A few last words for no very good reason at all...

I am writing this in the couryard - the 'smoking' couryard of The Horse in Moretonhampstead, pretty much the back of beyond on Darmoor, though certainly not in its bleakest parts. I had planned to stop off at my regular going home haunt, the Brewers Arms, in South Petherton, but when I got there at just 4.25pm, it was shut and wasn't, so the girl in the knick-knack shop opposite told me, due to open until 6pm. Well, it seemed a bit daft hanging on for 90 minutes, so I took off again to home in Cornwall, consulting as I drove - dangerous, don't try this at home, kiddiwinks - the Sky Cloud wifi finder app on my iPad. It assured me that the Union Inn in Ford Street, Moretonhampstead, had Sky wifi, so I set my sat-nav for all points Moretonhampstead.

I've never been here before and imagined some modest clutch of mud huts (though, I hear you remark, the Sky wifi might have been some indicator), but instead found a smallish town in which driving anywhere in its small streets consists of reversing a great deal to let pass yet another Chelsea tractor. Moretonhampstead, on Dartmoor, is that kind of town. Just how much I found out when after one pint of Thatchers at the Union Inn and not really fancying a bowl of the industrial sized chips it serves, I wandered off and found The Horse.

This 'inn' - well, I suppose they would call themselves a gastro-pub - is a very different establishment entirely. Going out to get another laptop mouse, I noticed more folk have arrived since I did about 30 minutes ago, and they all seemed to be the very nubile daughters of the local gentry and their brothers. One indication of

how I am ageing, if any more indications were needed, is just how bloody young 18/19 lasses are these days. They certainly weren't that young when I was 18 and praying to get my end away at least once before I died. (I did, as you ask, and I had just turned 19. I know, a little older than some and a lot older than some others, but there you go, that's life. I blame a Roman Catholic upbringing and a fat early adolescence persuaing me - to this day, in fact - that I am not particularly attractive.)

The schlepp here was just that. We have plenty of very narrow lanes in Cornwall but none I have yet come across meanders for more than five miles and which have to be explored at a very safe 20mph as you have no idea what might be around the corner. As it happens I met only one car and one tractor coming the other way in all

those five miles. I just hope I can find what we here in Old Blighty call 'an A road' which isn't something out of Enid Blyton and her Famous Five. As it is I shan't be back home for some time yet and most of that journey will be taken up getting the hell off Dartmoor again.

I semi-enjoyed the past week in Bordeaux, but my aunt really is now getting old and doddery, and unfortunately deaf and set in her ways. That wouldn't matter if I didn't inadvertently seem to do everything, but everything in a way she didn't like, which didn't conform to her ways, with the result that my head was chewed off pretty regularly. But I should add that she is not in the best of health and I don't think I should be any the more genial if and when I reach 86.

Last night we went to a concert of more or less Latin music and I enjoyed some if not all of it. Several pieces I did enjoy were played on harp and flute, but I'm buggered if I can track down what they were, because even before they musicians tuned up, they informed us that the programme had been changed in some ways, but then didn't actually tell us which ways. One thing I did't like were three piece by Villa Lobos (is that how it's spelled?), I just didn't. I know that's heresy of a certain kind, but, well there you go.

Got to say one thing in favour of The Horse (and I shall chase up a write-up once I have written this last piece): I've just bought a final half-pint of Simmonds cider (not Thatchers, unfortunately) and it was only - only - £1.70. Bloody hell. That did surprise me. Now here's a link to a write-up  and the place's own website

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The crap going on in Turkey will have taken most of us by surprise but only for coming so soon. My sister and brother-in-law lived in Istanbul for several years and even then, she tells, me Erdogan dictatorial tendencies were well to the fore. The coup was in his words 'a gift from God' and will get many in the foreign ministries of Europe and the US scratching their heads as to what to do. But seeing as they did bugger all when Sisi took over Egypt, I suggest it won't be very much.

