Mustering the support staff

Looking down Tackleway to the sea - the Shoebox is the house by the lamp-post, with the blue front

When you move country you forget that it's not just a question of switching residence: there's a whole network to re-establish.  It's only after three months that I begin to feel we're getting there.  I'm not talking about friends and acquaintance: it starts with the need for tradesmen - electricians, plumbers, joiners etc. - and the places to shop for daily needs - a decent butcher, vegetable shop and  supermarket.  But where do you go for shoe repairs? or dry cleaning?

Then there's the question of personal maintenance - the doctor and dentist and - last but not least - a decent hairdresser (less a problem for me, since it's a once-over with the clippers, than for Paul with his flowing locks).  But there's also the osteopath, the acupuncturist and - ideally - a decent masseur. 

And that's just us: there are the dogs to consider as well: registering with a local vet; finding a decent shop for leads, beds etc.; and then locating a groomer and a dogsitter.

We now have a pair of cleaning ladies who come in each week to give the Shoebox a once-over; the fishmonger is beginning to know me; and the dogs are delighted with the canine hotel we've located when we're away for the night.  As I say, we're getting there.

But the formation of new networks goes with nostalgia for the old: our dear cleaning lady, Agnès, our electrician Bruno, and the ever-charming Dr Picard, to name but a few of the people we became fond of during our stay in Ribérac.  It's not absence, but familiarity, that makes the heart grow fonder.  Out of sight, perhaps, but never out of mind.

Antony Mair

 

Waiting for that groomer!

The royal buttocks

The shoreline below East Cliff, Hastings

 



I've been thinking a lot about privacy recently, particularly the way in which, through Facebook and Twitter, people are happy to sacrifice their personal privacy for the perceived benefit of belonging to a group.  Big Brother does something similar: the "housemates" give up all privacy for the time of their internment, knowing that their every move is being televised. 

Several things bother me about all of this.  Research is now showing that an increasing number of young people are suffering from depression and anxiety as a result of the conflict between the public image they are (or feel they ought to be) projecting on social networks and their real selves.    Cyberposing is rampant, with Facebook entries or tweets that say things like "In Rio, overlooking Ipanema beach with a daiquiri" or "Recovering from an evening in the bar of the Ritz in Paris".  Per-lease.  We know the truth: you're in your semi in Bromley, with a life as mundane as everyone else's.

So far as Big Brother is concerned, it's not just the being televised at every moment that bothers me: it's the removal of all the normal props of any sort of internal life, such as books, newspapers, television, even - yes - computers.  How do the housemates cope?  how does someone as intelligent as celebrity housemate Julian Clary not go bonkers in twenty-four hours?

The answer is, I suppose, that, unlike subscribers to the social networks, who are motivated largely by peer pressure, there is the attraction of filthy lucre (for the celebrities) or five minutes' fame (for the rest).  But do they really understand what they are letting themselves in for?

Which brings me to the royal buttocks.  The furore about publication of photos of the princely posterior is hugely artificial.  In spite of the 3,600 complaints to the Press Complaints Commission, I really don't think the majority of people care.  Anyone with half a brain cell must have realised that pictures of the event would find themselves onto the internet and into the press before you could say "download".  If the prince had wished, he or his minders could have frisked participants for cameras beforehand.  As far as I can see, his sacrifice of privacy was entirely voluntary.  Like the Big Brother contestants, however, he may not have realised the full extent of the consequences. 
  

Antony Mair

International Composers' Festival, Hastings

The portico entrance of Saint Mary-in-the-Castle, Hastings

 

 

We had a terrific surprise this weekend, when we attended the final concert of the first International Composers' Festival in Saint Mary-in-the-Castle, Pelham Crescent.

 

Pelham Crescent is a decayed but stunning Regency crescent facing the sea just beyond the edge of Hastings Old Town.  At its centre a white portico on Ionic columns is the only visible exterior part of the former church of Saint Mary-in-the-Castle, built at the same time as the crescent.  The interior is beautiful, comprising a semi-circle built against the cliff, facing the portico, behind which, originally, would have been the altar of the church.  Parishioners sat either at ground level or in a raised gallery.  It is now the perfect performance space. 

