Ian Moore's Blog, page 4

Animal Paradiso

The first things to go in any long term recession are the luxuries; the treats that you indulge in when you feel a bit flush, life’s little pleasures. You cut back on the extra nights out, the take aways, the new TV, the full set, shampoo and pedicure for the dog – that sort of thing. So when I remarked to Natalie the other day that the local ‘Doggy Parlour’ had shut down, it was with a due sense of  doom, ‘Tch! Eh! Who can afford luxuries like a dog masseuse when times are hard?’ 
It turns out however that far from being driven to the wall by the economic climate the woman had instead felt comfortable enough to think, ‘You know what? I’ve made enough money, time for somebody else to groom the local dog population’ and just shut up shop, turning away business in her wake. I can’t help thinking we were somewhat responsible for her success and subsequent flight, I once had the same effect on an off licence owner in Mumbai, and that we’re now showing the same economic largesse to the vets in the area. We have (I left home four hours ago, so it might have changed) two dogs, three cats, four hens, three goats and two horses and we’ve become a cash cow. 
As with the doggy parlour madame, our vet abandoned her practice and moved back to Belgium, presumably to live in a gilded palace with no sick or rescued animals in sight, and her replacement is an unhappy looking man. He reminds me a bit of Tommy Lee Jones only with yellower skin, a slight hunchback and a disappointed look in his eye 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 seems to have found his swagger, and no wonder.  
The new 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, I do draw the line however when he starts 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’s changed his mind now though. 
Tallulah our hen leader, has been a bit peeky recently, she’s moulting, which is never a good sign, she’s stopped laying, she’s lost her voice and the most obvious sign of poor health, her crest has literally fallen, giving her the look of a late night reveller whose party hat has gone skwewiff and has 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 expecting a response along the lines of ‘will she fit in a decent sized Le Creuset?’ 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, fussily parading 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. Still, €137 for two jabs and some chicken tonic was a bit strong. 
Natalie was about to ask him his opinion about Junior too, who’s still clearly unwell, but fearing that we’d have to remortgage before we got out of the surgery I managed to steer her clear of the conversation and leave ‘only’ the €137 down. Junior’s muscle loss and overall demeanour grows more worrying, now constantly bullied by his erstwhile companion Ultime his one daily respite in the day is when Natalie lets him out into the garden to ‘cut the lawn’. He suddenly loses his truculence, like he’s won a reprieve, a stereotypical mousy husband escaping his harridan of a wife and hiding in the shed for the afternoon. This annoys Ultime massively and she watches from her paddock, occasionally stamping her hooves in anger and frustration. 
This doesn’t necessarily mean he’s become more passive with me of course. He may act like an old man who's lost the will to fight anymore but he obviously regards me with such contempt, I am so far down the pecking order in his eyes, that any residual anger he may have left is thrown in my direction. I thought we’d reached a state of truce-like acceptance between us when he allowed me to walk him back into the paddock only for the next day for him literally to push me out of his way as he made a beeline to drink, and slurp noisily from, the swimming pool. 
It’s a relatively safe place to drink from; I stopped putting in chemicals weeks ago, but the sheer decadence of the gesture is magnificent, like some ageing monarch of a crumbling empire having one last aristocratic hurrah. And in the background Tallulah is given her sips of Hen pick-me-up, while the cats toss small rodents at each other. In animal terms it all has a whiff of the Last Days of the Roman Empire about it, pampered creatures pushing excess and wantonness to their depraved limits.  
And it gets worse, having struggled to move the caravan with the punctured tyre out of the field (‘It gets in the horses' way’), I took a deserved shower and went looking for my slippers and some ‘feet up’ time, only to be told that I couldn’t have my slippers and that they were ‘occupied’. A toad apparently was asleep in one of them and shouldn’t be disturbed. 
And apparently we’re the dominant species.... 
If you like this then read how it all started, A la Mod... published by Summersdale and available on kindle, download and old fashioned paper HERE