Spielberg gets just two cheers from me for his Berlin Wall epic, but klezmer music gets all three. A shtik naches

It’s odd how, when and why thoughts come to you. Last night was the second in our concerts this time around, and we were at a wine chateau called Domaine de Chevalier near Leognan to listen to klezmer music played by Meshouge Klezmer Band I don’t know why, but Steven Spielberg’s film Bridge Of Spies came to mind and I realised why I was a tad underwhelmed.

OK, the film won three Oscars and was also nominated in three further categories. Well, leaving aside that the Oscars are arguably as much to do with drumming up business in and for Tinseltown, they are not necessarily the best guide to quality as many all too often assume. Where, for example are the nominations for the innumerable independent productions made each year. Heart on heart this the Oscar ceremony is very much an mainstream industry smoochfest. But that doesn’t get close to why I was a tad underwhelmed, and it wasn’t until last night, apropos nothing I can think of, that I realised why.

Bridge Of Spies is very much a Spielberg film and the guy knows how to make films. It had all Spielberg’s hallmarks, quality oozed from almost every shot and, thankfully another of his hallmarks – a large dose of schmaltz – was less in evidence. That particular quality, for example, ruined his much-vaunted ‘America is the land of the free irrespective of creed or colour’ epic Amistad, and when I heard Spielberg quoted as saying that when he filmed his biopic Lincoln, he felt he almost had to wear a suit and tie while doing so, I decided the film would not be for me. As a pretentious and sycophantic comment it surely takes some beating.

Bridge Of Spies did have some schmaltz, of course, notably the end scene when James Donovan is seen riding the subway on his way back to work, but largely Spielberg kept it in check. What he didn’t keep in check was his penchant for over-egging the pudding. . And ‘the building of the Berlin Wall’ was nothing as it was portrayed by Spielberg. I should say that I was living in West Berlin in the years the Wall went up and with my brother was even taken on the S-Bahn to Berlin-Friederichstraβe by our father (the BBC Berlin representative from June 1959 until July 1963 and possibly working for MI6, in some capacity or other).

First off, there is a comment from, I think, some CIA spook or other, that the agency had word that the Soviets were planning to build a wall to stem the flow of refugees to from the East to the West. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. In fact ‘the Wall’, which wasn’t even a wall for many months, was a panic measure by the East Germans on the night of August 12/13. It consisted initially of the East Germans – with no Soviet involvement – sealing of the East from the West simply by pulling barbed wire across every street and road connecting the two parts of the city. Until then folk could travel between both parts at will, and did, visiting family at weekends, for example. And it is not surpising that there appears to have been no planning whatsoever.

Walter Ulbricht (pictured), chairman of the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) and, since the previous year the German Democratic Republic’s head

of state, had admittedly, in an interview two months earlier, declared ‘no one intends building a wall’, but the sudden sealing of off East Berlin appears to have been an ad hoc decision in view of the thousands of East German citizens who were seeking refuge in West Berlin throughout the very hot summer of 1961. It would seems his declaration

The Germans, for good reason, are known for efficiency and planning and there was no efficiency or planning when they sealed the East off from the West. But Spielberg’s Bridge Of Spies gives a wholly different picture. The exchange of Abel for Gary Powers, the U2 pilot shot down over Soviet Russia, took place seven months later in February 1962 and the scene depicted of stout-hearted East Berliners making their bid from freedom while the wall was being built – with tanks and soldiers looking on – is simply very silly. Nor was there anyway the American student, Frederic Pryor, could have crossed over to the East to visit his sweetheart. As for the final putting in place of the last bricks shown in the film, well, that, too, is risible. Yet, it is admittedly still a film, and Spielberg might plead he was portraying an ‘artistic truth’.

