PROVERBS
Have I put all my eggs in one basket? I have indeed and I've counted them. By my reckoning (although they haven't hatched yet) I should have more chickens than I will know what to do with. That is if the eggs don't become an omelette. The eggs are sharing the basket with virtually all my irons which I have taken out of the fire. The fire I started in order to burn my bridges. I have the distinct impression that an irresistible force is leading me up a path with flower-beds on both sides. I'm on it now and curiously enough, the path bears foot-prints of what look like some idiots in a hurry. My companion, a charming visually impaired fellow who recently asked me for directions and has been tagging along behind me ever since, remarked that it didn't appear to him to be the kind of place one would encounter an angel, treading or doing anything else for that matter. After a little while we came across a stable. The door was open and we didn't see much in the line of ponies but I shut the door anyway. Can't be too careful. Then I heard a ghastly groaning sound coming from a nearby wood-pile. It was getting dark so we hurried away. A little further on, when the gathering darkness was competing with the gloaming, I got the shock of my life. A jibbering toothless old hag emerged from the bushes and launched herself at me. I pushed her away roughly in the direction of my companion and after a little while they seemed to be getting along like a blazing block of flats. A further indication that love is blind. He certainly accepted her sight unseen. They sat down on a large boulder which seemed to have been in place for quite some time because from what I could gather there was absolutely no moss. I rushed off into the undergrowth to talk to the two Swedish top-models I saw picking raspberries when the old crone made her lunge for me. They giggled coyly as they saw me coming and disappeared. It started to rain. The old crone was knocked unconscious by a Labrador and I narrowly avoided a plummeting Siamese. We picked our way gingerly through forlorn piles of bedraggled domestic pets, slumped motionless in the puddles. After a while the rain stopped. I looked up at the sky, it was full of dark threatening clouds but they were all shiny at the edges. I took this to be a good sign. I was wrong.
A little further on, my blind chum grew visibly excited. When I asked him what the matter was he said that could feel that his house must be very close by. I turned round to ask him how he knew and then saw that he was holding a bloody mass of tissue and aorta which he had picked up and was trying rather inexpertly to stuff into a hole in his chest. He may have dropped an H in the struggle. In a clearing, we came across a hand-painted sign "Dunroamin" it said and behind that was an ugly semi-detached castle. So my blind friend was English. I couldn't place his accent.
His mother greeted us at the portcullis and ushered us into the kitchen. She had a strange shaggy wig-like thing on her head but otherwise seemed perfectly normal. It was only when I saw the recently shaved dog shivering by the fire that I deduced that she was suffering from a hang-over. On the kitchen table I was I was slightly surprised to see two pies and a baby in a skillet. My blind friend pushed past me and thrust a finger into each pie, which, in retrospect, seemed remarkably enterprising of him. His mother, demonstrating that there is absolutely no correlation whatsoever between absence and affection, picked up the skillet and wacked him on the head. It seemed to me that at least one of his eyes was now bigger than his stomach. I didn't have time to study him much because my thoughts were with the baby, which was out of the frying pan, in the air and heading for the dog. I hauled the ashen-faced child out of the embers and brought him over to the sink to give him a bit of a rinse. I had very nearly finished when, through the window above the sink I caught sight of the two Swedish top-models gambolling naked together at the edge of the forest. Imagine my horror when I returned my attention to the baby to discover it had disappeared. An odd gurgling sound seemed to be coming from the plug-hole. It was time to leave. Discretion is the better part of valour, particularly in the face of a skillet-wielding wino. As we left, we pushed the old crone into the moat. What with my chum being blind and my having a pronounced and endearing squint, and the old woman smelling to high heaven, possibly higher, it seemed the only moat worth bothering about. Despite what they say.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
LOU ROUBALLOU
Even his coughing didn’t wake her. He had kissed the nape of her neck and traced a line with his finger from her pelvis to her shoulder. Rubbed his toes against the soles of her feet. Held the curve of her stomach in the palm of his hand. Wrote her name with his nose on her temple and gingerly plaited the wisps of blonde hair which straggled out towards him across the pillow like an invitation.
Her body lay half-wrapped under a white sheet, which offered only the vaguest outline of her legs but then stretched in taut furrows across her perfect bottom. The angle of a bared hip curved down to the soft roundness of her stomach. He imagined the tight curls of pubic hair massed in the strict dark triangle between her legs. She lay with her back to him, and as she changed position he kissed her spine through the sheet as if to coax her round again - but not enough to wake her.
He thought about their lovemaking of the night before and how she moved under him, her hair plastered across her face, deftly making poetry of his dedicated clumsiness. How afterwards, conscious of his weight on her, he had raised himself slightly on his elbows to look long into her eyes, trying to see behind her tender gaze evidence of something else.
Later, as they lay on their backs looking at the ceiling and the stencilled blue frieze, she had stretched her arm across his face to feel for her cigarettes and spectacles on the bedside table. He had kissed her wrist, then the crook of her arm and pressed his face into the soft hollow of her shoulder as she leant over him.
Turning towards her as she put on her glasses, he traced slow circles over her stomach with his fingertips. He watched her take the tobacco out of a plastic pouch, drop it into the hollow of a cigarette paper, and roll it into a thin tight cylinder before putting it between her lips...
A church bell wearily chimed the hour. Eleven. A vague echo in the street outside and the footsteps of old people passing by. Stripes of sunlight and shadow on the thin white curtain.
She stirred under the sheet and drew herself slowly into his arms. He smiled to himself as he pressed her to him with the palm of his hand on the small of her back. She raised her head to lay her cheek on his. After a moment, with an almost imperceptible sigh, she opened her eyes.
She was awake.
Even his coughing didn’t wake her. He had kissed the nape of her neck and traced a line with his finger from her pelvis to her shoulder. Rubbed his toes against the soles of her feet. Held the curve of her stomach in the palm of his hand. Wrote her name with his nose on her temple and gingerly plaited the wisps of blonde hair which straggled out towards him across the pillow like an invitation.
Her body lay half-wrapped under a white sheet, which offered only the vaguest outline of her legs but then stretched in taut furrows across her perfect bottom. The angle of a bared hip curved down to the soft roundness of her stomach. He imagined the tight curls of pubic hair massed in the strict dark triangle between her legs. She lay with her back to him, and as she changed position he kissed her spine through the sheet as if to coax her round again - but not enough to wake her.
He thought about their lovemaking of the night before and how she moved under him, her hair plastered across her face, deftly making poetry of his dedicated clumsiness. How afterwards, conscious of his weight on her, he had raised himself slightly on his elbows to look long into her eyes, trying to see behind her tender gaze evidence of something else.
Later, as they lay on their backs looking at the ceiling and the stencilled blue frieze, she had stretched her arm across his face to feel for her cigarettes and spectacles on the bedside table. He had kissed her wrist, then the crook of her arm and pressed his face into the soft hollow of her shoulder as she leant over him.
Turning towards her as she put on her glasses, he traced slow circles over her stomach with his fingertips. He watched her take the tobacco out of a plastic pouch, drop it into the hollow of a cigarette paper, and roll it into a thin tight cylinder before putting it between her lips...
A church bell wearily chimed the hour. Eleven. A vague echo in the street outside and the footsteps of old people passing by. Stripes of sunlight and shadow on the thin white curtain.
She stirred under the sheet and drew herself slowly into his arms. He smiled to himself as he pressed her to him with the palm of his hand on the small of her back. She raised her head to lay her cheek on his. After a moment, with an almost imperceptible sigh, she opened her eyes.
She was awake.
Monday, September 22, 2008
RITES OF PASSAGE
My son, aged 13, has just acquired his first mobile telephone.
In sub-Saharan Africa, boys of his age are starved for two weeks and then tied to an ant-hill whilst other slithering biting insects are inserted into their underpants. Virgins dance rhythmically and dizzingly around them, their little pounding feet kicking up small clouds of dust. An elder of the tribe advances inexorably towards the writhing child, a blunt stone in his wizened hand with a view to monogramming the kid’s body with swirling tribal motifs…
In the Brazilian rain forest, teenage boys are encouraged to drink bat urine, noted for its powerful hallucinogenic qualities, before having a large wooden peg hammered through their foreskin. Then, to the throbbing beat of the maracas, they are ritually abused by four uncles, a lemur, two llamas, a squinty-eyed old armadillo and a passing German anthropologist.
In the dark, dank, dripping dangling jungles of Northern Borneo, small boys are tied to an ant-hill, with a wooden peg hammered through their foreskin (which according to tribal lore and western statistics, offers effective protection against the nastier forms of sexually-transmitted diseases). Their front teeth are then filed into an attractive “v” shape whilst baboon-snot is ladled into their left ear. They are then expected to limp off into the jungle in the company of a squinty-eyed old armadillo. On no account must they return to the village without the sacred necklace. This they will have fashioned themselves from the pubic hair of fourteen recently rogered virgins (including at least one albino), the pelvic girdles of seven boys of more or less the same age and the prostate gland of the squinty-eyed old armadillo. They have 45 minutes. Their return to the village is greeted by a rousing cacophony of raucous rejoicing, as a rabble of senile old grandmothers with v-shaped teeth prepare the celebratory stew from the entrails of the slaughtered teenagers and the spleen of a passing German anthropologist.
In these far-flung countries, with their ancient cultures and their negligent dress codes, these rituals represent a rite of passage, an essential step in the age-old process of leaving aside childish things and taking one’s place in society as a man.
And how do we, in the West, mark this vital transition?
We give the nonchalant gum-chewing little bollocks a mobile telephone…
My son, aged 13, has just acquired his first mobile telephone.
In sub-Saharan Africa, boys of his age are starved for two weeks and then tied to an ant-hill whilst other slithering biting insects are inserted into their underpants. Virgins dance rhythmically and dizzingly around them, their little pounding feet kicking up small clouds of dust. An elder of the tribe advances inexorably towards the writhing child, a blunt stone in his wizened hand with a view to monogramming the kid’s body with swirling tribal motifs…
In the Brazilian rain forest, teenage boys are encouraged to drink bat urine, noted for its powerful hallucinogenic qualities, before having a large wooden peg hammered through their foreskin. Then, to the throbbing beat of the maracas, they are ritually abused by four uncles, a lemur, two llamas, a squinty-eyed old armadillo and a passing German anthropologist.
In the dark, dank, dripping dangling jungles of Northern Borneo, small boys are tied to an ant-hill, with a wooden peg hammered through their foreskin (which according to tribal lore and western statistics, offers effective protection against the nastier forms of sexually-transmitted diseases). Their front teeth are then filed into an attractive “v” shape whilst baboon-snot is ladled into their left ear. They are then expected to limp off into the jungle in the company of a squinty-eyed old armadillo. On no account must they return to the village without the sacred necklace. This they will have fashioned themselves from the pubic hair of fourteen recently rogered virgins (including at least one albino), the pelvic girdles of seven boys of more or less the same age and the prostate gland of the squinty-eyed old armadillo. They have 45 minutes. Their return to the village is greeted by a rousing cacophony of raucous rejoicing, as a rabble of senile old grandmothers with v-shaped teeth prepare the celebratory stew from the entrails of the slaughtered teenagers and the spleen of a passing German anthropologist.
In these far-flung countries, with their ancient cultures and their negligent dress codes, these rituals represent a rite of passage, an essential step in the age-old process of leaving aside childish things and taking one’s place in society as a man.
And how do we, in the West, mark this vital transition?
We give the nonchalant gum-chewing little bollocks a mobile telephone…
A SPECIAL OFFER FROM AVEDA
A friend of mine asked me recently if I would buy her some hair tonic at the new Aveda shop in Kensington Church Street. Outside the shop I picked up the trestle sign that had just been blown over by a gust of wind, hoping I suppose that this modest act of courtesy would ingratiate me to the attractive sales assistants I would surely encounter in the store...
I entered the shop and as I was examining the intimidating shelves of creams, gels, oils and ointments, I was approached by a tall, very attractive girl with blue eyes and flickery eye-lashes wearing a rather tight black silk dress. She asked me with great warmth and politeness if she could help and before I had a chance to reply she had offered me a cup of herbal tea. This tasted like boiled straw with a dollop of molasses in it, but I welcomed it for the contact it provoked with the delightful sales assistant.
I had to call my friend to establish exactly what kind of hair tonic she required because there were several options available in the hair tonic line. Two bottles of Hair Volumising Tonic were subsequently produced and brought to the counter. Then, to my astonishment, the beautiful girl asked me if I would like a hand massage. I was so taken aback that I said, rather gracelessly, that I would never look a gift horse in the mouth, particularly, I might have added, one with such obviously beautiful teeth.
She sat me down in a kind of sun-lounger and placing a folded towel over her thigh, invited me to lay my hand on top of it. This I did, my heart racing. Her décolleté was about two feet from my nose, and jiggling. She asked me questions about my life in France, my accent and my vineyard and I replied as coherently as I could while she swabbed my increasingly clammy hand with exfoliating cleanser. I thought I might pass out from pure pleasure and thinly-disguised desire. Her eyes were professionally neutral but I felt they had that Customs Officer capacity to look into my soul. Her amusement at what she saw there was carefully veiled but she wore a faint knowing smile which they may have taught her at Aveda to encourage male customers to fall hopelessly and irrevocably in love with her.
