Life and Times – Page 2 – Anecdotes and Antidotes in Burgundy

Gones for good: Episode 3- Farm to table

Spraying shit on the town hall has to be the best performative protest against bureaucratic bullshit ever conceived. The French farmers are in round 3 against the government of Gabriel Atal and the bright young thing PM is scrambling to defuse the situation ahead of Macron, never a popular figure in the countryside, making his cow-admiring, cheese tasting appearance at the annual Agricultural Salon in Paris this weekend. France loves a good protest and also love their farmers. The food and wine of France are at the heart of its self-image of being paradise on earth, the very essence of the good life. They parade their local produce as part of the ‘patrimoine’ and have been fierce in the protection of the various ‘pays’ and ‘produits’. There are 114 different protected types of agricultural produce under the AOP scheme in France, plus 363 registered protected wine designations. The obvious problem is that all of the protections mean nothing if the supermarkets are doing their best to drive price down and the incredible concentration of their purchasing power – the top 6 supermarkets are French owned and have revenues of €180 billion. Milk is bought at a marginal price that keeps farmer’s in penury and forced to use whatever production enhancers they can to keep alive, regardless of the long term damage to the cows. Several publicized suicides of farmers has reinforced the public support for the farmers and even with their protests blocking roads with what the Spanish are calling ‘tractorados’, as the protests spread to Spain, Czechia and Greece against what are seen as overly bureaucratic and complicated oversight and rules emanating from Brussels.

What is putting a hair up the ass of the farmers is that these rules which are costly and frustrating do not apply elsewhere. So the target for their ire is the import of foods from outside of EU, milk from New Zealand seems a ridiculous example yet finds its way into European dairy products. French farmers did an inspired version of a trolley run this week by going into French major supermarkets, loading up in front of the cameras with products either masquerading as ‘French’ produce, or imported where the local version cannot be made for similar pricing; walking through the doors, without paying, and then donating it to the food banks that are a part of everyday life for many people in the rural farming dominant communities.

Attal and other officials were supposedly surprised by “the scale and fury of the protests” . I was impressed. We had tractors ambling along the major freeways in and out of Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux and most major cities, 3 abreast, at 5km an hour. Dumping of manure, hay bales and that staple of farm equipment, the old car tire, outside local offices of the government that are involved in any way with administering the EU’s farm policy. There is a speed camera on the way to Macon in a rural part of the department, and it often gets spray-painted but it got tired two weeks ago, and they have either not bothered to remove them or they keep them topped up. Surveys in France showed 90% plus support for the farmers, after all in principle they only want French produce as it’s the best and anything that threatens that gets an easy thumbs down.

In a familiar routine now this has been going on now for 4 weeks, protests, disruption, and widespread support, Attal and other ministers urgently travel hither and nither meeting with the local Farmer’s Union guys. Every time one is interviewed on TV we get yet another example of regional dialects living on, I can barely understand them and I think the urbane Gabriel struggles too. Having survived his brush with the blue-overalled ‘Bobs’ with tractors and wellies, he dashes back to Paris and prepares another round of concessions. One early give was the repeal of the 16, yes 16, different regimes involved with preserving and controlling hedgerows. This week brought increased checks on food producers claiming their products are made in France and heightened legal action taken against those that did not conform. Attal promised there would be “product by product” checks on foods produced outside the EU containing pesticides banned across the continent to ensure they were stopped. Which is all well and good, but you cannot help but wonder why did it take 4 weeks of mass protest to get that to happen? The original protests were about the byzantine pension rules for Farmers and the pending removal of the agricultural fuel subsidiaries. Those got rolled back, but the issue is less about which little ‘give’ the government acquiesces to next but the ongoing fight underneath across the European Union.

