Parties

Provence It’s difficult to believe that Evelyn will be 90 in a few months’ time. I’ve known her for more than ten years and, because she can converse on most subjects, I look forward to seeing her when she visits. A retired British archaeologist who ran departments in some of the best universities for most of her life, Evelyn still travels ten months of the year. She is also more knowledgeable about geopolitics than most, and a formidable political debater who can sometimes be prone to anger during discussions. I like to thrash things out too, but quietly. I can’t bear shouting. If things start to get shrill, I leave the room. The passing years haven’t diminished Evelyn physically or mentally.

Everyone went to the same school as someone famous. In my case it’s Spider-Man, Tom Holland, who joined my former school about 30 years after I left. Back in the mid-1970s, the most famous old boy was another superhero, Major Pat Reid, who’d been captured by the Germans during the war and briefly imprisoned in Colditz. His bestselling memoir popularised the notorious jail and led to a TV series, an Action Man model and various other spin-offs. He was known as the only man to have escaped from the Nazis and turned it into a board game. He showed up on sports day, in July 1975, to give us a pep talk and hand out prizes to the school’s top athletes. I wasn’t among them, of course. My great days as a sportsman lay ahead of me. They still do, in fact.

Apparently it’s easy to make money on YouTube by teaching a course in your specialism. Mine is having no friends. And I share my aversion to humanity with a number of very distinguished names. Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson and Howard Hughes were all solitary creatures who didn’t allow social frippery to dilute the focus of their ambitions.  Psychologists tell me I have ‘autism’, which is promoted so widely in our society that we ought to call it ‘taughtism’. But I take issue with these experts. I don’t believe I have a neurological disorder. And I’m not some crazy hermit who lives in a cave or a ditch. I simply can’t help noticing that most human beings are a waste of space – myself included.

In front of me, a sea of lads in bucket hats and Adidas, with pints. Behind me, a sea of lads in bucket hats and Adidas, with pints. A luxuriantly barneted Richard Ashcroft is concluding his warm-up act and tells us to give it up for the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world, which those in Wembley on the last Wednesday in July do with abandon. A montage of headlines flashes across huge screens about the reunion – the hatchet being buried, the dynamic pricing queue to buy tickets that was so long everyone joked Oasis would have split up again by the time it was your turn to shell out. And then the brothers strolled on. Liam in a bucket hat and zipped cagoule with a rollneck collar, scowling but still managing to look like sex on a stick.

Looking back, I can pinpoint my fatal blunder. It was lunch. It was like the West allowing Vladimir Putin to help himself to the Crimean peninsula without a peep, basically. This is how it happened. My husband had invited two families to stay over the May bank holiday which bled into half term. For four days. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, in light tones, ahead of their arrival. ‘I’ve told them they’re bringing all the food and doing all the cooking.’ As if I’d welcome this wonderful idea, when in fact what he’d suggested was the domestic equivalent of handing over the nuclear football and the codes behind my back.

After we bought a place on my father’s hill farm in 2000, I’d study the notices pinned to boards in post offices-cum-stores across Exmoor in a glazed trance. If we got a puppy, I reasoned, as I studied a blurry Kodak photo of a Cadbury-coated labrador gun dog’s melting mega-litter, I’d stop wanting another baby. The children would sally forth into the great outdoors without complaint at the word ‘walkies’. Our love of the dog would carry us through the ups and downs of family life and – here was the kicker – render the five-hour schlep from London to Exmoor, to an unimproved farmhouse sans TV at the end of a two-mile track, non-negotiable. And then, driving down a steep hill outside Exford one day, I screeched ‘STOP!’ just past a five-bar gate.

The moment I stepped out of the Covent Garden sunshine and into the regal offices of the Lady magazine, it was like stepping into a 19th-century Tardis, and I was already in love. ‘I’m going for the editorship hell for leather,’ I wrote in my diary (published in 2010). ‘I’ve even been out and bought and read a copy of the magazine for the very first time!’ It was the funeral parlour ambience. The genteel tones of the telephonist, Ros, taking calls from deaf dowager duchesses placing adverts for a couple to prepare light luncheons and do some gentle housework in return for accommodation in the gatehouse. It was the fact that the Lady was the inspiration for P.G.

Provence Molly MacCarthy launched the Bloomsbury Memoir Club in the spring of 1920 with two aims. The first was to bring together the old Bloomsbury set who’d been dissipated by the first world war and the second was to encourage her dilatory husband, Desmond, to write his memoir. She was successful in the first but not the second. The original club was composed of old friends and family members: the MacCarthys, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and John Maynard Keynes. The aim was ‘serious but also to amuse’. There were few rules, ‘one of which was that no one should be affronted by anything read or said in the Club’. For years I tried to get a small memoir club going down here in Provence; winters can be cold, dark and lonely.