Why, perhaps, we have rather less to fear from Diaper Don than many so far suggest – he's yesterday's man

Harold Macmillan described the greatest challenge to a politician as ‘Events, dear boy, events’ and Joseph Chamberlain warned that ‘In politics, there is no use in looking beyond the next fortnight’.

So with that in mind we should be cautious about the apparent trend of more US states considering banning Donald Trump from standing in their Republican primaries. But at the end of the day, I suspect, Trump really is on to a loser.

It all kicked off in Colorado a few weeks ago where the state’s Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that as Trump had not just cajoled but had encouraged his – armed – supporters to ensure Congress could not certify the November 2020 election result, this amounted to insurrection.

This decided it that under Section 3 of the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment it should rule that thus Trump should and would not be eligible to stand for election to state or federal office.

That relevant section runs:

‘No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.'

This amendment was brought in after America’s Civil War to ensure no secessionist politicians could stand for election.

Naturally, as this involved ‘law’ and ‘the law’, there has been, and certainly will be, more argy-bargy about how that section of the 14th Amendment should be interpreted. For example, Trump supporters have argued that the office of President is not mentioned in the section and is thus not included.

They also insist that what I can only describe as ‘the invasion of Congress’ was not an ‘insurrection’ at all but merely a protest meeting. Furthermore, they claim that whatever the ‘protest meeting / insurrection’ was, Trump did not encourage anyone to do anything illegal.

So what is what? You will see why answering such questions is a field day for lawyers on a substantial hourly fee and a grand opportunity for them all to make a great deal of moolah (i.e. ‘. . . but what do we mean by “meaning” and “interpretation”? We cannot proceed, your honours, until the court is entirely clear as to what we are talking about. I contend that . . .’)

Colorado’s decision has now gone to the US Supreme Court, and how the court will rule or whether it will even agree to give a ruling is anyone’s guess. Scooting around the web looking up stuff on this whole matter, I have come across the suggestion that the US Supreme Court might simply take the view that it is not its business to get involved with what is ‘a state matter’.

Given how jealous US states are of what they have of independence that view makes sense. But, note, it is simply just another view. The court might, on the other hand, rule – and thereby echo one of the claims made by Trump – that what Colorado has decided is essentially ‘election interference’ and rule that Trump should be allowed to stand in Colorado’s Republican primary and the US cannot condone ‘election interference’.

And thus more scope for the briefs: ‘What, your honours, do we mean by “interference”. It could be that on the one hand, all things considered and trying to keep a clear head about the matter, that . . .’

. . .

What I find pertinent and telling is that similar lawsuits to have Trump barred from standing in their state’s Republican primary have now also been filed in Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Alaska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Vermont and Virginia.

However, let’s be clear: this only means that ‘lawsuits have been filed’. It does not mean that Trump will not stand in a state’s primary or even that Trump will not be allowed to stand for election in November 2024 in that state. Lawsuits can fail and often do. And even where they succeed, they go to appeal, as it has happened in Colorado, and on appeal it might be thrown out. Thus end of lawsuit.

Now for a second ‘however’: Trump’s camp, which keeps yelping ‘election interference’ and seems blind to what Trump and his team got up to after November 2020 – in my book a textbook case of ‘election interference’ – will be rather more worried than they let on.

They might chunder, that this is all a Democrat conspiracy which has, if they are to be believed, corrupted pretty much the whole US justice system and point out that Colorado is a Democrat state and that all seven of its supreme court judges are Democrat appointees. One-nil to the Trumpists?

No, not quite – MAGA morons, don’t pop the champagne corks yet or, more probably, don’t grab a can of beer quite yet.

The lawsuit was brought not by Colorado Democrats but by Republicans in the state. These are men and women who would most certainly prefer to see a conservative, Republican president but who most certainly do not want to see mendacious rapist and fraud like Trump sitting in the White House. So they are doing their very best to ensure it doesn’t happen.

What the overwhelming political character is of the other 17 states I have listed above, whether Democrat or Republican, I don’t know. But something tells me that whatever lawsuits are brought, they are more likely to be brought by Republicans who will feel just as their fellow Republicans did in Colorado: they want a Republican president but do not want him or her – don’t rule out Nikki Haley – to be that piece of disgraceful dreck Donald J. Trump.

