Proper jobs

Trades come and go. During the industrial revolution one of the best trades to be in was being a child. A qualified child could pretty much turn their hand to anything, from working long hours in brutal conditions in a mill, to working long hours in brutal conditions down a mine, right up to understudy for Santa. These days, traditional work for children in England is pretty much restricted to thieving and being injured for the amusement of others on ‘you’ve been maimed’, although it would appear that exciting new prospects are opening up in the fields of lurking, being sullen in public and moaning. Traditional employment for children in textiles, mining and so on are still available in the developing world apparently but, frankly, that’s a hell of a commute.

Have I got a proper job? You’d have to ask somebody else.

But I do occasionally wonder if I might be better off doing something proper. Not important, Christ, I hope I’m self aware enough to realise that I can’t be trusted with the responsibility of anything that actually matters. Not even glamorous, I look terrible in sequins.

But I do think I’d make quite a good explorer.

All of the signs are there but principally my love of maps coupled with my inability to ask for directions and the absolute conviction that if you just keep going long enough you are bound to arrive at your destination or more probably something even more interesting. This, as far as I can understand it, is how most of the great discoveries of foreign parts were made, either sailors were looking for a quick route from A to B or merchants were trying to deliver silks and spices without so much wear and tear on the camels.

Most compelling of all though is my utter inability to travel light. Something tells me that a train of bearers would finally see an end to my ‘oh did I remember to pack?’ episodes part way through a journey. Yes, yes you did remember to pack it, because all that is left at home is a vague outline of a house in your garden. In fact your patio and shed are being erected for the night over there.

I’ve got a swiss army knife and a compass. Quite a good start I think. My long term aim is, of course, to have a country named after me but I have a sneaking suspicion that they have all been discovered. So either I have to be the first on the spot when the ice cap melts and there’s some rock, some dinosaurs and so on underneath, or I’ll just have to settle for a plateau.

While what I do might not be exciting, might in fact lead me to fantasise about being an explorer (always polar, never jungle), at least it’s better than being a clown. This, I’m pretty sure, has to be the lowest form of employment, because people who do it are generally doing it because they find it gratifying and, and this is the scary bit, they think others will too.

I mean, even a crack addict whore listlessly gobbling the cock of an overweight businessman in a car park is probably not thinking ‘this is a great performance’. I’d imagine he’s thinking ‘I hope this guy doesn’t realise I’m a man’ and possibly ‘Wow, I’d really like some crack’. Plenty has been written about clowns being more sinister than funny. I’d go further than that, I’d say they are so tragically unfunny that they kill any emotion in anyone watching, even fear. My proof? Why are there no clowns on youtube? If clowns were so frickin’ hilarious then why is the number one youtube video, week after week after week, not clown related? Having said that, clown in an industrial accident, fuck yea, five stars. But a clown doing his act on youtube, Jesus, how creepy would that be? Booked a clown for your kid’s party? No? then just watch this clip, with luck, it’s the one where the clown falls into a threshing machine. That’s why Mr Giggles can’t be here today kids.

That, and he’s a peado.

A sprinkling of stardust

There’s more excitement in the village than there’s been since the last informal running of the bulls. Discreet yellow signs point the way for ‘cars’ to go to ‘base’ and, intriguingly, ‘set’. It would appear that that crazy old business we call show has come to the village and judging by the plethora of vans, lights, gaffers, best boys and cables, we’re not just being sprinkled with stardust, we’re having it crapped all over us.

There appears to be a film unit at the Vicarage. The Vicarage is no longer the abode of the vicar, it was sold off years ago by the local church to raise money for either charity or to finance the vicar’s somewhat expensive tastes in fine vestments and booze, depending on who you believe.

Actually, I rather liked the old Vicar, he was an ex-RN type who could have come straight out of central casting, looking as he did like an aged version of the jolly mariner depicted on the front of a packet of Player’s Navy Cut. Word had it that the church thought so highly of his work in our delightful corner of a leafy shire that they packed him off to some inner-city parish. Apparently his beard covered most of the expression of shock he wore in his last months, but by no means all.

