Hot Flushes

Amongst the various trades who have done their best and worst in the new house is the plumbing firm who were contracted to remove the old gas boiler and central heating radiators and put in an immersion heater.

The young guy who put the immersion heater seemed less than capable of controlling his equipment, particularly his oxy-propane blowtorch, so heavy it was mounted on wheels. It kept going out, and each time he relit it (on the gas hob of our newly decorated and sparkling kitchen) there was an impressive fireball two metres across, and an orgiastic spew of greasy soot which settled on everything, smearing at the slightest attempt to wipe it clean.

He left the immersion heater with a temporary electrical connection. Luckily, the BH rang me to say that it would be worth checking. Just as well I did, as the capacity of the wire and plug he had put was quite insufficient, and after only a quarter of an hour the plug was just about to melt and catch fire. I burnt my hand removing it. It could have burnt the house down.

We then had to wait for our electrician to put in a proper electrical feed: a difficult job, now that the crap plumber had placed the immersion heater right in front of the electrical connexion, rendering it inaccessible.

Finally, just before going to Normandy, we had hot water. Again, the sharp eye of the BH came into play. What were those strange orange streaks dripping from the cistern of the lavatory? I undid the lid to the cistern, whose valve mechanism I had already marked down for replacement. There was a billow of steam coming out of the cistern, whose waters were a good 70 degrees centigrade. We all know about the menopause, but the lavatorial hot flush is a novelty.

So it was back to the firm of plumbers. They could hardly contain their mirth - one of the secretaries, with a note of envy reserved for those who enjoy the luxuries of the truly rich, and do not share them, remarked wistfully that it must be quite comfortable to be warmed like that. Still, after some grudging discussion, they sent a proper plumber.

He really needed his wits about him, because the previous plumber, after getting his pipes mixed up, had sawn away all the supposedly redundant piping, removing at one fell swoop of the carborundum disk all the incriminating evidence. He had also semi-carbonised the wall where he had done the soldering. God knows how much gas he had used making the wrong set of sweated joints.

Finally the 'good' plumber cracked it, and we now have hot water from the hot taps, and cold water where it is supposed to be. A lot of bother, and really infuriating, but the incident now brings a wry grin to the memory.

Service Announcement

Back online after a lot of very pleasant family interruptions: firstly the visit to Antibes of Arthur, who brought his parents in tow, and secondly our trip to Normandy, to take Papy to Lily and Alain's exhibition at the Salle André Malraux in Yerres, in the Paris suburbs.

Arthur's French is now as good as his English, in the same way that Edward 1st's son, the first English prince of Wales, was promised to be as good in Welsh as in English. That said, he has captured the Parisian 'r' perfectly. He just needs the words to go round it. His prowess at ice cream and other delights was equally impressive. Let's hope that next time he comes he can spend more time at the beach, in his sexy swimming costume and cool shades, catching the eye of the young Italian lovelies who were already loitering near him with intent.

Normandy was our first long trip in the car - fourteen hours of driving to get there, and the next day, after the usual supersize but quite excellent lunch at the local café, we headed for Yerres. The trouble was it was the wrong day to set out. Paris on a late Friday afternoon is one colossal traffic jam, over a hundred kilometers wide. It took five hours to get to the exhibition, instead of the usual two. Bladder discipline had to be military, and clutch replacement is recommended even for new cars.

The exhibition was in an interesting building with a wonderful hammerbeam roof. The paintings, and Alain's sculptures (the first time we had seen any) were displayed to real advantage, with excellent lighting and plenty of space around them. The problem was that there wasn't much sign of visitors. Not surprising, really, as the gallery was quite hard to find.

Afterwards we all went for dinner at an Italian restaurant nearby. It was an occasion to see Pierre and his girlfriend Aurore. How they put up with the old farts nattering on about things which didn't interest them is a mystery, but they managed it.

After a night at the local Etap hotel, which had, shall we say, a somewhat aromatic drainage problem, we took Papy back to Normandy, where another supersize lunch was consumed.

The return trip was undertaken in submarine fashion. we could have done with a taller periscope, as the rain was bucketing down and visibility was minimal. We drove till we dropped, reaching Valence at 11.15pm, staying yet again in an Etap hotel. Today, we motored through the rain once more and got home shortly after one o'clock.

