donkey – Page 3 – derrickjknight

‘We’re On Holiday’

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Jackie has planted one or two roses on the back drive. Given that they cost £1.49 each at Poundstretcher this one is inappropriately named ‘Dearest’ yet it has surprised us with its powerful, yet delicate, scent.

After a sniff round the garden, my Lady drove me on a circuitous route to Hatchet Pond and back.

Glimpsing a large reflective pool through trees at the bottom of Pilley Hill, I asked to be disembarked in order to investigate.

This was the larger building turned upside down;

and this another.

Cattle obligingly clambered down to the pool to drink.

They, too, were reflected.

Around the next bend ponies and their foals were keeping residents’ grass in order.

At Hatchet Pond we found that the cygnets are growing up,

but remain uncertain what to do with their legs.

There were many visitors to the water on this, the hottest day of the year so far.

Swans, gulls, and ducks, of course, live there.

Cattle drank and bathed.

I was not the only photographer.

Two brothers and their elegant little sister were also enjoying a paddle.

The father and boys played ducks and drakes, and were joined by mother and daughter with whom I had been chatting.

The delightful little girl announced that they were on holiday.

On the far side of the pond a donkey and her foal were snuggling among the shrubs,

and grazing ponies flanked an appropriate warning sign.

Incidentally I have often been asked about ownership of the forest’s free-roaming animals. Although they are free to roam they are owned by commoners with grazing rights. This explains the collars and tags usually seen around necks, or, in the case of cattle, pinned on their ears.

Much watering of plants was required this afternoon.

This evening we dined on Jackie’s delicious sausage casserole, creamy mashed potato and swede, and perfect runner beans. This was followed by Tesco’s sublime strawberry trifle which we would have eaten with Jessie and Guru on Saturday had I not somewhat redistributed its constituents by dropping it (with its lid on) on the floor. Jackie drank her Hoegaarden and Bavaria mix, while I drank Gilbert & Gaillard Les 3 Couronnes Côtes du Rhône 2014

She Mistook My Brogues For Acorns

Barrie and Vicki dropped in this morning to present me with Barrie’s new book, ‘Walking in the Sea’. I look forward to reading it.

Ever since my lingering cold in August, I have been feeling decidedly under par, so Jackie persuaded me to visit the GP, made the appointment, and drove me there. After a thorough examination, Dr. Moody-Jones formed the opinion that I have a specific infection and prescribed antibiotics. I have confidence in the diagnosis. We’ll see how we go.

On a very sunny afternoon Jackie drove us through the forest. We enjoyed wood- and heathlands, and the livestock that, having right of way in the New Forest, roam the terrain and the roads.

Pools, such as this one formed near Bolderwood, are beginning to varnish the forest floor.

We stopped for a while near the Ornamental Arboretum.

Next stop was Nomansland where ponies grazed on the green,

where the lowering sun cast long shadows and glinted in the animals’ eyes.

The matted, crusty, hide of some of these creatures bore evidence of how muddy their environment has become.

As we drove back along Roger Penny Way, a grunting sow followed by squawking offspring, clambering all over each other in their haste, burst through the bracken, dashed along the verge, and came to a halt among a heap of fallen leaves and acorns. They were just like the proverbial pigs in a trough. I was amazed at the amount of noise they made.

At one point the mother left her brood, advanced on me, and, her nose rings grating on my toes, snotted all over my light tan brogues. Eventually she realised they were not acorns, and returned to the trough.

On the approach to Beaulieu, a group of cattle, and one pony, grazed on the heath in the warm glow of the setting sun.

Just before we reached the village, rounding the bend in a narrow road, we came hard up against the reason for a bit of a hold-up. A donkey, its rear hooves planted in the road, calmly chomped in a hedge.

This evening we dined on roast lamb, mint sauce, roast and mashed potatoes, carrots, cabbage and corn on the cob. Jackie drank Hoegaarden, and I abstained.

Portraits From 1982 – 1986

In recent days, I have been nominated for two more awards, the Leibster; and the Real Neat Blog by Alex Raphael. Unfortunately I was very tired when I received the first one, and cannot remember who awarded it. I acknowledged it and said I would follow it up the next day. I didn’t get around to it. This is really bad. Having spent ages scrolling down ‘Blogs I follow’, I haven’t been able to track it, so, kind nominator, if you are reading this please accept my apologies. My difficulty was nominating others for this newcomers’ honour, which would have meant checking how long my favourites had been blogging. The questions are also time consuming.

