Murder in the cathedral

It seemed a timely moment for a TS Eliot tag, being as the old boy's second volume of letters is due out just now, though of course the overall effect might be closer to Titus Groan . . .

I have a soft spot for cathedrals, having more or less grown up in one; Lichfield to be precise. This one is actually the delightfully lop-sided edifice of St Etienne in Toulouse and if anyone was murdered here, then odds-on it was the architect.

It is, in fact, a complete bodge-up. The nave is totally out of line with the choir, here and there they obviously ran out of stone and changed to brick, and it all sort of leans on that wonderfully asymmetric giant pillar which looks as if it's about to keel over.

The overall effect is exceedingly odd; sighting up the aisles is distinctly dodgy and I'm tempted to think that competing clergy operate an off-side trap during evensong.

For all that, it has a great deal of eccentric charm, especially when birds fly in through the broken windows somewhere right up high, and go into permanent orbit around the vaulting. I'm rather fond of the old place.

Therefore it was a must-visit when I took my mate Barbara Fuller on a whistle-stop tour of central Toulouse one grotty November afternoon last week. She took the rather fetching pic, thus giving me the chance to burble on again at last about nothing in particular. So no change there . . .

Apparently back in 12, 13 or even 14 something (my dates are even vaguer than usual), they already had the old bit of St Etienne, i.e. the sort of nave that we were standing in to take the pic. Then Bishop Somebody had the brilliant if megalomaniac idea of demolishing the lot and building a mega-cathedral.

For whatever reason, this also involved moving the whole thing several metres to the left. Anyway they'd got as far as building the back half when they ran out of money, enthusiasm and inclination. I suppose it's also possible that the great Bishop was burned at the stake or something else par for the course in those unenlightened times.

Under the circumstances, it was kind of handy that they hadn't got around to knocking down the old front half. They pressed it back into service, bodged the two halves together, added a sort of porch thing in brick, and left it at that. Which must have taken a lot of shrugging off, even by the exalted Gallic standards of the Midi.

It rates as No2 in my Top Ten Ecclesiastical Heroic Failures. Number One goes to the architect of Girona Cathedral, who built an incredibly daring single-span roof, the largest of its day. He then crapped himself that it would all fall down and threw himself into the nearby river with distressingly fatal consequences.

Unfortunately, it's still standing after 800 years. Or fortunately; it rather depends on your point of view . . .

The bluffer's guide to getting younger

I come from one of those families where everyone is born aged 91 and counting. Me, I always tried to rebel. I sold my Meccano model of a zimmer frame to the kid next door when I was only 17 and a half.

So after nearly half a century (help!!) of trying to avoid nightmaria imaginata geriatrica, it comes as a shock to find that bits are falling off me. The aforementioned latin tab isn't some gothic form of mega-toxic mushroom, though it might as well be; there's loads of them to choose from, here in super sticks-tastic SW France. It's actually a highly refined form of collective family hypochondria where everyone has viruses instead of colds, not just the blokes.

You first realise that the world is not as it once seemed when those miniscule screws drop out of your glasses and you can't see to put them back again. Perhaps it's what comes of not paying the TV licence?

Bloody specs: I never thought I'd find a hate object to rival yappy dogs and boy band records but I've succeeded. I might even promise to listen to an all-in-one yappy boy-dog band track every day in return for renewed vision, though on reflection, simple old-fashioned selling of the soul to the devil might be easier. Or offering to have all one's lingering teeth pulled out before they succumb to the lure of gravity (it's all those McCavities . . .)

But it's not just crap eyesight. Once you get into the groove of nightmaria imaginata geriatrica, your mission to self-destruct can cease to be impossible in about ten seconds, should you choose to accept it. To quote the immortal Nigel Molesworth (as I love to, whenever possible): "there is something wrong with yor hart, which hav stoped beating . . ."

Both my knees are knackered. They go blue and melt away into the sunset at the vaguest first sign of incipient damp. During our last two months of nearly-drought I used to hang them out of the bedroom window in hopes of a four-minute warning. Wonderful night for a Raindance? Don't talk wet.

