Tuesday 11th August

10 CC were one of those great and original bands of the early seventies. They had a run of great singles and albums but suffered almost from having four great and creative songwriters in the band.  Two of them, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme left to work on an album called Consequences.  This was a concept album that simply grew and grew.  Originally intended to be a showcase for an innovation they had invented called the Gizmo, which when attached to a guitar produced a range of squelchy, almost orchestral sounds.  It never caught on but they did and had a run of five or six brilliant albums before becoming more and more involved as video-makers and music promoters.

So what happened to Consequences.  Well, the concept of the album was of a world being overwhelmed by catastrophic weather conditions, only to be saved by a musical piece written by a man called Blint.  They decided to involve Peter Cook to be the voice of Blint.  He ended up writing huge chunks of conversation involving not only the strange Blint, but his neighbours downstairs (his flat had a large hole covered with a tarpaulin allowing the flat upstairs to be heard) who were involved along with one Jewish and one alcoholic Solicitor in a divorce, meanwhile Godly Crème interspersed songs which may or may not have fitted the story.  Confusing?  But brilliant nevertheless, Peter Cook was incredible and hilarious as all the character voices.  It ended up being over three discs long and was a huge commercial flop.  It is now very sought after and I had to pay over forty pounds for the 2 disc Japanese Import on CD a few years ago, but it is much more expensive than that now.  Like quite a few bands from the seventies (and early eighties) their stuff on CD is increasingly hard to come by, but well worth the effort – apart from their last record ‘History Mix’ everything they did had the stamp of Genius, like a stick of rock, all the way through.

Monday 10th August

One of the Special days in Eymet is the Medeaval Festival.  It is a day of celebrating the Middle Ages; there is falconry, archery, even jousting, lots of stalls and demonstrations of blacksmithing and chain mail making; and to cap it all there is a Banquet in the square accompanied by fire-eaters, jugglers, men and women on stilts, musicians playing old instruments and a jolly old time to be had by all.  Or so I am told.  My wife was here the last three years but I had always missed it, having to work in London.

So I was quite excited to experience it all and we along with many friends had paid our 24 euros for the banquet a couple of weeks in advance.  The morning of Saturday was auspicious, it had rained all night and a fine drizzle was still coming down (after weeks of hot sunshine).  But it looked as if it might clear up by midday.  At nine the costumes arrived, because all participants are encouraged to dress up.  My wife looked splendid in a long gold dress and hat.  I chose a red and yellow hat and red cloak to accompany my breeches and red leg strappings. These did cost 12 euros each but we wore them all day.  We were incredibly busy in the Café, as there were plenty of cagoule-clad visitors in town all hoping the rain would stop soon.  Well it did in the afternoon, and though still chilly the entertainments in the Chateau started about three.  I saw some falconry and a smaller wetter crowd were walking around the stalls.

About five it poured again and as it looked like it was set in for the night the banquet was cancelled, so again I missed it.  We were swamped again in the Café as people with young kids sought shelter from the storm (sorry Bob).  I cannot tell you how many chocolate chaud I made, but we had a good day.  Sadly we had to give our costumes back and we were refunded for the meal; I got two take-away pizzas and we had an early night instead of enjoying the Medeaval revels till midnight.  Shame, but there is always next year…

Sunday 9th August

“Forty Years on, when afar and asunder, parted are those who are singing today.”  That was the first line of our School song.  Or actually it was borrowed from another, and a public school at that, school; it may even have been from Eton.  But our school had pretensions of some limited grandeur.  We even had three houses and ours Cavendish was generally last in everything, from Sports Day to Poetry Reading, although I did once win the Public Speaking competition (big surprise, hey). We used to sing this song to quite uplifting and jolly piano accompaniment at every opportunity and the words have stayed with me, and the sentiment.  I cannot recall looking back when I reached 58, forty years after leaving school but my son was born about a year later and is now 46.