What occurred to me during last night’s concert was that the overall production of the film was somehow too sumptuous and oddly out of keeping with the subject matter. The rich colours, even when depicting drab East Germany, the substantial sets, all of it was somehow out of kilter. Even the style of filmmaking – the set pieces, the ‘good acting’, even in scenes between Abel and Donovan in the prison and the court scenes were first and foremost filmmaking, and fine filmmaking at that. And that was exactly what seemed and seems to be inappropriate.

The world of spies and the whole business of cynical East/West relations was shabby, on both sides. We told lies to our people, they told lies to their people. I grew up in that Cold War era and until I began to think for myself was wholly convinced we, the West, were the Good Guys in White Hats, and the Commies, the Russkies were the Bad Guys in Black Hats. If only life were so simple. But that is still the mentality of Spielberg’s film: Good v Evil. It’s as though he also word a suit and tie in homage to the Goodness Of The West when he made Bridge Of Spies. Shame, really. As the Sixties thriller The Spy Who Came In From The Cold showed us, it is possible to give a more realistic and more honest account of the times – and their breathtaking cynicism – without resorting to fairy tales. .
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As for the klezmer music, I have to say I enjoyed it immensely. If I were to be cruel, I could claim that one or two klezmer tunes go a long way, consisting, as they seem to, of about three chords, but there is a definite joi de vivre about them which could cheer up a corpse and makes up for everything. And it is not the kind of music to sit

listening to in rows of ten – I was dying to get up and move, though I couldn’t tell you how. But this was a French music festival and although I shan’t claim it is in anyway po-faced, it was a shame we heard the music in what was to all intents and purposes a concert hall (albeit a makeshift one) and weren’t part of a wedding party of some kind, any kind of party, in fact. Then there are the slow, sad klezmer tunes. They too grab you and don’t let go.

No, this honkey believes that blue men can’t always sing the whites and sometimes shouldn’t even try (but no, I’ve not crossed over to the LibDems, no sir, life’s far too short). As for Turkey – well, what did we expect from an apprentice dictator such as Erdogan? That last remark will pretty much mark my card. If he staged his own coup, he wouldn’t be the first, but then, if…

There was a jokey question years ago, originally posed, I think, by Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Do-Dah Band – and, no, I wasn’t a regular fan or thought they were the best thing since sliced bread – was ‘can blue men sing the whites’. I suppose, in the interests of clarity, I should deconstruct that but if you have already heard it or know what Stanshall was getting at, please don’t be offended. What with the rediscovery of ‘the blues’ in its various incarnations by British rock artists in the Sixties (much to the delight of America’s blues artists who were pretty much universally ignored in their home country), and given the provenance of the blues, it was asked, not necessarily stupidly, whether it was not just a little daft, not to say, insulting for nice white chaps and chappesses to sing the blues. In short, were we white honkeys entitled to sing the blues?

Well, that is a question I won’t get into here, mainly because life is too short. But again in short, I understand why some black folk might be offended, although I suspect the claim that whiteys shouldn’t sing the blues was first made by whitey liberals, many of whom tend to think those on whose behalf they fight the good fight aren’t really up to fighting their own corner and can do with a bit of whitey liberal help. (It’s pretty much a fact that no one is more appalled by ‘racism’ in Britain than white twentysomething middle-class Labour supporters in Hackney and LibDems in the rural Quantocks just outside Bristol).

If when you are singing the blues, you are singing about the goddam-awful life of your own, your parents, your grandparents, their parents and their grandparents, in what seemed like perpetual servitude with no hope of escape and betrayal by your government again and again and again, you do wonder quite how skinny white chaps from Dartford, Edgware, Macclesfield and Cardiff could really identify with the feeling of hopelessness or even the gallows humour which engendered many blues songs. As I say, it’s debatable and, wisely, not a debate you will find me involved in at any time soon. I mention this because last night my aunt and I drove the few miles to the parish Church of St Vincent (Eglise Saint Vincent for the sticklers) in Preignac to hear five singers who call themselves Concert Studio Gospel de La Bordeaux Gospel Academy singing a number of gospel songs. And I have to say, their technical abilities notwithstanding, I found the whole experience a tad dispiriting (ironically, pretty much the opposite of what gospel singing was intended to do).

