Jeremy Clarke

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.

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 or cupboard without a wizened lump of cheese set in a trap. Otherwise, she is sane and serene and while her forgetfulness is infuriating to her, its origin doesn’t seem to be organic. She’s 87. I’ve been staying with her for the past few days. Also visiting is my mother’s sister, aged 91. Apart from her deafness and a bad foot necessitating sticks, push trolleys and an electric cart for mobility, she’s right as rain.

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 stalls were set out under the shade trees of the village boulodrome. Ex-dustman Grandad loves browsing in skips and charity shops and at car boot sales and he was in seventh heaven. At the first stall, I was very drawn to an old hand-tinted framed print of two peasants standing in a furrowed field. The sun was setting, their shadows were long. The man had his hat in his hand and was thanking God for their harvest, a pathetic basket of potatoes.

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 take advantage of these offers by swimming in a different pool every day and working our way through the expat society of this remote part of the Provence. It’s Oscar’s first trip abroad; he is staying for a fortnight. Today was day four. The effect of the contrast in his plastic mind between a flat above a hairdressers in Newton Abbot in Devon and a daily succession of private pools in a 42°C heatwave in the hills of Provence must be very great.

‘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 front page was an arresting photograph of President Trump going head to head with President Macron, in Paris, their forearms joined and their hands clasped in the arm-wrestling start position. At their first public handshake in Brussels, Macron had crushed Trump’s hand until the Donald’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. Here was the second leg of the contest and the Donald was playing away from home.

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 gauge with large green digital numbers showing 50.5°C. Little wonder, observed the taxi driver, that the street was deserted. He dropped me outside the Sercotel Sorolla Palace hotel where Eva was waiting on the steps. Eva was the Spanish PR lady, or shepherdess, in charge of 13 travel journalists from all over Europe on a three-day cultural tour of the city. ‘Eva I am ever so sorry,’ I said. ‘Shit happens,’ she said pleasantly and idiomatically.

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, there was nothing to suggest that they were even slightly drunk. Appearances might have been deceptive, however, for they were all of them privately and expensively educated young women. I was bidden to be seated and offered a glass of wine, which I accepted. I sat and sipped and listened to their chatter. That something or somebody was ‘cute’ or ‘insane’ appeared to be the highest possible accolade. Men and maleness were beyond a joke.

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 system certainly disapproved. Viagra and the tart cheap fizz had brought on exquisitely agonising acid reflux. As it was getting on for nine o’clock, we decided that if we didn’t get up right now, leave the hotel, and go and find something to eat, we’d starve. As we walked down the hill into the teeth of the gale, raindrops hit us in the face like tiny bullets.

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 the defendants can’t be arsed to turn up. The British are now so fat that endangered breeds of heavy horses such as the Suffolk Punch are being revived as personal transport. A computer screen aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth, our spanking new, state-of-the-art aircraft carrier, launched last week, was seen to be displaying the logo of Windows XP (copyright 1985–2001). An NHS contractor concealed 700,000 test results in a cupboard because it couldn’t be bothered processing them.

‘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 used to it.’ ‘Why did you change then?’ I said, annoyed by the snobbery. ‘I’m a spirit medium,’ she said. ‘I have lots of wealthy clients. I was working with one in her home, and it came into my head to say to her, “He says you must give everything away, including Bella.” I didn’t have a clue who or what Bella was. The client was dumbfounded.

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 and waiting to pay. While the pensioner in front of me fruitlessly riffled through her handbag for her chequebook for the third time, I stared out of the window and was instantly rewarded by the sight of a Fiat reversing into the rear of a parked Citroën. Wallop! The drivers leapt out to view the damage, which was negligible, apparently.

‘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 of the reinforced glass window that separated the mountain gorillas from the human beings. We had stupidly left Oscar’s iPad on the first bus of the three it had taken us to get there, but by now our devastation had given way to depression. The sight of these mountain gorillas made the iPad seem curiously irrelevant. I have a theory that the gene responsible for obesity in humans also compels them to go to the zoo.