It is easy to romp through Hemingway just as it is easy to chomp through a packet of M&Ms. But both leave you feeling queasy. The dialogue is banal and repetitive, but I suppose it would be if you drank like Hem and co. It’s surprising that his “lost generation” could make it as far as the lavatory, let alone the typewriter.

The cardboard characters squelch through the narrative permanently in search of a free lunch. Hemingway is on solid ground, though, when it comes to liquids. A lifetime of rigorous research puts lead into his pencil when it comes to describing dissolution. Jake Barnes, the hero of the novel, sinks five bottles of wine with lunch down at the bull run in Pamplona, but no amount of toping can help Jake: he had his nads shot away in the Great War, and is doomed to love and glug in requited frustration.

For all that, I am reading it greedily, forced to fill in the blanks between the stunted dialogue and the otiose descriptions. It’s a good story with just enough pointers to make it work (if you don’t mind filling in the gaps and the repetition). I guess if Hem, who hid his talent under a bushel of rye, was ever blessed with genius it was in the words he omitted.

Anyway, I’ll finish the goddam clunker tonight if only to appreciate the denunciation of his account by the people who were with the author in Paris, Pamplona and San Sebastian. Their recollection is at variance with the great laureate’s, though how anyone can remember anything after that amount of drinking is a mystery to me.

Which got me thinking about Trump. It’s tempting to imagine his speeches being influenced by Hemingway, whose vocabulary seems similarly limited. But fiction is a closed book to the POTUS. Anyway, he lives in a fictional world and - if he can read at all - is clearly a stranger to all forms of the printed word.

I got an email today from the New York Times to tell me that they have “curated” ten articles for my perusal from the last week’s news. They do this every week, this kindly curation. Ever noticed how everything, from the ingredients of a pub Scotch egg to an exhibition of Jackson Pollock, is now “curated?” It is annoying, and I don’t need my news or my comestibles curating.

Behind me there’s a slight commotion. A police horse has entered the Sweet Italia gelateria and is eating a plate of ice cream. Another police horse is alongside, trying to nose in. Two mounted flics are encouraging them. Soon besuited festival goers are filming and photographing. What a sweet photo opportunity! But ice cream for horses? Whatever next? Hemingway short stories before lights out at the stables?

Sharing my outside table – an upturned oil drum – are two heavily accented creative types drinking Guinness and discussing budgets. They are feeling the pinch and can no longer spend €50k a day. I know the feeling. Perhaps I too should shift some beer tokens from my offshore account. Paupers have no place in Cannes, where the top suite at the Carlton is €100k a night.

I hear the clicking of stilettos down the marbled quayside. These fabulous poules de luxe are eyeing up the older male talent, shrewdly calculating their wallet size.

I avert my gaze back to Hemingway and spot an amusing line about journalism and lunch, two inseparable features once upon a time. “I worked hard for two hours. Then I sorted out the carbons, stamped on a by-line, put the stuff in a couple of manila envelopes and rang for a boy to take them to the Gare St-Lazare.” Then he went to lunch for the rest of the novel.

Carbons! We still had them in the last days of Fleet St. Six copies of each article for the Daily Telegraph’s quaint old Peterborough “gossip” column had to be made. Around teatime I would take a copy of the following day’s column to Viscount Camrose and Lord Hartwell, the erstwhile sibling owners of the fabulously eccentric paper. Hartwell’s office on the 5^th floor had a small lawn overlooking the Street of Shame from which he would distractedly flick olive stones as the printing presses shook the Telegraph’s – and sometimes the nation’s – foundations.

Back at the Quay’s some fishermen are gathered amidst the jostling hucksters from the film festival. One of them has landed a 95kg tuna off Saint-Raphael this morning and will be carting it to the market in the morning. The drinks are flowing, the night is young but it is time to curate some supper and finish The Sun Also Rises.

According to the great man there is no Spanish word for “bullfight”. But there sure is one for bullshit.

I had the pleasure of being introduced to Peter Mandelson in 1986, in the Press Gallery bar at Westminster. I was a diarist on the Telegraph’s Peterborough column and my beat was politics. “The only thing I’ve got to say to you, Mark Porter, on or off the record, is FUCK OFF.”

Thus spake the great man as he quickly withdrew his hairy hand from mine, for these were the days before he started waxing his hands (the backs of them, I mean).

I had run a lead story in the column about how Labour’s new director of communications had thrown the union law book out of the window in his sacking of his deputy, John Booth, who was chief press officer at Labour’s Walworth Road HQ. A curious business because Lord Mythomane had head-hunted Booth before persecuting and firing him after months of humiliation and bullying.

“Six months into the job, Mandelson decided I had to go. He consented to comply with agreed procedures only after a lot of persuasion by the National Union of Journalists. When we sought grounds for dismissal, we were told: “This is not a problem identified at a specific time, nor is it entirely susceptible to description.””

As an incentive to leave quietly, Booth’s shorthand note from July 1986 records Mandelson telling him: “If we have to terminate your contract, I will make any fabrication of the truth and stick by it faithfully.”

He was granted three months “to improve” his performance but was given no criteria by which it would be assessed and was banned from attending that autumn’s party conference. In November, despite protests from HQ staff and approaches to Neil Kinnock from MPs including the late Tam Dalyell and Derek Fatchett, he was dismissed.

Veteran journalist Don Macintyre, with the close cooperation of the subject, wrote a 638-page biography of the Armani-clad Machiavelli. Unfortunately for Macintyre much of the first print run of “Mandelson: And the Making of New Labour” had to be pulped because it libelled Booth, who successfully sued both Macintyre and Rupert Murdoch-owned HarperCollins.

In a subsequent article in the New Statesman Booth wrote: “Paul Routledge spoke to me for his Mandelson biography; Macintyre didn’t. The pulped biography is the result.” Paul Routledge was another political hack-turned-biographer, and erstwhile boss of Macintyre when the pair of them wrote about industrial affairs at The Times. They left Murdoch’s employment after refusing to cross the Wapping picket lines – rightly (or wrongly) assuming that their union contacts would leave them out to dry (or worse) for being ‘scabs’.

The libel action focused on two paragraphs of the biography which recounted Booth’s recruitment as the chief press officer and subsequent dismissal 10 months later. The source for the untrue version of a minion’s fall from grace being, of course, the truth economist himself, Mandelson.

Substantial costs and damages - believed to have been north of £10,000 went to the London Bach Society, Hit Racism for Six and a new pair of Kevlar-lined bicycle tyres.

Booth said he felt he had no option but to take legal action after being alerted to the offending section of the book. “These were highly damaging lies. This was a rewriting of history and made damaging allegations about my work which had seriously defamatory consequences for me - particularly because I work partly as a political consultant. This was compounded by the fact the author did not consult me at any point.”

My first encounter - by telephone - with Mandelson was shortly before this, when I worked on The Times diary. He was in regular contact with the paper, despite his own edict at Walworth Rd to have nothing to do with strike-busting ‘scabs’ who daily crossed a picket line to work for Murdoch in Wapping.

