of wine. At 9 p.m. I declared I was bored and suggested we go for a drive. With Paul driving, obviously, so I could have a drink.
No bars appeared to be open in Mirambeau, and then we spotted a sign for Château Mirambeau. A leisurely drive up a hill took us to the place, and after passing through some magnificent gates and along a long drive, we saw a most beautiful building, its charm enhanced by the fading golden light of the sun. It was as if we’d stumbled across Chatsworth House on the outskirts of Corby. It has an obviously classy restaurant, and I told Paul I’d treat him to dinner there one evening, on the strict conditions he ordered neither a plate of chips, nor a cup of strong English breakfast tea.
Paul drove on to Jonzac, 20 miles away, and parked near a smart café not far from an enormous building of a military appearance. People were enjoying their late dinners and drinks at the outdoor tables but stopped to look at Paul parking the 17’ long Mercedes opposite, and a couple of not-very-smartly-dressed English people emerging. Now Paul had already told me he didn’t want a ‘second dinner’, and that a plate of chips and an orange juice would suffice for him. After perusing the menu I ordered a Thai curry and a glass of wine for myself, which cost around 25 euros, along with chips and orange juice for Paul, at 4 euros. I could see from the waiter’s expression that he didn’t consider our orders took due consideration of the concept of égalité.
Throughout our hour at the café the young men of the area did what young men do all over France, namely shatter the peace and quiet by driving low-capacity motorbikes with screeching engines past every group of people enjoying a quiet night out. Native French people appear never to be troubled by this antisocial behaviour. I wanted to hurl bricks at the culprits.
When we returned to the gite I was quite mellow so I decided to smoke my pipe, and enjoyed a glass or two of Hennessy VSOP whilst listening on my MP3 player to AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and Free. Anyone spotting my efforts at ‘air guitar’ and ‘air drumming’ would have assumed I was epileptic, I imagine. And so ended another happy day.
THURSDAY 9 AUGUST
I was awoken at 11 a.m. by the sound of Paul singing the chorus to Peter Sarstedt’s Where do you go to my lovely?
Where do you go to my lovely,
when you’re alone in your bed?
Tell me the thoughts that surround you,
I want to look inside your head.
I must admit to a few moments’ consternation before I realised Paul wasn’t actually in my room, but entertaining the other holidaymakers just outside our gite.
I’d adopted the habit of taking along a small digital recorder on our travels and it wasn’t long before it came into use. We’d driven to the local Super U, and as usual Paul had sought out a convenient disabled parking spot. But there was a problem. A large white-painted stone – or ‘a 200-pound lump of fuckin’ concrete’, in Paul’s elegant phrase – was positioned near the left hand side of the parking spot. I took a photo of Paul pointing at the stone, looking most unhappy. Then he drove a few yards to another disabled parking spot, without a stone, where I photographed him with an expression which said, ‘The French can do it, if they only try!’
In typical Paul fashion, he grumbled all the way to the store about the ‘fuckin’ French’. Just outside the store, a middle-aged French lady turned around and faced him, and with a winning smile remarked, ‘You need to be careful – some of us do speak English, you know!’ Paul was taken aback and muttered to me later, ‘Fuckin’ great. I’m cursing the French in front of the one fuckin’ person in this miserable fuckin’ town who can speak English!’
Not long afterwards he related a story about his friends and himself, who grew up in the village of Stanground, near Peterborough:
‘When Stanground boys went to the cinema in Peterborough in the 1960s, we very often borrowed bicycles from behind the cinema. We didn’t consider it stealing, we just didn’t ask the owners if we could borrow them.
We rode the bikes back to Stanground where we usually dumped them in the river, then walked the final 200 yards like the respectable people we were. This only came to public attention when a boat snagged on something, where the river was supposed to be 12 or 15 feet deep. But there was by then an underwater mountain of bicycles.’
I noted that the population of Mirambeau were markedly shorter than one might expect in an English town, as one often finds in France. And I had a theory to explain the phenomenon. For centuries, and even to this day in certain parts of France – the Pyrenees and the Loire Valley come to mind – people have lived in caves hewn into the limestone rock. These people are known as ‘troglodytes’, and happily refer to themselves as such.
But human nature being what it is, the average person would prefer the lesser effort of excavating a cave to a height of 5’, rather than 6’ or even 7’. The outcome was predictable. Short people would thrive in the caves, while tall people would keep knocking their foreheads on the stone, and in due course replace the existing tall village idiot. Before long Paul and I came to refer to any particularly short and ugly person as un trog or une trogette. Mirambeau had more than its fair share of them.
On a long winding road we followed a small car with a French number plate. The car was apparently incapable of more than 20mph. We could see an old couple arguing in the car, and from time to time a piece of litter was hurled through the sunroof. Paul then admitted that he threw litter out of cars, but only when there were no other cars around. He clearly felt this gave him the moral high ground over the old French couple.
Paul opined that the old man wanted to throw caution to the wind and move up into third gear, but ‘the old trout’ wanted to keep the car in second gear. He continued, ‘At a wild guess, when the husband wants to go up to third gear and hit 30mph, the wife ties her knicker elastic around the handbrake, and pulls at it with all her might!’
We pulled off into a small road to get a taste of rural France and drove towards the town of St Dizan-du-Gua. A few seconds later we were passing a field of sunflowers when we both spotted something that made us laugh out loud. Someone had removed a few seeds from a number of sunflower heads so as to give images of smiling faces. Needless to say we had to stop, and I took a photograph of Paul beside one of them.
I also took a photograph of a crop – a cereal crop? – on the opposite side of the road, a crop which had puzzled me for over 25 years. Nobody seems to know what it is. Paul thought it was maize, but I was sure it wasn’t, as it had just a few feathery seeds at the top.
Not long afterwards we were driving through a large area of land in which only grape vines were growing. ‘I reckon this is a vineyard’, Paul said. I stared at him in disbelief and mumbled, ‘No shit, Sherlock!’, and we laughed.
Paul was now starting to become a little agitated that he had become the butt of jokes, as I recorded everything daft that he did or said, but nothing daft that I did or said. I was about to record this observation into my digital recorder when I spotted that I was about to speak into my electronic breathalyser, which was roughly the same shape and size. Paul roared out laughing and said he wanted the incident to go into the book, and I agreed that it would.
St Dizan-du-Gua was a pretty village with a fetching church and steeple. Although Paul did remark on the high number of Châteaux Breezebloques.
Some time later we drove through the small village of St Fort-en-Gironde. Paul spotted a few newish houses with new tiles and painted shutters, ‘obviously the English have taken over the village.’
Shortly afterwards we were
