The old concern!

It must be admitted by the most hopelessly prejudiced observer of what is correct and appropriate that every up-and-down swimmer has rights.  They, OK I, swim from one end of the swimming pool to the other taking up but a small proportion of the total pool area and that small proportion is taken in an easily predictable way.

Nevertheless this small imposition remains something that mere paddlers, especially those of stunted years, find impossible to take on board as they frivolously splash their way around the pool.

Children are, therefore “fair game” and, over the years, once I have ploughed out my furrow in the pool, I take no prisoners.

When the “swimmers’ lane” is a narrow length of water clearly delineated by float lines children enter it at their peril.  One particularly pernicious inadequately parentally supervised little boy thought it a good wheeze to swim against one of the restraining lines of floats thereby reducing the narrow width even further and causing a potentially serious accident as a strong swimmer producing a semi-professional crawl, OK me.  It wasn’t serious but it was irritating and I used the traditional aggressive technique of choice in these situations and adopted a space-filling breaststroke.

The most effective aspect of this anti-invader stroke is the leg kick, with the emphasis on the “kick” part.  I have recently cut my nails so the “slicing” part of the arm action was unfortunately lessened.  He got the message.

A small girl who I bumped into at the other end (entirely her parents’ fault) was more frightened by my apology (instinctive rather than heartfelt) rather than the collision.

Otherwise I have had a lane to swim in each time that I have gone to the pool which is in itself remarkable.  Long may it continue!

Sound, always sound!

One thing about the back of beyond in Normandy and a well-insulated and double glazed hotel in a remote suburb of Paris is the lack of noise.  By God I realize the difference now that I am back home!

The day begins with the Dogwoman next door taking one of her brood for a walk and thus provoking one of the others to bark in the monotonous threnody of loss that marks her departure – and which tell us that it is time to think about getting up.  Which we don’t of course, it being holiday and everything and so we endure the heartfelt howls of loss and then wait in tense expectation if the bloody animal suddenly shuts up, and then there is relief mixed with exasperation when it starts again.

We then have a neighbour opening and closing his gate which can only be done by slamming the thing and letting it vibrate metallically and loudly – and which of course stimulates the dog to an ecstasy of barking.

When this dies down we then have to endure our shouty neighbour on the other side of the road driving the white van over a strategically placed piece of metal so that it make a hollow ringing sound which is louder than anything that has gone before.

And then, if you are lucky, the planes start.

Then normal life starts and cars, vans and lorries pass.

As soon as we are up we move to the other side of the house and are within earshot of the swimming pool.  There are now four or five phases of noise.  The first is the French.  This comprises two ineffectual parents and two repulsive children the youngest of whom after shrieking for the first ten minutes or so then starts bawling.

This is then followed by the basso profundo of a grandfather calling his errant grandson to order.  Constantly.  He (the child) then starts crying too.

A recent new level of sound has recently been reached by the addition to our motley crew of a horde of Indian lads who yell their way around the pool and dive bomb the water and then spend the next few hours trying to push each other in.  At this point the discordant symphony of sound has reached the sort of intensity where it can only be dealt with by joining it.

Swimming with earplugs and under water only the most piercing of childish shouts can penetrate!  Tranquillity!

Another day of cloudy skies in the morning and bright sunshine in the afternoon.  Suits me.

I have started the tasks of the summer and spoken to someone in Cardiff about my finances.  He was patience itself in trying to get me back onto the website that catalogues the mismanagement of my funds since I put them there five years ago.  The only people who have done well out of my savings are the fund managers.  The Investment Bankers.  The people who have done their best to destroy the western banking system.  The bastards as they are know to the rest of us.

However, their Internet voice in Cardiff was courtesy itself and turned out to be a member of an old ice cream making family in Cardiff, now long gone.  I have a good mind to contact the organization and give the guy the credit he deserves.  It is little enough that one has reason to be thankful for an anonymous voice on the so-called help lines!  One should celebrate true help when one finds it!

At least my savings still exist even if the “steady if unspectacular growth” is hardly a feature of my so-called investment.

