“T-‘s really pissed at you!”

This was not particularly welcome news. People who annoyed T- sometimes turned up floating face down in the Moscow River following totally unrelated and entirely accidental incidents.

“Why is he pissed at me particularly? You’re involved in this too!”

“I told him it was your idea. I have to live in this city.”

I pondered for a moment.

“OK – what do the Shareholders say?” If they were foursquare behind us T- could go whistle.

“They tell me they have no recollection of agreeing to this visit, that I should cancel it immediately and put you on the next flight to anywhere in Western Europe at your own expense.”

“So, fairly ambiguous then?”

Winston Churchill is oft quoted as having said “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” He didn’t know the half of it. Anyone wanting to work with Russia at this time had to start by suspending any notion of cynicism. Cynicism is a foolish position at the best of times: it is what morons do instead of thinking and call wisdom. At other times it was just downright dangerous. The Shareholders could just be hanging us out to dry for reasons of expedience, or they were engaging in complex manoeuvrings about which we would never know anything.

Alexi was probably grinning at the other end of the line. “So we’ll go anyway, OK? It’ll have to be tomorrow. I’ve been told that I should take some holiday for a few days. Purely co-incidentally.”

“Right. I assume that my reservation at the Kampinsky is cancelled?”

“It is.”

“I’m not staying in the bloody Ukrainia again am I?”

I was always being shoved in the Stalin-era Ukraina when things went awry. Whatever charm the Gotham City architecture might have held for others was entirely lost on me. Its long, gloomy, corridors smelt unremittingly of drains and boiled cabbage. It was also a popular place for the Moscow criminal gangs to administer punishment beatings to those who displeased them. I don’t why there particularly. Perhaps they appreciated the room service (“Hi! Room 705 here; Could you send up a length of sturdy rubber hose, some good, stiff, electrical flex and some more nuts?”), but I always found it rather indifferent.

“No. T- will think to look for you there. He seems very anxious to talk to you. I’ve got somewhere in mind. Write this address down.”

My Russian may have been poor, but I had at least learned the alphabet, so I copied it down, letter by letter and read it back to him.

“Good lad. I’ll pass by at six thirty for you.”

“Right. What time is the flight?”

“We’re not flying anymore. We’re driving. Less conspicuous.”

“Driving! It’s about 2000km! It’ll take a day each way.”

“About 30 hours, as it happens. Don’t worry; we’ll drive shifts.”

“Alright. If we must.” A thought occurred to me “Hang on. If T- is looking for me, why doesn’t he just wait the other side of passport control for me?”

“I told him you’re coming from St Petersburg by rail, so he’ll be staking out Leningradsky station. I’m fairly sure he swallowed it.”

“Great. Just great. OK, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I looked up at the arrivals board. If T- wanted to make my life a misery by badgering me at the airport then he would probably assume I was on the London flight. That didn’t land for another two-and-a-half hours. I’d stopped overnight in Berlin on the understanding that I needed to be here early to travel on. T- for all his wealth and low cunning was basically fairly  slovenly. He’d not haul his carcass over here unnecessarily early and he was too mean to employ any but the cheapest help. I should be able to exit without being unduly importuned.

Even so, as I left passport control I pulled my hat well down. This would excite no interest: the month was February and the behaviour perfectly normal.

The arrivals hall was helpfully crowded too, so I ducked through thinking small thoughts until I reached a little knot of taxi drivers, sought out the one who looked least likely to beat me over the head with a shovel and bury me in a shallow grave somewhere, and handed him the piece of paper.

“I want to go here, please,” I fondly imagined myself saying. He raised his eyebrows when he saw the address, but said only “one hundred dollars.” I moved to take back the paper. “OK, OK forty dollars.” This was better, reasonable even, but the big drop surprised me. “Let’s go.”

The Leningradskoe highway looked bleak and cold as we headed into the city. Most of the traffic was heading out to the airport and the jam that side was very slow moving, which I hoped was annoying T- no end, but we sped along nicely, quickly passing the Khimki memorial – marking the limit of the German army’s advance in 1941 – and entering the city proper.

Here we hit jams. Stuck in the fumes, we inched along. The taxi had no radio, so I amused myself trying to work out where we were going. The words meant nothing to me. Eventually we joined the Garden Ring and speeded up a little, exiting the ring road after about 40 minutes and heading south east away from the centre. Here we entered some back streets of older buildings and pulled up outside a high wall into which was let an impressively sized wooden door.

Taking my bag, the driver pressed the door bell and waited with me until the door opened to reveal a youngish man wearing a monk’s habit who addressed me in English.

“Mr Doust? Your friend called this morning to explain you would be joining us for the night. Welcome.”

Trying to disguise my surprise, I fumbled for 40 dollars, which I gave to the driver who promptly gave me twenty back, saying a few words to the monk and inclining his head to me.

“He asks that you place that into the funds of the monastery.”

“Could you tell him that I shall do so with pleasure and gratitude, please?”

The monk introduced himself as Father Konstantin. I learned later that he was a hiermonk, a priest who had decided to become tonsured as a monk after the death of his wife some years before.

“Have you stayed in a religious order before?”

“No. I confess that I haven’t”

“Well, as you can imagine, your stay will be a quiet one. You are, of course, very welcome to use the chapel as you wish and there is a schedule of services displayed in your room. Are you of the Orthodox faith?”

“No, I’m Church of England, I suppose, though I’ve never been baptised.”

I didn’t know what he’d make of this, but it would be pretty low, lying to a priest. To my relief he grinned. “Alas we haven’t time to complete the catechism before tomorrow or I could help you with that.”

He introduced me to a far more elderly monk, Father Basil. “Father Basil looks after our two guest rooms,” he explained, “he can’t unfortunately understand English and he cannot speak in any event.”

“Is that a vow he has taken?”

“Not exactly, though it is a consequence of his faith. He fought at Stalingrad during the Great Patriotic War, but afterwards he was sent to Magadan for refusing to recant.”

I knew of Magadan, though at that time I hadn’t visited the city, knew it from its role in the Gulag Archipelago.

Father Konstantin continued “He refused to stop praying, so his tongue was cut out.” Father Basil showed me his hands. All his fingers were missing their first joint.

“Frostbite.”

