Provence

‘Would you like to meet Eric Idle? Don’t worry, he and his wife Tania are smashing.’ This was 2009. I was visiting my old art teacher from school, Frank Docherty, and his wife, Chrissie, in the village of Montfort-sur-Argens. Eric had a house nearby, they said. They’d got to know one another a few years before when Eric had begun buying Frank’s surrealist paintings. I was too wee for early Python but as a teenager knew every line of The Life of Brian. And all the voices. I apologise now to anyone who was on late-night double-decker buses from Paisley to Glasgow in 1982. On the way home from the pub, Gaynor, a student nurse like me, and I would go upstairs, sit in the front seats and perform endless giggling recitations and songs from the film all the way from Paisley town centre to Hawkhead nurses’ home. For me, Eric was like the Queen or Billy Connolly or Stanley Baxter; there my entire life. So yes, I did want to meet him.

Perhaps I’d read that Eric could be prickly and was slightly in awe – scared, even – of his quick-fire wit and intelligence, but he was a delight: friendly, interesting and funny. Tania was dazzling. I’d never met anyone with such LA glamour and charm. By then I’d stopped watchingTV and, never one for magazines (apart from The Spectator and Private Eye), I wasn’t interested in celebrity as such – just good chat and a laugh.

We got on well, and invitations to Eric and Tania’s followed. In 2013 I introduced Eric to Jeremy Clarke. They took to one another at once and from 2015 until 2023, when Jeremy died, he and I enjoyed happy summer evenings together around Eric and Tania’s table on their terrace above the olive grove, watching light from the setting sun play on the Massif des Maures. Later, Eric would get his guitar out and we’d join in the old favourites: Cockney songs, the Beatles and a few of Eric’s including ‘Look on the Bright Side’, ‘The Galaxy Song’ and ‘He’s a Cunt’.

I was taken aback when the man pointed to me and said to Eric Idle: ‘Is she a goer then?’

Eric’s new book, Idle in Provence, A Brief History of Thyme, was launched here in Cotignac at the Hôtel Lou Calen’s bookshop the other weekend. As well as describing how fame helped him turn the tiny, off-grid, ruined stone cabanon he bought in 1971 into a luxurious second home, he talks about his friends – local eccentrics and superstars. David Bowie, George Harrison, Robin Williams, Paul Simon, Harrison Ford and Ronnie Wood are among those who visited.

The final chapters of Eric’s book include some of the funny but heartbreaking final emails he exchanged with Jeremy. Last winter Eric sent me the chapters to approve. He’d been in tears rereading the emails, he told me, adding: ‘Sorry to make you cry hon…’ And cry I did.

‘Dearest Jeremy… You have to remember… many of us give a real shit about you departing the scene, and want and even pray with the book of uncommon prayer that some miracle will give us just another evening with you… next week when I sing “Bright Side” at the Sydney Opera House I will be thinking only of you.’

Because I’ve written a review of the book for the October edition of the Oldie, and Eric wrote the foreword to Jeremy’s posthumously published third collection of columns, he asked me to join him for his book launch signing. We sat side by side, he with his books and me with Jeremy’s. But it was Eric’s event. The first chap in the queue had a long grey ponytail. He was thin, snaggle-toothed and scruffy. I was taken aback when he pointed to me and said to Eric: ‘Is she a goer then?’ Eric explained afterwards that the guy wasn’t being intentionally inappropriate, merely quoting the Python ‘Nudge, nudge, say no more’ sketch.

Soon there was a queue out of the bookshop door. On meeting Eric, some beamed their enthusiasm and devotion at him, others were shy. A few bounced up and down on the spot with excitement. An older man in shorts showed us his tattoos. His entire left leg, groin to ankle, was covered in scenes from Monty Python. There was hardly a square centimetre of uninked flesh. ‘My thigh is the films, and lower leg, the series,’ he said, asking Eric to sign his leg as well as a book. A wag behind in the queue asked the tattooed man if there was a python in his shorts.

An hour in, a younger chap with kind eyes and a bubbly wife handed Eric four books to sign. Alain was from Paris and had been a fan since his father had taken him, aged ten, to a show. He’d been to every live performance in the last 20 years and collected Python memorabilia, some of which he’d also brought along to be signed.

Eric has been giving interviews for weeks now. The great Michael Berkeley recently recorded an edition of Radio 3’s Private Passions with him – something I’ve been petitioning Eric to do for years. After signing books for three hours, Eric was interviewed by the BBC, following which there was a drinks party and dinner in his honour for close to a hundred guests. I’m more than 20 years younger than Eric but it was me, not him, who had to go home and lie in a darkened room for half an hour in between events.