What can one say about the new coalition government? Nothing very complimentary, I fear, but then the same was true of the previous Tory-lite regime. The difference is that the coalition has no mandate, since deals between what I’ve heard described as power-hungry individuals (I make no comment) have trashed manifesto promises. It’s hardly surprising, then, to see rioting in the streets. I hate the aches and pains of advancing years, but I’m glad I’m not starting out in education or work now.
Martyn is very busy at work, again because of absences of colleagues. The college is planning how to cut spending, and there might be compensations. It’s a similar story in the Courts service. Because of shortages of legal advisors, two of our nine courtrooms are now ‘dark’. My sittings usually total somewhere in the 50s, but this year so far I think I’m heading for little more than the minimum 26. Each time I sit it feels like the first time, and I’m hardly building my chairmanship skills. (It doesn’t help that my last three sittings were as a winger.) Since youth court business is very slow, I’ve taken the hint and stood down from the yoof panel. I was sitting rarely, I didn’t like the work and others were clamouring for more sittings. So the decision was pretty easy. The cuts mean more work for the union, though, and as I’m now Deputy Chairman of the Kent Branch, what I’ve lost in magisterial expenses I reckon I’m more than gaining in Magistrates’ Association miles.
This was the year I hit 60, so we had a nice gathering in the garden on the nearest Sunday. This was a major piece of luck, since the forecast had been poor. But as ever at parties, you never get a chance to stop and chat with people. Still, it was lovely to get even a fleeting moment with valued friends, and to see them making new friends. The tidal wave of good wishes around the date was quite moving.
On the day itself, I was down at the station early in the morning to get my old geezer discount card – though I don’t think I’ve broken even yet! I was very cross that my bus pass didn’t turn up promptly on the day, though. As a rather snotty council official explained none too patiently, the entitlement is moving back in time with the female state pension age, hence the wait of over three months: I’ve only used it twice so far.
We hope 2011 will treat you kindly, and that the clouds on the horizon will prove to have silver linings for us all.
Martyn & David
Home
We began the year with the chaos of building work – we’d decided to get the shower room refitted. The set-up we inherited wasted an awful lot of space, and the wash basin and shower enclosure were both designed for much smaller people than us. It was also beige to the point of depressing. The work was OK, but the workers real champions, getting here from the south coast every day but one in terrible conditions. In the summer, we had the boiler replaced and the heating system updated, which (the bill aside) was entirely painless – we pushed off to France, leaving the eponymous Mr Waterman with the key.
The garden has been a little disappointing. I suppose that’s a fair reward for the lack of goodness in the soil: we’ll top dress with some good stuff in the spring and hope for better things. Still, there were some successes: the echinaceas started flowering this year, and we had a 33% increase in our Bramley crop: up from 3 to 4.
Wheels
We bit the bullet and replaced Egg1 this year. At five years old, it was starting to get electrical faults. It was in most ways a better car than Egg2 – livelier and much less thirsty. Anyway, its replacement, a VW Tiguan, is turning out OK, even if its general air of refinement is let down by rather agricultural noises when it’s slugging at low revs. As ever, I feel soiled from dealings with the motor trade.
A rented C3 Picasso was an odd mixture – quite lively, but uncomfortable because of the cheap sloppy seats and jerky on/off brakes. It was hard to place accurately on the road, and if one could feel anything through the steering wheel, one was hallucinating.
Egg2, having had a 281 bus wiped along its side outside the chip shop, had to spend a week or so in dock. The bus company’s insurers provided us with an automatic Passat. With a drivetrain almost identical to the Tiguan’s, it also hinted at the nasty noise the latter makes under load at low revs. I have asked the Hauptvolkswagnerei whether they recognise this as an issue, and if so, what they’re doing about it. No reply.
Arrivals
Annie has been to see us in Langton and Lagrasse, and we had a lovely afternoon with all seven Bobbetts in Lagrasse – when they finally found us.
Another 9-couvert Lagrasse lunch, August
They came on one of the warmest days, so appreciated the coolth inside the house and in the river.
The birthday was a good excuse to get a few valued friends round, and we’ve had some smaller gatherings in Langton too. It was great to have a visit from Ria and Jan in July. Ria and I have been pen friends since we were both 12, but I’d never met Jan and Ria hadn’t met Martyn before.
Food & Drink
My father used to speak of digging one’s grave with one’s teeth. Well, mine (grave and teeth alike) will be well filled. We grew spuds and beans in containers this year: the charlottes did quite well, but the beans were disappointing.
I keep experimenting with bread recipes: we’re currently working on a batch of rolls with chopped olives, and I tried some pesto rolls a while back – luscious! Martyn’s cakes remain his speciality, though he is also gaining fans with his cherry tomato, garlic and basil bruschette. We took a couple of trays of them to Lagrasse neighbour Beverly’s 50th birthday bash. We both like cooking, so tend not to do a lot of eating out. The new owners of the Red Lion in the next village are doing a fine job, though, and it’s within walking distance.
We catered the birthday bash ourselves. You can’t expect a party here not to include the Madhur Jaffrey chickpeas, of course – an odd mix with quiche lorraine, I admit, but tradition oblige. Shame I forgot to serve the naans… Omission more than repaired by Martyn’s magnificent gateaux – effective only as part of a calorie-controlled diet, of course.
