12 April 2023
Weds. Some little repairs. Aside from the cleaning and clearing of the shit-strewn cacti, I spent a happy hour up in the big orange tree handing oranges to H atop Fabien’s stout ladder and, wielding his extendible loppers, thinning out the branches, creating a bit of light and space in the tops. We had thinned the tree a bit in the summer on F’s advice and the new growth was lush and lively, and the boughs bouncing under the weight of the barrel-full of fruit. I’ve never known it so willingly rampant. I guess the (whisper it, touch wood) the final destruction of the yucca has helped. that was sucking whatever meagre moisture was in the soil to feed its habits.
The rockery is likewise happy, little succulents huddling between the pebbles like a forest in a model village, except for one green-blue cotyledon that rises from the miniature like a giant, fairy-tale beanstalk, fee-fie-foe-fum, up into the clouds. I thought I’d clear a space for it down by the prickly pear in the sun, a place full of weeds and ivy and overgrowth from the laurel hedge, and agapanthus and the sound of a grumbling toad I never saw, and I prised the roots of some stubborn fugitives until, inevitably, the dull thudding of roots breaking below ground was punctuated by the high, crisp crack of the wooden handle of my fork snapping in two. Just above the metal socket that takes the taper, so I cut the wood flush and the cheap and slightly rubbish vice I bought in Lidl in Italy last year had its first chance to shine. I mounted it on the green fence overlooking Fabien’s bottom path ten feet below and as soon as I loosened the ball joint the merest amount it sent a little cascade of poorly machined metal components down to his vegetable patch of artichoke and aubergine. The ball join is an ingenious feature—you can position the jaws of the vice at any angle you choose, but first you must go next door and find Eloise, the younger daughter, wearing her pyjamas, and ask her for the keys for the gate to the rickety wooden steps to the path to recuperate the physical stupidity that is at the heart of all ingenuity. I rebuilt it without swearing very much and moved the whole thing to the low wall over by the Paropert so that if it lost its guts again at least I’d only have to scrabble in the gravel for them.
Dad’s chisels aren’t sharp. I had cleaned them and made sure they had snuggly-fitting end caps so the tips would hopefully stay rust-free before I put them in the shed in the summer. I don’t know how, or if, he sharpened them, but I needed hammer taps to push the broad blade through the soft wood. I’ll sharpen them before I leave and hone them will Bill’s stone. The upshot, and indeed upside, of all this, was that I was able to maintain the illusion of industry and purpose while H picked up and snipped through all the orange tree trimmings and I was really only able to satisfy myself that the handle was adequately shaped and shorn to the form of the fork once the orange off-cuts were all safely away in the large white gardening sacks. In fact, I still had to drill a hole for a new screw to hold it all together, although, so beautiful was the fit, especially now that I had pounded the grip of the handle onto the recently cleared path, that the screw was nothing more than the flourish of the tedious pound-shop craftsman that I am.
Ed was here in the autumn. He never comes here, and certainly not on his own. He drove down with H, in one go, obviously, Calais to Menton without H’s assistance as co-driver required. I’m fairly sure he keeps a record in his head, or maybe it’s written down, and he attempts to break that record whenever he does the trip, which would explain (a) why no one is allowed to help him with the driving and (b) why he then drives like someone attempting to break the record of someone who has already driven, in one go, far too fast, attempting the increasingly dangerous and ridiculous task of breaking a stupid record, many times before. Each new attempt only creates the perfect conditions for an even more reckless attempt next time.
The elderly broom, an original and authentic feature of this place, with its wire-bound natural blond bristles, now swept to a short, stiff quiff, had been the subject of a careful repair a couple of years ago. The dry handle had sheared at a fallible knot. I had doused the sharp, tessellating peaks and troughs with strong wood glue, had jammed them hard together, and I had bound the wound with a reel of red electrical tape before wrapping the handle with flexible plastic-coated wire, a length of blue and another length of white, until the work was set in a glorious tricoleur, nothing more steadfast to hold the handle of a working man’s tool and, I reckoned, as long as it’s used with respect for its purpose and age, it should continue to sweep a clean and happy future. In truth, and this is well documented, wood glue on the Riviera is no match for temperature and humidity, and if I could have replaced the handle I would have done, but the thin wire that binds the bundles of fibre also entwines the base of the handle in a continuous, delicate coil, fastened with a small pin. It’s elegant and a certain sort of handsome and has just enough of the alluring suggestion that I could manually recreate this process that I see straight through it. I know that if I replace the handle it has to be for one that already has a new head attached, which isn’t really in the spirit of patriotic resurrection that is the very fundament of this place and its creaking contents.