The Washington ambassadorial gig is seen as the most glittering and important diplomatic post in the UK government. The perks include a luxurious ambassador’s residence in Massachusetts Avenue and a Queen Anne mansion designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens.

When he appointed Mandelson as ambassador, Sir Keir Starmer saw in him a skilful and persuasive link to the mercurial and tantrum prone Trump. With his trade experience from his time as a cabinet minister and Brussels commissioner an invaluable qualification for the job, Mandelson seemed an atrtractive option.

Never one for false modesty, Mandelson boasted that when he first walked into the Oval Office the president said to him: “God, you’re a good-looking fellow, aren’t you?”

A brilliant and ruthless spin doctor, he masterminded the birth of New Labour and would berate newspaper editors if he disapproved of their coverage.

He became MP for Hartlepool in 1992 and helped propel Sir Tony to the leadership of the party after John Smith’s death in 1994, a move that led to a bitter feud with Gordon Brown.

It was whilst campaigning in Hartlepool that he ordered fish and chips “and some of that delicious looking guacamole” – mistaking mushy peas for the upmarket avocado dip, little known north of the M25 in those days.

I guess the rest, along with his reputation, is history. I await with interest in the inquest into his treachery - his passing on of confidential sensitive information at the height of the banking collapse to the very people he was publicly blaming for bringing it on: the American banks.

As Nick Cohen in his excellent Substack column observed a couple of days ago, the level of betrayal is staggering. “I have never seen anything like it in British politics. You would have to go back to Kim Philby spying for the Russians to find an equivalent.”

To paraphrase the Mandelson’s quip about the 1987 Labour election disaster: his self-packaging was great, it’s just that the product kept seeping through.

Greenland - the place that’s been in the news for all the reasons it would rather not be in the news. But be warned, Mr Trump: it is not the kind of place you want to mess with. There may only be 56,000 people on it but most of them are Inuit, and they scare the shit out of polar bears. And then there’s the womenfolk, who really run the place. Tougher than a woodpecker’s lips. Just think of Eskimo Nell, Deadeye Don…

Not so long ago I went there for my summer holidays. I wasn’t sure why and I’m still not, but I’m glad I went.

My great friend Dr P had a thing about it, and her enthusiasm was infectious. We’d soften the icy blow with a few days sunbathing in Iceland and a week in Greenland in the middle. That sold it for me. An Arctic roll.

From Reykjavik we landed in Ilulisat, one of the livelier spots on the Inner Arctic Circle, to do some iceberg spotting. It was from this glacial shelf - the length of England, if you please – that the iceberg that sank the Titanic started its own maiden voyage some three years before its collision with destiny, joining the ship on the seabed some two weeks after ripping a hole in her side.

Never mind history. Let’s get down to dinner. On the restaurant wall was the pelt of a polar bear and several sealskins. Through the panorama window, beyond the pastel coloured houses, icebergs were sweating in the late summer sunshine.

Earlier it had soared to 10c but had now plunged to 5c. Sensationally balmy for a Greenland evening, but not so good if you are an iceberg. Welcome to the land of the hunter and the hunted, where the midnight summer sun does its best to make up for the rest of the year.

“The ice is now too thin for hunters’ sleds in much of Greenland but, up in the north, there are still icebergs the size of Manhattan,” says Tagak, our guide and one of only 51,000 remaining Greenlandic Inuits, who make up by far the largest portion of the population on the world’s largest island.

Further north the Inuits are still allowed to hunt polar bears for subsistence, and are the only creatures of whom the Arctic monster is (rightly) afraid. But these folk live on the margins of existence so choice of provender is somewhat limited, so why not a flank of freshly battered Polar bear?

Mamartut was Tagak’s top recommendation from an admittedly small selection but it was stunningly good. I grazed on “Greenland tapas,” a combo of what’s locally available, prepared by chef owner, Kim Pedersen. A post mortem of my napkin would have revealed three types of whale (roasted, smoked and stewed), musk ox and reindeer jelly, with the odd smear of claret, not to mention seal soup and puffin.

We awoke to a panorama view of Disko Bay and its myriad icebergs glimmering antifreeze blue in the weak morning sun, like aliens on a vast indigo stage.

After a hefty Danish breakfast at the Hotel Isfjord we boarded a sturdy fishing boat, the Sapangaq, and gunned north for 50 miles, up the Ataa Strait and through the Pakitsoq fjord system to visit the Eqi glacier in Baffin Bay.

Small icebergs bobbed and wobbled as we thundered in and out of channels between the bigger ones, hitting larger and larger chunks of ice. Thunk! Thunk!

Gradually, the sea turned from bluey-grey to grey as it morphed into frozen sludge. Half a mile short of the glacier, a jagged ridge rising to 900 feet above sea level, the skipper brought us to a halt.

“Any closer, very dangerous,” he announced. Two minutes later a huge slab of the glacier collapsed into the sea, sending a sludgequake which slapped the side of the boat and caused the bay to quake and graunch audibly.

Large chunks of ice the size of whales appeared to come to life and leap up before crashing down onto the epic and freezing fastness of the bay. By mid-September the bay is ice-locked and the tiny local communities hunker down to face seven months of isolation.

“The glacier will gradually regroup and expand slightly, but during the past 10 years it has moved further back than during the previous 150,” said the lady from World of Greenland, who run the trips.

As we laboured through the thickening water Kristian Brandt, the 49-year-old Inuit skipper, assured me the Sapangaq would plough through ice a metre thick. “This is fast changing. We see bears floating by on small patches of drifting ice. It is not right.”

Dr P is a French political scientist who was, and still is, curious about Greenland. She worked as a defence analyst in the Prime Minister’s office but her other passion is the pudding trolley so eating well and regularly was high on the list of priorities. Perhaps surprisingly, this proved to be no problem.

We lunched in the restaurant at Ilimanaq Lodge, where an old village was being restored and where World of Greenland owns 15 chalets. In the old chapel a simple confection of fish and locally grown vegetables was imaginatively cooked and we experienced the apotheosis of the carrot, culminating of course, in a déclinaison of the humble carrot cake.

Next a 90-minute flight to Nuuk, the capital, checking into the excellent Inuk Hostels, where we met the owner, a Greenlandic author and scholar, Liisi Egede Hegelund, a charming and knowledgeable hostess. And also the famous and glamorous Danish archaeologist Jeanette Varberg, who was on a book launch jolly.

At her suggestion we took a short boat trip across the glassy stillness of an inland fjord to the semi-abandoned village of Qooqqut. We are well south of Ilulissat and the conditions are markedly more clement.

At Qooqqut we met Sulli, Greenland’s breakdancing champion who is also a waiter at the cheerful Thai-style seafood restaurant near the pontoon. He gave me a spin on his quad bike during one of his frequent fag breaks. “There’s never a dull moment here,” he said with conviction.

The fiery sunset glowed orange across the water as we sailed back and the stillness was occasionally disturbed by the distant thunder of glacial waterfalls.