I remarried and my daughter Laura was born forty years ago yesterday, an occasion for great joy all round.  My then wife was called Joy too and Laura was born on the very hottest night of the hottest summer for many years.  But she was worth it.  Incidentally around this time Harry Nilsson on one of his less successful albums had a song called Joy, a sad and funny song about how much misery Joy had caused him.  Hahaha.  But forty is a funny age. It is almost the turning of the page between being young and getting a bit older.  Most people I find aren’t quite so happy about leaving their thirties, whereas fifty, sixty and seventy are celebrated as real milestones, achievements almost (and by eighty and ninety just a cause for thanks that we are still here at all).  And looking back forty years what a time of optimism it was.  We had gotten through the three-day week, inflation was rampant and yet there was a widespread belief that things were going to carry on getting better and better.  Musically it could hardly be better, though punk was just beginning to ring its ugly rasping bell, there was still a great feeling that we were living in the best of times.

Of course from the perspective of today it is highly unlikely that I will be looking back on today, forty years on.  Though hopefully many who are singing today, parted as we may be, will still be “looking back and forgetfully wondering what we were like in our work and our play.”

Saturday 8th August

Is it just me, or is the world going bonkers.  I seem to find myself in silly situations time and again.  Maybe it is partly my fault, because I try to use words correctly, and stupidly assume that others are working under the same principle.  So when someone says that we will meet you at six, and it is already late morning, I stupidly assume that they mean six in the evening, eighteen hundred hours, not 7.30 or even 8.  I have cleared the decks, physically and mentally, tidied up, brushed my teeth even, and am sitting and waiting.  And waiting and waiting. And the amazing thing is that when they turn up over an hour late, I am the one apologizing, rushing to say, “Oh it doesn’t matter, we weren’t doing anything anyway.” When I should really be pointing at my watch and demanding an apology.

We recently opened a new bank account here in France for the Café.  Easy enough you would have thought, but there were many forms to complete, including address and e-mail.  A couple of weeks ago I went in to pay some cash in.  The docket had spaces for quite a few numbers, not only account but code banque, code guichet and cle rib.  I asked politely where I would find these numbers and was told it was not necessary to fill them in.  I casually asked why they were there and the cashier blinked in amazement and said he had no idea as nobody ever used them.  Oh well.  I returned today to bank some more cash and handed over the docket with the account number and name filled in.  A different cashier said that this account did not exist.  I showed her our cheque-book and she said, yes but not at this bank.  I pointed to the word Eymet and the branch address.  She still insisted that this account did not exist.  I asked her to check and she fetched a superior and explained the problem.  Five minutes passed and they found that indeed the account did exist, and it was at this bank.  No apology, no explanation for the initial statement (without checking) that the account did not exist.

I explained that we had never received a statement, whereas our other (house) account we get every month.  The superior went away and returned a few minutes later telling me that they definitely e-mailed it to us each month.  “Could you kindly check the e-mail address you are sending it to?” I asked.  She came back with a printout and said “But we do not have your e-mail address.” In an angry voice as if this was somehow our fault.  Would it be possible to post it to us in future, I asked.  Yes, but we do not have your address.  I opened the chequebook and pointed to the address printed there under our name.  “Okay, I will change the details.”  As if this was a hard task that might take her all afternoon.  Again no apology, no explanation.  I have absolutely no confidence that I will ever get a statement. I do keep a separate record (on a spreadsheet of course) but do like to check it occasionally.  We will see.

Friday 7th August

Diary Entry – 20660423

“They tell me it is late April, and I suppose it must be.  I have been rescued, taken in, taken pity on, taken care of.  Bathed, shaved and given clothes.  And food, real food – not manna, not scraps from rubbish bins, but real vegetables.  Carrots.  You cannot imagine how wonderful carrots taste.  And some sort of meat, they tell me it is chicken, but I have never tasted chicken like this.  Besides it is yellow, not white, and the smell makes me feel dizzy.  Succulent, that’s the only word I can find to describe it.

