A Stretch In Limousin – RSVP

On Friday night I called a woman a moth and was practically dragged off stage by a 16-year-old in a very skinny tie. The two events were not, however, related, as much as I would kind of like them to be.

I didn’t mean to call anyone a moth by the way, I was aiming for ‘mito’ in Italian, which means ‘myth’ but is used to mean cool, funny, great, what-have-you. Anyway, quite by accident, I called her a moth. She seemed to like it. I’m thinking of calling other women moths too.

Also – for a short while – I got up on stage again at the ex-pat bar in Droux and was roundly mocked by a table of young people, one of whom I then sang at, improvising an almost inappropriately tender song. Then this kid by the name of ‘Shameless’ – who another me in another time might have labelled an impudent little scrote – quite rightly took his guitar from me and told me that I cannot sing. He actually said, ‘You can play but you can’t sing’, which just goes to show how wildly wrong one can be at that age. The impudent little scrote. I told him, ‘You don’t understand me or my music.’ Or I told someone else that. Or I told the entire bar that. My memory is being deliberately evasive.

I was later told that the bar dog, who goes by the name of ‘Hairpiece’, sang along with me. Apparently that’s a rare honour. He normally only ever sings along when Fay plays the piano. Having not heard Fay play the piano, I’m still unsure whether the accompaniment of Hairpiece is or is not a compliment. But I have my suspicions.

So the point of all this is, I had a whale of a time. Furthermore, I am surprised to find myself feeling so utterly relaxed here, more so I believe than I have at any other time or in any other place in my life. Therefore I feel totally free to make an absolute gargantuan oaf of myself on an unprecedented scale. Isn’t that exciting? It most certainly is.

Nor do I care that people may be saying horrible things about me behind my back, which some of them, surely to God, must be. After all, there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about.

Speaking of which, my name was apparently mentioned at a local English-speaking book club a couple of villages up the road by people I have not met. Which almost certainly means that this blog has at least one more reader than I imagined. Unless it was someone from the Inland Revenue snooping about. Which is unlikely. I am after all, a minnow in inland revenue terms. So there you go. It’s my blog, working its magic, casting its spell. One minute a reader asks about me at a book club in rural France, the next the Guardian and the Independent are in a bidding war to publish a weekly column of my titillating exploits. It’s only a matter of time.

Oh, also, at some point tonight I made a toilet-based mistake mid-conversation and had to hide my pants behind a church wall. Thankfully, that is not the kind of thing I will ever, ever write about in public.

Phew.

If any of you know of such a creature, please send her my way. And quick, before I do something weird. (And probably illegal.)

One…

Two…

Maddie looks a little boss-eyed in her bookcase picture. She isn’t though.

À demain.

Suddenly they’re everywhere. And some real beauties.

What I really need is a mushroom identification book. Although apparently pharmacies here will tell you what you’ve got. But the pharmacies are miles away. I need a mushroom man to pop by with his mad mushroom skills and cook me an omelette and toss me a bag of magic. Know ye of such a man? Please say yes.

Thursday 18th August, 23:46

So you know when you’ve just been involved in a serious car accident and you don’t realise how serious it is till you get home, look in the bathroom mirror and notice a three-foot shard of metal jutting out the base of your skull?

Well, it’s not quite that bad.

It’s actually nowhere near that bad. It was just me, my bicycle, the moonless twists and turns of the Le Buis highroads and a sideroad ditch full of bracken and bramble.

THhhoooomk.

That was the noise I made as I disappeared into the undergrowth and was held tight by a thousand tiny spikes.

I’d been for dinner with Alex and his parents and I was a little over-exuberant on the three-kilometre downhill ride home. In fact, the last thing I remember was standing up on the pedals and thinking, I fucking love this country… hold on, I’m on the grass… and then there was a crumple, an unfortunate fold and lots of brittle, snapping sounds. But I was OK. I was conscious. And alive obviously. But conscious was key.

The only thing that concerned me, once I’d realised that I could see, and I could move, was that my wrist was hurting, and now, having ridden home, played with the cats, taken out my contact lenses and rubbed contact lens solution all over my scratches, I realise that yes, my wrist is going to hurt in the morning.  It’s the same wrist I’ve fractured twice before so I know it’s already a weak, limp, flimsy, frangible thing, and now that the booze is beginning to wear off, it’s already starting to throb.

I’ve had a lot to cushion the pain for now, including a bottle or so of red wine and a hefty batch of eau de vie, and it’s doing a bloody good job too, but there are still things creeping through. Reminders of what’s just happened. Prickles under my shirt that on further inspection turn into thorns under my skin, but nothing deep, and certainly bearable.

Plus there are scratches on my nose and across my lower face (chin). Not quite as vicious as frankly, I would like, but scratches nonetheless. Hopefully, they’ll beef up overnight. If I scab up properly, I can dine out on this for weeks.

