Low life

Michel is one of those Frenchmen one encounters now and again whose shining saintliness is beyond rational understanding. This great bear of a man, with heavy silver rings on his fingers and thumbs, is always cheerful, always kind, always puts others before himself. Whenever he speaks with me, it is always under the pathetic delusion that he might learn something from me that he did not already know. The only thing that makes him in any way contemptuous is my pointing out his goodness to him. Michel was a teacher. For many years, he taught English at a private school in Somerset. Now retired to his native Provence, he has grown corpulent — or ‘bloody fat’, as he puts it.

Showered and shaved and wearing a stiff new Paul Smith candy-stripe shirt, I took an Uber to the party. I love London and it was grand to be back and to be driven through the sunny streets by Yusef, one of the many new arrivals adding vibrancy, energy and diversity to our great city. Diversity is strength! Diversity is our greatest strength! (I used to believe that unity is strength, but I have lately recanted of this foolish and evil idea.) ‘Will you be voting in or out, Yusef?’ I said in a comradely manner, as one perplexed citizen to another. ‘I think stay in, sir,’ he said. ‘Better for the economy.’ ‘What economy?’ I said. ‘The global economy is a parasitic Ponzi scheme and the EU is already hollowed out.

Hours before boarding the cross-Channel car ferry, I received a text message from the company warning of severe fuel shortages on the other side of the Channel. Nevertheless, it went on to say, for safety reasons the transporting in vehicles of fuel-filled jerry cans was strictly forbidden. Bugger that. I went out and bought two five-gallon second world war-style green steel jerrycans, filled them to the brim with diesel, and concealed them in suitcases. As we queued to board, I looked around at the lines of vehicles, many with trailers and roof boxes, and hoped and trusted that every one of them was packed to the gunnels with fuel containers of every description, because surely they weren’t going to search every car before letting us on board — were they?

We cleared the kitchen table for a game of pick-up sticks. Remember them? Thirty long, thin bamboo sticks, their differing values painted on them in red, blue or yellow stripes? You bunch them in your fist and let them collapse in a heap on the table and then the players extract one at a time from the pile without disturbing any of the others? The game is still being sold in Oxfam shops for 99 pence a set under the rubric ‘Those Were the Days’. The kitchen table is circular. Four of us, representing four generations — me, my son, my grandson and my mother — are playing. I let the sticks fall. My grandson picks up a loose ten stick and does his silent maniacal rictus laugh. My boy reaches out and snaffles an easy two. Mum’s go.

A fresh start in a new gym in a foreign country. The serious young gym attendant didn’t speak a word of English, so we did the best we could using my limited French. He weighed me then asked me to hold a device that measured my body mass index via my palms — how it does that I can’t even begin to guess — and he carefully wrote down the result on the induction form. Had I ever exercised before? I had, I said, but about three years ago, after a cancer diagnosis, I had lost heart and stupidly given it up. What kind of exercise did I used to do? Swimming, karate, cycling and gym, I said. He carefully, and a touch sceptically, I thought, wrote all that down. How tall was I? Six feet exactly, I said.

On Sunday we were invited for lunch at Chez Bruno, an unbelievably posh restaurant in the south of France. At Chez Bruno all the dishes, even the ice-cream desserts, are flavoured with truffles. Resting on the gate pillars as we drove in were two gigantic stone truffles, and next to the entrance was a long painted fresco of the Last Supper, with Bruno’s face superimposed on that of Jesus and 12 Michelin-starred chefs as his apostles. In the carpark a dignified old gent stepped in front of the car. His job was to park it for us. I took my foot off the clutch thinking the gears were disengaged, but they weren’t, and the car kangarooed forward, knocking him on to the bonnet.

The tourist information office of the small French country town looked closed. Peering between the posters on the window glass, I couldn’t see a light on inside or furniture or people. I tried the door anyway and it gave way. The office was open. In the corner of a large expanse of tiled floor was an office desk. Seated at the desk was a woman aged about 20 absorbed in a fat paperback called Think and Grow Rich. My appearance on her office tiles seemed to astonish her. She leapt out of her chair and almost ran to welcome me. Did she speak English? I said. Yes, of course. How could she help? I said that I had read somewhere that the town boasted an Olympic-sized outdoor swimming-pool and I was wondering where I could find it.