To Bee or not to Bee

I remember Michael Caine once telling the story of filming The Swarm in the late 1970’s, it was a filthy experience he said. Most people who’ve seen it would probably agree, “My new ‘ouse in Hollywood needed carpets”, was Caine’s creative process behind the decision to appear in the film but that wasn’t what he meant by filthy. Despite previous films being made in the uncomfortable jungles of Malaya, the arid plains and harsh mountains of India and even the Elephant & Castle in London, Caine’s abiding memory of The Swarm was when the bees were first released from their hive on the first day of ‘bee shooting’. Millions and millions of the things were suddenly free, ready for their big moment in front of the cameras and they all, en masse, defecated on the film crew and assorted Hollywood glitterati.
“Bees, you see,” recounted Caine later on, “never shit on their own doorstep.”
If only horses had the same level of domestic hygiene and decorum.
Look I know the score, you have animals you have to put up with the attendant ‘produce’, believe me as parents of three growing boys Natalie and I are well aware of the hygiene challenges. The constant smell, the incessant low rumbling and muffled farting of young boys followed by the inevitable giggling, and the seeming impossibility of actually urinating in the toilet forms a constant backdrop to our house. The dogs defecate, as dogs do, in a free range, ad hoc manner, the cats either in their litter tray or next door, the hens generally in their coop, the goats whenever I look at them but the horses...
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 has to be given to Junior who is still struggling with some – still as yet undiagnosed – wasting disease and so when the latest attempt of giving him a boost was to increase his feed drastically one expects 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 Want’ 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 it became clear that bowel evacuation was simply not a good enough reason to interrupt their extended meal, nor 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 and would continue eating and egesting at the same time like a sordid take on the ‘Boy in the Fountain’ statue in Brussels.
It was only a week later when the horses finally realised that what they were now eating was their own matter and 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 are at school at least, I’ve been locked in battle with a project that even now, even in its infancy, I’m regretting for the sheer lunacy of what I’ve taken on. In early November I will be performing my first stand up set in French, the fact that as yet I have to write the set, translate what I have written or even – and this could be the killer – learn French, is causing something of a hindrance in the confidence department.
There are a number of reasons I booked the gig in the first place, firstly I’m convinced, sorry wasconvinced, 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 know nothing.
I also thought that setting myself a deadline, which the show is, would mean I’d knuckle down and do the required work immediately and thoroughly. Fat chance. I have lived with myself for 42 years now and yet still apparently operate on a level of quite farcical 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 do some gigs actually in France. That by having some foot in the nascent French stand up circuit I might not have to travel quite so far, or be away for quite so long.
I am now 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’. It’s possibly the most daunting gig I’ve ever taken on, even more daunting than my very first gig even, because now there’s so much further to fall, and to my mind at stake.
I love France. It’s not just home to me, it’s my refuge, my bolt-hole and I’ve always liked the fact that, largely, I’ve kept my job as a stand up comedian entirely separate from my home life here. I may be out of the loop in terms of much of what goes on on the UK comedy circuit, but I think that’s a good thing, I’ve not been ground down by it like some of my peers who have no escape from it at all.
And now, here I am fretting away at a script I don’t even truly understand in order to bring stand up, my job, even closer to home.

I am definitely more horse than bee.
NB I have done some gigs in France before, though not in French. The whole sorry debacle is documented here.

The End of the Road is Nigh

The bags have been packed for three days now. Actually that’s not quite true, they’ve been unpacked and packed every day for the last three days as my desire to feel like I’m on my way home, ‘bags packed’, gives way to the brutal reality that I’m not, ‘bags unpacked looking for something to wear’.
In 36 hours time I’ll finally be heading home though and after two weeks on the road I’m ready, believe me I’m ready. I’ve tried to behave myself. I’ve drunk less and eaten properly, I’ve given exercise some serious thought - I’ve been travelling with a brand new and as yet unused pair of trainers but as any traveller knows, trainers are great for safely storing electronics or cans of shaving foam in your suitcase – and I’ve even done a bit of work every day. But it’s become clear in the last few days, when generally the only people I’m speaking to have actually paid to come and see me at gigs, that I’m retreating into myself more and more. I’m socially monosyllabic, spending the afternoons sitting in my suit, shirt and tie waiting for the evening’s gig so that I’m one step nearer home.
As little Maurice said on the phone the other night in between sobs, “Two weeks is too long Daddy.”
So I have three gigs to go and they’ll be good gigs too. I’ve always been conscious of the fact that while offstage I may look hollow eyed and tired and give off the air of a grumpy narcoleptic I still have a job to do, a job I’m good at, and one that I cannot allow travel/fatigue/melancholy to interfere with. It’s partly why, a few years ago, I changed my style as a comedian. I used to be very grumpy on stage, certainly deadpan, occasionally moribund but ironically it takes energy to carry that off and I had the wrong kind of energy to do it. I now smile onstage, chat more, sometimes even move around a bit, in other words it’s much more of a performance and it helps me as much as it chivvies the audience along.
And while I’m on stage I forget that I’m not at home.
Three more gigs and that’s it and whereas normally I would then go back to my hotel, not sleep and just count the hours until my plane or train leaves this week is a treat, I’m heading straight home! Okay, it’s a ten hour overnight bus journey from London to Paris, followed by another three hours on trains but I’m heading straight home! It’s become my morning mantra, ‘I’m heading straight home’. (You’ll not be able to walk when you get there) I know, but I’m heading straight home!
And when I say I’m ready, I mean really ready. This is not just a mental state, this is not just about the suitcase being filled, I have thirteen hours of travel to fill and I’ve organised my ‘in-travel’ entertainment to within an inch of its life. I have a laptop, a tablet, an ipod and a phone. The tablet and laptop now have a range of films and television programmes on it which will be chosen depending on my mood, and which have been selected to suit battery lengths, which is an exact science. I have the Scorcese ‘George Harrison’ documentary if I’m brooding on the nature of ‘showbiz’, the French film ‘The Last Mitterand’ if I feel like improving my French, ‘Three Days of the Condor’ if I feel paranoid, ‘Escape to Athena’ if I’m drunk, ‘That’s Entertainment!’ if I’m feeling ‘showbiz elated’, ‘Annie Hall’ if I need reminding just how insignificant my own talent is and Andrew Marr’s ‘The History of the World’ if I feel like being talked at. I have a book obviously, a bilingual thriller to improve my French vocabulary and numerous podcasts and recorded Danny Baker radio shows.
I am prepared for the inevitable night without sleep and I know what I’m doing, I’m good at this.
My ‘packed lunch’ is all planned too, I’m going for a Chorizo and Mozzarella toasted sandwich, two bags of crisps (though not the travel unfriendly Wotsits), a Yorkie chocolate bar, a healthy snack (fruit-based flapjack type affair) that won’t get eaten; a bottle of water, a small bottle of red wine and five small cans of ready-mixed Gin and Tonic to dull the pain of being on a bus for ten hours.
I’ll eventually get back home and like James Bond in Skyfall, I’ll straighten my cufflinks, tighten my tie and walk back into my family.
This is when it gets difficult.This is when I need to calm the crazy. This is when I need to stop being me for a bit and just relax, what no one wants at this point is what usually happens the minute I get home, to whit, me stomping around the house complaining about the mess, noisily tidying up kids toys before I’ve even taken my suitcase upstairs, tutting at what I perceive to be the appalling mis-management of the fridge in my absence or straightening the pile of DVDs that shouldn’t have been left by the television anyway. I won’t do that this time.
I’m going home and this time I’m going to hug them and hold them all first. And I might not let them go for the whole three days I’m there.