Ah well, these things test and improve character.  Probably.

Back home!

The lack of egg for breakfast was given a further twist when one of the unsympathetic kitchen workers actually went out of her way to show me the recently arrived cardboard box filled with microwaveable ersatz egg – and then did nothing with them.  Ah Paris in July!

I read my catalogue for the Marmottan Monet Museum rather than pack and so Irene’s knock at the door galvanized me into action and everything was piled into suitcases and we were read to make our way to the airport.

Irene hates everything to do with airports and flying and therefore, in a way in which is understandingly perverse, she demands that we arrive in the concourse at a time which to me seems unbearably early.

Our plane was scheduled to fly at 6.30 pm and we set off at midday when we left the hotel!

Admittedly our airport CD Gaulle (as the GPS called it) was at the other end of the city from where we were staying but it should have taken us no more than 40 minutes to get there on the outer circular road.

Which we could not get on as the entrance had been blocked off.  The GPS tried to get us back to the blocked entry with a determination which even seemed to express itself in a certain exasperation in her perfectly modulated voice as I ignored her “recalculation” attempts to redirect.  Eventually we managed to find another entry and joined the very heavy lunchtime traffic going around the city.

At least we were not going the other way, because the drivers there weren’t going anywhere as we passed kilometre after kilometre of static traffic.  For Irene, the traffic jam on the opposite side of the road justified our early start because that “could have been us!”

To facilitate our return I had, rather intelligently I thought, marked our starting point when we hired the car as one of the “favourites” on the GPS.  This brought us to the airport with relatively few problems except we needed to top up the petrol to avoid being penalized.  Finding the airport petrol station was difficult but once found we had to get back to the drop off point.  One missed turning and suddenly we were directed another 9 kilometres to turn around!

It seemed as if we would have to fill up again to ensure that the pointer was still at the full point of the dial.  It was particularly galling that to turn around we had to leave the motorway and pay a toll and then pay another toll at the other end of the roundabout to get back on to the motorway!

We finally made it back to the airport and the drop off point for the car by ignoring the advice of the GPS and going on signs and intelligence to get us there.

The walk to our terminal from the drop off point was absurdly long and it felt as though we had been condemned to another version of Jean Paul Sartre’s existential vision of damnation where hell certainly was other people. 

To pass the hours of time before the check in opened we decided to have lunch.  A three-course lunch was €25: poached eggs with chopped chives and mayonnaise and salad; braised salmon with tarragon sauce and basmati rice – and the highlight of the meal a raspberry tart with cream.  For an airport, the meal was good; for a restaurant only the tart would have been truly acceptable.

The flight was entirely without incident with the exception of my finding a free seat over the wing with consequent legroom for the journey.

We arrived back in Barcelona to floods of sunshine which have been abruptly cut off this morning by sullen skies.  I hold fast to my belief that Spanish weather does not deny sunshine for an entire day to the faithful.

Now, off to Terrassa to pick up Toni and his mother to bring them down to the positively Parisian gloom of Castelldefels.

But it is a Tuesday and I am on holiday.  So who cares?

The good, the bad and the downright thieving!

The day dawned in rain.  So what else is new in Paris?  In July.

By the time we had had our second breakfast without egg the skies had turned to a sullen grey which was a great improvement on the previous liquid offering that we had had to cope with in the morning yesterday.

Even though the egg is reconstituted and arrives in the hotel in sealed microwavable containers, I feel that I have a right to spurn the yellowed offerings that we should be given in the mornings.  Not to be allowed to do so is an infringement of my basic breakfast rights.  For it to happen a second time is little short of direct insult.  


I decided to complain.

The desk was staffed with the charming gentleman who, when we first arrived regaled us with stories of his having been trapped in Manchester in the rain and so we had a fellow feeling for him.  


He listened to my hesitant complaint (it was hardly against him) with total sympathy and offered to disregard the parking fees that we have run up by presuming to park our car in the hotel car park.  40€ in exchange for almost inedible egg seemed like a good compromise!

We therefore set off for our first Cultural Expedition of the day in a happy state of mind and in lack of rain –let us not go so far as to state that we were bathed in that rarest of Parisian commodities: July sun!

