A Stretch In Limousin – RSVP

Last month the bank foreclosed on my overdraft. They sent a letter to an old address. I didn’t get it. So I didn’t know till yesterday, in Sainsbury’s, at the till, at the front of the queue, with my backpack full of groceries, which I then had to remove, like a shoplifter.

These are desperate times.

Thank God I’m running away to France soon, where when they’re not being corralled for photoshoots, reptiles run free.

This is my French face.

We were up at 5.30 and out of the house by 6am. The sat nav said we’d be there by 3pm, but the sat nav didn’t know it was Good Friday. It made a lot of assumptions that day, that bastard sat nav, the most erroneous of which was that it would take an hour, maybe an hour and a half, to get past Paris. Instead it took four, maybe five hours.

‘As long as we get there while it’s still light,’ said my sister. ‘Just so we can see to get the bugs out of the house.’ My sister has a thing about bugs. She’s afraid something hideous is going to crawl into her sleeping bag in the night. As if.

Even after the débâcle that was Paris, however, arriving in daylight was still possible. We were looking at 7.30, maybe, if everything else went smoothly.

Everything else did not go smoothly.

‘Hopefully we’ll make it by midnight.’ The first time someone said this, it was obviously a joke.

Gradually, as motorway after motorway filled up with the tailbacks from overheated vehicles and collisions, it became less funny. Then, with the end finally in sight, we had to double back on ourselves to make sure we didn’t run out of petrol. That was another half hour. Then, stupidly deciding to trust the sat nav with a short cut, we went off-motorway.

Never trust a sat nav with a personality disorder. Or topographical agnosia. Having decided it couldn’t find the village with which we’d reprogrammed it, the sat nav chose another slightly similar-sounding place in entirely the wrong direction.

That was another hour.

Then we hit a ‘ROUTE BARRÉE’ sign which we (stupidly) decided to ignore, almost ending the evening in a large ditch as a consequence. Then came an enormous diversion which the sat nav totally refused to acknowledge.  ‘Go back to the ditch,’ the sat nav insisted. ‘This day must end in a ditch.’

Eventually we arrived at the house at around 12.30am and not only was it more overgrown than a medieval forest in a child’s wildest imaginings, but also, as soon as we got out of the car and began to try and locate where the drive used to be, it started to rain.

Then, when we finally fought our way through ten minutes of undergrowth and found the house, we discovered that at some stage over the last couple of years, it had been broken into and pretty much stripped bare.

Suddenly it was all rather depressing. Furthermore, there was no way we could get the fold-up beds up through the forest, so we’d either have to sleep in the car, which having just spent 18 hours in it, was not appealing, or drive around looking for a hotel.

In the end we drove to Limoges and found an Ibis hotel. It smelled of smoke. I was asleep by 3.

…

After a giant breakfast in the hotel, the first job was to buy tools to tackle the undergrowth. There had been a selection of tools, including an industrial strimmer, but along with the log burner, the oil stove, the gas fridge, the crockery, cutlery and various bits of furniture, they had all been taken. So we bought an axe, an adze and a machete and returned to the house, whereupon my brother-in-law and I set to work dismantling the forest. There are actually around two acres of land around the house so all we really hoped to achieve was to carve a 50-metre path from the dead letterbox to the front door. We managed this in a few hours.

My sister meanwhile cleared out the house itself – from the Miss Havisham cobwebs to the mountains of mouse dung – and got to work on making it habitable.

By the time we got the first fire going in the late afternoon, things were starting to take shape.

We opened a box of wine.

…

At the very latest, I’ll be returning during the first week in June. Maybe sooner. I’ll be staying there for four months. Maybe longer. My task while I’m out there will be to reclaim the land from La Dame Nature. The house itself is seemingly made of artex and asbestos and is, sadly, in its autumn years, so there’s little point pumping money into it. We’ll just need to make it secure, fix the plumbing so that at least there’s cold water and either get a generator or possibly a solar panel or two to provide some power.