Argentina now has a $9 dollar bill as its president, Brazil had one (and he still has supporters), Hungary has the – democratically elected! – moron Viktor Orban as its prime minster. Poland had a gang of pseudo-democrats in charge until recently, and in The Netherlands one Geert Wilders, a far-right winger to his fingertips came out top in a recent election (but is having a very difficult time finding any other party willing to form a coaltion government with him).

But the US is different: it, its size and its economic clout are enormous. Uniquely in the world, although China might be coming up fast, the US and its political developments affect the rest of the world deeply.

. . .

If, as a neutral, you were to try to evaluate Trump’s achievements when first in office, they are not much. And I stress that such a judgment must be made impartially.

Employment in the US is lower than it was, by quite a bit, than when he left office. He added several trillions to the national debt, and although he tries to make out that he boosted the American economy by referring to the rise in stock prices, his measures were decidedly short-term, and there is always a price to pay by employing such short-term measures.

To make an analogy, I could be a semi-billionaire tomorrow and appear to be very rich indeed if I found banks stupid enough to lend me £500,000 / $500,000. But I would also have an enormous debt around my neck and you can bet the interest rates I would be charged by the lenders would be huge. So how rich would I really be? That is the stunt Trump pulled.

I began this entry with the warnings of Macmillan and Chamberlain. They say of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides that you can experience 18 seasons in 24 hours. Politics might not move as fast, but you might see what I am getting at.

On the face of it Trump is toast: he faces several criminal trials and one civil trial (which will cost him, perhaps $1bn in ‘disgorgement’, i.e. paying back the amount his fraudulent behaviour made him by inflating is worth when applying for loans and getting better rates and tax advantages).

His main tactic is to try to delay all the trials until after the November 2024 election when – he believes – he will be president-designate again and once inaugurated can order – apparently legally – the US Department of Justice to drop all the charges.

Furthermore, if he is found guilty in any of the federal court cases, he can, as president, ‘pardon himself’. To this Brit such a development sounds outlandish and mad, but from what I know that is how the American governmental system is stacked.

The one exception will be the trial he faces in Georgia: as I point out above, US states retain a modicum of independence and they live in a voluntary federal system, and a US president has no power at all to pardon anyone found guilty of a state crime. Only that state’s governor can do that (and once again I must plead that I am astonished that I regard as potential corruption – at a state level – is tolerated).

There was a very good piece in the Washington Post recently by a Robert Kagan (you can find it here) in which he warned that at present, in the lead-up to next November’s election rather too many people are rather too supine about the threat Trump presents to the US.

Pertinently, Kagan is not as Trumpist might care to have it some wishy-washy quasi-socialist Democrat lickspittle but a self-declared neo-conservative and as such his fears echo those of Colorado’s Republicans who brought the lawsuit to get Trump banned from the state’s Republican primary.

Kagan warns that although many might at present be concerned about a ‘Trump dictatorship’, if and when he wins the election and returns to the White House what happened in 1930s Nazi Germany would well take place in the US.

So Kagan, suggests the time to act is now, though he doesn’t suggest quite what to do.

Many in positions of power, he warns, might care to ‘cooperate’ with the new regime and argue that personal survival – Trump has publicly declared he will purge the federal civil service of those who opposed him – is more attractive than being cast into the wilderness.

Kagan also suggests that ‘ordinary’ people will, metaphorically, bend the knee and not make waves as, arguing that is what many Germans did in the 1930s, that however distasteful or even bad the new Trump regime is, it largely leaves their own lives untouched.

Those at present vocal Republicans who proclaim what a disaster Trump would be might, Kagan suggests, pull in their horns after he is elected and, pragmatically also opting for survival over oblivion, begin to keep their mouths tightly shut.

. . .

I can’t deny that I, too, have been fearing the worst: hoping that either Trump doesn’t make it to become the Republican presidential election candidate or, if he does, is beaten at the polls (and that despite the US wacky, wacky, wacky electoral college system).

But then, very recently, I began to see it very differently.