She smoothed cream onto the back of my hand and then, gently but firmly, began the massage. She pressed the tips of my fingers, the flesh between each joint, then each joint. She squeezed the skin between my thumb and forefinger and interlaced her thin elegant fingers with mine which made me feel as if we were on honeymoon.
She rubbed the palm of my hand with hers and explained that Aveda products were entirely natural, not tested on animals and were all made from renewable resources. I could only croak in reply like an equatorial marsh frog in a Brazilian rain forest.
« Where did you learn to be such a good masseuse? » I stammered feebly, trying not to lower my eyes to the curve of her breasts, the occasional sight of which was bruising my eyeballs and provoking a strange humming noise in the back of my head. She said that it was part of her Aveda training but also that her flat-mate was a massage trainer. I had a brief vision of myself stretched out on a pile of Turkish cushions, my body shiny with jasmine oil, as two outrageously beautiful women worked on my pressure points. I was only able to disentangle myself from this vision of paradise with the thought that the flat-mate in question was probably an Ethiopian former body-builder with who she’s been in a stable relationship since they met at an aromatherapy workshop in 1993.
When I came to, the girl was looking at me quizzically and with a subtle unforced professionalism she asked « Do you often meditate? » I tried to compose my features into those of an open sensitive person whose capacity for calm and passive meditation in no way conflicted with his vigorous sexual appetite and all-round general manliness. « Yes », I lied.
She swivelled my chaise-longue and shifted her weight in the low wooden stool on which she was sitting in order to start on my left hand. I caught a fleeting glimpse of the inside of her right knee, an image I will probably take with me to my grave.
All too soon she was making firm circular movements with her thumbs in the palm of my hand: I could tell that the session was being drawn to a close. I tried to distract her, hoping that conversation would bring us into extra time. A kaleidoscope of hormones made rational thought almost impossible, but in desperation I gurgled, pointing to a small red scar on the inside of her elbow: « Did you burn yourself frying an egg? ». She laughed, a light shimmering laugh and my heart filled with pride that she had found my half-joke amusing. My pleasure was short-lived: «What a moron! » I groaned to myself. « A beautiful girl like that would never do anything as mundane as fry an egg ». What’s more, judging by her eye-wateringly perfect body, it was clear that she lives exclusively off a diet of low-fat yoghurt and organic celery..« Ironing » she said simply.
How my heart went out to her! Here was further proof of the unjust world in which we live. That an ethereal blonde goddess of such beauty should have to do her own ironing! I had to bite my lip hard not to volunteer to do all her ironing for her for the rest of her life if only she would extend my massage for a few more minutes...
Reluctantly, I removed my hand from her thigh and tried to prepare my body for the short walk to the cash register. My hands felt light and tingly, my heart was filled with love and my head was a confusion of noble sentiments and lascivious thoughts.
Somehow I made it to the counter where I was able to prop myself up as I paid and she put my hair tonic into a bag.
« Would you like to be kept informed of up-coming promotions from Aveda ? », she asked sweetly, pushing a form across the counter for me to fill in. I could only nod weakly. I couldn't remember my first name, I filled in the day's date for my date of birth and I made up my post-code completely.
« And this is a voucher for a Free Neck and Shoulder Massage - would you like that? » Somehow my mouth had suddenly gone dry and my tongue was glued to my front teeth: « Yurrgggh » I managed, nodding like a maniac.
« I'm Sarah, ring me if you would like to make an appointment». My knees were going to give out. Sarah! Sarah! What a lovely name! Proud, strong Sarah of the Bible! A name of over-powering sensuality! « Sarah! » I murmured to myself and the sound slid from my tongue like a kiss, caressed my lips and floated out of my mouth like a cloud.
« Here's my telephone number », she said as she pressed the Aveda card into my shaking hand. « Call me whenever you'd like to come in »...
I took an involuntary step back as my eyes glazed over and I pictured us dining in a small intimate restaurant in the Knightsbridge area. A red tasselled lamp-shade funnelling a cone of light onto the starched linen tablecloth. My hand laid gently but firmly on hers between the silverware and the wine glasses. Her delicate wrist, circled by a discreet diamond-style bracelet, her pale elegant forearm...
Someone was pushing me gently but firmly from behind and I realised that I had stepped back into the fur-coated robustness of a middle-aged woman who was fending me off with her hand-bag.
Sarah glided from behind the counter and taking me gently but firmly by the elbow, she steered me towards the door. I tried to pull myself together. I made a clumsy attempt to shake her hand in farewell, a love unrequited. Instead, off-balance, I grabbed the tips of her fingers and waggled them feebly. Curse it. She smiled a heavenly smile. Maybe she wouldn't hold it against me. I grinned sheepishly from the pavement. I began to leave and then glanced back to see her already talking to another customer. With a heavy heart I turned and walked straight into the trestle sign outside the shop. It fell over with a frightful banging and crashing. I didn't dare look up. I examined the sign with exaggerated attention as I hastily picked it up and put it back in place, before striding, what I hoped was purposefully, off in the direction of Notting Hill Gate...
A friend of mine asked me recently if I would buy her some hair tonic at the new Aveda shop in Kensington Church Street. Outside the shop I picked up the trestle sign that had just been blown over by a gust of wind, hoping I suppose that this modest act of courtesy would ingratiate me to the attractive sales assistants I would surely encounter in the store...
I entered the shop and as I was examining the intimidating shelves of creams, gels, oils and ointments, I was approached by a tall, very attractive girl with blue eyes and flickery eye-lashes wearing a rather tight black silk dress. She asked me with great warmth and politeness if she could help and before I had a chance to reply she had offered me a cup of herbal tea. This tasted like boiled straw with a dollop of molasses in it, but I welcomed it for the contact it provoked with the delightful sales assistant.
I had to call my friend to establish exactly what kind of hair tonic she required because there were several options available in the hair tonic line. Two bottles of Hair Volumising Tonic were subsequently produced and brought to the counter. Then, to my astonishment, the beautiful girl asked me if I would like a hand massage. I was so taken aback that I said, rather gracelessly, that I would never look a gift horse in the mouth, particularly, I might have added, one with such obviously beautiful teeth.
She sat me down in a kind of sun-lounger and placing a folded towel over her thigh, invited me to lay my hand on top of it. This I did, my heart racing. Her décolleté was about two feet from my nose, and jiggling. She asked me questions about my life in France, my accent and my vineyard and I replied as coherently as I could while she swabbed my increasingly clammy hand with exfoliating cleanser. I thought I might pass out from pure pleasure and thinly-disguised desire. Her eyes were professionally neutral but I felt they had that Customs Officer capacity to look into my soul. Her amusement at what she saw there was carefully veiled but she wore a faint knowing smile which they may have taught her at Aveda to encourage male customers to fall hopelessly and irrevocably in love with her.
She smoothed cream onto the back of my hand and then, gently but firmly, began the massage. She pressed the tips of my fingers, the flesh between each joint, then each joint. She squeezed the skin between my thumb and forefinger and interlaced her thin elegant fingers with mine which made me feel as if we were on honeymoon.
She rubbed the palm of my hand with hers and explained that Aveda products were entirely natural, not tested on animals and were all made from renewable resources. I could only croak in reply like an equatorial marsh frog in a Brazilian rain forest.
« Where did you learn to be such a good masseuse? » I stammered feebly, trying not to lower my eyes to the curve of her breasts, the occasional sight of which was bruising my eyeballs and provoking a strange humming noise in the back of my head. She said that it was part of her Aveda training but also that her flat-mate was a massage trainer. I had a brief vision of myself stretched out on a pile of Turkish cushions, my body shiny with jasmine oil, as two outrageously beautiful women worked on my pressure points. I was only able to disentangle myself from this vision of paradise with the thought that the flat-mate in question was probably an Ethiopian former body-builder with who she’s been in a stable relationship since they met at an aromatherapy workshop in 1993.
When I came to, the girl was looking at me quizzically and with a subtle unforced professionalism she asked « Do you often meditate? » I tried to compose my features into those of an open sensitive person whose capacity for calm and passive meditation in no way conflicted with his vigorous sexual appetite and all-round general manliness. « Yes », I lied.
She swivelled my chaise-longue and shifted her weight in the low wooden stool on which she was sitting in order to start on my left hand. I caught a fleeting glimpse of the inside of her right knee, an image I will probably take with me to my grave.
All too soon she was making firm circular movements with her thumbs in the palm of my hand: I could tell that the session was being drawn to a close. I tried to distract her, hoping that conversation would bring us into extra time. A kaleidoscope of hormones made rational thought almost impossible, but in desperation I gurgled, pointing to a small red scar on the inside of her elbow: « Did you burn yourself frying an egg? ». She laughed, a light shimmering laugh and my heart filled with pride that she had found my half-joke amusing. My pleasure was short-lived: «What a moron! » I groaned to myself. « A beautiful girl like that would never do anything as mundane as fry an egg ». What’s more, judging by her eye-wateringly perfect body, it was clear that she lives exclusively off a diet of low-fat yoghurt and organic celery..« Ironing » she said simply.
How my heart went out to her! Here was further proof of the unjust world in which we live. That an ethereal blonde goddess of such beauty should have to do her own ironing! I had to bite my lip hard not to volunteer to do all her ironing for her for the rest of her life if only she would extend my massage for a few more minutes...
Reluctantly, I removed my hand from her thigh and tried to prepare my body for the short walk to the cash register. My hands felt light and tingly, my heart was filled with love and my head was a confusion of noble sentiments and lascivious thoughts.
Somehow I made it to the counter where I was able to prop myself up as I paid and she put my hair tonic into a bag.
« Would you like to be kept informed of up-coming promotions from Aveda ? », she asked sweetly, pushing a form across the counter for me to fill in. I could only nod weakly. I couldn't remember my first name, I filled in the day's date for my date of birth and I made up my post-code completely.
« And this is a voucher for a Free Neck and Shoulder Massage - would you like that? » Somehow my mouth had suddenly gone dry and my tongue was glued to my front teeth: « Yurrgggh » I managed, nodding like a maniac.
« I'm Sarah, ring me if you would like to make an appointment». My knees were going to give out. Sarah! Sarah! What a lovely name! Proud, strong Sarah of the Bible! A name of over-powering sensuality! « Sarah! » I murmured to myself and the sound slid from my tongue like a kiss, caressed my lips and floated out of my mouth like a cloud.
« Here's my telephone number », she said as she pressed the Aveda card into my shaking hand. « Call me whenever you'd like to come in »...
I took an involuntary step back as my eyes glazed over and I pictured us dining in a small intimate restaurant in the Knightsbridge area. A red tasselled lamp-shade funnelling a cone of light onto the starched linen tablecloth. My hand laid gently but firmly on hers between the silverware and the wine glasses. Her delicate wrist, circled by a discreet diamond-style bracelet, her pale elegant forearm...
Someone was pushing me gently but firmly from behind and I realised that I had stepped back into the fur-coated robustness of a middle-aged woman who was fending me off with her hand-bag.
Sarah glided from behind the counter and taking me gently but firmly by the elbow, she steered me towards the door. I tried to pull myself together. I made a clumsy attempt to shake her hand in farewell, a love unrequited. Instead, off-balance, I grabbed the tips of her fingers and waggled them feebly. Curse it. She smiled a heavenly smile. Maybe she wouldn't hold it against me. I grinned sheepishly from the pavement. I began to leave and then glanced back to see her already talking to another customer. With a heavy heart I turned and walked straight into the trestle sign outside the shop. It fell over with a frightful banging and crashing. I didn't dare look up. I examined the sign with exaggerated attention as I hastily picked it up and put it back in place, before striding, what I hoped was purposefully, off in the direction of Notting Hill Gate...
Thursday, June 21, 2007
IF IT’S FRIDAY, IT MUST BE GHENT
I don't know much about Ghent and what I do know I learnt from a South African performance artist whose next project involves a live S+M routine and a vat of risotto. Apparently, there is a relationship between the stirring action (risotto) and the whipping action (S+M). As a result, I have some doubts about her reliability as a tourist guide. However, she had an engaging smile and she did mention the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb Triptych in the Cathedral - a surprisingly orthodox recommendation considering her odd artistic predilections.
So here I am, sitting within a beer-mat's fling of St Bavo’s Cathedral, with a glass of Bruges Tripel in front of me. I haven't had a drink for ten days and I feel distinctly light-headed. I wonder what aspect of the beer is Tripel. I fear it is the alcohol content.
I am staying with Ief and An, who I met in Le Lau in the South of France. They have generously offered to lend me their van to go to the Languedoc to pick up my wine, my books and other stuff although that is another story. I am not really looking forward to going but I am absolutely delighted to be in Ghent.
An and Ief are a very attractive couple and deeply, nonchalantly, cool people and Ghent is altogether in their image.