“We are hunters for many generations. But hunting on thin ice is not safe and many think that the alternative – fishing – is a woman’s work. That’s why so many go to the pub,” said Tagak as he dropped us at the airport.

The smell of hotdog fills the air. It is true, there is a big affinity with the demon drink here. Something that the teetotal Trump might have strong views on should his grandiose plans come to anything. But if an iceberg can sink the Titanic, the land that calves them can surely put a fool in his place.

The trip ended where it began, in Iceland. We flew to the east of the island, the bit that’s off the beaten track, and visited the Vatnajökull glacier and sea fjords amidst the mountains and vast national park in this least visited of areas. A volcanic end to an elegiac trip.

The last time I was in the Chelsea Arts Club my old mate Barney Bates was playing jazz piano and Laurie Lee was standing at the bar minding his own business. I was with the song writer Chris Potter, whose day job was to write about politics for the Sun, plus a sprinkling of ne’er do wells from the Colony Room in Soho.

They’re all long-dead - me included, now I think about it. We ate in the arts club’s elegant garden though Barney skipped the lumpy stuff. He got his calories from the six bottles of wine he drank every day, whilst marking the bounds of licensed Soho in his cowboy boots.

It is just possible that Barney, who played with Acker Bilk and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band back in the 60s, is still with us: he was six feet three and rangy, strong as two horses and eloped with a trapeze artist who whipped him into shape as he quit the bottle for God.

I remember him carrying a yacht piano up three flights of steps to my father’s living room overlooking Clapham Common, a Rothman’s wedged in his moustachioed, wine-stained mouth. Barney was good fun and liked to say things how they were, or at least, how they appeared to be at any given moment on the kaleidoscopic spectrum of his day.

Mine host forty years later is the splendid trencherman, Guy Venables. A cartoonist for Private Eye, The Spectator and Metro, Guy also writes comedy sketches and a booze column. He lives in style on a Bohemian estate in East Sussex where Picasso and Dali were once regular guests, though long before his time.

The evening starts at the bar – where else? – sandwiched between the umbrella rack and a woman surrounded by shopping. It’s 5.30pm. “What about a Dry Martini?” says Guy. It was a rhetorical question and the use of the singular was fooling no-one. The stemmed glass was still and cold as Christmas, its viscous rim leering with intent. Bar staff should be issued with white scrubs and serve these £6.50 motherloads in syringes, like sodium pentothal before open-heart surgery.

We managed a couple of braces before shuffling into dinner in an ear-friendly alcove. It was a hearty affair – in my case devilled kidneys followed by grilled calf’s liver and puréed potatoes, washed down with a bucket of red from Portugal’s visceral interior. Guy tucked into a freshly clubbed cow and basket of thrice-cooked chips.

“Why thrice?” But the East European waitress was having no truck with such otiose questioning. “More wine, gentleman? Same again?” I left nearly five hours after arriving and remember laughing a lot but the details now escape me. Surely the sign of an evening well spent? Guy’s taxi dropped me near the Hurlingham Club, where a bedroom in a council tenement awaited.

The do at the Kazakhstan Embassy was a staid affair by comparison. Canapes and Georgian wine courtesy of Central Asian diplomats and airline officials. Would I care to come to Almaty sometime soon? The former capital of Kazakhstan is the Sodom and Gamorrah de nos jours, I am assured by someone in the know, who paid with his marriage.

There’s a train that goes to Tashkent via Astana and Almaty, and a Ritz-Carlton that commands views towards China and Kyrgyzstan. I am warming to the idea, even if it’s about minus 20 just now. Almaty claims to be the birthplace of the apple and the Kazakh word for apple is – you guessed it – adam.

I was in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan in July and August watching bareback horse acrobatics and women archers who stand on their hands and shoot with their feet. Then I pootled up into the mountains where the Soviet cosmonauts used to take their R&R, when Yuri Gagarin was the Elvis Presley of the Evil Empire. But from what I hear Kyrgyzstan has nothing on Kazakhstan, and I do hope that I shall live to make the journey and tell the tale.

But right now I’ll count myself lucky if I make it back to Cannes on Sunday from Walsall. My lungs went on strike in the cinema a couple of days ago but I managed to wheeze my way to the Manor Hospital, where they whacked me full of steroids, nebulisers and antibiotics.

“Can I wash these pills down at The Fountain?” I asked Dr Sanwar, a charming Levantine lady with a knowing look. “We’d prefer to check you in for the night. If you must drink, do so in moderation.” I haven’t looked back. Ah, here is the family Uber…

View east from Hungerford pedestrian bridge.

The train from Birmingham takes 80 minutes but it’ll be marginally quicker once they’ve completed the super new high speed HS2 link (latest ETA: 2036 at £100 billion, three times over-budget - and spiralling). This folly to grandiose small-thinking will shave 30 minutes off a journey of 120 miles, but instead of ending in Leeds the London Flyer will terminate in a field outside the Midlands town of Lichfield.

I look out of the rain-spattered window and the shepherd’s pie gives way to a vivid vista of pea-green farmland. The organophosphates fill the shoots with iridescence, even in the half-light of a dismal December afternoon.

The underpants and a spare ink cartridge are in my knapsack along with the drugs and Kindle

Last night I was in the Fountain in Walsall to road test my new James Bond spectacles. It can get pretty lairy in there, particularly if those two ghastly old pagans are talking utter cock at 150 decibels. I had Q build hearing aids into the arms of my specs for my forthcoming 65^th birthday, and they are terrific, focusing one’s hearing on the immediate conversation and blocking out the fuckwits.

Wish I’d had these audio specs in the days of writing diaries. Amazing to sit and eavesdrop. Until you realise that people in London are no more interesting than anywhere else.

But there are other things you can do with a quick tweak of the App. I was briefly able to eavesdrop on a conversation in the snug while Roy the mechanic was holding forth on how to tap out the glow plugs in an S-type Jag. I switch focus back to Roy as I once had a beautiful S-type. It was a car of grace and power and was supremely comfortable. My erstwhile French family of Ana, Poupoune and Pierre-Marie said they felt regal and we larged it on the Riviera.

But nothing lasts. I’d driven it from Cannes to Walsall to spend Christmas with my mother and brother and was on my way back to France when I drove through a very deep puddle.

“You mean the English Channel?” piped up Tony the Fascist, in his buffed co-respondent shoes, drainpipe jeans and teddy boy mullet. Anyway, some dashboard lights came on – we’re back on the car again – and things gradually went downhill. It was an early warning of a fatal malaise. I limped into Cannes and spent €1,200 at the garage. A surge of life followed by a rapid decline, then two months later I sold it for scrap. Tony downs his pint and sweeps out.

“Shame yow wore in Walsall,” said Roy. “I’d have got it going again. Best to stick with a mechanical car - there ay nothin yow cor do if yow’ve got a spanner.”