NB Having said all that, the chaos that is my home life is available as a book, published by Summersdale and available HERE

Plums

To say that ‘making chutney has been my salvation’ would probably be overstating it somewhat, but since we moved to France it has been a necessary outlet, a respite, my go-to calm place. Some people assume that the chutney page on my website is a joke, some sort of elaborate gag to act as a hook to media interviewers, a ruse to show just how wacky us comedians can be. It’s not. I make chutney. I love it.
For the past two years though production has been halted. A combination of appalling spring weather, voracious birds and horses who like nothing better than to see me miserable has meant that there’s been absolutely no summer fruit whatsoever. The fruit trees have grown their leaves in early spring and made playful motions as to actually producing fruit buds and then all of a sudden give it up as a bad lot and remain impotent throughout the season, mocking me from their now horse-free orchard.
This summer has been different though. The apple trees, after a particularly bad mauling from Junior, have given up on life entirely but the pear tree is back proudly showing it’s juicy wares as is the peach tree which was so laden a branch snapped off before it could be successfully propped up.  The plum trees have gone crazy, firstly the plump, juicy Reine Claudefollowed shortly after by the vibrant purple of the damsons. It all sounds beautifully romantic and bucolic to imagine us getting up for breakfast and foraging for fresh fruit of a morning, and to be fair Natalie and the boys quite often do just that but I’ve never really trusted fresh fruit.
Oh I like the idea of it and I’m hugely protective of my orchard but just picking a plum or something off a tree with scant regard for what may have laid eggs in the thing is utterly beyond me. Natalie, like her dad and most of her family as far as I can see, think nothing of plucking some ripe specimen and munching eagerly around the bad stuff. Madness if you ask me but there’s more. Fresh fruit is messy, with its unregulated juice spouting off at every bite and therefore not to be trusted if, like me, you’d rather not be seen in public at all than with tell-tale fruit stains all over your Fred Perry.
But the plums just keep on coming. I’ve made dozens of jars of chutney, Natalie has made jam and ‘leathers’, we’ve done clafoutis, more chutney, extra leathers and another load of jam which only used up about two branches of the stuff. Now, like I say, I love a spot of chutney making and could quite happily spend all day in the kitchen but there’s a limit and just blindly producing industrial quantities of plum chutney is all very well but after the fortieth kilo of de-stoning the things the novelty does tend to wear off.
There’s no way we could cope with this year’s plum harvest alone, we needed help. Karine is a friend who lives about a mile away, she has three children similar ages to ours and we’ve known her since we moved in. Recently she set up her own organic fruit and veg business and sells at the local markets on a Thursday and Saturday. Karine is a very gentle, quietly spoken lady but she knows what she wants and although she was initially keen to sell our plums for us, she had to inspect them too and also confirm that they are in fact bio, or organic, and that they haven’t been ‘treated’ in any way.
Of course my childish nature couldn’t let an opportunity like this go past without comment,
“So you’ve invited a neighbour around to inspect my plums?” I know childish, and also as is my nature at times, utterly relentless and so what I perceived to be ribald hilarity quickly palled until even Samuel couldn’t help himself and just told me to ‘give it a rest.’
Karine declared herself happy with my plums (you see? I just can’t help it!) and took a large basket, possibly around 10 kilos and a smaller basket of pêches de vigne. She did so the next day too and then two more baskets the following week. I have to say that part of me, tragically, felt a little sad about giving up my fruit like that which I know sounds odd but my orchard is important to me and the welfare of its fruit of genuine concern.
“What are you doing?” Natalie hissed at me in the market, spying me skulking about behind a stall opposite Karine’s, which I might add was doing a roaring trade.
“I’m just watching my plums.”
“You’re weird.” She said.
I felt some strange kind of parental responsibility as I watched the basket quickly empty and gauged the ‘worthiness’ of prospective buyers, whether or not they’d treat my plums with the respect they deserved, that they were going to a good home.
“Are you really going to stand there all day like this?” Natalie asked, after trying and failing to get me to move.
We made about 50 euros in the first week and still I felt some strange guilt about letting them go, a pathetic sense of loss which meant me moping around all through lunch on market day like I’d had to give up a litter of puppies or something. It was a very odd feeling. Natalie tried to insist that what I was feeling was a delayed shock, that the trauma of my botched vasectomy had come back to haunt me through the metaphor of my ‘lost plums’, which of course brought the house down but which was unhelpful to say the least.
The doorbell rang and I went to answer it just to get away from any more uncomfortable double entendres to be honest. It was our elderly neighbour and could I do her a favour. This is unusual as madame is about 90 years old, bent double but fiercely, and I mean fiercely, independent.
“Of course.” I said, wondering what on earth it could be.
“I’ve got too many plums on my plum tree. Can you take a load off me?”
And I did too, like a plum.
For chutney recipes and botched vasectomy details, my book,À la Mod... is available in paperback, download and audiobook read by me. Clickhere.