First, my less contentious objections, in no particular order. The five of them – all white, needless to say - sang at the front of the church about 20 feet in front of the altar and were amplified, with their amps pointing towards them so, presumably, they could monitor themselves. But that meant that the sound was thrown into the rear of the church and up to the cupola, where it was reflected back into the church (and no doubt partly re-amplified when it was caught by the five microphones) and was generally a noisy mush of noise.

The five themselves did not have a range of voices necessary for and interesting choral sound: there was no bass, for one thing; and although they sang together well, there were no arrangements as such (for example not attempt at counterpoint to give a piece more texture). Had I not been in France in the Church of St Vincent in Preignac, Acquitaine, but somewhere in the West Midlands where I was told I was listening to a concert by the Evesham WI Singers (runners-up in the 2013 WI Sing Britain, Sing finals in the Albert Hall), I would have been none the wiser. And equally as unimpressed.

My more contentious point comes back to the satirical question ‘can blue men sing the whites’. And my response would be ‘no, not really your Honour’. Yes, I know I am on sticky ground here, and I know that there have been several white honkeys with exceptional voices – Treforest’s very own Tom Jones or Janice Joplin, for example - who might just pull of singing a blues or a spiritual. Just. But surely to goodness the provenance of gospel songs and spirituals make it difficult territory for us whiteys to trek on, some might say walk all over.

From what I know (and pedants are very welcome to write in and set me straight) when a congregation of slaves gathered on a Sunday in their makeshift church in South Carolina or Louisiana or Alamaba and encouraged each other somehow to find the strength to get through another week of the abject and hopeless misery by singing Wade In The Water or Praise Him or Everybody Sing Freedom or Swing Low Sweet Chariot (some of the songs sung last night), they really felt it. They felt it in their hearts and souls. They didn’t just sing those songs ‘because they liked the melodies’, they sang those songs out of desperation.

On my iPhone I have 24 songs by Marion Williams (I just put one on now, This Train) and listening to her and other black singers there is an almost indefinable essence which is wholly absent when the songs and music is played by whiteys. OK, I know I am laying myself wide open to criticism here, I would be very interested to hear contrary arguments (some hope – no one, but no one ever responds to my invitations to get in touch), but all I shall say ignore my possibly ham-fisted way of saying it, just try to listen to what I am trying to say. So they answer to the satirical question I quoted above – ‘can blue men sing the whites’ – is, as far as I am concerned, ‘no, not always by any means’.

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Then there’s Turkey. That fine example of democratic practice – 3,000 judges locked up overnight – Recip Tayyip Erdogan is at it again. He blames his would-be nemesis Fethullah Gűlen and for all I – we – know Gűlen might well be behind it all. He, on the other hand, suggests Erdogan is behind it all and staged ‘a coup’ as part of some Machiavellian strategy to neutralise his opponents. Neither claim is verifiable, but from where I sit that second claim would seem to be just a little more

plausible. It was, for example, odd how small the coup was and how easily the military involved in the coup threw in the towel. But I doubt whether you and I will even know the the truth of this mukey affair for many a year. I might well be dead by the time one or the other comes clean and announces to the world: ‘Ok, it’s a fair cop, it was me, guv.’

The US, of course, is stuffed because they need Turkey as somewhere to base their aircraft. And as Erdogan has been making things up with Israel – quite possibly, the thought occurs to me, in the run-up to staging his own ‘coup’ – the US is pretty much between a rock and a hard place. I don’t doubt the commentariat are full of opinions and in a minute – it is now 14.37 (2.37pm for my Brexiteer readers) and I shall have to wait another 10/15 – I shall listen to The World This Weekend on Radio 4 to collect my newest set of opinions. The EU is stuffed because they need some they can sell their immigrants to. But I can’t see EU members lining up soon to welcome Turkey into the brotherhood, not after this. Why buy in trouble.