It began when I came across first a claim by the former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger . In it, he says, quite a few people who deal with Trump report that, er, ‘he smells’.

Initially, I just put this down to another piece of ‘ad hominem’ criticism of Trump, although there was something oddly compelling about the piece, given the somewhat unusual claim it made.

Then, more recently, I came across an even more, superficially unlikely, claim that Donald Trump as a matter of course has to wear nappies (US diapers) 24/7.

The explanation given is that since the late 1990s, because of his addiction to Adderall (the ADHAD drug), his consumption of speed and cocaine and not least his full-time diet of junk food – Coke, burgers and French fries – all of which have a laxative effect, especially in conjunction, he has been incontinent.

Hence the smell, which Kinzinger says is combined with various deodorants to try to mask it.

OK, this might strike many as simple malicious gossip. But, oddly, malicious gossip is often true. And I can’t help feeling this claim is also wholly true.

Because of that, I cannot in any way take Trump seriously: basically he is a man in his late 70s who shits in his pants, stinks and talks complete shite around the clock. To describe Trump as ‘not a serious man’ is to do a grave in justice to morons around the world.

So it struck me: Trump will eventually not make it to become the Republican’s presidential candidate, for one reason or another. So, hugely piqued, he will stand as an independent candidate. And at the poll he will fail badly.

Yes, nationally he will get several million votes but he will die a miserable electoral death. And that, dear friends, is what I truly think will happen. Then, finally, I suspect he will die of heart failure, all those burger and fries calories claming their due.

PS Why Trump insists on painting he face orange – and making it so obvious what he is doing – baffles me. 

He looks very silly indeed. I assume he believes that by ‘bronzing’ his face he would look quite as old but, Donny, it ain’t working.

Why his staff don’t diplomatically warn him what a complete prat he looks is also a puzzle.

 Oh well. Do I care? What do you think?

Roast cygnet, guffawing farmers, a lodge dinner, thwarted evasion and three main courses – my night rubbing shoulders with the great and good of the City of Lincoln (before later retreating downhill to my rented room in a two-up, two-down)

While ‘researching’ – the posh word for ‘googling’ – all and any info I can get on the Lincolnshire Standard Group (in Britain), I came across a newspaper archive. I was working as a reporter on one of its papers, the Lincolnshire Chronicle in Lincoln, from June (the 10th, I think) of 1974 until mid-October 1975 and wanted to remind myself of several things.

Specifying that I was working ‘in Lincoln’ is not a bit of stupidity – the owners, the LSG (which no longer exists), published several papers in Lincolnshire of which one, the Lincolnshire Standard, was published in Boston, a town which the more astute among you will realise is not Lincoln.

Sadly, the archive had nothing on the Lincolnshire Chronicle, but they had these cuttings from the Lincolnshire Echo, which was the local evening paper when I was in Lincoln. The Chron has long since vanished and the Echo is now the local weekly. I doubt either of these stories would have made the nationals, not even at the time.

The Lincolnshire Standard Group (LSG) was taken over several times, thought the name was retained, but according to the UK Government’s Companies House was wound up in 2016.

. . . 

I was ‘researching’ in connection with a new project I am preparing for, and while doing so, I recalled one night getting an evening job which on the face of it would not seem to be the most onerous assignment. In the event I did find it oddly challenging.

Lincoln had a ‘lodge’. It probably also had – and still has – a Freemasons’ Lodge, but this lodge was purely local, and sadly I can’t remember what it was called.

Like all such outfits, its membership consisted of the great and good and the powerful of the city – Lincoln, though not very big – it has a population of just under 104,000 – is a ‘city’ because it has a cathedral – as well as many local farmer and landowners from the county.

Lincolnshire is largely agricultural and in some ways it is something of a mirror image of The Netherlands around 120 miles across the English channel to East-South-East. It is just as flat and featureless, though the county is split in two by the ‘Lincoln ridge’ and the whole county is on two levels.

The Lincoln ridge runs right through the city, dividing it into ‘Uphill’ and ‘Downhill’ with a very steep climb from ‘Downhill’ to the castle and cathedral. Pictured on the right is Steep Hill, named for obvious reasons which 

pedestrians have to climb from the commercial city centre if they want to visit the cathedral.