I have reluctantly decided that I am too involved in composing my daily Ramblings to manage this, and will continue to point up blogs I admire in the way I normally do, above, for Alex, and below, for Rob McShane.

On a wet morning, Jackie drove off to replenish our larder, and I, raincoat clad, ambled round the garden,where

the Lady in Black climbing fuchsia, the prunus pissardi leaves , and the honeysuckle enjoyed a cooling shower. Keen observers will notice that my camera lens did too.

Hardy, bedraggled, workers crept into this rhododendron.

The dragon’s armour plating affords him suitable protection.

This photograph is for The Wayward Warrior, an excellent poet.

In Lidl, Jackie found, a superb new Dosset Box that is unlikely to lose its lettering. On account of a slight tear it its packaging, this was sold for 89p.

Since I can’t read braille I was having to guess the different containers in the old one.

This afternoon I returned to the task of sorting, scanning, and returning to photograph albums the prints Elizabeth had borrowed.

Let’s begin with a laughing Louisa in Gracedale Road sometime in 1982. She has never stopped spreading delight.

The summer of 1985 comes next.

Sam appears to be wondering where the contents of his ice cream cone have gone. Looking at his cheeks and chin we would be able to tell him where some was to be found.

A little further on in the year he rides a donkey down the steep steps of the cobbled street in Mousehole, Cornwall’s famous tourist venue.

In the autumn Jessica and I rented a French gite. Here she is in its garden with our son.

I have featured that year’s Christmas at my parents’ home in Morden before. Here is a shot of my youngest brother, Joseph.

This picture of Louisa was taken in the garden of our Gracedale Road house on her fourth birthday in May 1986. Never content with her thumb, she always added her first finger to her mouth when tired.

London experienced a pleasing amount of snow for children that December. Mind you, judging by the expressions on Sam and Louisa’s faces as Matthew pushed or dragged them over the snow, on Gracedale Road, or Tooting Bec Common, it was pretty cold.

Later this afternoon the rain stopped. Jackie continued pruning and weeding, and I did my best to cart the contents of one of the large bins, into which she chucked the cuttings, to the compost heap before she had filled the next one.

This evening we dined at Lal Quilla.Jackie’s main dish was lamb dopiaza; mine was prawn vindaloo. It is many years since I ate a vindaloo I had not cooked myself. That is because, so often, it lacks complexity and seems mostly to consist of curry powder. I thought I would be safe here. I most certainly was. The meal was perfect. We both drank Kingfisher.

In Search Of The Action

Yesterday Becky gave me another computer lesson, this time in tagging. She showed me how to tag my posts and explained the significance of doing so. That, therefore, is another editing job for me. I made a start on the task this morning.

A violent storm that had raged throughout the night and morning gave way to a calm, springlike afternoon. This was perfect for an art assignment Flo had hoped to complete.

The one problem was that the task was to photograph horses in action. And, as my readers will know, New Forest ponies are not prone to activity. Mostly they are at least upright, but occasionally they are simply prone. We thought an expedition to the north of the forest would perhaps offer possibilities for the occasional evidence of movement.

More trees had been uprooted during the night. Those that had been on the roads had been cleared away. Others lay where they fell. What really gave Jackie a white knuckle drive was the amount of water across the concrete and tarmac. The fords were all awash with fast flowing water, as were the ditches. Sometimes, as on one stretch on the outskirts of Ringwood that I had happily walked through quite recently, the road was flooded. At this particular point our chauffeuse stopped altogether, thinking she would have to turn back. An oncoming car sprayed its way through the water, giving her the confidence to try it, which she did successfully. The brakes had to be tested after each ford encounter.

It was the perhaps unlikely village of Ibsley that provided the photo opportunity that we sought. As we drove slowly through it, having just crossed the ford, three ponies made a dash for a waterlogged spot in front of the cattle grid to a residential garden. Small orange showers flashed in the sunlight, and the animals leapt into action. The woman who lived in the house had just tossed a supply of carrots onto a patch of dry land. These were soon devoured and hopeful nostrils quivered in the donor’s direction.

