A Stretch In Limousin – RSVP

So. Here we are.

In five days’ time it is my birthday. I will be 43.

‘“Vshoom. What was that?” “That was your life, mate.” “Oh, that was quick. Do I get another?” “Sorry, mate, that’s your lot.”’

That Fawlty Towers quote has always chimed with me, but now – these days – it tootles ever more vigorously. Because it does go, this life, ever so, ever so quickly.

However, it’s not over, I have heard, till the heart stops beating and the brain turns to a kind of putrid jelly, and there’s no reason either of those things should happen in the immediate future. No reason they shouldn’t happen of course, but let’s remain positive if we can.

So. In six days’ time, a new life beckons. A new life in rural France. I’ve no idea how long it will last, but – unless something goes really horribly, painfully wrong – it should last for at least four months, by which time life in an asbestos shack without any heating will most probably be made untenable by the encroaching cold. My hope, however, is that the next few months go so swimmingly that come the end of summer, we decide to install a wood burner, enabling me to stay there through the winter months, like a proper woodsman. I may even grow a beard. But we’ll see. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For the moment everything is up in the air.

My brother-in-law will be driving me out there next Wednesday. This is a list of the things which we are hoping to be able to fit into the car with us:

• a generator
• a gas fridge
• a camping stove
• a camp bed
• a one-man work station (desk)
• two chairs
• a rug
• a giant piece of tarpaulin
• a shelving unit
• a chainsaw
• a large selection of rusting gardening equipment
• a jerrycan
• a toolbox (with tools in it)
• an extension ladder
• a fishing rod
• a set of solar-powered fairy lights
• a micro irrigation system
• some seeds
• two giant tubs of masonry paint
• a bicycle
• a guitar
• a large box of books
• a laptop (with a new battery – if it arrives in time)
• a nuclear bunker-style stash of non-perishable foodstuffs

We may yet have to hire a van, or leave some stuff behind. We’ll know more after having a practice pack at the weekend. I will take pictures.

So. Over the past few weeks, I have been trying to convince certain periodicals to pay me money to write about my experiences while I’m out there. Naturally – for it is the way of this world – the vast majority have ignored me completely. Most of the people I have approached care neither for my ideas nor, presumably, my façon de s’exprimer. Ah well. I shall solider on regardless. I shall stagger though this desert of editorial disregard, occasionally buoyed by a fleeting mirage of interest, but ever intent on the oasis of well-paid patronage which I remain convinced is out there somewhere. I shall not give up. Not while there are metaphors to be stretched to snapping. Not while there is rhythm in my heart and something firm and fizzy in my cranium. Not yet.

So. Six days. Oh la vache!

I will admit, in retrospect, I am really quite pleased that I was raised on a housing estate in the north-east of England with a nicotine-fingered cliché of a father who would ‘nip up the road’ for a loaf of white bread at noon of a Tuesday, only to return at midnight of a Thursday, key scrabbling at the escutcheon, reeking of bitter, accompanied by two braying simpletons who would leave pools of urine on the canvas of the toilet floor, which I would discover with my bare feet some time later when, awoken by their braying, I would creep to the loo in a frown-crumpled daze, leaving sheets fresh torn from my own sharp little toes, in paisley pyjamas from which I’d bitten the buttons, because even then, aged five or six, my home life was already making me mentally ill. And father, as always, sans loaf.

I will admit that there is a certain grim satisfaction in remembering, albeit vaguely, being pushchaired around the streets of Pennywell in the dead of night by my long-suffering mother, 17 years a hospital cleaner, desperate to get out of the house where she’d borne four children to a sick, violent, ceaselessly feeble man whom she loathed at least enough to take a bottle of gin into a hot bath in a failed attempt to head the fourth child – poor little Karl – off at the pass.

I will, if pushed, remember it all with a melancholy relish: the fish-supper treats from a rare bingo win, the Sun delivered to the front door, ITV with meals from tins or flaky pastry, mother’s bedtime cigarette tracing letters in the dark, father’s barking madness and nights in the cells, the post-violence silence that would last for days and days and days.

Relish because I came through it; because I had no choice and it made me what I am; but mostly because it made me appreciate the alternatives.

It’s like being poor in general. Only by being poor can you truly appreciate having money. There are few clichés fatter with truth than that one. This is why rich kids invariably suck – at least until they’ve met enough poor kids to help them snap out of it.

This is why the lower classes and the upper classes need one another. The lower classes need something to aspire to: Radio 4, kitchens in which people spend time, meals at table, people paid to clean their mess, pesto, holidays abroad, a bidet, a wine rack, books.

And the middle and upper classes need to realise how incredibly fucking lucky they are.

From the moment I got out of Sunderland – only as far as Liverpool but it was a start – I began to realise that there was more to life than dark laughter and getting plastered to forget. There were families who told one another how they felt, for example, who were not embarrassed by knowledge or emotion and who got plastered just for the fun of it. I immediately liked these people. And I aspired to be just like them.