Consternation in France when I turn down lunch (yes, really), but if that’s too boring (it is a bit), an odd response to Turkey’s military coup (in that we’re all supposed to cheer along democrats even when they are nothing of the kind) and the ‘Brexit was the right move’ line gets a sound analysis

Illats - Day Three

I am in my third full day down here in the south-west of France, but we have not yet attended any concerts. We have three, three nights in a row, from Monday on, and then I fly off again on Thursday. My aunt had various medical problems and two operations, so it wasn’t certain I would come this year, and when she did decide she would be up to it, I had to persuade my boss to allow me this week off as she is already short-staffed. Next week was out of the question.

So far I have done next to nothing if not exactly nothing, and that is how I like it. I caused some consternation today by asking to be excused lunch. The fact is that although each meal is by no means substantial (and always very tasty), I am no longer accustomed to eating a great deal. At home I can start the day off with half a

big tub of unsweetened Greek youghurt (i.e. the creamy one) and some kind of fruite, perhaps three satsumas chopped up. Then I might not eat again until supper. Or if I have lunch, usually some kind of salad - Greek salad, or one of my own devising (it’s not difficult - just chop up, in any order or combination, an onion/some spring onions, leek, tomatoes, celery, orange, apple or some other fruit and a little chopped up garlic and the lost seasoned with fresh pepper and drowned in olive oil). With that I’ll eat a tin of smoked herring or a hunk of cheese or a pork pie - Christ, this is getting dull writing it all, let alone reading it, so I’ll stop here as I’m sure you get the picture...

As I said, I don’t really eat a great deal these days, and for no reason other than I like to eat only when I am hungry. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like food - I do, a great deal. It’s just that I don’t like feeling full. I more or less stopped eating bread or wheat products some years ago, although I’m by no means anal about it, and will certainly eat, for example, a piece of cake if some were offered, and the result is that the spare tyre almost all of us carry has been substantially reduced, I don’t feel as hungry so often and generally a little more alert. Ironically, I do eat bread when I come to stay here because the ‘something compagne’ bread is a tasty as hell when toasted and a fresh baguette is also very, very nice. So here it the exception.

But as I don’t get up very early while I am here (and this time round I have strictly been turning the light off at 11pm rather than reading throught to gone 2am/3am as in past years) so I’m getting loads of sleep (which I like as I dream a great deal), I don’t eat my breakfast - three small pieces of that very tasty ‘something compagne’ and a mug of tea - until way after 11am. Then, in the course of things comes lunch at around 1.30pm and I’m just not hungry. The trouble is that I do like food and don’t stint myself.

My aunt (step-aunt) if essentially Irish although she grew up in Britain until her early twenties (just under 60 years ago) since when she has been living in France (and, for a short time, Algeria when it was still France) and she doesn’t count herself as ‘a good cook’. That’s mainly because she isn’t, on her own admission, particularly interested in cooking. But in those 60 odd years of living here in France, she has picked up one or two good tips which can make an ordinary dish punch above its weight.

So, for example, the other night for supper we had fish pie. It was very straightforward: a mish-mash of salmon, tuna and sardines covered in mashed potato (‘pomme mashe’ I should imagine it is called hereabouts). But what made it stand out a little were the herbs my aunt added: fresh dill, for one, and one other I can’t yet remember.

As I say, lunch in this household is still traditional: several courses eaten over the best part of an hour and a half (but then that’s also because we talk to each other). My aunt claims the French way of eating, eating protein, vegetables and starch separately, is healthier than having everyhing on one plate, and for all I know she’s right. So we start with some very simple salady thing – grated carrots or sliced tomatoes with dressing – then pate, then a meat course, then a vegetable course, then cheese. And then my aunt has a cup of Nescafe and ‘something sweet’. I don’t drink the coffee because although I like freshly ground coffee, I’m not that bothered about Nescafe.

