out with the old life, in with the new

From the subscription renewal card of a famous magazine:

“Another year of … Admitting nothing, blaming everyone, being bitter and looking fabulous”.

Happy New Year everyone!

wild life (2)

And then there was the day Reynard came calling. As I stepped around the corner of the House on some errand, there he was, sniffing the ground. I stopped with a start, unsure of how to react, tentatively calling “Bonjour, Maitre Renard”, not wanting him to run. He didn’t seem scared, but didn’t seem keen to stay either; just sauntered off at his own elegant pace, cool as a cucumber, brush straight up in the air, giving me a last look over his shoulder as he slipped under the fence: “Some other time, perhaps”.

But I never saw him again, though he would be welcome, to cull the hordes of rabbits growing plump on my lantanas and geraniums (lantanae? gerania?) – and even on the barks of the fruit trees, the fucking little bastards.

family life

When the Fool was around 4 or 5 years old, his Grandmother felt it was time to make a start on his and his elder brother’s education in foreign languages. This was done at the dinner table, on which there happened to be a pair of small ceramic frogs (one pink and one pale blue, God knows why). Naturally, there were also forks. And frogs and forks, Grandmother decided, were as good a place as any to start an education.

That was without counting with my muddled brain (even then). At some point, exasperated at our continuing failure to correctly name each of the two, she picked one of the ceramic frogs from the table and gently knock-knock-knocked me on the head with it, all the while repeating “frog, frog, frog!”

The frogs – like some later-day version of Pentecostal tongues of fire – did their job, and neither my brother nor I have ever since confused our frogs with our forks, confusable though they are.

And that – endless repetition, knocking them over the head (gently!) and divine inspiration – is how you teach children new languages. And pretty much anything else.

frog, frog frog!

life under the weather (4)

sporting life (2)

The Fool swims. In the locker room, he begins by discarding his spectacles … whereupon reality acquires a decidedly nebulous dimension. Then, it’s a matter of a moment to undress and put on the swimming trunks, cap, goggles, and to step into the heated pool area itself.

And then it becomes really nebulous (no bad thing, I suppose – I mean, picture the Fool in his tight lycra swimming trunks, silicon cap and bright blue goggles. The mind shudders).

Adelante: by then he has retreated into a world within himself, a bubble of power and concentration, and he goes into his routines only vaguely aware of the other people and shapes around him.

But routines are conducive to idle thoughts: “Hello! Do I see some shapely silhouettes in the next lane?”, and in his mind’s eye there appears a gaggle of comely thirty-somethings, agog at the elegance of his stroke. “Go, Shark!”, he fancies them saying as he goes by in a welter of spray; and “Fly, Albatross, fly!”

And he discreetly smiles his wolfish smile as he leaves them in his wake …

You don’t think they could be 80-year old great-grandmothers instead, do you? Shaking their heads and murmuring “It’s that nice Mr. Mitty, dear. But we’d better not wave to him, lest he drown himself on his foolish grin”.

office life (2)

Seen on the intranet site of a corporation not a million miles away from where the Fool sits “Necessity is the mother of invention, by Plato, Greek Philosopher”.

Lest anyone think he was a basketball coach, I suppose, or a fucking Hollywood actor!

old life

I don’t know about similarly affected people, but when his hair started thinning the Fool suddenly began finding himself with frequent bruises – and even open wounds – in his tender scalp.

One gets used to it.

I just seem to have missed the part when these morphed from the proudly exhibited war wounds of the rugged, handsome man-about-the-outdoors to the sad marks of the tottery old Fool, distractedly bumping into things.

And it used to take sharp-edged stone lintels to actually draw blood. Now, any old rotten wooden beam will do the job.

sporting life

The Fool swims. He’s not particularly proud of it (horrible, common sport, swimming), but it’s what the Doctor ordered. So he swims. The school the Princess attends has a pool, and it’s available for “external users” after-hours. But the children’s teachers remain for us externals, and in the way of children’s teachers they are not content with simply watching one swim and keeping an eye out for drowners. They like to organize “activities” and contests – it stems from their habit of having to keep idle young minds and bodies occupied, I suppose. I have thought of telling them they needn’t bother with us (it’s all the poor Fool and his classmates can do to keep afloat, much less have the sort of idle thoughts that need curtailing), but they seem so happy.

Anyway, in the course of activities and contests, points are attributed and prizes given. And so it has come to pass that the Fool was elected Swimmer of the Year last year. The fact that my classmates – my competition for the Grand Prize – seem to be for the most part natives of landlocked lands who cannot have seen the sea or a pool much before their 40th birthday is neither here nor there. Modest people with much to be modest about – such as the Fool and Mr. Clement Attlee – live for these small triumphs.

wild life

“Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole”. It would take a much braver man than the Fool to even try to emulate the inimitable William Boot, nature writer and war correspondent extraordinaire. So I won't. Just some occasional notes about the creatures on the Hill.