Judge Smith was inclined to agree, and delivered an encomium of praise to the public house in general and The Fountain in particular. He pays for a large round of drinks with his Apple watch then confesses to using cash if he needs a medicinal whisky. “With the watch the missus can see what I’m drinking as I drink it and she doesn’t approve of strong liquor. Anyway, there’s nothing you can’t get done by blokes in the pub – cars, extensions, violins, legal advice and ironmongery, to name but a few.” In comes Steve the AI programmer.

My brother is over from America so conversation naturally gets round to Trump. Tom, working in academia, is wisely circumspect as he doesn’t yet have an American passport. But someone has seen a funny clip on social media in which the American comedian John Mulaney likens Trump’s presidency to a horse loose in a hospital. “It’s never happened before,” says Glen, who’s relating the tale in a tone of mock despair. “No one knows what the horse is gonna do next, least of all the horse. He’s never been in a hospital before. He’s as confused as you are.” Despite the absurd image’s closeness to the bone, we giggle. Nervously.

Smith is learning German on his iPhone 16 on an App called Babbel. Like the Apple watch, he bought the iPhone off a carpet salesman in The Fountain’s bar. He’s got extra-large font so he can read it, and is chomping through German grammar like a rat at a potato.

The language’s complex structure is meat and drink to the retired KC, who is a former classics scholar from the local grammar school, where I too read Latin and Greek but with rather less distinction. “I think I might have another medicinal, just in case.”

The train journey over, I am now in the members lounge of the Southbank Centre, on the 6^th floor of the Royal Festival Hall. The Thames is the colour of brown Windsor soup. I am looking across at Shell Mex House and the Savoy. A couple of hundred metres west the newish Hungerford Footbridge looks like the derrick of a collapsed oil rig, far less elegant than its dilapidated and dangerous predecessor designed by Brunel and favoured by suicides.

I once watched a man top himself as I ate an excellent Chinese meal in the Royal Festival Hall canteen. He took a while to jump but when he did he went to the bottom without resurfacing. They usually re-emerge to the east of Blackfriars Bridge, where God’s Banker Roberto Calvi was found hanging 44 years ago.

Blackfriars Bridge was the erstwhile home of the Express Newspapers, where I once had the pleasure of writing the leader articles and Cross-bencher political column in the Sunday Express when the agreeable Lord Stephens ran the show from a respectable distance. Drunk all week on huge expenses at Westminster I’d totter back to the office to scribble up the tattle, than back home to Scotland on the Friday night flight. What could possibly go wrong? That’s for another time.

I am here on a mission: dinner tonight at the Chelsea Arts Club with the estimable cartoonist, comedy sketch-writer and bon vivant, Guy Venables, and tomorrow night a do at the Kazakh Embassy. More to follow once I’ve had some more fun eavesdropping with my new specs…

“Cooey,” I cry across the narrow valley before crossing the stream at the bottom of the garden and climbing the steep bank up to her place. She tells me that one of her neighbours – a quiet and serious retired fashion designer - has burned holes through her olive tree in order to communicate via laser light signals with Mme Beauregard, a 97-year-old widow who runs a drugs cartel from an apartment which looks down on Mme P’s house from the other side. I inspect the tree and fail to see any holes. Mme Beauregard seems to be sitting quietly on her balcony. Perhaps she’s counting a thick wedge of €500 notes. Or maybe knitting. I wave.

I’ve mentioned before that the town’s high-profile mayor is in cahoots with her and the diabolical fashion guy, as well as with Thales Alenia, the top secret aerospace centre in nearby Mandelieu. They are doing weapons testing on Mme P with X-ray guns that see through walls. They’ve been targeting her knees and back.

Her poor cat died recently, apparently after an acid attack by unnamed assailants, but not before a local vet had fleeced her of a chunk of savings the night before the poor thing died. Mme P is now bent double with some terrible back ailment and sees only the ground by her feet unless she’s looking to the left or right. She is also partially sighted.

I would be calling her Dr P except she never finished her PhD in American literature. Once you get her off the crazy stuff she’s as sharp as ninepence, especially on the subject of taxation. I can’t help feeling that a failed marriage and a broken heart put her on the path to misery. But that’s another story.

One must not give in to despair. I give her a small table plate from Istanbul, bid her farewell and make my way to the conservatoire to do some piano practice. I walk along the sea front, past the vieux port at the foot of Le Suquet village, then along the rue d’Antibes. The ever present binmen are clearing the Gambetta market with high pressure hoses.

I’m heading for Salle 22, the room of a million wrong notes with its gleaming black Yamaha grand. The more I play, the more I realise that it is a hopeless task. I mean, even to get NEAR to getting a piece ALMOST right seems somewhat harder than it did the day before. It’s like being in a doomed relationship – nothing you do can be right, and the sweet moments are there merely to highlight just how wretched the bad ones are.

And to add insult to injury my brother over in Maine has been given a new Steinway to practice on. Not only is it four inches longer than my Yamaha but it doesn’t seem to make any mistakes. At least, not on the video of the Gifted One playing some rather impressive jazz.

But hey, one mustn’t complain. At least I’ve had one firm and faithful new friend this past month: the bacillus I picked up from the breakfast trolley on my first day in Kyrgyzstan. The doc told me yesterday there was a problem with my red cells and has stuck me on metronidazole for the next week.

The down side is you cannot mix this stuff with alcohol because if you do it has the same effect as Antabuse. This is the drug used to discourage alcoholics from drinking by making them (note “them” not “one”) so ill they want to die. George Best must have really loved his tipple as he frequently drank through the horrifying effects and came out the other side. If not smiling, at least with someone else’s liver.

I go to the cinema so as not to be confronted by the wine rack or the siren call of the Quay’s. Or the urgent need to eat. No matter what rubbish you’re watching, you’re at one remove from temptation, even though there’s an excellent brewery within the Cineum complex. I watch The Roses, an amusing but incoherent account of a warring couple. Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman act their hearts out only to be unravelled by a script writer and director who seem to lack a plot map. At least the disappointing film has a sharp dénouement, and the ill-starred couple go out with a bang and a whimper.

At home by midnight I weigh in to see if the magic weight loss drug is having any effect. It is: my weight has gone up, marginally.

Across the valley a whistle blasts shrilly into the still night air. ASSASSINS, she cries. “Ta gueule, vieille bique,” someone shouts. Cold as Christmas is the warm August night. What if she is right? And we are not only wrong but mad? I open Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham and am soon yawning.

Wasn’t he the one who said the Riviera was “a sunny place for shady people?”

I shall be the Diaghilev of the piano, a new Victor Hochhauser, Toad of the Royal Festival Hall…

I gave up hope a little while ago of editing The Times or Le Monde. Frankly they are beneath me. Fame as an impresario is all that matters now. Quit while you’re ahead, as they say, so this is what I am going to do. I am only 64, fortissimo sempre, and I have soared the depths of journalistic endeavour, from the kids column for the Walsall Observer to Pudding Correspondent for a food-porn mag. Plus a few Fleet St sackings along the way.

