Tag: Books

Raising One’s Spirits

The above flyer dropped through our letterbox on Wednesday and is just another illustration of the superiority of the French health system over that of the UK. Professor Bobohera’s services include mending broken relationships, curing impotence, and the lifting of evil spells. He can also ensure success in exams and financial investments. Apparently, he operates on a ‘payments on results’ basis, which should serve as an example to some of the Harley Street scoundrels I’ve had to deal with in the past. Most remarkable of all, perhaps, is that results can be achieved by post, on provision of a photo and a stamped addressed envelope.

Flyers like this show the admirable proactive nature of the French system. When I lived in Paris, one would occasionally come across similar specialists, usually clad in colourful national costume, handing them out, outside Metro stations in the 20th arrondissement. I wish Professor Bobohera every success. If I ever meet him, he will no doubt be amused when I tell him that he bears a very strong resemblance to Monsieur Abubakar who, until recently, sold spare parts for vacuum cleaners in the Saturday Notre-Dame market.

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One positive aspect of the current enforced inactivity is that I am on track with my fifty-books-a-year challenge. In January I’ve read Inside Story by Martin Amis, The Last Word, a collection of short stories by Graham Greene, On Seamus Heaney by Roy Foster, and Equal Danger by Leonardo Sciascia (a story of political corruption in Sicily). I’ve just started re-reading Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd, which I first read when it came out in 1987. It’s a good start, but I’m not deluding myself. The crunch will come if and when the current restrictions ease and we are able to get out and about more. For the time being, though, reading is a welcome escape from day-to-day reality.

One other book I’ve read in January is The Correct Order of Biscuits by Adam Sharp. I feel that this doesn’t really count, because I read it on my Kindle and it only took thirty minutes from beginning to end. It consists of a set of lists compiled by Mr Sharp, which, admittedly, makes it sound pretty dull. In fact it is hilarious. Like Mr Sharp, I am a bit of a list-obsessive (I even make lists of lists of things to do), but he is the James Joyce of list-making and brings it to a completely different level.

Here is one of my favourites:

The best ‘be quiet’ phrases I’ve heard around the world:

5. Shut your pie hole. (English)

4. Save your breath to cool your porridge. (Scots)

3. Shut your fountain. (Russian)

2. Close your beak. (Spanish)

1. If you don’t shut up, I’ll climb into your mouth and shit myself. (Hungarian)

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Alan Clark, the Tory politician and diarist (and, according to his wife, ‘an S, H, one, T’), was also a historian. His first book was The Donkeys, a history of the British Expeditionary Force’s campaigns at the beginning of the First World War. Clark was strongly critical of several of the generals involved in the heavy loss of life that occurred. He took his title from the phrase ‘lions led by donkeys’, which has been widely used to compare British soldiers with their commanders. The book was well received at the time, but its accuracy has since been questioned, and it has come in for considerable criticism for its one-sidedness.

I mention this because, while casting around on the internet, I came across the following. It is a page from a 1956 edition of Owl Pie, the British Army Staff College Magazine, and outlines the fate of thirty-two members of the 1896 college intake – most of whom would have taken part in the First World War. It’s not for me to decide whether they were donkeys or not, but I imagine a conversation over a drink with the last man on the list might have been interesting.

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After weeks of rumours that a new, more severe lockdown was in the offing, with every option, including the removal of our belts and shoelaces, being considered, Friday night’s announcement was something of a soggy soufflé.

In a televised broadcast, Prime Minister Castex said that, from Sunday (today), all non-food shopping centres larger than 20,000 square metres will close. There will also be a ban on all travel in and out of France from outside the EU, and all arrivals into France from within the EU must present a negative Covid test (previously this rule had only applied to arrivals by air and sea). The protocol on home-working will be reinforced so that everyone who can work from home does so, and the police will be stepping up checks on curfew compliance and cracking down on illegal parties and restaurant-opening. Monsieur Castex added, ‘The question of another lockdown is legitimately raised in view of the latest data. We want to do everything we can to avoid another lockdown. The coming days will be decisive. Let’s be very vigilant.’

For most of us, this means very little change for now, apart from making travel to and from the UK even less feasible. The threat of a complete lockdown is clearly still there, and there are many who think it would have been more sensible to go with that option right now, on the basis that the sooner it starts, the sooner it will be over. It’s difficult to avoid the sense that there is an element of fudging in the current government tactics. Coupled with the recent row over the supply of vaccines, this has not been the best of weeks, politically, for either France or the EU in general.

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Things I’ve learnt this week:

The French for window-shopping is faire du lèche-vitrine, or ‘window-licking’.

After the battle of Waterloo, the Marquess of Anglesey had his leg amputated. It was buried with full military honours in a nearby garden.

Areodjarekput is an Inuit word meaning ‘to exchange wives for a few days only’.