Unfortunately, at 45 and a half, I am increasingly sensitive to the apparently omnipresent young and Ghent is distressingly full of them. I must make a mental note to avoid university towns from now on. Fortunately, I asked directions to the Tourist Office from a police officer who was definitely older than I am. This made me feel slightly better.
A more elderly population appears to congregate around the Cathedral, so my sense of increasing decrepitude is slightly diminished. The trendy here favour the jumble sale fashion - mix and don't match - which reminds me of New York and a girl I once loved. The sky is a wonderful Mediterranean blue and the occasional clouds, heavy and Irish-grey in the middle, wispy white at the edges, move at an obliging speed in front of and away from the sun. The waiter is friendly, girls in short skirts go cycling by and the faded grandeur of the architecture is raising my spirits. The Tripel is taking effect. As a result - or perhaps it is the proximity of the Cathedral - I feel I am in a sort of ante-chamber to paradise. You know, the room next door to the Swedish-style massage parlour where an exaggeratedly tall top model, whose lipstick matches her pointy shoes, might pummel away at one's nether regions.
I think it is time to pay my bill and go and see the paintings in the Cathedral.
I have been to see the paintings in the Cathedral.
Inexplicably, I had difficulty finding the front door. When I found it, I did rather a lot of pushing when I should have been pulling. "Trekken" for Christ's sake. A small and very ancient nun, who was presumably pushing according to the regulations, eventually staggered past me squinting against the sunlight, muttering unsaintly imprecations. I made up for my incompetence by sneaking past the ticket-seller to the Mystic Lamb. Everything is a bit blurred and there seemed to be triptychs everywhere.
Struggling to see it over the heads of two rows of giggling German teenagers, I found the Lamb slightly over done.
In the crypt, I speed-walked past the dimly-lit exhibits, pausing only to marvel at a solid silver sculpture of John the Baptist's head on a silver salver. He looked surprisingly smug for someone who had just been decapitated.
I was hoping that in this medieval jewel in the crown of Ghentish ecclesiastical art I might find a public lavatory. No such luck. Back upstairs, the pressure on my bladder caused me to give only cursory glances to the 21 chapels in 1980's World of Interiors-style black and white marble. Not to mention the morose-looking bearded fellow who was playing the harp beside yet another triptych. I couldn't even find the celebrated statue of Jesus lying down and looking grey, thin and in agony.
I, on the other hand, looking grey, fat and in agony, pushed my way out of the Cathedral and limped across the square to the Tourist Office. Where I found the lovely lavatories thoughtfully laid on by the splendid municipal authorities. I am beginning to like Ghent more and more.
Now, I decided, was the time to find a small item with which to ingratiate myself to my kind hosts - and a little something for their children. But how to do this on the budget of a blind one-legged recently-dispossessed Somali goat-farmer paying alimony?
I found a bookshop in a nearby street. Its garish blue-and-yellow plastic bags and slightly dog-eared clientele suggested that it specialises in second-hand books. Hesitating only briefly between the distinct economic advantage and the potential social risk that this discovery represented, I entered the shop. Almost immediately I found a comic-strip book, circa 1981, about a footballing hero, for Daan, aged 7. I knew he had an interest in football because his mother had warned me that I would be obliged to go to a match the next day. He's a goal-keeper - as I was at his age. I had to give up quite early on in my career because of back problems. Brought on by too much bending down to pick the ball out of the back of the net. An is an enthusiastic supporter. She even emailed me the Flemish for "the-referee-is-a-lousy-no -good-beer-swilling-accountant-from-Brussels-born-out -of-wedlock-with-bad-breath -and-a-tiny-willy". Quite a mouthful. The insult of course, not the referee.
Tikka, aged six, presented greater difficulty. Nothing in the needlework section, too young for flower-arranging, cookery books all too obviously soup-stained, so I settled for that reliable old fall-back, a book about cats.
Thrilled with my purchases, I approached the pre-pubescent sales assistant at the till. Adopting the self-deprecating pseudo-embarrassment of the tourist, I ask if she speaks English. She looks at me with raw contempt and when I ask her if she could wrap up my books she does it so badly that even I could have done it better. I say that she can keep her ugly plastic bag and she knows why I don't want it and her contempt deepens. I smile a squinty-eyed smile, heavy I hope with irony. She ignores me.
Back on the street, I resolve to buy an oil-lamp for An and Ief. An oil-lamp would strike just the right balance between romantic feminine ornamental domesticity and rugged practical outdoor manliness. The ultimate ying and yang of presents. And, if made in China, dead cheap too.
I spend an hour looking for one. No luck. I find a shop selling Chinese artefacts but these include illuminated paintings of waterfalls which blink on and off, cheap lithographs of over-fed koi and a hand-carved balsa-wood model of a DC10. I can't see any of this integrating successfully into the décor of a house in the South of France. I try a shop selling stuff from Morocco - perhaps a North African lantern for the terrace? I see a rather attractive one, pick it up and appraising it with what I hope looks like the practised eye of the connoisseur, I surreptitiously examine the price-tag. Eighty-seven fucking euros. I nearly drop the bloody thing and, looking as if I have just remembered an urgent appointment, leave.
It is nearly six o'clock and despite my failure, it is time to call and An and Ief. I’ll just have to arrive empty-handed.
Ief tells me to take the Number Three tram towards Mariakirke, from the clock tower. Fortunately I am standing near the tower and as it happens, as we speak I am being very nearly run over by the Number Three tram in question. Ief suggests with a serious sense of the surreal that I get off two stops before Mariakirke. But how am I to know? Belgian trams don’t indicate the stops from the inside. Sensitive as I am, I am not psychic. However, I have a trick up my sleeve. To the grim-faced tram-driver with bad skin, I sing inexpertly: “Ay Mariakirke, Mariakirke, je t’aimais tant, c’est entre les tours de Bruges et Gand?” adding, rather superfluously, “Zonder liefde, warme liefde, lachte duivel, de zwarte duivel”.
“Two euros”, he replies, with the sense of poetry and lyricism for which the Vlaanderenland is renowned.
By some miracle, I get off at the right stop and find my way without difficulty to Tortelduifstraat.
Tortelduifstraat, I ask you. Some people’s lives are so bathed in love, harmony and a trust fund offering 8 per cent per annum, it makes you sick. An and Ief are no exception. They live above a film studio and an office complex the size of which would make a Warner Brother blush. Their open plan apartment is so open plan it reminded me of Wyoming. Their terrace, with its uninterrupted views of Lille to the South and the Zuider Zee to the North, is the largest undeveloped space in Belgium.
They have a flat screen toaster, tasteful furniture and a competent, pretty baby-sitter who is studying astro-physics.
Their delightful children rush towards me when I arrive and cling on to my legs like in the films as if I were a favourite uncle. They are beautiful kids, well-dressed and their hair is nicely combed. Our cordial relationship cools however when I offer them my presents. Tikka was immediately and ostentatiously unimpressed and is clearly not familiar with the reassuring Anglo-Saxon formula that it’s the thought that counts. I should have bought her a make-up kit from Mac. I’ll know next time. Daan, after some initial enthusiasm, began leafing through his book looking for references to Superman. Disappointed, he handed the book to his father.
Ief, charming man that he is, went into raptures over my choice. How, in between the beatings and solitary confinement that constituted his early childhood, this comic-book was his only solace, along with some class A drugs, home-made jeniever and a spotty-faced, pig-tailed little girl next door called Frida.
Which just goes to show that, even though the Belgians have an international reputation for premature balding and being beastly to black people in the Congo, they do have a kindly considerate side too.
An emerges from her office to welcome me. She is currently trying to persuade Daniel Day-Lewis to star in a twelve-part series about bank-robbing Free-runners, to be shot in Buggenhout this Christmas. Working title: “Kill Wittgenstein”. She seems quite optimistic that she can get some funding from the Norwegian herring industry. I tell her that I once met a woman at a party who was a friend of a friend of the woman who ran the Media Programme office in Paris at the end of the 1980’s…
After several aperitifs, we left for the Vier Tafels. It’s a theme restaurant in the Patershol area of the city. The theme is Belgium’s rich and glorious colonial past. I know this because they have crocodile, elephant and zebra on the menu. There’s giraffe too. Served with their celebrated Hutu sauce. I wanted to order the Waterzooi but Ief informed me that this was a kind of hippopotamus, best eaten when there isn’t an “r” in the month. So I settled for musk-rat à la Katanga instead. Delicious.
From there, we went to a really extraordinary place, the Véloken. This former cupboard was turned into a bar by the brother of the man who plays the harp in St Bavo’s. The bearded owner was wearing an Eddy Merckx tee-shirt and a pair of battered red ballet shoes. An told me that he had been a dancer at the Paris Opera. That he had been hugged by Rudolph Nureyev in 1973 and hadn’t had a wash since. He had lived in Montmartre and had revelled in the bohemian glamour of artistic society. He had frequented the bars where impoverished artists paid for their drinks with their paintings.
Eventually, he returned to Ghent, having been invalided out of the Opera after nearly drowning during a performance of Swan Lake. Knowing that all the artists were in Ostend, making love to each others’ wives, writing bad poetry and committing suicide, he resolved to open a bar where down-on-their-luck cyclists could pay for their drinks with their bicycles. As a result there isn’t much head-room. Bicycles hang from the ceiling and - irritatingly - the rest of the available space is taken up with oil-lamps. If only I had known earlier.
It was here that I fell victim to an infamous Ghent speciality - the misleidend toeristisch gezelschapsspel. The object of this ploy is to charm people like myself into thinking that Belgium is one great happy family and that everyone is related to one another. No sooner had we ordered our beers (two Vandenbrouckes and a Peeters Doubel), a mother and daughter combo, sponsored by the Town Hall, entered the bar. They sat down opposite us at the trestle table, ducking under the saddles and handlebars.
Ief, charming man that he is, immediately engaged them in conversation. Now it seemed to me quite clear that these two were Romanian gypsy types – an appreciation reinforced by the fact that the daughter spent a lot of her time rubbing her foot against the inside of my left calf. A long conversation ensued. So many consonants and so few vowels. I could only catch the occasional word – “forty euros” – “Somalia” – “goat-farmer” – “first cousin” – “alimony”...
It turns out, according to Ief, charming man that he is, that they have an aunt in common, a blind librarian on the Belgo-Dutch border who went on a package tour to the Horn of Africa in the seventies. Ordering another round, we all wept into our Boonens, carried away by the emotion of this impromptu family reunion.
From there, we staggered out of the Priest’s arsehole, into the rain, across St Jacob’s square, passing one or two heroic pointing statues which made me feel deeply inadaquate.
In the Trollenkelder, Ief talked me through the beer menu. Twenty-five minutes later, after much deliberation, we opted for three West-Vleterens. The waiter zig-zags to our table, affable and prematurely balding. An inclination of the head. Three West-Vleterens please. His pimply face darkens. A long conversation follows. Even I, for whom « Jacky Ickx » and « Trekken » constitute 90% of my Flemish vocabulary, realised that that there was a problem. It became clear that the last bottle of West-Vleteren was offered to Leopald 1st just before his coronation in 1831. The Greeks had offered him 17 cases of Retsina the previous year. But to no avail.
I wonder what Charlotte had offered him in 1815. A case of Guinness probably...
Embarrassed, we settled for two Cokes and a Seven-Up.
It was this incident that caused me to have the following revelation. There are really only four beers in Belgium. And two of them come from Holland.
In fact, it is the advertising, bottling and labelling industries that are the true wonders of Belgian brewing. All those beers with evocative names and intriguing stories – they are all invented by someone like Ief. And as ever, the secret is in the quality of the ingredients. These age-old secrets are jealously guarded through the generations – and handed down from one marketing person to another.
I have pierced the enigmatic mystery of the Belgian brewing industry and I am prepared to reveal all.
First, the ingredients : Trappistiche, Kreug, Vlaamse, Brel, Vleteren, Trekken, Schlammen, etc... You put these carefully selected deeply evocative names into an old sock. You let them ferment a bit. Then you empty them out onto a table, taking care to remove bits of old toe-nail and sundry fluff. Ensuring that the operation is taking place in a sterile, anaerobic environment, away from direct sunlight, in a constant temperature, you shuffle them around and combine them according to the pre-arranged price structure. One word will do for the cheap beers. Two words for the mid-range. For the really expensive ones, three words are obligatory and ideally should include some reference to a monastery.
Doubel and Tripel can be added indiscriminately, according to taste.
The advertising campaign consists of declaring that the beer is currently unavailable.
I really don’t know why Heineken and Carlsberg haven’t tried it.
It was time to go home. Outside it was raining so hard it was obvious why the municipal authorities came up with the idea of the canal system - to get rid of all that bloody water.
Perfect weather for a waterzooi, I remarked to Ief as we were overtaken on our way to the tram by two citizens who had opted to swim home.