Apart from the occasional freebie and review, a bit of stunning geopolitical analysis in any language you care for, and, of course, restaurant critiques, there will be no more quill sharpening or desperate calls to unanswered phones in offices manned by AI bots and expense-claiming bot-lickers, in the hope of getting a free trip to Skegness. No, I’m too proud for that.

After dinner in Arles I drove up to the Ardèche for the opening of the Festival du Chateau d’Alba, picking David up from Montélimar station en route. He’s a prof at the Cannes Conservatoire as well as the Conservatoire Royal in Brussels and has played all over the world. He’s also a former finalist in the world bridge championship. In short, one of that rare breed of genius: nobody’s fool.

Emma, the chatelaine of the Chateau d’Alba, had organised a post-concert dinner in the 11th century dining room and the accordeur was making last minute adjustments to the 1879 Erard grand in the elegant drawing room. David was sitting in quiet contemplation in the anteroom overlooking the wild rural beauty of the lands Robert Louis Stevenson picked his way through on a donkey 150 years ago.

So here’s the review I wrote in French under a pseudonym for a local paper, since it simply wouldn’t do for one’s agent actually writing a review. But I’ll say here and now that it is an entirely objective account of the evening.

“It was more a soirée musicale than a formal concert, an intimate gathering that harked back to the salons of the 19th century in which Chopin, Liszt and Schumann would showcase their works to rich patrons.

But David Levy took us further back by opening his recital with Bach’s virtuosic Fantasie Chromatique & Fugue, a bold and complex harmonic structure in three movements, before catapulting us firmly into the 20th century with four of Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes & Fugues.

It was a taster menu, if you like, of the oeuvre’s colossal whole. The Shostakovich 24 were written in homage to Bach towards the end of Stalin’s brutal tenure. Reflective, challenging and virtuosic in equal measure, we step into two, three, four and even five-part inventions before the climacteric final Prelude & Fugue in D minor. This 12-minute tour de force takes us from Bach to the future, with a slow-build and mournful chromatic nod towards the Master before exploding in a terrifying arc of light over the bleak landscape of the 20th century.

M. Levy clearly had to adjust tempo and touch to accommodate the antique action of the Erard, but it was nonetheless an equally impressive performance to his recently acclaimed account of the 24 in the Salle Gothique in Brussels. The applause was as furious as the playing, and this was just the interval.

Drinks in the walled garden were soon followed by one of Bach’s lesser known works, ‘Le Caprice sur le départ de son frère bien aimé’ (BWV992), a touching tribute to his brother Johann Jakob on his departure for Sweden.

The ensuing two Schubert Fantasies could not have been more contrasting. The Grazer Fantasie in C major D605 is little known and was only discovered in the 1960s by the Hungarian pianist Lili Kraus.

Composed by the young Schubert, it is full of charm and notably lacking in focused gloom - a Schubert-meets-Haydn (and the young Beethoven) moment, and an excellent platform to launch into that firework display that is the Wanderer Fantasie (D760).

One wondered once again how the venerable Erard would cope, but it did, and the result was as good as it could have been. The upper register was not always able to match the lower, leading to some drowning of the higher notes close to the thunderous climax of Schubert’s showboat, but the result brought tumultuous applause, as well it might. A brilliant curtain opener for the 2025 Chateau d’Alba festival.”

I am now in Central Asia reporting mainly from the lavatory after succumbing to food poisoning after my first breakfast a week ago. But one must make the most of things. I have learned the Cyrillic alphabet (almost) from various crappers along the 1,100km route. I have experienced a rustic but thoroughly professional hospital in Karakol where the nurses filled me with antibiotics, electrolytes and minerals.

I am having a meeting with the Minister of Tourism shortly and the Ministry of Culture has expressed keen interest in a recital here next summer, to coincide the opening of the Nomad Games, where, inshallah, I will be covering a kok buru contest. This is a Kyrgyz take on polo in which they play with a headless goat. There are no rules and the winners are broken ruins after a couple of seasons.

It makes professional rugby look like a game of hopscotch. My colleague Ian Borthwick, the legendary Paris-based Kiwi rugby commentator and award-winning photographer, not to mention former 1st class rugby player, winces at the mere mention of it.

He’s here with me, photographing the eagle hunters, wrestlers and archers gathered at Salbuurnun for yesterday’s pageant of elegant wildness in one of the last great theatres of the past. For better or worse, Genghis Khan is now linked to the world of Tik Tok and Instagram.

Adios, mtf, mtf…

A tap on the porch window. Then another, louder, tap. I look round to see an Asiatic hornet peering in at me. It manoeuvres and does another vaguely kamikaze-style attack on the window pane, stunning itself slightly. What if it breaks? This window is in fact the front door to my house and just beyond it, buzzing around an orange tree, are a few more of these ghastly things. They are the biggest hornets on earth and they have taken a liking to my garden and a serious dislike to me. Two days ago I killed an inch-long fucker that was buzzing me. In the throes of death they apparently let off a pheromone to warn the colony if there’s a giant nutter on the loose waving a wet towel. According to Google a nest can be a metre wide and contain 500 of these angry fellows. And the ensuing death is not for a popinjay like me.

Médiathèque Jean de Noailles at Cannes. It’s in the old Rothschild holiday home.

Dare I even open the door? How long do these pheromones last? Google says 72 people a year die from hornet and bee stings in the USA alone, and the hornet sting is by far the most painful. Statistically Cannes must be ripe for such a fatality. I wonder also how many people die as a result of a panic attack after consulting Dr Google? Now I badly need the lavatory and mine is outdoors. I am surrounded by very rich people here on the Croix des Gardes. Adnan Kashoggi, the Great Gatsby of the Middle East, lived just up the road. And yet here am I living in an acre of terraced jungle without an indoor privy. I am probably the last man on the Côte d’Azur who has to go outside for a crap. And when I’ve been away travelling for any time I need a machete to cut back the undergrowth. I digress. I wonder whether hornets take a break for lunch?

Neighbour Adnan Kashoggi and his missus just before he went to the great minefield in the sky. Handy for a cup of semtex.

I sneak out of an actual door and steer a wide arc around the back of the house, avoiding the orange tree, to get to the music room in a separate building where there is an actual indoor loo. The mosquitoes are out in force, too, taking advantage of the last cool draught of morning air. It will be another scorcher today. Yesterday, Thursday, was a bank holiday. Every Thursday in France seems to be a bank holiday. Most people also take the Friday off so they can have a good run at the weekend. Faire le pont, as they say here. I’m not sure how many get to work on a Monday, but I approve of such things. A truly civilized country.

At least the library is open, a magnificent colonnaded 18^th century building with high ceilings and marble floors. It was one of the Rothschild family’s holiday homes but was squatted by the Waffen SS during WWII so the family gifted the place to the town once the Nazis had gone. Couldn’t they just have given it a damned good scrub? Isn’t that like buying a new Bentley when the ashtray in the old one is full? Anyway, I’m not complaining. Its garden is sculpted and grand in an understated kind of way. Plenty of shade and unexpected nooks where assignations with girls in glasses take place, I fancy. I have four back copies of the London Review of books to read plus a book about Kyrgyzstan, and these poxy hornets mean I can’t possibly work from home.