A long, not very ecological trip, but humanly worth it.

Home ports

Amongst the various floating status symbols and boys' toys, one name and home port stood out from yesterday's quayside walk: the Phantom, home port Stockton on Tees. Doesn't quite have the resonance as Panama.

Poutine et nouna

The Antibes equivalent of whitebait has just hit the streets. Long queues of excited natives crowd round the fishermen's stalls and grab plastic bags full of "poutine" or "nouna", immature sardines and anchovies. The difference in nomenclature, I gather, is to do with the size of fish. The ones where the innards are well defined are called "habillés".

Curious to see what the excitement was all about, we queued as well, and asked the fishermen what to do with it. The answer was direct and simple: "Just eat it!"

How? Apparently it can be made into omlette, or just eaten raw, with lemon juice. They preferred it raw. We opted for the latter, and brought some home for lunch, the myriads of tiny eyes staring accusingly out at us from inside the plastic bag. Lemon juice was added.

We each put a dollop on our plates, with the amount pre-determined (the elvers are glued together by their own slime, so you get what you get), looked at each other to see who dared to start first, and then I took the plunge. It tasted really good, but the texture was like finely shredded, semi-decomposed jellyfish, not that I have ever eaten it.

The BH took one small spoonful and nearly gagged. Rare: she normally eats anything.

Prenez votre ticket et attendez votre tour

Spent some considerable time this morning waiting my turn at the Post Office, in order to pay in a cheque. Nearly all public service departments here run on a ticket system, and you have to get a little coupon with your number on it from a machine. Then a luminous notice board indicates when it is your turn, and which counter to go to. All fair, one might think, but not everybody, and particularly not North African immigrants of a certain age, can read. These unfortunate people were really stressed out, staring despairingly and uncomprehendingly at the notice board and their ticket. Sure that their turn had been taken by somebody literate, which it probably had.

It reminds me of our trip to the Sous Préfecture at Grasse, last week, where I started the process of becoming a legal driver again, after Swansea's cock up. The same ticket system, but this time supplied in the kind of giant bog rolls you now get in motorway toilets. In the motorway bogs, the rolls are frequently missing, just when you need them. Ditto at the Sous Préfecture. However, help was on hand, and a strong lady came laden with new supplies. The wait was in proportion to the length of the roll: who says size doesn't matter? I couldn't help noticing another of those artfully stuck yellow stripes on the same dreary tiling I'd seen in the CPAM. This time it was furnished with a different legend - ligne de discretion. What it really meant, I think, was that people filling in forms or cheques at the counter had a right not to have the next customer after them staring over their shoulder. Needless to say, the yellow line had little dissuasive effect.

These places are timeless, in the original meaning of the term. Somehow once inside time has no dominion, even though there are occasional whiffs of air and echoes of sound from outside in the real world. I could imagine writing a short story, apparently hyper-realist, about people waiting in one of these stale, uniformly grey outposts of the state, each anxious for their turn and worried both about queue jumping and the adequacy of their documentation once they reach the counter. Only at the end of the story would a few well placed mythological hints demonstrate that this was the antechamber to the underworld, where the dead dawdle, waiting for Charon's announcement of their turn to cross the Styx.

Costa del crime

Just heard that bailiffs have immobilised Bernard Madoff's tub, moored at La Gallice, the next port round the Cap d'Antibes. The boat's propellers were chained up, which means that anybody trying to sail it away would make a considerable noise whilst ruining the hull, drive shaft etc. One small detail: had the bailiffs looked closely, they would have seen that there was little risk that the owners were likely to up anchors - the bow rails were equipped with those lethal looking spikes that are meant to deter birds from roosting on window ledges, a sure sign that the boat is essentially mothballed. The Bull (for that is the name, in big letters, over its arse - stern is too elegant a term) is quite a minnow, but cost a cool seven million. So what do the really big ones cost?

Chants

The Better Half's predecessor was somebody with considerable musical interests, particularly choral music. Before I came, Marie-Paule had invited the BH to a soirée at her house just outside Montauroux, where her choir colleagues had picked up their scores and sung divinely. I was a bit 'cold turkey' for music, and felt that here was an experience which I could do with too.