We have an existential threat to European peace and harmony sitting in his bunker under Moscow at the end of a 30’ long table, probably at this very moment lecturing some poor lackey on the history of the Kievan Rus, or at least his own personal take on it. His Ukraine adventure cranked up energy prices to the point that inflation took off. Everyone got squeezed. Everyone was supposed to make sacrifices, but it seems the large corporations, especially the supermarkets, didn’t get that memo. While they record soaring profits, paying dividends and obscene bonuses to each other for ‘job well done’ the farmers and the ordinary person struggles with higher costs for fuel, food and rent. At the same time we have very lofty and admirable goals to right the years of ecological wrongs with rules to reduce loss of hedgerows, biodiversity, over dependence on monocultures and overuse of pesticides. However, no-one wants to price that in and so as the pithy adage goes, the shit flows downhill and the farmer is supposed to deal with the consequences, but the supermarkets can still make their profits and the ordinary person does not want to pay €0.20 more for a liter of milk or butter to keep the farmer from bankruptcy or in extremis, suicide. So yes, I guess I understand why they are spraying shit at government offices.

Lyon this week has been mild again and although the schools are off for ski week the only snow is at high elevations and the smaller, low level elevation places in the Jura and the Alps Maritime are fields of unwelcoming brown rather than glistening pristine white snow. It is the snow season so the restaurants and media are talking up the winter dishes like Choux Croute, Fondu, Tartiflette and other various holy alliances of cheese, pork and potatoes.

Saturday was St Modeste’s feast day but again no special dish in his honor. St Modeste is, it transpires, one of those fortunate chaps who was considered a generally good sort as Bishop of Trier and was rewarded with sainthood for being a best in class confessor. So he actually died in his bed in 489, no miracles, visions of the bleeding pumping heart or public beheading following several days torture for him. He got the honor as more of a local nomination process that people put forward their local martyrs and their very best confessors. After being canonized locally, all it took was some local big wig to persuade the Pope to support it, perhaps while on pilgrimage to Rome, or Avignon. Having a local saint was always good for tourism and trade with people coming to see whatever relics remained at the patron church, so the big-wig would return happy, some fiscal lubrication of the process may have been necessary, but it seemed to work for these what are called Pre-Congregational Saints. All good things come to an end, and Rome and the Pope stopped the local ‘Vote for your local Saint’ efforts in the 11th century. By that point I think they were afraid the title of Saint was being devalued as there were mushrooming cases of miracles, no shortage of martyrs and by that time there were confessors nearly everywhere. So St. Modeste is really an old style saint, and in full Lent no real feasting to be had anyway.

Friday night we went to “Le Cochon Qui Boit” tucked away in the narrow streets between the hillside below Croix-Rousse, ‘Les Pentes’ and the Saone. The Drinking Pig is a bright small space in a typical Lyonnais Canut-style building run by two guys who trained at Tetedoie, the expensive Mich one star up on the hill of Fourviere. The food was very veggie led, a fabulous Jerusalem Artichoke bisque as an amuse-bouche signalled their intent. The wines are all natural as is the trend now. Natural wines all have labels that are bright-colored, and the names pun their way to taking what was traditionally very cheap wine from non-fashionable appellations into something cool and sells at 3 times the price of their traditional neighbors. The first white I tried was a Gros Plant Nantais which was crisp with a hint of the fruit from the Melon de Bourgogne grape it was partly blended from. More succesful than the Jura white that followed, a grassy yellow Chardonnay which only just made it on to the side of pleasurable. The Carignan from Languedoc was lighter than I expected but a great compliment to the Pigeonneau fermier de Bresse, petit épeautre et blettes. Filleted breast of roast pigeon, served with spelt, chard and a cabbage parcel stuffed with all the inside bits of the bird made into a deep red rich sausage. The dessert was insanely good. Describing it as butternut squash three ways does it a disservice, one caramelized round of roast squash sat in a nutty foam and was topped with a quenelle of butternut ice-cream wrapped in a stripe of chestnut puree. I always feel a bit uneasy taking pictures of plates as it is so clichéd, but here is the pigeon dish. In conclusion, this particular pig was well-fed and did his best to join in the drinking.