Our destination was the Centre Pompidou the High Temple of Modern Art and anathema to Irene.  


We got there reasonably directly and ascended the external escalator with increasing interest.  There is something about the gradually revealed landscape of Paris which never fails to delight, and as soon as you are above roof level the city is laid out (in all its morning gloom) for one to take unsuccessful photographs!

The contents of the museum failed to stimulate Irene and, in spite of my impassioned history of art lecture to accompany the paintings I do not think that I managed to make her think any more positively of what she saw.  Even the eventually found single example of a Rothko failed to move her.  A lost case I fear.

Our lunch was in some sort of pseudo pub where my meal was snails and cheese: a true delight.  Though the beer was crap.

Our second cultural visit was to the Marmottan Monet museum which was more difficult to get to than any of the others we had graced with our presence.  It took multiple train changes, wrong ways and much walking before we finally gained the doors of the imposing edifice which housed the museum.

The ostensible reason for our visit was for Irene to get to see the Berthe Morrisot exhibition housed in the gallery.

I am not sure that I have changed my view of the artist after seeing more of her works in one day than I have seen in the rest of my life – and that includes looking at her work in books!

Her sketches I admire and her work on light tending towards abstraction I found fascinating – who knows what she might have produced if she had lived thirty years longer and gone into her old age with a wildly wielded brush in the same way that Monet expressed himself.

And talking of Monet, I suppose that I might have managed to get a partial view of what the museum might have contained if I had paid more attention to the last part of the museum’s title.

The number and quality of works by Monet in the museum is breath taking.  Here is the painting, “Impression, sunrise” which though a critic’s dismissal gave the name to the whole movement of Impressionism.  


The number and quality of water lily painting reduced me to incoherent delight.  And, much though I remember Herbert Reed’s dismissal of “ardent young snobs working themselves up in front of paintings” I was reduced to tears by the canvases I saw.  I was transported back to my adolescence where I would visit the National Museum of Wales and go straight to the Monets, look at the three canvases of water lilies that the Museum possesses and leave refreshed and happy.

I saw my sixth façade of Rouen Cathedral in two days; and anyone who can wander through that magical room in the Marmottan with canvas after canvas of water lilies and views of the garden in Giverney without emotion simply has no soul.

In some ways the best visit to a gallery was this last one.  It is certainly the one which moved me most and I have bought a catalogue so that I can rail against the poor colour reproduction and protest that I need to return to get a “real” view of the paintings.

Although we are both exhausted and frankly relieved that we return to Barcelona tomorrow we both feel that we have been most fully rewarded in our cultural pilgrimage by our last museum.

Our last meal in the obscure area of Paris where we reside was not in the restaurant that has served us well for the last three days but rather in an Italian restaurant where the chef has confronted us each time we have gone to a rival.

In a spirit of adventure we decided to go to the almost empty restaurant and sample his wares.  We were greeted effusively and treated to a “hands on” approach throughout the meal: Irene being a blond especially so!  We were beguiled into accepting all his recommendations under the woefully inadequate impression that we were having a fixed price €17.50 meal with a few extra drinks.

As the final price was €89 you can imagine how much like shorn lambs we felt when we finally manage to escape from the rapacious clutches of the Coptic Christian Egyptian masquerading as an Italian restaurateur.  We have realised that the money that we have gained by the egg not being readily available at breakfast we have now spend on an evening meal.

Tomorrow will, I swear be relaxed – or at least as relaxed as packing to a deadline of midday; getting the hire car back to the airport; buying Toni a present and catching a plane can be.

Will there be egg tomorrow is what the uneasy sleepers in this hotel are asking themselves.

And who cares about the answer.

A panorama of paintings!

Apart from going up the wrong street and trying to imagine how a restaurant could have been converted into a fairly sleazy looking nightclub before noticing that our destination was on another corner – we had a good night.  The food as before was excellent and the atmosphere was good too.

