C'est Modnifique!: Adventures of an English Grump in Rural France, page 18
'This?' I said, very close to losing it. It's one thing to be accused of stealing but the idea that I might wear supermarket clothing was frankly beyond the pale. 'This is a limited edition, Paul Weller-designed Fred Perry shirt, that is at least six years old.'
'Your shoes, then? Maybe there is still a tag in there from when you bought them?' Her tone had become more conciliatory, she clearly didn't want a showdown with an angry mod so she was now making a play about 'having to do her job'.
'No,' I said and ostentatiously placed my feet, one after the other and with scant regard for hygiene on to the till packing area.
'Your trousers?' she said nervously.
'You want to check?' I shouted, while beginning to unbuckle my belt.
It looked like the poor woman was about to scream and the manager was called. Though the alarm issue wasn't solved, he obviously just wanted me to go, as did Samuel, who, for the most part, had been hiding behind the photo booth curtain as a lot of his friends' mothers had day jobs in the place. The manager was equally suspicious of me, but without a full-on strip search, something I was perfectly prepared to do as long as it was carried out at the till itself, he had no choice but to let me go, even though he kept looking like he had, Columbo-style, one more question to ask. I have to say, and much to Samuel's surprise, the whole thing cheered me up enormously.
'Why are you smiling?' he asked. 'Do you like arguing that much?'
'No Samuel. Not at all. But I just had that argument in French!' Maybe this gig wouldn't be completely beyond my capabilities after all.
Beyond Repas
I walked past a collection of deserted bikes and scooters towards the house. I knew Natalie and the boys weren't going to be there; Natalie's sister and our two nephews were staying, so they'd gone out for the day. Their plan had been to go to the zoo, but not only was it too cold, they'd also reckoned, probably correctly, that most of the exotic species would refuse to come out and remain indoors in something of a mood. Instead, they'd gone to a big, indoor soft play area about an hour away which, when it's full, is exactly like the zoo anyway. Well, the chimp house at least.
Natalie's sister and her boys were over to celebrate Maurice's birthday (he was turning eight), which is always a momentous occasion because, as Maurice was born shortly after we moved here, it signifies just how long we've been in France. When we'd moved in on a glorious winter's day in January, the place had looked very different indeed. The gravel was pristine, for a start; the vast garden was just two acres of sparse lawn with some young, spindly fruit trees to break it up and there was only our Jack Russell running around the place. Now, eight years on, and in the middle of the worst spring in living memory, it looked like a cross between a pebble-dashed rainforest floor and a city farm.
Junior's initial excitement that someone had returned home and therefore he would be fed quickly subsided into contempt when he saw it was me, and he went back to angrily snorting at the world.
I began to tidy up as soon as I got inside the house, which was a pointless exercise, even more than usual, as the next day would be Maurice's party and an industrial-sized tidying up operation would be necessary after that. Normally I dread his annual birthday party, but I felt quite sanguine about this one, tiredness partly but also I was pretty thoroughly prepared too. I had vittles.
I had been offered a lucrative gig at short notice for the previous Saturday night which everybody, seeing as it was Saturday, was only too happy for me to take as I was a serious barrier to their Saturday evening television enjoyment, but in an act of foolhardy bravado I decided to drive there and back overnight.
In total I drove for about seventeen hours, was 'at work' for about two and a half hours and spent 45 minutes in a mad supermarket sweep around Waitrose in Esher; the main purpose of driving being to fill the car with 'provisions'. Provisions? You may ask incredulously – you live in the Loire Valley, man, you have some of the world's finest cuisine on your doorstep; some of the world's most celebrated wines produced within spitting distance; award-winning goat's cheese made literally next door; what can you possibly need from England that you can't get there? Well look, I love French cuisine, I love its sauces, its textures, its flavours, its importance and its sociability. When I'm away I miss the smell of a boulangerie in the morning, the 'saving some room for cheese'-sized main course portions, the acceptability of wine at midday. I love real cassoulet, homemade tarte tatin and even the ethically reprehensible foie gras. But the one thing that the French, with their rich culinary history and Michelin stars, have never got right, the one thing in which they lag woefully behind, is crisps.
As usual I had my timetable worked out down to the last minute: leave home at 8.50 a.m. local time, hopefully get to the Eurotunnel for around 2 p.m. and arrive in the UK at about 1.30 p.m.. I allowed an hour and a half to get to the gig at Sandown Racecourse, where I had a call-time for 4 p.m., giving me an hour somewhere in the Sandown vicinity to track down and raid a supermarket. Everything went like clockwork, there was the odd snarl up on the périphérique around Paris, but I'd factored in contingency time so I still had a good forty-five minutes at the supermarket. Only I couldn't find a supermarket, I wanted a big, out-of-town supermarket; the kind that has ripped the heart out of the British town centre, but could I find one? I was badly eating into my 'food'-buying time when I spotted the aforementioned Waitrose on Esher High Street.