On the tram back to Tortelduifstraat, Ief interrupted an animated conversation with his half-brother the tram driver to inform me that public transport was free at the weekends as an incentive to people not to drink and drive. I thought this was a bit rich given the fact that unless you were intimately related to someone in the Belgian brewing industry (sic) there is absolutely no way that you would ever get your hands on a enough beer in one evening to become a danger to the public.
So it was, despite a few scoops of the electric soup thoughtfully laid on by Ief before he went to bed, sober as a judge, I tripped over the shag-pile carpet, collided with the Cassoni sofa and went to bed.
I don't know much about Ghent and what I do know I learnt from a South African performance artist whose next project involves a live S+M routine and a vat of risotto. Apparently, there is a relationship between the stirring action (risotto) and the whipping action (S+M). As a result, I have some doubts about her reliability as a tourist guide. However, she had an engaging smile and she did mention the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb Triptych in the Cathedral - a surprisingly orthodox recommendation considering her odd artistic predilections.
So here I am, sitting within a beer-mat's fling of St Bavo’s Cathedral, with a glass of Bruges Tripel in front of me. I haven't had a drink for ten days and I feel distinctly light-headed. I wonder what aspect of the beer is Tripel. I fear it is the alcohol content.
I am staying with Ief and An, who I met in Le Lau in the South of France. They have generously offered to lend me their van to go to the Languedoc to pick up my wine, my books and other stuff although that is another story. I am not really looking forward to going but I am absolutely delighted to be in Ghent.
An and Ief are a very attractive couple and deeply, nonchalantly, cool people and Ghent is altogether in their image.
Unfortunately, at 45 and a half, I am increasingly sensitive to the apparently omnipresent young and Ghent is distressingly full of them. I must make a mental note to avoid university towns from now on. Fortunately, I asked directions to the Tourist Office from a police officer who was definitely older than I am. This made me feel slightly better.
A more elderly population appears to congregate around the Cathedral, so my sense of increasing decrepitude is slightly diminished. The trendy here favour the jumble sale fashion - mix and don't match - which reminds me of New York and a girl I once loved. The sky is a wonderful Mediterranean blue and the occasional clouds, heavy and Irish-grey in the middle, wispy white at the edges, move at an obliging speed in front of and away from the sun. The waiter is friendly, girls in short skirts go cycling by and the faded grandeur of the architecture is raising my spirits. The Tripel is taking effect. As a result - or perhaps it is the proximity of the Cathedral - I feel I am in a sort of ante-chamber to paradise. You know, the room next door to the Swedish-style massage parlour where an exaggeratedly tall top model, whose lipstick matches her pointy shoes, might pummel away at one's nether regions.
I think it is time to pay my bill and go and see the paintings in the Cathedral.
I have been to see the paintings in the Cathedral.
Inexplicably, I had difficulty finding the front door. When I found it, I did rather a lot of pushing when I should have been pulling. "Trekken" for Christ's sake. A small and very ancient nun, who was presumably pushing according to the regulations, eventually staggered past me squinting against the sunlight, muttering unsaintly imprecations. I made up for my incompetence by sneaking past the ticket-seller to the Mystic Lamb. Everything is a bit blurred and there seemed to be triptychs everywhere.
Struggling to see it over the heads of two rows of giggling German teenagers, I found the Lamb slightly over done.
In the crypt, I speed-walked past the dimly-lit exhibits, pausing only to marvel at a solid silver sculpture of John the Baptist's head on a silver salver. He looked surprisingly smug for someone who had just been decapitated.
I was hoping that in this medieval jewel in the crown of Ghentish ecclesiastical art I might find a public lavatory. No such luck. Back upstairs, the pressure on my bladder caused me to give only cursory glances to the 21 chapels in 1980's World of Interiors-style black and white marble. Not to mention the morose-looking bearded fellow who was playing the harp beside yet another triptych. I couldn't even find the celebrated statue of Jesus lying down and looking grey, thin and in agony.
I, on the other hand, looking grey, fat and in agony, pushed my way out of the Cathedral and limped across the square to the Tourist Office. Where I found the lovely lavatories thoughtfully laid on by the splendid municipal authorities. I am beginning to like Ghent more and more.
Now, I decided, was the time to find a small item with which to ingratiate myself to my kind hosts - and a little something for their children. But how to do this on the budget of a blind one-legged recently-dispossessed Somali goat-farmer paying alimony?
I found a bookshop in a nearby street. Its garish blue-and-yellow plastic bags and slightly dog-eared clientele suggested that it specialises in second-hand books. Hesitating only briefly between the distinct economic advantage and the potential social risk that this discovery represented, I entered the shop. Almost immediately I found a comic-strip book, circa 1981, about a footballing hero, for Daan, aged 7. I knew he had an interest in football because his mother had warned me that I would be obliged to go to a match the next day. He's a goal-keeper - as I was at his age. I had to give up quite early on in my career because of back problems. Brought on by too much bending down to pick the ball out of the back of the net. An is an enthusiastic supporter. She even emailed me the Flemish for "the-referee-is-a-lousy-no -good-beer-swilling-accountant-from-Brussels-born-out -of-wedlock-with-bad-breath -and-a-tiny-willy". Quite a mouthful. The insult of course, not the referee.
Tikka, aged six, presented greater difficulty. Nothing in the needlework section, too young for flower-arranging, cookery books all too obviously soup-stained, so I settled for that reliable old fall-back, a book about cats.
Thrilled with my purchases, I approached the pre-pubescent sales assistant at the till. Adopting the self-deprecating pseudo-embarrassment of the tourist, I ask if she speaks English. She looks at me with raw contempt and when I ask her if she could wrap up my books she does it so badly that even I could have done it better. I say that she can keep her ugly plastic bag and she knows why I don't want it and her contempt deepens. I smile a squinty-eyed smile, heavy I hope with irony. She ignores me.
Back on the street, I resolve to buy an oil-lamp for An and Ief. An oil-lamp would strike just the right balance between romantic feminine ornamental domesticity and rugged practical outdoor manliness. The ultimate ying and yang of presents. And, if made in China, dead cheap too.
I spend an hour looking for one. No luck. I find a shop selling Chinese artefacts but these include illuminated paintings of waterfalls which blink on and off, cheap lithographs of over-fed koi and a hand-carved balsa-wood model of a DC10. I can't see any of this integrating successfully into the décor of a house in the South of France. I try a shop selling stuff from Morocco - perhaps a North African lantern for the terrace? I see a rather attractive one, pick it up and appraising it with what I hope looks like the practised eye of the connoisseur, I surreptitiously examine the price-tag. Eighty-seven fucking euros. I nearly drop the bloody thing and, looking as if I have just remembered an urgent appointment, leave.
It is nearly six o'clock and despite my failure, it is time to call and An and Ief. I’ll just have to arrive empty-handed.
Ief tells me to take the Number Three tram towards Mariakirke, from the clock tower. Fortunately I am standing near the tower and as it happens, as we speak I am being very nearly run over by the Number Three tram in question. Ief suggests with a serious sense of the surreal that I get off two stops before Mariakirke. But how am I to know? Belgian trams don’t indicate the stops from the inside. Sensitive as I am, I am not psychic. However, I have a trick up my sleeve. To the grim-faced tram-driver with bad skin, I sing inexpertly: “Ay Mariakirke, Mariakirke, je t’aimais tant, c’est entre les tours de Bruges et Gand?” adding, rather superfluously, “Zonder liefde, warme liefde, lachte duivel, de zwarte duivel”.
“Two euros”, he replies, with the sense of poetry and lyricism for which the Vlaanderenland is renowned.
By some miracle, I get off at the right stop and find my way without difficulty to Tortelduifstraat.
Tortelduifstraat, I ask you. Some people’s lives are so bathed in love, harmony and a trust fund offering 8 per cent per annum, it makes you sick. An and Ief are no exception. They live above a film studio and an office complex the size of which would make a Warner Brother blush. Their open plan apartment is so open plan it reminded me of Wyoming. Their terrace, with its uninterrupted views of Lille to the South and the Zuider Zee to the North, is the largest undeveloped space in Belgium.
They have a flat screen toaster, tasteful furniture and a competent, pretty baby-sitter who is studying astro-physics.
Their delightful children rush towards me when I arrive and cling on to my legs like in the films as if I were a favourite uncle. They are beautiful kids, well-dressed and their hair is nicely combed. Our cordial relationship cools however when I offer them my presents. Tikka was immediately and ostentatiously unimpressed and is clearly not familiar with the reassuring Anglo-Saxon formula that it’s the thought that counts. I should have bought her a make-up kit from Mac. I’ll know next time. Daan, after some initial enthusiasm, began leafing through his book looking for references to Superman. Disappointed, he handed the book to his father.
Ief, charming man that he is, went into raptures over my choice. How, in between the beatings and solitary confinement that constituted his early childhood, this comic-book was his only solace, along with some class A drugs, home-made jeniever and a spotty-faced, pig-tailed little girl next door called Frida.
Which just goes to show that, even though the Belgians have an international reputation for premature balding and being beastly to black people in the Congo, they do have a kindly considerate side too.
An emerges from her office to welcome me. She is currently trying to persuade Daniel Day-Lewis to star in a twelve-part series about bank-robbing Free-runners, to be shot in Buggenhout this Christmas. Working title: “Kill Wittgenstein”. She seems quite optimistic that she can get some funding from the Norwegian herring industry. I tell her that I once met a woman at a party who was a friend of a friend of the woman who ran the Media Programme office in Paris at the end of the 1980’s…
After several aperitifs, we left for the Vier Tafels. It’s a theme restaurant in the Patershol area of the city. The theme is Belgium’s rich and glorious colonial past. I know this because they have crocodile, elephant and zebra on the menu. There’s giraffe too. Served with their celebrated Hutu sauce. I wanted to order the Waterzooi but Ief informed me that this was a kind of hippopotamus, best eaten when there isn’t an “r” in the month. So I settled for musk-rat à la Katanga instead. Delicious.
From there, we went to a really extraordinary place, the Véloken. This former cupboard was turned into a bar by the brother of the man who plays the harp in St Bavo’s. The bearded owner was wearing an Eddy Merckx tee-shirt and a pair of battered red ballet shoes. An told me that he had been a dancer at the Paris Opera. That he had been hugged by Rudolph Nureyev in 1973 and hadn’t had a wash since. He had lived in Montmartre and had revelled in the bohemian glamour of artistic society. He had frequented the bars where impoverished artists paid for their drinks with their paintings.
Eventually, he returned to Ghent, having been invalided out of the Opera after nearly drowning during a performance of Swan Lake. Knowing that all the artists were in Ostend, making love to each others’ wives, writing bad poetry and committing suicide, he resolved to open a bar where down-on-their-luck cyclists could pay for their drinks with their bicycles. As a result there isn’t much head-room. Bicycles hang from the ceiling and - irritatingly - the rest of the available space is taken up with oil-lamps. If only I had known earlier.
It was here that I fell victim to an infamous Ghent speciality - the misleidend toeristisch gezelschapsspel. The object of this ploy is to charm people like myself into thinking that Belgium is one great happy family and that everyone is related to one another. No sooner had we ordered our beers (two Vandenbrouckes and a Peeters Doubel), a mother and daughter combo, sponsored by the Town Hall, entered the bar. They sat down opposite us at the trestle table, ducking under the saddles and handlebars.
Ief, charming man that he is, immediately engaged them in conversation. Now it seemed to me quite clear that these two were Romanian gypsy types – an appreciation reinforced by the fact that the daughter spent a lot of her time rubbing her foot against the inside of my left calf. A long conversation ensued. So many consonants and so few vowels. I could only catch the occasional word – “forty euros” – “Somalia” – “goat-farmer” – “first cousin” – “alimony”...
It turns out, according to Ief, charming man that he is, that they have an aunt in common, a blind librarian on the Belgo-Dutch border who went on a package tour to the Horn of Africa in the seventies. Ordering another round, we all wept into our Boonens, carried away by the emotion of this impromptu family reunion.
From there, we staggered out of the Priest’s arsehole, into the rain, across St Jacob’s square, passing one or two heroic pointing statues which made me feel deeply inadaquate.
In the Trollenkelder, Ief talked me through the beer menu. Twenty-five minutes later, after much deliberation, we opted for three West-Vleterens. The waiter zig-zags to our table, affable and prematurely balding. An inclination of the head. Three West-Vleterens please. His pimply face darkens. A long conversation follows. Even I, for whom « Jacky Ickx » and « Trekken » constitute 90% of my Flemish vocabulary, realised that that there was a problem. It became clear that the last bottle of West-Vleteren was offered to Leopald 1st just before his coronation in 1831. The Greeks had offered him 17 cases of Retsina the previous year. But to no avail.
I wonder what Charlotte had offered him in 1815. A case of Guinness probably...
Embarrassed, we settled for two Cokes and a Seven-Up.
It was this incident that caused me to have the following revelation. There are really only four beers in Belgium. And two of them come from Holland.
In fact, it is the advertising, bottling and labelling industries that are the true wonders of Belgian brewing. All those beers with evocative names and intriguing stories – they are all invented by someone like Ief. And as ever, the secret is in the quality of the ingredients. These age-old secrets are jealously guarded through the generations – and handed down from one marketing person to another.