My room was properly austere: a wooden bed with a thin mattress, no pillow and a single blanket; a sink with one (cold) tap, a lamp with a ten Watt bulb and a couple of icons. The trouser press was conspicuous by its absence as was the minibar. These I could live without, but I was slightly concerned by the lack of evidence of any radiator. Even at two o’clock in the afternoon I could see my breath in the frigid air; at two a.m. I’d be frozen.

In the event Father Basil appeared a few minutes later with a pile of bedding and pillows. I felt vaguely ashamed by the relative luxury but simultaneously grateful for their solicitude. He also brought a small paraffin stove, some tea & sugar and a teapot for me to use.

With surprising deftness considering the state of his hands, Father Basil wrote on a scrap of paper to the effect (I believed) that there would be a meal served at six o’clock. Hand gestures showed me where. He also showed me the way to the loo and the location of a bell I should ring should I need anything.

And then he left me to my own devices.

I sat on my bed and considered the reason for my visit. The company for which I worked had recently acquired an oil refinery just a little East of the Urals. This refined crude oil bought locally in roubles. The products it manufactured were either distributed in the local market or exported to Western Europe.

This export trade was particularly lucrative for us because refinery gate prices for the various products – gasoline, kerosene, diesel and fueloil – were agreed in roubles on the day they left the refinery, and these prices were based on the price paid for the crude.

Since the rouble was steadily and consistently devaluing against the dollar, we would simply sell the products forward on the various derivative markets knowing that once they reached market in a month or so time, the rouble would have devalued by another 10% or whatever making us a healthy margin once we’d converted what was necessary to pay our bills to the refinery.  The margin was made in hard currency and generated – quite legitimately – offshore, conveying considerable tax advantages. Everything that went to export was meant to be ours to sell; no third parties were supposed to get a look in.

Except that T- was cheating. He was buying up products supposedly destined for local markets and then bribing someone in the customs office at the refinery to provide the export documentation to allow him to pull the same trick.

Everything that left the refinery for export went by rail to the ports in the Baltic. What T- didn’t know was that I had a contact in one of the border stations the oil went through who kept me in touch with who was putting what across it. When T-‘s export volumes had suddenly trebled I simply asked for copies of the rail bills and discovered that he had got his grimy little fingers into our rice bowl.

This caused us much dismay, so we were heading down to the refinery with the simple intention of confronting the refinery manager and instructing him directly to cease all sales to T-. This would work. Instructions from Moscow made by telephone, fax or telex could generally be ignored; face-to-face orders could not. Alexi would be doing the threatening. My job was to salve the wounds with a nicely lucrative “consulting” contract that would require the refinery manager to travel to Vienna every month or so for a couple of days in return for a quite generous salary paid in the currency of his choice. I just needed to establish at what he would be an appropriate consultant.

I’d noted some shops at the end of the street. I wandered up there now to buy some emergency provisions for the trip. These amounted to a dozen Snickers bars and two large vacuum flasks I planned to fill with hot tea in the morning.

The evening meal in the refectory was a meagre affair of black bread and pickles. Father Konstantin explained that the Orthodox Church had many days of obligation on which fasting to one degree or another was required and this was one of them. I was perfectly happy. The taste I acquired for black bread in those days never left me.

The meal itself was conducted in silence. After we had eaten, Father Konstantin passed a few minutes with me. Would it be possible, I asked, for someone to wake me before six? Father Konstantin said he would do this himself. He was going out tonight to minister to the drunk.

“Alcohol is a curse in this city. Every night people drink themselves unconscious and sleep on the streets. At this time of year that means they die.”

I knew he was right. I’d seen the frozen bodies in the morning myself. The local authorities didn’t really care, except that they had to pick them up and dispose of them. Father Konstantin and his little band headed out with hot soup and blankets and did what they could to keep people alive.

He was as good as his word, and by six fifteen I was packed and ready to go. I handed Father Konstantin fifty dollars; he wouldn’t take more, though staying here had saved me a great deal.

He smiled at the two large flasks of tea.

“Would you like me to send these to you?  They might be of some use to you in your work. I won’t need them once I go back to London.”

“Better than that, before you go home, fill them and pass them on to someone who might need them. Warmth means life in winter.”

And with that he gave me benediction and ushered me out into the dark street.

The temperature at that time of day was about -30°C, mind-numbingly cold, though I was well wrapped and amused my tiny brain by growing miniature icicles on my eyebrows by breathing upward.

I was enjoying this innocent pastime when car lights appeared at the end of the narrow street and headed down towards me. I drew back into the shadows on general principle, but the car halted before me and Alexi flipped on the interior light and waved.

I was disappointed to see that he wasn’t driving his stupidly overpowered Subaru. I’d been looking forward to properly demonstrating the capabilities of this 325 hp turbocharged monster by driving sensibly and within the speed limit, but it seemed I was to be denied the opportunity.

Appropriately, perhaps, we were to be heading to Siberia in a Lada Niva.

I took a few bit from my bag then stowed it in the boot.

“So, where’s your car?” I asked him as I got in.

“This is my car. I use it when I go up to the dacha of a weekend. It’s far more suitable for where we’re going than is the Subaru, and in any case I’d give you permission to sleep with my wife before I let you drive that.”

The back seat of the Lada was filled with blankets and other provisions, so I added my newly acquired flasks of tea. Then we pulled off and spent the next half an hour trying to decide whether we were being followed or not. It was a fairly unlikely scenario, we both admitted, but our employers had had us educated at vast expense in all kinds of cloak and dagger shenanigans, including counter surveillance tactics, so it seemed rude not to.

Having satisfied ourselves that no-one was interested in us, we joined the highway heading southeast.

We changed drivers every two hours and stopped for a decent break every four. The winter landscape was monotonous and wearing, and although the traffic was thin the tendency of trucks to straddle the middle of the road made driving hard work.

We talked little. The two hour off-shift provided necessary rest on the surprisingly comfortable back seat. There would be time enough to talk once we reached our destination.

After many hours we pulled up in the dead marches of the night at a service area where we could get a shower. Then we sat and waited while our flasks were refilled.

“I drove from Moscow to Irkutsk once,” Alexi offered “It took us eight days. This is a drink of water in comparison. We would have been quicker but we blew the head gasket near Omsk and it took two days to get it fixed.”

“The size of this country is impossible. Do you think the Russian Federation will hold together? Long term, I mean.”

