Tuesday 5th June

So nice to be back; and this time with warm pleasant weather, such a change from Easter, where it was cold, windy and full of rain.  We camped on the way down near Blois, and there was a thunderstorm overnight, but it was thirty degrees during the day, and we swam in the heated pool.  Just like summer, I thought, which of course it almost is, though these early June weeks can catch you out.  It was quite a long drive and we made the error of trying to run through Paris, a big mistake as every Parisien was trying to escape and the peripherique was blocked most of the way.   Still as we headed South and hit the Dordogne, all of those pleasant memories came back to us.   I was especially struck by all the vineyards, the old stock was just stumps back in April, and now they were covered in green leaves and tendrils growing up to the wires, can’t wait to see them in midsummer and then again heavy with fruit in October.   The gently rolling hills sweeping down to the rivers, and even the few houses dotted around seem sympathetic to the landscape, with their orange tiled roofs and light stone walls.  This part of France seems particularly untouched by the modern world, one imagines that viniculture has been going on for hundreds of years, and though there are now roads and traffic, it seems less intrusive than in much of England, where vast fields and disappearing hedgerows have changed the way the countryside looks from even fifty years ago, let alone hundreds.  And Eymet herself is quite beautiful in the sunshine, such a contrast to the rainy London.  We have just walked around in the sunshine in shirts and shorts, had a Monaco and glass of wine in Café de Paris and are now watching brave London in the pouring rain as the flotilla of boats goes down the Thames. So sad for you all.

Monday 4th July

As America will be waking to another Independence Day weekend, and England will be basking in the reflected pride of the long Jubilee weekend we are once again returning to France.  This time we are hoping to actually buy one of the houses we saw last time.  Whether this is a good idea what with the Euro in crisis, and the world teetering on the edge of another depression; this one threatening to make the 2008 banking debacle look like a jelly-exiting-the-mould-wobble, only time will tell.  But the money in the bank is earning hardly any interest, and if everything collapses what good will money be anyway.  So, wish us luck as we go on our way.  Blogging may be slightly disrupted but ‘Kismet’ internet-café permitting, you should still receive them.  Enjoy the Jubilee, as we enjoy La France.

Sunday 3rd June

There is nothing quite like warm Summer rain, so different from the cold biting pellets of winter.  Here the plangent plash of gentle droplets is cool and refreshing, and cling to leaves and flowers like early morning dew.  And there is nothing quite like the smell, it is quite unique and so evocative, it takes you right back to childhood.  The very grass seems to smell fresher, and is the greenest green you will ever see, the pavements, sticky with sap and days of dry weather are washed clean in a few minutes, and as it is only a passing shower, though it may inconvenience for a few minutes, you know it will soon clear up and again in no time the sun will have evaporated the water and the pavements be drying as you watch them.  But now breathe in and smell that rain as it is absorbed back into the air, only to fall on someone else.   Enjoy it while you can, as too soon it will be Winter again.

Saturday 2nd June

One has to almost feel sorry for David Cameron, every time he tries to move on he is dragged back by the Leveson inquiry and his disastrous relationship with News International.   And, long-running sore that this has become it will not be the trigger that fires the gun.  There have been many predictions that the coalition will break up; some observers gave it a year or eighteen months at best, but it has outlived that.  The LibDems are in a bind, their popularity is at an all-time low but they still don’t quite understand why.  It is not because they are part of the Government and therefore suffering from the usual mid-term unpopularity, it is because they have betrayed everything they ever stood for.  Imagine that you were a habitual LibDem voter, what were you voting for all those years, when you knew that your party would most likely never form a Government on their own?   You were voting for a party that you believed had some integrity and honesty, and you were certainly NOT voting for the Tories.  Those who did vote Tory may not be perfectly happy with them but they can hardly be surprised at the policies being pursued.  As the clock ticks on and it becomes more and more obvious that unless the LibDems break from the Tories and state that they will not go into coalition with them again then many LibDems MPs will lose their seats, the pressure will grow.

But before that even I believe the pressure will come from the other side.  There may well be a feel-good, or feel-a-little-less-bad factor, this summer, with the Jubilee, the Football and the Olympics, and the poll lead Labour enjoys at the moment may begin to close, especially if Europe gets worse.  And then the right wing of the Tories may well seize their chance, of both winning an election without the nuisance of going in with anyone else, and they will push for a referendum on Europe itself.  And I suspect that David Cameron might be up for it, or if not him there may even be a coup and George Osborne will try his luck.  Whether they would ever win a referendum is not at all certain, but giving people the opportunity of a vote on it might be enough to make an election worth a try.   So, remember, you read it here first.