I have pierced the enigmatic mystery of the Belgian brewing industry and I am prepared to reveal all.
First, the ingredients : Trappistiche, Kreug, Vlaamse, Brel, Vleteren, Trekken, Schlammen, etc... You put these carefully selected deeply evocative names into an old sock. You let them ferment a bit. Then you empty them out onto a table, taking care to remove bits of old toe-nail and sundry fluff. Ensuring that the operation is taking place in a sterile, anaerobic environment, away from direct sunlight, in a constant temperature, you shuffle them around and combine them according to the pre-arranged price structure. One word will do for the cheap beers. Two words for the mid-range. For the really expensive ones, three words are obligatory and ideally should include some reference to a monastery.
Doubel and Tripel can be added indiscriminately, according to taste.
The advertising campaign consists of declaring that the beer is currently unavailable.
I really don’t know why Heineken and Carlsberg haven’t tried it.
It was time to go home. Outside it was raining so hard it was obvious why the municipal authorities came up with the idea of the canal system - to get rid of all that bloody water.
Perfect weather for a waterzooi, I remarked to Ief as we were overtaken on our way to the tram by two citizens who had opted to swim home.
On the tram back to Tortelduifstraat, Ief interrupted an animated conversation with his half-brother the tram driver to inform me that public transport was free at the weekends as an incentive to people not to drink and drive. I thought this was a bit rich given the fact that unless you were intimately related to someone in the Belgian brewing industry (sic) there is absolutely no way that you would ever get your hands on a enough beer in one evening to become a danger to the public.
So it was, despite a few scoops of the electric soup thoughtfully laid on by Ief before he went to bed, sober as a judge, I tripped over the shag-pile carpet, collided with the Cassoni sofa and went to bed.
DOUBLE DUTCH
I sent this letter to a Dutch couple, Maaike and Han, very good friends of mine, after we passed each other in our cars recently. I was living in the south of France at the time. They had driven from Holland, were tired and a very mild domestic argument was in progress, as I learnt subsequently from a mutual friend. I was late for something as usual. So we didn’t stop. This letter was inspired by our non-meeting.
Some references may be obscure to people who don’t know anything about Mr and Mrs Schat, or Dutch bicycles, or thyroid conditions, so some explanations are necessary.
Mrs Schat, to whom this letter is addressed, is a former nurse and was involved in local politics, before she resigned from her political party, a perfectly inoffensive organisation, very slightly to the right of centre. Small of stature, she is hardly overweight at all. It is true that she has had a minor accident in the family Volvo estate during each of their last three holidays to Olargues, in the South of France.. They have a house in the village which they are renovating.
Her husband, a charming, good-natured man full of wit and intelligence, works as a doctor, checking whether people are as ill as they say they are in order to get off work. It is an unglamorous, sometimes dangerous task, but his income rivals that of some of the bigger-spending African dictators. Han did have a brief and eye-wateringly libidinous career as a Dutch naval officer but neither he, nor his father, have ever had the slightest contact with the German Army. I am virtually certain that Han has not consulted any more German internet porn sites than either you or I. One of the things that upset the Dutch most about the German occupation of Holland during the Second World War was that the Wermacht took most of their bicycles with them when they left. The Gazelle is a popular brand of bike in Holland. The stock has long since been more than replenished but the theft still wrankles, even today. The Schats have three very attractive daughters and one very unattractive dog – none of whom, to my knowledge, has ever been mistreated in any way... The expression «rather be hung from a cliff by his finger-nails and stung to death by killer bees » is one of my own invention and can only be used under licence. Don’t worry if you don’t get the Hilversum joke. You may be too young. I’m not sure I do either. I think « fishermen’s stockings » is weirder and funnier. Lastly, Maaike and Han are, as far as I know, perfectly happily married.
Dear Maaaaaike, We have been close for a long time now. It is therefore with great affection and not a little emotion that I permit myself to pen these few lines. Accept them as a measure of the love and respect which have always been your due, an indication of the uncanny and spontaneous affection which drew us together all those years ago and which has never faltered since, despite the vagaries of life and the many kilometers which lie between us.
Some of the things I have to say may be painful and unpleasant but I feel it my duty as a friend – nay more than just a friend - to grab the nettle by the horns. I hope, in all humility, that you will find these simple words of advice and insight, from a very dear admirer, helpful in the difficult weeks which surely lie ahead. Use them as a life-belt in the stormy sea of life, as a totem, a relic, a icon, a colostomy bag if you will, - to use a metaphor which should strike a chord with you, my dear Maaaaike, you who are to the medical profession and the Christain Democrats what the tsunami was to the tourism industry of South East Asia.
But I digress. Where to begin ? It is rare and deeply unsettling thing to catch a fleeting glimpse of the private lives of those we care about : especially if what we see is a putrid tangle of sordid infamies, conjugal violence, sexually-transmitted diseases and a festering, suppurating, pus-filled, fly-infested haemoroid of hate-ridden mutual distrust and right-wing politics.
Although I pretended not to see you when we passed each other on the road between Colombières and Mons when you were down here some time ago, in fact I saw it all. In a flash, as you went by, I saw it all.
I saw Han’s face contorted with mad rage, his temples glistening with hate, his lips drawn back over his fleshy pink gums in a ghastly grimace of uncontrollable anger and disgust. His fist, his fleshy fist, knuckles as white as a dairymaids arse, poised menacingly, about to pummel you into the glove compartment... You – oh how my heart went out to you at that instant, cowering behind a tattered yellow route map of Europe, a scream silent in your throat. Your children, your poor lovely children, wide-eyed with terror, huddled together in the back seat, their beautiful innocent faces transfigured with fear, yet, as I drove past, I registered the look of weary resignation on their tiny little faces, as they bore witness once again to the sordid scene that has been played out oh so many times before in the past. A scene that has shattered their infancy, destroyed their childhood, a scene which will surely cripple them in adolescence and will ultimately lead, in adulthood, to their joining the medical profession in the forlorn hope that they might bestow some of the love and care that was so cruelly missing in the solitary, emotionally-handicapped psychotic desert that their ravaged lives will certainly become.
Even poor bedraggled Frans, fearfully peering out from a crack in the shoe box in which she had spent the last 957 kilometers, seemed to be thinking wistfully of those long terrible weeks she had spent at kennels on the Zuider Zee in 1995, where you sent her for her own safety when you discovered that Han made frequent visits to an utterly revolting German internet site entitled « A Dog is a Man’s Best Friend ».
These horrible, hateful, hideous images have been haunting my days and disturbing my nights ever since that fateful afternoon, when the air in the valley was heavy with the scent of cherry blossom, the mountains glittering with silver streams, the vines fresh and fragile with new growth. As if Mother Nature herself was mocking you – the beauty of the Vallée d’Orb a cynical counterpoint to the sinister drama unfolding in the Volvo estate. If only I had had the courage to intervene ! I could have turned the van around and rushed to your defence. I could have shown the dreadful brute that masquerades as your gentle ever-loving husband that I, for one, would not stand by and let one of my dearest, blondest and most overweight friends be bullied and bruised and belittled by a brash brutish braggart. Instead I meekly continued along the road to Colombières in order to beat up a friend of mine who had forgotten to feed my dog...
Faced with such calumny, plunged unwillingly into the everyday violence and squalor of a domestic nightmare, an innocent onlooker to a tragedy that is at once banal and universal, my mind a maelstrom of anguished thoughts, of crippling indecision, of woeful hesitations and a ghastly anxiety which gnawed at my bones, bruised my eyeballs and made me feel quite peculiar when I got out of the shower... WHAT COULD I DO ? ? ?
I should have realised earlier that the lurking hydra of conjugal abuse was lurking in the dark corners of your lives, lurking and ready to strike when the lurking period was over. How profoundly horrified was I, and yet strangely touched, when I realised that destiny had ensured that I, your one true loyal and trusted friend, should witness for himself what others could only guess at.
Your neighbours, turning a blind ear to the thumps and muffled screams, the bruises and broken limbs that you valiantly declared to have acquired whilst carrying out a pogrom of communist homosexual black people during their annual whist drive with your fascist friends from the town hall. Your parents, distraught to see great clumps of your hair missing - and how puzzled they were to find fistfuls of it in Han’s sports coat pockets – how bravely you passed it off as one of the symptoms of a rare tropical disease that you had contracted from sitting on the bus next to a filthy little woman from Sumatra. Your children, fighting back their tears, explaining to the other kids in the play-ground that your black eye and dislocated shoulder were the result of an Ikea wardrobe collapsing on you as you were assembling it.
Such courage ! Such loyalty !
Blessèd be the silently beaten up for they shall find succour in the Lord and verily shall sitteth on the right hand thereof, for ever and ever, yeh even unto eternity and until the end of time, whichever cometh sooner.
The signs were all too apparent to the sensitive, concerned and attentive friend which I consider myself to be. I should have realised that something was up when you started sound-proofing the house in Olargues, the fact that you consistently crashed the Volvo during each Summer holiday, a subconscious gesture of limp defiance against the tyrant, pathetic yet strangely heroic in its symbolic rebellion against your husband’s (can we still accord him the honour of this appellation, the lowly slug?) brutal authority.
To an outsider’s eyes it looked as if you were an incredibly incompetent woman driver, a spoilt bourgeoise housewife more concerned about trivial domestic details than taking responsibility for her husband’s smart car, the fruit of years of toil and struggle in the challenging professional world of insisting that people who are half dead from fatigue, Industrial Stress Disorder or trade unionism are perfectly fit for work.
But not to me, although I admit that sometimes it was easy for me to fall into that trap and I must say that on more than one occasion I thought to myself – oh how I regret it now ! – « What a stupid bitch ! Why doesn’t her long-suffering ever-loving husband just give her a comprehensive beating up... ? » Little did I know ! ! ! Your crashing into bollards, municipal buildings, lamp-posts, domestic animals and small children were pitiful cries for help in an uncaring world, a world that was blind to your suffering, heedless to your pain and stoney-cold in its response to one woman’s silent anguish...
Now my darling Maaaaaike, now you have an ally, a friend, a co-conspirator, an accomplice, a support, a crutch, a crotch and a helper through the valley of tears and bitter lamentations that is your putrid marriage.
How many times must you have asked yourself in your darkest hour « Naar wie kan ik gaan in mijn donkerste uren ? ? »
I cannot turn the clock back. I cannot meddle in the intricacies of your convoluted marriage, for which, despite your unblemished reputation, you might bear some slight, very slight, glimmer of responsibility. I am reluctant to expose Han to any actual physical harm due to the fact that I am an intellectual and am also mindful of the unpleasant consequences which might well ensue. Nevertheless, we both know that what he deserves is a fate so terrible that he would far prefer to be hung from a cliff by his finger-nails and stung to death by killer bees.
I have made certain inquiries, which, I feel, it is my duty, as a friend, an admirer, an adviser, a potential lover and beneficiary therefore of your father’s huge estate, to reveal. As you ponder the bleak future that stretches out before you like a pool of vomit, this information may help you to take the agonising decision which torments you day and night and which caused you in an unguarded moment to throw yourself into the reassuring arms of your young neighbour, Remko, a sensitive blonde body-builder from Apeldoorn.
Hans Schat, that beaming, friendly-faced ex-naval officer is not the easy-going Dutch person that he would have us believe.
His father, Heinz-Keonig von Schatt zu und bei Toiletenbohl, came to Holland one Wednesday afternoon in July 1941 once the coast was clear and the pathetic resistance of a handful of squinty-eyed clog-wearing tulip farmers had been effortlessly crushed.
In the confusion of victory he came, with many other camp followers, in lipstick and high heels, tottering and tittering in the footsteps of the goosesteps of the jackboots of the proud Wehrmacht, part of the parasitic detritus of modern warfare: prostitutes, dentists, lion-tamers, three-card-trick men and... and... bicycle thieves...
As UberGazellenführer he had direct responsibility for the rounding up, internment and export of millions of rusty Dutch bicycles. Witnesses have never been able to forget the tragic sight of those seemly endless columns of humiliated bikes being pushed to the collection areas, many with flat tyres, saddles skew-wiff, others with their chains hanging limply from their sprockets, some even had their little wicker baskets still attached to their handlebars... How one pitied those saddles which had, up to then, been nuzzling the soft thighs and perfectly formed bottoms of smiling Dutch girls in dirndl skirts, now to find themselves crushed and pummelled under the cruel weight of the feldgrau arses of the fleeing Wermacht!
Von Schatt, the Eponymous Boche, as he was known to his intimates (two particularly unsavoury characters, Achmed, a one-eyed Morrocan knife-thrower, and Zlob, a part-time abortionist from Southern Bulgaria), threw himself into the task with such gay abandon that he quickly acquired heamorroids from excessive use of the bicycle pump. It is a miracle he ever sired a child at all.