No more carrots being forthcoming, Flo and my cameras were mistaken for tasty morsels and they and we were silently nuzzled.

It was to be Scooby who really set the cat among the pigeons. Of course he remained in the car with Jackie, but he became a wee bit excited at the sight of such huge potential dinners wandering about. Indeed, his glutinous mucus will probably never come off my passenger seat window. His barking had the effect of a summons on all the ponies in the vicinity. Our car was soon surrounded, causing a log-jam in the traffic.

Our granddaughter and I had as much fun photographing each other photographing our subjects as simply shooting the animals.

When we arrived at Hyde, we were awarded a bonus of a couple of donkeys particularly interested in holly leaves. After a session with them, Flo strode across the large expanse of green, to picture another pony, and in the process missed a horse and rider. But that wasn’t really a subject she needed.

She had already photographed a sublime pony’s head and a delightful set of donkey choppers.

We dined this evening on Jackie’s chicken jalfrezi and savoury rice which was as delicious as ever. Flo’s variant was boiled egg korma. My beverage was Kingfisher and Jackie’s was Peroni.

Hanging By A Thread

The following were the human beings I saw when walking The Splash ampersand this sultry morning: a few isolated car drivers on the road; a postman getting into his van outside the study centre; a woman in a nurse’s uniform leaving a house and walking to her car; one man crossing a road to another house; a psychotherapist walking from her home to post a letter in the box on the green opposite; two woman chatting in a cottage doorway; and a teacher with a group of schoolchildren having a lesson in a shady spot by The Splash. That’s it. Contrast the peace with yesterday’s heaving pavements. By mid-day, even the birds were mostly quiet. The rhythm of my sandals slapping the tarmac was at one point interrupted by the sound of a squealing gate that emanated from a donkey in need of lubrication.

A very small lamb was silhouetted against the sky visible through a hole in the Furzey Gardens road hedge.

A bunch of horses in a Fleetwater field had me wondering whether Kevin Pietersen had branched out into equestrian breeding.

Beside The Splash it was the eager voices of the schoolchildren I heard first. Peering through the foliage I spied the sun-dappled group seated around the stream. For them it was a quite different experience than that of the children I had heard yesterday in Shrewsbury Road.

On my return to the flat, the painters were, in a most relaxed fashion, availing themselves of the facilities offered by Jackie. John Broad expressed the idea that they should cancel next week’s job and come back here instead. Dean was exchanging texts with a friend to whom he had just sent photographs of the setting in which they were working.

I am experiencing a niggling discomfort very similar to one I suffered when I was a child in about 1949. It is strange to feel the same annoyance from a nagging gnasher at seventy as I did at seven. I have a wisdom tooth the root of which was partly exposed many years ago when its next door neighbour was extracted. It is now gradually attempting to prise itself loose from its moorings. If only I could get a good grip on it I feel certain I would be able to help it on its way, just as Mum did with one of my milk teeth. I whinged all day because it was sore, but couldn’t pluck up the courage for the final lift off. Neither would I let my mother near it. I had seen a cartoon in either the Dandy or the Beano where a parent tied a string round a bad tooth and the other end to a door knob, slammed the door shut, and had the tooth literally hanging from a thread. When I eventually allowed my mother to wrap her fingers around my molar it came off in her hand with no tugging at all. It had been metaphorically hanging by a thread. This enables me to imagine what it was like for six year old Jessica just before her front teeth fell out.

This evening, sitting in the garden before dinner, we watched a thrush competing with a blackbird and various tits for theirs. The thrush actually seems to be more alarmed by other birds now than by us.

Dinner was Jackie’s slow roasted pork with superb crackling (tip) and crisp vegetables, followed by sticky toffee pudding. My accompaniement was Berberana rioja 2012; hers was Hoegaarden.

Boxers

As it circles the sky the sun’s rays move around rue St Jacques. The valerian corner focussed on yesterday is the first recipient; by mid-afternoon the back wall benefits; the front of the house is lit in the evening. Although still very cold and subject to ferocious winds, the clouds dissipated somewhat yesterday and I was treated to light shows, first of the shadows of next door’s oriental grasses, bowing, bending, and snapping back on the garden wall; then the fragile flickering of leaves of the trees opposite in the kitchen.