Friday 1st June

What can I say about Colin, his voice is one of the most instantly recognizable and wonderful sounds in Music.  He was in the Zombies, who had an instant hit in 1964 with ‘She’s Not There’.  In 1968 they recorded their swan song album ‘Odyssey and Oracle’; after its poor reception and a string of under-achieving singles the band decided to break up and go their separate ways.  Colin actually returned to try his hand at his old job in insurance, before making a string of beautiful albums in the early seventies; One Year’, ‘Ennismore’ and ‘Journey’  where he performed with a string quartet, as well as the more usual pop backing.  He has always remained friends with his former band-mates, and they have reformed from time to time and still tour occasionally.  Colin has recently released a couple of albums with Rod Argent, another Zombie, but it is the early trilogy I return to time and time again, those and the constantly re-issued work of the originally Zombies, who are now recognized as one of the great seminal voices of British Pop, and the album that was so neglected in 1968 is now rated as their masterpiece.

But through it all, like red lettering through a stick of rock has been the crystal clear and yet slightly vulnerable voice of Colin Blunstone singing  ‘Her voice was soft and cool, her eyes were clear and bright, but she’s not there.’  Or ‘The nearer we got to Andorra, the sun set on the land.’  And best of all ‘I realise that I’ve been in your eyes some kind of fool, so say you don’t mind, you don’t mind, you let me off this time.’

Thursday 31st May

I can remember as a child growing up in Suffolk there were stinging nettles everywhere.  There seemed to be massed ranks of the monsters along all the roadsides, and in every bit of woodland and small copses the ground was covered with them.  You learnt pretty early to avoid them as the merest touch of those serrated leaves was like being bitten by a wasp, a sharp and nasty sting.  We also learnt that dock leaves were natures antidote, so would rub furiously with a dock leaf until it disintegrated and spread green gunk all over your ankles.  But sometimes stingers, as we called them, were unavoidable; why was it that the football always ended up in a clump of stingers, or the short cuts were overgrown with them.  We used to carry a switch, a short piece of whippy tree branch to bash them down and would carve out a pathway just wide enough to make our way through the giant triffid-like creatures, heads nodding in the breeze, but inevitably you would still get stung.   Often on returning home from hours of play we would be covered in white lumps surrounded by a red and itching patch of skin, almost displaying our war wounds with some sort of pride.   But apart from keeping small boys away from anything like having fun what use are stinging nettles; do they actually hold some important rank in the food chain, and without their vicious little barbs the whole ecology of Britain would come tumbling down and we would end up starving.  I doubt it.  But they are actually the most resilient of weeds; if you get some in your garden, (and you will) you can snip them back all you like but in a couple of weeks they will return.  You can don thick leather gloves and try to pull them out by the roots, but they are connected by subterraneous runners and simply pop up again a few feet away.

One of my very pet hates – stinging nettles, who needs them?  Manufacturers of nettle soup exempted.

Wednesday 30th May

In my early twenties I read quite a lot of Swift, that great 18^th Century satirist.  Besides the famous Gullivers Travels he also lampooned the Government of the day with several seriously written proposals to solve problems, one of which was to eat young babies; perfectly argued and logical it was too.  A feeling of déjà vu has returned like a rush of blood to the head, which I am sure Mr. Osborne must have also suffered recently, upon living through the great 2012 pasty tax fiasco

It must have seemed such a cracking wheeze to raise a few millions more by taxing food kept warm for takeaway consumption.  It soon became known as the Pasty tax, and immediately started to present a few problems.  The tax would be levied if the product, and let us for convenience sake call it a pasty, were served at above ambient temperature.  But as so often the devil is in the detail; if it was a particularly cold day almost everything would be above ambient temperature; how long would a loaf of bread have to be left to cool down before serving as a ‘warm’ product; if it was a hot day it might be that the pasty would be below ambient temperature.  Greggs the baker mounted a campaign to get rid of the tax, and the press got behind it.  For weeks the Government suffered bad headlines and the words ‘Pasty Tax’ must have caused disturbed night’s sleep in Downing Street.

Then , out of the blue, just as the sun comes out and people have stopped eating, or caring about the price of, pasties, the Governments shoots itself in what is left of its feet by announcing a change, a u-turn of momentous proportions and the ‘Pasty Tax’ is no longer a ‘Nasty Tax’ but a ‘Kept Warm Tax’.