And on the drinks front, Château Aiguilloux rules in the Corbières, though for everyday use, Camplong was on better form this year. Their white is also OK, but not really a match for our favourite Picpoul de Pinet. There has been a great crop of sloes in the garden behind the scout hut where art class meets. Stand by for news of the sloe gin!
Clan
Good news: my nephew Richard and Anna are to be married next year. He beats his grandfather Smith’s record by a couple of years, sneaking in a little after his 39th birthday. Pip’s two are keeping the wedding stationers busy: Alan married this summer, and Ceri is to remarry. On Martyn’s side, the good news is that his nephew, Tim, has had a successful corneal graft, and his sight is vastly improved.
Arts
Historia has had a successful first season of Judenfrei, the story of two Jewish lawyers in Berlin in the 1930s, and starts a further run in a Hampstead theatre in January. We saw it in a City church, where the acoustic came close to ruining it. Impressive piece, though.
I went with Annie to see the Cézanne card players exhibition at the Courtauld one wet day in November. I’ve never had much time for Cézanne, but enjoyed this little show very much: his drawing of figures is a bit hit & miss, but his use of colours is terrific. It was my first visit to the Courtauld, and I’ll be back. On a first visit it’s such a surprise to come round a corner and find oneself face to face with iconic pieces like Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe and Renoir’s Bar at the Folies Bergères.
I keep slapping paint about, and have even gone back to watercolours a couple of times. There’s no doubt that acrylics are my thing – I lack the patience and self-discipline that you need to succeed with watercolours.
(Orbieu, autumn: watercolour.)
Whatever I attempt, it rarely succeeds if I spend more than one session on it. My last two efforts in acrylics were rather drawn out and laboured. This little piece – and it’s no more than a sketch, really – took about an hour, plus a few minutes’ fiddling a week later. I spent a messy half hour or so another day with soft pastels, and have played a little with watercolour pencils, but I find the inability to mix colours very limiting, and I’ll need practice to learn how each pigment reacts to the addition of water.
Departures
We’ve been to France a few times this year as usual, and look forward to the day when we are no longer limited by school holidays. Our Easter trip was helped by some good weather – it’s always a mixture early and late in the year, but we had good days for walking, cycling and otherwise enjoying the beautiful countryside of the Corbières, as well as days for reading, painting and model-making. Spring was very late in France as well, and the area had had heavy snowfalls that lay for days. Consequently, there was still mimosa in flower, and it was late in our stay before we could make our annual pilgrimage to see the minute daffodils and irises up on the hill. Yet curiously enough there were hundreds of flamingos on the étangs – and no shortage of mosquitos either.
I spent much of the Easter hols trying – and failing – to get Frogtel to set up the ADSL service I’d ordered on the internet. When I did reach them, the sales people told me I needed to talk to the techies, and the techies reciprocated. At one point, Martyn thought I was about to blow a gasket. None of which produced results, of course.
We came home via a few days at Annie’s house in the Gironde, arriving to find the boiler burst by the frost and the kitchen knee-deep in mouse shit. Annie’s co-owner had left food and dirty utensils in the kitchen when he left, so it was hardly surprising.
The travelling was mixed – leaving on Good Friday was a mistake. The tunnel and the French motorways were heaving with British tourists, and we’d decided on a longer than usual route to avoid bad weather. We stayed the night in a hotel in Fleurie that I used some twenty years ago: quiet and comfortable, and run by two friendly chaps, probably of our persuasion. The journey home was far better – the roads were quieter, so we made a pretty healthy average speed.
We routed via Berne for our summer trip: the laptop I’d bought in Fribourg in 1995 had become very unreliable, so I decided to get a decent machine as a birthday present to myself. We rather miscalculated the route, wrongly assuming that there was much more completed motorway through the Jura. So it was well after dark when we reached Pam and Geoff’s. Next time, we’ll grin and bear Basel.
As to computer shopping, we went to the new Media Markt in Gümligen, where ‘spricht jemand hier gerne Englisch?’ quickly resolved the language problem. Having researched at length and decided on a Sony or a Tosh, I came out with a Hewlett-Packard. The next task was to get it speaking to the world from Lagrasse. When we arrived, the router could see the ADSL service, but not the internet. A neighbour having given me the phone number for Frogtel’s anglophone help desk, I finally got a call back from a helpful young man who talked me through what had to be done to get the router correctly programmed. Now that that’s done, the service is vastly superior to what we get in the UK.
2010…
Unlike some years, the summer in Lagrasse was not too hot. We had a couple of warm days at the beginning of our stay, but for the rest of the time it was unspectacular, and cool enough for one or two bits of maintenance. And the paint was still on the door when we went back in October.
This came as a relief, since a week or so before we went south for half-term, I spent an anxious few hours watching the water level of the Orbieu rocketing up. You can watch it in real time on the internet: a gauge on the new bridge sends readings at frequent intervals to the Météo France website. When I checked it at around 6:00 am, the level had risen over four metres in less than twelve hours. When it reaches 7, the house floods, and the forecast was for further torrential rain. With a strong wind from the east and high waves on the Mediterranean, the Aude couldn’t exhaust quickly enough into the sea. Well, by around 8:00 I started to see a slight downward curve in the graph, and a more distinct curve in the reading upstream at Saint-Pierre des Champs. So we were lucky this time.
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