Bouchon Ablution

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 but three children later and, over the last eight years, the comings and goings of five dogs, four goats, four cats, two horses, a donkey and five hens have ridiculed the notion that we had gone for ‘the easy life’. 
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’ve never found a way to silence it, take a step back.
Until now.
Thanks to ear wax.
Yes, I know some of you may be eating and all that but the truth is that just a few minutes of over-zealous cotton-budding led to a week of almost serene peacefulness that I will always look back on with great fondness. One moment the world was all ‘Daddy, do this’ and ‘Daddy, can I have that?’ and the next, after I’d pushed a load of cerumen further in rather than get it out, it was like I was underwater, I still had clarity of vision but the rest was all muffled like a sedate conversation heard through thick walls. It was bliss.
Of course I affected some level of trauma. Halfway through a conversation with Natalie or the boys I’d just hold up my hand, contrive some sort of emotion of loss, point to my ear theatrically and then waddle off unsteadily looking for a chair somewhere. After a couple of days people stopped trying to talk to me altogether and I was, shamefully, utterly at peace with the world as a result. I’d bought some deblocking liquid at a local pharmacie but it became clear pretty early on that it simply wasn’t up to the task. I ostentatiously squirted the stuff in my ear in front of the family so that I could at least claim I was addressing the problem, but in reality all it did was add to the dampening of sound and increase my isolation.
A week I stayed like that, and it was like a holiday in a fancy retreat, but like all holidays it had to end and Natalie, bored now with my deaf old man act and beginning to see through my faux discontent, decided to take action and booked me a Doctor’s appointment. I could have possibly pretended not to have heard her of course but by now I was only taking written communication and that, as any lawyer will tell you, is binding.
The Doctor was not happy. His secretary, also his wife, had booked me in for midday which is odd to say the least as France shuts down at midday for pre-lunch apéritif, so when he opened his door to let out what he thought were his last patients for the morning and saw me sitting there, he was not best pleased.
“Have you got an appointment?” He snapped
“Yes,” I said, “it was made with your wife this morning.” His shoulders sagged as he looked beyond the room to where his wife could be heard gossiping with the previous patients, ‘typical’ was the word running through his mind.
“Okay, come in, come in.” He said testily while looking at his watch.
I explained the problem to him and he seemed to cheer up obviously thinking that this was easy and wouldn’t take long at all. He jauntily wrote out a prescription without even looking in my ear and handed it to me with a flourish.
“Erm,” I stammered, trying to construct the French in my head, “I’ve been using this stuff for a week. It hasn’t worked.” His demeanour changed again and again he looked at his watch and then at me, a look of ‘You’re English, what do you know of lunch?’ on his face. Again he looked on the verge of some personal defeat and seemed almost crippled with inaction as though he wanted to tell me to just clear off but knew that he couldn’t.
“Right!” He said suddenly, “Come with me!”
He led me into the ‘surgery’ part of his office and made me sit down by a sink, quite rough as he manhandled me into what he thought was a better position for the operation. He called his wife in to help.
“Blocked ear.” He barked at her, “And we have to be in Orleans for two.”
“So what?” She replied, clearly used to these pre-food tantrums, “It only takes an hour to get there.”
“Yes, well...hold this!” And he handed her a kidney-shaped pan, “hold it under the ear.” He then attached something to a tap and then also attached an orange rubber hose. He turned the tap on and the water blasted out into the tiny sink, splashing back at him. He then pinched the end of the hose, like you would a garden hose, to make it a stronger, more concentrated jet of water.
“Ready?” I’m not sure if he was asking me or his wife.
For the next five minutes, while he practically sat on my shoulder and twisted my head while power jetting my inner ear I was, to all intents and purposes, water boarded. All the while he barked instructions at his wife, “Don’t hold it like that, like this...” which meant he lost his aim with the hose and sprayed my face and clothes instead, “honestly,” he berated her, “you understand nothing!”
That the Sarkozy-Kärcher treatment of my inner ear worked was nothing next to the satisfaction that he’d obviously got from the exercise, a chance to publicly shout at his wife and torture an Englishman seemed to leave him with a sadistic calm, like Laurence Olivier in The Marathon Man and I could tell he was now going to enjoy his lunch all the more for the experience.
Despite the indignity of the treatment though I have to admit that emerging from the surgery to the blast of summer birdsong was actually quite wonderful.
“Feel better?” Natalie asked when I got back, the boys splashing noisily behind her in the pool.
“Much. Feels good actually.” I said and I meant it.
“I’ve just been speaking to my sister,” Natalie continued almost whimsically, happy to be able to chat again I suppose. “They’ve just adopted a Jack Russell puppy...where are you going, I’m talking to you!”
“I’m going to find some cotton buds.” I replied over my shoulder, “And hopefully some wax.”
The whole gruesome story about my futile quest for peace is published by Summersdale and available HERE