The medieval – and thus picturesque parts of the city – are ranged around the cathedral ‘uphill’, so this is largely middle-class territory. Downhill, where I lodged, is made up of street upon street of terrace of ‘two-up, two-down’ terrace house, which are a feature of most English towns over the past 100 years.

. . .

One day I was told that I would be ‘reporting’ on the annual dinner of this particular lodge and on the face of it, that sounded like quite a nice number – who doesn’t like a free meal. All it would entail would be to go along, eat a pleasant – though English – dinner, then write about 500 words the following day, pretty much about nothing in particular except who was there and what we were served.

This lodge’s annual dinner was notable in that it was just one of, I’m told three, such events in all of Britain at which roast cygnet – young swan – could legally be eaten. The then ‘Queen’ of England (so now the ‘King’ of England) owned all the country’s swans, and catching, killing and eating one was in times past a capital offence. That is if you were caught, you were executed.

One suggestion I’ve just come across is that centuries ago they were hunted almost to extinction and to preserved them, they were made the property of the ‘crown’, although somehow I don’t buy that explanation.

It casts England’s ‘royalty’ in the role of conservationist and although Brian, our current ‘king’ is something of a green freak, I doubt even 100 years ago a family and their mates which took, and still takes, great delight in massacring grouse and other ‘game birds’ in their thousands very autumn (fall) are much bothered.

The only way they would agree to ‘preserve’ an animal is to ensure it was still available for killing in perpetuity. There is also some scepticism about the claim that all the swans belong to the ‘crown’.

I can’t remember where the annual dinner was being held – possibly the Guildhall, but I am just speculating and really have no idea. But I can still picture the inside of the venue in my mind’s eye.

There were rows and rows of long tables at which members sat with a ‘top table’ on a dais – this was not a classy event where guests sat six or eight to a table around a nicely decked spread with fine china.

The top table guests included the Dean of Lincoln Cathedral but as to the other guests I can only speculate that the Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire as well as the Lord Mayor of Lincoln will have washed up for their supper .

The ‘hoi polloi’, as it were, seemed to me to consist, apart from me, of most of Lincolnshire’s farmers. Ruddy-face, large and jovial and increasingly drunk, they were all gratifyingly coarse. I add ‘gratifyingly’ because otherwise you, dear reader, might assume I was rather disparaging of their behaviour. I wasn’t at all.

My first mistake, being then still something of a ‘southern jessie’ despite the four years I had spent at university in Dundee, was once to refer to Lincolnshire as ‘northern’. The first time I did this – long before that lodge dinner, I should add – I caused outrage: ‘Do you mind! We’re the East Midlands!’ And, of course, Linconshire was, but my knowledge of my rather small home country – ‘Old Blighty’ (and I have no idea where that name originated) – was then very limited.

Yet to my then untutored ears the Lincolnshire accent was distinctly ’northern’. It does, in fact resemble the South and East Yorkshire accents, unsurprisingly as South and East Yorkshire border Lincolnshire to the North-West and North, but it is a distinctly ‘Midlands’ way of speaking. Like the Lincolnshire countryside, the accent is very, very, very flat, and, as in most rural areas, from where my fellow guests at the dinner came, it is very, very, very broad.

I don’t mean it as a snooty gibe but as a compliment when I say that rural Lincolnshire folk, like most farmers, are also distinctly unsophisticated. I long ago discovered I prefer the company of men and women who call a spade a bloody shovel.

There were no women guests – this was in the mid-1970s, after all – and once my guests found out that ‘the Chronicle’s reporter’ had never before attended one of their lodge annual dinners, they were very amused and looked forward to what I would make of it all.

England (and Lincolnshire) are not renown for their culinary expertise, despite what many now claim – you certainly can eat very well in Britain if you can spare something like £150 a head with wine, but if you cannot, your options are very limited. My tastes do incline more to French, Italian and Spanish food, but having said that, I do like a good, un-fancy steak and kidney pie with chips.

So on our menu that night was to a standard English dinner – roasted meat with roasted potatoes and ‘two veg’. And, I assumed, that the roast of the first course would be the swan.