Gones for good: Episode 2 – Love, pain and ashes

Busy days. A late celebrated anniversary due to me being back in the Bay Area on the actual day (that was worth its own blog, but it would be like falling on a bruise, I’ve done that before, which if you didn’t read it can be found here), Shrove Tuesday and Mardi Gras, the fête de St Valentin.

France is on one hand religious, as late as 2011 over 50% of the population believed in God if asked, although it’s now down to 44% but 35 million Frenchmen and Frenchwomen self identify as Christian. On the other, it is constitutionally not religious, your Church wedding means nothing. There is no ‘And so help me God’ in courts, no invoking of His blessing when they sing the national anthem. No opening the Senate with a pithy prayer, and no place legally for any religious symbols at school. As much as people would point to the enforcement of the latter having become more a casus belli of the right and their fear of what they see as the visible signs of the march of radical Islam across the fatherland. Crucifixes around necks and yarmulke had been quietly ignored for decades, but the hijab and more recently the full body cover abaya have drawn the ire and attention. Macron is courting the center right or more pointedly not allowing the far right under Le Pen to profit from the cry for some casual cultural bullying. So religious, except when it’s mainly not.

Every day in the bakers they write on a chalk board the Saint for the day. When they finish the weather forecast on France 2, they give the sunrise and sunset, phase of the moon and the Saint’s Day. Tomorrow is St Julienne for example. I am unaware if St Julienne has any particular pastry or treat but we are still technically in the season of the Bugne. This is a Lyonnaise doughnut, very light version of a doughnut and light years from a Crispy Creme or the English jam doughnut. Traditionally a Mardi Gras treat as it has ‘gras’, grease or fat; it is a small shape of dough fried in fat ahead of lent’s lean days. Dusted with sugar, it’s a sticky-fingered treat for the ‘gouter’. It is the English who are feted for their afternoon tea but ironically other than the legions of the retirees who, having strided the green and sadly now fetid land, retire to a local tea shop for tea and scones, most Brits do not have afternoon tea. Yet in France, every child returns from school between 4 and 5 to have the treat of the gouter, the local version of afternoon tea. A drink with a sweet something, bugne, chocolate bars, pain au chocolat or bread with lashings of Nutella. The adults partake with tea, sadly usually without the addition of milk and many, many bizarre herbal offerings masquerading as bringing some healthy side benefit. I am not a massive fan of bugne Lyonnaise, but neither am I a fan of doughnuts regardless of which side of the Atlantic they originate from. I do, however, really like the ‘ears’ style doughnut, called Elephant Ears or if you are from the South West ‘Bear’s Ears’. Les Oreilles d’Ours are flat layers of flaky pastry, fried of course, but flavored with orange water, fleur d’oranger. They are dangerously good, bought by the 100g and needing to be eaten within minutes to be fully appreciated.

The French are zealously religious about bread. Their church is the Boulangerie. We are blessed in our Burgundy town of 3,400 souls with 6 bakers, with rotating days of closure fresh bread is available 7 days a week, 6 days a week with two bread bakings, morning and afternoon. The supermarkets also sell bread, but you really must have given up on life to buy your bread there. The bakery scene is further slightly subdivided into Boulangeries, places that sell only breads, Boulangerie- Pattisseries, places that sell Bread and cakes and Patisseries that sell only cakes. There is a further odd distinction with Banettes, which are bakers who sell pre-prepared sandwiches, small individual deserts and cold drinks which serves the lunch crowd and school kids; most have some seating as its uncool in France to eat on the run. There are 35,000 boulangeries, according to the Confédération Nationale de la Boulangerie Pâtisserie Française, about the same number of communes in France. The distribution is not that straightforward as the major towns have more and the villages have lost their bakers over the years. Paris has 1360 bakeries, Lyon 286. In 1960 there were 50,000 in France but from then until around 2010 they declined steadily with many disappearing from rural villages, as the population moved into the towns and old retiring bakers were not replaced. They flat lined for a few years but since 2017 there has been a resurgence, from 2017 to 2023 the number of boulangerie-pattiseries grew by 9% as a new generation of scratch bakers has joined the profession.