Alexi dragged on his cigarette.

“Been a nation for a long time, Russia. I suppose the Chinese might decide that they want a slice of the East one day. Who knows; we may rent it to them. The declining population is a worry. But, yes, I think it will hold together. Out of habit if for no other reason.”

As we neared the Urals, the road became more difficult. The margins of the highway had crumbled in the bitter cold, so all traffic was forced to share the middle ground, veering onto the broken tarmac at the edges to let each other past.

The juddering on the crumbled surface jarred the senses and amplified our fatigue, but as day broke we reached our destination, a small, dirty city built around rail, river and oil pipeline junctions.

There was industry here, but a lot of it looked closed down. The oil refinery located on the edge of town, however, was visibly busy. We pulled over and surveyed the scene. We’d halted next to a railway that led into the refinery. A steady stream of tank cars were rolling by carrying their cargoes of petroleum 3000 kilometres or more to the ports of the Baltic Sea for export.

The Russian railways were astoundingly efficient. Nothing got lost and the complex and extensive network of tracks made this by far the most sensible way of moving freight. During the Cold War, the West feared the railways. Nuclear ballistic missiles on their launchers could be moved quickly and continuously across the Soviet Bloc, hiding in tunnels or sheds when photo reconnaissance satellites were known to be passing overhead, mobile missile silos that were impossible to track.

We brushed up as best we could in the confines of the Lada and then drove down to the refinery. The main gate and gatehouse of the installation still bore all the insignia of the Soviet era, but it was rusty and tired now. Next to the gate was a poorly painted sign with our company logo.

Alexi stopped the car at the barrier and waited impassively until the armed guard came to us: normally visitors would dismount and enter the guardhouse to plead for entry, but this was not a normal situation. He handed the angry man his credentials and an animated discussion took place which ended when the guard fairly jogged back to his hut and picked up a phone.

“It would seem that he has been instructed that no-one who does not have a pass issued by the refinery manager himself will be allowed entry today, a change in the regulations that he is unable to explain. I’ve told him that we are not moving from this point until he either opens this gate or shoots us.”

“That must have focussed his mind a bit.”

“I expect we shall see some kind of result shortly. Ah, here we go.”

A car had pulled away from the administration offices a couple of hundred metres away and was heading towards us. It parked on the other side of the barrier, but directly in front of us, blocking our passage should we be dramatic enough to try to crash through it.

The man who emerged was thin with a bushy moustache. He was wearing a grey suit whose colour matched his general pallor. He looked nervous.

Alexi got out of the car and I followed. He walked to the barrier and held out his hand. Reluctantly, the man took it. I followed suit.  Alexi started to talk. Clearly he was demanding entry. The man folded his arms and stood firm.

Alexi changed tack. “You see this man?” he said in English, indicating me, “He is your boss’s boss’s boss. Do you understand?”

Technically this was not entirely untrue. For control reasons I signed off the expenses claims of the head of the group that had control of refining. It wasn’t exactly a direct line management, but what the hell.

The man chewed his moustache for a second and answered: “Yes, I understand. But I have a direct order that you are not allowed on site.”

Alexi grinned, took a piece of paper from his pocket and said to me “Sign that, please.”

I did so, and he handed it to the moustache man. “There you are. A written instruction from a higher authority.”

With the look of relief of a man just given a get out of jail free card, he nodded to the gatekeeper and returned to his car.

The barrier lifted and we followed him to the office block.

“That’s the personal assistant to the refinery manager,” Alexi explained. “A good man, by all accounts, an engineer who kept this place running with no resources except a few rolls of duct tape for five years before we bought it. He’s not cut out for this political shit. We should try to protect him.”

Exiting our cars, we entered the building, passed the surprised security desk and walked up the stairs to the first floor landing. Mr Moustache hesitated in front of a large leather padded door. “He’s in there,” he said to Alexi. “OK, you had better follow us in.”

And he opened the door.

The office was palatial, about 20 metres by 10 and expensively furnished. From behind a large, ornate, desk there erupted a red faced man. He was yelling in Russian. Alexi waited for a minute for him to take breath and threw the sheet I had signed down in front of him.

He read it and looked at me. “You cannot do this! Foreigner!”

“I just have,” I replied, really wishing I had some idea of what I had just put my name to.

He said something to Mr Moustache who replied “Да” and deflated a little.

Alexi said “I think I’ll stay here and discuss some things with the Director. Why don’t you take a tour?”

He lent over and whispered “Find some evidence that T-‘s mob were here.”

“I’ll do what I can. What did I sign?”

“His letter of dismissal. You have taken direct operational control of this establishment. Congratulations.”

“Thanks. I’ll buy you a drink later. Can I do that?”

“Buy me a drink? Sure!”

“No – can I sack him?”

“Not at all, but he thinks you can. We’re in the provinces. People will believe anything here.”

And saying this, he walked over to the drinks cabinet, selected a bottle of brandy from the shelf, collected two glasses and sat down in front of the chastened refinery manager.

I asked Mr Moustache: “How many floors has this building?” “Three plus the ground floor and a basement. The basement is for boilers and the rest of this block is offices.”

“Excellent. Very sensibly organised. Let’s start with the top floor.”

I was watching him closely. He tensed at this suggestion.

“Let’s go now.”

The top floor proved to be inhabited for the most part by accountants. The stairs emerged at the midpoint of the floor and I started with the right wing, moving slowly along the corridor examining the doors. Mr Moustache stayed at my side, offering information as we proceeded, but as we turned and headed back to the stairwell, he became silent and when we passed into the left wing he started to lag behind.

About halfway down I found it. A door with no sign on the outside. Russian bureaucracy liked labels and the absence of one was incongruous. I could see the holes where a sign had once been mounted and on the carpet, when I looked closely, small specks of saw dust from when it had been unscrewed.

“What or who is in this room?”

He didn’t answer, so I repeated the question.

“I’m not sure that I know.”

I looked at the door frame. It was common practice in Russia at the time to seal one’s office door on leaving it for the day. This was done by means of a piece of sting attached on the inside and passed between the door and the frame when it was closed. On the outside the string was passed though a cup screwed to the frame that was plugged with plasticine. This was then marked with a seal that looked a lot like a franking stamp. If the door were opened the string broke the plasticine seal which could not be remade without the owner of the stamp knowing about it. Elegantly simple.

