"Dear Louis

............Apologies for being so late with this but I returned from my little refresher to discover.......a Turkish steam bath with cracked valves on taps leading to drenched papers, swollen and stained photos, walls covered with mould, a door that had bulged to the extent that it only recognised the Customs and Excise entry, ........ and a computer that registered its protest by depriving me of ps g's and , yes a colon - that one is still on the run. This I might add was merely icing on my routine legging it to the airport shambles wherein everything is defiled under "fix on return" in recognition of the great import of fixing myself for export......... The candles and fairy dust on top are the traditional brown envelopes in the hall............ The season of rage mists and melancholy pips in the coinbox has begun.

...............Well, once upon a Monday morning that should have been Sunday (except the pilot hoped for better weather and the pilot had the face of someone who had invested most of his life in a vain speculation on better things, a face flattened with lack of interest that was his equivalent of a dependable low yield bond from whatever government he could hope to elevate himself with) I took the 4.30 am taxi to catch a bus to London so Dafydd could drive me threequarters of the way back to White Waltham aerodrome a.k.a Maidenhead roundabout. An investment of 4 hrs snoring against the risk of delays on the 3/4 of an hour journey on Great Western Rail from Oxford via Reading......... The sort of thing one does to keep an appointment with people who've shown a sudden interest in ecology and the conservation of energy........

 

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Before setting off on the biplane trip to Bordeaux.White Waltham airfield.28/9/98

Jason Cooper in the cockpit. White Waltham airfield.28/9/98

Once at the aerodrome I lurched into a genial motley crew.......with the pilot still revving on full dither........... The peach schnapps I had bought for take off was downgraded to breakfast followed by the full English, overpriced as only it can be in a wooden hut manned by " bars-not-open-to-eleven"s accustomed to shaking down the owners of twin engined toys at sundown.........

.......I had the uneasy feeling that I was the only person there to realise the dodge factor was going off the clock and pfc (provision for crapola) was putting in a bid for gong of the day - enhanced by a claim in Hugo's briefing sheet that a few suitcases of shirts could impede the centre of gravity of Comrade Antonov's considerable belly, so could mine be sent ahead in the in-laws Porsche? ......... when I knew perfectly well it would merely down-elevate the plane's fuel bill......... No fault - routine head in the clouds overdrafted outmanouevering, and it was a pleasure to run one's finger over the rust around the elevator cables and watch some poor sod kicking el tango furioso with a footpump on the undercarriage.

Our co-pilot, Henry Robinson, spoke French sans accent and effected a tolerable Tintin impression without realising it...........suited to a scientist developing directional software for warfare.........

Watching the whingeometer go off the clock shortly after because the visibility was down to a mere 800 ft and there was a puff of wind and a few drops over Cherbourg in the wrong direction was a classic......... not least for knowing the date of the wedding could not be altered. .........The fact that these biplanes were designed for flying through blizzards in Siberia at ground level added a certain je ne sais quoi to this awayday..........I offered my services as navigator and ventured that landing a bi-plane from 800ft on the plains of Northern France offered more room for maneouvre than Marie Celeste's Vauxhall Cavalier on the M25 at a Bacardi sunrise.

.........Fortified perhaps by the thought that his chances of making a penny out of this were diminishing, the pilot decided that one could lunch it de trop if not absolument, and sandwiched us in for what I suspected he was aiming for - a quiet little airport pleased to see something cheap 'n easier than Twin Beeched landing fees Bordeaux. However I thought this was s.o.c. (standard operational crapola) with airworthiness certificates or fuel bills or landing fees' fees. Big airports never come cheap....... could Aircrafty Arfur knew something we didn't? Bis. as usual, an overdraft too far, Nyurdle ho!....... premium cruising......DSC as in Don't Submit Complaints or Don't Speculate Cautiously, Damn Slippery Customers......

More fond of my fellow passengers than usual on economy class, as they were as carefree a bunch of awaydays as ever boarded a biplane short on paperwork. Hugo always had a gift for people, and he led by example with a suit that strode strutted shuffled and slipped somewhere between St Andrews club house in the late 30's, the under-managers office of the Follies Bergeres in the early 40's and a street corner pause to explain itself at the Dixieland fringe of Broadway on VE day.........

Take off....... the exquisite pleasure of not being told to fasten your seatbelt soared me into the permagrin and gave a chance to recall what I was looking for - the aerial views at the low speeds and altitude I had on the London-Paris microlight crossing, . Spirits rose as louche-lurching ladies maintained a constant stream of in-flight delicacies sloshed down with vodka while the gents slumped back and hicupped into their subconscious the number of times the engine misfired........ Reception out to lunch, my kind of hotel..........There are few things more elevated than returning to normality in the presence of the abnormal, which I suppose is as Christian a paradox as one could stumble across outside a railway voucher from Oscar's diner.

