roger, he jocularly commended the tramp on his refined taste, and said that it inclined him towards leniency. That gay tramp came to mind now, two days before Christmas, as I stood in front of the champagne section in the French hypermarket, tempted by the special festive offer of 25 per cent off a magnum of Nicolas Feuillatte Grand Reserve, a mid-range champagne that I prefer over some of the dearer ones, a saving of €11 per item.

We ascended the gangplank and were smartly directed to the ship’s library, where the seated purser swiped my debit card and took our passports. This purser’s face was prematurely aged, disfigured by misfortune, implacably hostile. Would she be keeping our passports until the voyage end, we asked humbly? We would get them back at the end of the cruise and not before, she barked, furious at our ignorance of the ship’s rules. Cabin 302 was one deck down, next to the dining room. Catriona’s suitcase was already placed outside the cabin door. Mine perhaps had yet to complete its journey through the cruise-terminal security machinery. The cabin was roomier than expected. A sealed, chintz-curtained porthole vouchsafed a view of the horrible sea.

I took a dab of antiseptic gel and rubbed my hands together. ‘Alone tonight, sir?’ said the charming head waiter. I was, I said. For the sake of conviviality, he seated me opposite the only other lone diner in the ship’s restaurant, a chap in his mid-sixties with his head in a book. This bookish loner had a jutting Mr Punch chin and an old-fashioned lothario’s pencil moustache. A few hours earlier, I’d noticed him prowling the deck wearing only a minuscule pair of leopard-skin print bathing drawers and a sea captain’s hat. We shook hands and exchanged Christian names. Gunter hailed from Germany but spoke basic English. I asked him what his book was about. ‘It is about life after death,’ he said.

My pal Charlie inherited a car and a ride-on mower from an old pal. He kept the mower and the next time he saw me in the pub he offered me the car. He’d driven down in it, he said, and it was out in the pub car park. ‘This car is bombproof,’ said Charlie handing over the key. ‘Even you couldn’t wreck this one.’ I asked how much. He wanted paying not in cash but in art, he said. He’d seen this painting for sale on a French restaurant wall and now that he was back in England he wished he’d bought it. I was returning to France in a fortnight. I knew the restaurant. There were about a dozen works hung on the wall, all of them efflorescences of the same confident genius. Charlie showed me a photo of the object of his desire on his phone.

The door to Trev’s flat was open so I walked in and found him on the sofa watching TV. He looked up and gave an ironic cheer. How long was it? We thought it must be at least a year since we’d last seen each other, maybe a year and a half. And how was Trev? He was fine, he said. He had plenty of work on — building work and delivering logs — and was generally taking care of himself. We had arranged to go for a few scoops at the pub. While he got ready he told me what he’d been up to. The headline news was the closing down of the King Bill, about which I already knew. Trev went to the private closing-down party, he said. The departing landlord locked everyone inside the pub and told them to drink everything and smoke away.

At ten to eleven we filed outside the church and assembled in the graveyard around a small cenotaph commemorating the dead of two wars with a dozen unmistakably local names. As we shuffled out, we hoped that the rain would hold off — no offence of course to any of the names on the cenotaph who copped it at Passchendaele. We were about 30 souls, combined age about 2,500. At 60, I was the second youngest by a decade or so, and I was attached by the hand to grandson Oscar, aged seven. The rain couldn’t decide whether or not to hold off. Oscar and I sheltered from the horizontal spits in the lee of a gravestone five feet tall.

We had a hyperbole competition, the taxi driver and I, over the climbing full moon, clearer and brighter than either of us had seen it for as long as we could remember. Did I know, he said, that the gravitational power of the moon on the Earth was just enough to stabilise the Earth’s wobble? It might have been put there, and its mass finely calibrated, just for the task. No, I said, I didn’t know that, but it just goes to show. ‘Show what?’ he said. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. But after thinking about it I said that maybe it goes to show that the physicists and astronomers are banging their heads against a brick wall. ‘How’s that?’ he said. He was a young man and terrier-like in his passion for logical debate.

The French countryside around here is teeming with wild boar. They visit the shack at night to eat the pansies and nose up the flower-beds, and their violent flare-ups over a disputed morsel wake us up. Standing about in the lane the other night, blocking it, was a 25-strong gathering of them. They ranged from cheerful little tackers to daft adolescents to suspicious old bruisers. And when we take the old dog on her daily walk, we hear them thrashing about in the tinder-dry undergrowth on either side of the track. Our neighbours advise taking a stick with us at this time of year, to fend off an attack, but as the boars seem more afraid of us than we are of them we don’t bother.

