A Stretch In Limousin – RSVP

December 31st, 2011.

• I will not drink alcohol, smoke tobacco or partake of any narcotics for the duration of January 2012 (in honour of the Olympics). (Not really.) (Balls to the Olympics.)
• I will do five minutes of finger practice on the guitar every day for the duration of January 2012, then review. (I have been doing this every day for a week so it’s not like some wild, impromptu, jazz-like promise.)
• I will do 15 minutes of physical exercise every day (a delicious cocktail of press-ups and skipping) for the duration of January 2012, then review. (This is a wild, impromptu, jazz-like promise.)
• I will not shave between now and March 21st, the Spring Equinox.
• On March 21st, I will shave my face and cut off all of my hair. I will be like the one who plays tennis in The Royal Tenenbaums, but with a much weaker chin.
• I will finish Stage One of the refurbishment of The Stretch by May 31st 2012.
• I will have a party on May 31st 2012.
• I will find purpose, direction and contentment. Although maybe not this year.

That’s it. Oh, and get some books published and pay off some debts. Piece of cake

2012.

My year. May it be yours too.

Have fun.

Happy new year.

December 25th, 10.58
I woke up at around 8.30. My watch is broken again but it’s only the strap and time doesn’t stop because of a broken strap. Oh, no. Outside, a substantial blanket of frost made my first and maybe last Christmas in France a white one. I put on my big coat (thanks, Michael) and trainers (thanks, Karl) and walked down to the shed to take a photo of the field. This is something I have been doing every day for about a month. I wish I had been doing it every day since the day I arrived, because then it would actually mean something. Oh well.  Never mind. I peed in the compost heap, came back indoors and built a fire. Then I had two cups of tea and a chocolate bar. Ho ho humbug.  

This is not the first Christmas I have spent alone. I think it’s the third. Maybe the fourth. One year, in Liverpool, I ate a tin of Campbell’s meatballs for Christmas lunch. Out of the pan. This year I was planning to have cheese and bread, maybe crack open a tin of olives, but on Friday night, someone gave me an old trout.

This is my first Christmas without electricity.  

I opened my presents around 09.45. Both of them. One is a collection of Tibetan Buddhist meditations and the other is a book of spells. My sister is a funny one. The book of spells contains this sentence: ‘Buy your lottery ticket on the right day for your star sign.’  

K, thanks.

Just after 10 I went for a ride on my bike and took some photos. It’s a lovely day. I rode up to the cemetery in Le Buis and played with one of the loose effigies that are lying about up there. I did think about bringing it home with me, but somehow it seemed wrong to steal a tiny metal Jesus from a corpse on Christmas Day.

Here are some photographs of fields.

Jesus looks extremely gay and flouncy when you take him down from his cross. I’d never noticed that before.

Now I’m going to cook my trout.

Have fun. Be happy. If you can’t be happy, fuck it. Give up.

It had been an emotional day, but it was becoming a day of intoxication, when there, right there at the offset of the latter, Graham gave me a Christmas present. It was something he’d made. It was something he’d made from something he’d taken home last time he was here, in June. The something he’d taken home had been a rectangle of bark, freshly stripped from a newly felled and sawn ash log. I had a couple too. I used mine as placemats, then I burned them. Graham made this:

He gave it to me upside-down, and when I turned it over, I’m not ashamed to say, I cried like a tortured lamb.

As I say, it had been an emotional day already, what with one thing and another – relationship breakdown, six hours trapped in Limoges, a desperately unfair fine on the train, a found tennis ball, loved and lost – so I was ready for some kind of release.

I love my pyrograph. I love the fact that it started here, that it came back here, that it has cats and axes and a ring-stained frame. But I especially love the fact that it came when it did, that it reminded me why I’m here, what I’ve achieved so far and that I’m only halfway through. At least.

Thanks, Graham.

Happy Christmas everybody! May you all have some moments of delicious sweetness and calm, as well as at least one surprise erotic episode that leaves you feeling weak at the knees and a little soiled.

See you in 2012, if not before.

x

Tuesday 20th December, 16:26
I didn’t sleep much on Saturday night – maybe an hour and a half. Saturday night was split-up night, you see, and split-up nights, predominantly and quite rightfully, are sleepless nights. Split-up nights are dreadful.

When the split-up came – creeping up on me like the shadow of a knife that disappeared when confronted, making me think that maybe, just maybe I was imagining things – I was chagrined that I happened to have a friend over for five days. It didn’t seem fair on my friend that he had to have his valuable vacation time eaten up by the clichéd clusterfuck of wretchedness and wrath that follows on from any unforeseen break-up. But then I realised that if it hadn’t been for my friend being here, it would have been so, so, so, so, so much worse.

In the end I was able, with my friend’s help, to become quite epically intoxicated, and then, in that state, to spend a couple of days singing sometimes quite fierce songs about The Death of Love. Although aesthetically it may not have been my best work, it was tremendously cathartic. My throat still hurts.

Graham, who had previously visited just after I first moved out here in June, came back out for five days. We hired a car for a few days so I could get some insulation and steal some abandoned sleepers from an unmanned train station. Unfortunately we didn’t get the insulation because the place we went to had sold out, and then, my heart was all cracked and weeping so I decided I really didn’t give a fuck if I froze to death this winter and would rather just ditch the car and get wasted. We didn’t get any sleepers either, because they were too big for the car and on closer inspection, rather more bitumen-grody than I had hitherto imagined. I wanted to make steps and path borders out of them, you see, before they’re carted off to Italy to be burned. This, apparently, is their fate. Quite possibly mine too. We shall see.