Until tomorrow, my little cabbages…

…enchanté.

Friday 19th August, 13:17

I’m pretty sure my wrist isn’t fractured, but it’s definitely too temporarily damaged to be put to any good use in the garden. So here I am, disabled by boring pain. However, there is good news. Sadly, also bad news…

The bad news is that an apparently very nice and very talented man in London has stomach cancer, but the good news is that he gave some of his morphine, via a mutual friend, to me. So although I’m sitting here disabled by pain, it’s now starting to drift away somewhat, and there’s an indescribable pleasantness slowly washing over me.

Jesus, I’d make a great junkie. If I didn’t have so much to do, I might seriously consider it too. But I do. And so – morphine or no – I’d better get on.

To the media centre!

Here we see the photographer tyrant at work. Note the authoritarian digit, bottom left.

I tell you what, since I got these here cats, and since a very darling friend of mine reminded me about post-scheduling, I’ve realised that there is absolutely nothing to stop me rashly promising to rack up a post a day. (Weekdays only.)

A post a day! (Weekdays only.)

Imagine that.

Traction awaits.

It’ll mean a tremendous dip in quality of course, with a large number of photographs of cats, mushrooms and earthworms (but mostly cats), as well as heaps of pointless self-congratulatory filler like this.

But that’s not the point. The point is that I promise you – henceforthwith – to deliver one blog post a day. (Weekdays only.) Heck, I’ll even change the name of the site. Not that it’ll make a farthing of difference, but what the hay, it’ll spur me, and maybe I can get some of that attention I’ve always craved so very badly, even when on the few occasions I’ve achieved it, it’s been so very empty.

Yeah!

Some of that.

Let’s see how long I last. 

 À demain.

So I was clearing out a substantial woodpile, most of which was rotten because it had been there so long, and not only did I find an ants’ nest that you could hear – and loud, like badgers in tin boots dancing in cat litter – and not only was there a fat silver snake that slinked further into the woodpile and gave me big pause – there was also this… this gaggle of eggs, or… no, they must be eggs. If I’d come across them in London, I’d have assumed they’d fallen from the plump wrist of some bling-pimped pre-teen strumpet, but here, they can only be eggs. BUT FROM WHENCE? Or where even.

Anyone?

‘You want to be careful,’ said Alex one night at the shack. ‘You might turn into a cat man.’

He said it like that, like it was up there with BNP man.

I like cats. And I like people who like cats.

A couple of years ago, I was failing to date a TEFL student, a Congolese Italian girl who was far too young for me anyway, and we were in a bar in Waterloo which had a friendly black cat roaming about the place. The moment I saw her recoil and spit ‘fa schifo’ at the gorgeous thing, I knew, she would never know the delicious mortification of the Webster ‘move’.

I don’t trust people who don’t like cats. I don’t necessarily trust people who do like cats either. But I like cats.

A few years ago, when I was pretending to be a deformed man called Stan, I gave myself a cat. Which is to say, I pretended to have a cat. I did that because Stan needed someone to love. And – just like me! – Stan loved cats.

Stan’s cat was called Pablo. I used photos of Morticia, my ex-girlfriend’s mum’s cat, to illustrate his escapades. And then I killed him.

There was a great outpouring of sadness from my regular readers. It made people cry.

That’s a pretty fucked-up thing to do actually, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a kick out of it.

Anyway, I was going to get a cat post-Morag, but In Real Life, and start gardening and kitten-rearing, and blog about it all. I was even thinking of having the cat write a secret blog and then Stan discover it. I thought it might be a good way to illustrate his nervous breakdown.

I have a lot of preposterous ideas.

But that was a good one.

Hmmm.

Anyway, I’ve really got a cat now, and if she dies before me, I already know I will be devastated. It’s extremely easy to become attached to a cat. The second day I had Maddie, I had to deflea her. At some point, the fleas were all fleeing her poisoned fur, crawling all over her eyes and nose and freaking her right out. I sat on the floor of the bedroom with her, picking the little bastards from her body and crushing them with the nail of my thumb till they cracked. I felt such tenderness for her. And such venom for those fleas. And in the crunch of that, our first proper crisis, something cracked in me too.

I can’t figure out why some people look down on cat people. I guess they assume that people who like cats, or people who have more than one cat, have problems with human relationships. Like the mad old woman who lets her countless kitties poop in her Rice Krispies, furball tumbleweeds rolling across the kitchen table. Or the middle-aged man who lives in the woods, taking pictures of mushrooms and letting his kittens suckle him.

I’ve had a couple of messages on the old social technologies that bear out this prejudice. ‘It’s a budget Shining,’ wrote the charming Gillpea on Twitter. ‘You’ll be found in March, surrounded by kitten innards, gibberish on the walls, cowering from the sun.’ Meanwhile on Facebook, the equally charming Piers wrote: ‘And then two were suddenly thirty. And your personal hygiene fell away as your 15inch finger nails didn’t allow you to reach those tricky places. And the crumbling house filled with niche pornography and ‘Marché U’ bags. People stopped phoning. The change was complete….’