Early this morning I finished reading Susan Hill’s excellent novel ‘The Service of Clouds’. The writing is beautiful, with spare descriptions of nature and the use of various other devices to reflect the theme. She manages to avoid creating an air of melancholy in what is essentially a tale of sad, emotionally unfulfilled lives. It is about disappointment, isolation, and loss. Moments of happiness are brief. This latter is symbolised by children flying kites which soar aloft, only to plummet when the wind drops. She brilliantly evokes the experience of the ending of life in old age, and captures the effects of childhood on later years.

It was a bright morning when I set off towards Monbos. Not far out of Sigoules is a sign pointing to Le Roby. This time I obeyed the stop sign and followed the arrow. The road is very short, leading to a few houses behind which is a grass track bordering fields with a view across the valley.

The juxtaposition of pale irises and red hot pokers at the corner I turned, had me thinking of Fire and Ice. These were the boxing nicknames given to two policemen, partners, friends, and rivals, played by Aaron Ekhart and Josh Hartnett in Brian De Palma’s film ‘The Black Dahlia’. Scarlett Johansson and Hilary Swank also star. As it is worth watching, I will say no more.

A garden in the little hamlet offers a different iris colour scheme.

I wondered whether the door marked W. C. on a rather ramshackle outbuilding was still in use. It seemed a long way to go from the house in the middle of the night.

The grasses on the track were like those that grew on the railway path behind 29a Stanton Road in which I grew up. Today the stems are soft and a fresh lime green. Later in the summer they will be dried out and yellow as corn. Just as they were when we, as children, used to slide our fingers up their stiffness, making their seeds fly off. It was fun to aim them at each other.

Soon the track was taped off and I could go no further. A donkey beneath a lichen-covered pussy willow tree in a field of buttercups, seemed, at first, to be my old friend on the Pomport road. This one, however, was younger and better kempt.

Two intruders out of their normal time were scaling a drainpipe. Perhaps the weather has confused them. I found myself wondering whether they were early or late.

It was just as well I’d gone out earlier because Clement arrived to check the work soon after I had returned. Saufiene having been in Tunisia, as I knew, his partner had been unable to phone me because he didn’t have my number. I gave it him. He had visited on Saturday when I was out. I expressed my disappointment at the lack of completion, and gave him my French snagging list on which he complimented me. He agreed with all my observations and, indeed, found a few more. He said he would give Thierry a slap and bring him here tomorrow to finish off. When I responded that he might ‘get one back’ he said ‘You don’t know me. I’m a great boxer’.

This being a bank holiday, even the bar was closed. Showers had begun at mid-day, so I have dashed up and down to my perch outside Le Code Bar in between precipitations in order to post this, after I had lunched on a Carrefour pizza. That means I ate it, not that I used it as a plate.

Fangs

Saufiene, Clement, and Thierry arrived on time this morning and waited for delivery of the new doors and windows, overseeing their delivery and stacking in the hall and garden. As they were leaving they noticed that the deliverymen had left a huge wooden palette blocking the pavement. Saufiene undertook to have it removed in the afternoon.

Le Code Bar at lunchtime was full to bursting, as must have been most of their customers. A tasty vegetable bean and noodle soup was followed by a beautifully presented ham and egg salad. A succulent steak with a mound of crisp, bronzed, chips was the main course. Dessert was the delicate chocolate mousse on a soft biscuit base served with creme anglaise.

After this I needed a rest before walking the Pomport road and donkey’s field loop. The profusion of cowslips, dandelions, buttercups, daisies, and other wild flowers I cannot name; the may and cherry blossom; and the willow tree by the lake must have been deceived by the reportedly recent warmer spell into thinking it was no longer winter, for it was again very cold. Cattle lying down in the field by Chateau Cluzeau gave a warning of the rain that set in before I returned to rue Saint Jacques.

The donkey was lurking behind a tree at the top of the hill. We were enjoying a friendly chat until he set up a deafening honking and tried to fell the tree. With this on one side and the horrific snarling and barking of the four evil-looking dogs baring their salivating fangs and hurling themselves at their wire fence enclosure on the other side of the narrow stony footpath, the hubbub was quite terrifying. Any fear was no doubt exacerbated by having, last night, watched Liam Neeson’s six companions in ‘The Grey’, translated by the French as ‘Territory of the Wolves’, one by one, being torn to pieces in the frozen Alaskan wilderness. Neeson himself was magnificently capable and brooding as usual. He didn’t survive either, but that was left to our imagination as he prepared himself for a fight to the death with the leader of the pack.