 

The composer Polo Piatti, who lives close to us in the Old Town, was the guiding genius of this event.  We had not heard of him before, but thought the event worth a visit.  In Hastings, you should always be ready to be surprised.  The concert comprised a series of pieces by participating composers, all accessible, and superbly performed.  The festival ran over two days, with a series of talks, discussions, rehearsals and performances, and the seating was arranged informally round tables downstairs.  We found ourselves in the gallery, where the accoustic was fantastic.   

 

More exciting even than the music itself was to be in touch with yet another artistic initiative.  "If it's not there, make it happen" seems to be a recurring refrain in Hastings arts circles.  In these days of cuts and austerity, it's impressive to see it succeed.

 

Antony Mair

The experience of blogging

Old fishing boat beside the fishermen's huts on the Stade, Hastings

 

 

I started this blog about six weeks ago, as a way of keeping in touch with friends in France - and indeed elsewhere in the UK and the rest of the world.  Otherwise there's a danger of losing contact: and friends are too important for that.  However, the blog seems to be developing a slight life of its own.  I'm a tad taken aback to be told by blogger.com that I've had over a thousand page views in that period: and when I look at the audience figures I see that, in addition to the UK and France - which I would have expected - people seem to be clicking in from the USA (25% of the total).  Flattering though this is, I can't believe these are all people I know.  What interests them about my little ramblings?  perhaps they'd let me know.  The other surprise is the number - just under 5% - from Russia.  Now I know nobody in Russia at all.  I'm flattered, though slightly alarmed.  I am not going to be drawn into disclosing my views on the Pussy Riot question, for fear of some cyber-retribution.

Of course this whole thing has gone slightly to my head.  I have added some tweaks at the end of the blog, which enable you to be posted as a "follower", and - I think - to have the blog sent to you by email.  But since my technical expertise is severely limited, none of it may work.

I shall continue to fire postcards into the ether, since somebody somewhere is clearly enjoying them  Perhaps there's a single person out there who's been logging on a thousand times in the past six weeks.  If so, I'm delighted to be giving at least one person something to do!

Antony Mair   

 



Beyond Eastbourne...

View from the Shoebox, with Beachy Head in the distance

 

Before we moved back to the UK I subscribed to the Financial Times on my Kindle.  At a time when I was deeply concerned about where the euro was heading the FT was a useful addition to the French media.  And the FT was great, although as time wore on I felt more and more ignorant about economics - there seemed to be as many theories about the euro's fate as there were economists. 

 

When we returned to the UK I subscribed to the Guardian, again on my Kindle.  It seemed fine at first: less targeted to a readership comprising solely teachers and social workers than I recollected, and the broader coverage was welcome.  However, as time wore on it became clear that the foreign section was woeful.  Or perhaps I mean, in particular, the European coverage.  After several weeks of reading the Guardian I felt my grasp of European politics not just slipping, but disappearing altogether.  Syria, China and the US got ample coverage.  M. Hollande, Frau Merkel and S. Monti didn't get a look-in - let alone Brussels and the EU at large.

 

Thinking it was a problem with the Grauniad alone, I bought a hard copy of The Times.  Perhaps it was too much to hope that a paper forever tarnished by its Murdoch ownership would approach the status of a journal of record that it once had.  In brief, it was the same: Syria, China and the US.    

 

As I look out to sea from the Shoebox I can see Eastbourne in the distance, and Beachy Head beyond it.  If I were to turn my eyes further to the left I should be able to glimpse the French coast.  I haven't succeeded yet, but I'm told one can sometimes see it.  Perhaps someone could alert the UK press that it's still there.

 

Antony Mair

 

Bread and beyond

Obsessive? moi?

When we first got back to the UK I had great difficulty getting used to the bread.  It never seemed to taste of anything.  Even the Old Town bakery Judges didn't really seem to hit the spot (I've had to change my views since - I was feeling pretty negative at the start about a lot of things.)  This is no good, I thought.  I'll have to get back to baking it myself.