I drank Bombay gin and Fever-Tree tonic on the half-empty easyJet flight to Gatwick. I was even offered ice cubes. I was dressed like a peon, so as soon as I arrived in London I went into the nearest Gap superstore and bought jeans, a shirt and a jumper in the sale and threw away the clobber I was wearing. The only items in the sale were either small or extra small so I looked a bit like a frogman, but felt much happier. I had another large one in a pub with overflowing flower baskets, then checked into the hotel, where a decision had been made, said the receptionist, to upgrade me to a ‘club’ class room. The toilet paper in this room was embossed with a pattern of fleur-de-lis, which lent a touch of splendour and improved my overall experience in the bathroom palpably.

What consolation in life can Arthur and I find after that defeat at the hands of Manchester United in the quarter-final replay of the FA Cup, and the manner of it? West Ham and their always hiding fortunes are, and always have been, real life for me; real life, only sport. My father first took me to Upton Park for the first game of the 1966–7 season against Chelsea. I was nine. Even then I had set my face against my father, but the subject of West Ham was a kind of no-man’s land between us, and until the day he died our relationship consisted entirely of conversation about a football team. (Even this was tinged with disdain after old Arsenal programmes discovered in the attic suggested an earlier allegiance.) My father came from solid West Ham-supporting stock.

On Monday morning I was in a blind panic. The deadline for posted manuscript entries to the Daily Mail First Novel competition is 1730 GMT on Saturday 16 April. But I was in France again. A letter sent from France to Blighty takes between three days and a week. Therefore I had to get my entry — 5,000 words in 12 point Times New Roman, double-spaced, and a 600-word synopsis of the rest — posted by midday at the absolute latest. The winner gets £20,000 and a book deal if he or she can faithfully promise to deliver the finished novel by 31 October. On Monday morning my problems were threefold: the printer had run out of bloody ink; I couldn’t work out how to change my page format from single- to double-spaced; and I couldn’t find a paper clip.

The younger grandson, Klynton, four, has got in the habit recently of thrusting his hands in my trouser pockets and tearing up and throwing away whatever he finds there. He goes about it with energy and application, snarling and growling like a lion, and it’s bloody annoying. Because he is impervious to physical pain, a smart cuff around the cranium only makes him press his attack more violently, like a brave bull ‘insisting’ against a picador’s lance. If there is a sofa handy, I pick him up, throw him across the room into it, and he comes back at me as if rebounding on a length of elastic. Most often he robs me of cash, but the other day his assault was rewarded with an hour-old MOT certificate that was ripped apart in the ensuing tug-of-war.

While I was in Provence, my hostess and I went out one day for a walk in the hills. We walked for three hours and didn’t encounter another soul, and apart from a couple of blue-tits, nor did we see any wildlife. At one point we came to an old stone monastery chapel perched on a ledge with aerial views of forested hills and mountains stretching away to the horizon and not a sign of the 21st century visible. Architecturally, the chapel exterior was simplicity itself, suggesting a holy order of utmost austerity. My hostess had been here before, she said. In fact she makes a point of coming up here and visiting the chapel if ever she feels low or troubled.

I shared a taxi from Cheltenham station to the house party in an outlying village with a stripper. Finding a taxi in Cheltenham during the Festival is as difficult as picking a winner in the Bumper, and we were amazed and pleased to have got one so easily. One wouldn’t have guessed that the dark, petite young woman, thickly wrapped against the cold night air, was a stripper, but she was proud enough of her occupation to talk about it on the seven-furlong ride between the station and the ‘gentleman’s club’ where we dropped her. She’d come all the way from Cardiff, she said, to dance in a cage from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m., and she very much hoped it was going to be worth the effort financially.