I couldn’t read the name on this seal, but it wasn’t one of ours.

“I want the key to this door, please.”

He looked wretched.

“We don’t have one. That office is not part of the refinery.”

“Very well. Then call someone with a lever to open it.”

“But it is sealed.”

I pulled the string out of the plasticine. “No it isn’t. Now, a lever, if you please. That is a direct instruction.”

He had a radio in his pocket and we were joined three minutes later by a well-nourished looking lad with a stout screwdriver.

“Excellent. Ask him to break the lock, please.”

He did this with gratifying efficiency and walked away quickly, not looking back, thinking, I imagine, that this was something he would do well to forget.

Inside the office were two desks and a great deal of paper work. Leaning against the wall was the sign taken from the door. T-‘s company sign.

Mr Moustache was trying to disappear into the shallow pile of the carpet.

“It would have been simpler to have told me about this. No matter. Please ask someone to bring me some achieve boxes.”

With his help (once he realised that I wasn’t going to sack him – not that I could – Mr Moustache became quite animated) I found all I needed in about 20 minutes. The sign, company stamps, directories and records were all packed away and taken downstairs to the Lada. Alexi was right: this really was the provinces. Whoever normally occupied that office really believed that the seal would keep people out, a legacy, I suppose, of a nation that had once valued petty rules and regulation above everything else.

I went back to the refinery manager’s office and found the atmosphere much warmer. Alexi and the director were sitting on sofas smoking cigars and sipping the latest of several brandies.

“Ah Jon, I was just discussing with Sasha here how he might be able to help us with optimising the quality of oils going to export. Perhaps you might be able to come up with soemthing? And T- called. He was quite surprised to hear we were down here. He’s suggested that we might be able to use some of his capacity at the ports to improve the economics, if circumstances are in our favour.”

He looked at me pointedly.

“I think all the evidence suggests that would be a good idea on his part.”

Through the alcoholic haze the refinery manager missed the meaning, but Alexi did not.

“Under the circumstances I wonder if you could reconsider your earlier decision.” He proffered the document I’d signed that morning. I looked at the incomprehensible Cyrillic, then rolled it into a tube, picked up a lighter from the table, and burned it.

When we left, I had to drive. Alexi was drunk and in an expansive mood.

“You see, the thing about this country is that no-one values face to face meetings. I’ll accept that we’re not amateurs, but you see that was very easy. All we had to do was turn up and break the logjam. Everybody’s happy. I’m happy, you’re happy, the Shareholders are happy. OK, T- is not happy and says he’s going to kill you, but he probably doesn’t mean it and the irony is that we’ll all probably be a lot richer for sorting it out you see.”

He dozed off. I drove. And drove.

About 9pm we came to a small town which seemed to exist only to serve the road. Here there was a restaurant open and I was trembling with tiredness.

By the door there were the usual collection of derelicts one saw in every town. They hassled us rather half heartedly as we entered.

The proprietress seemed nervous as we sat. She spoke hurriedly to Alexi.

“Ah. She’s never had an American in here before and she is worried because she doesn’t have any hamburgers to give you.”

“You are joking.”

“Not a bit. She is genuinely worried that you will be unhappy.”

“Did you mention that I am not American?”

“Yes. But you must understand that out here, even now, all foreigners are American.”

The food arrived. Pork from a pig she had reared herself, cooked with cream and something akin to horseradish. It was perfect – warming and comforting. I was starting to feel a very long way from home.

When we’d finished eating, I fetched the collection of flasks from the car. Alexi asked her to fill them with tea, except for the two I’d bought in Moscow which she filled with thick vegetable soup.

Leaving the restaurant we passed the gaggle of rapidly chilling drunks. Finding the most rational looking, I pressed the flasks into his hands. “Drink. Hot.”

I straightened up and saw the restaurant owner looking at me, her expression a blend of mistrust and bemusement.

Despite the snide comments one hears sometimes about expat drinking habits, these were not emptied by us. A previous owner of the house – one Roger – was an enthusiastic and prolific “cavist” who brewed vast quantities of wine, pineau, cider and such like and invited his cronies to come and sit in the cellar with him and drink it, and he left them behind when he went off to the great vineyard in the sky.

Whatever the myriad charms of our cellar, sitting in it is not something that particularly appeals to me, but the rural “cave” nonetheless remains an important social centre in the Vendée.

I get invited to go and spend a couple of hours underground every now and again. Some of the caves I visit are pretty basic, furnished with a few stools and a rough table on which are placed glasses and an unlabelled bottle of some homebrew, sometimes good, sometimes not.

Others are positively lavish, with proper bars (in one case garnished with fairly lights), mood music and a comprehensive cataloguing system for the rotgut.

However, social inadequate that I am, my own cellar languishes unused for anything except a mountain of old packing materials, the earliest layers of which date from our move here in 2003.

But during this week the cellar has featured large on my daily horizon.

First off, of course, was the trip down there to find some bottles suitable for ketchup and very profitable it was too from that respect.

Having successfully filled and plugged the bottles of sauce, my mind turned to the other bottles down there. Could they not, I speculated, be filled with wine?

Now, I’m not about to start brewing my own. I’ve done that and frankly there are bods out there who do it far better and I might as well get it from them. But what a lot of people around here do is buy wine in bulk and bottle it themselves to save a bit of money. Wine bought “en vrac” works out far cheaper, and the quality can be excellent.

For our school events we always buy from one particular merchant in town and I know his stuff to be good as a result, so I toddled along this morning and have acquired a 20 litre test batch of his recommended Vin d’Oc rosé and red Côtes du Rhone. Once bottled it should come in at about €1,80 per bottle, which is about half what I am normally paying for everyday wine.

The other thing that being down in the cellar reminded me was that its roof needed insulating, what with winter coming on in a few months. We’ve been meaning to do this for a while since we realised just how much heat was being lost to the cellar from the living room which is immediately above it.

There is already some little insulation there, but it is woefully inadequate, so following  a little online research we identified what we needed (that sort of aluminium foil stuff with fleech in between) and I was able to get two rolls of high quality stuff at a very generous discount on the basis that it was the end of the batch.

Having got it home I addressed myself to the matter of installing it. I had some vague idea of moving the mountain of rubbish around as necessary to make space, but quickly realised that this was simply stupid and set about loading it into the trailer for a trip or two to the dump.