After, I suppose, a soup of some kind as our first course, we were served our main course and my new farming friends were very generous, piling my plate high and encouraging me to take ‘seconds’, which I, of course, I did.

Then once the main course plates had been cleared away and I anticipated pudding came the shock: my friends announced that we would now be enjoying or second ‘main course’ – another roast with potatoes and two veg.

But I was full. I could not eat any more. I tried to excuse myself and announced that I would be sitting out this second main course, but they – guffawing with delight, I realised, at some private joke – would have none of it and again piled my plate high. This course, too, I managed to finish, though quite how I did I really don’t know.

Then our plates were again cleared away and my farming friends revealed what had been amusing them so much: there was a third ‘main course’. I said I could not eat another morsel. Nonsense, they said, but I informed them I was going outside for a cigarette.

Well, smoking that cigarette would normally have taken no more than six or seven minutes, but I made sure it took far, far longer, and I lingered outside to allow my friends each to finish their third ‘main course’ and for the dishes to be cleared away before I re-joined them. But when I did . . .

‘Ah, there you are,’ they said, ‘you weren’t here when the food was served, so we filled your plate for you.’

And they had: there in front of me was my third main course. Somehow I managed to finish it, but how?

Then came speeches from the toffs at the top table, with the Dean of Lincoln making a surprisingly filthy speech, and it is a measure of my then unworldliness – I might even already have been 25 – that I was mildly shocked by it. What, a man of the cloth! Good Lord. I suppose it takes all sorts.

I only wish I could find out which ‘lodge’ that was.

Er, more writing (to prove I am as good as my word)

Well, there you are, a man as good as his word and you can’t often say that. As I am sitting in the Costa Coffee branch on the Old Brompton Road, Earls Court, London (the A3218 for those who need to know these things, though I can’t think why) and killing time, I might as well make good on my intention to ‘write every day’ to ‘keep my hand in’.

I’m killing time because I’m waiting to go to London Paddington to catch my train home to North Cornwall. That is at 12.03 and it is now 9.58. I stayed the night at my brother’s just around the corner, the nearest Tube station – Earls Court for those who need to know these things (and I use the entrance on the Warwick Road, A3220) – is just a few minutes walk away from his flat (US apartment) and if I leave there at just after 11am, I should get to Paddington in very good time (and shall, in fact, be obliged to kill a little more time).

Then it is a trip of just under four hours – quite long by British standards a mere trippette for those of you living in the US or Brazil, India, Russia or China, of course – and then from tomorrow it will be back to the old routine, which, though, no longer exists now that I have pretty much dotted every I and crossed every T of my ‘Hemingway bollocks’ and must now set about establishing a new routine. And that might not be easy.

I have long had something else in mind to attempt. In fact, I have long had several things in mind to attempt, but its best to do things one at a time or risk doing none of them as well as they might deserve.

I shan’t say what it is because for some time I’ve believed that the more you talk about ‘what you are going to do’, the less ‘you are likely to do it’. And frankly – to my certain knowledge to my late father’s increasing irritation – I spent rather to much of my life talking about what I was going to do and doing absolutely fuck all about it.

OK, I know why I did fuck all about it (though I shan’t bother explaining here because it is not only irrelevant but rather uninteresting), but the salient fact is that I did fuck all. I still have, somewhere, pretty much every short story I’ve written, an attempted novel and a novella, but it really does not amount to very much at all.

That I have kept them is for one reason only: I had no very good reason to get rid of it all. If I did, if someone did come up with a good reason which convinced me, into the trash it would all go (and no tears shed by me or anyone else).

The thing I have planned is superficially quite straightforward, but what I should like to try to do is a little more subtle. And there’s the rub. Because I have now – at 74 – got to the stage that I am just writing to ‘amuse’ myself and the chances that any of it will ever be published are as close to non-existent as they might ever be, I want to take the more difficult route, and that requires quite a bit of thinking.

Well, actually not that much thinking, just thinking of the right kind, and frankly I’m not much of a thinker. I can bullshit as well as the best of them and better than many. But thinking?