It is rumoured that Han was a conceived as a consequence of a sordid black market transaction in which his mother offered the unscrupulous UberGazellenführer a night of vigourous sexual activity in return for the last puncture repair kit in Oostellingenwerf. At the end of the war the poor woman was held (and quickly released on account of her overwhelming body odour) by the local Resistance Committee, a schizophrenic ventriloquist and a three-legged pigeon impersonator (he could only do stool pigeons).
When they wished to subject her to the customary humiliation of shaving her head for collaborating with the enemy, it was found that she was already bald and they had to content themselves with shaving off her moustache instead... In a cruel twist of ironic fate she was later decorated (The Iron Clog - First Class – with Tulip Leaves) for her work in the stuggle against the invader.
She transmitted so many diseases of a sexual nature so prolifically that the German war effort in the Low Countries was literally brought to its knees and thus seriously hampered. For a time there was only one soldier manning the Atlantic Wall between Delfzijl and Knokke-Heist who had not caught a debilitating infection - and that was thought to be only because he preferred poodles.
Her reputation was such that many soldiers leapt at the chance to fight on the Eastern front rather than run the risk of catching the clap in Zuit op Googledorf. Han’s father was later posted to Croatia where he was responsible for the requisitioning of prams. These were sent back to Germany to be melted down and turned into Panzers. With the fall of the Balkans, the portly von Schatt was seen on the last baby-carriage out of Zagreb. Achmed and Zlob took it in turns to push him all the way to Berlin.
In the chaotic aftermath of the war, von Schatt senior was spirited out of Germany, with the aid of the devoted Achmed and Zlob, disguised as a bath-mat. A previous attempt to flee the justice of the victorious Allies came to grief when he presented himself at the Swiss border posing as a Tyrolian yodeller, An alert border guard tried to confront him when his false handlebar moustache fell off. The handlebars, taken, of course, from a requisitioned Dutch Gazelle, made such a noise when they hit the ground that von Schatt barely had time to run for it.
In 1974, a copy of a Venezuelan cycling magazine was sent to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Tel Aviv. In it, there was a photograph of a smiling but visibly aged von Schatt standing shyly outside his bicycle repair shop-cum-massage-parlour in Caracas. He looked perfectly riduculous in garish sombero and faded lederhosen and the decision was taken to let the old lunatic die in peace. It is understood that when he finally passed away he was much lamented by the local bicycling community, according to a spokesperson...
Han was brought up by his mother and her brother, an alcoholic midget with buck teeth and a wooden leg. For several years they eked out a living, selling eke. After a time they moved to a southern suburb of Hilversum where they lived upside-down in a cardboard box. It was there, they said, that they got the best reception..
It was here too that Han was taken into care after being arrested for selling dirty pictures. He would spend hours laboriously cutting out colour photographs from women’s magazines, photographs which he would then dip into a bucket of sump oil before selling them on the streets. Several years later a traumatised local authority auctioned him off to the lowest bidder, a kindly old cobbler and his toothless wife.
With them, Han passed some of the happiest years of his life. They lived in a charming little cottage in the woods with a thatched roof and freshly painted shutters, a little vegetable garden in front, sweet pea and forget-me-nots tumbling over the little wicket fence. Inside, the house was spartan but spotless, the old iron stove black and silent in the corner, the crisp red-and-white check table-cloth spread over the wooden kitchen table, fresh flowers in a dainty little vase, a kitten curled up in the armchair beside the fire.
Only the 3784 pairs of women’s knickers hastily stuffed into a dresser by Han’s distraught owner marred the bucolic atmosphere of this sylvan idyll. Owing to a rare thyroid condition Han spent his nights stealing underwear from the neighbours’ washing lines which the kindly old cobbler had to return to their owners the next morning, red-faced and limping to conceal his erection.
Han, against everybody’s expectations, eventually got a place at the University of Hoogezend-Sappemeer to study the backs of cereal boxes but due to a clerical error he later become a clergyman.
Shortly afterwards he was invalided out of the Dutch Reformed Church and found himself a job as a laboratory technician where he excelled in the demanding task of injecting guinea-pigs with super-glue.
It was here, in these unpromising circumstances, amidst the test tubes and the formalin, he met you, dear Maaaaike. You were squirting lemon juice into a rabbit’s eye in your father’s laboratory.
How could Han’s heart fail to beat a little faster as he saw you, pipette in hand calmly approaching the little huddled ball of trembling white fur cowering in its filthy cage?
You, blonde and smiling in your lab technician’s red bolero and fisherman’s stockings.
He, awkward and pale, transfixed before the first and only true love of his life.
The rabbit, writhing and half-dead in the piss-sodden sawdust.
The rest, as they say, is misery. He forced you into marrying him under threat of informing your father about your benzedrine habit and what you liked to do with rabbits when you weren’t squirting liquid in their eyes.
Using your father’s connections, Han was able to forge his doctor’s papers and become a medical practioner. After a shakey start (he was once brought before a medical tribunal for grabbing a patient by the scruff of the neck, tickling them under the chin and injecting them with printer’s ink) he became the affluent and much-respected doctor that he is today.
So you see, Dear Maaaike, Han is not the man he appears to be. His life is a tissue of lies, a web of exaggerations, a litany of half-truths. He is an impostor, a charlatan, a fraud. You have every right to divorce him - he has deceived you from the outset. By revealing the sordid details of his origins and early life I hope I have smoothed the path to a happier life for you and your darling daughters, and poor bedraggled Frans.
Far be it from me to influence you – the decision is yours to take and yours to take alone, however as you must know by now, that if there is anything I can do, Sweet Maaaaike, any little thing, a small word of comfort perhaps, or a tiny deed of disinterested friendship, all you have to do is send me a large cheque and a stamped self-addresssed envelope and I will reply as soon as I can wriggle out of my strait-jacket. I’m typing this with my novxbqse.
As ever, Charles
I sent this letter to a Dutch couple, Maaike and Han, very good friends of mine, after we passed each other in our cars recently. I was living in the south of France at the time. They had driven from Holland, were tired and a very mild domestic argument was in progress, as I learnt subsequently from a mutual friend. I was late for something as usual. So we didn’t stop. This letter was inspired by our non-meeting.
Some references may be obscure to people who don’t know anything about Mr and Mrs Schat, or Dutch bicycles, or thyroid conditions, so some explanations are necessary.
Mrs Schat, to whom this letter is addressed, is a former nurse and was involved in local politics, before she resigned from her political party, a perfectly inoffensive organisation, very slightly to the right of centre. Small of stature, she is hardly overweight at all. It is true that she has had a minor accident in the family Volvo estate during each of their last three holidays to Olargues, in the South of France.. They have a house in the village which they are renovating.
Her husband, a charming, good-natured man full of wit and intelligence, works as a doctor, checking whether people are as ill as they say they are in order to get off work. It is an unglamorous, sometimes dangerous task, but his income rivals that of some of the bigger-spending African dictators. Han did have a brief and eye-wateringly libidinous career as a Dutch naval officer but neither he, nor his father, have ever had the slightest contact with the German Army. I am virtually certain that Han has not consulted any more German internet porn sites than either you or I. One of the things that upset the Dutch most about the German occupation of Holland during the Second World War was that the Wermacht took most of their bicycles with them when they left. The Gazelle is a popular brand of bike in Holland. The stock has long since been more than replenished but the theft still wrankles, even today. The Schats have three very attractive daughters and one very unattractive dog – none of whom, to my knowledge, has ever been mistreated in any way... The expression «rather be hung from a cliff by his finger-nails and stung to death by killer bees » is one of my own invention and can only be used under licence. Don’t worry if you don’t get the Hilversum joke. You may be too young. I’m not sure I do either. I think « fishermen’s stockings » is weirder and funnier. Lastly, Maaike and Han are, as far as I know, perfectly happily married.
Dear Maaaaaike, We have been close for a long time now. It is therefore with great affection and not a little emotion that I permit myself to pen these few lines. Accept them as a measure of the love and respect which have always been your due, an indication of the uncanny and spontaneous affection which drew us together all those years ago and which has never faltered since, despite the vagaries of life and the many kilometers which lie between us.
Some of the things I have to say may be painful and unpleasant but I feel it my duty as a friend – nay more than just a friend - to grab the nettle by the horns. I hope, in all humility, that you will find these simple words of advice and insight, from a very dear admirer, helpful in the difficult weeks which surely lie ahead. Use them as a life-belt in the stormy sea of life, as a totem, a relic, a icon, a colostomy bag if you will, - to use a metaphor which should strike a chord with you, my dear Maaaaike, you who are to the medical profession and the Christain Democrats what the tsunami was to the tourism industry of South East Asia.
But I digress. Where to begin ? It is rare and deeply unsettling thing to catch a fleeting glimpse of the private lives of those we care about : especially if what we see is a putrid tangle of sordid infamies, conjugal violence, sexually-transmitted diseases and a festering, suppurating, pus-filled, fly-infested haemoroid of hate-ridden mutual distrust and right-wing politics.
Although I pretended not to see you when we passed each other on the road between Colombières and Mons when you were down here some time ago, in fact I saw it all. In a flash, as you went by, I saw it all.
I saw Han’s face contorted with mad rage, his temples glistening with hate, his lips drawn back over his fleshy pink gums in a ghastly grimace of uncontrollable anger and disgust. His fist, his fleshy fist, knuckles as white as a dairymaids arse, poised menacingly, about to pummel you into the glove compartment... You – oh how my heart went out to you at that instant, cowering behind a tattered yellow route map of Europe, a scream silent in your throat. Your children, your poor lovely children, wide-eyed with terror, huddled together in the back seat, their beautiful innocent faces transfigured with fear, yet, as I drove past, I registered the look of weary resignation on their tiny little faces, as they bore witness once again to the sordid scene that has been played out oh so many times before in the past. A scene that has shattered their infancy, destroyed their childhood, a scene which will surely cripple them in adolescence and will ultimately lead, in adulthood, to their joining the medical profession in the forlorn hope that they might bestow some of the love and care that was so cruelly missing in the solitary, emotionally-handicapped psychotic desert that their ravaged lives will certainly become.
Even poor bedraggled Frans, fearfully peering out from a crack in the shoe box in which she had spent the last 957 kilometers, seemed to be thinking wistfully of those long terrible weeks she had spent at kennels on the Zuider Zee in 1995, where you sent her for her own safety when you discovered that Han made frequent visits to an utterly revolting German internet site entitled « A Dog is a Man’s Best Friend ».
These horrible, hateful, hideous images have been haunting my days and disturbing my nights ever since that fateful afternoon, when the air in the valley was heavy with the scent of cherry blossom, the mountains glittering with silver streams, the vines fresh and fragile with new growth. As if Mother Nature herself was mocking you – the beauty of the Vallée d’Orb a cynical counterpoint to the sinister drama unfolding in the Volvo estate. If only I had had the courage to intervene ! I could have turned the van around and rushed to your defence. I could have shown the dreadful brute that masquerades as your gentle ever-loving husband that I, for one, would not stand by and let one of my dearest, blondest and most overweight friends be bullied and bruised and belittled by a brash brutish braggart. Instead I meekly continued along the road to Colombières in order to beat up a friend of mine who had forgotten to feed my dog...
Faced with such calumny, plunged unwillingly into the everyday violence and squalor of a domestic nightmare, an innocent onlooker to a tragedy that is at once banal and universal, my mind a maelstrom of anguished thoughts, of crippling indecision, of woeful hesitations and a ghastly anxiety which gnawed at my bones, bruised my eyeballs and made me feel quite peculiar when I got out of the shower... WHAT COULD I DO ? ? ?
I should have realised earlier that the lurking hydra of conjugal abuse was lurking in the dark corners of your lives, lurking and ready to strike when the lurking period was over. How profoundly horrified was I, and yet strangely touched, when I realised that destiny had ensured that I, your one true loyal and trusted friend, should witness for himself what others could only guess at.
Your neighbours, turning a blind ear to the thumps and muffled screams, the bruises and broken limbs that you valiantly declared to have acquired whilst carrying out a pogrom of communist homosexual black people during their annual whist drive with your fascist friends from the town hall. Your parents, distraught to see great clumps of your hair missing - and how puzzled they were to find fistfuls of it in Han’s sports coat pockets – how bravely you passed it off as one of the symptoms of a rare tropical disease that you had contracted from sitting on the bus next to a filthy little woman from Sumatra. Your children, fighting back their tears, explaining to the other kids in the play-ground that your black eye and dislocated shoulder were the result of an Ikea wardrobe collapsing on you as you were assembling it.
Such courage ! Such loyalty !
Blessèd be the silently beaten up for they shall find succour in the Lord and verily shall sitteth on the right hand thereof, for ever and ever, yeh even unto eternity and until the end of time, whichever cometh sooner.
The signs were all too apparent to the sensitive, concerned and attentive friend which I consider myself to be. I should have realised that something was up when you started sound-proofing the house in Olargues, the fact that you consistently crashed the Volvo during each Summer holiday, a subconscious gesture of limp defiance against the tyrant, pathetic yet strangely heroic in its symbolic rebellion against your husband’s (can we still accord him the honour of this appellation, the lowly slug?) brutal authority.