Of course Rennes was no grass strip. We parked alongside a Grumman warplane belonging to a wealthy Brit (one seat, two engines, £3000 an hour to fly) and shuffled off for neon-strip beers in the illusion that we would be coasting on down South.........

The French love to ground planes short on paperwork. At this point my recollections become a little dazed and confused, but they involve long delays while the seized pilot and co-pilot strutted their stuff to the Douaniers, a formal unloading of baggage, crashing out on the floor of an airport for my first time since Thailand, a taxi into Rennes, allegations that authorities in Hungary were showing a touching concern for a certain amount of VAT due on the biplane, a military style reconaissance of restaurants in Rennes, mistakenly obtaining chewing gum from a contraceptive machine in the gents as a wedding gift for Hugo, slodgeing five parts of a pig inside of me before de-wodgeing the folding stuff by candlelight, discovering a toy crane for Hugo, uncovering abusive postcards for Soho, the traditional one star discovery of a local hero for some reason one forgets imediately but I think he ran a fishing fleet, re-taxiing to the airport to be told the game was up, falling asleep on the airpost floor while the pilot legged it and the remaining dirty dozen turned themselves inside out to find just one person with a credit card, passport and driving license in the same name, being booted on the sole before Stella 'n fag ash table danced into slo-mo shuffle then Peugeoted down South on auto-avuncular............

Air Hugo, (a club class "e're we go"), fulfilled its initial promise by making the chateau for supper, and I have to say its chairman got the claret jacket for sustained good cheer.......vague memories of him in the boot of the Peugeot holding, in a manner suited to something between the mace of Westminster and the staff of Canterbury, an umbrella purpose built for semaphore at Pangbourne speech day.....

I seldom spoil a place by remembering its name. Candlelight and shadows suffice. Fragments of women's voices fluttered into the dark. I am partial myself to muttering around large courtyards with gasping tables and glasses that seem to come up and introduce themselves........ found myself booked into a chambermaids room midway through some complex of stairs, corridors and other people's bedrooms and after the usual 3am exit to tender the foliage fell into a dreamless sleep in pleasant contrast to the horrors that come stumbling over the meadow every night at Oxford......

Attempts at ablution absolution in the morning were assisted by a quiet and elderly man with the gentle concern of a concierge. Bemused perhaps by a bespectacled burn out with a Chinese dressing gown on top of a Santa Monica jogging suit he gave me the perfect simple breakfast of French bread, French butter and French black coffee and slowly the conversation wandered over the restored roofs towards the Congo and tribal art. I had crash landed in the bosses billet, and for some reasons of early morning diffidence or minute particles of accent filched from better behaved relations of mine we got on with the relaxed assumption of sensitive but cynical urbanity that is the delicate preserve of Frenchmen in the countryside when acknowledging their companions culture............. rather like one of those exotically overpriced pots of strawberry jam found in herbal shops off Bond St........definitely a step up from the waiting room on Reading station, Terence, I said to myself as he shepherded me through rooms full of spears and sculpture and paintings......Pity Timmo wasn't there and.nothing like Louis and Hugo for getting the Kerouac generation out of the tabloids and into drawing rooms of their choice......... Alas, poor Hulton, I thought, slowly frying on the Aga bills in Glos.........

Of course you can take the driveway out of Zombie, (Ed Hulton, co-founder of club) but you can never take Zombie out of a driveway. The next chateau was run by white Russians and it was but half a bottle of what for the first time in my life could be called the house claret with a measure of dignity before I was being showed arcane references to Zombie's rentals and other suitcase jobs. Best of all was a picture of a two wheeled turn of the century whale-bellied motorcar sweeping a promenade while ballasted by the Imperial Admiral's patented gyroscope. At this point the zombometer went right off the clock and I rediscovered the meaning of impracticality. It was raining softly, the rooms were large, breakfast permanently laid and the wallet running on empty. Pure Heaven.

My companion in the chateau was Buster, the only other passenger with a decent flying jacket, who when I suggested one evening we walked the 14km back from the restaurant volunteered that on the whole he would rather not as one of his legs was wooden and anyway both had been broken ten times in racing cars. A reasonable preference for someone quieter, older and tidier than myself with the bemused expression of a man seeing everything come round for a fifth time. He gave me a series of tutorials on the esoterics of the motor car.......