A boulangerie has to sell the basic baguette ‘traditionelle’, which is price controlled and currently €1.30 and 250 grammes. Generally avoid this and get the next one up, in Burgundy we get the Charolais which is €0.40 more expensive but sour dough rather than a commerical yeast. In France overall they bake and sell 6 billion baguettes per year, equivalent to half a baguette per person per day so yet the french like their daily bread. 82% admit to eating bread every day and an old expression to describe something as taking a painfully long time is “longue comme un jour sans pain”, as long as a day without bread. In Lyon, we have an embarrassment of riches bread wise and part of the fun exploring around where you live is working out who has the best bread, the best croissant and sorting out when your first choice is open – Reymond in our case, open only Monday to Friday and closed (congé) for August and for ‘ski week’ next week. Local knowledge like knowing who is closed when, who is open on Sunday is a result of some worthwhile exploration. At some point I will have a deep dive on Reymond as they have amazing breads and other treats. The initial frustration of moving to France from the US and not having every shop open whenever you want it soon fades as you realize that the people who work in shops and restaurants have families too, they need time off to play with their kids, they need to get a proper meal at lunchtime and if you need some more mulch for the garden remember to get it Saturday as everywhere is closed on Sundays. I like that the service is professional without ass-kissingly desperate for the tip, I like that the wait staff get benefits and vacation, I like that I am never hustled for a tip when getting a coffee or buying a sandwich. Is it frustrating that Reymond is closed for two weeks in February? Yes, but really, what the fuck? Other breads are available. The guy has kids, and he is up at 4.00am every day of the week creating some of the best bread in the world, so if the kids are off school for Ski-Week I am happy he is with them and then comes back to bake, happy and content to put his love into his dough and not put the love for the other dough above all else, like in some places we could mention.

Croissants and their fellow breakfast treats like Pain au Chocolat (which for some reason my kids and I always have to pronounce in a New Jersey accent as “Panna Shock-a-latt” ) are grouped as Viennese pastries, ‘Viennoisseries’. The supposed story is that they were originally created in Vienna in the crescent shape as symbol of the victory of the Holy Roman Empire over the crescent-bannered army of the previously unstoppable Ottoman Empire on September 12th 1683. You will see Viennoisseries as the offering engraved on many Boulangerie windows and store fronts. Sometimes the baker will specify which butter they use, Reymond for example uses only butter from Charentes, French butter generally has a higher fat content than US butter which helps give that nutty mouth feel.

The French do not seem to get the same press as the Belgians or Swiss for their chocolates, but my experience has been that there is an insane level of quality of chocolates to be found everywhere. There are specialists that have retail outlets in all major towns, Charolles is the home of Maison Dufoux who has 6 retail outlets including one in the bustle of Presqu’isle in Lyon. The real surprise is the artisanal chocolates available in the Boulanger-patissiers who quite often make their own chocolates alongside the cakes and tarts. The French rarely visit each other empty-handed, so florists do well all year, and you understand why the baker, who has done his work by 7.00 am, spends his days baking cakes and making chocolates, which are boxed in small gift-sized presentations. Unlike in commercial chocolates you get to choose what goes in your selection, but that means there is no cheat sheet telling you what each one is, this is not your Cadbury’s or Sees Candies. It was the fête du St Valentin on Wednesday, so artisanal chocolates were getting a lot of love.

The dozen roses gift seems to be an imperial hangover. In France, roses are sold metrically, in 10s or 5s. Like most of the western world the French have adopted the Hallmark-enhanced saint’s day with love commercially celebrated correctly with chocolates, champagne and a choice of roses, pink, yellow, white or red. Restaurants do well, wine shops do well, and flower shops have to hire extra staff and do very well. The 14th was also Ash Wednesday, so there was an odd mix of people hustling around Garibaldi at lunchtime, some with bunches of flowers, some with a charcoal smudged cross on the foreheads, some with surprise lover’s picnics and some with all three, love and devotion was in the air.

If you need some love in your ears, start here.