In addition to all this is the wine. Neither of use drinks a lot and her husband, a Frenchman from Corsica, can’t drink any alcohol for health reasons. The thing is that long gone are the days when I could drink at lunchtime and not feel like sleeping for the rest of the afternoon. And even the modest amount I do drink with lunch these days make me so sleeping, doing anything else but sleep is a bloody chore.

So there you have it: for the most honourable reasons imaginable I asked today to be excused lunch. And as I skipped supper last night, the consternation I caused was rather large. Oh well.

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There will be plenty of ‘oh, well’ going on in Turkey now after the failed coup. You will know as much or as little as I do, but although military coups against democratically elected heads of state and prime minister are not usually a cause for rejoicing, I was disappointed to hear this morning that the coup against president Erdogan had failed. For however ‘democratically elected’ he is, he is increasingly showing dictatorial tendencies and, for example, is giving those parts of the Turkish media not yet controlled by the government a very hard time.

x My sister lived in Istanbul for several years until five years ago, and long before she left she was telling me how her Turkish friends and neighbours, admittedly professional middle-class secular folk of a liberal beng, were becoming worried by how Erdogan was turning the country into ever more of a police state. So, as I say, I was a tad disappointed that this coup had gone off half-cock. It remains to be seen what will happen next (and it doesn’t quite help Britain that our new Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson a few years ago lampooned Erdogan in a limerick, describing him as ‘the wankerer from Ankara’. I can’t imagine Erdogan laughed much when he heard that.

Overall, we are living in interesting times. I was listening to British news yesterday and it seems in some quarters Theresa May’s appointment of Johnson and two other ‘leading Brexiteers’, David Davis and Liam Fox as, respectively chief Brexit negotiator is regarded as a move that would have made Machiavelli blush. Well, put last description down to journalistic hyperbole and one too many gins, but it is most certainly a very canny move. As the Financial Times puts it ‘Johnson, Davis and Fox to pursue EU divorce and take blame if it goes wrong’. That’s not Machiavellian in my book, that’s a class move: the wanted Brexit, so they can shoulder the burden of getting a good deal for Britain outside the EU. And if they fuck it up, or even if they deals they strike are poor, one Theresa May – who didn’t want to move anyway – is in the clear. Nothing underhand about that, m’lud.

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A few days ago, I heard a commentary on the EU referendum and its result, one of five as part of a series by the BBC’s Radio 4 by academics. It was by someone called Professor John Gray, who teaches philosophy at Exeter College, Oxford. He didn’t actually identify himself as either a Leaver or a Remainer, but what he had to say did make me think a little (and if you have access to Radio 4’s iPlayer, you can ‘listen again’. It was on Tuesday last, July 12).

Essentially he was saying that the EU is an inward-looking, failing and isolationist organisation on a road to nowhere and which will be left behind by the rest of the world. And given that in several Mediterranean member states the rate of unemployment for folk under 25 is over 50pc and has been for some time, he might well have a point. What struck me was the reasoned way he argued: there was none of this

to my mind hysterical and phoney, ‘take back control and seize your destiny’ and ‘bring back the groat’ rhetoric which helped to make the referendum debate such an intellectual embarrassment (the Remainers were no better, by the way).

Instead he laid out the circumstances as he saw them: with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the EU decided it wanted to be a force in the world and set out along that course. The trouble was that it was already being left behind by the rest of the world where economic growth made the EU’s economic growth embarrassingly piddly. But listen yourselves if you want the real thing rather than my potted and probably simplistic summing up.