The overwhelming impression is of rabbits, rabbits everywhere. Come to think of it, Coney Island might not be a bad solution in our quest to find a name (though it's wise to check with the American wag first, for undesirable connotations). The first weekend we spent at the House, one even fell into the underground patio (a sunken patio, the top of its walls flush with the ground – where clothes can be hung to dry in the open air but out of sight of guests. Clever, eh?). It had been a dark and stormy night (reader, clichés were promised from the beginning), and he was a fluffy little fellow, wet through and in shock at the ten-foot fall. The Fool picked him up with a towel and rubbed him, like Roger with the puppy in The 101 Dalmatians, and then set him down outside (fully prepared to take him out of his misery, if he proved to be too far gone – though I didn’t tell the Princess that). He sat there for a moment, then his ears shot up like exclamation marks and he bolted up the hill, stopped again, lifted his ears once more to get his bearings, then off again and into the undergrowth, to warn his mates about large holes in the ground.



There’s a pair of nesting buzzards, on the slope in front. One sees them often, soaring lazily over the mountain, and even more often just hears their call when they are lost to sight against the trees in the background. Once, I was trying my father’s old duck-decoys in the pool when a shadow suddenly loomed. I looked up, and there was one of the pair, hovering, checking the lie of the land, ready for the stoop. But it saw me and must have felt discretion was the better part of valour (I flatter myself thinking), and it flew off.

And there’s a grey heron, crossing the horizon eastwards in the morning and westwards in the evening, regular as clockwork. And flights of mallard in V-formation, like F-16s. And more.

I mean to put up some sort of a bird-feeding table, though the trees still need to grow quite a bit before they are of a proper size to attract songbirds.

office life

“The best acronyms, of course, should provide no clue as to their meaning, and yet be bandied about as if the meaning were known to all. Once their meaning is known to all, however, their bureaucratic utility declines: for acronyms are to modern bureaucrats what incantations are to ancient shamans”
Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, fulminating against the British National Health Service.

“Modern bureaucrats” have nothing on blonde shamanesses, sayeth the Fool.

life on the hill

So, it’s been three years and we still haven’t come up with a name for the House. After hearing my lyrical (I thought) description of the fabulous views, an American wag suggested Bellevue (“in New York City", he added helpfully, "the hospital of choice for the insane”). To my stepchildren it is Praia Grande (from the name of a beach 2 or 3 miles away), implying it’s a beach house, a notion I fight strenuously to disabuse them of. Most other people call it Colares (after the hill-town across the valley from us), which at least brings it closer to the ideal of the 19th-century quinta de lazer (leisure farm) I naively intend it to be.

To me, it’s just the House. “Hey, House”, I greet it when I return there after a spell (but only if I’m alone, bien entendu, no need to reinforce the poor opinion of one’s mental equilibrium already held by the distaff side). And then I walk around, to check the trees, “hi there, beautiful lemon tree”, “hello, noble cypress”, “hey, mighty oak” – this to a foot-high sapling we brought from the wood at Grandmother’s house in the North, and which is being groomed in a vase until it’s ready for transplantation to its place in the grand scheme of things (as I modestly call the not-quite-completely-haphazard way the plot is being planted). And only then do I enter the House proper, and go around opening windows and putting new books on shelves, and patting the ones already there (hey, little book), lighting a fire and getting a dinner going.

And after three years I still can’t quite believe I have this life.

life under the weather (3)

This being a Fool’s blog, with all the potential for irrelevance, banality and clichés that that entails, I don’t suppose it comes as a surprise that it should have kicked off on this most banal of topics, the weather. But it’s not just that. We’ve had unusually bad weather for the past two weeks and it was beginning to weigh on one’s mind. Now the sun is out, even if the wind has not abated. We’ll see if we can move on to other things.

life under the weather (2)

Viento más estúpido, más cabrón …, thus a Spanish friend of ours inveighing the gear-busting Levante which sometimes disrupted sailing at Puerto de Santa Maria, near Cadiz, in our racing days.

I am often reminded of him when looking out the windows of the House on the Hill, at the poor trees being bashed by the merciless whirlwinds which come busting up our valley from the sea. The valley runs west-to-east, perfectly aligned, we have come to realize, to channel all wind directions spanning the compass from 210 to 330 degrees (South-Southwest to North-Northwest) and to accelerate them in a Venturi effect (the Fool likes to pretend to a scientific bent of mind, don’t you know).

Guess what the prevailing winds are on the Hill? Northwest in summer, Southwest in winter, natch, plus or minus a few degrees each side.

life under the weather

The color of the sky as far as I can see is coal grey.
Lift my head from the pillow and then fall again.
With a shiver in my bones just thinking about the weather.
A quiver in my lips as if I might cry.

Well by the force of will my lungs are filled and so I breathe.
Lately it seems this big bed is where I never leave.
Shiver in my bones just thinking about the weather.
Quiver in my voice as I cry,

"What a cold and rainy day. Where on earth is the sun hid away."

I hear the sound of a noon bell chime.
Now I'm far behind.
You've put in 'bout half a day
while here I lie
with a shiver in my bones just thinking about the weather.
A quiver in my lip as if I might cry,

"What a cold and rainy day. Where on earth is the sun hid away?"

Do I need someone here to scold me
or do I need someone who'll grab and pull me out of this four poster dull torpor pulling downward.
For it is such a long time since my better days.
I say my prayers nightly this will pass away.

The color of the sky is grey as I can see through the blinds.
Lift my head from the pillow and then fall again
with a shiver in my bones just thinking about the weather.
A quiver in my voice as I cry,

"What a cold and rainy day. Where on earth is the sun hid away?"
I shiver, quiver, and try to wake.

(Like The Weather, 10,000 Maniacs)