The A31/M27

We found the password for BT Yahoo, so I was able to get direct access to the Internet on my Apple. This didn’t last. I kept being informed that the password was incorrect. It was perfectly adequate the first time.

So I went for a walk. Down to the village hall; right past Furzey Gardens; up to the remnants of Stoney Cross; under the A31; straight across heathland to a road junction; right to Fritham where Jackie met me.

The temperature had plummeted and a bitterly cold East wind was getting up. I really had to keep up a brisk pace and was regretting not having worn a topcoat when I stopped to talk to a sheep farmer. We stood for a while, each trying to rub life into our hands. Interestingly, he, too would warm up after half an hour. Unfortunately neither of us had yet done the required amount of exercise. After passing Furzey Gardens this road becomes very rough, full of holes, and usually muddy. This morning, like the criss-crossing trails of various hoofed animals on the other side of the A31, the mud was frozen and therefore much easier to negotiate. Iced over pools crackled underfoot.

The path across the heath was a wide cycle track broadened by the cropping of ponies whose aforementioned hoof prints made numerous patterns involving overlapping rings. I tried in vain to find a perfect Olympic symbol. There were plenty of droppings interspersed with the prints, but it was not until the track turned right on meeting its junction with the road to Fritham, that I actually met any animals. First I encountered Eyore, Winnie the Pooh’s assinine friend, who tore himself away from his gorse to stare at me gloomily, and was not prepared to budge from his advantageous position. This was quite unlike the pair of magpies that flew from their lofty perch at my approach. The terrain was cropped smooth and other donkeys and ponies were feasting on the prickly yellow-flowering shrubs. The wind up here, with no trees to take the edge off it, was fierce.

Lining either side of the road at Fritham were a number of the smallest ponies I have yet seen. One looked like a cuddly toy having curled itself into a ball, bounced out of its small owner’s bed, and rolled out into the open for a taste of freedom.

‘Where shall I meet you?’, Jackie had asked. ‘It’ll only be a small place’, I’d replied. ‘We’ll find each other. I’ll stand in the middle of the road if I have to.’ As I did, in fact, stand in the middle of the road at a junction into Fritham, bitterly (as in freezingly) regretting this statement, I began to wish I could have been more specific. What I hadn’t realised was that this was a much larger village than the few buildings nestled around me. Jackie had quite sensibly gone to the Royal Oak first. But, being quite accustomed to being a search party of one, she tracked me down, thawed me out, and drove me back to the pub where she enjoyed Peroni and I did Ringwood Best until time for lunch which was ham and barley broth, and mixed gammon and cheese ploughman’s respectively. This hostelry probably well deserved the Good Beer Guide’s award for Hampshire’s country pub of the year. Apart from the excellent ales and food there are some really good local oil paintings on the walls. There is far more seating outside than in, but today all the customers were inside as near as they could get to the log fires.

After lunch we travelled by car to Ringwood for shopping, then on to Helen and Bill’s for a brief celebratory visit on Helen’s birthday. Incredibly, we were unable to find strip lighting in Ringwood and had to go to Hedge End Home Base, in quite the opposite direction, to make our purchase of these.

We are so well sited alongside the A31 just before it joins the M27 going East, that it is easy to forget that it has cut the forest down the middle. This major east/west route enables us to cover distances in short spaces of time unheard of in London. The road to Fritham bears one reminder of the damage to communities that seems to have been the price. The signpost to Fritham also bears a sign to Stoney Cross. If you follow this you just come to the A31 onto which you must turn right and travel to the Cadnam roundabout before you can come all the way back to a few buildings which you could easily miss. There are signs in Minstead bearing the same legend. What I have, in my second paragraph, called the ‘remnants of Stoney Cross’ are a few houses, a garage, and a Little Chef, which is all I have been able to find. Maybe other properties were demolished to make way for the road. Cadnam, although a larger place, appears to have suffered the same fate. Nevertheless, we were able to drive backwards and forwards from Ringwood to Hedge end in search of a few strip lights. So how can I object?