I was found almost unconscious and rambling by Dan and his sister Emily in one of their fields a week ago.  They thought I might be a drunk at first, but Emily couldn’t smell any booze on me at all, so they took me in.  They are organic farmers in Kent, not far from the channel.  They grow expensive food and rear a few animals for the rich in Strata level AA+ and above.  I am (was) only on level AC, so had no access to this sort of food.  Lucky bastards, is all I can say.  Dan says he doesn’t care who eats his food, he just loves growing it, in the old-fashioned way.  They hand-plant and pick everything and only have one old tractor but Dan doesn’t like to use it because the micro-power battery uses so much power and though the business is good they have to watch their cred all the time.  They are of course part of Tesda com-glom, as is all food production. I have to be hidden three times a week when the Tesda lorry collects the produce.

Dan only tolerates me because Emily likes me.  He would like me to leave, but she wants me to stay a bit longer.  He is rightly worried that my existence will threaten their entire livelihood.  Emily is intrigued that I have escaped the system and am trying to make it on my own.  I tried to explain what life was like for the mid-strata workers like me, but she has no real comprehension of life away from the farm.  She has only ever been to basic-crammer, and still finds computers scary.  She only watches soapy-sopes on TV.  Almost all of farming is big business now but Emily and Dan are fourth generation organic farmers and have escaped most of the changes of recent years.  They are tolerated because rich consumers want real food, authentic, and unpolluted.  And because Tesda wants what they grow they are allowed to do things in this ridiculously old-fashioned way.

They are of course what anyone in the society I left behind would consider dirt poor, but actually they are far richer than we will ever be.  They eat beautiful food, and live in a nice old farmhouse cottage.  It doesn’t even have real heating and hot water, just an old wood-fired stove in the stone floor kitchen.   One screen in the whole house keeps them in touch with the outside world, but apart from shows like Eastenders and Cajoolty they hardly used it, certainly not the super-net or for shopping.  They earn barely enough cred to keep the farm going, but are happy despite that.  No com-units, no holo-tv, presumably no syn-sex units or designer drugs either, though I could hardly ask them that.  I suspect that none of those things would make them happy anyway.

Dan barely tolerates me; he is suspicious of all strangers.  I overheard him talking with Emily about getting me patched up and away from the farm as soon as they could; he didn’t want any truck with the Polis.  But Emily has become my protector, she feeds me, she talks to me, she comforts me.  I think she is desperately lonely, here on the farm. She has no friends and even their neighbours don’t seem to call often.  Dan is a moody bastard and hardly speaks most days.  Maybe Emily is looking for love, but if she is I certainly am not the one for her.  She knows they cannot keep me here forever; isolated as the farm is, there are still occasional visits from neighbours and I am obviously a reb, so their whole set-up is in constant danger the longer I stay.

I was certainly in a bad way when they found me, but Dan reluctantly said I could stay for two weeks, just until I was strong enough to continue my journey.  “Then I would have to be on my way” he warned, pointing his muddy finger at both of us.”

Thursday 6th August

The trouble with education is that it isn’t.  It in no way prepares kids for the world they will have to deal with.  All it does do is teach them how to pass exams.  I was educated in the sixties, at a grammar school in Stowmarket.  To my eternal regret they never did teach me how to change a three-pin plug or saw a piece of wood correctly or how to strip down a motor-bike engine, all of which my old friends (separated at eleven) did learn at the Secondary Modern School down the road.  But they did teach us a bit about life, and how to be decent citizens. And they instilled in us a love of learning and knowing things and being interested in the World around us.  Exams?  What exams?  Oh yes, we did take our ‘O’ levels and I sort-of did a bit of study towards my ‘A’ levels, which I never took, preferring the vicissitudes of life in London to school.  But though we knew these exams were coming up, there was precious little preparation for them, it was never drummed into us that they would be important in determining our future.  And as for University; well we were the elite, la crème de la crème weren’t we?  So it was just assumed that if we stayed on and took our ‘A’ levels we would naturally progress to a free University education with a generous grant too.