Then there's something that falls apart on a regular basis, somewhere inside my left shoulder. I never have worked out what that's about. I just charge danger money for thumbing lifts.

Two standard bloke remedies for Age-Prevention-Self-Delusion (APSD or All Pissed) are noisy motorbikes and even more deafening electric guitars. I went through a prolonged bike period in my twenties to dodge a quadruple bus-pass so I figure this time it has to be guitars. I have them stacked up around my living-room like a Boy-Thing Cindy doll collection.

All over the Western World, ageing playboys are scrubbing away frantically at Fender guitars in a desperate search for eternal youth through the Genie of the Strat; grey-haired and sweating in the hope of at last being who Mick Jagger might have been 50 years ago and probably still isn't today.

The only realistic result is to make you Stone-deaf, which at least makes it easier to accept life in the Faust-lane and do that deal on the boyband tracks as proposed earlier.

It's what comes of being the generation that refuses to grow old. You can tell we've got it all skewed from the way we treat our kids. Being selfish gits, we keep burning their CDs instead of incinerating them. They're obsessed with computer games instead? It's all our own fault.

Eaten alive by his own Kangoo

I've a vague idea that my car is becoming a man-eater. This is due to the steady deterioration of the central locking system. Neither front window will open and two of the door-locks have packed up.

I'm beginning to have a persistent nightmare that one day, it will refuse to let me out via any recognised orifice, squirt digestive juices all over me and simply swallow me alive, pausing only to gob a few scraps of hair and bones out through the exhaust pipe. I'll only be identifiable by dental records and the odd spare tyre.

Doubtless I'm a victim of my own prejudices and cosy memories of plastic windey window handles on cars and other antediluvian devices from a lost and nostalgic world of long ago, when men were men and Morris Minors were not yet being driven at 20mph in the middle of the road by overly-infatuated enthusiasts.

I've tried hard not to become a slave to technology: Look at TV remotes. Originally they were promoted as a means of saving terminally bone idle lard-tubs the bother of staggering three feet across a Barrett House living room to change channels.

These days, one false move down the back of the sofa, no-one can find the buttons and home entertainment as we know it grinds to a halt in a blind panic. Then there's the other buttons for the DVD, the satellite and a Force Ten outside putting the dish into orbit. Me, I walked away from TV, it's become too much like hard work vegging with a can of beer . . .

But I'm just as bad as anyone else. A few days ago my ADSL line went down for a few hours. At which point I realised just how lost I was without the computer: Couldn't access the blog, my website, my email, my clients. Scary.

Of course, what really makes these situations horrific is the Age of Mass Non-Communication:

Technical problems? Please consult our website.

I can't, the ADSL's down. That's why I have a problem.

Well, try our helpline.

You mean the one that's designed to save you money by avoiding talking to me at all costs?

To be ignored completely, please press 5!

(Blankety-blank, silence, nothing, emptiness, mutism, void, vacuum, deep space, out to lunch until the last syllable of recorded time . . . and the one after that)

If I ever discover who invented telephone call stacker systems, it will be worth starting the Revolution just for them . . .

These systems are possibly slightly more unhelpful in French than in English but it's a very fine distinction and nothing to get rabidly anti-French about.

I was astonishingly lucky. France Telecom knew about my fault and were actually in the process of putting it right. It is hard to quantify the magnitude of this particular miracle.

Maybe it's just the ageing process. Being the kind of person who routinely defrosts his fridge with a hammer and chisel (works a treat, by the way . . . especially if you have one of those crap cool-box things that ice up in about 12.8 minutes) perhaps I'm just not fitted for the traumas of hyper-technology.

It's bad enough having to put specs on to tune a guitar or even set the volume on my valve amp (lovely old relic of the steam age, Leo Fender's Rocket) and watching the few remaining shreds of my ever sparse rock'n'roll cool disappearing into the ether or even a passing hyper link.

But this week's retro success has to be rediscovery of the portable cassette recorder. These things are brill. You can take them to a building site (in this case, sunny Rouvenac, home of the living dead or possibly the Grateful Dead), fill them to bursting with dust, plaster and old bricks . . . and they still work!!!