I’ll also need a chainsaw.

Plus, there is a telephone line, so internet access may not be out of the question.

…

On Sunday night, we went to bed around 10pm, with another 5.30 start if we were going to make the 3.20 ferry crossing from Calais. I had just got to sleep for the second time (the first time my sister had woken me up to ask if I’d heard something fighting outside – probably foxes, maybe bears), when the sound of a sleeping bag being hastily unzipped and a woman screeching and swearing and stamping around almost brought the house down.

At first she thought it was a twig and was fearlessly kicking it around the bottom of her sleeping bag. Then she felt it crawling up her leg and flew into a panic.

It was a maybug. They look like this…

Sometimes life isn’t fair.

There is no electricity. There is no running water.

This is how it looked five or six years ago:

Since then, as far as anyone is aware, no one has been near it. It will therefore be wildly overgrown, barely accessible even. It may also have become home to wild animals – foxes, bears, gentlemen of the road. It may even have fallen down. Apparently this is quite a genuine fear.

It’s in France by the way, and it’s owned by my sister and her husband. The nearest big town – Limoges – is half an hour away by car.

This weekend we’re going to take a look at it. If it’s still standing, I’m thinking I might go and live there, probably after my birthday at the end of May till the end of the summer. Or beyond.

I could do the place up. And write by oil lamp. I could do sit-ups. And learn some French. I could ride my bike and go swimming in the nearby lake. I could even figure out what I’m going to do with my life.

Ah, the more things change, eh? Eh?

Eh?

I wonder if the Department for Work and Pensions have the internet. I’m guessing – based on my dealings with them this morning – that they do, but that they haven’t a clue how it works. But just in case, I have to start being discreet. I have, in other words, to stop making snide comments like the one I made just a few seconds ago and learn to keep my stupid sodding mouth shut. Ach. It’s a bit of a pain not being anonymous any more.

So be it.

I am Karl Webster and here is my news.

I spent a weekend in London and was overawed and humbled by the generosity of old friends. I also dismantled a garden shed, which made me realise that what I should be – rather than a sub-editor, or a language teacher, or a translator, or God forbid, a writer – I should be a gardener. I have experience too. A little. Back when I was an unskilled builder to the stars – Sinead O’Connor, Anthony Minghella, Harold Pinter’s agent – I did quite a bit of gardening work, and I always loved it. I love the breath of the sun on my concave chest and the honest burn and thrum of a worked muscle.

So that’s what I told them today, at the job centre – or rather, the Jobcentre Plus – it has a ‘plus’ now. That’s progress. ‘I want to work outside,’ I said. ‘I love the honest burn and thrum of a worked muscle.’

Brian was very nice. ‘I can’t tell you what to do,’ he told me. ‘However….’ He then suggested that there was a much greater possibility of me finding work if I concentrated on one of the areas in which I have most of my experience. He was referring to the teaching of English as a foreign language or the sub-editing of arse-numbingly tedious magazines. Ironically, the area in which I actually have the most experience is writing… but not paid writing.

Still, tonight – as an experiment – I put ‘writer’ into the Direct Gov online jobsearch engine, just to see what would happen. What happened was that I was offered one job as a minimum-wage nutritionist or another as a British Sign Language interpreter (pay ‘exceeds minimum wage’). And that’s not the kind of writing I do. Actually, unless I’m mistaken, that’s not actually writing at all.

So I put in ‘gardener’ and I discovered that gardeners get paid, on average, between £6 and £7 an hour.

I was quite shocked by this. I may as well become a nurse. But no… I must follow my heart. And my heart says write, dear boy, write. So. Writing. Writing, writing, writing. A writer writes.

Ooh, something good happened. I forgot to say. A couple of weeks ago, a magazine editor told me he liked my balls. This was because I sent him something. Not a photograph of my balls, but a terse, querulous email having a miffed pop at him for ignoring a pitch I’d sent him a few weeks earlier. ‘File a test piece,’ he said. ‘What else can you write about?’ I filed. I told him. He’s ignoring me again. The shit.