Irene had almost exactly the same meal as she ate the night before, on the grounds that it had tasted good and she had enjoyed it.  This is an excellent reason for repeating a repast but it is not something I could do on successive nights!  Not with a menu which offers many and varied delights to tempt the pallet.

I had lobster bisque (and no there were no bits of the beast in sight, but still tasty) followed by pork with string beans and sauté potatoes.  Irene liked the look of my dish and vowed to eat it the next time we were there.  I fancied the cheese but was disappointed that one had to choose one of the cheeses on offer with the possibility of having a slice of each firmly rejected – so I settled for the lemon sorbet.

The red wine, served in a jug, added substantially to the price of the meal but what the hell, I’m on holiday!

We return to the art galleries, firmly resolved to resist the cunning wiles of passing Rumanian thieves, determined to indulge ourselves with a feat of Impressionists!

For the larger care of our souls we intend to make a pilgrimage to Notre Dame so that Irene can see in reality what she has read about in literature.  I must admit from my reading of The Hunchback of Notre Dame I was expecting a much more Gothic (in every sense of the word) building full of dark corners and mysterious stone staircases.  It is difficult to sustain Romantic images when surrounded by camera-obsessed tourists who seem unable to validate their experiences without the necessary number of clicks.

In the Louvre, especially in front of the Mona Lisa, the jostling sea of camera waving visitors was joined by almost equal numbers of people trying to get a photograph of themselves on their mobile phones with the Mona Lisa in the background.  One guy was taking pictures with his IPad while others were wandering around with their Nintendo 3D guides to the museum: perhaps it was the Nintendos that drove the German woman into the Luddite conversation with us yesterday!

There is some form of pallid sunshine worming its way through the net curtains on my window but even as I type it has gone.  We are looking forward to another July (sic.) Paris day of climatic gloom.  Even Irene, who is not keen on too much sunshine, admitted that she was looking forward to returning to the warmth of Spain!  Shame on Paris for selling tourists the lie of a great city basking in the warmth of sunshine; far better look at the artists of the city who constantly delight in painting the myriad reflections in the glassily reflective surfaces which are only available to a city bathed in rain!

Just off to the meagre breakfast that this cut price joint “serves” to its visitors.  Yesterday there was no egg – if that continues today there will be Complaints.  When one is as culturally determined as we are, the necessity of a filling breakfast to fuel the campaign is essential.

Irene has now become a member of an exclusive club that of FMG – Frustrated Museum Goers.  She wanted to go to the d’Orsay gallery specifically to see her favourite Renoir painting of a couple dancing in the town, a companion piece to another painting of a couple dancing in the country.  At first we were told it was “in store” but then a much more helpful attendant told us that it was being exhibited in the USA.  Irene was not happy.

I too am a member of the FMG club having built up the power and presence of Van Gough’s last painting of Blackbirds over a Cornfield when visiting the Van Gough Museum in Amsterdam and finding it in an exhibition abroad when I finally got there.

I am determined that when I finally get round to going to Munich to see “Boy picking fleas from a dog” by Ter Borsch, I will previously have phoned the gallery to ensure that it is in place at the time of my visit and I will then be able to tick off a “must do” item from a list that has been in existence for over 40 years!

The paintings were wonderful and it was overwhelming to see such a profusion of Impressionist and Post Impressionist paintings in one building.  While the National Museum of Wales has an example of The Façade of Rouen Cathedral by Monet, the d’Orsay has a wall with five of them hung together.  The gallery has riches in depth and I was very tempted to buy yet another book to add to my collection, but amazingly I managed to resist the pull!  Though tomorrow really is another day.

I am still not convinced by the internal architectural arrangement of internal walls within the cavernous interior of this former railway station.  The formation of the display rooms have stone partitions which look vaguely Egyptian to my eyes and are satisfying neither at floor level nor when viewed from one of the many vantage points that one gets from the journey up to the cream of the collection – the Impressionists on the fifth floor.  But the paintings themselves outweigh any cavils that I might have about their display.

Our attempt to see Notre Dame was frustrated by queues and torrential rain.  Our daily dose of heavenly refreshment continues unabated – though it was only today that Irene remembered that she had a coat of some sort in the car in the subterranean garage.  Ah well, better late than never – and it will be used because I have looked at the weather forecast for Paris and the weather continues in its unrelentingly liquid way.

