Two Men In a Car (A Businessman, a Chauffeur, and Their Holidays in France). Mike Buchanan
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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 at the end of a long queue of slow-moving traffic following a tractor moving at 3mph, cutting the grass verge. But the forward visibility was excellent, so why the queue? I speculated that this might be a tourist attraction, a rare opportunity to see a Frenchman working.
Soon we came to St Romain-sur-Gironde, a quaint old village, but I was struggling to find anything to say about it, and so asked Paul for his thoughts. ‘Quality gate rotting on the left, peeling paint on the shutters on the right. What is it with the French?’ There were a few nice gardens with roses, so we concluded this was yet another village taken over by the English. Paul then spotted a field of sunflowers surrounded by a fence, ‘clearly fenced-in, in case they run away!’
We came to the town of Mortagne. Lots of well-kept boats and yachts in the port, all very attractive. We stopped for a drink at the Bar Restaurant Glacier du Port, to have our customary beer and cup of tea. Paul again didn’t like the tea, and declared – not for the first time – that it would be a ‘bloody miracle’ if he were ever to find a cup of strong English breakfast tea in France.
Above the bar, Paul spotted some recently-painted shutters above a neon sign whose first few and last few letters only were still present. ‘Obviously the shutter painter stood on the neon sign to balance himself, and knocked some letters off. Tosseur!’
For some reason I explained the French law of inheritance to Paul. This law is said to account for the poor state of upkeep of some buildings and estates in France. Estates are divided equally between siblings, so individuals do not have a financial incentive to invest in properties, to keep them in a good condition. Paul, as usual, had a view on the matter, and recorded it.
‘I’m disagreeing with Michael on the French law of inheritance whereby the children all inherit equal shares, whether individuals have looked after their parents for 40 years or never even bothered to send them a postcard.
What should happen is that upon an estate owner’s death, the estate solicitor should call in a Polish builder – from Krakow, ideally – and get him to do any repair work required on the building, and decorate the interior with magnolia paint. Then the solicitor should bring in a shutter maker and painter from Corsica, and an English window cleaner from South London.
Only when these people have been paid should the estate be put up for sale, and the remaining money shared equally between the surviving children. This will sort out the problem of grimy looking buildings, bad shutters, and dirty windows.’
I always appreciate Paul’s clarity of thought on complex problems.
We drove into the resort of St George which looked very well-heeled, clean and pleasant. Paul tried to find something to moan about, but for once struggled. We had a drink in a café and as is often the case in France, the toilet had no wooden or plastic seat. This came as no surprise to me, but Paul was horrified and assumed it had been stolen.
FRIDAY 10 AUGUST
This was the day of the Médoc wine tour. We left the gite at around 6.30 a.m. and found the traffic very light. At about 7.00 a.m. we saw a sign indicating the direction to Toulouse. I pointed out the sign to Paul and remarked, ‘If you go that way, you’ll have nothing to lose!’ He replied, ‘Why’s that, then?’, saw the sign, and groaned.
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