So this is my plan…

I need to rejig my online presence, optimise myself and remove obstacles.

Then, through a delicious cocktail of sporadic physical exercise, utterly self-centred Buddhist practice, absolute bloody-mindedness in terms of Project Festival, and benefit-scrounging, I will stumble on through the Spring, into the Summer and my 44th year of existence, and… I don’t know…. Something will turn up.

Most probably tomorrow.

Six hours. That’s how long it took me to condense seven weeks (and four festivals) into five minutes. And one second. I’m actually rather pleased with it. See for yourself…

So. Now what? Well, for the moment, nothing. As ever, everything comes down to money and not only do I not have enough money to continue travelling around visiting festivals, but also, I don’t have enough money to do anything else. So I’m going to have to get a job. Probably doing something other than writing, which, as always, seems to me like a waste of my time. But for now I’m out of options.

I’ve written up the festivals here. I’ve pitched a number of magazines, trying to get jobs writing about what I’ve done and what I want to do. I’ve pitched companies in the hope of securing commercial sponsorship. I have an agent who has apparently tried and failed to find a publisher for a book of the project. And that’s it. I’m out of ideas. (If you have any, please leave a comment or email me here. Thanks.)

I’ll keep going of course. I’ll keep trying until… well, until I give up. But that won’t be for a while yet I don’t think. We’ll see.

For now, if I might quote a film that’s been much on my mind recently, I’m reduced to the status of a bum. I have an interview to claim Jobseeker’s Allowance on Tuesday. I’ve sworn in the past that I would never stoop so low again, but fuck it: this is no time for pride.

So that’s that for now. In half an hour or so, I’m off to London for the weekend to sponge off friends and drink rum from a bottle in my bag. But at least – and I don’t say this lightly – at least the sun is out.

Have a wonderful weekend, whatever you’re doing, and hey! …be nice to each other.

Anon!

Today I was going to write something about Ryanair, who mugged me to the tune of €40 last Friday, and totally got away with it, but I ended up spending most of the day writing up The Battle of the Oranges and then having a little bit of a breakdown by the canal that runs past my sister’s back garden.

By the side of a canal is really one of the last places you want to find yourself weeping in public and wondering what you have done with your life. The top of a very tall building is another. Sunderland is a third. Sunderland of course is one of the last places you want to find yourself doing anything at all.

As I was walking along the canal I thought about drowning myself. I didn’t think of doing it because I was seriously considering taking my own life. I thought of doing it because I am a writer, and that is what writers do. They imagine doing things or seeing things that might not necessarily ever actually happen.

For example, I am now thinking about drowning Michael O’Leary, the founder of Ryanair. I would never do it in real life of course, even if I had the opportunity, but for now, because I am a writer, I am imagining kneeling on his chest on the bank of the canal that runs through Fleet and pushing down on his forehead, so that his eyes, nose and mouth (if you like, his face) are submerged in the canal, and his lungs are filling up with water. Oh, wait – I have just imagined that prior to getting him to the canal, I hacked off his arms with an axe – rather a blunt axe – it took ages, and I charged him €40 for the privilege. The dismemberment was really just to make him less likely to be able to resist my cold-bloodedly murdering him in the canal. Realism is important, you see. Or at least it is to me. That’s the sort of writer I am. Sadly, it is not the sort of person I am.

Which is why I was having a little breakdown by the canal.

I am fed up with myself, and my foolish dreams. But tomorrow is another day. So they say. And they are right. It is. Tomorrow I may write about Ryanair. Although frankly I have lots of other things to write, so maybe I shouldn’t bother. I mean, I probably shouldn’t bother anyway, but really – smokeless cigarettes? I… I….

We’ll see. In the meantime, please read this. I’d like to know what you think.