As I worked I uncovered shelves on which masses of empty bottles were stacked. But on the bottommost shelf, where the bottles were standing up, they weren’t empty. I’d never before noticed this since the shelf had been hidden from view since we chucked the removal boxes in there almost eight years ago.

Taking one of the bottles up to daylight, I examined it. It was one with a wired in cork that are found on some beer bottles, such as Grolsch. Wiping the neck clean of dust, I popped the cork, and sniffed cautiously. Gadzooks! Cider.

Emboldened by the discovery I took a sip, and blow me if it isn’t perfectly good. Home made, very dry, sparkling and outrageously strong.

I’m guessing that the bottles must have been there 11 or 12 years and there seem to be about fifty of them.

I’ve not found a hoard of solid gold Napoleons yet, but I feel it is imminent.

Except that there is nowhere to put the garlic and the handle is on the wrong side.

But you get the idea.

Its purpose in being, its raison d’être, is to drive corks in wine bottles, and I’ve been using it to do just that, except that I have been bottling tomato ketchup, not fermented fruit juice.

The South Vendée is currently beset with a staggering glut of tomatoes. From my point of view, things could be worse. Tomatoes are one of my five “Desert Island” foods. But the fact remains that there is a limit to the quantity I can eat at one sitting, so preservation is the order of the day.

This tomato ketchup is closely based on one described in the late Keith Floyd’s book (scandalously out of print, I might add) “Floyd on France”.

Floyd understood and explained better than any other Briton I have yet come across the subtle nuances and myriad contradictions of the French attitude to The Art of the Table. There is no awkwardness in his juxtaposition of a recipe for ketchup, for example, with a monologue on that gift to the cardiac specialist down on his luck, rillettes.

So I reproduce (with some minor modification – I am no apprentice) his excellent solution to the tomato problem:

1kg toms
500g red onions
1 kg red peppers
Olive oil

Peel the tomatoes, deseed the peppers and finely chop the onions. Cook in the oil slowly for about an hour, then pass through a fine sieve.

Add the following to the resulting red gunk:

One finely chopped red chilli
One tsp paprika
Salt & Pepper
One tsp mustard powder
Three crushed cloves of garlic
75g sugar
Two wine glasses of vinegar

Cook very slowly for two hours or so until thick, pot and seal down. The above should yield about a litre of the finest ketchup.

I found among the many hundreds of empty bottles let in the cellar by the Bloke Who Sold Us The House some rather nice 50cl bottles that one held Côtes du Rhone, and these made admirable sauce bottles. I now need to find a use for the rest of them.

Ted, you may rest easy. I’ve just been intensely busy with the business of gites, providing people with the best holidays we can and returning them whence they came in far better frames of mind than those in which they arrived.

I like that last bit of my job.

Ted tells me that he and Billy Two legs have spent the past couple of weeks in Canada’s Northwest Territories where they have collected “significant and irrefutable evidence of the presence of large, non-human primates,” which is nice.

The happy pair of intrepid explorers have arrived at the settlement of Fort Resolution (population about 500, which, as Ted points out “does somewhat limit dating opportunities, which is a shame after so many weeks in the wilderness after which even Billy was starting to look pretty damned attractive”) where they intend to spend a couple of days drinking beer and recovering from anaemia occasioned by several thousand mosquito bites. Remarkably there appears to be a restaurant in the town. It is called Marg’s Kitchen. Less surprisingly, perhaps, the speciality (indeed, only) dish is moose served in a variety of sauces.

The few minutes of my days that have not been filled with work have been occupied trying to stop the guinea pigs breeding.

Attentive readers may recall that, a while back, a scheme was hatched by my devious & malodorous offspring and / or My Dear Wife (I’m unclear on the details) to obtain guinea pigs. In a moment of weakness I appear to have consented to the extension of our menagerie.

When the three guinea pigs arrived – one for each child – they were given names according to the taste of each. Thus Christened were Storm, Caramel & Makka Pakka.

At the time I held all three up to the light and examined their more intimate regions. All appeared to be the same. I learned later (oh! That I had learned before!) that the sexing of guinea pigs during the period of their adolescence is not easy and is certainly well beyond the capabilities of a novice such as myself.

Perhaps inevitably one of the three – Storm – turned out to be a girl and quickly fell pregnant. I became aware of her condition when her legs started to be too short for her, and moved her into temporary accommodation for her confinement.

There she delivered two little guinea pigs, who (and happily very young guinea pigs are easy to sex) turned out to be boys. These were named Socrates & Aristotle and in due course joined the other boys in the large pen I’d built for them, though they are taking a little holiday elsewhere at the moment.

Storm is in a nearby pen, temporarily living in splendid solitude until someone can supply what will be unequivocally guaranteed as another female.

However, Caramel has realised that she is not long distant and has become increasingly persistent in his attempts to renew acquaintance with her. In fact his feats at escapology are becoming quite remarkable.

Guinea pigs are hardly the most athletic of creatures. They are poor climbers and although I have heard tales of great leaps ours certainly seem incapable of surmounting a barrier 12 inches high.

Notwithstanding, Caramel was managing to scramble onto the roof of the hutch (I suspect Makka Pakka may have been giving him a bunk up) and drop down the other side. Once out, though, he was stymied, being unable to either get over the little fence into Storm’s pen or back into his own.

So he’d rush around outside of both making plaintive whistling noises until some charitably disposed person passed by, scooped him up and popped him back in.

After a few days of this we all got a little tired of the rodent Lothario and I have been pitting my mighty intellect (first class degree in something quite difficult plus 43 years in the School of Life Experience) against his tiny, tiny mind.

And for a while now he’s had the upper hand.

With each counter measure I have erected, Caramel has become more inventive, more cunning and more cock-sure in getting past them.

He has used his testosterone pumped little body to lever things out of the way, he has scrambled over ever more formidable obstacles, wriggled through tiny gaps and performed acts of balance that would amaze the most accomplished circus acrobat.

All this, with a brain the size of a sunflower seed and barely six months of life, a profound testament to the motivational power of lurve.

But I think I’ve got him now.

The construction is complex but in essence it involves carefully positioned chicken wire and half a dozen roof tiles. I can’t really give too many details in case the little bugger is hacking into the WiFi.