I have also got to print out a letter for my neighbour and hand it to the police. Therein lies a story for another day, but the poor dear is convinced she’s being persecuted by property developers who are road testing death ray machines on her which they are given by the Thales aerospace centre down in Mandelieu at the behest of the mayor. It is a mighty rich winter stew of a plot but the mayor, who seems to me an exemplary fellow and possible future Presidential candidate, doesn’t come out of this imbroglio with much credit. But I’ve yet to chat with him about these death ray guns. She is the mother of two young women I have proposed to in the past decade and they do say one should look at the mother before acting in haste. And to think that THEY turned ME down!

Oh death, where is thy sting? Is it time to go to The Quay’s or should I slap on some sun cream and cut a wobble across La Plage du Midi?

Watch out for these fuckers. The real ones are the size of condors and hairy as an Arab arms dealer.

I buy some piano scores from Arioso, the best music shop in Paris and stop in a café at the foot of Montmartre for coffee. I am reading the score of Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte when in walks an beautiful young woman. “Vous êtes musicien, monsieur?” To which I reply: “No, just an ancient student.” We chat. Her mother is a concert pianist and renowned pedagogue. She asks to see the score then sings the first two lines in a beautiful, swelling mezzo-soprano voice. Tears well up in my eyes and I find myself unable to speak. When I do attempt to my voice cracks and my nose starts to run. I have to make my excuses and go rather than risk blubbing like an old fool. I give her my card and make my excuses and belt up the hill to the microbrewery for a swift pint of IPA.

Chance encounter

Low on funds after the escroquerie of the Moulin de la Galette I dine at Chartier, one of those elegant belle époque bouillons - cheap restaurants for the masses. I am at a table of strangers opposite a young Turkish doctor seeking to escape Erdogan’s dictatorship, and an earnest pair of middle-aged French guys who express a very keen interest in politics, travel and what I do for a living. Wine and then Armagnac flows. They are very agreeable and well informed.

“So what brings you chaps to Paris?” I ask, giving them my business card. “A tax conference. We are tax inspectors from Limoges.” The tête de veau and rum baba churn a little. Another Armgnac, perhaps? Have I filed my returns correctly? One thing that does annoy about France is the paperwork. Many bureaucrats are also thugs and they run the country. Did I really earn only €619 last year?

Tuesday May 19:

I am on the TGV from the Gare de Lyon. My phone pings. It is the fabulous opera singer from yesterday. I look at her website. Mélisande Froidure-Lavoine. What an aristocratic sounding name! We exchange messages and before I know it I am stepping into a taxi at Cannes station. There are always taxis around during the film festival.

Desperate for a piss I rush into the guest quarters on the top terrace, where my piano sits gathering dust. A hammer is lying on the floor and the door has been forced. I have been burgled. I go down to the Chalet where two windows have been smashed and the door kicked open. My few remaining valuables which I hung onto after selling my Scottish home have been stolen and the place has clearly been squatted. The bottle of aftershave that Philippa bought me has been drunk and all the drawers emptied.

The squatter dossed down in the wash-house. Two beds had been made on a blanket with a layer of cork flooring placed on top. The last of my detergent had been used for a wash. The thief clearly had a dog. Remnants of food are everywhere plus clothes, trainers and washbag. And fag ends everywhere. The fucker left in a hurry (in my new Adidas trainers), but will he come back? The rozzers arrive and give me a filthy time, as if I had burgled myself and squatted my own place. It took a long time to convince them that I had been away. I guess there’s a lot of insurance fraud. Forensics coming tomorrow. I’m going down the Quay’s (sic) and may be some time.

I used to be the Pudding Correspondent for a food-porn magazine, a title given to me by William Sitwell, the waggish editor. So I suppose I got my just desserts the other night when I got rooked by a Parisian waiter. I’d emailed the Moulin de la Galette asking if they’d like to appear in an article I was writing about culture, food and fun in Montmartre for an upmarket website and magazine.

It’s a smart place next to a windmill up near Sacré Coeur, and I’d eaten well there many years ago. Just the sort of place readers would like, in theory, and certainly one of the best locations in the whole of Paris. The deal was I’d give them a decent passing mention if the food was free (and assuming, of course, that it was up to snuff). Travel writers don’t generally get paid expenses so for lunch we fill the poacher’s pocket of our Barbours from the hotel breakfast buffet, and for dinner we live off our wits.

Anyway, the man in charge wrote a charming note back to say they’d be delighted to host me. So Shanghai Lil and I got stuck in, but it soon became apparent that the place, which is under new ownership, was hiding behind its former reputation. I don’t know why I chose panko prawns in a French restaurant but the Somalian chef hadn’t a clue and they were oily as the man who served them. “Not good,” said Lil who once ran her own restaurant in the Dordogne. “They go in pot at 60C and pot heat to maximum and fat go away.”

Moulin de la Galette: don’t waste your money

This is a rough translation from her French, which is wildly enthusiastic but rarely accurate. She speaks no English and had never heard of London when I met her on the Cannes to Paris night train 18 months ago. The sole “meunière” was coated in undercooked flour and served with a sauceboat of molten butter. A ghastly oily mess. After sickly desserts came the bill - nearly €200. What could I do? The food was too filthy to recommend and the owners had offered it for nothing.

Fate was to provide the answer. “This is being paid for by the owner,” I explained. The waiter looked non-plussed. “No-one told me,” he said. “I am writing about your charming place and you are giving me a free dinner. I am, if you like, singing for my supper.” The waiter started whining that I’d left no service. “Service in France is, I believe, included,” I said rather haughtily. “I have no cash but please take €20 off this,” I said handing him my card. Without checking the amount on the machine, I tapped in the code. Back came the slip: €218.40.

I was cross at this stage and Lil was roaring with laughter as I showed the waiter the email exchange with his boss. She didn’t know what was going on and thought it appropriate to laugh. “Is this guy taking the piss out of me?” the waiter asked her. She laughed even louder.

The following morning I spoke to the bloke who invited me and it seems I must have dreamt the whole thing up: “We never gave meals away for publicity. We don’t need any.” I sent him our earlier exchange but all further phone calls went to an answering service and emails remained unanswered. No fool like an old fool, I guess.

Saturday 17 May:

I am celebrating Mass from the terrace of the Café de la Mairie opposite St-Sulpice. The cathedral doors have been thrown open to include the throng that fills the square as there is standing room only in the house of God. The mighty organ – one of the world’s most famous – accompanies the exquisite singing. I would have joined them but feared spilling my foaming pint.

Café de la Mairie, place Saint-Sulpice

I have hired a Velib city bike (with electric assistance) and earlier headed down from Montmartre to the Arc de Triomphe before tootling eastwards along the Champs Elysées towards the Rive Gauche and the Latin Quarter. The cobblestones nearly shook my fillings out so now I know what the road to hell is paved with, and why so many Parisian cyclists are foul-tempered.