The irony, of course, is that the gang of Brexiteers stomping around the country yelling out their jinogistic slogans will have bee wholly unaware of any of that. Of post-Brexit planning there seems to have been nothing, and if things do work out economically for Britain and Old Blighty doesn’t go down the tubes as prominent Leavers predict (and no doubt secretly hope so they can crow ‘we told you so!’), it will be nothing more than a stroke of luck. Fancy!

Tonight we’re off to a concert of gospel music. It isn’t strictly part of the series of concert put on here by the good, middle-class folk of Acquitaine, but I’m looking forward to it as I like a bit of gospel music, me.

Boris (hereafter and in view of his unprecedented, not to say bizarre, coronation as Britain’s New Foreign Secretary to be referred to as ‘Johnson’) and a tale of woe, woe, woe when there was no room at the inn for this traveller and, bugger me, if not one Wise Man turned up. As for surly, unhelpful French bastards, I present a prime example

Illats – July 15 (Bastille Day plus 1)

The baffling, baffling, utterly baffling appointment of Boris Johnson as Britain’s new Foreign Secretary must be left for another time as I’m still tired, though I slept

well last night and am not as tired as I was yesterday. Any non-British readers wash up at this blog and don’t know who ‘Boris Johnson’ is, you’ll find extensive details of the man and his crass stupidity on the Wikipedia page on clowns and their role in responsible government. But for those who do not know what he looks like, here, left, is his official appointment portrait, taken two days ago at the Foreign Office.

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I should, of course, have written and posted this entry yesterday when unkind Brit gibes at the French would have carried more weight and been even more gratuitously tactless, but as I spent more or less all day asleep – I’ll explain later – there was not really time and I wasn’t really in the mood. As it is, and while I was asleep, the annual parade of military might by which modern nations like to demonstrate national pride took place along the Champs Elysee in Paris, no doubt frightening the hell out of Isis and giving them second thoughts about whether to poke out their tougues again at Marianne and make suggestive comments about her virtue.

(Why when the French march all their troops and transport all their tanks and other armoury up to Paris to send it through the centre of the capital it is a ‘demonstration of national pride’, but when the Russians and Chinese do the same outside the Kremlin and Red Square it is an ‘unprecedented display of militarism designed to frighten the world’ I have yet to fathom. I do know it is something to do with democracy, but I have yet to make the link.)

The reason I spent more or less all Bastille Day lying on my bed asleep was because I had had barely three hours kip in the previous 48 hours (give or take an hour for dramatic representation but really no more than one). I had for some reason I am still trying to work out booked a 6.50am flight from Gatwick to Bordeaux with BA instead of the usual 9.50am flight with easyjet I have been catching every year when I fly out to Bordeaux for my annual concert-going with my elderly aunt. I can only think it was because at the time of booking BA were £2.35 cheaper than easyjet and – well, we all know that post-Brexit times are hard or will become so and that every penny must be made to count. (That I booked the flight on June 18, four days before the EU referendum, and so could not have known the outcome is a point which would only be made by a pedant and if that is you, you are officially banned from reading this blog for six months.) The upshot was that I was faced with getting up at just after 4am to drive to Gatwick from my brother’s flat in Earls Court, West London. It was that or find a hotel near the airport and drive down the night before.

Courtesy of an offer from APH parking with whom I have dealt before to leave my car near the airport, I was able to book a bed at the Gatwick Europa Hotel in Crawly for just £11 more than the cost of parking my car for eight days. However, somewhere along the line there was a cock-up. I got to the hotel at around 11.40pm and very much looking forward to a quick shower and wank before getting my head down only to be told there was no record of a booking in my name. I insisted there must be (and it didn’t help that the night staff were a surly middle-aged Frenchman who gave a new dimension to the concept of unhelpfulness and a slightly young, very tubby Brit who was that night’s nominal night manager. It is obvious the Europa Hotel chain don’t care very much who the appoint for night shift duty).