Better read than dead

On Thursday, Prime Minister Jean Castex announced an extension to the couvre-feu (curfew) here in France. For the next 15 days at least, we all have to stay indoors from 18.00 to 06.00. One consequence of this, which I suspect Monsieur Castex hasn’t taken into account, is that it makes these weekly postcards increasingly difficult to write.

More and more, there is less and less to say. I go out in the morning to buy croissants and the newspaper. In the afternoon I go out for a stroll down by the river or around town. I take my camera and click away happily enough for an hour or so (the two pictures here are from the beautiful church of Notre-Dame-la-Grande in the market square). And that’s about it. The rest of the time, I am confined to barracks. A little treat used to be a trip out in the early evening for a hastily quaffed vin chaud at one of the stands that the more enterprising bar owners had set up. Now this too has gone. Nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing to report. I will soon have to start producing recipes, horoscopes, or ‘useful household hints’.

To alleviate the boredom, I’ve taken up a challenge/invitation offered on Twitter by Ian Leslie of the New Statesman. The aim is to read 50 books in a year. I’ve been slightly handicapped at the outset because, just before setting out on this project, I’d started reading Martin Amis’s Inside Story, which comes in at a hefty 522 pages. Once I’ve finished this, I aim to quickly read a couple of short books to get back on track – I can get through a Maigret or a Morse in a day or so.

For the last few years I’ve made a similar resolution – to try and read at least one book a week. Normally I do quite well till around the middle of March and then, with the arrival of warmer days and lighter evenings, things start to slide. In the summer, a month can go by without a book being finished. By the end of most years, I will have done well to get through half the target amount. The Twitter challenge is an attempt to formalise things a little and keep me at it.

While thinking about this, I’ve done a very quick, very rough stocktake of the books in the house that are waiting to be read. I’ve excluded ‘dipping-into’ books: reference works, anthologies, and books bought for study that were never going to be read all the way through. I stopped counting when I got to 250. There are lots more. Many of these came with us when we moved from the UK. Some have been accumulated over the years, to be read ‘when I’m old or retired’. Well, I suppose, to paraphrase the Walrus, the time has come to read of many things. If I stick to my new regime, I have the next five years’ reading lined up and ready to go. Plough through them steadily, one a week, and the backlog would be cleared. But of course it doesn’t work like that.

I now keep a record of books bought, and there have already been three this year. Ian Dunt’s How to Be a Liberal, PD James’s The Mistletoe Murder (a 99p Kindle special offer), and The Last Word (a collection of Graham Greene short stories, bought because it contains ‘The Lieutenant Died Last’, on which the film Went the Day Well? is based). Last year I bought 38 books, 15 hardback and 23 paperback (I don’t count the Kindle 99p ones – these are often books I’ve already got and the Kindle versions are handy for reference-searching). Most of the books bought were second-hand, and quite often the postage cost exceeded that of the book itself. As addictions go, it’s not an expensive habit.

Of the books bought last year, I have read 19. Thus the ‘waiting to be read’ pile gets ever larger. Does this matter? I don’t think so. The gloomy philosopher Schopenhauer once said, ‘Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them; but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.’ He’s probably right, but a more cheerful view was presented recently in the Guardian by Giles Oakley. He said that Jonathan Miller had once defended the piles of unread books in his home by explaining that he absorbed the contents ‘by osmosis’. For Mr Oakley, this was ‘the perfect excuse for me to buy more books’, and I’m happy to agree. Many people I know buy more books than they are ever going to read. Book-browsing and book-hunting may be secondary pleasures when compared to reading, but, for many of us, pleasures they undoubtedly are.

Moving to France has changed my perspective slightly. I accept that part of the price one pays for living here is that the prospects for pleasant book-browsing are significantly reduced, but that never quite removes the pang of staring blankly at shelves of interesting-looking covers in a second-hand shop and not recognising the name of a single author. This will, I hope, gradually diminish with time as my knowledge of French literature slowly improves, but the likelihood of discovering a hidden gem is small. Trips to Paris offer some solace. There are a couple of very good English-language second-hand bookshops, quite close to each other on the south bank: the Abbey Bookshop on rue de la Parcheminerie in the 5th and San Francisco Books on rue Monsieur-le-Prince in the 6th. I avoid the more famous Shakespeare and Co. nearby, because it is full of tourists taking photos of each other. For the rest of the time, there is always Abe Books, the online second-hand store, though this has lost some of its appeal since it was taken over by Amazon.

When I told Madame of my new challenge, she thought it an excellent idea and said immediately that she would take it up herself. ‘The more the merrier,’ I declared, with a sinking heart. The little swot will no doubt reach the target sometime in mid-June … unless of course some deeply unfortunate accident were to befall her reading glasses.

