The good part was some nifty on-line detective work that tracked down a hotel Chris and I stayed in at Douarnenez, four years ago, and then booking Teddy and me in for one night next Monday. It has a private jacuzzi that Chris and I enjoyed during our visit. I’m pretty sure everyone makes love in it but you try not to think about the previous couple as you lock the door and climb into the bubbling hot tub.
The bad part was the pissing rain and being trapped inside a small camper van with a wet, frustrated dog. I did a bit of client work and translated a short Breton mermaid story (which wasn’t so bad, I guess) but I still felt stir crazy by about 4.00pm. I hung on until nearly 6.00pm before cracking open the whisky and managed not to get legless. That word looks odd, should it be Legolas? Nope, he was an elf. Legless it is then. Maybe I didn’t quite manage to stay sober.
The ugly part was the rage I felt at Chris for inflicting this bloody empty existence on me. They say that anger is a stage of grief but I’d not experienced it before. Take my word for it, it’s not pretty. You try to think respectfully of your beloved but you hate them for leaving you. In my semi-drunken state I turned to poetry. I won’t (dis)grace this page with what I wrote, suffice to say it’s called Fuck You.
This magnificent erection is Rosie’s drive-away awning (on a lovely campsite in the grounds of Chateau Lanniron in Quimper). It’s a fantastically useful bit of kit which allows me and Ted to disgorge the contents of the camper van and leave them, all zipped-up and safe and sound, while we drive off on adventures during the day.
However, it’s a bit crap technically because it needs over 30 tent pegs to stop it blowing away. This contrasts dramatically with the old Terra Nova Quasar two-person tent that Chris and I used for our many camping trips. That was a classic, designed to support life in a blizzard on Everest and requiring a mere 12 tent pegs to do so.
I suspect Chris would think the awning was a bit de trop but I make no apologies: it does the job. Putting it up takes a while and those 30+ tent pegs require liberal use of a good mallet. Chris and I always took a 2lb club hammer with us, which could drive a nail into concrete. For reasons that escaped me then and still elude me now, she called said instrument a collybonker.
It was undoubtedly useful but (as ultra lightweight campers limited by the infinitesimal carrying capacity of the Morgan) we were concerned about both its bulk and its weight. Our great – sadly unfulfilled dream – was to make our fortune by the invention of an inflatable collybonker.
Now I’ve given the idea away. I suppose someone else will cash in.
The week before she died, Chris and I had planned to share our Desert Island Discs with each other. We never got around to it so now I’ll never know which tracks she’d have taken with her as a castaway. Anyway, I decided to choose mine this week and make a playlist.
How does one choose the soundtrack to a life?
Well, after a few false starts, I discovered that it’s obviously not just about selecting your favourite eight “discs.” They would change, probably quite quickly as musical tastes develop and new music appears on the scene. These discs have to be more than that, I decided: they must represent significant phases or experiences in one’s life; important relationships and memories.
So, after much enjoyable deliberation, here, in chronological order, is the list I would present to Kirsty Young and the BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Discs researchers if they ever came knocking on my door.
Green Onions (Booker T and the MGs) The first record I ever bought. It’s as good now, 50 years later, as it was then and I still absolutely love it.
I Get a Kick Out of You (Gary Shearston) This came out when my first wife Sara was pregnant with our – very much alive and kicking – daughter, Nicky. We were young, naive, and very happy.
Sledgehammer (Peter Gabriel) I remember dancing to this terrific pounding rythym round and round the sitting room with my kids when they were young and bumping bottoms.
Clay Jug (Jackie Leven) I met Jackie Leven a couple of times in the 90s when I got involved in menswork. This track includes Robert Bly’s voice. It’s powerful, deep stuff.
Life, Love and Happiness (Brian Kennedy) This track was my solace and consolation during the agony of separation and divorce. How do your love yourself when you are hurting others?
Baby Come Home (John Martyn) Chris adored John Martyn; we went to see him together once. This wasn’t her favourite track but I would sing it to her anyway: Get your skinny ass home.
Perpetuum Mobile (Penguin Cafe Orchestra) Chris and I played this track as we came out of the registry office when we got married. It’s full of hope and possibilities, and reminds me of herunquenchable energy for life.
Here It Is (Leonard Cohen) We played this at Chris’s funeral service, as we wrote our goodbyes on her coffin. May everyone live, may everyone die. Hello my love; my love goodbye.
And which disc would you pluck from the waves if you could only save one? Kirsty always asks her guests in conclusion. My answer came quickly: I would plunge into the foam to retrieve… Green Onions. I discovered it when I was about 18 years old and the uncoolest kid in town. I had a beige jumbo cord jacket, Farah slacks, white Poplin shirt, brown knitted tie, and a pair of elasticated tan leather shoes that in hindsight had something orthopedic about them. Sex hadn’t yet been invented.