Besties

It’s been a long and weirdly deflating winter. Milder than it should have been for weeks, wetter than it should have been for more weeks, and cold but not for long enough so far. The whole mess in Gaza continues to be an affront to supposedly Western democratic norms, but then again, the ongoing one in Ukraine is also a long-running festering sore. The climate summit was hosted by the head of a Petro-state’s national oil company and attended by over 4000 lobbyists; the climate crisis has devolved into nothing but the script of a bad 1990’s disaster movie.

We seem to be living in the shadow of many megalomaniacs, as I have mentioned in prior outbursts. I feel a particular sense of failure about them as a group, as they are all of my generation. When I misguidedly thought that we were all reaping the benefits of the baby boom on our cruise towards a better place, some were in fact being formed to become tyrants. Viktor Orbán, two months younger than my brother, Xi Jinping, 3 years older than me but a year younger than Putin, a year older than Recep Erdoğan, baby boomers one and all. They obviously were not concerned about what car to drive, where Frank Zappa’s house was in Laurel Canyon and what was the best modern novel. The best car for them was chauffeur driven and bullet proof. They could plunder enough personal wealth to buy most of Laurel Canyon and the best book is obviously one written by them telling the proles what to do. There are some other minor characters strolling around the world stage, Nehandra Modi is an elder statesman having been born one year after the partition and departure from India of the British is 1950. He is well-loved by the Hindu majority of Indians and feared by those of other faiths, but he loves a bit of authoritarianism alongside his vegetarian and abstemious lifestyle. Benyamin Netanyahou, born the following year, is meanwhile bombing children with US-funded and supplied weapons in an effort to prolong the ‘war’ against Palestine helping him to avoid criminal charges, let alone the admonition for the terrible sequence of events that the supposed hard man of Israeli politics oversaw, that led to the horrific deaths of 1139 of the citizens he was supposed to protect. But the country is at war and that’s no time to stop taking action, or look at what you are doing for now and the future?

Lurking and gurning, stage left, is public enemy number one, the Donald. He is actually the oldest of this august group, born the same year as my sister in 1946. He is ahead in any poll you care to read, across most age groups including for some frightening reason the young. He is leading over everyone’s favorite grandfather Joe Biden. ‘Sleepy Joe’, as Drumpf dubbed him and Fox have continued to remind everyone, is at best underappreciated, at worst sleepwalking into an electoral disaster. Not that the Democrats don’t have experience with that, just wait until the numbers get worse mid-year and some bright spark will suggest Hilary should come back and throw her hat into the ring. Biden is four years older than Trump and wears each year like a decade. He walks across a stage, or down a flight of stairs and if successfully accomplished, we all breathe a collective sigh of relief, like parents watching their child negotiate his first nativity play as Shepherd Number 2, little Joe didn’t fall over or drop his Crook.

He is however single handedly keeping Western Democracy functioning. He is keeping China from invading Taiwan, he is keeping Putin out of Ukraine and doing this while what passes as the Republican party nowadays careens around the Washington political institutions trying to stymy him in anything and everything he does. The Federal Reserve has tried to kill the economy under Biden, but he has survived and the economy has survived. A little bruised but still punching. The general standard of living has improved and improved most for the people at the bottom. The jobs are still more in demand of job fillers than the prior decades of people hunting in vain for a job, a situation that continues to support modest and successful wage rises and better conditions for Union workers. The administration has ramped up green energy infrastructure, even if most of it has occurred in the south and southwest where it’s easier to build anything, period.

Sadly, Biden is the very embodiment of Rodney Dangerfield. He is old and he does not get no respect. Our common hope is now reduced to Trump being so deranged during the primary campaigns, where he will assume that the nomination should be his by right, without having to go through the motions, and that the legal convictions pile up enough doubt that enough people hold their nose, forget about his age and re-elect Biden. What then happens we can probably look forward to another B-Movie script too.

