C'est Modnifique!: Adventures of an English Grump in Rural France, page 24
I didn't realise just how stupid an animal a horse actually is. I've seen War Horse and this noble, heroic creature is about as close to the two dolts we have as Katie Price is to Audrey Hepburn, from a distance the same species but entirely different in almost every conceivable way. A certain amount of leeway had to be given to Junior while he was so ill and so when the latest attempt at giving him a boost was to increase his feed drastically, one naturally expected a manure windfall, but there's a time and a place surely.
Two enormous bales of hay arrived and were deposited in the field and they – Junior and Ultime – tucked in. And then they kept tucking in. In fact, they very rarely tucked out, occasionally leaving the 'Eat as much as you like' hay buffet in order to go and get a drink. But that was the only time they left the table, as it were. After a few hours they made the decision that bowel evacuation was simply not a good enough reason to interrupt their extended meal, nor was going for a wee, and so after a few days their pristine bales of hay, which had been neatly placed by the hedge, actually looked like a food fight in a particularly rancid public toilet. Natalie would go out every day for a week to try and sift the horse dung from the food, a futile job as the horses themselves wouldn't budge while she did so and would continue eating and egesting at the same time like some sordid art installation.
It was only a week later when the horses finally realised that what they were now eating was their own matter and they, like pampered royalty at the salad bar in Pizza Hut, lifted their haughty noses and walked away from it, a resentful look on their faces as if to say, 'How do you expect us to eat this muck?'
I was watching this absurd carry-on from my office where, while the boys were at school at least, I'd been locked in battle with a project that even then, even in its infancy, I was regretting for the sheer lunacy of what I'd taken on. It was mid-September and in early November, less than six weeks away, I would be performing my first stand-up show in French; the fact that, as yet, I hadn't written the set, translated what I had written or even – and this could be the serious fly in the ointment – learnt French, was causing something of an earthquake in the confidence department.
There are a number of reasons I had booked the gig in the first place: firstly, I was convinced, 'was' being the operative word, that actually I am fluent in the language, but like a stubborn cork on an old bottle of wine my linguistic talents just needed an extra push to become unblocked.
I was wrong – I knew nothing.
I also thought that setting myself a deadline, that is the show itself, would mean I'd knuckle down and do the required work immediately and thoroughly. Fat chance. I have lived with myself for 42 years; I know myself well and yet was still capable of operating on a quite farcical level of self-delusion.
I also had it in my head, in my head being shorthand for 'wildest dreams' or 'drunken blatherings', that I could become proficient enough to actually do some gigs in France. That by having some foot in the nascent French stand-up circuit I might not have to travel quite so far so often, or be away for quite so long.
I was now finally knuckling down and doing the work: writing, translating – with the help of a clearly worried Natalie – and learning my lines, my put-down lines and my 'improvised riffs'. I was beginning to seriously fret, working on a script I didn't even truly understand in order to bring stand-up, my job, closer to home.
In terms of doorstep, I was definitely more horse than bee.
Question Time
I had taken steps to improve my French, but they tended to be mainly administrative – a notebook here, a dictionary of rude words or idioms there. I needed conversation and face-to-face practice. The thing is, I am just not a sociable person. Just because I can handle audiences with a degree of confidence and authority doesn't mean that I can deal with social situations in the same way; I get very nervous and constantly have my eye on a potential escape route. I was sitting in the Old Red Lion pub on High Holborn having a nerve-calmer and tonic and already planning my 'leave early' – or even my 'not turn up at all' – strategy when I just thought 'sod it', downed my drink in one gulp and strode across the road and into the pub quiz.
I like a good pub quiz, but preferably with people I know and almost certainly in a language I have some flair for, but this was neither. Because, of my family's continuing and, I might add confidence-sapping, reluctance to speak French with me at home, I was now reduced to joining social language groups in an effort to improve, ironically in London too, and speaking with (rather than at) total strangers, is something I never do. This particular group was holding a celebratory bilingual pub quiz and it seemed, at least it had when I'd signed up for it a week earlier, a good ice-breaking idea. The pub was heaving.
'I know!' said Chad, apologetically, as he introduced himself as founder and chief organiser of the group; his American accent struggling to be heard above the din. 'It's so busy! There's a rival language group in here tonight…'
I didn't catch the end of what he said, not necessarily because of the noise but I'd drifted away on the idea that there was a 'rival' language group. I imagined them plotting in a dark corner somewhere and that before the night was out there'd be some violent 'conjugation-off' and some pretty salty vocabulary bandied about.
I was one of the first to arrive, and deliberately so; that way I wouldn't feel intimidated walking into a large group and then slink off after a couple of introductions, but the numbers soon swelled to around forty people, which delighted Chad no end. 'I'll bet the other group don't have this many!' he beamed.
The idea of the group was that it was a mix of French and English speakers, so both groups had the chance to improve the language they were learning, the French could meet English people and vice versa. I have no idea if it was roughly half and half English–French or not but the group within the group that I spent the evening with were mostly French, which suited me. Of course, they were there to practise their English, but they seemed equally happy just to be speaking French with other French people, so I got to speak quite a lot of French right from the start.