After a few minutes of blunting his teeth on the wire, Caramel retreated to brood and plot in the hutch. Makka Pakka is keeping a very low profile down the other end of the pen behind a lean-to I made for him. I can’t say I blame him: Caramel has a very evil look in his eye.

“Who you lookin’ at, you poof?”

Predictably, perhaps, this raises strong emotions within the breasts of the Anglophone community, as can be evidenced by this thread on the Total France forum.

Read it if you like, but I warn you it is a little tedious, not least because the top flight BATs and their associated sock puppets chose not to involve themselves, which lessens the humour a tad.

Aside from the insults, wild claims are made along the lines of being able to buy sufficient foodstuffs for €60 in the UK to last two weeks in France.

Feasible, possibly, if one is prepared to live on dog food.

The way this all works is terribly simple. One buys one’s shopping online from the likes of Asda (part of Walmart, these days) and requests delivery to the depot of the transporter. They pop it in their van and drop it off a couple of days later at any one of a number of delivery points in towns near a corridor heading down to the distant wilds of South West France.

Charges for this service vary, but an average would seem to be about 20% of the value of the goods being delivered.

Now, I am not rich enough not to be unconcerned about the cost of living, and I am very happy to play an arbitrage going to reduce expenditure. In any case, cross border trade of this nature has a long history and I am always pleased to see someone taking the imitative to exploit a niche.

However, being of an old fashioned nature, I thought it might be sensible to do some maths before plunging in with my credit card.

Education these days is more concerned with getting children to “express themselves creatively” and to “discover” things than actually teach them stuff. Numbers and the adding up thereof are considered unnecessarily fettering. OK, I may be exaggerating a tad, but I was horrified to learn that “A” level maths no longer routinely includes material about complex numbers or anything remotely useful about matrices.

Anyway, old fuddy duddy that I am, I like numbers, so I did a bit of analysis involving the Asda and Hyper U online shopping services and my shopping list.

The upshot of this is that there appears to be no benefit, on average, in our using these services. OK, I didn’t include things like Marmite, baked beans or catering sized pack of PG Tips tea bags, which it is obviously advantageous to import from Blighty, but neither did I include wine or beer, which are far, far cheaper in France.

However, there are one or two little oddities that I might avail myself of next time I’m over there and have space in the car. In particular, washing up liquid and toothpaste are far cheaper in the UK. In terms of going the other way, though, dishwasher tablets, mayonnaise and tinned tomatoes are a good buy in France.

Limited commercial opportunities there, I’d say.

Of course, all of this is highly dependent on exchange rate, and on matters of taste. Some people find that they cannot be happy without a regular intake of Pilgrim Chedder and Potnoodles, but personally I find I can live without, so I’m not that interested in buying them.

The delivery services themselves are not immune from criticism.

In particular, and I should stress that I have not substantiated this myself and it is only hearsay, comments about the hours some of the drivers are putting in and of grossly overloaded vehicles circulate continually. I’ve no idea whether any liability would attached to the owner of some shopping if the transporter carrying the goods were found to be breaching the laws on rest breaks, but I think I’d be concerned.

Certainly some supermarkets appear to be unhappy about putting a third party into the supply chain between them and their customer. Again, I don’t have this from the horse’s mouth as it were, but apparently Tesco supermarkets decline to deliver to the depots of the forwarding companies citing concerns about the safety in trans-shipping goods that require constant and controlled refrigeration. I’d be interested to hear chapter and verse on this if anyone knows for sure.

Whatever. Having satisfied myself that I’m not missing out on the Sale of the Century I shall, nonetheless, be loading up with 84 cans of Heinz’s finest and other goodies (an ever diminishing list, particularly since I have now learned how to make Golden Syrup) next time I visit with a vehicle.

Even after seven years, I cannot share my neighbours’ opinion that baked beans are “too sweet.”

But the point is this: I have no idea how to quit it. Which is a shame because I have completely lost interest in the whole boiling.

Emails from this mob constitute about 50% of my merger communication with the outside world, complete spam making up another 35%, abusive material from Trixie the West Country Troll a further 10% and stuff I am actually pleased to read about 5%.

I believe this is about average for an email account these days.

Nevertheless it is a tad trying.

I logged on to my account on the network that I won’t be naming this evening to see if I could find the Off switch, but alas and alack there was none.

I suspect that having a large number of members is key to gaining respect from advertisers, which is presumably the point in setting one of these gigs up, so it is in their interest to make it difficult to leave.
Ultimately I suppose I shall just have to direct it to a dead letter mailbox I have set up which collects mail from previous ill-advised sorties I have made into the dustier corners of the interweb and automatically erases it after seven days.

I can’t help feeling that we could all be doing something more constructive.

Anyway, here is a video of the Buzzcocks to make reading this post more worthwhile.

Being self-employed, however, an entire day’s work has to be included in the proceedings, which naturally has to be made up from time that would normally be allocated in the direction of sleep.
Such is life.

One of the most pleasant things we did was to decamp, literally, I suppose, to the nearby (15 minutes drive) Forêt de Mervant for a spot of time under canvas, observing the creepy crawlies.

This was nice because it enforced a certain amount of relaxation, smelling the flowers, etc, which provided some precious moments for reflection.

One topic I pondered was this: why to the manufacturers of camping cars and caravans strive to give their output such silly macho names?

I’ve got nothing against these conveyances, mind; I’m just more of a tent kind of a chap.

But “Mustang,” “Challenger” and “Frontier?” Surely these cannot be the words people have in mind when they hand over the readies.

I would have thought that the “Comfy,” “Pipe and Slippers” and “Jolly Nice & Surprisingly Spacious” would better encapsulate the spirit of caravanning.

Presumably this is why I am not in marketing.

Some years ago, under the information-poor regime of our former mayor, a little land transaction took place. There was nothing untoward in the transaction: agricultural land near the centre of the village owned by a local farmer was swapped for an equal area owned by the commune on the outskirts.

No money changed hands. All completely above board and quite legal.

A few years later, the commune re-zoned a part of its new acquisition to allow for the building of some brand spanking new HLM – social housing units – complete with all new eco friendly whistles & bells. There were solar panels for hot water, heat pumps for space heating and oodles of insulation.

Great was the rejoicing. We didn’t hold a street party or anything, but we all got a nice warm feeling.