Pussy Whipped

When you’re dealing with someone who has an addiction, particularly a close family member, you’re constantly playing a game of cloak and dagger. Not just an emotional or verbal hide and seek but a literal ‘hide-the-bottles’ routine where conversations are also pre-edited, cultural ingestion censored and egg-shells walked on. So it is with my wife, Natalie.
It’s time to come clean, it’s eating me up and I can live a lie no longer.
We’ve tried to get around her addiction now for years. We’ve blocked the Eden channel on SKY, our local zoo passes have been allowed to lapse and she’s no longer encouraged to go to the supermarket for fear of trying to release frozen chickens back into the wild. Disney films are largely banned or watched late at night when she’s asleep and presumably dreaming of being a purser on Noah’s ark. For myself, when I’m home, I try to keep a watchful eye – not heavy-handed hopefully – just concerned, mindful.
When she proposed an urgent visit to the Garden Centre then, alarm bells rang. French garden centres, I’m assuming like their UK counterparts, still have pet stores attached though in the case of Natalie’s favourite garden centre not attached at all but right by the tills leading to the kind of horrible impulse buy which keeps animal charities in business these days.
“Why don’t we go to Gamm Vert?” I suggested, knowing full well that Gamm Vert had no ‘pet centre’ at all, “It might stock that new horse feed you want to try?” I added. The truth is this killed two birds with one stone, possibly the wrong metaphor, but Junior is ill, very ill. I’ve written about our relationship many times (CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE BOOK ON AMAZON) and also about his muscle wasting disease but we seem to be reaching a critical point. He seemed to have had enough last weekend while I was away, he lay down a lot and had trouble standing. He’s far older than we were led to believe when we found him and he’s struggling now.
“He’s like you,” Natalie said at breakfast, watching him out of the window on the verge of tears and after the reluctantly-called vet had been. I had just struggled down the stairs again. “He’s got an ulcer, he’s permanently grumpy and he’s got some kind of hip-muscle problem.”
“It happens to the best of us.” I said, trying to be cheery but as usual just managing to sound stoically aggressive, like a resentful war veteran.
“He’s losing weight though...” She added, sort-of jokingly.
It’s so difficult to know what to do. Junior is obviously ill but as yet no diagnosis or subsequent medication has made any difference and unfortunately it might just be the ravages of age, he’s now bullied by Ultime and the goats as well, like an old man who married late and is in thrall to a younger family.
The sign on the Gamm Vert door was not encouraging, ‘DONNONS CHATONS, DEMANDER A UN VENDEUR’ (Literally, ‘Kittens to give away, ask a sales person’) which, to continue the tortured ‘addiction’ metaphor is like announcing at an AA Meeting ‘Free Vodka Bath, Dive in.’ I ran ahead, thinking that if I could at least steer her away from wherever the kittens were on show we’d be fine and emerge kitten-less. Who was I kidding though?
The kittens weren’t on show at all. They’d been born wild, sur place, and were therefore roaming and liable to pop up anywhere, completely un-policeable, which is typically cat. I don’t know if Natalie was even looking for them, but within two minutes of staring at the Hortensia range with Thérence while I kept a watchful eye, we were surrounded. I say surrounded, there was one playful little chap who kept popping out from behind flowers and surprising Thérence, while apparently his brothers and sisters hid under the pallet.
The vendeuse gave us the back story while this happened. Abandoned blah, no home blah, people on my street kill cats otherwise blah and all the while Natalie and Thérence played with the thing to the delight of all the staff.
“Ah, they’re a great team!” Said one. “He’s a little comedian your son!” Said another.
“Yes. Like his papa.” Natalie said, to a dubious response as I stood scowling, ten yards away in the dangerous utensils section.
Of course I never stood a chance. Natalie affected surprise when I acquiesced the adoption, as if I ever had a choice and that I was too stupid to not see that I was being emotionally blackmailed in public, and so we took ‘Indiana Jones’ (yes, that’s his name) home with us under the guise of ‘one extra mouth to feed is hardly going to make a difference, is it?’ ‘A tiny thing like that? What difference could it make?’
Within twenty four hours we lost him, he was subsequently found in a cavity behind the chimney.   Earlier he sank his claws into Thérence’s toes which were dangling down from his chair as we sat eating dinner so hard that the resulting scream made me scream, which made everyone scream. The other animals eye him with suspicion like Oliver was distrusted by fellow urchins in Fagin’s den and particularly Gigi who is now no longer the ‘cutest thing on the block.’
It is, in short, ‘coo-coo’ mayhem in there and best avoided altogether.
I went out to see Junior who, despite a new delivery of hay, was sheltering in his stable letting Ultime and the goats get on with the business of eating and gorging themselves. He looked tired, but calm as well as though he was enjoying the peace and quiet for a bit, but also for the first time in our relationship it felt like he didn’t actually resent my presence. It felt like we were both hiding to be honest, like two old blokes in an allotment shed, no need to talk at all, just glad of the respite.
I don’t think he’s got very long has the old feller, but that thirty minutes or so we spent together, before one of the goats ran in like a hipster in the saloon bar, meant a lot to me and maybe to him too. Finally we seem to have bonded in some way even if, as it may turn out, it’s just a brief appearance of ‘Cantankerous Anonymous’, it will have been worth it.