This evening Jackie produced an excellent meal of stir fried chicken in chilli and black bean sauce; with egg fried rice; followed by bread and butter pudding and evaporated milk; and accompanied by a shared bottle of Lamberhurst Estate Bacchus Reserve 2011.

It Ain’t Half Cold/Hot Mum

Waking this morning between a warm sheet and duvet, then being struck by the cold air of the bedroom and colder atmosphere of the corridor through to the equally freezing bathroom, I reflected on the vagaries of temperature. Climbing into bed last night, greeted by the shock of wintry sheets, I had soon warmed up. The body has its own internal cumbustion engine. Blessed with a beneficial blood circulation, I am often oblivious of changes in temperature at home in England. The climate there is, on the whole, more temperate than in the Dordogne. Up or down, there is usually a ten degrees centigrade difference.

This area is very hot and arid throughout the long summer months, yet can, for a few brief hibernal weeks, be bitterly cold. Snow is no stranger to Sigoules, but it is a most transient visitor. Judith tells me that they went from minus nineteen to plus nineteen in a fortnight last winter in Razac d’Eymet.

For the first few days I was here this time I kept an electric heater on all day in the living room and – unheard of in England – all night in the bedroom. I slept in my clothes, including socks, and hastily added a dressing gown for my nocturnal trips along the corridor. Although it is still cold I no longer need the heater at night. Last week was so much warmer that I needed no heating at all. Jackie tells me it is now more clement in Hampshire than it is here.

Or have we just become so accustomed to central heating that we forget the freezing winters of our childhood and are no longer robust enough to withstand the temperatures in a mostly unheated stone house? Mind you, it is refreshingly cooler inside during the summer.

The greatest sudden contrast I have experienced was in Perth, Australia in 2007. Louisa, Errol, their infant Jessica, and I arrived at 2.00 a.m. on Christmas morning to stay with the delightful Gay and Mick O’Neill in preparation for Sam’s marriage to Holly. We had abandoned a bleak London to disembark from an Air Singapore plane feeling as if we were walking into an oven. Even at that time it was more than forty humid degrees, in the hottest summer the Australians could remember. There, the essential facility for a home is air conditioning rather than central heating. All the news on our hotel room in Melbourne the following week was either of forest fires or severe flooding in one place or another in that vast continent. The nearest sylvan inferno blazed right up to the end of Mick’s mother’s road.

Jessica fought a long losing campaign to get me into winter woollies. As I sit here in a long lanate Lakeland jumper, I am now grateful that she bought me that one.

I warmed up in Le Code Bar with a scrumptious pulse and noodles soup; a vol-au-vent filled to overflowing with a delicious sauce that just had to be mopped up with bread; a large slice of lean pork cooked on the, minimal, bone and a plentiful platter of crisp chips; completed by two fresh coffee eclairs, probably from the superb boulangerie.

Clouds brought both rain and comparative warmth this afternoon. After tramping around damp and dripping village streets I set off down the D17, took a left turn just before the leisure centre, up a narrow winding byroad, left at the top, and back down past the lake to rue St. Jacques. From the top of his field the mud-spattered donkey silently surveyed my passing on the D17. When I walked by along the hillside track the dogs had their usual go at me. He left them to it.

The upward climb offered a level, albeit rain-veiled, view of Chateau Cluzeau.

Today’s title is a parody that of the 1974-1981 television sitcom series ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ based on the adventures of an execrable concert party entertaining the troops in Burma.

Perseverance

Yesterday afternoon I finished reading ‘The England of Elizabeth’ by A.L. Rowse. This Elizabeth was the first English queen so-named. I am aware that most people alive today have known no other than Queen Elizabeth II. First published in 1950, during the reign of our Elizabeth’s father, King George VI, the book was researched and written without the aid of modern technology. Rowse had no computer and no internet. His work is the result of a lifetime’s scholarship. It is packed with information about how people lived in the sixteenth century, how they were educated, how they were governed, and what they believed. Detailed references abound. The author’s own reading was immense.

There is much to admire here, but I cannot say I enjoyed the writer. His attempts at humour, mostly in the sections covering religion, fell short for me. More than once he voices the opinion that works of art are more valuable than human lives. If that is indeed his opinion it was patently not shared by the makers of ‘Resistance’, described in yesterday’s post. Sarah’s symbolic burning of the mediaeval map, which is what the Germans were really after, is a clear statement of the opposite view.