I returned to the car to get my laptop and was able to show them the email I’d been sent from APH confirming a room had been booked in my name, but that cut no ice at all. There was no record of a booking made in my name and, anyway, the hotel was full up (apparently of 1,000 Japanese juveniles all playing Pokemon on their phones and tablets to judge from the racket coming from the adjacent lobby.) Once midnight had long come and gone and it was obvious I was getting nowhere, I decided to cut my losses and try to find a room in a nearby hotel – any nearby hotel. I asked the surly Frenchman what were the hotels nearby. ‘How should I know,’ he

replied, ‘I’m from France.’ That, dear friends, is verbatim. Idiot. Brexit is looking ever more attractive.

After looking up hotels on the net, I tried the Crawley Holiday Inn, but had no luck, and then the Holiday Inn Express – yes, I know, what’s the difference, but there is, it seems – and was told I could have their last room which I booked for £99. So with the customary ‘fuck off you unhelpful French bastard’, I was off in search of the Holiday Inn Express my satnav informed me was just over a mile away.

That finding the bloody place took me the best part of 20 minutes I put down to the fact that like black cats in the night commuter towns like Crawley all look the bloody same at any time of day and are riddled with roundabouts every 200 yards or so – you take the wrong turn-off at one and you are onto the next roundabout before you realise your mistake. Or perhaps I’m just thick as shit.

As it was I found the hotel just before 1am and booked in, given the electronic key to room 135 with a cheery ‘you are lucky, sir, it’s our last room, and that will be £7 for parking’. In fact, it wasn’t, and for that I am very grateful, because when I slid in the electronic key and let myself in, I found it was already occupied by a foreign family of four. Back to the reception desk who pronounced themselves flummoxed and immediately found another ‘very last room’, this time 301. And so it was to bed where in all the excitement and praying I didn’t sleep through my alarm I didn’t get off to sleep until about 2.30am. I know because I kept looking at my watch. Two hours 20 minutes later my iPhone alarm went off.

There were more fun and games at Bordeaux airport (where I found myself at 9.35am that morning). I wasn’t due at Cerons railway station, 20 minutes south of Bordeaux and where I was to be picked up, for another five and a half hours, but I cared not one bit. I had already planned sitting in the sun at a café I know opposite Bordeaux Gare St Jean, supping a beer and enjoying a cigar, but as it was still early I decided to treat myself to a café au lait and a croissant at the airport. Which is what I did, only ten minutes after settling down for the whole area to be invaded – very slowly, it has to be said – by a policeman, a soldier with a very lethal looking automatic rifle and various typists with ‘Police’ armbands who told us to get our things together and leave. The area was then taped off. We who had been removed sat on metal benches about 20 feet away waiting for the café to be re-opened, but we were then told to make ourselves even scarcer and we withdrew to the further part of the airport. There, settling down again we heard a loud (or loudish) bang and that was that. I can only think they found a suspicious discarded Dunkin’ Donuts box and were not prepared to take any chances.

So there you have it: although I arrived at my aunts at about 5pm (she wanted to go shopping in the local Intermarche and, at 81, is no longer the fastest shopper) I didn’t get to bed until about 10.30pm because – well, I was being polite and thought disappearing into my bedroom for the next 24 hours might be a little rude. I got up at 11.30am yesterday, had a substantial lunch of lamb cutlets – I mention that because these days I find I eat less and less meat – and just a few glasses of wine. And it was the wine at midday which did it, because I again had to crash and slept for another four hours. The bonus was, of course, that I missed all the Bastille Day excitement.

. . .

Our concerts, only three in my stay here although there are, of course, more on other dates, don’t start until Monday night and I am off again on Thursday. My aunt, who is feeling her age a lot these days and has had two operations over these past 12 months, doesn’t like to go out on her own after dark, so she isn’t able to attend any of the concerts if I am not here to accompany her. (Incidentally: no Liszt or Chopin. Yippee! All that banging around on the keyboard – Liszt – and silly showing off up and down the keyboard while we, the audience, play Hunt The Melody.)