C'est Modnifique!: Adventures of an English Grump in Rural France, page 22
I found it all very annoying, to be honest, and it meant that if I heard one of the hens giving off at any point I would go running after them to see if they had added to a secret egg stash somewhere. Something which happened with alarming regularity and much to the delight of our visiting barbecue guests, who frankly thought the heat had got to me. I returned from one of these forays to the nicely cooking barbecue only to find one of the guests, the father of one of Samuel's friends, actually turning the meat himself! Now to my mind there are rules about things like this and you don't, you simply do not, muck about with another man's coals. There were very clear demarcation lines being crossed here, a clear breach of barbecue etiquette and I stomped inside to register my complaint with the salad chef, Natalie.
Just then there was an explosion that came from the freezer as, once again, and I do this with alarming regularity in the summer months, a small green bottle of beer which had been left to chill in the wrong place and for far too long blew up and oozed beer slush inside the freezer drawer. Putting these little bottles in the freezer for a brief spell rather than have dozens of them taking up space in the fridge at any one time is a good idea – on paper. It's just that after about four or five of the moreish little things I completely forget that they're in the freezer at all, until one of them explodes. In the summer it's as regular as a noonday cannon salute, I'll sit down somewhere for a few minutes and then hear a subdued blast as another forgotten beer erupts in frozen frustration.
It's got to the point that if I buy a small crate of 24 bottles I'll actually only drink about fifteen of them, and so it was with good caution that Natalie reminded me I had put a whole crate in the freezer just before the barbecue guests arrived, something I had quite forgotten in between the egg search and the barbecue scandal; so I was told to clear the whole thing up while someone else, my barbecue nemesis probably, looked after the meat. It was a great evening, though: the meat was done well, rather than well done, especially the ribs with a sticky plum and rhubarb chutney coating. The kids all played in the pool, I made strides with dinner-table conversation French, which is like 'speed language' for the uninitiated, and I met some of Natalie's friends who I hadn't had the chance to meet before as I'd always been away working. It was also a chance to say thanks to those who'd rallied around her when she'd been ill several weeks earlier when, again, I had been away.
It was very late by the time everyone had gone and the boys were in bed, and Natalie and I sat on the still-baking terrace in the dark and silence, happy with ourselves and our lot generally.
'I love it when it's like this,' I said, closing my eyes and putting my head back, 'so peaceful and quiet.' And I put my arm around Natalie as she put her head on my shoulder. 'So calm.'
There was a large, muffled explosion as 24 beer bottles exploded in another freezer somewhere, but neither of us moved – it was just too bloody hot.
Nice and Quiet
We hadn't had a family holiday away since the disastrous caravanning break in Biarritz a couple of years before. Apart from the fact that places like Biarritz aren't supposed to be done on a budget, it's like hiding ticketless in the toilet of the Orient Express, the weather had been atrocious too and so, for our first holiday for a while we wanted guaranteed good weather and were going to do it in style.
Part of the preparation for a holiday for me is batting off questions like, 'Your life is a holiday, why do you need a holiday?' and 'You live in paradise, why do you need a holiday?' It's difficult to argue with this really. On paper, yes we do live in paradise and people could have paid a fortune to have a holiday at our place (I'm not bitter), but home is now so overrun with maladjusted rescue animals that we (for that read 'I') need to go somewhere without malevolent horses, plotting goats, striking hens, vicious cats and retarded dogs. I was looking forward to it immensely.
'Daddy?' Samuel asked nervously at lunchtime the week before departure, 'did you say we were going to Nice?'
He was standing transfixed watching the news.
'Yes,' I replied, 'Nice. Why?'
'An apartment on the seafront?' he continued.
'Yes, an apartment on the seafront in Nice. Why?' My habitual lack of patience was already being tested.
'It's not that one is it?' And he pointed to the television screen as what looked like Côte d'Azur-based beachfront apartments were not only being 'buffeted' by a ferocious storm, they looked like they were being lifted up and thrown around. This wasn't buffeted, this was filleted.
'Ah,' was all I could say as I was already frantically typing an email to our prospective landlord, Monsieur Filio in Nice. The phrase 'bloody typical', never far from my lips at the best of times, was about to raise its ugly head once more.
Obviously I wanted to know that Filio was OK, but primarily I wanted to know that our beachfront apartment was still actually near the beach and not in bits like abandoned Lego, halfway up the Alps somewhere. The storm, though incredibly violent, was also mercifully short as the camera crew continued to walk about the place and interview assorted Niçois under what was now a hot, beating sun. They seemed happy enough but then the camera crew would widen the shot to show 200-year-old-trees that had been tossed aside like used toothpicks. It didn't look good.
I am not a patient man. Partly it's the job I do, with stand-up the responses are immediate, there's no waiting around when you're on stage; everything happens at a pace so it's difficult then not to treat the 'real world' with exasperated impatience when things don't happen as quickly, but even still… 24 hours! Twenty-four hours it took him to answer my email enquiry and that's an awful lot of time to stew in your own paranoid juices.
'Maybe his electricity is down?' Natalie said reasonably.