You see the stuff I have to put up with?

Even when I tell these people I’m writing a beautiful, haunting song about my cat, with sadomasochistic undertones, they still refuse to take me seriously. ‘Stupid cat man,’ they mutter, maliciously.

Anyway, fuck ‘em.

So, there was some concern before I went away to London for 10 days that Maddie would have a rotten time with the mini-menagerie with which she’d be staying, but I am pleased to report that she won them all over with her spellbinding charm and absolute refusal to take no for an answer, and by the time I came back she was wholly accepted, even being allowed to eat from the same bowls as the rest of the pack.

When I arrived to pick her up, she was sleeping in a straw bowl on the kitchen table with her new best friend, which just happened to be the little tabby kitten I’d already agreed to bring home with me. I was concerned that she wouldn’t remember me. I should have known better. The second she opened her eyes and her gaze fell upon me, she scrambled to her feet and BOOM – attached herself to my face like a giant merkin. Alas, no. That is a lie. She did start purring though. Immediately. But that was that. Fay and Ray reckoned that she didn’t do that with them and that that was proof enough that she remembered me. But I have to say, I wanted more. I wanted something slightly more reminiscent of Christian the lion.

I’m so needy.

So anyway, now I have two.

For reasons that amuse me greatly, and because it fits her, meet George. Georgie for short.

Maddie and George, together.

I am a cat man. And proud of it.

As I have mentioned before, but not for a wee while for fear of cheapening it, I’ve been meddling with Buddhism for a while. Chanting mostly, which whether it has any positive effect or not, I quite enjoy. (So it does.) You might recall I chanted for a lovely black cat in Ivrea in March, and killed it stone dead.

Namaste.

Another thing I’ve taken from my superficial exploration of Buddhism is the desire to be a more decent human being. That probably sounds like a terribly toothless, insipid thing to say, but … well, there it is. Not that I was an ogre before, but reading and talking about Buddhism just made me more aware of how I think I should be, and more conscious or the consequences of my behaviour and words. Particularly my words.

Anyhow, the reason I mention all of this is because of the old killing thing. I’ve killed a few things since I’ve been in France, out of necessity, mostly, and it’s got me wondering, how is it possible to be a bona fide Buddhist with the whole anti-murder thing going on, and live in the countryside? I mean, do they really not kill anything? I can see how they might resist splatting a mosquito across their arm, preferring instead to brush it aside, all serene, but what about a horse-fly? Horse-flies are screaming out for a fatal pummelling. Or what happens when a mob of marauding ants storm a Buddhist’s breadbin? And what if a rat was about to rip out a child’s throat and a Buddhist was standing close by with a machete? Would they not be dutybound to take the life of that rat? Or do Buddhists feel, as Morrissey appears to, that animal life and human life are equally sacred?

I ask because I’m having trouble. I don’t want to kill things, I really don’t. I’ve even saved what I can where possible. For example, I saved a couple of butterflies and bees from the paddling pool when it was up, because if I hadn’t, they would have died slow and needless deaths. And I like butterflies and bees. This one, for example…

I’ve also stopped the cat torturing a couple of things. Stinkbugs and beetles, for example, that she has no intention of eating, but will happily claw and bat and chew and spit out till they die. But then who am I to interfere with nature’s way? If we don’t kill things out of respect for nature, then surely that same respect should prevent us interfering just because we’ve seen something we don’t like.

I actually caught the cat playing with a rather magnificent stag beetle the other day, and I took it off her and put it outside. An hour or so later it was still there, incapable of going anywhere because the cat had mangled it so badly. So I stamped on it. I put it out of its misery, because that seemed like the decent thing to do. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I shouldn’t have interfered at all. After all, who did I think I was? GOD???

When ants invaded the kitchen, I was a particularly tyrannical, vengeful, unforgiving god, with a plastic bottle of genocide…

And yes, it did do precisely what it professed on the packaging.

On another occasion, wasps crawled into empty beer glasses on a table near me and I squashed them with other empty beer glasses until they were squished to death or suffocated or drowned. I would like to say it was self-defence, but it wasn’t really. It was vicious, pre-meditated murder.

I know that the answer is to find a balance: not to be cruel, but not to be stupid either. I shouldn’t have killed those wasps, and I’m sorry, even though I heartily despised them. I could probably have saved that hornet too. But the ants had it coming. They came into my home. If I’d gone into their home, they would have done everything in their power to kill me. Unfortunately they would have failed, because I am massive.

Anyway, if there are any proper Buddhists out there who can advise me further, please do get in touch.

Or I will kill you.

Little joke there.

Enchanté.