Whoever occupies the Vicarage, the finest house in the village, has obviously decided to supplement their income by hiring it out as a filming venue. The film unit have been there for a few days now and so I am assuming they are not taping a porno, although the way that films are made these days, maybe they are filming the original ‘Dirty Doinking’ and the sequels ‘Dirtier Doinking’ and ‘Filthy Doinking’ back to back. If they are filming back to back, it’ll be a pretty dull porno.

In fact, the presence of blokes in puffa jackets grunting into walkie talkies, that staple of the film industry, indicates the sort of production likely to end up actually on the box rather than on youhootube. It has gathered remarkably little attention. When I were a lad it would have been the subject of considerable interest, now everyone has a video camera and puts their own film together to broadcast to their mates, even if this is just happy slapping a rotweiller until it comically savages them (I’d give that three stars, four if the dog eats the camera after eating the tormenter).

Or maybe it’s just the wrong type of entertainment. With interior filming in an old house, this is likely to be something that means tight breeches on the men and plunging necklines on the women, Jane Dickens or similar. Of more interest no doubt would be a talent show. Indeed, I’ve worked out the perfect talent show formula – acts are not even allowed to perform, they simply turn up in a room and have abuse hurled at them and their dreams shattered for the entertainment of a baying mob who can, by pressing the red button, activate a hose that shoots liquid shit at the hapless soul at 800psi until they stop screaming. Surely that is kinder than the seconds of suspense that come between the host saying ‘the result of the vote is that you are…’ and the word ‘fucked!’ or ‘Coming back next week’.
For my generation at least, seeing local views on telly is still a bit special. For many, the glamour fades when the view is partially obscured by a BBC reporter in a flak jacket, or a line of riot police, but there’s something about seeing something familiar treated in an unfamiliar way that fascinates, like when they put straw down in front of an old building and, hey presto, it’s the Victorian age, marred only slightly by the double glazing and the satellite dish.

Of course those desperate to break into the business could just hang around the set hoping that the leading man meets with an accident like ‘being bludgeoned by an ambitious local’, or try to get a part by giving the director a blow job. If it’s a porno, that’s the audition.

Life Laundry

Prompted by the horrified realisation that I was turning into my mother in terms of showing hoarding tendencies, (she has the excuse of coming from a generation where you never threw anything away because a) things could be fixed rather than just replaced back then and b) even if something was knackered beyond repair, it could always be pressed into service as part of a barricade against any Nazi invasion) I decided to get rid of some of my stuff, or ‘junk’ as my wife more accurately if somewhat cruelly describes it.

This was prompted not just by the fear of turning into my Mother in terms of hoarding, but the very real possibility of turning into one of those mad old men who start off hoarding magazine collections that week by week build into a treasury of tat that you’ll treasure forever as it collects dust under your bed. Free binder with part two. Then you start hoarding all newspapers. Then before you know it you’re crapping in a plastic bag and hiding it in a cupboard to keep it safe from the Government.

My extensive video collection sat dust covered and neglected. It wasn’t just that my VCR had started playing up about three years ago and I had never bothered fixing or replacing it, nor was it that I was fickle enough to have transferred my attention first to DVDs, then to the internet (video is okay, DVD is better, youtube is hysterical but nothing, and I mean nothing, tops some desperate presenter on BidUp TV whoring himself live on telly trying to persuade you to buy towels and seeing that they have ten thousand of in stock, sit back, ‘phone your friends and start making bets on when his perspiration and desperation will become visible), it was just I had better things to do. Nintendo mainly.

One thing is for sure, anyone going into the local Oxfam will have one hell of an opportunity to get themselves a world class cinematic education on a budget. No longer will they have to feel slightly inferior because they have not seen classic movies. Even better, I was able to group them by genre.

This proved to be a little bit disturbing. There was a hell of a lot of action movies, with Arnie and Bruce very well represented. This is odd, as I always thought that I was a sensitive little soul, but based on the evidence of my movie tastes, my sensitivity extended to thinking it uncouth if a villain was dispatched without a pithy one-liner.