However, the rejoicing was short lived in the house of the previous owner when he received an enormous tax bill for the new houses.

How could this be?

It emerged that the land swap had been messed up, and that, as far as the State was concerned, the parcel of land that the new HLM were on was not, in fact, owned by the commune, but was still owned by the farmer.

How this can have occurred is unclear. Our former mayor had a reputation for “micro management” which meant that a lot of stuff that could be delegated often wasn’t, so perhaps that is where this fell through the cracks.

What is clear is that sorting it out what should have been a routine and simple transaction is going to be a costly exercise. Not obviously in monitory terms, but certainly in time.

And when your local government is run by (for the most part) unpaid volunteers, many of whom are self employed, time and money can often be the same thing.

A message overnight via satellite from Ted with his thoughts on the small matter of integration.

Ted is currently camping out in Northern Saskatchewan where he is hunting Sasquatch in the company of someone named Billy Two-Legs.

He and Billy are being plagued by what he describes as “mosquitoes from Satan’s own diabolic swarms.”

“They are completely impervious to DEET,” he relates, “and we have reached the inescapable conclusion that they are an introduced alien species and the latest attempt by the Grey Men to subvert humankind.”

Well, quite.

He continues: “You want to know how to tell how well you’ve fitted in? Well, you Euros all have different kinds of power outlets in your house depending on which country you’re in, right? Go around and see whether you’ve changed all the plugs on your appliances.”

This does have the advantage of being empirical, so I’ve been and checked and it seems that only two three-pin plugs remain: one on a little used kitchen blender and one on a soldering iron that I’ve never been able to master.

On that basis I suppose I can say “Vive la France!” and I’ll have an extra large portion of snails, frogs’ legs and tripe sausages all liberally soused in a rich garlic sauce.

However, I’m obviously not integrated enough to meekly accept that all loo paper must be pink and I was disappointed (though hardly surprised) to see the mountain in the supermarket was still rather monochromatic when I passed last Friday morning.

What was surprising, however, was that the store was completely devoid of pasteurised milk.

Despite having pioneered not only the practice of pasteurisation but also of refrigeration, the French have historically had a distant relationship with what most of the English-speaking world regard as being “fresh milk” preferring either the slightly sweet and burnt flavour of UHT long-life stuff or, in rural areas, drinking raw milk.

Raw milk is having something of a resurgence here. Personally I prefer it and am not suspicious of it. I give it to the kids too. There is nothing inherently dangerous about the stuff after all, though it does require careful animal husbandry and absolute cleanliness in handling.

Pasteurisation is instead of proper hygiene.

Some groups of farmers have started getting together and funding vending machines that dispense raw milk to the public from places like garage forecourts (you bring your own jug) in an attempt to boost margins over what they can get from the dairies and this is really starting to take off.

Clearly this Friday there hit been some hiccup in distribution and the shop’s supplier had failed to – literally – deliver, so the supermarket had phoned up the local farm that supplies them with packaged raw milk and asked them to step into the breach and the fridge was filled with that instead.

I hoped they were sensible enough to have paid them well for their trouble.

The men around the table – and they were all men – were rich, powerful and very, very worried. They represented the secret funding resource behind the bid by one Rev. Elstow J Periwinkle III to become the next President of the United States.

To say that the Reverend was right wing and conservative was a bit like saying the Dead Sea was slightly salty.

Among Elstow Periwinkle’s more popular policies could be listed: a plan to arm all kindergarten teachers; reform of the judicial system so that the families of the guilty shared in their punishment (which could include death by stoning for some offences); a complete ban on women wearing trousers or skirts that came above the knee to “curtail immorality” and the disenfranchisement of anyone receiving welfare benefits.

Foreign policy objectives were similarly robust and based on the principle that “promotion of American values in all nations – if necessary by forcible means – is a Godly mission and one from which we will not shirk. Hallelujah.”

It was all terribly stirring stuff and, coupled with some highly persuasive but entirely unattributable internet conspiracy theories involving all the likely nominees from other parties,  it had seen the Reverend’s Holy Renewal Movement surging in the polls to the point where the mainstream parties were getting more than a little twitchy. It was clear that Elstow J Periwinkle III was very much in with a chance of scoring the Top Slot in November.

Unless, that is, something occurred to put him out of the race.

So when the letters began arriving, outlining some of the more questionable business activities that were funding the Reverend, the assumption had been made that it was the Opposition that was behind them.

And although they were a concern, it had not been a great one. The various enterprises – legal and otherwise – that pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the Holy Renewal Movement’s coffers were separated from the Movement by multiple layers of shell companies, nominee directorships, blind trusts and brass plates in far flung corners of the globe and could not possibly be linked to the Reverend or to his backers, individuals who felt that they were not already rich enough and saw the chance to make a substantial return on their investment in Elstow Periwinkle once the Moral Rearmament started in earnest.

Thus, it was assumed that the main parties were just flinging mud in the hope that some would stick.

Until, that is, the first detailed description arrived.

It explained how cash generated from an illegal gold mining operation in the Amazon that was poisoning several hundred square kilometres of virgin forest with toxic wastes was air freighted via three Caribbean islands described as machine parts, printer ink cartridges and exotic fruit to Panama, where it was laundered through a more-or-less above bored foreign exchange business. From there, the semi-clean money was “spent” at a chain of a dozen Nevada brothels (owned, ultimately, and in deep obscurity, by the Periwinkle Foundation, a non-profit organisation set up to combat moral turpitude arising from line dancing) before heading to Europe.

Exchanged for Euros in another foreign exchange operation in Estonia, the cash was used to purchase second hand furniture in the Baltic States, which was then shipped to the United Kingdom, to be resold at any number of small auction houses, car boot sales and antique fairs.

The now laundered money was finally used to buy improving literature and DVDs from the Reverend’s own London Mission. From there it was repatriated to the States to partially fund the Movement’s campaigning.

There were many such operations going on under the Movement’s control.

Two things were interesting about the letter: firstly, that it contained information that for reasons of simple security was not known in its entirety by any one person; secondly, that it came with a return name and address.

Two of the Movement’s more senior enforcers (or “heavy clerics” as they were known internally – in this case the Reverends Kelly and Steve) were sent off to France to “interview” the sender, a man calling himself Duncan Michelson-Morley.