I keep plugging ‘my novel’, the only one I have so far written, and I might as well admit that it is a good example that we should never judge a book by its cover. Here’s the cover, back and front. Don’t judge.

It, too, is not – or rather, I hope it is not – as straightforward as it might appear to be and I do believe I have succeeded in doing what I tried to do. Whether anyone else will agree – would agree (the will/would are crucial here) is another matter.

But what I attempted with that gave me the idea for what I might attempt with the next one. I’ve had ‘the story’, ‘what it’s about’, for some time, but I came to realise that if it was to be worthwhile in any way, it will need an added dimension. I know what that dimension is – a safer way to put it is ‘might be’ – but what I don’t yet know is how to create it. Hence the thinking.

Savvy?

Two and a half hours later . . .

I should have published these links, US Amazon and UK Amazon. Happy reading (as if).

Ten days in France, now back home again

Illats, SW France

Not so long ago, I reported that I had finally finished ‘My Hemingway bollocks’, officially ‘The Hemingway enigma’, and that at present not having anything to get on with and thus be able to stick to what had become my routine of writing for four or five hours every afternoon, I would do a little writing about whatever occurred to me every day, just to keep my hand in.

Well, one of the cliches with which we are all acquainted is ‘the road to Hell is paved with good intentions’, and so I’ve discovered: I’ve got fuck-all writing done as in ‘fuck-all keeping my had in’.

I did start what was to be an entry for this blog – where all the other ‘daily writing’ was to be placed – but after about 30 minutes of totally inconsequential scribbling (that is, tapping away on my laptop keyboard) I realised just how tediously dull what I had so far written was and that I was thoroughly bored with it.

As it is a universal truth that ‘if the writer is bored with what she or he has written, you can bet the reader was doubly bored and had long given up’, I junked what I had.

By the way, have any of you read – or, better, attempted to read – ‘a classic’ and become so utterly uninterested that you would to anything else just for a good excuse to stop reading? Yet all the time there lurks in the back of 

your mind the admonition ‘don’t be such a hopeless, dumb and simple sod – this is “a classic” and although you think it is as dull as ditchwater, that is your fault, sonny. Get on with it’.

You do, however, throw in the towel, and such a spineless capitulation is inevitably followed by hours and often days of guilt when you castigate yourself for being that hopeless, dumb and simple sod who doesn’t even have the wherewithal to ‘read a classic’.

Along those lines, though, I have to add that there are some classics which have I haver read (or am reading) and which do repay that effort. One such is George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I’d already over the years read several of her, shorter, novels and I like her slightly ironic take on most things.

‘Oh’, write all the bods ‘passionate about literature’, ‘but you must, must, must read Middlemarch! It’s probably the best English novel ever written!’ And they thereby confirm that shameless hyperbole is not restricted to ads for Hollywood films and weekend book section reviews. In the latter my favourite piece of bollocks is when a novel is described as ‘an important new work from . . .’.

To cut a long story a short, I have written fuck all of anything since I completed My Hemingway bollocks, not even a shopping list (although I have not doubt at all it would have been a rattling good shopping list). Well, at least now I am.

. . .

I am on my way back to rainy, cold and miserable North Cornwall from rainy, not quite as cold but just as miserable, south-west France where I have been keeping my aunt company. She turned 93 a few weeks ago and her husband died several years ago and lives on her own in a rather large, in part a little decrepit house where the wiring is the very definition of ‘death trap’.

She is now quite infirm, although she can very slowly get about with a zimmer frame, but does so only when necessary.

Our routine has been very simple: I appear downstairs at 10am where she has just finished her breakfast and I drink a bowl or two of milky coffee. In recent years she has taken to eating ready-made meals from the supermarket, so for the past ten days I have cooked her lunch, partly because I enjoy cooking and get no chance to do so at home. What I cooked has included roast chicken (though this time not as successful as the last time, because I didn’t roast it enough – time was getting on and my aunt likes to eat by 1.30pm and it was by then already gone 2pm), pan-fried salmon, home-made burgers (a lot nicer than any ready-made burgers I have ever eaten), mushroom omelette (simple, but a nice one is very tasty).

