Tooth talk

"Does the dentist speak English well?" I asked of a man as hairless as Patrick Stewart of Star Wars. Looked like him too.

"Not at all," said Pierre Blanchard, gripping my hand like a lumberjack. Thus I started work as observer/translator to the dental travails of OS, my younger daughter

I decided to get on Blanchard's better side. I complimented his baroque background music even though it might have issued from a tape loop. "It's necessary to calm the teeth," he said and we both laughed at that. OS, a rock/pop fan now prone on the table of pain, wagged a sandal in disagreement.

Blanchard poked around and concluded it was the last tooth on the left-hand end of the maxillar. That I could translate. Then came something more difficult: did it make a noise when OS chewed with it? This was so alarming (What kind of noise? A squeak? A bellow?) I had difficulty conveying it to OS. Who was in any case unhelpful since the pain discouraged her from using it to chew.


The tooth was further interrogated with several power tools, one of which emitted a brilliant white light which would, I felt sure, have illuminated OS's socks - from the inside! During this session Blanchard summarised his discoveries: (a) a problem with the tooth (Bien entendu!), (b) a more general problem. I didn't fully translate the latter since it contained the word purulence - never one of my favourites.

More dentistry would be needed on OS's return to the UK, complicated by the fact that she is due at Glastonbury within forty-eight hours.

I complimented Blanchard on the well-chosen logistics of his one-man cabinet (everything neatly to hand without rising from his stool) and received his hand more cautiously. The fish tank I ignored.

Answer me this

What exactly is a holiday? Sleeping away from home - you can do that in jail, on military service or purely by accident. Talking foreign talk (as in Birmingham?) Drinking to excess and not caring. I could go on.

The old bromide says you relax on holiday. But suppose you relax anyway, off-holiday. How much relaxation can a man stand? VR reads off-holiday and on-holiday and that's OK. I write off-holiday and am inclined to write on-holiday and that's not OK. It looks like work. Holiday as an act of denial, doesn't sound right. If a holiday's Lent whence comes Easter?

We do other things. Occasional Speeder and Darren took us to a lovely restaurant - haute cuisine but with utterly humane service. Witty even. The waiter asked what I disliked and I answered fervently cucumber and courgettes. Later I was presented with The Club Sandwich Revisited decorated with, inter alia, borage flowers, pansies and marigolds. Courgettes had also featured but had been removed - "No loss, they were just there for show."

OS developed tooth ache during the week-end. A visit to the Maison Medicale de Garde in Béziers saw us in and out within twenty minutes, carrying prescriptions for an analgesic, mouth-wash and an antibiotic. Promising to see a dentist on Monday. What the Republicans call socialistic medicine.

Touring the Béziers flower market we found ourselves monitored by police on Segway scooterish things (two wheels side by side) looking essentially foolish.  Adding to their foolishness they labelled themselves Securité en Proximité or some such.

Globe artichokes have an an ornamental as well as a culinary function it seems. Below: there's only one reason you'd find me in Galleries Lafayette - air conditioning!

Cultural stuff

Satnav got five members of our group from Hereford to Autignac and is presently guiding us round  the Languedoc. But the relationship is much more adult these days and it is the front passenger's job to force satnav to do what it doesn't care to do.

Roadworks to the south of the nearest big town, Beziers, had already proved a pain yet they lay en route to the airport where we picked up the remaining duo of our party. Satnav had to be fooled into  creating a non-intuitive detour and I can't pretend this was achieved faultlessly.

One problem with such techno-domination is that we can end up on very small roads - notably those whose only function is to provide access to vineyards. These can be very rough, a penance in our Skoda with its tyres inflated 15% more than normal to compensate for the heavy loads often carried.

One hideously deep pothole jarred the whole car and caused the running light (the lower of the two in the pic) to detach itself partially from the the front-end bodywork. Hence a visit to the Skoda dealer.

Although resident in the Czech Republic Skoda is owned by Volkswagen and has long since lost its unreliable image. For twenty minutes or so I was able to glance around the large showroom and note how German style (especially typography) mated uneasily with the French way of doing things. How French marketing phrases like A saisir! (ie, Grab it!) looked out of place in this cathedral of seriousness. Like wearing flip-flops to a funeral.

Not that I'm complaining. Long before I'd completed my sociological research the job was done and at no charge. And I had a headlock on satnav all the way home.

Step-up or stigma?

A check-out at the Intermarché gives priority for the disabled. At first sight a good idea. Granddaughter Bella saw an elderly woman, wracked with Parkinson's, hand over her purse to the till-girl.

But an old man joined the queue behind us, moving slowly, needing his walking stick. Did he qualify as disabled? How does one verify?

The situation solved itself. A younger, more vociferous chap tagged on and with him I established the French for disabled. Handicappé, of course. Then the younger man opened his wallet and pointed to a certificate stamped with the unrelated letter R. Some kind of anti-foreigner scam? What the hell? I waved them both through.

In future I'll avoid the Caisse Prioritaire check-out. Or possibly apply for an R stamp myself.

LOST TIME I used to crawl-swim a mile twice a week, posting about this to excess and boring many commenters. For several complex reasons I had to give up swimming.