There’s a book by Umberto Eco about a guy who, after losing his memory, returns to his childhood home to re-read all of the books he consumed growing up. The idea is that it will trigger memory recovery but what the guy is actually trying to do is reconstruct himself from this literature. This is something I’ve often considered, and wondered about its effect, but what the book made me realise is that the character had the realisation that he was just as much a product of what he had read as what he had done. This is more than true in my case as I shamelessly plagiarise anything that might make me sound more witty or important than I actually am. So God alone knows what I would have been like if I had tried to reconstruct my character from my video collection – probably that special 80’s action combination of camp and butch and always ready with a one liner and a rocket launcher.

Obviously, there were some videos that I just could not part with. Video diaries from ten years ago, from the Hay literature festival, from the Edinburgh festival and from Sidmouth Folk Festival, back in the days where my mate owned a broadcast quality video camera and I had a jacket and tie and a microphone and you could get away with just about anything. Also, the Star Wars Trilogy that was bought for me for my 21st. Two reasons to keep this, sentimental value and because they prove, like incriminating CCTV footage, that HAN SHOT FIRST DAMMIT! Oh, and my wedding video.

A moving experience

I’ve been helping my mother move house. This mostly consists of my being by turns grumpy, sweaty, sulky and hysterical while my mother organises everything, like a cross between a ringmaster and a cowboy herding sheep.

We were leaving the home that I had lived in for a few teenage years before buggering off for a life of not so gainful employment with a brief but deeply shit career in the private sector so while weekends at home were fun, I did used to rather dread the prospect of work on a Monday. Hence the house held mixed memories and I wasn’t sorry to leave. I did wonder about Mum though, and had nightmare visions about having to pry her fingers off the door, like Thatcher leaving Downing Street (you just know that they had to get rid of the carpets because of her claw marks in them).

Not a bit of it, close door, in car, off to estate agents, not a backwards look or remark.

This was good, because by then my condition could have been described as ‘frazzled’. Mum had been packing for weeks, months even but, Jesus, so much stuff! We had got through all the proper boxes and the big boxes and were slowly having to use smaller and smaller boxes, it was like packing up Russian dolls.

Thankfully, years of playing Tetris paid off and I was able to fill the back of my hire car to the roof with loads of stuff in boxes. This was in addition to the loads of stuff I had taken to the tip.

And that was in addition to the stuff that I had taken to the tip on previous occasions, which was a lot. If the local tip had some sort of loyalty scheme, I’d probably have a skip named after me by now.

Once at the new house, we unpacked all the stuff we had packed. Two things occurred to me, the first was that I could really, really get to hate the smell of cardboard and the second was that nobody, with the exception of the owner of a furniture warehouse, needs that many side-tables. My mother has more side tables than places to put them. The laws of geometry and physics have been bent to allow he to have all her side tables in one room – it’s no coincidence that the large haydron collider went bust, its entire power output is being used to distort my mums front room into ten dimensional space to allow her to display her vast collection of nick-knacks on her side tables.

My melt-down moment came when I discovered that I had packed, transported and unpacked some red and amber glass rock things that are used as part of a flame effect for an electric fire. An electric fire which my mother no longer owns.

My melt-down did not manifest itself in the usual rant. More worryingly, it took the form of a cold and shocking realisation that I. was. Exactly. The. Same.

I helped settle Mum in her new home (realised that I liked it more than the old place) and, a couple of days later, came home and got busy.

First thing to go – my video collection. Hundreds of video tapes. Films and programmes. Thousands of hours of entertainment. This was my entertainment bank, compiled as a young man when I was pretty sure that the rest of my adult life would consist of me living alone with nothing much to do except watch my favourite movies. This was my weapon against boredom.

Three things happened; the invention of the internet, Nintendo and getting married. Believe me, the concept of being bored has not existed for me since about 1998 when the slightest sign of it is met with the perky yet dread enquiry ‘want to chat about our relationship?’.