They returned a few days later thoroughly bruised and deeply shocked by what they had undergone.

Having found the isolated cottage corresponding to the address, the Reverends had settled down for a few hours to watch the dapper little man they presumed to be Duncan Michelson-Morley as he pottered around his garden, drenching roses with the contents of a large, old fashioned, brass sprayer.

Having satisfied themselves that the man posed no conceivable threat, even though they were missing their accustomed hand guns, the clerics had followed the man as he re-entered the cottage, with a view to employing some “enhanced interrogation” techniques, for fun if for no other reason.

When they came to their senses a few minutes later it was to find themselves in their underwear, strapped firmly into upright chairs. The dapper little man was there too, but now he looked far from harmless. It wasn’t that he was polite and smiling (always a bad sign if one is professionally bound, the reverends knew), it was that he was confidently brandishing a kendo shinai with which he had already – apparently – inflicted a number of livid bruises on arms and legs.

“Now, now my dear fellows,” he had started, “did you really think that I wouldn’t spot your clumsy attempts at discrete surveillance? What do they teach you young people these days? No matter, let me explain what this is all about.”

And so he had. He explained that he knew all that was going on to support the Periwinkle campaign, though he declined to reveal how. He explained that his continued good health and liberty – as evidenced by regular communication by means he was not about to disclose with several lawyers around the world – were key to ensuring that the intelligence remained between “friends”. He explained what he wanted: Elstow Periwinkle to be exposed for the fraud and filthy hypocrite that he was.

“He can even blub on television and beg for forgiveness like that Jimmy Swaggart character who was big your side of the water a while back did, if he wishes. Then he can bugger off to West Virginia or somewhere and take up snake worship or something. I really don’t care. But I want him gone or I pull down everyone and everything associated with him. Just nod your heads if you understand, gentlemen. Jolly good.”

Then he had kicked them out, watching them go from the door, casually swinging the shinai with a practiced ease.

They had found their car and clothes about a kilometre up the quiet lane that led to the lonely house. The reverends dressed quickly, not least because, to their profound surprise given the haste with which they had made the return, when they arrived they found Duncan Michelson-Morely waiting for them, leaning easily against a tree cradling a pump action shotgun.

“I think it best that you leave town very soon. Please be assured that I will be checking.” And off they went.

Once back in the States, their report digested with a degree of incredulity, the Movement’s intelligence machine had swung into overdrive. This was superbly provision with well placed, sympathetic, sources in all of America’s plethora of intelligence agencies, and information flooded in.

The first task had been to place the cottage in France under close observation, rather more adeptly than the Reverends had proven capable of. Everything, every detail of its occupant’s life, was noted for analysis.

Identifying and investigating that occupant proved confusing: Duncan Michelson-Morely did not exist and had never existed. No record of his birth, marriage or death could be found by the extensive network of tentacles the Movement possessed.

The man who lived in the house was named Eric Michelson-Morely, so it was presumed that he was adopting the very thin cover of changing his first name for some reason yet to be discovered.

Eric Michelson-Morely most certainly did exist, but the extensive information gathered – including photographs from various sources – was highly contradictory.

Born 62 years previously in Chepstow, Eric Michelson-Morely had received a decent if undistinguished education and had passed some 37 years working as a provincial solicitor. He had never married and his medical records indicated a decidedly fragile constitution. His interests included amateur dramatics and a near obsession with roses.

On the other hand, Eric Michelson-Morely had cropped up a number of times since his retirement in some unlikely places for a man of previously conservative character; in particular he had gambled, won and lost in spectacular fashion in Las Vegas, frequenting at least one casino controlled by the Movement.

But this was the only tenuous connection that could be found, and nothing whatsoever in Eric Michelson-Morely’s history gave reason to suspect that the Reverends Kelly and Steve should have had any problems whatsoever with him.

And yet the bruises were clear to see, and despite extensive and repeated de-briefing neither man budged one iota from their stories.

What was obvious was that there was no way that Eric Michelson-Morely could ever have assembled the information he was threatening to broadcast. So the Movement began to search for an intelligence connection. And they struck pay dirt.

It was discovered that a recent incomer to the nearby town of St Louis sur Baq was a man who had previously worked for France’s most secretive agency, the DCINCD. His reasons for being so far from Paris were unclear, but the words “special assignment” were whispered locally. And his arrival in the region coincided with the arrival of the first letters.

This was most promising indeed.

To add credence to the notion that any scandal emanating from France and aimed at the Movement was baseless and mischievous, the Movement decided to provide a motive, and in short order the Reverend was on his hind legs announcing that, as President, one of his first tasks would be to pass the “France Sanctions Act” forbidding the performance to the “sinful” Can-Can on American soil and making trade between the two nations unlawful.

This was met with wild cheering (and a certain amount of foaming at the mouth) from the faithful and a two point gain in the polls. The enraged fulmination from the French embassy was music to the collective ears of the Movement.

The Movement then set-about building a back-up laundering system that was to be kept “cold” until the threat posed by Michelson-Morley could be neutralised. Any investigation of his claims post mortem would find nothing.

Finally the means for that neutralisation had to be arranged. To this end, a small dissident group had been established named the Popular Front for the Liberation of Andorra. This had caused a certain amount of bewilderment amongst the law enforcement personal called into to investigate the setting fire to litter bins and the painting of false beards and glasses on statues of President de Gaulle that the PFLA claimed as their work. For a start, Andorra appeared to be liberated already, but Europe was full of vociferous factions making all kinds of statements, so they sighed and got on with it.

They didn’t expect for one moment that the PFLA would involve themselves in assassination.

But what had been missing was one final piece of the jigsaw, a physical link between Michelson- Morley and Pierre – Yves Pompodore de Frou-Frou, and that had finally been established. The previous evening they had been sighted in the same bar where, in accordance with established trade craft, they had steadfastly ignored one another. The watchers waited for something, something out of the ordinary, and they got it.

Without warning, the DCINCD man had consumed every drink on the table in front of him, behaviour so bizarre that it had to be significant, at least to intellects blunted by frustration, greed and an unhealthy love of conspiracy theories.

So now the meeting moved towards a decision. Liquidation was the word they used.

“How long will it take to get the necessary assets in place?” asked the Reverend.

“Not more than a month.”

“Good.” The holy man smiled broadly. “Let’s get on with God’s work then shall we?”