So, now if you buy a pasty, fresh from the oven, but still hot – no tax.  If you buy a pasty kept warm on a hot plate – tax at 20%, if you buy a pasty let go cold, congealed fat and all – no tax.  You couldn’t make it up, and even now it is sure to present inconsistencies, if for example the pasties are kept warm in Styrofoam containers but not heated by any source other than their own latent heat, or if the pasty is served cold but customers are invited to use a complimentary microwave to heat up their pasty.

But three cheers for George Osborne, I haven’t been this amused since Chris Huhne’s ex-wife shopped him for asking her to take the rap for a speeding fine.  Keep up the good work boys.

Tuesday 29th May

There have been many predictions of one language eventually surpassing all others and assuming the mantle of World Language.  Before the First World War many people thought German would prevail; thank goodness they were wrong.  A hundred years earlier it might have been Spanish and of course most of South America speaks Spanish (except for those annoying Brazilians chattering away in Portuguese).  With the huge cultural influence of America coupled with the once vast British Empire, English is certainly very dominant.  But watch out for the Chinese who have numbers on their side, though like in the joke about the man who worked as a Chinese typesetter; the job was boring but he certainly met a lot of interesting characters.

Surprisingly with globalization continuing at such a reckless pace, most languages, National ones at least, are surviving, though anthropologists will report the alarming almost daily loss of small community tribal languages all over the globe.  Maybe the drive towards homogeneity will be halted by all of those instant translation apps now available.  But if the world has to fear any language taking over and becoming ubiquitous watch out for Ikea, or Swedish as some people still call it.  You have to admire these canny Swedes who refuse to compromise and come up with different language friendly names of their products, so we all have to learn Ektorp and Vissa Skont (here I have to apologise, as I cannot be bothered to work out how to put all of those double dots and slashed vowels into these terms) and as this famous furniture store continues on its path of World domination it is obvious that very soon we will all be speaking Ikea.

Well. It beats Starbucks with its Grande, and Vente, which thankfully have not caught on.  How can you call the smallest size Tall and the medium Grande and not feel a total dick?

Monday 28th May

From one end of the country to the other the whole country has a smile on its face.  After weeks of bad news, and the constant revelations of sleaze at Leveson, the slow-motion car crash of the Euro and our Government’s very own omnishambles, at last some good news.  The Torch relay is visiting almost the whole country, and everywhere it goes it draws big crowds, with old and young alike getting excited.  And, of course, the weather has changed.  After weeks of pissy cold rain and wind, arriving almost unheralded and like a bolt out of the blue – Blazing Summer – as hot as I can remember England being in May, and so unexpected. Everywhere you go you see happy contented faces, and every open space in all the parks you see young lovers snuggling or family picnics, and even though I do not like them, disposable barbecues.  And they are probably right, all these sun-worshippers.  As well as being by far the earliest bit of good weather, it must be the hottest of the year so far.  There is also the possibility that at any moment we will revert back to those wet and grey-cloudy overcast days we have had too many of lately.  And who knows as well as being the best weekend of the year so far, it could well end up being actually the best, and perish the thought – the only one.  So out with the factor fifteen, drag yourself away from the telly, and get outside and join us all in one great big smile.

Sunday 27th May

I first heard this superb band when I was going out with Louise,( and I had a daughter, now 26, with her) so it just shows you how long they have been around, a few personnel changes agreed – but the constant factor has been the voice and songwriting of Paul Heaton.  And their first single and the lead off track from the first album still brings a smile to my face whenever I hear it – ‘Song for Whoever’, a real antidote to all the soppy songs with girls names in the title.  Jennifer, Annabel, Philipa-Sue – I forget your name.  Brilliant Lyric, as they all are, ‘A Little Time with that line ‘Funny how soon the milk turns sour, doesn’t it’, to Perfect 10 – a song about girls in different sizes, and a mention of men’s willy size too.  Or ‘Don’t marry Her – Fuck Me’; now how many times girls have you wanted to say that.  I have seen them two or three times and they end their shows with ‘Woman in the Wall’, a really jovial song about a murdered woman bricked up between two walls, which is surprisingly good fun to sing along to. As is often the case with my favourite bands their best days are probably behind them, but with the Beautiful South their songs always sound so fresh and are invariably upbeat and life-enhancing, as if they were written yesterday, so for originality and great lyrics – A Perfect 10.