We were encouraged to read widely and explore whatever took our fancy about a subject, not just the syllabus, not just the books we would be questioned on.  In fact, in an act of rebellion on my part I answered a question in my mock English Literature paper “In your own words describe why you think Wordsworth was a great poet.”  My answer “I don’t think Wordsworth was a great poet, but I do think Dylan Thomas was….”  Mr. Shimmell, our English teacher explained that my paper would have been awarded nil points, but said that my essay was actually very good, and encouraged me to continue reading Dylan Thomas.

The whole league table exercise has been a disaster, with schools competing to cram in far too many exam results per pupil, as if this was any measure of how well they had been educated.  And Ofsted are as bad, interested in Grades and School policy and branding schools as failing with little regard to the fate of teachers or pupils so labeled.  We need to get back to treating our school-kids as people not as numbers on a graph.  And don’t even get me started on Universities….

Wednesday 5th August

It is August and the tourist season is in full swing.  The café is getting busier too, and not only English but quite a few Belgiques and Hollandaise and of course a fair sprinkling of French.  Mum and Dad are out here for a week, and though we haven’t been sightseeing so much, every evening we are eating out and it is almost a party every night.  As is our recently acquired tradition the first night with any new guests we go to the Pizzeria.  This is by far the most popular restaurant in town with many people driving miles to come here.  Their pizza’s are the best, very thin base, a wonderful home-made passata and lashing of finely shredded mozzarella.  Simple and wonderful, they are baked in a stone oven at about 375 degrees and take only about four minutes.  I sometimes call in for take-away pizza and it is quite something to watch the pizza-chef who not only is making the pizzas but has to remember the order he has placed them in the oven and with his pizza-spade slides them out when cooked.  Thursday was the Gourmande evening in Parc Forestiere, Friday and another Gourmande evening in Sauvetat.  Saturday and some friends made a wonderful paella.  They run a B. & B. and they were so busy they brought the paella and barbeque over to us. Another great evening.  Sunday and we ate in the Peruvian restaurant, another wonderful meal.

Last night we ate at Seyches; a four course meal with unlimited red wine for twelve euros each and tonight is the Night Market here in Eymet.  My poor parents will go home today exhausted.  But for us the Party continues, we have the Medieval Festival at the weekend and lots more to come.

Tuesday 4th August

Haha….at last – the cat is out of the bag.  The rise of UKIP, and the recent news regarding Calais and the many poor and desperate people trying to enter Britain is all because of, but at the same time playing on, the public’s fear of uncontrolled immigration.  And it is true – there are large, many would say huge, numbers of people entering Britain.  I once saw a documentary piece on Newsnight, where a Chinese Restaurant owner in Soho said that the illegal number of Chinese immigrants far exceeded the legal number by maybe a factor of ten to one.  In other words – for every one legal immigrant (and that number is pretty large) there are ten illegal immigrants coming in.  And one has to ask why?  The nonsense spouted by the Mail and other papers about them coming in to claim benefits is just that, but it is believed by large sections of the public.  In fact, as all the evidence shows, immigrants (at least the legal ones) are net contributors to the exchequer.

Last night a French Official explained why the chat is no longer dans le sac.  He told a Sky reporter that the reason that so many are risking almost everything to get to Britain is quite simple, it is because they can easily work without papers. Many people criticize France and other European countries for their bureaucracy, and it can be slightly frustrating at times – the number of forms one has to fill.   But it is this very bureaucracy that prevents French Employers from using illegal immigrants.

In Britain we have had a succession of Governments that have both reduced controls on business and cut the number of staff employed to check on them.  It is reckoned that maybe as many as ten percent of the low paid are actually not even paid the Minimum wage, and yet there are very few prosecutions every year.  Gang-masters are rife and they exploit these poor and desperate people, but they (the illegal immigrants) know that in Britain you can get work without papers.  You will maybe be paid a pittance and have no health and safety or any other protection, but work is work and these people are desperate.  But the market philosophy prevails here, anything business does is okay.  So what if they mostly under-declare their taxes, so what if they exploit their workers – they are the ‘money-makers’, the wealth generators.  And that in short my friends is why so many illegal immigrants come here.  They can survive without papers of any sort because of the unbridled greed of our Capitalist business owners.  Wasn’t it ever such – the Slave Trade was run by just such unscrupulous individuals, the mill-owners employing children to pick scraps of cotton from moving machinery, the young boys used to unblock chimneys in Victorian houses, the whole of the British Empire was built on unbridled greed.  So if you are looking to stop these poor people trying to invade the tunnel the answer is simple.  Stop these so-called entrepreneurs from employing people without any papers at all.   Make them pay decent ages, check on them and make them ay their taxes…

