Cancer

At the desk I gave my name and showed my Covid vaccination pass and the woman told me to take a seat with the others. I greeted the two elderly couples and the healthy-looking man wearing a three-piece suit and tie and plonked myself down on one of the orange sofas. The tatty oncology department at Marseille now feels like home. The hard-as-nails but sympathetic receptionists. The seatless lavatory bowl. The notice on the wall listing the recognised mainstream religions, designating them with equal disdain as ‘cultes’. Which is a far cry from Torbay hospital, where I was treated for cancer before this. At Torbay hospital the oncology department has

The chesty Corsican taxi driver was giving me his earnest appraisal of the way things were headed in France politically. On the right we were passing the battlefield of Aquae Sextiae where the Roman general Gaius Marius, commanding 37,000 legionaries, massacred a 100,000-strong Teutonic horde thought to be headed for Italy after laying waste to northern Spain. Then, on the left, the church of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume with its fragment of Mary Magdalene’s cranium displayed in a spookily lit showcase. Later, turning south, we would pass through the countryside of Pagnol’s childhood, now split by the motorway. And a bit further on — glimpsed through roadside trees at Aubagne — the Foreign

With a French health card everything is free for us cancer patients, even taxis to and from the hospital. ‘This is the longest taxi ride I’ve ever taken in my life,’ I said to last week’s driver, Virginie, on the outward leg of our three-hour round trip to the hospital at Marseille. ‘Your poor French state though,’ I added. ‘Good for us taxi drivers though,’ she pointed out. She was around 50 years of age. Her summer frock revealed a powerful upper back. She wanted to talk about her four girls aged between 13 and 19. The first three had been always obedient and polite, but the youngest was a

Not long after Catriona and I first met, her husband painted my head and shoulders portrait in oils as I sat next to an open window in Provence with my shirt off. The result was an astonishing and rather brilliant study of spiritual depravity. But I was too amazed and humbled to have my portrait painted in oils by a professional artist of international repute to much care about the result. Nor had I expected a photographic likeness. And at the same time I was genuinely delighted that at least I didn’t look like a bourgeois. Later the painting arrived in Devon in the post, beautifully and expensively framed, and

Although fatigued to the point of catatonia, and sitting there like a 19th-century Fang funeral mask, I am glad to contribute to the gaiety of a dinner party by being a good listener. But to be a good listener, even a catatonic requires acting skills. I am learning to lift my glass to my mouth and absentmindedly sip while politely maintaining eye contact. I am learning to leave a dignified or at least sane interval between each visit to the glass and to vary that interval. I am learning to appear interested long after interest has waned or petered out. These skills need polish and I am not yet the

In the waiting room I thought about the Duke of Edinburgh. In particular, I pictured him saluting the cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. In 1915 Colonel Maud’huy told his assembled French soldiery: ‘Many men salute correctly, very rare are those who salute beautifully… One could say that the salute is the hallmark of education.’ Maud’hay was an aristocrat-dandy. He would say that. Yet a simple practised movement can be powerfully expressive and every year the Duke of Edinburgh’s respectful, comradely martial salute was a thing of beauty. I looked forward to it. And every year, as he stepped backwards and saluted Lutyens’s sublime pylon, the execution was so reliably superior to

After weeks of living in the 18th century, going everywhere on foot and encountering few other souls, I drove to Marseille for a hospital appointment and got stuck in a crazy traffic jam. As a reintroduction to the human race, it was a brutal shock. Hooting, shouting, sirens, blue lights, motorcyclists doing wheelies, cars mounting pavements and grass verges, cars forcing a path through the stationary traffic using their bumpers as buffers: utter chaos. In an hour and a half the three-lane queue moved forward 80 yards. The chaos reminded me of a taxi ride I once took from Palermo airport. On the half-hour drive into the city we had

The Moulinards had inhabited the old stone hilltop house for centuries, ekeing out a hard living among the sun-baked boulders. They were peasants. In the winter of 1962 there was one Moulinard left. Henri: old, alcoholic, feeding the furniture into the fire for warmth. A delegation of relations came up the hill to persuade him to go into an old people’s home. When they’d left, old Henri took himself off to a large oak tree and hanged himself from a branch, dangling there for several days before being found. The house passed to a Marseille butcher who sold it on to an English couple who asked us to house-sit last