It's hot here in Autignac. Yesterday I donned my cozzie and my sun-proof tee-shirt and stood timidly. I used to jump in but I'm older and fear a heart attack. Like a wimp I use the ladder – but without a trace of oooh-ooher-oohoohooh! Not surprising, the pool thermometer registers 28.7 deg C. Did three ten-length swims and will jump in today.

LIVING ON Clive James has leukemia and emphysema and may die any moment. His collected TV criticism should be ephemeral but isn't. "Joan Lestor was a splendid chairperson (at the Labour Party Conference): When a speaker's time was up, she slung him off the platform. 'Thanks comrade.Lovely speech. Don't spoil it.' And back the poor sod went to another year of anonymous toil."

Verlaine never had these problems

Not all verse gets written

The images were there. On the two-day stretch from Hereford almost to the Mediterranean I had time to reflect since Occasional Speeder now does most of the driving. Prefers it that way.

Time and the necessary state of mind. OS had linked her smart phone to the car radio and we listened to a collection demonstrating how the Beatles' music-making evolved from artlessness to something more adult. Then how Paul Simon became better than adult.

So we weren't just grinding out the kilometres and I was able to to take in the speeding views. One image recurred over the flatlands - a cluster of grain silos. An image that metamorphosed into an idea - of a Praetorian Guard, observing and protecting our progress. A benign presence.

Plus something more inexplicable. During our overnight at Chevilly, near Orléans, a Dutch family, dining at the next table took turns to cosset a slightly fractious baby. As we left for bed they bid us a friendly goodnight and VR, uncharacteristically, said "Lovely baby." That pleased them.

Even more uncharacteristically I added, without thought, "And the way you passed the baby between you - like a gift."

Unforeseen, arriving out of nowhere, but versifiers never look gift-horses in the mouth. Especially after a virgin birth like this. There had to be something that would succumb to meter and rhyme.

But if there is it's proving hellishly hard to dislodge. Too early, perhaps? Or perhaps there isn't anything and I'm deluded.

In the meantime this post acts as an aide memoire. Plus more experimentation with rosé – especially the syrah-based sort, a new discovery.

To the land of make-belive

What will Father Christmas bring? A drive in the car, only to Dad's office but hey, it's a drive in the car. Oooh! - a bag of sherbet lemons. Yikes - a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Aunty's coming; she should be good for a florin.

Slowly the world of childish anticipation contracts behind us, giving way to more lasting pleasures:

They say that Ingmar Bergman's one of his best.

I say, darling, how about...? No? I quite understand.

Jack's brother's an accountant; he's agreed to do the tax return.

Enthusiasm disappears. Recently VR lifted the cushion of the easy chair and found something brown underneath. A grape that had tumbled there weeks ago and had turned into a sultana. That's enthusiasm.

But this year is different. We booked this year's French villa within a month of returning home from last year's. The anticipative madness has described an eleven-month-long crescendo initiated as usual by Occasional Speeder. Through dark winter afternoons we were bombarded by emails describing restaurants on an increasing radius from the nearby village. We have argued about different techniques for getting up early enough to lunch in Carcassonne. Strategies for bypassing Rouen (and its damaged bridge) on the southward journey have been analysed and discarded. OS has produced a schedule covering the whole holiday fortnight: Friday June 13, afternoon: Chill; Thursday June 12, if it's wet: Narbonne cathedral.

VR and I, veterans of a thousand French holidays, have stuffed our Kindles with indulgence. We have bought jars of Hollandaise sauce (for the asparagus) because France doesn't do made-up Hollandaise.

I'm even looking forward to the drive (shared these days with OS). I know it'll quickly become a drag but that doesn't matter. For the moment my enthusiasm is virginal, something to be cossetted.

Time travel by fire engine

The smallest unit in British local government is the parish council (nothing to do with churches). Once VR was the autocratic chairman of Belmont Rural PC, cutting bucolic blether down to ten seconds at most. I edited the PC's quarterly Belmont Voice.

Neither of us wishes to resurrect those bureaucratic futilities but odd memories float back.

At a PC Fun Day we had a bouncy castle, a soccer shoot-out and a local fire engine. That latter item sticks.

Half an hour before the opening, a five-year-old lad asked when the fire engine would arrive. I told him. Thirty minutes later - to the second - he noted the fire engine's continued  absence. Using adultspeak I held him off for ten minutes. Time slipped by, the lad asked again. And again. My excuses got longer ("Perhaps a house is burning down."). Eventually the vehicle arrived and a queue of five-year-olds formed.

Fire engines hypnotise young boys. A lesson too late for me interviewing graduates for journalistic jobs: "Have you got the persistence?" I might have asked, magically pre-imagining the above. The 2:2 sociology applicant would have looked blank - a characteristic of sociological study. OK, send in medieval history.

JOE’S NUDGE
Don’t know for sure but…

Leaves, summer’s coinage spent, golden are all together whirled,
sent spinning, dipping, skipping, shuffled by heavy-handed wind,
shifted sideways, sifted, lifted, and in swarms made to fly
spent sun-flies, gorgeous tatters, airdrift, pinions of trees.

Reasons why. Words carry meanings (ie, codes). But words are also sounds, independent of meaning; bring several word-sounds together (“spinning, dipping, slipping”) to create a new sound and – if you’re lucky – a new meaning. This poet understands: “spent sun-flies, gorgeous tatters”.

Possibly Manley Hopkins, but too modern. Actually R. E. Warner, b. 1905