I did however limp into the nearest cafe called the "Sporting Bar"where I saw a row of silver cups behind the bar. Trust me to have stumbled, clutching my beret, into the family HQ of one of the ten best players of petanque in France. I maintained l'honneur de la patrie by arranging tutorials for the English and was imediately invited to supper chez lui by a local technocrat where the Franco-German alliance was shredded, fried and spat out. I now have a tolerable understanding of why the English in general and myself in particular can presume some standing in the Bordeaux region and my ability to put my feet under the table, as they say in Norfolk, home of the canard, was effortless.

...........There have been occasional interludes for thought. William Friedkin (director of "Exorcist") came down to Oxford........ I was able to give the first information on excorcism in Galicia which Zombie uncovered in the 70's and I dropped in on recently that even he hadn't heard of over all these years.......Well somebody - probably a financier with a bad conscience - once said life is divided into three stages (strange how the colon still refuses to budge from my keyboard) - acquisition, reflection and dispersion. I suppose its now time for the dispersion...

Hugo's wedding could be seen as one of the more relaxed falling leaves of DSC displacement behaviour, and as I've just had a wodge of black and white stolen moments of time redeveloped at the photo shop perhaps I had better round off where I rough edged in my last letter........

The "Sporting Cafe" did its bit Petanques is an admirable game, for you can play it on the roughest of surfaces yet the pubjudge carries bits of metal like micrometer screw guages to see if there's the minutest difference between contenders. One throws the ball from under one's palm in the manner developed by Zombie and myself as the introductory movement of the "wheelchair handshake"...... and if you land one ball on top of another there are pleasing echoes of a pistol shot. rather than the click of a lavatory door in a Mayfair hotel that echoes wooden bowls...... The rough and tumble of the backyard where you can blame a lot on the gravel rather than the delicate and predictable strokes of a manicured lawn. A convenient shuffle from the cafe and none of this heigh ho and its only six expensive miles to stroll before the 19th hole. Golf is God's revenge on those who work in offices, Petanques is God's bonus for those who think in cafes.

I unfolded my glad rags in the chateau thinking that it was an appropriate setting for the last of the tribal rituals these days that is marriage, and that any tribal ritual associated with Hugo would at least be colourful as well as erratic. A certain amount of preliminary feasting would be a good appetiser for the sight of one of Berkshire's fleeter of foot standing still in a public place and vowing a long term contract to cover a future sufficiently uncertain for economists and soothsayers in London and Paris alike to speculate on the armageddon........but then its not unreasonable to view this earth as a continually evolving cemetery.

Madame had the Russian attitude to conviviality and there was always a bottle of her best on the sideboard. As with great artists, anonymity was a distinguishing feature - the good stuff was not labelled to distinguish it from the stuff that was exported to Germany......... I remembered this sound principle when I went to lunch with my fellow lurkers, loungers, and louchers. When the time came for a digestif to brace myself for the equal division of a bill (at least three quarters of the company anticipated by plumping for the pricey items) I dropped a series of hints about something special. Something in my eyes, if not my accent induced Madame to sense a familiarity with these things. So she brought a large bottle of Perrier which would have passed muster at a boy scouts jamboree. As the laughter of innocents died down I opened it and the full 80 proof hit me in the nostrils, slapped a restraining order on every molecule of oxygen and then proceeded to turn the entire central nervous system into an approximation of Hammersmith Palais on Saturday night. I was back on home territory where customs and excise is no career for a man, petits fonctionaires are despised and good 'ol boys go head down with their boots on........

Alchemy? Partly nuts, with a touch of pear and perhaps prune...... a couple of drops on a sugar lump would keep a cold away for a week. A real pleasure giving a homilly to the assembled shifters on the virtues of home distillation...... and as I warmed to my theme and embraced the cunning pacing of the paysan at least a glass full found its way round my system. It marched in triumph like an emperor challenging the ghosts of Irish oysters and Fulham vindaloos to reappear on the foothills of colonic irrigation. The bill for each flaneur came to less than a non-starter and a bottle of red ink at one of Conran's collective cattle sheds in the City for corporate crap-outs. We talk about catching up with French scoff in the forseeable future but I can't see it......Nyurdle ho, there's always second helpings..... tribal rites turn to fights in direct proportion to investment in the intial shindig. Strife or bunfight, marriage is not so much Voltaire's last adventure of the cowardly as the single income's first flight from reality.