So as 2023 slips into collective memory I am not the most enthusiastic about what 2024 holds for us. There was some great new music created in the past year or more accurately discovered by me in the past year. So in the spirit of making an effort to finish on an upward tone here are some highlights of what the young people have been doing musically while my cadre have been busy fucking shit up:

The links are to Bandcamp/YouTube but for those inclined there is a Spotify playlist here.

Geese – Album: 3D Country – bunch of young gents from Brooklyn or at least currently based there. They defy simple description but sound like the product of many nights drinking and listening to old 90’s geezer rock like Primal Scream’s Exile on Mainstreet Phase or Ash or Supergrass, but through a very American lens, almost a C&W bastard child. 2122 or Mysterious Love

Lil Yachty – Let’s Start Here. Where do you start with this? Yachty is a 26-year-old from Mableton Georgia, rapper, cool looking guy, man about New York City, hanging with the stars. Had some big hits including Broccoli with DRAM. All so normal then this drops. This album is the stepchild of Axis Bold as Love, Fulfillingness First Finale and Dark Side of the Moon, just insanely layered and fun and if Floyd or Stevie Wonder had the use of a vocoder this is what they might have sounded like. My favorite album of the year without question. Drive me Crazy or Black Seminole.

Fever Ray – Album: Radical Romantics – Karin Dreijer is a unique voice and has produced some of the most interesting electronic music of the last 20 years as half of The Knife and her solo stuff as Fever Ray. Some of her output is admittedly hard work but she has a great turn of phrase and the very Swedish electronics work well. This album is melodically stronger and dare I say it quite fun, the live video is worth finding. Kandy or Carbon Dioxide for the atmospheric gas fans amongst us.

Baxter Dury – Album: I thought I was better Than You. I was late to the Baxter Dury party. I was a massive fan of his Dad and had the good fortune to meet him once and have a drink with him while he serenaded my girlfriend to the dulcet sounds of J.J.Cale. Baxter has his Dad’s way with a lyric but has added his own louche style, girl backing singers a key part of his sound. I have consumed his early stuff now thanks to Rachel for the introduction to I’m Not Your Dog which for obvious reasons is popular with the French. Aylesbury Boy or Celebrate Me ‘lick my head’ indeed!

Steve Mason – Album: Brothers and Sisters. I have been a fan of Steve Mason’s happy, clappy, mellow soft rock since the Beta band 3Eps days and their 30 seconds of stardom in High Fidelity when John Cusack drops it into play. He continues to make great music and it’s all pretty upbeat, he has also done some dub versions with Dennis Bovell and that deep bass sound has permeated his work. There is yet another reworked sample of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s qawwli song Musst Musst as well. Brixton Fish Fry or No More.

Will Butler + Sister Squares. What happened to Arcade Fire? There was a period when they defined cool, “it” and relevant and then they disappeared into a haze of seriousness and a bad Christmas album. Will Butler was the earnest front man and happily this album, his 5^th or so since the Fire went out, is fun, upbeat and catchy, still with Will’s quirkiness at times. Saturday Night or Stop Talking.

Hania Rani – Album: Ghosts. Hania is an accomplished Polish jazz pianist who has played with Portico Quartet and released some moody piano instrumental works like “On Giacometti” from earlier this year and her memorial pieces on behalf of Ukraine. This album shows her amazing voice and cool arrangements, interesting rhythmic stuff also going on from the Portico’s who back her on several songs. Don’t Break My Heart and Dancing with Ghosts.

Do Nothing – Album: Snake Sideways. In the wake of the earnest singy-shouty bands from the British Isles like Idles, Fontaines DC, BCBR or Yard Act comes Do Nothing. Two well received Eps were followed this year by the Snake Sideways album and it’s a lovely little grower. You have to like the spiky post rock guitars and Chris Bailey’s voice but there is some really great stuff here that rewards repeated listens. Amoeba or Happy Feet.