Last May we had dinner with a comic who reads a lot and his wife. At one point, he told Catriona that he had just finished a novel that he had enjoyed more than anything he had read for a very long time and he would like to lend it to her. He disappeared into the house to fetch it, and returned empty-handed and cross. His wife confessed that she was reading it and hadn’t quite finished. His wife loves to watch telly more than read novels, so this was a surprise. And here she was refusing point-blank to give this one back because she hadn’t finished it. The comic was furious; she was obdurate. Catriona could have the book when she had finished it and not before. A few days later the novel appeared on a bookshelf in the house, lying sideways.

On Saturday night, I toddled up to the village hall for the fish-and-chip supper, quiz night and raffle — bring your own booze — hosted by the vicar. The hall was already packed when I walked in, and I was shown to the only one of 14 tables that wasn’t yet full and introduced to the couple seated there. I think Joan and Bill suspected me of being an imposter because they immediately interrogated me as to where in the village I lived and where in the country my strong regional accent originated. Nor did my answers seem to satisfy them. Finally, we were joined by Margaret, whom I knew. Margaret was just back from Iran.

Early on Friday morning I flew from the north of Iceland to Reykjavik, from Reykjavik to Heathrow, then I hopped aboard the night sleeper from Euston to Glasgow Central to attend the wedding of Catriona’s eldest daughter, held the next day at the Winter Gardens of the People’s Palace on Glasgow Green. Three years ago, Catriona separated from her husband after a 30-year-long union. The separation was not amicable and is as yet unsettled. Apart from a glimpse at a graduation, the wedding was the first time they had been in the same room for three years. I was invited to the reception but not to the ceremony. As the new man in Catriona’s life, I imagined I would be a cynosure when I walked through the door that evening.

The temperature gauge needle heeled hard over into the red. ‘Not again,’ I said to Oscar, sitting beside me on his booster seat. Sunday evening, and I was returning him to his mother after having him to stay for the weekend. The distance door to door is around 20 miles: about 40 minutes along country roads. After ten miles, a steep uphill climb proved disastrous. Steam was pouring in through the heater vents and fogging up the inside of the windscreen. I tried the demist blower on maximum heat but only cold air came out. So I drove the car with one hand and wiped the steam from the glass with a sodden little tissue, searching for somewhere to pull over. Oscar was as calm as an adobe wall in the moonlight, as Raymond Chandler once put it.

As is traditional in this village, the Chapel congregation had walked the 100 yards up the hill to unite with the Anglicans for the Harvest Sunday morning service. The Chapel people are on the whole younger and more visibly filled with the Holy Spirit than the Anglicans. Retired postmistress Daphne was standing in the aisle, bubbling over as usual with love and joy, and bestowing hugs and kisses on anyone attempting to squeeze pass. The Clarke contingent — mother, aunt, grandson — took a pew brazenly near the front. The service this year was led by the rural dean, who is an absolute babe. This was a rare visit, and we all of us, young and old, male and female, feasted our eyes greedily on her as she emerged theatrically from the vestry shooting her glamorous cuffs.

I got off the plane at Changi still pleasantly sedated by Xanax, passed through the ‘nothing to declare’ channel, and there, waiting with my name on a signboard, was my guide for the next four days. Joy was short, middle-aged and had a low centre of gravity. She was Chinese, she said, pleased about it. A minibus and driver were waiting at the kerb. ‘Get in!’ said Joy. I did as I was told. We drove to the centre of Singapore just in time for the Garden Rhapsody light and sound show. ‘Look! Supertrees! Can you see them?’ she said. You couldn’t miss them. Towering above and around us were a dozen or so 50-metre-tall branched steel structures twinkling with coloured lights.

‘Have you ever thought of having some colour put in, love?’ said Julian as he shaved my neck with a razor and performed other small finishing touches with his scissor tips. I was sitting on a kitchen chair in his half-finished kitchen extension and while he worked I bowled underarm tennis balls to the schnauzer puppy. Julian was referring to the sides of my head, which, freshly shorn, were bright silver. Over my dead body, Julian, old son, I said. Old men with dyed hair look ridiculous. One can always tell at a glance whether a man has dyed his hair. My friend Trevor dyes his hair himself, I said, and on occasion I’ve seen it black, brown, ginger and grey all at the same time. It’s so sad. Ah, but hair products have moved on, said Julian.

I arrived for lunch a bit late and was led to the dining table. Our hostess disappeared back into the house to bring out the food, leaving me to acquaint myself with the other guests, an Englishwoman and an American. The Englishwoman said that yesterday she had fallen off the wagon after eight weeks and today she was terribly hung over. She didn’t feel guilty, however, because she had enjoyed herself very much. The American man’s eyes were hidden behind sunglasses but he had a warm smile and great teeth and an easy, open manner. He introduced himself by saying that this was his first time in France, and that he was checking out Italy and France as possible places of refuge in the not-so-far-fetched event that he had to flee America. ‘Trump?’ I said.