Mioaw Mieux

It started with what I thought was a dead cat and then the evening got progressively worse from then on. To be fair, it wasn’t actually dead but ever since someone had thrown a black Labrador at us on our honeymoon from a fourth floor window in Havana, I’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 grills 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 the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. 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 12 foot 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.” Samuel said simply, adopting the role of spokesman 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 tramples 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 sea front 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 grill 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 me 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 I must add 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 Depardieu in Cyrano de Bergerac but all that went through my head was the desperate plea of Steve Martin’s ‘”My whole life is ‘Have To’” speech in Parenthood. The cat made a noise behind me which may have been the feline equivalent of ‘For fuck’s sake, get on with it you tart’ and I started to climb the security grill stroppily.
Natalie would say that the grill started to buckle under my weight but, more accurately, as I climbed it the extra weight pulled down the grill, no more than an inch but enough to allow the cat to successfully extract its head. We were now an even more incongruous sight as this obviously pampered moggy, rather than run away and get clear of the grill, continued to cling on with its claws and look down at me, 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 the thing 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 I’ve –admittedly forced – 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 grill. That 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 in the apartment. I found it hard to share their humour frankly and stripped off in the kitchen, chuntering 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, I ducked 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 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.”

I’m never going on holiday again.

For new readers and old, a fuller, more detailed (horrific) account of our efforts with rescuing animals is available as a book/kindle from Amazon or an ebook on itunes click HERE

Pretty Vacances

Those who have read the mighty tome that is À la Mod... the book (published by Summersdale, available HERE) will be aware of the disastrous caravanning holiday in Biarritz a couple of years ago. 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 scars of the holiday are still visible and we haven’t been away as a family since.
Until now.
Part of the preparation for a holiday 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 would pay a fortune to have a holiday at our place 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. And so we are, and this year in style – a beach front apartment in Nice on the Côte d’Azur.
“Daddy?” Samuel asked nervously at lunchtime last Monday, “did you say we were going to Nice?” He was standing transfixed watching the lunchtime French news.
“Yes,” I replied, “Nice. Why?”
“An apartment on the sea front?” He continued.
“Yes. An apartment on the sea front. Why?” My habitual lack of patience 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 beach front 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 in Nice, the phrase ‘bloody typical’, never far from my lips at the best of times about to raise their ugly head once more. Obviously I wanted to know that he was okay but primarily I wanted to know that our beach front 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 Niçoisunder 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 and it’s difficult then not to treat the ‘real world’ with exasperated impatience when things don’t happen as quickly, but even still...twenty four 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.
“He bloody will be...” I said tastelessly.
I could see how the next few days were going to pan out. Our beach front 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 whilst 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 is as after 10 days in Nice, Natalie and the boys were off to a three day family fête while I had to return home and relieve her house-sitting parents at the ‘Zoo for Idiot Animals’.
I am 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 has made it very clear that I really do need to stop banging on about it, that is not in my DNA and I’ll continue to chunter about injustice as long as I can, thank you very much. It means 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, in one of her ‘stare out of the kitchen window wistfully’ reveries said blithely,
“I think we could adopt something else, you know?” It’s 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 relaxed attitude to quickie divorces?’ She’s broody again though and therefore needs to be treated with kid-gloves (no pun intended) and sensitivity.
“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’m hoping that the holiday and with it two whole weeks of not having to clear up assorted beast poo will have the desired effect. One can only hope, though she seems pretty far gone this time.
And so the holiday has taken on a bigger meaning, rest, respite, cure, adventure, break. It’s going to be the family holiday equivalent of a ‘Truth and Reconciliation Committee’ but the apartment is apparently in one piece, the sun is shining, the ridiculously complicated roof bar and box system maybe rattling ominously on top of the car, the boys already bickering five minutes into an eight hour drive but, as Starship once sang, ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now...’

See you in a couple of weeks. Hopefully.