The occasion arrived. Marie-Paule had organised a private concert in the gated community where she lives, not far from the Lac de Saint Cassien. Coming from afar, we arrived too early, and ended up chatting with what turned out to be the musicians. The public, who arrived in dribs and drabs, were another matter. We were young, indecently young... We really felt that without Zimmer frames we were nobody.

The gated community, by the happenstance of economic rent, had excluded anybody productive below the age of about eighty. Mind you, the gerontocracy must have been paying through the nose for all the things which were once cheap (hedge trimming etc), but which are now really expensive. That said, they were super-sympa, sprightly, and an advert for how to grow old productively and gracefully. Hope we end up at least as positive as them.

Before the concert, the Better Half had had a vague premonition that the texts were going to be a bit too religious for her liking. But things looked theatening when we saw that the musicians had glued an icon of Mary Magdalen next to their sound system. The Blessed MM occupies a special place in the Catholic weirdo pantheon, in very knowing counterpoint to the Immaculate BMV.

The concert was presented by the singer, who introduced the proceedings with a well delivered, but totally cringeworthy message of peace and love. The doves, or mangy pigeons if we are frank, should have been crapping themselves with joy and light. Certainly, celestial violins and angelic choirs should have been echoing around the well-guarded and gated community, protecting it from the jeunes beurs in nearby Montauroux.

Despite the cynicism, and despite the welling nausea provoked by the 'bons sentiments', sung in French, Aramaic, Tibetan, etc (but all sounding extremely franco-français), we had to admit that the female singer had an exceptional, one could almost say absolutely angelic voice, which gave an undeserved cachet to the archicrap, Joseph-Dreamcoat, Hair, mid-sixties/seventies, Scouts d'Europe psycho-peace drivel which was offered. Some of the hymns were offered to the Dalai Lama. It sounded just like the smart and slick stuff for the right wing, pro-Israeli, American Christian right, etc., which was also intoned, mercifully with reasonable musicality, in great quantities. No criticism, mind, just a vague feeling that we were submitting to paid-for, calculatingly feel-good stuff, rather than something totally involuntary (because really true) and from the heart.

After the concert, which, despite the melic charms, seemed to last far longer than necessary, there was a supply of cakes and quiches. I wasn't hungry, so I talked with the so-called composer, who compared himself unselfconsciously with Mozart and Berlioz, and, bizarrely , Paul McCartney. Despite the megalomania, he offered to show me how to play his 'udu', a kind of tuned percussion made of terracotta, shaped like an amphora, but with a fist sized hole on the side. A couple of minutes playing this really neat instrument really made me forget the longueurs of Mary Magdalen and stirring plastic Olive Branches. So, though not converted to a message of peace and love, I was totally smitten with a strange thumped ocarina.

Red Carpet Treatment

The rain and wind let up at last, and I headed as usual for the port: a decision shared by many, as this is the season of the Salon Nautique, a very swish boatshow for the super rich. The chromed boats themselves didn't really interest me that much, and anyway I am not mindful to buy a supertub at this particular juncture in the world economy.

What did interest me was that behind the gaudy banners, behind the sinister security fences, behind the ridiculously action-man dressed municipal police, the organisers had rolled out hundreds of metres of red carpet, all along the quaysides.

Coming from North Wales, I had never seen one of these carpets in the flesh. A great desire to walk on one overcame me. I saw that the organisers had included about fifty metres of the stuff before the ticket barriers, so, despite my somewhat casual attire, I put on a confident, potentially yacht-buying expression and sauntered past the fuzz. Plenty of rich people going in the direction of the ticket barrier, but why were they mincing their steps and looking pained?

I soon found out. The torrential rains of last night and this morning had seeped under the plush red carpet, forming concealed puddles, veritable artesian wells of none-too-clean water. As the pampered rich marched forwards towards their outward rewards for the triumph of capitalism, the hydraulic and very material dialectic occasioned by the burden of capital squirted a cold and scummy reminder into their trouser-bottoms and up their shins, a discreet but unmistakable message from below.