The bishop is now on the final lap of Mass so I’d better not swear too much, but those tit-wobbling balls-aching cobbles may well have been rolled over by the tumbrels of 1793 and welcomed first the Panzers in 1940 before the jubilant Free French liberators reclaimed them, but they merely bring out the soixante-huitard in me.

They are useful for piling in barricades and hurling at the police, and for creating a moody cinematic atmosphere. Ever noticed how cobblestones are always wet in films? That recent and absurd Netflix remake of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, The Talented Mr Ripley, is all shot on wet cobbles on the Amalfi coast, an area not renowned for its wetness. But that was the least of Netflix’s problems.

I look up from my idle musings and a poor God-botherer is being carted away to an ambulance. I notice a handsome brunette whose ample cleavage is on display sitting to my right. She has seen me looking at her. I feel uneasy and ungodly, take a slurp and look the other way.

This evening I am invited to road test the new menu at the Monsieur Aristide hotel in the heart of Montmartre. The little restaurant is in a courtyard surrounded by elegant tenements and I have avoided lunch in eager anticipation. But my slavering spirits sink as a small plate of ceviche arrives. Imagine a gundog being presented with a tiny tin of cat treats. But worse, a moustachioed and sequined crooner appears and perches himself Val Doonican-style on a makeshift stage and fiddles with his laptop.

I dive into the bread basket, top up the wine and prepare for the onslaught. He tosses a pearlescent mic from one hand to another and starts his pre-warble banter. I see faces appear at the windows of the tenements. The Dali taches quiver and the singer launches into a couple of Lionel Ritchie numbers. But crikey, this winsome fellow – he looks like the young Johnny Depp – has a voice that sounds like coffee flowing over a bed of gravel.

Crooner and GM of the excellent Monsieur Aristide Hotel in Montmartre, Antoine Defontaine

More faces appear. Song after song wafts into the night air. The audience is putty in his hands, even the neighbours are whooping it up. My fillet of sea bass arrives, complete with a few leaves of baby spinach, two baby carrots and a brace of perfectly cooked but small asparagus. The singer, it turns out, is Antoine, the hotel’s 27-year-old GM. He’s turned his 25-roomer into a hangout for vibesters from the music scene, but you can have enough of a good thing so I fuck off to the Patoche microbrewery for some calorific IPA and a bag of nuts.

My phone suddenly pings. A message from my piano teacher, asking if I might be gracing the conservatoire any time soon. The last time I saw him was in April in Brussels when he played the entire cycle of Preludes & Fugues by Shostakovich at the Salle Gothique in the Grand Place. David Levy is a piano monk and former world bridge finalist as well as being the voice of my conscience. The only slot is first thing tomorrow morning so I book it for two hours and slosh down my pint.

Sunday 18^th May:

It is 06h30 when the alarm sounds and it’s freezing cold hurtling down from Montmartre on the hire bike to the Place Clichy and on to the rue de Rivoli, the bulwark of the Rive Droite. What a tacky street it has become. The Louvre and the Hotel Meurice have preserved some of its former grandeur but elsewhere trinket stores, MacDonalds and bubble tea outlets line the once great boulevard. They used to say the Rive Gauche was “là où tu penses” and the Rive Droite was “là où tu dépenses.” This astute description is no longer true.

At the practice room I make a hash of it after months in hospital and then lots of travelling and no practice. Music is a cruel mistress and demands full commitment. It also demands truth and simplicity and I can’t stop lying and cheating from the moment I lift the piano lid. How can bare notes on a page be such fixed points in a turning world, never swayed by fashion, time or tide? I vow to practise every day on my return to Cannes. But hell, there’s a monster piss-up coming off in Scotland, a party in London and a food festival in Lyon next month.

During the morning’s practice André Le Letty, former chef at La Tour d’Argent and a couple of other Michelin 3-stars, calls to invite me to lunch. I left him a phone message a week or so ago. André, along with his old friend Yves Camdeborde, threw their stars into the Seine and left the great kitchens to create the “bistronomie” movement: great cooking at affordable prices. It’s a fascinating subject and a lasting gift to the rest of us.

The afternoon is spent in the land of nod. Just as well there are no wafers handy. I awake and sign up to a weight loss course which a Google algorithm has somehow thrown up on my iPhone, as if reading my mind.

At St Lawrence’s church I sit on a pew at the back and admire the beautifully decorated organ pipes before looking down in prayer. My flies are undone.

In the jewellery shop a nice lady of a certain age has repaired my watch strap and asks me what I’m up to. We chat for a while and I mention the lovely church. I explain I’m on my way to Paris to stay in Montmartre. “You really must visit the Art Deco church of Saint-Jean. Fabulous modern stained glass.” I pick up a business card and say I’ll send a postcard. She scribbles her name and mobile number on the card. “I prefer WhatsApp.”

This fabulous little town is full of handsome and game-looking old birds. And the high street is spotless and full of fine shops, smart pubs and antique stores. In the book shop I ask if they have a copy of Nunc by my old chum Quentin Letts. The gum chewing cashier’s face remains blank as an unaddressed envelope. “Anything by the great Charles Nevin? He’s local - lives in Frome.” Frome is three stops away on the train, just over the Berkshire/Somerset county boundary. “Frome’s not local.”

The high street is stiff with union jacks hanging limply in the afternoon heat. I expect to meet Miss Joan Hunter Dunn at the Hungerford Tennis and Bowls club but instead find myself being drawn towards The Bear hotel, like a filing towards a magnet. Here tattooed yeomen of England are roaring pleasantly in the Bear Garden as the lager flows.

Behind me the narrow boats moor up on the Kennet & Avon canal and ageing hippies unshackle their bicycles from the foredecks and head for last orders at Holland & Barrett. My pint of Speckled Hen is slightly sour so I shuffle like a Somme veteran across the road to The John of Gaunt. Where will this all end? What is it that the road to Hell is paved with?

Roger and Glen

Apparently when you eat, the food mixes with the gel and hey presto, the blubber-busting gunk absorbs the fats and cholesterol, and parcels it away in the colon.

From here, of course, it goes into the nearest river, bypassing the overflowing sewers which are all jammed up with the uncollected banknotes of shareholders, so rich are the pickings for investors on this Septic Isle.

Anyway, I digress. Tim is a technical chap and explains in convincing detail. He's worked most of his life as a builder. Well, a builder and yachtsman. He's also a plumber, poet and navigator. I read the script of his book about sailing and it was riveting and well written. I am sure one of his old business cards says: "Tim Marston, Writer & Decorator."

I go and join Roger, Mark and Glen in the tap room. We are agreed that a) it is time for more beer and b) if there was any Chinese beer we'd try it to see what the future tastes like.

"Trump almost rhymes with cunt," someone lobs into the conversation. "So does Musk," says Glen. "So does Howard Lutnick, or whatever his name is," says Roger. "You know, the commerce secretary who fined all those penguins." Tariffs and stock crashes are not the usual fare here at the Fountain and politics is generally avoided. The only hedge funds in Walsall belong to parks department and Tariff's one of the waiters at Golden Moments.