Anyway, who’s got time to be bored? There’s freeview, digital radio, there’s Mario and Resident Evil, there’s all the stuff on the internet. Bored, alone? Spend a guilty three minutes watching surprising filth and then an hour disinfecting your hard drive, clearing your browser history and showering the guilt off.

Postcard from Norfolk – the Visitors Book

Posters adorning the walls of tube stations not only advertise coming events and products to purchase to make us happy, but perform the vital function of giving tube passengers something to look at apart from the back of the head of the girl in front (I can spend hours playing ‘guess the conditioner’ before having the shit kicked out of me for being a pervert by making one sniff too many) while waiting for a tube that’s suffered more delays than Chinese Democracy.

One of the posters that caught my attention was for the annual convention of perverts, freaks and desperate attention seekers known as ‘Erotica 08’, a sort of fair where the clowns wear leather pants with the arse cut out of them. The poster shows a zip being undone and behind it, instead of a flaccid and undersized cock with an infected piercing through it, which you’d expect to see at a fetishists convention but which the prudish rules of advertising mean you are unlikely to see, is an attractive young couple, wearing PVC nethergarments. The lady is running her tongue over the chap’s shoulder with a look of pleasure on her face that I thought women reserved for eating ice cream.

What a crock of shit (Main exhibition hall, stall C12). Have you ever seen anyone who actually partakes of all that dressing up and thrashing about with whips, chains and custard and so forth? I’ve seen them on telly documentaries and have stumbled upon them when browsing porn on-line and, by god, these people are positive trolls. I have yet to see an honest-to-god fetish type who is attractive. The reason for this is sound enough, attractive people don’t need to stick a chuck of red Leicester up their arse to have fun having sex. Fetishism is for the beauty impaired.

Or the old, and Christ, seeing a couple of wrinkles going at it in a dungeon is trauma enough for anyone; I think these people are sadists, taking pictures of themselves, putting a link to it marked ‘cheerleader fun’ and then imagining the horror of anyone clicking the link looking for a swift three and a half minutes of self indulgence. Possibly these people are so old that they can remember when dungeons were in popular use, but that’s no excuse for building one in your spare bedroom.

Possibly people explore fetishism when their sex lives get a bit stale or they want to try something different. Personally, I’d suggest having an affair with a much younger person and hence wrecking your marriage, this has to be better than ordering a gimp mask by mail order.

While some seek thrills, others find comfort in the familiar. On and off for the last few years, my family has got together for a holiday in Norfolk and, although going at different times of the year, we tend to stay at the same place, a rental cottage in a small village. As one does, one records one’s visit in the visitor’s book, passing on helpful hints, warnings about rabid badgers wandering the woods, good places to visit and the like. For those visitors with a sadistic streak, you can indulge this by mentioning a ghost, a remark sure to endear you to the parents of younger visitors.

What I noticed on a recent visit is that there are a lot of regular visitors. Nothing odd about that, but one family has taken to starting entries ‘40th visit’ and so on. Again, quite charming.

Except that somebody else did not think so. Somebody has been through the visitors’ book and made some comments about the comments and, in reaction to ‘nth visit’ had commented ‘you’re just showing off now’. Personally I thought that was hysterical.

It’s either going to encourage visitors to raise the visitor’s comment to an art form, or re-set the book to the sort of brevity that perhaps should be encouraged, remarking on the weather, any places of interest that might be enjoyed by others and which cockle stall is to be avoided. I may simply write ‘spent entire week shagging, in that chair you’re sat in now’.

Postcard from Norfolk – more fine dining

The cutlery may be silver, the plateware the finest china and the food locally sourced, humanely killed (the vegetables anyway, there’s no way to humanly kill an animal, at the end of the day it’s a bloke, a mallet and beast that has the great misfortune to taste good in a cranberry sauce), lovingly cooked and impeccably served, the wine may be fine and the company finer but, at the end of the day, if you have annoying fellow diners, dining out can be a trial. This is because it’s hard to eat food while grinding your teeth and hard to maintain a conversation about the films of Ingrid Pitt while three tables away, somebody is behaving annoyingly and your mental processing is filled to capacity with thoughts of taking your steak knife and showing those poofs in the kitchen a thing or two about carving.