I know people who swear by Waitrose – I did when I lived in England; its quality and its freshness they opine, its range. Well that's all very well and obviously a good thing, but if what you're after is the baser elements on the culinary food chain then its smaller stores can be a sad let-down frankly, the Esher branch especially. Nestled in the High Street, the store is neither one thing nor the other: it's too big to be a corner shop and too small to be a modern, behemoth superstore. I'll concede that with the necessary constraints of space, coupled with the demands of the Esher public, knowing what to stock must be a delicate balance, but for my purposes they had got it sadly wrong. It was very busy and I appeared to be upsetting the natural order of things by going the wrong way down certain aisles, swimming against the Esher tide, as it were, and drawing the kind of approbation normally reserved for more serious transgressions. Nobody actually said anything to me, but there was an awful lot of tutting going on.
I just couldn't find what I was looking for: the crisp section was lamentably underwhelming, taking up a tiny portion of the shop – the size of an area normally reserved for the Loyd Grossman cooking sauce range in any sensible establishment. This can't be it? I thought, and went careering around the shop again assuming that I'd missed something. My local French supermarket is very parochial, the range on offer quite narrow – you'd be hard pressed to find non-French wines, say – but I think if the regulars of my local Super U were to be dropped into Waitrose Esher they wouldn't have a clue where they were. If in my trolley dash I'd been looking for antipasti, black linguine, my local goat's cheese (four times the price of home), various naan breads, myriad packets of flavoured couscous, pawpaw, and the world's largest and most pointless collection of aged balsamic vinegars I'd have struck gold, and of course if I lived in Esher I'd be very happy that I had access to such a wide range of world foods. But I wasn't and I don't; I wanted Wotsits and my time was running out.
Eventually I had to ask an assistant if they sold multipacks of Wotsits, he looked down his nose witheringly as if I'd just sneezed all over the dried apricot section, and informed me that 'No, sir, we do not.' I filled my trolley with Skips, Twiglets and Quavers, the latter a poor Wotsits substitute in my book, a few token biscuits of various colours and made my way to the till, defeated. The boys, I thought, would be very disappointed.
It was 4.30 a.m. when I finally got home and, bleary-eyed, dumped the shopping on the table and went to bed, exhausted. Normally the boys leave me until whenever it is I wake up, knowing that I'm a moody so-and-so at the best of times so it's wise to let me get whatever sleep I can, but they woke me quite early on that Sunday morning by jumping on the bed in unison and screaming 'Daddy, Daddy, did you bring all that stuff back? It's like Christmas!'
'It's like Christmas?'
Really? Well this Christmas would be a much cheaper affair then – no more Nintendo DS or iPods for you boys, just biscuits and crisps. English snacks and E-numbers are hugely popular at children's parties here, thanks to our culinary pioneering, and Maurice's party was a huge success. I settled back into a garden chair as the dust settled and the last of the children left, tired yet contented.
'Daddy…' Maurice said, as I closed my eyes to the warm evening sun.
'Yes, birthday boy,' I replied.
'Did you let the goats into the orchard?'
There's always something isn't there?
The goats, Chewbacca again, seemed to be able to escape at will and actually, once having done so, then panicked and yearned to be locked up again, more comfortable in familiar surroundings. As such, desperate times called for desperate measures, and it was decided that the electric tape that currently keeps the horses in check should be lowered to protect the goats from themselves and their permanently itchy feet.
The process of actually doing this was fairly straightforward; Natalie and I had become dab hands at the logistics of animal imprisonment, even if the results, in practice, are decidedly patchy. The only potential problem was that Junior, plainly under the weather again with what had now been diagnosed as a muscle-wasting disease, had decided to fight his physical travails with typical belligerence and springtime aggression. So while I was screwing the brackets for the electric tape into the fence posts, Junior was doing something similar to Ultime just a few yards behind me, and deliberately trying to catch my eye while doing so.
I ignored the angry beast and just got on with my work. Having completed the re-electrification it was time to test the thing; the time-honoured standard procedure for this is to get a piece of grass and touch the tape with it, the resulting shock will show whether it's working or not. But you know what? I'd had enough. So often had I had to go through this rigmarole over the years – I have developed a tic to prove it – that I just couldn't face it anymore. I came out in a cold sweat at the prospect, I started stammering with fear. The pain is short-lived but intense, the charge remember is set at a level to deter a horse, a charge far, far higher than most effete English mods can handle, and as Natalie didn't fancy testing it either we decided to just turn the thing on and see what occurred.
What occurred was flying goats. Not literally, of course, but each one of the goats got one blast from the horse-charged fence, was thrown back a few yards and didn't go near the fence again, for a bit anyway. Could it be? Could it really be? That the great goat–man stand-off was at an end. If so then it was for the benefit of everyone.
Natalie's parents had made it clear that unless the goat problem was solved they would, quite rightly, not be keen to housesit the place for us in the summer when we wanted to go on holiday. These goats had driven a wedge between this family that could be solved only if they'd just stay in their ample bloody field and, though it was early days, the signs were encouraging and that this new system might just work. Occasionally, one would hear a goat that had drifted too close to the electrics but they quickly recovered. Let me make it clear we hadn't suddenly got goats being flung across the place like the weapons of a siege army throwing livestock at a battlement. They seemed genuinely happier, though with their eyes the wrong way up (as all goat eyes are) it was difficult to tell exactly what they're thinking. Inscrutable creatures.