The joiner working on our windows, Ollie Adams, turned out to be a baker's son.  He recommended Dan Lepard's recent book Short and Sweet, subtitled "The Best of Home Baking", and I set to.  My mission was interrupted after a week or two when Paul visited a Chinese doctor in Hastings and was told to stop eating any yeast.  My subsequent attempts at soda bread were far from brilliant: even following Dan Lepard's recipes it turned out a bit too heavy for comfort.  Undeterred, I looked at the other bit of Dan Lepard's book and discovered the joys of biscuits, both savoury and sweet.  These things have a way of taking hold, as you can see from the picture above: ginger biscuits and macaroons for tea and elevenses, and savoury ones with blue cheese and oatmeal, or chilli flakes and almonds, for that glass of wine in the evening.  Although there are only two of us in the house, when you take visitors and our dogs into account as additional consumers we seem to get through a fair quantity each week!

What I'm a little anxious about is that I've only begun to deal with the contents of this book, by tackling the "Bread" and "Biscuits and cookies" sections.  However, there are six other sections, ranging from cakes (don't even go there) through "sugar sugar", covering sweets and fudges (go there even less) to pies and tarts for supper (mm, may be better).  Now I just have to hope that the Chinese doctor doesn't extend the restrictions...

Antony Mair

Café society

Our new "coffee house" in George Street (with Paul and the dogs)

When we had our estate agency in Ribérac, prospective buyers from the UK would speak wistfully of "café society".  I know what they had in mind: those expanses of tables and chairs on the broad pavements of Paris streets, where you can people-watch for hours.  I think they also had some idea of Jean-Paul Sartre and Juliette Gréco on the Boulevard Saint Germain: people dressed in bohemian black, discussing the meaning of life.  The concept was a sort of mish-mash of Sartre and Maurice Chevalier. 

Ribérac's cafés didn't really meet this sort of expectation.  I realised after a while that the people who frequented them most had the time to spare because they didn't spend it on DIY in their houses and gardens.  But they weren't exactly high-grade intellectuals either: they'd have appeared as out of place in les Deux Magots as a ploughman at Versailles.

What's curious, though, is that the English, who started the coffee house idea in London in the eighteenth century, seem to have given it up subsequently.  Starbucks and Costa may be reviled, but they at least reintroduced quality coffee to the UK after the filthy instant brew the English had lived on in previous decades.  I'm not sure that our new Hanushka Coffee House is going to be the haunt for Hastings' answers to Addison and Dryden, let alone Simone de Beauvoir, but for the moment it's a nice place to sit in the morning and watch people strolling through the Old Town.  And, this being a small place, you inevitably see a familiar face and someone to chat with.  Which is, I suppose, what society is all about anyway.

Antony Mair

   

How much do we need to be protected from quacks?

I recently saw this sign over a small shop in a mews behind Hastings' main shopping centre.  Among other establishments, the mews contains a dog-groomer, a reptile shop, a place to have your computer repaired, and a couple of alternative health establishments, of which Andrey Shipilov is one.

For me, the sign highlighted the difference in approach between the English and the French in matters relating to complementary medicine.  Basically, the French are suspicious of anything outside the mainstream.  When I told my French dentist that I was going to an osteopath she gave me a lecture about quacks and how I needed to be sure that I went to someone properly trained in France.  In the event I found myself in the hands of an excellent English osteopath who had been trained in the UK and been the first person to have her foreign qualification recognised in Aquitaine. 

The basic principle in French legislation is that the public needs to be protected from charlatans.  But I'm not convinced that the public is so dumb as the French legislators think.  Certainly Andrey Shipilov, who proclaims himself as a Russian doctor, appears to be under few constraints in his mews in Hastings.  I'm a fan of acupuncture and massage, having greatly benefited from both, but I'd not heard of Akabane testing.  When I saw the sign I immediately thought it was some additional quackery.  However, on Googling it, I came across a blog entry by Nora Franglen, founder of the School of Five Element Acupuncture in London.  This told me that Akabane testing was a way of testing an imbalance of energy between the two sides of the body, as a preliminary to treatment.