Ian Sweet – Sucker. Ian Sweet is the stage name of Jillian Medford and is the other side of LA to LDR’s glossy Hollywood glitzy antics. Her songs are of the young poor strugglers that make up most of the striving artists and actors in SOCAL. Gritty electric pop with some production that really pulls it together. Sucker or Fight

Skinny Palembe – Album: Hardly The Same Snake. Doya Beardmore grew up in South Africa but then moved to Doncaster of all places and his music reflects a global vibe that works as well in Donny as Jo’burg. It swings, it has a jazz inflection but works as a good collection of songs and his voice is more sustainable than Alex Turner’s striving eeforts at crooning. Don’t Be Another or Like A Heart Won’t Beat

Lana Del Ray – “Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd?” Lana continues to get better and better, and this oddly named paeon to LA, the Carpenters and 70’s soft rock is superb. Couple of self-indulgent spoken voice segments by guests apart this is faultless. She has more confidence in her voice so happy to share the vocals with others. She wrote this on her phone and then built it up over time with collaborators and finally Jack Antonoff to pull it all together in an LDR album way, her 9^th for god’s sake. Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd and Fingertips.

The Reds, Pinks and Purples – Murder, Oral Sex and Cigarettes. The RP&P is the performing name of Glenn Donaldson who lives in the Inner Richmond (I know as he released an album called that) in San Francisco and is prolific to say the least. He can be accused of sounding like Morrissey but he is way much more than the baritone which is indeed at times a bit familiar. All heart ache and frustrations, very, very catchy songs and then a throw away guitar instrumental that is glorious. What will heaven be like? Or Use This Song If You Need One.

Quitting time -a quitter’s raga

Every now and then the compulsive urge to try something new manifests itself in me taking on a new activity. Luckily, my desire to try out the new is equally matched by my ability to quickly see the errors of my ways and to stop the pointless pursuit of unrealized mastery of the new activity. I had shown a keen interest in music as I entered my teens and following in the Britton family tradition my parents thought I should learn a musical instrument. Having studiously ignored the piano sitting in the living room, they kindly bought me a guitar for Christmas and armed me with Bert Wheedon’s “Play in a Day”. I duly practiced “Bobby Shaftoe” solidly for about 4 days until, with my Trumpian-short fingers struggling with the steel strings of the two chords, I decided that maybe guitar was not for me. I spent more time electrifying the guitar with a small mike attached to the body and recording my echoey guitar effects on my reel-to-reel than I ever spent playing songs.

My only other musical venture was singing, we sang hymns every morning at school assembly and whenever we went on the bus to an away sports match to play another school I was one of the ring leaders of the back of the bus impromptu choir treating the compliment of the 3 or 4 teams to our cheery terpsichorean efforts. The songbook at that time included childhood favorites like “3 Wheels on My Wagon”, “Do Re Mi”, “My Old Man’s a Dustman” the inspirational “Jerusalem” and “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” and the classics from our parents like “New York, New York”, “Chicago”. As we got more into music we added “Feel like I’m Fixing To Die Rag” from Woodstock, “The Boxer”, “Pinball Wizard”, and some Beatles – “Rocky Raccoon” and “Back in the USSR”. I kept some of those into my rugby playing days, adding ‘actions’ to the Swing Low and Jerusalem songs, picking up some new and far more tasteless ditties along the way. Into our late twenties, we serenaded packed pubs on our cricket tours with many of the same songs. (If you would like to hear what those songs were supposed to sound like, listen here). My only formal effort at singing was I joined the choir for Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, which was fun but not something I was going to find a lot of time for in a busy teenager’s life.

I am sure on hindsight that joining the choir was more an ironic act than a genuine desire to improve my singing. In the same vein, one day when we were signing up for the local East Somerset sports tournament we all thought it would be hilarious to enter the 3000-Meter Walk. When the final entries were registered it turned out that as much as the hilarity at the time was communal I was the only one who had actually registered, so alongside my modest efforts with the discus I now had to learn to speed walk. I duly practiced walking in large circles and on the day I triumphed in a field of 4 and qualified for the County sports event, something my discus throwing did not qualify me for. At the County Event I scraped second and went on to the Regional Championships, which was getting embarrassing as the other athletes at this point were serious, focused and making an effort whereas I was not. In the Regionals I came a respectable 3rd out of 8, but that was the end of the line for my speed walking and the peak of my athletic career.