Notre Dame looks disturbingly clean, but our further explorations were cut short by the necessity of finding some sort of shelter from the storms.  We cut our losses eventually and marched back to the Metro, but not before we had found a Chemist for me to get a razor to scrape away the burgeoning grey growth that has sprung up on my cheeks.

To celebrate finding a razor and to escape from the downpour we went into a bar and ordered a large beer each.  To my utter horror when the bill came is was for €19!  Almost €10 a beggared pint!  This still does not reach the record level of €11 a pint for daring to drink in the arcades off the Cathedral plaza in Milan, but still!  A pint of Carlsberg for €9.90!  Sheer unadulterated robbery.

Tomorrow a possible visit to the Richard Rogers’ gallery masterpiece and another opportunity to try and tempt Irene to give modern art a chance!

Before that dinner in our favourite restaurant in Malakoff (an area of Paris of which I have never previously heard) and a well deserved rest.

Culture does not stop for Sunday and we must be prepared to travel and travail!

The Big City

A generally uneventful journey over to Paris from Normandy and the only even of note (or weary recognition) was the insufferable traffic jam which greeted us as soon as we hit the city proper.

The hotel in the B&B chain is basic, very basic.  There are no cupboards and the shower is miniscule – but it is a bed and it is en suite and that, basically is all we need.

The breakfast is served (if that is the word) by an uncaring woman who lives up to the stereotype of resentful summer servitors in Paris and ostentatiously refills machines and leaves component parts blocking others in a way which shows that she is highly trained in customer disengagement!  And there was no egg.  When I asked about it I was told simply that there was none.  It was left to the receptionist to explain that the delivery was late but that everything should be wonderful tomorrow.

As far as I can work out we are nowhere near either the centre of the city or the airport so we have, thanks to the kindness of the northern French allowed ourselves to be situated in the most inconvenient of places for everything we want and need to do.  Though there is parking - which I fear we are going to pay through the nose for!

Today will mark the first time that Irene has visited the Louvre.  I think that her inclinations are more towards the paintings in the D’Orsay but I am sure that we can do both.  There is some sort of museum pass which should see us through our time in the city.

We had to pay to go to the toilet in the underground commercial opportunity that is the vast space under the glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre!  Robbery!

Our culture ticket is bought and that gives us the inestimable advantage of being able to short-circuit the queues which are a characteristic of culture in the city.

The Louvre was, as always wonderful and vast and undoable.  No sooner have you seen the delights in one room than another is calling you and there is room after room that demands attention.

From J. L. David to the School of Avignon old friends were waiting to be revisited and chattering my enthusiasm to Irene (long suffering Irene!) I became quite light headed with gobbling up one masterpiece after another.

As with all my gallery visits there was An Encounter.  This time with a German lady who joined in with my gibbering to Irene and delivered a diatribe on the Modern Attitude Towards Art and Things Cultural.  She maintained that we grew up in a Golden Age of respect towards Art and that social networking and the lack of attention paid by young people to their heritage was the end of everything.  All of this was apropos of nothing of course she just seamlessly entered our conversation and continued for some time trading artists’ names with me and extolling the decency with which we appreciated them!  What would a gallery visit be without a strange intervention!

Exhaustion forced us to stop, but not before we had visited one of Irene’s favourite Murillos of the Little Beggar Boy.  This is obviously a painting which the artist wanted to paint and there is a freedom and urgency in the brushstrokes which is missing from his more famous and presumably commissioned devotional paintings.

Our meal in the subterranean complex was taken in the restaurant area where you can choose from a variety of outlets.  We chose Lebanese and had a selection of five non-meat salads which turned out to be tasty and filling.

Out into the rain and on the Pont Royal a woman appeared to find a wedding ring and readily agreed to hand it in to the police.  The key word in that sentence is “appeared” as we were involved in a scam where she asked for money for her kids as we took the ring away to find a policeman.  It was simple theft really and the bored policemen told us when we tried to present the ring to them.  They shook their heads when they heard that we had given the woman money, thank god it was not too much!  Anyone want to buy a “gold” wedding ring?  Going cheap!