‘Canicule,Won’t Cool’

I find weather talk boring at the best of times, but the constant repetition of the phrase, ‘Bloody Hell, it’s hot’ is surely one of the most irritating facets of a heatwave. Yes, it’s hot, we get it, stop pointing it out. They’re the kind of people who make a cup of tea and burn their lips on an over-ambitious first gulp, ‘Oh, that’s hot!’ Of course it is, YOU JUST BOILED THE WATER!
Of course my slightly irritable mood might be down to the fact that it is so bloody hot. The difficulty with being a mod is that the rules are never relaxed, the temperature doesn’t hit 90 degrees and we all go wearing cut off jeans and muscle t-shirts, the rules still apply as anyone who saw me almost literally turn into a pool of water while wearing a mohair suit in Bangkok once will testify. The last canicule (heatwave), in 2003, was reportedly responsible for 70,000 deaths across Europe, mainly old people and Goths, so I’m aware of the repercussions but anyway, the point is, tempers are short, energy needs to be conserved, no extra duties taken on. Keep your head down and get through it. Minimum effort spent.
“What do you mean we’re having a barbeque for twenty one people on Saturday evening?!” I asked Natalie with genuine exasperation.
We are already a week into the Grandes Vacances and already knackered, and taking on a big social responsibility like this just seemed to be the stuff of madness, plus a lot of the invitees would be kids from Samuel’s theatre group, it would be like being on a day course with TGI Friday staff. If it’s too hot for Natalie to be cleaning up poo from the horses’ field once a day, then surely it’s way beyond the reasonable temperature to outdoor cook for twenty odd French people?
I went off to sulk somewhere cooler than in the fiercely hot front room, and also to secretly do my ‘To Do BBQ List’ and also a ‘To Do BBQ List – Appendix 1 – Shopping List’ list. The beauty of the weather being like this at the moment is that it’s very quiet. For most of the day the boys are languishing inside, as are Natalie and the dogs, the cats and so on. The horses and goats are trying not to get in each other’s way in the stable and even the hens are clucking less. In fact, they’re doing everything less. Since the canicule began we have had very few eggs, actually even from a couple of weeks before, and it’s now becoming an issue.
I love my hens, I love their fussiness and their shrill admonition if I stumble in upon them unannounced like a lost bloke who’s wandered into the M&S bra-fitting department, but if they’re not producing any eggs then they’re just yet another drain on resources. It all seems to be Monica’s fault, again showing the curse of all hens named after songs by The Kinks. She is brooding again and therefore refusing to leave the nest area of the coop. Naturally this tends to put the others off laying and production has, it seems, all but dried up. We have searched everywhere else but apart from the odd stray we haven’t found where they are now laying, if they are laying at all. The chicken man in the market was convinced that they will have found somewhere else but other people, French people I must add, have laughed that off and said simply that the hens are French hens and are therefore on strike. I have now separated Monica, put her in solitary if you will, but this has yet to make any difference and so the last course of action, before introducing new blood that is, is to – and I quote a chicken farmer here – ‘dunk her silly arse in cold water.’
It’s all very distressing but it means that if we hear one of the hens giving off at any point, it used to mean that they’d just laid, we go running after them to see if they’ve added to a secret stash somewhere. They normally haven’t but it’s just about the only sound around here at the moment, apart from exploding beer bottles that is. It’s become something of a regular practice to put small bottles of green beer, my favourite is ‘33’, in the freezer for a brief spell rather than have dozens of them taking up space in the fridge at any one time. That’s all very well and a good idea on paper until after about four or five of the Moorish little sods I completely forget that they’re in the freezer at all until one of them explodes. It’s now as regular as a 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 15 of them and so it was with good caution that Natalie reminded me that I had in fact put a whole crate in the freezer just before the barbeque guests arrived. 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’ and I met some of Natalie’s friends who I hadn’t had the chance to meet before as I’d been working. It was also a chance to say thanks to those who’d rallied around her when she’d been ill a couple of weeks ago when, again, I was 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 the freezer but neither of us moved, it was just too bloody hot.

The A la Mod, published by Summersdale, and all about the early years is available HERE 
and in all good bookshops. Thank you.