We look up Lutnick on my iPhone (you wouldn't want to accuse the wrong chap of being a total Lutnick) and discover that his firm Cantor Fitzgerald makes vast profits from fixed income bonds when the economy tanks. US Treasury and other Haven bonds have soared since Liberation Day, when Pig Trump put his lipstick on and whipped out the Doomsday Board.

The only people on earth not to have witnessed this were the residents of Penguin Island, but that's because they were too busy raping and plundering the US Steel Corporation and looting and pillaging Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

It was great to get out and about again after spending most of the week lying low with a chill I caught going in shirtsleeves on a pub crawl in Manchester 10 days ago. I'd flown out of a heatwave on the Côte d'Azur into the icy embrace of the north and, being too mean to pay for a suitcase, had no warm clothes.

On Friday night I pulled myself together and went for dinner at the home of Walsall's curry king, Brian Salt. He really knows his cumin from his coriander and cooked eight different dishes for eight of us, one of whom will shortly be opening a restaurant in his adoptive Provence.

Step forward Robert Shipley, who recently cooked for Robert De Niro at a private dinner party in the South of France. Robert has been living in the horns of a dilemma, balancing twin careers as lead guitarist for an emerging rock band, and chef. But once the restaurant opens in Marseille in late May where he'll be running the kitchens, it will be au revoir to guitar and bonjour to the warm embrace of le ventre du sud (not to mention la plume du critique). I have not had the pleasure of Robert's cooking but everyone who has says he's a genius.

His other brother Chris, a polished and amusing Whitehall climate specialist, plus charming, witty sister Jenny - who combines art and business down in Cornwall - made for the liveliest table I've sat at in a while. It was great to catch up with their mum, too, my old friend Wendy. We used to go cycling together in an age of bitter shandies when John Betjemen was still alive (just) and church bells rang across litter-free graveyards.

Back at the Fountain tonight after a stroll in the Arboretum, i sit next to a chap called Roy who is moaning about the beer and his gout. Glen has driven to South Wales and back and is thirsty as a miner. A woman with a fairground laugh is causing ear damage. I mention that China has announced 50% retaliatory tariffs against America and that Trump is on the rampage about Iran.

Roger (RDH Smith KC and retired judge) is weighing up the fate of the planet in his Rolex mind. "Anyone for another pint?" he says. Roy, waving his arms in the air, knocks over one of his two half drunk glasses, washing Glen's scratchings off the table and onto the floor, under the nose of an untethered beagle.

I head home to watch Newsnight with mother before setting off tomorrow for Brussels. My last night in this curious paradise that is, in its inimitable way, Walsall. I wonder whether I can get Fat Binder pills in Cannes

?

Anyway, in the bar where I was idling some 95 minutes before the start of the film (I hate to be late) was a copy of a newspaper with an article by the ex-editor of The Economist.

This guy - called Bill Emmott (I think it was he who wisely turned me down 30 years ago for a job) - summed up the psychology of the Russian bear with succinctness and wisdom. Allow me to quote a little as I think it bears repetition. And I'd been thinking about this quite a bit recently, though with less clarity than Bill, whilst watching Russian agents Trump and Musk dismantling the US (I wonder whether they have ever been to admire the spire of Salisbury cathedral?)

"There is little doubt that in 2014 Vladimir Putin felt insulted when then-President Barack Obama described Russia merely as “a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbours, not out of strength but out of weakness”. Yet 11 years later, and three years on from Putin’s attempted full invasion of Ukraine, Obama’s comment remains true. The trouble is that both Putin and President Donald Trump are acting as if Russia is strong rather than weak."

The facts of the war say otherwise, he argues. Russia’s military has suffered 900,000 casualties. Russia is devoting 40% of its budget to the war. But for all that Putin has only 20% of Ukraine’s territory. Russia’s only recent success has been in pushing some Ukrainian forces out of its own border region of Kursk largely thanks to Trump temporarily cutting off US intelligence.

"The truth about the war is that it has been the act of an authoritarian leader using the only weapons he has: military power and nationalist rhetoric. Now, in 2025, the truth that is emerging is that despite his failure Putin may not want to end the fighting because if war spending were to end or slow, Russia’s economy would be in deep trouble."

No matter where I go in these troubled times there is no escaping the churning of fine minds. No sooner do I attempt to engage my Chinese dancing friend Shanghai Lil in some meaningful WhatsApp banter than I am reminded of more serious issues by Nick Cohen, whose latest Substack pings its arrival. He addresses the the pincer movement on Europe of two vicious empires, one based in Moscow and the other in a seaside resort in Florida. This man writes faster than I can read.

Anyway, I flick from one thing to another on my new Apple portable telephone that is also a camera and wireless, and stumble on a review of a book about how plastic particles have wormed their way into the unborn.

"Encore une pinte de IPA, s'il vous plaît." The rain is now horizontal and the film starts before I can possibly manage a third. Going back to Bill Emmott, at the end of my hapless interview 30 years ago at The Economist his News Editor, who was wearing a t-shirt, jeans and trainers, asked me if I’d put a suit on specially to come to see them. Wrong-footed by this sartorial note I mumbled that I was off the London Library next. “Ah, do you always dress up to go to the library?” I slunk out of the office. Never has the retreating squeak of freshly polished Church shoes sounded so embarrassing.

Meanwhile, the whole world watched in stunned silence. It was as if Jamie Bulger (remember him?) was being asked to blame himself in front of the shopping mall’s live TV surveillance before being dragged up a railway siding to meet his fate.

President Trump’s use of the English language is not just an assault on the senses but a major obstacle course in the art of comprehension and he should at all times be accompanied by an interpreter, and preferably be wearing a muzzle.

“He often speaks in long, run-on sentences, with frequent asides. He pauses after subordinate clauses. He frequently quotes people saying things that aren’t actual quotes,” says George Lakoff, professor of Cognitive Linguistics at the University of Berkeley. “And he repeats words and phrases, sometimes with slight variations, in the same sentence.” Trump is, simply put, a transcriptionist’s worst nightmare: severely unintelligible, and yet, incredibly important to understand.”

Some in the media (Washington Post, Salon, Slate, Think Progress, etc.) have called Trump’s speeches “word salad.” Some commentators have even attributed his language use to “early Alzheimer’s,” citing “erratic behavior” and “little regards for social conventions.”

The second solecism, that of wearing the wrong clothes, is hard to understand. To dress up as Chairman Mao when in the company Chairman Hitler shows gross disrespect to the Third Reichest man in the world, and segues into his unforgivable error of opening his mouth.

Did he not realise that humiliation in front of the world’s cameras is part of the pre-plunder of Ukraine ritual? “Mea culpa, help yourselves,” were the scripted words.

President Zelensky would to well to take a leaf out of President Macron and PM Starmer’s book: always keep a civil tongue up the bakside of the world’s biggest arsehole.