When we got into the Musee D’Orsay, slightly damp, but undaunted we immediately faced the cultural challenge by having a cup of coffee.  This is a much more civilized way of appreciating culture than actually traipsing round looking at pictures!

By the time we were ready to set off on our active looking we barely made it past the Barbizon School before a multi-lingual announcement told us that the place was closing.  Although we are going back tomorrow we found ourselves caught up in the panic which attends any announcement of closure in a major public art gallery: the frantic looking at paintings on the way out to convince yourself that you have seen as much as possible and had value for the cost of your admission!  I am sure that any observer must have seen the Brownian Motion of seemingly randomly motivated spectators make when The Voice tells you that closing time is immanent!

As our lunch was salad light we feel perfectly justified in going back to the excellent restaurant that we found last night.  It had a good fixed price menu, served until late and has the sort of atmosphere that you expect, but rarely find in Paris.

We will find out shortly if our assessment was correct.  Bon appetite!

Sometime Internet

There are many aspects of visiting family of someone you don’t really know which are not availing to good. 

Some aspects, indeed which are positively deleterious to your health.  There is, after all, a limit to the length of time for which you can keep the rictus of a smile approximating to good humour stapled to your face.  Add to this sense of boredom the overlay of a foreign language in which family members you don’t know are speaking about other family members you have never met and the slide into hysteria is always tempting.

But the final horror is saying goodbye.  Not, obviously the escape which is inherent in the word - but the length of time with which individuals can draw out the period during which the farewell takes place.  During the last of our three (3) family visits I lost the will to live three times on successive moments and also tried physically moving the car without the ignition keys in a desperate attempt to escape choosing anywhere in the wilds of Normandy to where I was!

But like all things, even school meetings, an end eventually arrives and you can then look back on the horror and pretend that you now laugh lightly when you think about it.

The much vaunted meal in the lorry drivers’ café was something of a disappointment.  It turned out to be one of the places in which we had attempted to get a meal when we first arrived.  The iron rule of nothing after two pm defeated us, but we ensured that we arrived with plenty of time to spare this time and we daunted to see that the whole of this part of the world had made it to the restaurant part of the café well before the end of the time to be welcomes and they had filled the place.

We were not, however turned away and we were quite satisfied to sit in the entrance at a plastic table and drink away the time necessary to be served.  The white wine was excellent – even if it was served in a glass without the natural accompaniment of a bottle.

We were offered the choice between tuna salad and terrine.  The salad was a small plate of chopped lettuce with mozzarella cheese and flakes of tuna with the oil and vinegar already added.  The terrine was paté.

The second plate was beef with yellow rice which was served on a metal plate for the three of us who ordered it to serve ourselves.  Good thing we didn’t choose the pasta as that looked desiccated and tasted worse.

The saving grace of the meal was the proffered plate of three different types of cheese: a Camembert, a chevre and another with which I didn’t bother.  We attacked these goodies (which were good) with an enthusiasm which obviously frightened the waitress who eventually snatched the platter away from us!

The dessert was cold rice pudding with rhubarb – which actually tasted better than it sounded.  But not much.

The wine, of which I had lots, was not included.  Neither was the coffee.  So the reasonable sounding €11 for the meal ended up costing more like €25.  Which, for what we had was not a good bargain at all.  So far Spain is winning hands down in the provision of good quality, reasonably priced food.  Tomorrow Paris and we shall see what the city can offer.

At present the girls are trying to download the photos that we have taken onto their computer system.  Once again this has necessitate a telephone conference and much heartache.

France!

I am not a bitter man, but I do consider that waiting in an unmoving queue in a Paris airport for a hire car for a longer period of time than it took us to get from Barcelona to Paris is deeply wrong.  The only thing that kept us sane was a self-assured and chatty American in front of us who regaled us with his city hopping career and his grandiose plans for the future in Singapore.