'Maybe,' I replied, not interested in mundane explanations.
'Maybe he's dead?' Maurice asked, a sense of the macabre winning out over sanity.
I could see how the next few days were going to pan out. Our beachfront apartment would be beyond repair and we would have to frantically make alternative arrangements, which inevitably would mean mending the puncture on the caravan and taking the old girl out for one last hurrah. Only there would be an added trailer off the back of the caravan this time and it would be overflowing with a huge, bloody great 'chip' that I couldn't actually wear on my shoulder while driving. I'd been looking forward to this holiday for months, since we'd booked it in February in fact. It was going to be short enough as it was as, after ten days in Nice, Natalie and the boys were off to a three-day family fête somewhere while I had to return home and relieve her livestock-sitting parents.
I was, it has to be said, mildly resentful of this arrangement. Did I say 'mildly'? 'Hugely' might be more appropriate, bloody annoyed would be closer to the mark and though Natalie had made it very clear that I really did need to stop banging on about it, that is not in my DNA and I continued to chunter about injustice as long as I could. It meant though that while the response from the landlord, when it finally came, ('Yeah, cool. See you later.') was very welcome, the relief was also short-lived as Natalie, apropos of nothing and in one of her 'stare out of the kitchen window wistfully' reveries said blithely, 'I think we could adopt something else, you know?' It was obvious she meant of the animal variety but to be honest the first thing that ran through my head, after the sound of nuclear klaxons had died down, was 'how about adopting a "no tolerance policy" towards future adoptions?' She was broody again though and therefore needed to be treated with delicacy, sensitivity and tact.
'Are you actually insane?' I practically screamed. 'I'm having to cut my holiday short…' At which point she rolled her eyes and carried on drying the dishes. The local farmer's advice to cure our broody hen had been solitary confinement and dipping her backside in cold water and the temptation to try the same with Natalie was strong though I was hoping that the holiday and with it two whole weeks of not having to clear up assorted beast excreta would have the desired effect. One could only hope, though she seemed pretty far gone this time.
It was a lovely holiday and I delighted in showing Natalie and the boys one of my favourite places in the world. Nice had been my first ever overseas holiday when I was 11 years old, and that first holiday was memorable for so many reasons: the drive through France, my first trip 'abroad', the beaches, the clear blue water of the Mediterranean and the women. I had my first 'sexual' experience on that holiday so I was always likely to be marked by the place. I was snorkelling off the beach in Nice and dived down to the bottom to investigate some movement, though to be honest there wasn't much movement as there is little to be seen that close to the beach in Nice. Feeling proud that I'd made it to the 'depths' I rested briefly and looked up at the sun filtering through the sea and that's when it happened. A tanned, slender woman front-crawled right above my head and it wasn't just that she was topless – though she was, to my 11-year-old eyes, magnificently topless – or that she wore skimpy, leopard-print briefs; to be honest I don't know what it was exactly, probably just 'the moment', but I suddenly became aware that I was running out of breath and so made a dart for the surface and got there coughing and spluttering like I had the bends. I felt fantastic.
What I remember most about that first holiday though was the glamour, the sense of another, far richer world that I was too young to resent not being a part of. And even now I still had a sense of that; these gazillionaires with their enormous yachts seem to be caricatures, almost unreal and therefore not worthy of pointless jealousy. I was just enjoying the view. Up to a point.
It started with what I thought was a dead cat and then the evening got progressively worse. To be fair, it wasn't actually dead but ever since someone had thrown a black Labrador at Natalie and me on our honeymoon from a fourth floor window in Havana, we've been sensitive to these things.
The poor thing, the cat this is, was hanging by the neck from one of those pull-down shop security grilles and was motionless. There was a group of 'lads' looking up at it and Natalie, for the only time I can ever remember, had a lower opinion of humanity than I and was convinced it was a complicated cat-based ruse to mug us of our worldly goods at this unfashionable end of Nice's Promenade des Anglais. It wasn't. The 'lads' while clearly a bit drunk seemed genuinely concerned and relieved when we turned up to briefly share their burden but shuffled off pretty sharpish, relieved to pass on the responsibility.
I sighed as I looked at Natalie and the three boys, all looking back at me and obviously expecting me to do something about the situation. 'What on earth am I supposed to do?' I pleaded. 'It's twelve feet up and I'm wearing brand new linen trousers and expensive Italian knitwear.' I added the clothing detail to let them know what an enormous sacrifice they were expecting me to make, but it made no difference.
'Rescue it, Daddy,' Thérence said simply, adopting the role of spokesperson for the group.
It's at times like these, increasingly often I'm afraid, when my shoulders just drop as the crushing inevitability of my family's needs and animal-orientated whims once again trample all over my good humour. I turned and looked up at the rear end of the cat. It was no stray moggy that was clear, I could see a bejewelled collar shimmering in the seafront lights and this being Nice they could quite possibly be real jewels. The cat had long, silver-white hair, it reminded me of Blofeld's cat in Diamonds Are Forever, and rather than struggle with the grille and try to remove its stuck head it remained largely motionless. Typical cat, I thought, left like this it would be dead by morning but no it was giving it the 'I'm a cat and I meant to do this entirely' attitude.