Monday 3rd August

I am not religious.  In fact I am almost an Atheist; as a recent Facebook post said “You are a Christian, please feel free to pray for me while I think things through for you.”  I say almost an Atheist because I cannot quite believe that the Universe, the Laws of Physics, the propensity and diversity and amazing complexity of life itself can have happened completely by accident and without some intelligence somewhere.  I just believe that that intelligence, let us call it God, has abandoned us and left us completely to our own devices.  I can see no point in praying to God or praising him or even in positively believing in God as some sort of active and responsive entity while there are diseases that ravage the poor and defenceless.  That being said I did attend church as a child and for a while I tried to believe, attended bible classes and was confirmed, and then nothing.  No revelation, no light descending, no understanding and no belief.  Anyway I started listening to rock’n’roll and have been a child of Satan ever since.

Mum and Dad are over, and Mum especially is a believer – so I took them to the Protestant service held in the Temple here in Eymet.  It was a strange mixture of a traditional C. of E. service and a ‘happy-clappy’ evangelist service.  I had met the lay preacher Alan and his wife Julia before, and they are nice people (really).  And Elvis leads the singing and plays guitar so I wanted to see how the moody and sexy Elvis trans-mutated into a mild church-loving Christian in the daylight hours.  And it was all okay.  But a bit too much emphasis on believing and praising the Lord for my liking.  I have always felt this; why can the Church not just be a nice place to meet, to sit quietly, to contemplate, to think about the World, to meet people and maybe discuss the nature of the Universe, or even just to relax and read a newspaper while gentle music plays in the background.  I could quite happily attend church in that case.  But when they start all the ‘Praise be his name, Blessed be his name.’ and the repeated ‘Amen’s’ then my common sense starts rebelling.  I just cannot suspend belief long enough to swallow it all.  But in a way I am glad I went if only to confirm my own understanding that this Christian view of the world is not for me.  Anyway I hope that all of you attended your own respective churches and are believers all…

Sunday 2nd August

Almost every small town, and what would be termed villages in England, has a Gourmande Evening.  We have been to a few around and somebody mentioned we should try Sauvetat du Dropt.  It is on a Friday, same night as the excellent one at Sigoules, but as my Mum and Dad are here, and have been to Sigoules twice before we decided to try Sauvetat.  And it was really very good.  The town is smaller than Eymet, but very pretty.  The evening was held in a nice small green park behind the church.  The tables and chairs were much nicer and more comfortable too, an important consideration (the little metal stools at Eymet are really uncomfortable and I am usually dispatched for cushions).  And the food was fabulous and such a variety.  There was Pizza, Bio vegetarian salads, goats cheese wrapped in bacon and grilled, samosas, several cooked dishes with saucisses, and fish and lentils, and best of all Rotisserie Chicken, Grilled Jambon and Jaret (a huge knuckle) of Porc – all with potatoes roasted in the dripping fat from the meat.

My wife had the bio salad which looked lovely, Mum had a quarter chicken and Dad and I had Grilled Ham.  Well our portions were massive and the ham was superb, roasted on the rotisserie then sliced and chucked back into the flames to grill.  We had the obligatory two bottles of rose and to finish delicious crepes…

The entertainment was about to start but our friend Kenny was singing back in town so we came back and enjoyed two hours of great music.  Sitting under the arches, a glass of wine in hand and a full stomach, listening to good old rock’n’roll.  Life doesn’t get much better….