But discovering Green Onions back then and deciding for myself that it was great music made me feel good, and it still does. With a bit of luck, there’ll be someone around to make sure it’s one of the tunes played at my funeral, or maybe at the wake.
I’m back at Le Bateau Livre a hidden gem near Penestin: a bookshop that is also a restaurant. Pascal Mucet and Marie-Paule Gaudin came up with this brilliant combination in 2005. I was last here four years ago, on holiday with Chris in the Morgan. We discovered it by chance as we drove along the coast road and loved it so much that we came back a couple of days later for a second bite.
Much has changed since then but Pascal and Marie-Paule are just the same; their stock is still unusual and impossible to leave on the shelves; and L’Assiette Océane is still the best thing on a good menu. Being Sunday, free hors d’oeuvres and aperitifs and were on hand for browsers. There’s a lesson there for failing British independent bookshops, je pense.
It’s great to be back though I notice that my French deserted me entirely the moment I walked through the door so I guess something else was going on under the surface. I drove down from Quimper in the camper van with Ted in the passenger seat, closing his ears as I sang along to Everybody Needs Somebody (To Love) on the Atlantic Soul Greatest Hits CD.
I need you, you, you
Baby, I need you.
Here’s the holiday selfie Chris and I took, just down the road, in 2011 (though I can’t remember calling them selfies then). Inspired by the picture and our literary lunch at Le Bateau Livre, I wrote a wee poem to celebrate. I’ve always enjoyed the Gatsby – hats be rhyme, but I’m easily pleased by my own verse.
We went to France my girl and me,
She wore my flying hat.
I’ve yet to be convinced, said she
That I don’t look a prat.
But you my sweet are on the road,
To wear it is your fate,
Adornment that is à la mode
Perched gaily on your pate.
You resemble Mr Gatsby,
She retaliated.
Henceforth ever let our hats be
Fashionably dated.
On 6 August I dropped my daughter Georgie off at Nantes Railway Station to catch a train to Paris to see her new boyfriend before she goes home to England and then to Dubai to work as a teacher there for the next two years. Ted and I continued north to a campsite at Quiberon, Brittany. I took the picture on the beach here just before sunset as we walked along the seashore.
Georgie came with us to France for the first week to give me a ‘soft landing’ as Ted and I took Rosie the camper van across the channel for the trip that Chris and I intended to make last August. We had to cancel it – with great regret – because Chris was, by then, too unwell to travel. In a sense, this trip is a homage to the dream we had of coming here together.
So, here we are, me and the boy, discovering how to get along when we’re up close and personal 24/7. So far, the nights are fine (we both like to cuddle) and the walks along river bank and seashore (chucking and retrieving tennis balls from the water) are brilliant. He travels well but it was hot in the Loire, so coming further north to find cooler weather was the sensible thing to do.
Ted is brilliant at many things, but he constantly pulls on the lead no matter what I do. This evening after a particularly torrid episode, I decided that something had to change and that since it clearly wasn’t going to be him it had to be me. Henceforth I told him (whilst he looked at me with those big sad eyes) I’m going to enjoy that fact that you are a sentient, semi-autonomous being who thinks he knows where he’s going instead of constantly being irritated that you don’t want to be the perfect show dog trotting adoringly by my side in the direction I want us to go. He ate a treat from my hand to show me he understood, at least I think that’s why he ate it.
Chris had a natural gift for understanding doggydom.
Last night there was a blue moon. That’s to say, it was the second full moon of a month containing two full moons. There’s a slightly more complicated version of a blue moon, which is the third full moon of an astronomical season containing four full moons. Anyway, it wasn’t blue…which is a bit of a swizz.
When Chris was in hospital last year, the sterility of the environment troubled her and she was constantly looking for any connection she could make with the more-than-human world. One day she wrote in her journal:
I can see the moon passing by the window at night.
It was coral and cornflower blue just after dawn
Now that’s what I call a blue moon worth seeing, not that I would have noticed with my poor colour vision. Personally, I love a crescent moon hanging low and fat over the horizon. Then you can clearly see that it’s not just a disc, but a three-dimensional sphere: our companion planet.
This year, Gifford’s Circus called their show Moon Songs. Chris and I adored Gifford’s and we used to go every year. For her 40th birthday, 40 of us had a champagne and strawberry picnic before the show and took over the whole of the Circus Sauce restaurant tent for dinner afterwards. When Tweedy the clown asked if it was anyone’s birthday, a four year old, a six year old, and Chris stuck up their hands. The whole audience sang Happy Birthday.
Kathy Skerritt and I saw Moon Songs 10 days ago. It was the first time I’ve been to see a Gifford’s show without Chris. I wanted to keep up the annual ritual but I couldn’t bear to go on my own, so I was delighted that our good friend Kathy could join me.
The show was not their best but it was still very good.
Coming Home to Story 