Hugo took immense trouble to deliver a restored 40 something Bristol convertible as a wedding present after Zanzibar....... ,giving Fiona the opportunity to trump Francois Sagan's reverie of an ideal ending by driving the most perfectly aerodynamic conveyance over a cliff with Bach at full volume on the CD player. Well, Mike Radfords Byronic awayday only managed four years before separate locks.......probably doomed to come off the road less travelled when he ran to an MGA for his younger half

.......Wandering by the banks of the river at evening was relaxing for the river was broad and the houses behind the path on its bank were anonymous and carelessly spaced, unlike the primly bunched and assertive piles of brick one sees in England. So much of France has the charm of appearing forgotten and open whereas our mortgagees are relentless in reminding neighbours not to look too closely. At the end of the day one can tire of people who ring fence door knockers.....

The last days of Hugo's freedom of movement were marked by long rows of candles on tables that comemorated much shifting of seats by people who were not in the habit of being pinned down. One evening twin ladies of impeccably reproachable rumours served a well spiced cous cous with lashings of extraversion. Alas memories of overdoing it at Radfords nuptials in a Palazzo full of rising nubiles, fallen women, stolen motor cars and bewildered Colonels erred me on the side of caution. In better times I would have spread myaelf across the table, but I sat upright as a spinster in a Bergman film, silently praying for the re-emergence of the inner Falstaff while their limbs fluttered into laps all around me. Not misbehaving at a marriage when you've never been married is a left and right of underperformance. Aspiring wistfully to the elegance that comes of shabiness.....one felt vaguely shrouded with the gravitas of Santa at a summer solstice for Ealing satanists on a closed branch line remembered only by pre-war cartoonists.

This probably imparted itself the next morning to Shanghai Sid, formerly known as the Scandinavian artist of the mechanically articulated, William Leigh-tipping-by-appointment-Pemberton, known to his friends East of Katmandu as "That'll Dhu Nicely" and West of Wittering as Value Added Turmoil, in additional assessment of his fiddling with mimickery. Sid is a fountain of comic wisdom in the backyards of humanity, renowned for running dry due to electrical failure before resorting to corporate room service. This time he was only two days late and had the impertinence to give me an early morning call so I allowed him ten minutes before gonging the breakfast paranometer with a suggestion that the bi-plane's shortfall could be repaired with a little plastic surgery on his part....... Shanghai Sid is the first among equals, and democratic with disparagement, not so much WYSWYG as WYSWG, What You See Is What You Get just as Why You Stumble Is Why You Grumble. The relief on his face as he escaped the hotel with a small premium on room service came somewhere between the relief of Mafeking and the last chancer from a Kent boot sale after not being asked to produce his MOT. There aren't many lorry drivers I would go into the jungle with but Shanghai Sid is one of them.

The great day kicked off, as great days tend to, at 6pm, Needless to say one or two churches on the horizon were detoured before we lurched up to cars parked as if they had to be ready for a get away before an overdue bolt of divine lightning struck ......... loitered over by people looking as if they had stopped off at the dog track while on the run from their better halves.

Hugo maintained his individuality to the last. The only recorded case I know of the groom being late because nobody had thought to give him a lift to the church. He appeared a little put out......

Given a cart or two it was probably much the same as the church had seen in the 15th century. I was assigned to distribute programs as if they were leaflets for vitamin pills. All in all a very decent service with none of these his and hers and who are you kiddings tribal divisions down the aisle..... and an Anglican padre who seemed delighted to take the afternoon off from reading P.G. Wodehouse. I can never understand why English grooms enter as if they were bringing the Elgin marbles back for keeps but weren't sure if there was a tax to pay....... was pleased to blink while Fiona had the touchingly bashfull reticence of an English woman with a private sense of humour in full disguise as she puts her best foot forward realising she is but a stroll away of being firmly in charge of the situation.

Hyms were sung with a gusto in direct proportion to the length of time since they had last been sung, before solidarity set in and the serious business of reminding any Germans that we were back in town was attended to......the greatest concentration of excessive consumers the village had seen since the Gestapo were treated to an oration of a posthumous warning about the earth's resources from a Red Indian chief........ before scattering petals and plunging into champagne outside the church. Hugo took his vows like a man, dressed in the manner of Nelson's equerry reviewing the stews of Istanbul. He was complemented by an equally collarless brother with a Sultanic goatee surmounting an Eastern coat somewhere between Nehru and Blofeld which a slightly alarmed Dafydd confided to me was at the cutting edge of Manhattan gay chic. I reassured him, with the tolerance of a tail heavy roue who had taken refuge in a frock coat, that these things happen when one goes out with a girl from Barbados..... After all, with the possible exception of a Tunisian village near the El Djem amphitheatre in the late '60's it was the best dressed wedding I've been to.