Part of my social reticence is down to what I do. This isn't false modesty; I'm a naturally shy person anyway, but I'm also aware that I am quite 'exotic'. Stand-up comedy is a fascination for lots of people, it's an unusual job and folk are quite often curious about what kind of people do it and how it works. As such, once I've told people what I do for a living it tends to dominate the conversation, and other people get drawn in on the back of, 'Ooh, have you met Ian? He's a comedian…', until you're surrounded and it's practically a gig; you then start worrying that other people will think that you're just showing off. Which is exactly what happened here, so it was a relief when we were divided up into teams and the quiz began.
There were five in our team, three men and two women, all, and this applied to at least 90 per cent of the group as a whole, as far as I could make out, a lot younger than me. There was Gilles, a Frenchman; Roberto, an Italian who spoke five languages and was just 'brushing the cobwebs from his Français', he said, with dispiriting accent-less eloquence, and Margot and Lucie from Paris, who were in London for a year just, equally enviably, 'for fun'.
The trust has gone from the pub quiz – smartphones have taken the innocence of the exercise away – so a couple of 'organisers' patrolled the tables making sure that nothing underhand was going on, but they needn't have worried. The quiz itself was almost secondary to the evening and provided a springboard for enthusiastic bilingual, sometimes pidgin, communication. No-one was taking the quiz that seriously, except for one bloke – me.
Look, I have a competitive streak. I don't like to lose; my granddad always said 'You can only do your best', but my dad also said that there's 'no point in doing anything if you're going to come second' and that's the one that's stuck with me. My fellow teammates found out pretty early on in the proceedings that this was no jolly, this wasn't something to be taken lightly and that I was, if needs be, prepared to argue my case strongly if I felt we were about to give the wrong answer. Fifteen minutes I spent trying to persuade Margot the folly of her ways and that I did indeed know the correct ingredients for a Mont Blanc, though she got her revenge when I said I'd never heard of 'Durdle Door' in Dorset and doubted that it even existed. We lost the quiz by one point and she subsequently blamed me and my poor Dorset knowledge for the defeat.
Frankly, I think the rest of the team were a bit relieved when the quiz was over and we could just get back to socialising. I was definitely having the better evening in terms of language, in that the vast majority of conversation at our table remained in French so I was learning and practising a great deal. Inevitably the conversation was largely about my job and, with the wine flowing, I began to get more loquacious, even treating it like a gig, shamelessly throwing in jokes and observations. Showing off basically.
'So Gilles,' Lucie asked, probably to cover the silence after one of my failed bilingual jokes, 'what do you do for a living in London?'
A slightly sheepish look came over his face.
'I'm a biologist,' Gilles replied, 'working on a cure for Alzheimer's disease.' Which is proper showing off.
I thoroughly enjoyed the evening and the confidence gained made me think that perhaps performing stand-up in French wasn't as beyond me as I thought, that perhaps it could be a viable option in the future. But linguistic confidence is one thing, personal confidence mixed with exhaustion was the real enemy.
Through a misreading of my diary I had driven over to London and was due to drive back to France again after work on the Saturday. I had filled the not inconsiderable space in the Land Rover with the usual English 'delicacies' and had gone to fill up the car with diesel in preparation for the long, late-night drive back. While the assistant was waiting for me to make my mind up on whether to buy an original Yorkie or branch out into the more exotic raisin and biscuit variety, her colleague let out an exclamation.
'Ooh Sharon, I think we have a leak on Pump 17!' They both looked at me as a second earlier I'd said 'Pump 17' and then we all three turned to look at Pump 17 and my car sitting next to it spewing out diesel at an alarming rate.
'LOCK DOWN!' said a man suddenly emerging from the back office and Sharon gave me a pitying look as she handed me back my cards and receipt. 'I wouldn't start that up if I were you,' she said, as if having weighed up the evidence in the two minutes that she'd known me she thought that was exactly the sort of stupid thing I'd do. The garage was emptied of other customers and roped off; new customers were denied access, which on a busy Saturday morning at a Sainsbury's petrol station wasn't popular and led to a few catcalls on seeing my car of 'Bloody French! F**K off home !'
The fire brigade arrived within minutes, all massive blokes with a sense of purpose and expertise that just made me look small and inadequate in every way and, an hour later, a cheerily driven low-loader truck was heading off into the distance with my stricken, crisp-laden vehicle on the back of it.
My first thoughts at this point weren't, how much will this cost? Nor, how do I get to work? Or even, which garage is it being taken to? No, my first thought was 'How do I still get home tonight?' During the week Samuel had been in tears again that I was going away so soon after being away the last time. It was heartbreaking knowing that there was still no alternative, he needed me around, and was finding the pressure on him hard when I wasn't. I'd cheered him up by promising that it was 'only for two nights, I'll be back before you know it'. And I was determined to make good that promise, no matter what the cost.
Fortunately, Eurostar cater nicely for the 'no matter what the cost' type travellers and I was back in the Loire Valley by mid afternoon on the Sunday. I was exhausted, certainly a bit down and quite paranoid too as the mechanic had called the evening before and suggested darkly that my car may have been the victim of foul play and that someone had possibly cut the pipes to drain the fuel.