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Things I’ve learnt this week:

In boxing, the original Queensberry Rules forbade the use of boots fitted with springs.

The Sami people of northern Finland use a measure called poronkusema: the distance a reindeer can walk before needing to urinate (around 7.5 kilometres).

In the novel that the film Pinocchio was based on, Jiminy Cricket was brutally murdered, and Pinocchio had his feet burned off and was hanged by villagers.

A week in Poitiers

The World at War

We are now near the end of our third week of home confinement and an improvement in the weather adds a subtle refinement to the irritation this causes. It’s far less of a hardship to be stuck indoors on a rainy day; once the sun starts shining you instinctively feel that outside a bar somewhere there is a seat with your name on it. Still, ‘mustn’t grumble’, as they say – a ridiculous piece of advice in my view, grumbling being one of the few real pleasures left in life.

As we can only leave the house for shopping trips and exercise each day, I’ve increasingly been resorting to various forms of virtual travel, one advantage of which is that you can move through both time and space. Quite by chance, just before we were told to stay at home, I’d ordered a box set of Granada’s The World at War series. It has been digitally remastered, with each frame restored and the sound upgraded and enhanced. The results are extremely impressive. There are over twenty-two hours to watch – some of which is background material – and at present we are watching one forty-five-minute programme an evening. In the six we’ve seen so far, the action footage is clear and sharp and the interviews, with everyone from Sir Anthony Eden to a group of East Enders reminiscing about the Blitz, look as if they might have been made last year instead of nearly half a century ago. It is compelling viewing and has stood the test of time remarkably, a painless way to absorb history. The series cost £900,000 to make, the equivalent of £11 million today. By comparison, according to Peter Morgan, its producer, the combined cost of series one and two of Netflix’s The Crown was £97 million.

Another form of time travel is provided by www.pepysdiary.com/, a fascinating website that is updated each day with an annotated extract from Pepys’ Diary for that day. If you register with them (it’s free) they send you an email with the day’s entry. Along with the extracts themselves, the site provides an encyclopaedia of information about people and places in Pepys’ time, with maps and a host of articles on broader aspects of seventeenth-century history. At the moment we are in April 1667, Pepys’ mother has just died, and everyone at court is getting twitchy about the prospect of war with the Dutch. The sudden appearance of a phrase in Latin or French usually means that Samuel has been trying to take his mind off things by indulging in some form of naughtiness or other.

My last virtual journey is more local and will, I hope, eventually be replaced by the real thing. I have discovered a book called Les rues de Poitiers by the magnificently named Raoul Brothier de Rollière. It was written in 1905 and is a biographical dictionary of all the streets in Poitiers. Obviously it is out of date: streets have disappeared, new ones have sprung up, and some have changed names. Nevertheless the potted descriptions are a fascinating insight into the history of Poitiers. Take for example, our own Rue des Carmes, a fairly quiet backstreet. It merits a whole page in the book and, amongst other things, one learns that it was an interior pathway between two of the main gates in the original Roman settlement. It got its current name from the ancient Convent des Carmes built here in 1367, and in the religious wars of the sixteenth century, cannons were placed on a platform a few doors away from our house to fire on the Protestant forces laying siege to the city from the hill on the other side of Pont Joubert.

The convent is long gone, replaced by a small block of flats, and this has given me an idea. Once the current crisis over, if I am spared, I intend to slowly start translating and updating M. Brothier de Rollière’s book, or at least the entries for the main streets. It will be a fine way to get to know the city better, and I will repay the debt by making amendments where necessary. I don’t think there are any new convents, but I will dutifully add details of all the vape shops, tattoo parlours and fast food establishments I come across.

***

You cannot buy bacon in France. Well, that’s not strictly true; there are online suppliers from the UK, and in Paris you can buy bacon at Le Bon Marché (the French equivalent of the Harrods Food Hall) or the very handy M&S food stores that are dotted around the city. We usually pick some up from one of the latter whenever we visit. What I mean is you can’t pop into your local supermarket and buy half a pound of back or streaky. It’s odd. One or two of them sell something they call bacon, but the slices are perfectly circular, leathery and taste like salty beermats.

What they do sell here is lardons, and one day last week I bought some of these for cooking our evening meal. When opening the packet, it occurred to me that the various small bits inside might once actually have been slices of bacon which were then chopped up. Out of curiosity, I sprinkled the contents onto a chopping board and started absent-mindedly moving them around with my finger trying to get some sense of how they had arrived in their current state. While doing this, I looked up and saw Madame S standing in the doorway. She stared at me thoughtfully for a few seconds and then left the room. I thought no more of it until later, when I passed the living room where she was on the phone to her mother in Perth. I’m increasingly deaf, but I am almost certain I heard ‘… and now it’s bacon jigsaw puzzles …’.