Cave Men

Among the sparsely populated area where we live there are several notable men. 

The Starers live in the next village.  Two elderly men, usually dressed in multi coloured acrylic jumpers, sit on a bench beside the roadside and stare at passing traffic.  Sometimes they are joined by a third.  Sometimes they wear flat caps.  They don’t seem to talk to each other.   

The Walker walks on the main road between our village and the next – though generally nearer to the next village than to ours.  He is always very neatly dressed and usually carries an umbrella.  I have never seen him walking anywhere else, just stepping along the busy inter-village road.  We once also saw him at a carol concert a few villages away.  He appeared in the choir but didn’t seem to be singing, just staring ahead and opening and shutting his mouth from time to time.  We think that someone cares for him, dresses him neatly each day and then sends him out. 

The Man Who Should Be Dead lives in our village.  When we first moved here neighbours pointed out his house, saying that the old man who lived there was in hospital and would not return.  We saw him for the first time about a month later wearing a flat cap and pruning his roses.  He has also been sighted bicycling gently down the road.

There is also The Man Who Sits Outside.  An old man, dressed in blue with the ubiquitous flat cap, sits on a chair overlooking both the road and his garden in most weathers.  He is very rarely absent.  I was once shocked to see him in the supermarket in the next village, as if a character had escaped from the television set.    

We took a drive out yesterday and saw nearly all the above on our way.   After hearing from my daughter in Wales that she and my grandsons were snowed in with all the schools closed we felt particularly lucky.  Here it didn’t rain, the sky was blue and the sun shone.

We drove down to the Valley of the Vézère  which is studded with caves and wonderful old chateaux; fit for sleeping princesses. 
 

 

 

The Vézère  is one of the earliest known inhabited regions in the world.  Cavemen have a bad image; clubbers, rapists and general bully boys.  Looking at the Vézère, it’s easy to see that people simply lived in caves because they were convenient, hunting animals for food and gathering from the plentiful trees and bushes which are still around.  There are areas which don’t seem to have changed for centuries, save for the electric cables and some tarmacked tracks. 

 

The people who lived in the Vézère valley were often prolific artists – not only Lascaux had its walls decorated.  I’ve never seen a cave drawing of women or children or any kind of domestic scene.  Cave art mostly consists of animal pictures – possibly they drew when the weather was too bad for hunting and dreamed of what they would like to catch.  Presumably those who couldn't draw stared, or paced, or sat at the cave entance.