So we didn’t really use the car to its full advantage. Plus it rained for three days solid so we were unable to get much work done outside. What we did do, however, apart from play and sing and draw and laugh and drink and smoke and chop and burn, was rescue something I found in the forest a couple of months ago. A living thing from long ago.

You might not agree that it’s a living thing when you see it. You might think a thing made or solid iron with blades and wheels and spokes and sprockets could never be a living thing. Not really. Not living living. And yeah, strictly speaking, you’d be right. Strictly speaking. But speaking strictly is overrated.

When I first found it in the woods, the trees were still dressed for the summer and it wasn’t until I was within a couple of metres of it that I actually made eye contact. At first I didn’t know what it was. I just saw skeletal wheels and giant wonky teeth. The wheels still seemed to move, although it was too heavy and too hemmed in by foliage and undergrowth for me to move it by myself. I wanted to move it though. I immediately wanted to bring it up from the bottom of the land, where it had been cruelly abandoned, to the plateau round the back of the house, where it could sit like an exhibit, not in a museum, but in a kind of adventure playground. But I had to wait for help.

Getting the thing from the forest to the lane at the end of the land was the hardest part as we had to cut up and remove some dead trees first. Once on the lane though, which is actually less of a lane and more of a potholed, weather-damaged drive, we took a wheel each and pushed, letting the steel bar of the reins act as a brake for when we needed a rest. We turned right at the shed and kept pushing. After maybe half an hour, maybe a little less, we had it in place on the plateau, like a big toothy diva on a dirty old stage.

Behold – The Hun:

So there it is. All I need to do now is clean it up and paint it and I’ve got an adventure playground for kittens and voles and whatnot. And I haven’t even told you about the retreat idea yet. Aaaah, you see? Who needs love?

This is a little catch-up.

THE RAINY SEASON

It is the rainy season here, if indeed three days can be counted as a season. I know that one swallow does not make a summer, but it makes a pleasant afternoon on a blanket in the sun, with the balmiest of breezes playing in my beard.

George has become practically housebound on account of the rain. Maddie gets bored, however, or dislikes it less perhaps, and ventures out into the downpour. On Saturday night, Maddie came back from one such outing with a wriggling, wet mouse in her maw. The moment she reached the cat-flap she started up the warning growl for George. ‘Stay away,’ it said. ‘This is my fucking mouse!’

George had been sleeping on the uppermost of two pallets – pallets which have since been used to make a rather snazzy mattress. Not snazzy. That’s not the word. Pikey. That’s the word. Awoken by Maddie’s warning noises, she sat up, stretched her body, and trotted across the floor to where Maddie was tossing and trapping the mouse, still growling at George. George – like Derren Brown she was – walked up all calm and fearless, waited for the right moment – when the mouse for a split-second was free from Maddie’s grasp – grabbed it with her gob and trotted out the front door, which I had scrambled out of bed to open – wanting the mouse outside – winding up shit wind-up torch and falling over pallets in the process. Maddie made noises, adding a hiss to her growl repertoire, but did nothing. George took the mouse outside as coolly as if she were in a Tarantino film, much cooler than she would have been if she’d caught the mouse herself I feel. Then she killed it and ate it.

I felt really bad for Maddie, who stayed in the corner, where the mouse-crime and humiliation had taken place, sniffing around where her mouse used to be and looking up mournfully at me. She was like a child who had been bullied. I opened the last tin of Whiskas for her.

 George has exerted her superiority.

 Here is George, Queen of her Castle.

Fetch me another mouse, minion. I am warming my arse.

She wins most of the fights now too. Here is a mouse she killed but could not be bothered to eat…

THE WORDY SEASON

Generally, while it rains, I stay indoors and I write. I have three projects to finish by the end of the year. I am working simultaneously on all three. Hence not making the time for the blog at the moment.

I am also reading like I’d forgotten how. Which is good. I am currently just over halfway through The Count of Monte Cristo. I had no idea Alexandre Dumas was such an outspoken advocate of hashish. I have been reading about the hashish club he formed with Baudelaire and others less name-drop-worthy. To me. An ignoramus. I find this hugely fascinating, and encouraging, and I intend to look into it keenly. For I like hashish too, and I think – on the whole – it gets a terribly bad press.

 I am reading other books too, including some French children’s stories. I’m just about breaking the back of Le Petit Prince but I’m finding him something of a self-righteous little fuck if I’m honest. Sorry. But he’s getting on my wick.

AUTUMN – IN PICTURES

There’s a hole in my gazebo, dear Maddie, dear Maddie. There’s a hole in my gazebo, you wantonly destructive little cow.

Here you see most of four dead trees I cut up with my chainsaw. This wood is covered up now with plastic. I’m hoping I won’t need it this year. It's probably not as dry as it could be, despite being dead for many years. I’m leaving it till last and currently plundering old woodpiles I found in the forest. I could talk about wood all day.

AUTUMN – A POEM

Oh, come now, all autumnal dressed,
This final stretch, this sylvan year.
A year is many days; if blessed,
A life is many years. This year,
Half-guessed; this go, half-gone,
But still, still here, still coming on.
Oh, come now, fetch my slippers.

/ENDS

A Christmas present arrived from my sister and beauf this morning. Or rather two Christmas presents. So the question is, do I open them tonight when I get home, in front of the fire with a glass of red wine? Or do I wait till December 25th, like a good boy?

What would you do?