A Very Cordial Entente

There’s a poster on the Paris metro advertising English lessons and the main picture is of a man with black eyes and cuts to his face, the thrust of the message being that if you don’t learn English properly you’ll get a good kicking. It seems a little strong to me but in her continuing effort to bring peace and linguistic harmony to the world Natalie’s English lessons go from strength to strength.
As well as setting up English clubs, offering private tuition and volunteering at local schools she is also giving intensive ‘language holidays’ where a student will stay with us for a week and be immersed in the full ‘English’ experience. I’ll admit I was a bit dubious at first, seeing it as a preliminary step on the road from relentless animal adoption to fostering teenage waifs and strays, all very laudable etc., but way beyond my capabilities. Henri, however, a fourteen year old from Paris, duly arrived as our first Guinea Pig so we set about being as English as possible.
The language was no problem for us. I’ve long complained that we don’t speak enough French at home, therefore making it more difficult for me to learn but we also had to ‘English-up’ everything else. I’d planned an English menu (the kitchen being my domain) of Sausage and Mash, Fish and Chips, Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding, Chicken Tikka, Belly of Pork and the like and also introducing the lad to the delights of specialist cuisine Anglaise like Worcester Sauce crisps, Wotsits and Twiglets, Dairy Milk, Pork Scratchings. The boys also did their bit by playing English games, for example in the week that the Ashes started they opened a recently purchased cricket set and introduced Henri to the delights of a sweetly timed cover drive and silly mid off, while Test Match Special crackled contentedly in the background. In the evening we watched James Bond films with English subtitles to help with Henri’s grammar.
In short the week we had planned couldn’t have been more English if we had taught him how to bottle up his emotions or get drunk, throw up and carry on drinking. He kept a diary, in English, every day and also had one on one lessons in Natalie’s classroom and the improvement in his language skills and therefore confidence was encouraging to see. He also got a very intensive language lesson from me when, investigating the ‘noise’ coming from the orchard he found me swearing like The Norse God of Swear at a peach tree. The offending tree, while not producing fruit for two years had now produced so much that its main branch had become too heavy and snapped off; I was understandably furious and gave full Anglo-Saxon invective to the bloody thing while Henri looked on, his head cocked to one side like a confused puppy.
If this was the most English of weeks though, we were up against some pretty strong French competition as they were countering our rosbifs, James Bond, cricket mix with two of the most potent symbols of ‘Frenchness’ going, the Tour de France and Bastille Day. The plan was to go and see le Tour pass by a local town, about 20 minutes away, but in order to do that I had to make it back from London in time to do so. I was hosting an awards ceremony in London on the Thursday night but was due to be on a ferry to Dunkirk at 2am and land in France at 5am. It would then take seven hours or so to drive home before immediately leaving to get a place by the roadside just in time for the procession. The fact that I made it home without stopping and on time, though wild-eyed and buzzing, just goes to show that Lance Armstrong was indeed correct, the Tour de France is simply impossible without the use of drugs. I had so many artificial stimulants rattling about inside of me I think I could have ridden the stage myself.
We found a spot roadside just in time to see the caravanne pass by. I didn’t know what this was and they don’t show it on the television coverage, but it’s basically a long procession of sponsored vehicles which pass by about an hour before the riders themselves. The cars and vans are quite often customised, for example in the shape of a can of drink or with giant, and recognisable, advertising figures on the roof making it look like the Tour de France warm up is a heavily branded episode of Wacky Races and they pass by at high speed shouting their slogans and drumming up atmosphere.
By far their most dangerous ruse though is that they throw ‘goodies’ from their vehicles, branded goodies obviously, but standing at the side of the road as dozens of vehicles pass by at high speed while ejecting an assortment of keyrings, pens, hats, madeleinesand the like is a hazardous exercise. A friend of ours got a rolled up copy of L’Équipe smack bang in his genitalia, a painful business but which meant that while he was doubled up in pain an inflatable plastic travel pillow, sponsored by IBIS Budget, went flying over his head and cut open Natalie’s wrist! I must admit that at the time I missed the whole wrist-slashing-budget-hotel metaphor as I was frankly astonished to discover that IBIS indeed have a ‘budget’ branch. That’s like finding Goebbels had a slightly more right-wing brother.
Following the caravannewe had a picnic and waited for the riders themselves. I’m not all that fussed by cycling normally but it was clear that Henri thought that this was a very big event indeed and was obviously excited and from our vantage point we had a very good view indeed. The actual cyclists-passing bit is a bit of a blur, a bit brief – though in the searing temperatures that may not have been a bad thing – but definitely a thrill. There’s something about a live sporting event that can give such a buzz. I’ve been to Wembley finals, Wimbledon and Ashes tests at Lords and the thrill as the cyclists went past loudly and at high speed was right up there as you get carried along by the other spectators and their enthusiasm. Henri, and all the other boys, loved it especially when we got home and we were all on the highlights on the television.
If the whole Tour de France circus is uber-French then to have that event followed quickly by Bastille Day is practically a Gallic overload. There is a sense of fun about Bastille Day, a bit like St Patricks Day but with less drinking, but it tends to take the same format every year.  There’s the obligatory brocante obviously and also the equally obligatory feux d’artifices (fireworks display) of which this one must have been about the sixth in as many weeks. It was a poor effort though. The local town normally excels at this type of thing but as the music cranked up to herald the start of the show and a hush descended on the hundreds of people on the riverbank, I could sense something amiss. Normally the stirring strains of La Marseillaisebegin and end these things and even if you’re not French, that is an emotional rallying cry, a proper national anthem. However what we got was the fragile pipes of Edith Piaf telling us that she regretted nothing and was actually I think the fireworks director getting his excuses in early.
Oh, it was poor. A fireworks display should never be lacklustre, but the gaps between each firework going off was just slightly too long making it look like the fireworks themselves weren’t really up for it , like moody teenagers forced to visit elderly relatives. The post fireworks display was even worse, as some kind of low-rent accordion orchestra began their set with the improbable and frankly unwelcome Viva Espana!

Only adult eyes really see these things though and Henri and our three boys had a high old time having forged what seemed like a strong friendship and joking and giggling away in English. Henri was with us for a full week, a polite, tidy and helpful boy who was staying with strangers and being forced to speak in a foreign language. It was obvious at times that he was a little homesick and a little daunted but he never really let on, never moaned or sulked. A successful week all round then, not only was his English massively improved he’d also developed ‘Le Stiff Upper Lip’ too.

What do you mean you haven't sorted out your holiday reading yet? A la Mod, the early years HERE (paperback, kindle, audio download, cave painting pictogram...)