So the laugh is on me.  Yesterday I was laid low with a migraine, which usually involves a severe headache on my left temple and the left side of my forehead.  An excellent acupuncturist who has treated me in the past, explained to me several years ago that my migraines arise from an energy imbalance.  Foolishly, I had not located an acupuncturist here to continue the necessary maintenance treatment.  Paul has now rectified that, and I am due to see someone tomorrow.  I shall find out more about Akabane testing then. 

I may have reason yet to thank the Russian doctor for a tip.  Cupping, however, may be a step too far!

Antony Mair

Sunday lunch at Winchelsea Beach

Giant thistles at The Ship

Sunday lunch and Christmas are arguably the two occasions that have best survived the transition from a Christian to a secular society.  Churchgoing may be almost extinct, prayer transmuted into meditation and the Pope largely consigned to oblivion: but there's something about lunch that still belongs to Sunday.  If in France it remains an occasion for the gathering of the generations at a gastrobinge, in southern England there is a profusion of signs outside pubs advertising that most depressing of phenomena - the Carvery.  A nation that now feeds itself on readymade meals out of Marks & Spencers takes itself off to a pub in order to sample the memory of the roast meat mother used to make.

But you don't have to go that route.  Neighbours of ours kindly invited us to lunch at The Ship, in nearby Winchelsea Beach.  Formerly a slightly drab hostelry near a caravan site, it was taken over by a group of locals, including the flamboyant Tom Watkins.  The clapboard exterior was painted a New England shade of grey, and the main bar transformed into a US diner lookalike.  For me, though, the triumph is the garden behind.  Instead of the usual dreary grass/privet/wooden benches and tables the renovators landscaped it into a beachside Eden dominated by the architectural forms of phormium, yukka and verbena bonariensis, with ornamental grasses bedded in gravel.  Tables are set at discreet intervals, linked by a winding path of wooden planks. 

Yes, on a Sunday you can have meat carved from a spit-roasted animal - but there's a postmodern menu of other options, and desserts that can happily tip you over the edge into that other Sunday feature - the siesta.  And for those who need to shop in order to justify an excursion, there's a butcher and delicatessen full of irresistible goodies.  Perfick.

Antony Mair

POSTSCRIPT

Paul in his new motor - the pocket rocket

Reviving the spirits

   Chris Elam, yoga teacher and Ayurvedic masseur, outside the garden house he has built for yoga, massage and personalised retreats.

I discovered yoga in London almost ten years ago, and used to go along to a windowless studio in Shepherds Bush Shopping Centre with a crowd of young mothers.  I became a convert.  When we lived in France I attended less demanding sessions run by an only slightly eccentric Dutch woman in the attic of her home.  Outside, the rolling hills of the Verteillacois were an inspiration in themselves.  My fellow-participants were older than in London, but the sessions were still like a mini-holiday.

A search on the Net for yoga teachers in Hastings brought up Chris Elam, who runs classes about ten minutes' walk away from our house.  His website revealed that he also did Ayurvedic massage.  Paul had gone off to London to see an old friend, and the weather was depressing.  I was feeling a bit wan, and picked up the phone.

What I love about this town is its unpredictability.  Chris gives massage sessions in one of the bedrooms on the first floor of his 1930s house just outside the centre of town.  "The room's quite warm," he said on the way up.  This was an understatement: it was like a Turkish bath.  "I try to recreate the feeling of southern India," he said.

Had someone told me ten years ago that the day would come when a perfect stranger in Hastings would massage my back with his foot, I might well have expressed a degree of scepticism.  But that's the richness of life: you never know where you'll be next.  With enough warm oil on me for a skidpan, the sensation of the back being foot-massaged was on the pleasure side of pain although we got perilously close at times.  "Have you changed foot?" I asked when he switched from one side of the back to the other.  He had.  The replacement was colder, but soon warmed up.