Usually I don’t notice annoying diners, that’s because I am, invariably the loudest and drunkest person in the room and I happen to think that I’m hilarious and, until somebody actually throws a roll at me to shut me up, I’ll maintain that delusion. There are exceptions of course, people on mobile ‘phones are just…perplexing. Why would you be on the mobile ‘phone in a restaurant, unless it’s to call the Environmental Health and actually try to get the place closed down before the desert course which you suspect contains out of date cream in its seafood surprise, the surprise being the use of seafood in a desert course.

Of course there are children, a perennial hazard in restaurants, unless you are a middle class family and are happy to let them get enough booze down their throats to result in their hanging limp from their highchairs for the majority of the meal.

More of a hazard are boozy adults who don’t normally drink and get a bit frisky and loud. Normally this is not a problem in the environment of, say, a Yates’s Wine Lodge, Wetherspoon’s pub or boozah. At Moreston Hall the night we were dining there however, it was quite a different story, as an entire dining room slowly became aware of a woman’s voice getting louder and louder. Actually, not even all that loud, it’s just that everyone around her, in an effect rippling out, either stopped talking or lowered their voice and so the effect was more pronounced.

The reason for this is that ‘Pinkie’, as she referred to herself constantly in the third person, was regaling all at her table with a graphic description of heer going to get a bikini wax. Now I know that they wax surf boards but I had no idea that one should also wax swimwear. Like re-waxing a Barbour jacket I supposed to maintain a waterproof exterior.

No.

In the space of a few horrified minutes I learned much more about bikini waxes than anyone, and I mean anyone, should. As did everyone else in the room. Top marks to Pinkie’s husband though, he obviously reasoned like lightening that asking his wife to lower her voice could cause a cheerful but loud woman who had decided that the dominant taste of the evening should be gin to either be angry or burst into tears. Pinkie, like her story, ran her course and normal conversation resumed. Apart from the mental scarring (and the rash on Pinkie’s mimsy), no damage done.

Next evening at French’s fish and chip shop, at Wells-Next-the-Sea, all the action was outside, with the wind blowing tourists along the front. Even the stiff onshore breeze couldn’t wipe the smiles off the windsurfers who came in for hot cups of tea (no tea tastes like the tea served at fish and chip shops, except for layby café tea). Even if he did flip open his mobile ‘phone and talk loudly, he could be forgiven as we had seen him and his friends earlier in the day providing great entertainment by zipping over the surface of the sea, then falling in an explosion of spray when trying to turn. As he said into his mobile ‘mate, you missed the sail of the century!’.

Postcard from Norfolk – Fine dining

After many years of driving past the doors of Morston Hall, hotel and restaurant, we finally got round to eating there. I knew the time was right to do so when the phrase ‘we really must eat there one day’ moved from an internal thought, through mumbling, past suggestion and finally to a chant voiced with almost Gregorian-monk like discipline by all in the car. Not to have booked at this point would have resulted in the next trip past the gates of the hotel being heralded with the same chant, but in that slightly mocking and accusing tone by the rest of my family, while I simmer internally and wonder if I am the only one able to pick up the telephone or what?

The booking was made and the night arrived. It was, I have to admit, a pleasure to dress for dinner in a suit thinking ‘I am going to look good’ rather than dress for dinner thinking ‘if I spill grease on this shirt, it won’t be a disaster’.

Not that we don’t get out much, but we were the fist non-residents to pitch up for dinner. This was in part to get maximum enjoyment from the evening and also a cunning ploy to enable the consumption of two gin and tonics before having to go through to eat. On arrival we were greeted by a ridiculously young and infectiously enthusiastic young man who was less matre de and more master of ceremonies.

Our first visit? How lovely, and were we celebrating any special occasion? Yes, we were celebrating my Mother’s birthday, one week ago today. Without a pause the young man stepped forward and gave my Mother an affectionate hug, wishing her happy birthday.