Again I looked back at Natalie and the boys, hoping for a reprieve, not to leave it to die obviously but to maybe call in some experts, the local pompiers for instance who would have ladders, a history of successful cat rescue and some protective clothing over their expensively collated new favourite summer outfit. At times like this it's easy to romanticise the scene, Gary Cooper in High Noon, the sacrifice of Cyrano de Bergerac, but all that went through my head was the desperate plea of Steve Martin in Parenthood and his 'My whole life is "have to"' speech. I knew exactly what he meant. The cat made a noise above me, which may have been the feline equivalent of 'For Christ's sakes, just get on with it you tart' and I stroppily started to climb the security grille.
Natalie would argue that the grille buckled under my weight but, more accurately, as I climbed it the extra weight pulled down the grille, no more than an inch or so but enough to allow the cat to successfully extract its head. We were now an even more incongruous sight as this obviously pampered puss, rather than run away and get clear of the grille, continued to cling on with its claws and look down at me, now about a metre below, looking like a mod-Spiderman and not entirely sure what I should do next. Was it too frightened to jump down? Did it want me to climb further and then try to carry it back to the ground? There was a brief interlude, a few seconds maybe, where I looked up at the cat's green eyes and it looked down at me.
He decided to end the stalemate and take the initiative, in short he decided that a 'Merci, bonne nuit' would be insufficient in the circumstances and that urinating all over me was the more appropriate response. From my (un)vantage point below I could see the large drops of yellow liquid before they actually hit me, and they seemed to fall in slow motion giving me a chance at least to hide my face but each drop that hit my clothes was like a stab in the back from the entire animal kingdom. All the effort – albeit admittedly forced – I've put in and this is how they repay me? I was so angry I couldn't move, but as the waterfall ended I looked back up at the cat and slowly began to scale the fence again with the intention of shoving its bloody head back in the grille. The cat, realising that very real danger was now imminent, leapt over my head and ran off down the road.
Again my shoulders slumped, but I couldn't move, I was crippled by defeat made worse, it has to be said, by the uncontrollable laughter coming from my 'loving' family down below, practically rolling on the floor in unruly mirth. Another family approached along the pavement, saw the scene and crossed the road, the mother looked up at me and actually 'tutted'; there no longer being any cat in evidence I just looked like another English drunk stinking of cat piss climbing up a shop.
'I think you'd better wash your clothes and have a shower,' Natalie struggled to say through giggles when we eventually got into the apartment. I found it hard to share their humour frankly and stripped off in the kitchen, gibbering to myself, and went to have a shower. I turned the shower on full and the jet was so strong the head shot up and the water powered out horizontally through the door and into my face, the shock of it knocked me over backwards which meant the jet of water was now drenching the entire bathroom. Quickly I shut the door, at least keeping the water in the shower cubicle but swearing loudly.
'What's going on in there?' Natalie shouted through the door.
'Nothing. Nothing at all,' I replied, now staring at an angry jet of water trying to break through the weak cubicle door and wondering how I could turn the shower off without drowning the room again. For five minutes I sat naked in the corner of the bathroom staring at the thing and in the end realised that it was futile and so opened the door, forgot to duck and just stepped in.
Ah, the healing properties of a warm shower. A good quarter of an hour later I emerged and could begin to see the funny side of the evening, my clothes were in the washing machine, I no longer smelt of cat wee and I'd wiped down the bathroom. All seemed good.
I strode into the lounge, a towel around my waist and drying my hair with another towel, in truth I felt a little heroic.
'Well I think I've earned a beer, don't you?' I asked rhetorically.
Natalie and Samuel, rather than agreeing anyway, actually looked at me in horror. 'What towel are you using?' Natalie asked nervously.
'The one that was hanging up outside the shower.' Again my shoulders slumped, 'Why?' I added defeatedly.
Natalie and Samuel again looked at each other, clearly weighing up whether to let this pass or actually let me know what the problem was. 'That's Samuel's hair-lice towel. I thought I'd separated it from the rest.'
Episodes of Peppa Pig always end with the family rolling about on their backs laughing uncontrollably. My face at times clearly has the ability to do this with my own family but I really didn't feel like joining in.
'Don't worry about the beer,' I said as I left them to it and trudged up the stairs, 'I'm going to bed.'
'Oh, Daddy,' Samuel said, tears of laughter streaming down his face, 'sometimes it's like we live with Mr Bean.'
Everybody needs their own inner sanctum, their own bolthole of privacy. Modern life is just too hectic and all-consuming to steer through if you haven't got a mental layby signposted on the horizon. France was supposed to be that oasis, and specifically this holiday. That elusive tranquillity is even more necessary now than it ever was but unfortunately, being a petty-minded control freak means that you're always 'on'. Conversations that have nothing to do with you are raided for problems, some animal is always making a noise somewhere that you can't not investigate, home life is played out to a soundtrack of bickering, laughter and tears like a Woody Allen Thanksgiving acted out by children. There is no respite from the endless din and clamour of life, and I'd never found a way to silence it or take a step back.