Deflating then, but somehow inevitable, that following Ed’s visit in the autumn, I found the broom listing in the shed, the handle flaccid, and the glue-tape-and-wire monument to the human struggle for immortality wrapped in a sagging, amorphous construction. I pulled out the broom and immediately recognised the handiwork—a signature fix—a dozen loose orbits of masking tape. I felt bad for the broom, the desultory solution to its malaise ugly and insulting; I felt bad for me, my failing repair and loss of the broom’s trust in my guardianship; and I felt bad for Ed who, as H often tells me, once put up a shelf with carpet tacks.
It needed a better repair, something that reinforced and spread the stress. I fancied something like a metal bar—a long bolt or some sort of stiff rod that I could insert into both halves of the handle, structurally integrated, complicit in the agenda and qualified for the task, which is to hold the top of the handle to the bottom of the handle in a way that resists the natural flexing of the wood around the break., something perhaps almost the exact opposite of masking tape, a product specifically designed to not stick too much to anything.
I perused potential solutions at the little ironmongers on the museum square. A young man—they’re all young these days but this one was still pupating—offered his assistance and I explained what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it, but I didn’t get very far before I could see the familiar look of utter incomprehension, and not at my French but at the purpose and method of my proposed repair. He meekly suggested I might prefer to buy a new handle, and fortunately the shop’s own broom, not one they sell but the one he presumably uses daily to sweep up, was perched attentively close by. It was very like my own and I took him through the implications of the bristle-and-wire construction, and he understood. To his credit, he jumped aboard the Superior Bodge Express as it began to accelerate and, clinging enthusiastically to the luggage rack, wind now happing his hair, we were off. There were threaded bolts of different gauges; there were door handles, screws, screwdrivers even, all offering tantalising possibilities. Choo, choo! Copper piping, a long hook, we were really picking up steam. I reached out for small pack of very long nails. Slender, shiny, straight, reassuringly utilitarian, and cheap. My co-driver’s eyes widened, and I could hear a long blast of the whistle coming from somewhere inside his head. He began to explain how perfect these would be. He told me how I could remove the head from one end. We had reached our cruising velocity and lunch would soon be served in the dining car. And, and I could sharpen the cut end to a point, just like the other end, and ram both ends into either piece of handle. Nature’s own miracle, a young bodger emerging from his cocoon and gaining sentience in his own environment. he stood, basking in the light of his own inspiration, and drying his wings in the hot smoke of the speeding locomotive. He was almost there. “Although”, he began, hesitant, waiting for the idea to coalesce into a communicable thought, “you could drill holes in the wood, so the nail doesn’t split it.” Good lad. We had arrived at our destination. I left his fluttering against the shop window in search of new repairs, and returned to the sanctity of my domain.
The crisp, glue-hardened shards of wood no longer fitted together anything like closely enough for a meaningful meeting of glued surfaces, so I mounted the cheap vice onto the low wall once more and cut the edges flat at a wedged angle for more surface area. I cut off a head from a nail and found a matching drill bit. I drilled as deep as I could into each half, the bit held in the jaws of the chuck at the very end to squeeze out the last little millimetre of depth for each hole, and filled them both with lashings of lovely PVA, most of which spurted out in a joyous white firework that sprayed adhesive all over the patio as I brought the pieces together. I wound a yard of my best blue plastic-coated wire around the repair approximately, I guessed, the length of the nail now invisibly embedded. As I mentioned, glue doesn’t work in these parts. Wood moves too much, shrinking and swelling with the weather until the glass in the doors of Yvonne’s dresser waggles loose or the sofa tears itself apart or the laminate lifts from the kitchen cabinet doors. Glue is just another kind of masking tape, holding things in place only as long as someone is actually watching. Yesterday morning, out with Genevieve on her birthday, we drove up to Cactusmania where I stumbled upon a broom, humbly sitting in a corner of a greenhouse, entirely made of bamboo. A stout, straight branch for a handle and a skirt of fine, dry shoots, the very tips showing in a brittle yellow petticoat, all held at the waistband by a belt of wild wire windings. It was beautiful. A twenty-minute job created on the spot, its own repair out of thin air. It’s not about the broom, of course, and certainly not the sweeping, but the bringing into being and the keeping.