To an outsider’s eyes it looked as if you were an incredibly incompetent woman driver, a spoilt bourgeoise housewife more concerned about trivial domestic details than taking responsibility for her husband’s smart car, the fruit of years of toil and struggle in the challenging professional world of insisting that people who are half dead from fatigue, Industrial Stress Disorder or trade unionism are perfectly fit for work.
But not to me, although I admit that sometimes it was easy for me to fall into that trap and I must say that on more than one occasion I thought to myself – oh how I regret it now ! – « What a stupid bitch ! Why doesn’t her long-suffering ever-loving husband just give her a comprehensive beating up... ? » Little did I know ! ! ! Your crashing into bollards, municipal buildings, lamp-posts, domestic animals and small children were pitiful cries for help in an uncaring world, a world that was blind to your suffering, heedless to your pain and stoney-cold in its response to one woman’s silent anguish...
Now my darling Maaaaaike, now you have an ally, a friend, a co-conspirator, an accomplice, a support, a crutch, a crotch and a helper through the valley of tears and bitter lamentations that is your putrid marriage.
How many times must you have asked yourself in your darkest hour « Naar wie kan ik gaan in mijn donkerste uren ? ? »
I cannot turn the clock back. I cannot meddle in the intricacies of your convoluted marriage, for which, despite your unblemished reputation, you might bear some slight, very slight, glimmer of responsibility. I am reluctant to expose Han to any actual physical harm due to the fact that I am an intellectual and am also mindful of the unpleasant consequences which might well ensue. Nevertheless, we both know that what he deserves is a fate so terrible that he would far prefer to be hung from a cliff by his finger-nails and stung to death by killer bees.
I have made certain inquiries, which, I feel, it is my duty, as a friend, an admirer, an adviser, a potential lover and beneficiary therefore of your father’s huge estate, to reveal. As you ponder the bleak future that stretches out before you like a pool of vomit, this information may help you to take the agonising decision which torments you day and night and which caused you in an unguarded moment to throw yourself into the reassuring arms of your young neighbour, Remko, a sensitive blonde body-builder from Apeldoorn.
Hans Schat, that beaming, friendly-faced ex-naval officer is not the easy-going Dutch person that he would have us believe.
His father, Heinz-Keonig von Schatt zu und bei Toiletenbohl, came to Holland one Wednesday afternoon in July 1941 once the coast was clear and the pathetic resistance of a handful of squinty-eyed clog-wearing tulip farmers had been effortlessly crushed.
In the confusion of victory he came, with many other camp followers, in lipstick and high heels, tottering and tittering in the footsteps of the goosesteps of the jackboots of the proud Wehrmacht, part of the parasitic detritus of modern warfare: prostitutes, dentists, lion-tamers, three-card-trick men and... and... bicycle thieves...
As UberGazellenführer he had direct responsibility for the rounding up, internment and export of millions of rusty Dutch bicycles. Witnesses have never been able to forget the tragic sight of those seemly endless columns of humiliated bikes being pushed to the collection areas, many with flat tyres, saddles skew-wiff, others with their chains hanging limply from their sprockets, some even had their little wicker baskets still attached to their handlebars... How one pitied those saddles which had, up to then, been nuzzling the soft thighs and perfectly formed bottoms of smiling Dutch girls in dirndl skirts, now to find themselves crushed and pummelled under the cruel weight of the feldgrau arses of the fleeing Wermacht!
Von Schatt, the Eponymous Boche, as he was known to his intimates (two particularly unsavoury characters, Achmed, a one-eyed Morrocan knife-thrower, and Zlob, a part-time abortionist from Southern Bulgaria), threw himself into the task with such gay abandon that he quickly acquired heamorroids from excessive use of the bicycle pump. It is a miracle he ever sired a child at all.
It is rumoured that Han was a conceived as a consequence of a sordid black market transaction in which his mother offered the unscrupulous UberGazellenführer a night of vigourous sexual activity in return for the last puncture repair kit in Oostellingenwerf. At the end of the war the poor woman was held (and quickly released on account of her overwhelming body odour) by the local Resistance Committee, a schizophrenic ventriloquist and a three-legged pigeon impersonator (he could only do stool pigeons).
When they wished to subject her to the customary humiliation of shaving her head for collaborating with the enemy, it was found that she was already bald and they had to content themselves with shaving off her moustache instead... In a cruel twist of ironic fate she was later decorated (The Iron Clog - First Class – with Tulip Leaves) for her work in the stuggle against the invader.
She transmitted so many diseases of a sexual nature so prolifically that the German war effort in the Low Countries was literally brought to its knees and thus seriously hampered. For a time there was only one soldier manning the Atlantic Wall between Delfzijl and Knokke-Heist who had not caught a debilitating infection - and that was thought to be only because he preferred poodles.
Her reputation was such that many soldiers leapt at the chance to fight on the Eastern front rather than run the risk of catching the clap in Zuit op Googledorf. Han’s father was later posted to Croatia where he was responsible for the requisitioning of prams. These were sent back to Germany to be melted down and turned into Panzers. With the fall of the Balkans, the portly von Schatt was seen on the last baby-carriage out of Zagreb. Achmed and Zlob took it in turns to push him all the way to Berlin.
In the chaotic aftermath of the war, von Schatt senior was spirited out of Germany, with the aid of the devoted Achmed and Zlob, disguised as a bath-mat. A previous attempt to flee the justice of the victorious Allies came to grief when he presented himself at the Swiss border posing as a Tyrolian yodeller, An alert border guard tried to confront him when his false handlebar moustache fell off. The handlebars, taken, of course, from a requisitioned Dutch Gazelle, made such a noise when they hit the ground that von Schatt barely had time to run for it.
In 1974, a copy of a Venezuelan cycling magazine was sent to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Tel Aviv. In it, there was a photograph of a smiling but visibly aged von Schatt standing shyly outside his bicycle repair shop-cum-massage-parlour in Caracas. He looked perfectly riduculous in garish sombero and faded lederhosen and the decision was taken to let the old lunatic die in peace. It is understood that when he finally passed away he was much lamented by the local bicycling community, according to a spokesperson...
Han was brought up by his mother and her brother, an alcoholic midget with buck teeth and a wooden leg. For several years they eked out a living, selling eke. After a time they moved to a southern suburb of Hilversum where they lived upside-down in a cardboard box. It was there, they said, that they got the best reception..
It was here too that Han was taken into care after being arrested for selling dirty pictures. He would spend hours laboriously cutting out colour photographs from women’s magazines, photographs which he would then dip into a bucket of sump oil before selling them on the streets. Several years later a traumatised local authority auctioned him off to the lowest bidder, a kindly old cobbler and his toothless wife.
With them, Han passed some of the happiest years of his life. They lived in a charming little cottage in the woods with a thatched roof and freshly painted shutters, a little vegetable garden in front, sweet pea and forget-me-nots tumbling over the little wicket fence. Inside, the house was spartan but spotless, the old iron stove black and silent in the corner, the crisp red-and-white check table-cloth spread over the wooden kitchen table, fresh flowers in a dainty little vase, a kitten curled up in the armchair beside the fire.
Only the 3784 pairs of women’s knickers hastily stuffed into a dresser by Han’s distraught owner marred the bucolic atmosphere of this sylvan idyll. Owing to a rare thyroid condition Han spent his nights stealing underwear from the neighbours’ washing lines which the kindly old cobbler had to return to their owners the next morning, red-faced and limping to conceal his erection.
Han, against everybody’s expectations, eventually got a place at the University of Hoogezend-Sappemeer to study the backs of cereal boxes but due to a clerical error he later become a clergyman.
Shortly afterwards he was invalided out of the Dutch Reformed Church and found himself a job as a laboratory technician where he excelled in the demanding task of injecting guinea-pigs with super-glue.
It was here, in these unpromising circumstances, amidst the test tubes and the formalin, he met you, dear Maaaaike. You were squirting lemon juice into a rabbit’s eye in your father’s laboratory.
How could Han’s heart fail to beat a little faster as he saw you, pipette in hand calmly approaching the little huddled ball of trembling white fur cowering in its filthy cage?
You, blonde and smiling in your lab technician’s red bolero and fisherman’s stockings.
He, awkward and pale, transfixed before the first and only true love of his life.
The rabbit, writhing and half-dead in the piss-sodden sawdust.
The rest, as they say, is misery. He forced you into marrying him under threat of informing your father about your benzedrine habit and what you liked to do with rabbits when you weren’t squirting liquid in their eyes.
Using your father’s connections, Han was able to forge his doctor’s papers and become a medical practioner. After a shakey start (he was once brought before a medical tribunal for grabbing a patient by the scruff of the neck, tickling them under the chin and injecting them with printer’s ink) he became the affluent and much-respected doctor that he is today.
So you see, Dear Maaaike, Han is not the man he appears to be. His life is a tissue of lies, a web of exaggerations, a litany of half-truths. He is an impostor, a charlatan, a fraud. You have every right to divorce him - he has deceived you from the outset. By revealing the sordid details of his origins and early life I hope I have smoothed the path to a happier life for you and your darling daughters, and poor bedraggled Frans.
Far be it from me to influence you – the decision is yours to take and yours to take alone, however as you must know by now, that if there is anything I can do, Sweet Maaaaike, any little thing, a small word of comfort perhaps, or a tiny deed of disinterested friendship, all you have to do is send me a large cheque and a stamped self-addresssed envelope and I will reply as soon as I can wriggle out of my strait-jacket. I’m typing this with my novxbqse.
As ever, Charles
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
LE VIN BLEU - An Irish wine-maker in France
How did a former dairy farmer from Wicklow end up making wine in the South of France ?
My interest in wine and wine-making got off to an inauspicious start when I did the vendanges, or grape-harvest in Burgundy as a teenager. Dressed in a tee-shirt, shorts and gymshoes, I was poorly equipped for some of the worst weather they’d had since the war. Hail and heavy rain for days on end. I was soaked, frozen, over-exploited, under-fed and thoroughly miserable. Milking cows in the rain was better than this.
I remember coming away from the experience thinking that it was better to concentrate on drinking the stuff rather than to enquire too deeply into how it was made. Which is what I did for years - drinking industrial quantities of low quality wine, quite often the product-of-more-than-one-European-country...
A passion for wine
That is until I went to live in Tuscany where, amidst the ancient chestnut woods on the terraced slopes of Monte Amiata, forty kilometres south of Siena, I tasted my first really great wine, a Brunello di Montalcino. Brunello is a deep, dark, tannic wine not unlike a Pomerol, it was " invented’ " by the Biondi Santi family who were convinced that the Sangiovese grape variety could offer more if it were aged in oak barrels and sold after 3 years in the bottle. Today it is one of the finest and most expensive of Italian wines.
After eighteen months, I left Tuscany and went to live in France. Once there, my enthusiasm for wine, kindled by the passion of the Italian wine-makers I had met, led to my getting involved in as many aspects of the wine business as I could.
At the Commanderie de la Bargemone, near Aix-en-Provence, I worked in the vines and learnt the rudiments of vinification from Jean-Pierre Rozan. I then went to the fascinating and astonishingly knowledgable Parisian wine-merchant Jean-Christophe Estève, exporting French wine to the UK and Ireland. Then, very briefly, to the L’Ecluse chain of up-market wine-bars where I proved myself to be an aimable but hopelessly inefficient wine-waiter. Eventually, in the absence of a proper job in the industry I reverted to my former career as a journalist and then went to work in French television as a producer..
Finding the vineyard
On the eve of my fortieth birthday I did what any self-respecting clapped-out media hack does and went off to the South of France in search of the good life. In my case, it was in order to try and find an area that resembled southern Tuscany where I could buy a vineyard and make my wine before I got too broken down to live out my dream.
With Tuscany on my mind and the idea of living in a chestnut wood and working vines on narrow terraces, I headed for the Cevennes, in the Lozère. Plenty of chesnut woods there, but not many vines in the beautiful narrow valleys. I went further south, with the half-baked notion that I would eventually come upon a place where the chestnut trees end and the wine-producing plain of the Languedoc would begin. In the Haute Vallée de l’Orb, between Bédarieux and Olargues, fifty kilometres north of Béziers, I found what I was looking for.
I was able to buy vines on the terraced slopes of the Caroux, the mountain which dominates the valley and constitutes the tail-end of the Cevennes. The soil is the same as in Tuscany, an unusual mixture of schist and limestone. The climate is similar too, hot and Mediterranean, but cooler than the plain to the south because of the altitude, 250 meters above sea-level.
Carignan
The grape variety here is predominantly Carignan, one of the traditional Languedoc cépages along with Syrah, Grenache and Mourvedre. Like the Sangiovese, Carignan was widely looked down upon as a variety only good for producing low-grade quantity and one which lacked the finesse to make a really exceptional wine. This attitude is changing, pace Jancis Robinson, and now Carignan has an increasingly large following of fervent afficianados. I set about tasting as many 100% Carignan wines as I could get my hands on. There weren’t many, but among others, Jean_Marie Rimbert’s Mas aux Schiste (geddit ?) convinced me that one could make a very respectable wine by reducing yields and paying close attention to the vinification.