Frankly, it could have gone either way. My mother is a rather prim and mannered Scottish lady and, to be honest, demonstrative affection is not something that my family are into (at least not until recent years, when the younger members have married into families and made the discovery that hugging is something you can do without alerting the council authorities). Luckily the young man was genuine, and very good looking, and probably a bit surprised at my mother hugging back. I know I was. It’s not often you see your mother surprised and melting and back to normal inside of a space of a skipped heartbeat. Granite, see, the Scots.

I looked at the waitress, twenty, gorgeous, and wondered whether I’d get away with saying it was my birthday today. Sensing this my wife steered me safely to a chair and the welcome embrace of a G&T.

Frankly, the food had a tough act to follow. The service was divine, but the food was sublime. The stand out dish though, the one I keep thinking about, was the parsnip soup. Now, I make a good parsnip soup, taking parsnips that are shaped like the ‘after’ pictures of an STD lecture and some curry paste, I can make a soup that will be hot and fiery enough to restore vigour on the coldest winter day, and that’s just with external application to the chest and pulse points, if you actually eat the stuff you feel great right up until your next bowel movement. But this soup…

They must have harvested the parsnips with a silver sickle when the moon was waxing gibbous. Such flavour, such subtlety. Then at the bottom of the bowl there was apple puree! Christ alive, it’s bonus food!

Frankly, anything after that was going to be an anti climax, yet it was obvious that the chef, if not his crepe pan, was on fire that evening. He was young and hence had something to prove and energy to spend proving it. Then, after dinner had finished, he pulled it out of the bag.

After he had done the rounds, a shy guy propelled out of the kitchen by his staff eager to see him complimented (as he deserved), we sat down to coffee. I idly reached for a chocolate and popped in my mouth and, oh; my. Chocolate and chilli! You can stick crack up your arse (and maybe you do).

Postcard from Norfolk – Brancaster Beach

One of the best beaches in the world is Brancaster Beach in north Norfolk. It has a constant breeze blowing along it, meaning that it is beloved of kite flyers and kite surfers. This means there is always something to watch, the kites themselves if you like that sort of thing, or, even more entertaining, bickering couples trying to get their kites aloft in a truly world-class wind. The wind also ensures that any litter on the beach is heavy and, as such, can’t really be classed as litter at all. Crisp packets and other gossamer trash don’t stand a chance, being blown tumbling the length of the beach towards the sort of post codes where these things inevitably turn up (thinking about it, such a phenomenon could explain the multiplicity of aged and faded tat that I find in my front yard). The wind also blows sand-devils, making the beech at once eerie and fascinating.

For those that like value for money, this is the beach for you. When the tide is out you get a LOT of beach. On some days I’m pretty sure you could make it all the way to Holland by just rolling up your trousers.

I’ve been on the beach in summer, pitched a camp with windbreaks and sun-tents, folding chairs and rugs because when I go on holiday I like to take more kit than a reasonably funded Victorian era to the African interior, back when servants were cheap and tents were made of teak, ivory, canvas and came with panelled studies with stoves. In the summer the waves actually do come reasonably close to the seashore proper and for those of us used to visiting off season, the effect is slightly claustrophobic. The reason that the sea needs to be so near the beach of course is that it is obliged to make some child’s holiday complete by eroding the castle they have just spent the last three hours building, thereby handing out an important life lesson about the permanency of things.

The beach kiosk at Brancaster beach is so successful that it’s actually doubled in size. Possibly the accommodate improved kitchen facilities (BLTss recommended) and possibly to stock not just bucket and spades but small amounts of earthmoving equipment for children returning for a second year who have not forgotten last year’s erosion fiasco and have spent the intervening year studying drainage, levees and canal systems and are about to progress from castles to fortresses.

But the stand out attraction at Brancaster is Parking Bloke. The entrance to the car park is marked by a tiny caravan, which gently rocks in the wind. With the white coat of authority and a roll of tickets, he is one of the most charming features of the north Norfolk coast.