Our lunches are always last for at least two hours, what with crudite – which my aunt insists should be eaten ‘for health reasons’ –, terrine, main course, cheese and coffee, and also because there really is no rush. Although my aunt is Irish, although born in Bodmin, she married a Corsican Frenchman – not contradiction there, I trust – and spent the past 65 years living in French culture, including Algeria before the war there.

Her wine cellar (established by her husband who, though, had to give up alcohol in the last 15 years of his life, had continued buying wine) is large, and we had wine at lunch for every meal, I followed that with a glass or three of calvados, then poire William when the calvados was finished with my coffee.

Sadly, drinking at lunchtime these days knocks me semi-sideways, so while my aunt had her nap I settled down aimlessly to surf the net and catch up on YouTube what that moron Trump is up to. Does anyone think he won’t go to jail? I’m curious.

It is jaw-dropping that anyone in the US is able to take him and his silly claims seriously. But some – rather too many – do, although those I’ve seen interviewed do not seem to be the brightest by a long chalk.

On this visit as well as my last visit I have skipped supper at 8pm, to the consternation of my aunt, but I really prefer having an empty stomach to be filled at lunch the following day rather than eat because ‘it is what one does’. My aunt is perpetually baffled that I don’t eat breakfast or supper, which, she says, is unhealthy.

. . .

In 40 minutes as I write – though this entry will probably not be posted until I am in Merignac airport – a taxi is arriving to take me to Bordeaux’s airport. So far I have always simply taken a taxi to Cerons station, about six kilometres away, but for some very odd reason all the local taxi companies are on strike (and I have no idea why *).

Finally, we managed to scare up a firm on the net – I don’t know where they are based or why they are not on strike, perhaps the strike is purely local – which could have taken me to Cerons but as the cab is coming all the way from somewhere, he suggested taking me straight to the airport. Pricey, but fuck it, I was just glad to find a cab.

Now I must stop and can carry on once I am safely in the cafeteria at Merignac’s Billi terminal, having passed through security (which is always such colossal fun).

Later, Merignac Airport, Bordeaux

Two hours later and €105 down I am now sitting with a cappuccino at the airport thinking of ways to kill the next three hours. Finishing this blog entry will soak up some of that time but there is not a great deal to do at an airport and there is only a certain number of coffees you can drink.

My aunt and I only went for one meal out this time, but it was a great meal, in Sauternes. Sadly, my aunt is now in the age where ‘everything has come down a bit’ or its soulmate ‘nothing is quite as it was’.

So the restaurant itself (which I have previously visited many years ago but was then not paying, either) had been shut for a year or two, renovated then reopened, but sadly, according to my aunt it wasn’t what it had been. Well, to my, admittedly untutored Anglo-Saxon, eyes it was find. We began, as we always do, with foie gras and a glass of Sauternes and this, too, was not quite has good was it might have been, and – well, you are way ahead of me, no doubt – to my, admittedly untutored Anglo-Saxon taste – was more than fine.

Then I had chicken breast, which might not sound very special but it as. I’ve managed to track down the menu for the restaurant, Le Cercle Guirard (Le Saprien before it closed for renovation) and I had Volaille fermière étuvée au vin jaune, champignons sauvages, sauce suprême perlée à l’huile de piment fumé. One for the French speakers who cannot count me in their number. I was very nice indeed. Oh, and with it I had a second glass of Sauternes which the restaurant patron assured me was traditional.

I hope to visit my aunt again in the new year at some point, but that will depend on her health. It is not the best.

* Taxi strike: my driver who was on strike a little earlier today but wasn’t now – I’m sure he explained why, but I didn’t quite cotton on – told me it was a result of new rules laid down by the insurance companies.

I can only repeat what he told me, but it seems one of the income streams for taxis is to take bods to hospital for appointments. The insurance companies are now insisting that unless unless a taxi conveys more than one passenger, it will only pay 50% of any claim.

They say it is in the interests of ecologie (being more green) but he and his fellow drivers are certain they just want to make more moolah by saving themselves a little. I suspect he’s right, too. When companies explain an innovation – which invariably costs the punters more – is in favour of ‘saving the planet’, scepticism is not just warranted by wholly advisable.