Over the years, I have tried my hand at various other sports out of curiosity or a desire for some fitness. Games with balls and rackets, tennis, badminton, ping pong, squash and the far inferior racquetball. Rolling ball games like boules, bowling, both Crown Green and 10 pin. Couple of efforts at the martial sports, boxing and judo. Team sports like football or rugby, cricket, field hockey, basketball (although years of playing rugby created habits of movement that proved bruising to my lunchtime pick-up compatriots) and Ultimate Frisbee. I have studiously avoided golf as I have neither the patience nor the desire to dedicate the time necessary to get any good at it, and the peripheral displays of male conformity and snobbery interwoven into the game alienated me from the get -go. I have held positions where it was obligatory for me to play, and I would happily hack around as part of a fun best-ball game, however on one occasion I was paired up in a four that was teeing off early in the draw and I had to take my tee shot in front of the gathered group of senior Japanese customers and serious American golfing colleagues. I was dressed correctly to look the part, but I gamely completely whiffed twice before shanking the top of the ball, for it to roll slowly and drunkenly down the side of the tee box. Before it got any worse, one of my Japanese colleagues smartly moved me to a different group at the back and spared everyone further embarrassment at my flailing efforts to kill the ball with a #1 wood.

I tried yoga while dating a yoga-loving Californian, but if ever there was an activity that smacked of temporary suspension of disbelief under the guise of a foreign and superficially spiritual activity, yoga was the poster child. I gamely accompanied her to her fave Sunday class in SOMA, only to be disdainfully rejected for not having the necessary experience for a class of this level. I think the guy could see that I would probably fart and would most definitely laugh and kill the serious vibe they were after. So my yoga career fell to the mat and never sprung back.

Another equally serious and ultimately annoying sports activity is skate skiing. It’s a revenge sport for the skinny and the short who were bullied in main stream team sports. The physics of the skis work against weight and height as they come in a basic size and surface area, the smaller and lighter you are the coefficient of friction is in your favor. If you are not, the ski is harder to move while propelling yourself on the flats and up hill, and insufficient to give you much control in the odd moments of relief down hill. It’s basically an unpleasant way to run fast in freezing cold weather with sticks on your feet.

One of the benefits of maturity is gaining a modicum of knowing one’s self, the self actualization process, knowing more accurately one’s own strengths and weaknesses. Logic then would suggest that we focus more on the things we can do well and enjoy, rather than persevering with those things that we ultimately will struggle with. The problem is that life throws challenges at us, especially in the work environment where it is harder to admit that we suck at something, especially if the thing we suck at is part and parcel of the job. I have spent a lot of time in customer facing environments, I have headed sales organizations yet the one thing I am terrible at is the networking gathering, the mixer, the early evening conference cocktail party, the schmoozing free-for-all amongst a large gathering of people. The goal of these events is to meet new contacts, introducing yourself, making polite small talk, sipping your drink politely cradled, as it always is, in a small paper napkin. Firstly, I have been doing what I do for such a long time, I struggle to get intrinsically excited about any industry event, it’s slightly more interesting than reading the minutes of the Chinese Politburo Central committee report on rice production but less interesting than watching reruns of the Simpsons. Secondly, I am just not that extraverted, I’m happy to wallflower or talk to the 3 people in the room who I know quite well rather than make the effort with the 297 I do not. I sit at lunches where it’s free seating and as much as I am French enough now to always say hello individually to everyone at the table, I marvel at the easy way some guys lean in, introduce themselves and chat as if they have known each other for years. With aging eyes I struggle to make out the name of the person on the name card, let alone the company name, so I am not going out on a social limb to introduce myself to someone who it may turn out is a vendor selling ‘insurance solutions’ or yet more software. I usually quietly eat my lunch and move on, same with the ‘cocktail events’, I meander around, drink one beer and desperately find someone I know or give in, and take my ball home.

Knowing when to quit is a learned skill, one I think I have mastered.