It costs a couple of quid to stay in the car park, no big deal. What’s most amusing though is seeing tourists pitch up in truly monstrous 4x4s and baulk at paying a couple of quid to park, pulling a U turn and zooming off in a cloud of indignation and planet-buggering pollution. What’s even funnier is checking out the faces of the blonde girlfriends up for a dirty weekend and their realisation that even though the bloke owns an expensive 4x4, he’s a cheapskate and is unlikely to lavish her with jewellery, ponies, holidays, cosmetic surgery and handbags.

Why do the 4x4s have to be in the car park at all? Why don’t they just park on the beach or somewhere in the tidal marshes. That way we could all laugh our arses off when the tide comes in and they discover that what they really, really need to cope with the off-road conditions of the north Norfolk coast is a boat.

Parking Bloke has seen it all. He’s in his little caravan in all weathers, rain or shine. My favourite experience – being instructed to avoid the top end of the car park, because that’s where the helicopter carrying the golfers playing the Royal Brancaster were arriving. From the gleam in his eye, I knew he was going to charge them for parking.

Postcard from Corsica – Boules

In the town of St Florent in the evening, men come to the town square and play boules. In the summer the sun heats the dirt square and in the evening that heat is released with each soft thud of a falling boul, landing in a puff of dust. There are arguments, sometimes as heated as the mid-day square. Voices are raised and fingers pointed within inches of noses. This is boules.

For the first few days, nobody took much notice of the young man who sat and watched the men each evening. He did not play and did not have any boule with him, probably a tourist and at best a distraction. Each evening he would sit there, watching the games. He left only when the last game had finished.

At the end of the week he approached one of the regulars and asked him, in halting French, who the best player was? The best? Easy, the Fat One, but he was no fun to play, he gloated when he won, he’d once gloated so much when he beat the local champion, an old man, that that poor old fellow had never played again.

The young man nodded.

The next evening, the first man to arrive in the town square found the young man already there. He had a set of boule and was tossing them with quiet deliberation. The metal spheres would land in a variety of patterns, grouped together or in a line. It was obvious that this was a young man of skill.

He greeted his first arrival in his tourist French, would he like a game? Just until his real friends turned up? It would be rude to refuse and the local and the young man played. The young man beat the local, but narrowly. The young man claimed beginner’s luck and explained that the game could easily have gone the other way.

More locals began turning up. One by one, the young man played them all, always winning narrowly. He was, the locals agreed, a natural, a master at placing each of those shiny metal balls exactly where he wanted them to go.

The Fat Man watched all of this silently. He was not impressed or intimidated. He knew that it did not matter how close the boule was placed to the tiny jack ball, he could still win. For the Fat Man was a violent player. Not for him the gentle artful placing of the boul. Rather, he would wait until the game had nearly concluded and blast his opponent’s boul away from the jack, leaving his own closest to small white ball.

The sun was balanced on top of the hill when the Fat One played the young man. The jack went down, the young man threw. Marvellously close. The Fat One threw, nearly as close. Again they threw. The Fat One smiled, he saw in the dirt the pattern of lines of force that would scatter this young man’s boul to the gutters of the square. The young man threw his final boul.

It landed on top of another of his, and stayed there. The men in the square were too surprised to gasp. Here, surely, was an art beyond skill. Even fifty years ago, they would have been debating burning this young man at the stake. The Fat One quivered with rage but, knowing all eyes were upon him, threw. It was a valiant effort, scattering silver balls. All except the young man’s final boul, which simply settled in the dirt, touching the jack. Smiling, the young man picked up his boul and walked out of the square.

Later, at his grandfather’s house, the young man returned the boul to their owner, an old man who used to be the local boules champion.

‘You should teach others that throw grandfather.’ The young man said. ‘You could be rich.’ The old man smiled and replied in slow French to his English grandson.

‘Not everyone has the patience or the skill, and you need to be family. Now, tell me again about the expression on the Fat One’s face when he was beaten by a tourist.’