Of course, it means going back to a musical timewarp, a cut-off date after which there were no cassettes. I'd forgotten just how good Thin Lizzy were, and then there was all that wonderful spoken-word stuff from the Beeb: Ian Carmichael is still Live and Dangerous.

Up among the moods and clouds, a shadowplay

Over this summer I finally got to know and love the Pyrenees. I don't know why it took me so long to get there. It's possibly because I don't go a lot on the ultra-sunny picture postcard stuff, possibly because most great things come in their own good time. But give me the moody moments, the storms, the rain, the wild and savage mountains, these I can love to the end of my days.

This is it - The Last House Before Spain

I've meaning for a while to drop in a quick snap of my girlfriend Claire's mum's place; the house which gave this blog its name.

Actually it's a bit of a bugger to photograph, being largely smothered in gigantic horse chestnut trees, each of them laden just now with about three billion conkers. It's a lovely old place nonetheless. You can just about make out the exotic clutter of wrought iron that decorates the roof, and the front porch which was apparently designed to look as if it was falling off the wall from the word go.

Legend has it that Claire's family got it for a very reasonable price on account of it being haunted. The alleged ghost turned out to be a strange squeak in the electric meter. Should you be lucky enough to be invited f0r lunch here, the food is awesome and the pears from the orchard at the back, out of this world.

Wotta lotta plotters . . . a theory which is mine

I have a conspiracy theory that I'm being surrounded by conspiracy theorists. Especially ones that have lost the plot, so to speak . . . Living in deepest sticksville, SW France, you do tend to meet a few folk who have come here to avoid life, the universe, the parallel universe, and everything, and everything else. But just lately I have been inundated with loons telling me that:

a) The moon landing was a fake

b) Somebody's air force is spraying us with barium in the hope of altering the weather

c) All the famous politicians are holding secret meetings to own the world personally

d) The world is controlled by giant lizards (presumably they beat the politicians to it)

e) We are all being force-fed GM foods in our sleep

f) A giant horned planet is going collide with the Earth in 2012

g) Well did you ever? What a swell party this is . . .

h) They've seen the planet and they know it's got horns

i) Someone's planning enormous explosions to move the Earth out of the way

j) Or maybe they were going to blow up the horned planet instead?

k) Perhaps it could just sound its horns and politely allow the Earth to move for it

l) You can never tell with a horned planet

m) Especially when the Earth moves for it, darling

As usual I may have got this all muddled up due to terminal vagueness/memory loss/not listening properly, and exaggerated it a bit for loopy melodramatic effect but you get the general idea.

I suppose it's cool if you own property next to Bugarach, the delightfully freaky highest mountain near us, which has apparently been designated the point of impact. That way you can sell it at a fat profit to some End-Of-The-World-Is-Getting-Nigher theorist, or even The Hunchback of Nostradamus and retire to the Bahamas.

Mind you, if I got vaporised before actually witnessing TEOTW (work it out . . .) at first hand, I'd ask for my money back.

I wonder what the collective noun for conspiracy theorists is? A plot, a coven, an obsession? Or even a conspiracy of conspiracy theorists.

They'll be telling us next that the giant lizards built the pyramids. What crap. We had a lizard working for us and it couldn't even make the tea, let alone lay bricks. It's what comes of having no thumbs.

I don't know why anyone bothers with this stuff when there are so many wonderful real mysteries. Wouldn't you just love to have watched them building the pyramids or Stonehenge? How did the Romans get their roads so straight? How does an aboriginal man know a tsunami is coming and leg it to safety the day before?

And don't you just love it when conspiracy theorists who smoke sit there telling you how THEY (alias THEM) are poisoning us and you must only eat ideologically pure, organic aubergines in order to survive.

And all this while voluntarily ingesting enough creosote-flavoured airborne filth to kill a horse. Perhaps they practise plotting against themselves in their spare time.

It's the blogroll of honour

This one ought to get my User-Friendly Label Of The Year Award. You can't help but be impressed by a company with the thoughtfulness to label its bog standard toilet paper in no less than four languages. After all that effort, it just seems a shame somehow to use a see-through packet . . .