My mind was racing, to be honest; paranoia fed on a diet of exhaustion and stress is a dangerous mix, and as Natalie drove me home from the station it was with a dull sense of surrealism that I noticed an elephant grazing in a field by the side of the road.
'An elephant!' said Thérence from the back of the car. Why it was there is anybody's guess, but my mind just viewed it and filed it, storing it away in a box marked 'More things to worry about'. It all felt like I was in one of those 1970s conspiracy films, I was being targeted by some shadowy organisation who knew that the best way to bring me down was to deliver regular little blows to my fragile mental state. An elephant on a French farm was just a cherry on the cake from some evil genius in an unofficial government office somewhere.
Home didn't immediately work to dispel these thoughts either. One of the dépendances (outbuildings) was stinking morbidly and covered in flies, proof that there was something rotting in there that needed to be got rid of pronto. Again, the sense of cinematic suspicion was all-prevailing as our 'hero' returns home to find a corpse. It was rats, two of them, and in fairly advanced stages of decomposition, and so we spent two hours clearing everything out of the room, disposing of the maggoty carcasses and disinfecting the place. As homecomings go, it wasn't the best.
The constant travel was by now taking a physical toll as well as a psychological one, and I had been to see one of Natalie's uncles, Pierre, a doctor. He eschewed my previous diagnoses of gout and arthritis, and basically said that my body was 'all out of whack'. A frighteningly fit man himself he referred me to a podologue (podiatrist) so that, he added cheerfully, 'we could start at the bottom'. I wasn't keen.
Feet should be a private thing; open-toed footwear allowed only on sandy beaches, and anyone who removes their shoes on public transport subjected to the strongest punishment in the land. Podiatrists, and this goes for their henchmen chiropodists, should operate in gloomy backstreets or do home visits, or preferably not at all. Podiatry is a perversion frankly and those who practise it should be on more than just a medical register.
In any case, the young podiatrist closely examined my right foot, holding it in his hand while I was almost overcome with a feeling of nausea as he twisted it this way and that; he moved his head closer to it, and fiddled with the ball, the heel and the toes. Occasionally he would look up to ask me a question and he seemed confused by the look of permanent horror on my face, my lip curled as I held his gaze and silently wondered just what kind of deviant he was. I think he took my disdain personally and prescribed surgically moulded inner soles to arrest a chronic foot, back, leg disorder, the fault of which he laid squarely at the foot – no pun intended – at the kind of light, unsupportive dandified loafers I wear often. He'd asked me to bring along a selection of my footwear (Natalie suggested I might need to hire a van for this) and he'd looked at them aghast like they were the very reason he'd decided to fight the good podiatry fight in the first place.
He might be right of course, but after nearly eleven months of various diagnoses for my pain I wasn't going to be doling out any congratulations just yet. I was going to wait and see if the new inner soles actually made a difference and that he wasn't, as I suspected, just keen on collecting casts and drawings of people's feet.
Diagnosis is the hardest part of medicine, I was once told – that's why House is so popular, most of the time it's literally a mystery. For example, poor Junior had been ill for a year now and we were no closer to finding out why.
Our new vet, who replaced our previous vet when she'd returned to Belgium, is an unhappy looking man. He has thin, receding hair; almost yellow, unhealthy looking skin; a slight hunchback and a disappointed look in his eyes that betrays his feelings about moving to this rural backwater, which is surely the death knell for the career of an ambitious vet. A few visits from us mind and he seemed to find his swagger, and no wonder.
The kitten, Indiana Jones, needed his first set of jabs and Toby needed some sort of dog booster, and begrudgingly you pay the exorbitant fees for these things, but then he started actively touting for extra business. He made it very clear when he first arrived that he was a domestic animal vet only – horses, hens, goats, etc. he felt were outside of his remit, presumably as a Frenchman regarding them more as foodstuffs than animal companions. He'd changed his mind now though.
Tallulah was a bit peaky again. She was moulting, which is never a good sign, she'd lost her voice and the most obvious sign of poor health, her crest had literally fallen, giving her the look of a late-night reveller whose party hat has gone skew-wiff and had clearly overindulged. Natalie mentioned this to the vet while he was mid-jab and I swear his eyes lit up. I think both of us were just expecting a Gallic shrug but no, he fair bounded over to his medicine cabinet and produced with a flourish a small vial of dark-brown liquid, which he described as a 'tonic'.
He suddenly became like a snake-oil salesman from some old Western film and started listing its magical (or mythical) healing properties, 'five drops of this a day and your hen will be back laying the railroad…' I'll admit scepticism is a default setting of mine, but I was in a mood to believe. Tallulah is my favourite hen, if not animal full-stop. She is like an avian Maggie Smith, bustling about the place, judgementally pecking at the floor, quite often telling me off for being in her way or admonishing the dogs for their apparent immaturity. I'll be honest, I didn't think hens would have a personality, but Tallulah has bags of it and I don't like to see her down.