I walk into the King Bill at eight o’clock and the usual young Friday-night crowd is in and the spirit is already moving. Whether this is due to the fatness of the moon or the availability and quality of the drugs on sale this evening, I couldn’t say. Whatever the cause, everyone is lit up and loved up and a curious unity prevails. The jukebox is up loud and I’m greeted left and right as I push my way between the friendly, relaxed faces in search of one in particular. I spot Trev sitting down at the head of the pub’s top table with half a dozen of his young nephews and nieces. Trev’s is an old farming family, solidly working class still, and they wouldn’t swap that for anything.

Nice airport was more or less deserted. Two-and-a-half hours early for the easyJet flight to Gatwick, I had a leisurely cup of tea and a bun at a café kiosk before going through security, sharing a counter with a couple of young gay Frenchmen who were bickering respectfully over the timing of some future arrangement. I took out my 99p 1987 charity-shop paperback, Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse by Patrick Hamilton, and began to read. I love Patrick Hamilton’s novels, but until that moment hadn’t bothered to try the later ones, which he wrote when his alcoholism had taken a grip and he couldn’t get out of bed, as they are generally considered to be disappointingly bad. But for 99p I thought I may as well see for myself, and I read hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

Before we left for Sunday lunch at the Les Deux Garçons restaurant, Aix-en-Provence, I checked the reviews on Tripadvisor. I’m mildly addicted to Tripadvisor restaurant reviews — I enjoy their Pepys-like unselfconsciousness — and never before have I seen opinion so equally divided between praise and censure. According to the dissenters, Les Deux Garçons is ‘a worst nightmare’, ‘absolutely horrible’, ‘a fraud and a scam’, ‘a theatre of clowns’, ‘the perfect place to while away a few hours — if you are on death row’.

I was diagnosed with prostate cancer with metastases in April 2013. It was a bit of a shock, but when the shock subsided I found I was happier than I had been for as long as I could remember. Every man in his best state is altogether vanity, says the Bible. With the dictator vanity toppled by a few carefully chosen words from a urologist, I found I was unexpectedly living in the present, savouring every moment, and genuinely happier and more alive than I had been for years. Kinder too. It is such a normal, rational reaction to being diagnosed with a fatal illness, it’s a cliché, I suppose. They wouldn’t say how long I had left. I guessed six months to a year, but a quick trawl of the prostate cancer website chat rooms indicated I had anything up to five years.

In the Foreign Legion’s Museum of Memory at Aubagne, near Marseilles, I examined the kit, weapons and uniforms from the Legion’s formation in 1831 up to the present day. Uniforms from the Crimea, the Mandingo war, the Mexican expedition,the second Madagascar expedition, the first world war, the Algerian war, the first Gulf war: there they all were, displayed in glass cases. My museum guide was Maurice, a proud Legion veteran. Green Legion tie, natty silver-buttoned regimental waistcoat, close-cropped head and an impressive row of medals on his chest. You only had to look at his lean face to see how fit he was. A tour of duty in the Légion Étrangère is five years. Maurice has five under his regimental turquoise belt.

The hotel reception was lit by three gloomy low-wattage light bulbs. It should have been six but the management was economising. The hotel’s nod to the city carnival was a single balloon strung from one of the empty bulb holders. I let my backpack drop from my shoulders and checked in. WiFi, said the receptionist, cost extra. The WiFi registration process was as insanely convoluted as buying illegal drugs. Room number dreiunddreissig was on a shabby corridor with two other doors. The room was dismally cold and small. It was bare of every amenity one normally expects to find even in a cheap hotel room, except for a bed, a kit wardrobe and a tiny table whose surface area was taken up by a dirty old television. The thin carpet was soiled, the wallpaper peeling.

Denis was my guide to and from the new out-of-town Lidl superstore at Salernes in Provence. I drove. The road was a smooth ribbon of asphalt newly laid through an ancient forest of dwarf oaks. The in-car conversation with Denis was, as usual, easy and undogmatic and wide-ranging, which is the only sort of conversation I am capable of, for I can never remember what my opinions are, let alone which set of beliefs gave rise to them. In this uncommitted way we drifted aimlessly on a gentle swell until we bumped up against the subject of ghosts. I had never seen or heard or felt a ghost, I said. Neither had I met anyone who had. So no, I didn’t believe in them. Denis had and did, however, claiming to have frequented two houses that were quite definitely haunted.