Getting started
I was lucky to find pretty well the only wine cellar in the valley which hadn’t been turned into a holiday home for Belgian tourists. In January 2001, I had bought my equipment, and was ready to make my first wine.
My first task was to embark on some pretty draconian pruning. My vines are vieux Carignan, between forty to fifty years old. They were being cultivated to produce as many grapes as possible for sale to the local cooperative – yields of up to 150 hectolitres (15,000 litres) a hectare are not uncommon. My target was to reduce yields to somewhere around 25-30 hecto per hectare. The vines are planted to a density of 4400 per hectare, pruned in gobelet, the traditional shape of vines in the Languedoc, which ensures that the leaves get the maximum amount of sunlight and which encourages early ripening of the grapes before the arrival of the autumn rains in early October.
Beginner’s luck
It was a perfect year. A mild spring with just the right amount of rainfall was followed by a hot summer. As I have decided to make a wine which is produced according to the principles or organic farming, I spray with rather ineffectual organic sprays which are harmless to the environment, the sprayer and the consumer, but they don’t do much damage to diseases either, blight and mildew being the two principal enemies. That year it was too hot for either to get a grip in the vines which was just as well as my spraying in that first year was as haphazard as my wine-waiting had been.
The vendanges, contrary to my earlier experience, took place in perfect weather conditions, warm and sunny during the day, coolish at night. The pickers had all worked on the same vines in previous years and knew them much better than I did. The complicated logistics of picking and bringing the grapes to the cellar went without a hitch and this was entirely due to their experience - and their patience with the new-comer.
Making the wine
I opted for the traditional – and simplest - form of vinification. The grapes, picked by hand and emptied into plastic containers (comportes) holding 50 kilos each, were brought to the cellar and put directly into a 3000 litre vat, without de-stalking. Care was taken that only the absolutely ripest grapes were selected and foreign bodies like leaves and branches were scrupulous sorted and discarded. It was a clean harvest, potential alcohol levels were high (nearly 13°) and volatility was exceptionally low. I stuck to my plan of adding minimal amounts of sulphur, which is used to ward off bacteria but which is also responsible for the pain in your head if you drink as much as I do...
The decision not to use sulphur or artificial yeasts or tannins which are commonly employed by the vast majority of commercial wine-makers, brought me into conflict with my oenologist, a brassy, ambitious young woman with a strong belief in chemicals, a too-pristine four-wheel drive and no sympathy for natural wines. I studiously ignored her advice and we parted company half way through the year, amicably but at loggerheads.
After a long maceration, nearly six weeks, in which the skins, flesh and pips of the grapes are kept in contact with the fermenting juice, I fiddled around with it as little as possible. I pressed the skins in my old-fashioned vertical press and kept the vin de presse seperate until just before bottling. Throughout the year I drew off the wine from time to time, to ‘air’ it and to get rid of the deposit which accumulates at the bottom of the vat.
After nearly a year in the vat, I bottled the wine in August 2003, clarified with egg-white and unfiltered. Leaving the wine to ‘settle’ I began to sell it in Spring 2004, much to the disgust and increasing indignation of my bank manager.
Sales
The wine is currently distributed in Holland, Belgium and Northern Ireland. I make regular deliveries to customers in Paris.
I attend local markets in Olargues, Lamalou les Bains, St Pons and Bédarieux, where I am absolutely merciless in collaring anyone I hear speaking English, or French with a Welsh accent. These people are overwhelmed with a battery of half-truths and exaggerations until they go staggering back to their car with a case under each arm.
Why Vin Bleu ?
Vin Bleu is a reference to an 19th century name for Carignan, ‘le cépage bleu’. In French, un bleu is a beginner, someone who is wet behind the ears, or ‘green’ in English. For my first wine it seemed appropriate...Vin Bleu is a reference to an 19 century name for Carignan, ‘. In French, un is a beginner, someone who is wet behind the ears, or ‘green’ in English. For my first wine it seemed appropriate...
The label, designed to reflect the organic and rather unorthodox style of the wine, represents a stylised bunch of grapes and was designed by a Belgian artist, Els Knockert.
Vin Bleu - Carignan 2002:
12.75° alc.
Deep ruby red, with aromas of garrigue (thyme, rosemary) and spices. An attractive tannic structure indicates its capacity for laying down. Pleasing balance between fruit and alcohol which is accentuated when served in a carafe.
Serving temperature 16°C, to accompany grilled or roast meat, stews and ‘hard’ cheeses.
Price
(ex cellar)
Vin bleu - Carignan
€ 6.-- / Btl. / TTC
Please contact me for delivery and transport conditions.
Tastings and cellar visits by prior arrangement
Contact:
Charles Haskins
ackamaracus@free.fr
How did a former dairy farmer from Wicklow end up making wine in the South of France ?
My interest in wine and wine-making got off to an inauspicious start when I did the vendanges, or grape-harvest in Burgundy as a teenager. Dressed in a tee-shirt, shorts and gymshoes, I was poorly equipped for some of the worst weather they’d had since the war. Hail and heavy rain for days on end. I was soaked, frozen, over-exploited, under-fed and thoroughly miserable. Milking cows in the rain was better than this.
I remember coming away from the experience thinking that it was better to concentrate on drinking the stuff rather than to enquire too deeply into how it was made. Which is what I did for years - drinking industrial quantities of low quality wine, quite often the product-of-more-than-one-European-country...
A passion for wine
That is until I went to live in Tuscany where, amidst the ancient chestnut woods on the terraced slopes of Monte Amiata, forty kilometres south of Siena, I tasted my first really great wine, a Brunello di Montalcino. Brunello is a deep, dark, tannic wine not unlike a Pomerol, it was " invented’ " by the Biondi Santi family who were convinced that the Sangiovese grape variety could offer more if it were aged in oak barrels and sold after 3 years in the bottle. Today it is one of the finest and most expensive of Italian wines.
After eighteen months, I left Tuscany and went to live in France. Once there, my enthusiasm for wine, kindled by the passion of the Italian wine-makers I had met, led to my getting involved in as many aspects of the wine business as I could.
At the Commanderie de la Bargemone, near Aix-en-Provence, I worked in the vines and learnt the rudiments of vinification from Jean-Pierre Rozan. I then went to the fascinating and astonishingly knowledgable Parisian wine-merchant Jean-Christophe Estève, exporting French wine to the UK and Ireland. Then, very briefly, to the L’Ecluse chain of up-market wine-bars where I proved myself to be an aimable but hopelessly inefficient wine-waiter. Eventually, in the absence of a proper job in the industry I reverted to my former career as a journalist and then went to work in French television as a producer..
Finding the vineyard
On the eve of my fortieth birthday I did what any self-respecting clapped-out media hack does and went off to the South of France in search of the good life. In my case, it was in order to try and find an area that resembled southern Tuscany where I could buy a vineyard and make my wine before I got too broken down to live out my dream.
With Tuscany on my mind and the idea of living in a chestnut wood and working vines on narrow terraces, I headed for the Cevennes, in the Lozère. Plenty of chesnut woods there, but not many vines in the beautiful narrow valleys. I went further south, with the half-baked notion that I would eventually come upon a place where the chestnut trees end and the wine-producing plain of the Languedoc would begin. In the Haute Vallée de l’Orb, between Bédarieux and Olargues, fifty kilometres north of Béziers, I found what I was looking for.
I was able to buy vines on the terraced slopes of the Caroux, the mountain which dominates the valley and constitutes the tail-end of the Cevennes. The soil is the same as in Tuscany, an unusual mixture of schist and limestone. The climate is similar too, hot and Mediterranean, but cooler than the plain to the south because of the altitude, 250 meters above sea-level.
Carignan
The grape variety here is predominantly Carignan, one of the traditional Languedoc cépages along with Syrah, Grenache and Mourvedre. Like the Sangiovese, Carignan was widely looked down upon as a variety only good for producing low-grade quantity and one which lacked the finesse to make a really exceptional wine. This attitude is changing, pace Jancis Robinson, and now Carignan has an increasingly large following of fervent afficianados. I set about tasting as many 100% Carignan wines as I could get my hands on. There weren’t many, but among others, Jean_Marie Rimbert’s Mas aux Schiste (geddit ?) convinced me that one could make a very respectable wine by reducing yields and paying close attention to the vinification.
Getting started
I was lucky to find pretty well the only wine cellar in the valley which hadn’t been turned into a holiday home for Belgian tourists. In January 2001, I had bought my equipment, and was ready to make my first wine.
My first task was to embark on some pretty draconian pruning. My vines are vieux Carignan, between forty to fifty years old. They were being cultivated to produce as many grapes as possible for sale to the local cooperative – yields of up to 150 hectolitres (15,000 litres) a hectare are not uncommon. My target was to reduce yields to somewhere around 25-30 hecto per hectare. The vines are planted to a density of 4400 per hectare, pruned in gobelet, the traditional shape of vines in the Languedoc, which ensures that the leaves get the maximum amount of sunlight and which encourages early ripening of the grapes before the arrival of the autumn rains in early October.
Beginner’s luck
It was a perfect year. A mild spring with just the right amount of rainfall was followed by a hot summer. As I have decided to make a wine which is produced according to the principles or organic farming, I spray with rather ineffectual organic sprays which are harmless to the environment, the sprayer and the consumer, but they don’t do much damage to diseases either, blight and mildew being the two principal enemies. That year it was too hot for either to get a grip in the vines which was just as well as my spraying in that first year was as haphazard as my wine-waiting had been.
The vendanges, contrary to my earlier experience, took place in perfect weather conditions, warm and sunny during the day, coolish at night. The pickers had all worked on the same vines in previous years and knew them much better than I did. The complicated logistics of picking and bringing the grapes to the cellar went without a hitch and this was entirely due to their experience - and their patience with the new-comer.
Making the wine
I opted for the traditional – and simplest - form of vinification. The grapes, picked by hand and emptied into plastic containers (comportes) holding 50 kilos each, were brought to the cellar and put directly into a 3000 litre vat, without de-stalking. Care was taken that only the absolutely ripest grapes were selected and foreign bodies like leaves and branches were scrupulous sorted and discarded. It was a clean harvest, potential alcohol levels were high (nearly 13°) and volatility was exceptionally low. I stuck to my plan of adding minimal amounts of sulphur, which is used to ward off bacteria but which is also responsible for the pain in your head if you drink as much as I do...
The decision not to use sulphur or artificial yeasts or tannins which are commonly employed by the vast majority of commercial wine-makers, brought me into conflict with my oenologist, a brassy, ambitious young woman with a strong belief in chemicals, a too-pristine four-wheel drive and no sympathy for natural wines. I studiously ignored her advice and we parted company half way through the year, amicably but at loggerheads.
After a long maceration, nearly six weeks, in which the skins, flesh and pips of the grapes are kept in contact with the fermenting juice, I fiddled around with it as little as possible. I pressed the skins in my old-fashioned vertical press and kept the vin de presse seperate until just before bottling. Throughout the year I drew off the wine from time to time, to ‘air’ it and to get rid of the deposit which accumulates at the bottom of the vat.
After nearly a year in the vat, I bottled the wine in August 2003, clarified with egg-white and unfiltered. Leaving the wine to ‘settle’ I began to sell it in Spring 2004, much to the disgust and increasing indignation of my bank manager.
Sales
The wine is currently distributed in Holland, Belgium and Northern Ireland. I make regular deliveries to customers in Paris.
I attend local markets in Olargues, Lamalou les Bains, St Pons and Bédarieux, where I am absolutely merciless in collaring anyone I hear speaking English, or French with a Welsh accent. These people are overwhelmed with a battery of half-truths and exaggerations until they go staggering back to their car with a case under each arm.
Why Vin Bleu ?
Vin Bleu is a reference to an 19th century name for Carignan, ‘le cépage bleu’. In French, un bleu is a beginner, someone who is wet behind the ears, or ‘green’ in English. For my first wine it seemed appropriate...Vin Bleu is a reference to an 19 century name for Carignan, ‘. In French, un is a beginner, someone who is wet behind the ears, or ‘green’ in English. For my first wine it seemed appropriate...
The label, designed to reflect the organic and rather unorthodox style of the wine, represents a stylised bunch of grapes and was designed by a Belgian artist, Els Knockert.
Vin Bleu - Carignan 2002:
12.75° alc.
Deep ruby red, with aromas of garrigue (thyme, rosemary) and spices. An attractive tannic structure indicates its capacity for laying down. Pleasing balance between fruit and alcohol which is accentuated when served in a carafe.
Serving temperature 16°C, to accompany grilled or roast meat, stews and ‘hard’ cheeses.
Price
(ex cellar)
Vin bleu - Carignan
€ 6.-- / Btl. / TTC
Please contact me for delivery and transport conditions.
Tastings and cellar visits by prior arrangement
Contact:
Charles Haskins
ackamaracus@free.fr
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