Emboldened by this rare foray into outdoor work, I set about trying to repair the results of the endless spring rain – in short de-weeding 200 square metres of gravel driveway. It used to be that we could put weedkiller down, but as the hens had taken 'free range' to mean 'go where the bloody hell they like' this was no longer an option. Natalie kept trying to convince me that we should allow most of the area to go fallow and therefore provide further grazing ground, but seeing as this seemed to increase the chances of acquiring further semi-domesticated animals or worse, deliberately letting the now re-imprisoned goats out, I wasn't having any of it. I am, I admit, a petty man, but a driveway is a driveway and seeing as we had moved here partly because I'd never had a driveway I wasn't letting it go, and I attacked the place with gusto wielding my hoe like a madman.
I have my standards, as Maurice's schoolteacher would testify. Maurice ruins at least one pair of trousers a week. He can't help himself; there are no half measures with Maurice, so even a playground game of football is treated like it's the most important match of the season and another pair of trousers gets ruined. His teacher suggested to him that perhaps sewing patches over the holes rather than buying a new pair may be the way forward but Maurice, knowing my thoughts on patches, demurred, 'Daddy doesn't allow patches.' Once again my ranking in the local eccentricity league table rocketed. I don't mind that at all, I've got a proud record of being over-dressed in all four corners of the globe and if some of that rubs off on my boys then I've done my job.
Maurice loves his football and had been dreading the end of the season, but in the same way looking forward to the big end-of-season tournament in Châteauroux where the best of the teams from the département all get together and compete for… well, nothing really. Just for the fun of doing so apparently. There's no 'competition' as such, just another opportunity for the under-eights, still playing four-a-side here, of the area to hone their levels of vision and technique without competitive burden. This may be why continental teams are more technically developed, as the cliché goes, but there's certainly no lack of 'edge' either.
The only problem with these jamborees is that, this being France, nothing starts until after lunch. Nothing. It's a little-known historical fact that the German invasion in 1940 was an early-morning fixture planned in the full knowledge that France wouldn't be ready until about 3 p.m., and even then might need a nap, post-cheese course, before retaliating. The football tournament wasn't scheduled to finish until about 11 p.m.! That's too late for me when I'm not working, let alone almost every eight-year-old in the area, and though I was keen to support Maurice – as my dad always did me (though at more sensible times) – I went with a certain reluctance. In fact, we all went, as we decided that this would be an ideal family day out and Natalie, Samuel, Thérence and I all went to lend Maurice our support.
The weather wasn't good again. All that week there had been glorious sunshine, and though possibly too hot for football it was certainly better for the spectators than dark, grey perma-drizzle. Every other spectator had clearly checked the weather forecast though and as hundreds of us all began to converge on the venue it was clear pretty early on that I was the only one in ironed trouser shorts, beige Clarks Wallabees and a vintage cycling top. I was bloody frozen right from the start. I blame the banks. The whole thing was sponsored by Crédit Agricole, and if you get a bank involved these days there's bound to be trouble. And you couldn't miss them, handing out their little corporate goody bags to the eight-year-olds from their pitched sales caravan and filling the place with loud music, Chumbawamba's 'Tubthumping' – 'I get knocked down…' – seemingly, and ironically, on repeat.
Even then the football didn't get under way until about 5 p.m., which meant nigh-on anarchy as about 300 eight-year-olds went from polite, sedate training exercises to whacking the wet footballs at each other and hitting one another with sticks. It's a wonder there weren't more injuries before the whole thing kicked off as these mini, wannabe footballers proved to be just like their older, professional counterparts, and steadfastly refused to behave and gave way destructively to boredom.
Finally, it began, and we had high hopes .
Maurice is a good player in a good team; nobody could remember when they were last beaten, but they started badly, a dull 0–0 draw, which was played out in the teeming rain and in which they seemed to have forgotten how to pass the ball. They played like they didn't know each other; in the next one they played like they didn't even like each other and were beaten, which left them in shock.
They had a ten-minute break before their next match and time for some soul searching. A couple of them were in tears, unused to defeat, while various parents offered explanations for the poor displays, 'pass the ball', 'look up', 'stretch the play' and 'it's too cold and wet' – the last one was mine. Samuel, however, had become something of a student of the game and was taking each player away in turn and having a chat, clearly more in favour of the 'arm around the shoulder' style of man management than carrot and stick. Plus, being only 12 himself, he could speak their language.
The next game, as the rain improbably got harder, was a much-needed victory, but against the most unathletic-looking bunch of children I think I've ever seen, some of whom would clearly have been much happier eating a football rather than kicking it. It was a victory, nonetheless. A much-needed victory – something to build on. At least it would have been something to build on, if the entire tournament hadn't then been put on hold for dinner! 'Dinner?' I wailed. 'In a football tournament?'