The essential problem with the hire car (apart from the moronically slow client throughput) was the credit card; which we did not have.  At least not the right sort of credit card.  Our cards did have the magic “VISA” inscribed on them but, alas, it was insufficient to allow the keys of the Skoda (!) to be released into our charge.  For a moment it looked as if, after all our waiting we would have to find another way of getting from Paris to Normandy.

Of course, with the luck that normally aids me in these circumstances things were eventually worked out – although it did necessitate taking out the “full” insurance packet and the payment, in cash, of large amounts of extra money.  But all the panic did allow me to use the line, “But I have to be in Normandy by early evening!” which has a sort of ring to it.

The transition from hybrid automatic to Skoda geared car was a little traumatic and no doubt by the end of the holiday when I return to Castelldefels I will have adjusted myself completely to a geared car and my right hand will be waving futilely for the non existent gear stick for a few days.

It took bloody hours to get to the Normandy coast with the last umpteen kilometres being through narrow winding lanes barely separating the ostentatiously bourgeoning vegetation being consumed by quite unnecessarily pushy cows which are characteristics of this part of the world.

Irene’s keen eye spotted a florist shop in some small village through which we were passing and so I was able to purchase a suitably ostentatious and predominantly “modern” arrangement of blooms to present to the birthday girl when we finally arrived to a hysterical welcome in which people made heroic attempts to try and make me feel not like a tedious supporting act to the arrival of the start of the evening – Irene.

The house in which we are saying has a narrow view through two houses of the sea.  Which is tidal – a real treat after the obstinately sluggish Med!

The house was filled and continued to be filled further with the close cropped, chunky friends of the Birthday Girl who, god bless them, were able to provide us with life sustaining cups of Tetley’s tea.  Every imprecation that we had made against this benighted nation based on the treatment meted out to us in Paris airport was banished with the first reviving sip of that sacred nectar.

A quick shower (quickish in Irene’s case) and we were ready for the fray.

All of my French has deserted me and all I come out with are mildly incoherent mumblings of a melange of French and Spanish which is of use to no man.  Irene, of course, is making intimidatingly heroic attempts to speak the language and is even using verbs, in the right tenses!  I am thoroughly dispirited and will attempt to pass myself off as a novice Trappist in an attempt to evade conversation!

The celebrations were held in a parish hall like affair on the coast.  We walked to this venue after a long and involved conversation about where the place was and how long it would take and how many policemen there would be around at the end of the day.  The end result was that two half empty cars set off while we were accompanied by a friend of the birthday girl as we walked there.

A long “U” shaped arrangement of tables for over fifty people were set out and the room filled up with other friends and relations to whom Irene was excitedly introduced.  She has not been back to this town for 17 years and I could see here eyes glazing over as she attempted (unsuccessfully) to work out who might have been who.

I drifted away from this enforced sharing and was engaged in conversation with a large bespectacled man bemoaning the lack of available guys on whom to pounce!  His true nature was revealed when he got his hands on a radio mike and became the life and soul of the gathering.

The whole gathering was an enjoyable cliché.  It looked and sounded like every French family having a bit of a do that you have seen on film with cavorting uncles, rampaging children, ancients in wheelchairs and assorted supporting cast members.

There was a floorshow presented by Ladies of a Certain Persuasion who at one point appeared and did their own version of The Singing Nun’s song “Dominique” – which I have not heard for eons and gave me a jolt as I had a Proustian moment sending me spilling back to my youth!

We did dance – though it was in the dark and I am sure that the strobe and laser made it appear more sophisticated than the disjointed spasmodic gyrations which are my usual response to music I have never heard before.

Irene and I admitted defeat at some late point in the evening and cadged a key to our house and, unsteadily, made out way home in almost total blackness.  Amazingly we achieved the front door and I fell, fully clothed onto the bed and resorted to the old “coma” technique for power resting.

At some point in existence I woke, far from refreshed and went to bed properly and felt that I could possible face the world in a few hours time.  Always a good moment!

And now, in the absence of the host, we face a new day in which our first task is to find something to eat as there is bugger-all in the house at the moment!

Onward into France!