(I know there is overlap by the way. I know there are working class families that read and communicate with alacrity and that there are middle class families who are violent and emotionally frigid, but I think, sadly, the generalisations hold water.) (Oh, and I also know that it’s poverty that creates these differences, and that it’s obscenely unfair. If I were blaming anyone, I would take this into account. I’m not blaming. I’m lamenting. And reflecting upon my interminable escape.)

Over the years – decades even – this process of embourgeoisement has gone quite well. I’m pretty middle class now, on the whole, even when people aren’t watching. I listen to Radio 4. I drink wine. I’ve lived abroad and speak a foreign language. I disdain Vernon Kay. I even betrayed my roots by ditching my regional accent. However, there is one area in which I fall down horribly, and that is that I still have no money.

But I’m optimistic. Fortunes change.

…

In the meantime, something I wrote about the Crazy Guides Communism Tour in Krakow was published in The Arbuturian this week. Look…

Indeed it was reading about The Arbuturian late last night that had me reflecting on my plebbishness in the first place. The Arbuturian describes itself as follows: ‘a magazine for the globetrotting connoisseur with an appetite for adventure and a taste for the highlife. We publish intelligent content for a cultured readership who seek a playful yet highbrow approach to a diverse range of subject matter.’ And if that doesn’t sound quite posh enough for you, take a look at the contributors. They’re all so cultured!

Bearing this in mind – a little coarse around the edges though I most assuredly still am – I am going to attempt to seduce them. En masse. I can only hope I’m not too much of an oik.

But then again, what could be more middle class than summering in the country pile in France?

What what?

We’ll see.

I’ll keep you posted.

All I am at the moment is a big bag of vouloir. So there’s not much to say. Plus I’m trying to be discreet. And discretion is the better part of vouloir. Ooh, I made a funny. Or did I? I’m actually not sure.

I’m in crisis, you know. I got a letter from the government the other day. I opened it and read it, it confirmed I was in crisis. So I’m trying to do a number of things to get out of crisis, but I really don’t want to talk about them.

I don’t want to talk about the people I’m attempting to persuade to pay me for writing things. I don’t want to talk about the novel I’m attempting to write, nor the fact that I’m determined to keep writing novels till one of them sells hundreds of thousands of copies. Then stop. I don’t want to talk about my attempts to claw my way out of debt without getting a job. It’s not just discretion actually. It’s more like a delicious cocktail of discretion, embarrassment and … actually, that is it – just those two things. Or maybe shame is a better word. Discretion and shame. Delicious.

Anyway.

The France date has been set at June 1st. My brother-in-law will take me out there, stay for two days as we attempt to establish phone, running water, front door security and – if the gods be smiling – internet, then I will be left on my own, with only dormice, deer, maybugs and wild cats for company.

I can’t wait.

When I’ve been away in the past, I’ve been accused of running away. I wasn’t running away. I was just looking for something more interesting.

This time I’m running away.

Sixteen days.

I am available and looking for work. I mention this in case you’ve come snooping from the Department for Work and Pensions. Which is unlikely. Assuming I don’t find any work, which is likely (in today’s economic climate), I am off to France four weeks from today, approximately. A generator has been purchased. And a selection of old gardening tools from eBay. Also, my French is coming on à pas de géant. I am corresponding with French people on MyLanguageExchange.com. I am learning lists of French words and watching lots of French films.

I knew a man in Italy who said that he learned Italian by watching a dubbed version of The Terminator over and over. Although I cannot approve his choice of film (not because it’s a bad film particularly, but because it’s a dubbed American film, as opposed to an Italian film), I think it’s a good method. Therefore, in between films which are new to me such as Cyrano de Bergerac, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Preparez Vos Mouchoirs, I watch and watch and rewatch bits of Amelie. Which I love. I would give my all of my beautiful hair to have made that film.

I wonder if Audrey Tautou ever makes it out Nantiat way. Maybe she summers there. She was born after all a mere three hours away. Maybe one crisp, pre-swelter morning in an otherwise deserted lake we will swim into one another and that will be that. The rest, as they say, etc.

Speaking of impossible dreams, I also plan to write a novel while I’m out there, or at least to rewrite the novel I wrote in my first year in Italy, eleven years ago, from which this spicy extract is taken, and change it in the process from something long and dark and predominantly joyless into something short and funny and utterly festive. Then it will be published quickly, enjoyed widely, awarded liberally and adapted into an enormously successful film starring Audrey Tautou.

I’m joking of course. All of that is perfectly possible.

À cœur vaillant rien d’impossible.

Oui?

Oui.

This photograph was the French shack – la cahute – when we went to check it out a couple of weeks ago.

Specifically, it was at the end of the first day of digging up trees. Previously, those trees that you see in the background were also in most of the foreground. My job when I return is to turn the background and the other couple of acres you can’t see into lawn, flowerbed, vegetable patch and idyllic arbour.

If you can guess what’s in my mouth, I’ll give you a thousand pounds when the boat comes in.

Enchanté.