.......There is an axis where Berkshire, Surrey and Hampshire meet. Like Le Grand Meaulnes it has secrets of recklessness and aesthetics you do not know about unless you grew up under its trees, and you can never explain to anybody who didn't grow up there. "L'audace, l'audace" the motto of the French cavalry fits in the pocket of a child who climbs those trees like a sweet. It never left Hugo when he jumped a bridge. Doubtless something Major Bill knows about and he entered into the spirit of things with multiple battery failure in the Roller the night before. The poignancy of an afficianado of lakes and leaves who has swanned 700 miles to stand on the right hand side of a B road in the rain as if it was just a detail is first cousin to sensibility. Occasionalluy I sensed a slight look of pain at the complexity of life in the Major's eyes.....running tanks into the Hun is probably simpler than running into one's sons friends in claret country.Hugo's mother added jolie verve to wit in a close to scarlet dress with specially tailored broad shoulders. French semiologists would have had a field day.

I slid easily into the benevolent smile Eddie Fitzgerald has when he knows he's got the Home Secretary on the run. Right will out no matter how long it takes....a few hours dithering with no time to change before dinner.... Stick me in a corner with wild boar and a high ceiling before me, and at my side Dafydd on the keen eye and Dave Turnbull who's mathematics on bungy jumping remains the benchmark, and Hugo's yacht designer whose ideas were so interesting I wasn't going to squander brain cells merely remembering his name while the magnums unloaded like the cannons at Trafalgar and its not all that difficult to be in celestial response to hacked coughs and the tin trays of Oscar's diner.

Hugo and Jason did a pretty good underage Morecambe and Wise from a balcony better suited to Johnny Halliday than Romeo, Defintive grace under pressure among the first division of bodies through the air. Jason has a certain well placed imperviousness to people who fall off roofs and is the only man I've ever met who accords due respect to Terry Thomas's immortal line in "Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines"........"You don't get treats like this every day"....... out of my four rolls of film I got what I think is one of the best I've ever taken........the enclosed of a French waiter taking a breather with Pernod and cigarette and an expression you could find nowhere else.

I think it was late that night that Buster said on the whole he would prefer not to walk as one of his legs was carved from wood, but I may be wrong, and it was certainly some night around that time that Chris Baker cruised in with a drawing room girl of velvet pockets from darkest SW whatever via Klosters who reminded me with an unspoken hint of reproof of some dinner there on the first DSC awayday but was obviously too well behaved at the time for me to remember and they gave us a lift back. One can always judge a person by how far they are prepared to go out of their way late at night......

.Buster, like all people who've smashed up their bodies many times in pursuit of a good curve was a delight and so easy to be with. I've seen it in old stunt artists -such people have a gentle manner, a sense of proportion, and are the kind quiet watchmen of a reservoir of private humour. When you smash yourself up they understand as nobody else does.

Belatedly chasing the mess left by Kretinous Leggatoutof town, misdirector of the video Like it or lump it, persistence is sincerity's cloak over the puddle............

After the ritual farewells that seem as ruthlessly energetic as the uncoupling of railway carriages I found myself in ritual denial at the BA desk in Bordaux (second hand ticket, shame about the face, would you like to sample our rejection tomorrow?) ....... thanks to an epochal return of deposit from the Zanzibar bound found myself on the Eurostar to the Champs whatever they were racing that day in Paris. Packs of my fellow country men littering the Gare du Nord under the eyes of overweight and doubly overtimed plods from Kent who were exported for the good will and funny hats should have been just reason enough to find the most circuituwhateveritous slow train to Brittany. I'm ashamed to say I was lazy. I should have got into the first carriage no matter what direction it was going in. There are few things more idle than a sense of purpose, whereas railways conspire with regret to sleeper you to sleep over a silver moon.. ........

Dunno when you're next wintered on the blasted Heathrow but the one detour anyone ought to find time for is the Spanish Chapel and Chapter House in Florence......... Central to the Dominicans, with great 14th century detail and complexity with different levels of meaning. We don't understand it completely, and the allegory is divided into sections. I have difficulties with their attitudes to heresy but the faces of Christ and St Peter are extraordinary for being found everywhere. the artist had delightful command of perspective and reality and no shortage of theatre. I'm very weak in being tired of people who cannot reconcile grace with complexity and occasionally take refuge in science.Please accept this afterthought as a pennance for writing so much about a wedding when I should have written three times as much about the lost resonances of this chapel.........