‘The England of Elizabeth’ takes a certain amount of stamina and determination for the layman to get through. Some of the later pages of my 1953 Reprint Society edition, which the flyleaf indicates has had at least one previous owner, were uncut. There have only been two books in my life I have been unable to finish reading, two hundred pages being my limit in each case. The first was Sir Thomas Mallory’s ‘Morte d’Arthur’ which, like certain sections of the Old Testament, bored me with its long lists of names; the second being James Joyce’s ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, which I couldn’t grasp. It is a mistake to attempt to read the latter as a narrative, although, if you can decipher them it does contain such episodes. As an inveterate punster – Jackie says it’s pathalogical, and the Greeks have a word for it – I should have enjoyed Joyce’s language. The trouble is he made it up, and his puns involve six languages – far too many for me.

Later, I watched ‘Stigmata’ on DVD. This psychological thriller, directed by Rupert Wainwright, was ‘a scary movie’ even before I was able to play it. At first, I couldn’t because a box on my laptop told me it was configurated for a different region. What on earth did that mean? The box told me I could manage the DVD region. How was I going to do that? I had to find device management. Well, following various paths by accessing, by trial and error, a number of different control panels on the desktop, I eventually unearthed it. Apparently my normal region is 2. There was a vast number of countries I could choose. Which one, for goodness sake? Closer investigation of the small print on the DVD sleeve, which is in any case minute, revealed that it was produced by Virgin Records of America, Inc. I picked United States. Given that I had bought the film in Wimbledon Village’s Oxfam shop, I found this rather surprising. But then not many people other than Americans can afford to live in that part of London. The U.S. is in Region 1. A warning informed me that there was a limited number of times I could change the region. So, even if I could remember the path would I be able to revert to Region 2?

The film was quite a contrast to the gentle ‘Resistance’. Violent action; strange, strident sounds; extravagant special effects; kaleidoscopic camerawork, it had them all. The depiction of the inflictions of the stigmata on the female lead was reminiscent of Mel Gibson’s horrific representation of ‘The Passion of The Christ’, which I could hardly bear to watch. Patricia Arquette and Gabriel Byrne were excellent in the main roles. Notes provided in the container offered two alternative endings. Having watched the incongruously romantic ‘theatrical’ coda, I decided to view the director’s original. He recommended watching the whole film again, rather than just his final scene. So I did. The original was much more convincing, but hardly worth a repeated complete viewing.

Afterwards, with much relief, I managed to revert to Region 2.

This morning I walked to Pomport and back. Just outside Sigoules, as usual, my friend the donkey was at home with his goats. Judging by the position of his ears, he wasn’t too pleased to see me at first, but soon, ears to the fore, happily tracked me along his fence, uttering a plaintive honking when it prevented him from continuing.

It was a bit breezy up at Pomport, so I had to walk rather briskly. Clad in fleecy jackets, hats, and gloves, like frozen market stallholders, an isolated elderly man and, elsewhere, a young woman were tending vines. Once again I beat the rain. This time it set in for the day.

The whole purpose of my trip in this cold month of January was to have some internal doors replaced by Huis Clos. The first appointment was 10 a.m. this morning. I received a phone call deferring this to 11.30. I stayed in from 11 to 5.30. No-one came and I heard no more.

I consoled myself with reading a little more of Andre Gide’s ‘La Porte Etroite’ and watching a DVD of Trevor Nunn’s acclaimed Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage-to-screen studio production of William’s great timeless tragedy ‘Othello’. Willard White’s performance as Othello was most powerful, and Imogen Stubbs’ Desdemona superb. Of the supporting cast I would single out Zoe Wanamaker, flawless as Emelia. Ian McKellen richly deserved the awards he won for his odious Iago.

This evening in Le Code Bar chicken noodle soup; a plate of mixed meats, avocado, and salad; superbly cooked steak with a mound of fried potatoes done with bacon, garlic, and some herb or another; followed by my choice from a huge basket of fruit, from which I just managed a pear; and a quarter carafe of rose wine assuaged the day’s disappointment. What makes it even better is that, although they don’t open the restaurant in the winter, David himself offered to feed me in the evening if I preferred. Which was just as well today.