I returned home with muscles relaxed and skin glowing.  Paul had got back from London.  "You smell like somewhere in India," he said.  I'm not sure where he had in mind.  All I know is that energy flows were restored by the following day.  Now I just have to get to the yoga class...

Antony Mair

Rediscovering Radio 4

                                                 The Shoebox pretends to be a big house!

During our seven years in France I rarely listened to BBC Radio.  If I listened to the radio at all it was to France Inter or France Musique.  I sometimes ventured onto France Culture, but they tended to have two-hour programmes on obscure items like Bolivian folkdancing or cavepaintings in Mali, which I found a bit self-indulgent.  France Inter had its oddities as well - in the midst of an interesting discussion about the French economy there would suddenly be a break with a song from one of the iconic French chansonniers before a return to the topic in hand. 

I'd always mocked French television as being stuck in a groove - with programme times unchanged in at least forty years, variety shows with people speaking into outsize microphones (had they not heard of overhead mikes?) and the same tired old American soaps dubbed into French.  So it came as a bit of a surprise to return to the UK and find that Radio 4 was even more stuck in a groove.  In fact it's like being in a timewarp.  John Humphreys continues on the Today Show, Women's Hour still parades its selfconscious concern about women's issues,  Any Questions is still touring scout-huts round the provinces, followed by the same dogmatic rightwingers calling in to Any Answers.   Nothing now gives me more pleasure than switching John Humphreys off when he is being self-righteous in the morning.  Unfortunately the contentious smugness seems to have spread to others on the news team, and I find myself switching off the lunchtime news as well.  The Moral Maze doesn't even get a look-in.

Recent articles in the newspapers have raised the question of Radio 4 being overly middle-class.  The role of the English middle classes is another topic on which I can fulminate at will.  But the prospect of change is like reforming the House of Lords - the people concerned are unlikely to proceed happily to the guillotine.  Meanwhile I have discovered that, through my computer, I can access dear old France Inter and find out what's happening across the Channel instead of listening to the London chattering classes pontificating to likeminded souls in Tunbridge Wells.   Vive la différence!

Antony Mair

Old Town Week continues...

                    The Carnival Queens give a helping hand

Old Town week continues, with its curious blend of folklore and history.  Yesterday we had the Whelk Eating Competition and the Seaboot Race - the latter involving people running up and down Courthouse Street in a pair of seaboots.  Last night was the race for the Jimmy Read Memorial Trophy.

The road leading up to our house is called Crown Lane.  Once a year, in Old Town Week, there is a race the length of it, in memory of Jimmy Read.  Jimmy, we are told, died 25 years ago, but was known throughout the Old Town because he delivered meat on his bicycle - no mean feat with the land rising steeply on both sides of the Bourne.  It is said that one day someone suggested to Jimmy that a moped would be easier - but the idea was rejected, since he believed it would always be quicker on his bike.

Jimmy's bicycle has been preserved or replicated, and is used each year for the race.  Riders are on-the-spot volunteers, who pay their pound to the starting official at the bottom of the lane, by the Crown Inn.  The rules are simple.  An old ten shilling note is placed beneath the rider's backside, and has to remain there for the full distance.  The bike has no gears and is heavy, so getting it up the hill is no mean feat.  At the top of the hill an official with a stopwatch records the time as the rider crosses a chalk line.

Simple, really.  But that's the charm of it.  From shortly after five in the afternoon until darkness fell at nine a substantial crowd lined both sides of the lane, cheering on the competitors.  Drinks supplied by the Crown Inn no doubt helped people to volunteer.  The riders came in all shapes and sizes, and moved at varying speeds - the fainthearted were sometimes given a push, which disqualified them, but nobody seemd to worry.  A good time was had by all.  I'm afraid that we retired indoors before the final prize was awarded, but doubtless there was a drink or two to celebrate!

Antony Mair

PS More snaps of the event if you click here - click on "Diaporama" for a slide show.