Hush, Whisper Who Dares (We’re Sneaking To France)

On the shuttle to Gatwick North Terminal a French couple who are far too loved-up block the entire entrance to the train by staring into each other’s eyes slap bang in the middle of the sliding doors, tongues inserted into throats and utterly oblivious to anyone around them.

It’s a big Covid-19 analogy and we’ve not even reached the departure lounge, it’s going to be tough to keep up… Holding back the loving-couple-induced-vomit I notice that they’re sporting shockingly matched outfits; ‘stone-washed’ denim blouson shirts, ‘distressed’ chinos and, unbelievably, denim espadrilles. It’s always a tight contest between the French and the Italians for the crown of Worst Dressed People In Europe, but these young lovers are on top of their game.

As the airport is so spookily empty I know we shall see them again, indeed we’ll probably be on nodding terms with most people in the terminal within the hour. We are. The staff look happy. I’ll repeat that: The staff look happy. Travellers amble slowly and don’t behave like cornered psychopaths, it’s more akin to being in Cecil Beaton’s Art of Travel photographic series than the usual Hieronymus Bosch Memorial Airport.

Ashly tries to help me with a demonstration of Covid-19 mask-wearing without steamed-up glasses. This involves loops around ears in a construction Heath Robinson would find baffling, I’m sure it will put me in a neck brace so I quickly give up and accept the perma-fog. At the newly named ‘Gate 102 of Calm’ a posh woman proclaims at Motörhead volume that she needs to ‘Make a phone call before we board.’ A ‘phone call’ no less! I expect her to shout ‘Operator, get me Whitehall 123’ into a bakelite handset. She’s wearing perfect Posh-Woman-With-House-in-Languedoc clothes; Hermes scarf, scruffy pink pedal-pushers and £200 boat shoes. She probably does have a boat, and undoubtedly a share in a horse. Her husband looks miserable and is obviously thinking about skinny Latvian prostitutes. Getting the vibe yet? Is the picture emerging? No?

Then allow me to turn the big light on… the usual Gatwick Scumbags and their dreadful children are nowhere to be seen. There’s no sign of people in yellow ‘holiday frocks’ struggling with huge cases larger than Nelson’s sea chest that are full of…holiday frocks. There are no young women with genuinely disturbing eyebrows wearing ‘holiday shorts’ so tight it appears that they have four vaginas. There are no drunk men in box-fresh reeboks with no socks and genital-crushing trousers – that surely required assistance to squeeze into – laughing at each other’s jokes about sangria and shagging. I can’t hear them shouting at each other from one side of the terminal to the other – calling names that sound like their parents named them after 1960’s chemical compounds; ‘Hey, Draylon!’ ‘Oi Jeffela’ or ‘Trammo! My son!’

Profusely sweating old folk don’t rush to the gate within twenty seconds of it coming up on the board and I’m still nervously looking out for children, have we walked into a sci-fi movie where the young have been removed to damp cages on the Isle of Man? I try to contain my enthusiasm at the concept. It could work. Are we flying to a small regional airfield in Wisconsin or KwaZulu-Natal? No we’re going to Montpellier, France, Europe – as we have every September for fifteen years.

The aeroplane is strangely clean and doesn’t smell of wee or peanuts, the crew hand out ‘proper’ surgical masks as our poncy designer ones are not accepted by Johnny Frog and they will simply turn us away. I’m convinced this is revenge for the Mad Cow Wars of 1990, or more likely the miserable failure of the French invasion of Wales in 1797 – I know that still rankles.

The cabin crew chat to Ashly about the merits of Pret A Manger cookies, this is a sea-change from them looking at passengers and wishing they were dead. EZ8065 is now The Orient Express pulling serenely out of Venice; not an abattoir truck on the M4 where sheep noses poke out of the slats gasping for a desperate last breath of air. If I’d known I’d have worn my navy seersucker suit and a white linen shirt. Drat!

The New European Dreamers

Airport ritual over, get there, get hire car, get on road. First stop is Sète, seaside town and ‘The Venice of Languedoc’, yeah they’ve got a canal.

Previously we stayed in a hotel in the Centre Ville but Ashly is a walking freak so we are decamped 2k outside Sète. Our stepometers are usually off the scale after a few hours, if Ashly doesn’t bang-out 15,000 a day she feels wheelchair bound.

The tourist restaurants that sit along the canal are generic French; gruff disinterested waiting staff and extremely ordinary fare. Our radar takes us inland to the town square, around the surrounding streets should do it. The danger here is that they are not tourist hangouts so Le Patron usually doesn’t give one or two fucks if you spend your cash (google it kids) there or not.

We think we might have found the balance between better food and very surly owner opposite a rather magnificent octopus sculpture. The Grenache we order is warm, we dare to point this out and he hautily tells us we will not ‘understand the aromas’ if it was any colder, we compromise by ordering a vat of ice from the scared nice guy who works there. He then tries to take the piss by deliberately not telling us each of the dishes we have ordered comes with a mountain of salad – and we’ve ordered a salad to go with them – this is a common policy, have a good old laugh at the Brexit Bastards.

Fair play but we’ve been around a bit so I determine to plough through the salad trough no matter what. We finish the lot, and the wine and… Hey Fucking Presto! He’s now our chatty chum with excellent English. He has also embarrassingly realised that Ashly’s French was 300% better than he first thought. Two can dance that tango mate…

We walk the few kilometres back along the coast in a predictably glorious early evening, Ashly hears that someone she has known since childhood has died in his sleep aged 53… kids and everything. Ouch.

Outside a very small locals bar one of the infamous Mediterranean winds suddenly decides to say hello in a loud voice, it picks up glasses of beer off the tables so we go inside… Old Right Wing French Guy Alert! Easily spotted by his caterpillar eyebrows and uncompromising stare from yards away. “Tramontana est fort non?’ we offer. Thereby follows a drunken rant pointing out that this is not the Tramontana, the Scirocco, the Marin, the Autan or the Ceris. It’s ‘Le Nord.’ As the kids would say – ‘Whatever mate.’ He’s drinking a very dangerous looking blue liquid so we defer to his wisdom.

Let The Children Sing

Leaving Sète for Roquebrun we drive through the heart of the French ‘holiday fun’ region; Pirate World, Aqualand, Luna Park and all points Alton Towers. The pillars of pleasure are silent. There is no screaming. You would usually be cemented in queues of child-driven misery just to pass slowly through this land, distressed parents wondering when or if this Bedlam will ever end and why they bother to wake each morning to try and satisfy the selfish monsters who get ‘bored’ if they don’t have nuclear-sized stimulation on the hour, every hour.

Maybe the apocalypse wasn’t so bad after all… Further down the road there is a low-rise sex-workers hotel. If you have trouble recognising them they are scary looking and always next to a truck stop – this one is butted-up to a bowling alley called ‘Extreme Bowling.’ Our small minds go into silent overload pondering the wonderful and varied opportunities of an evening spent scuttling between the two establishments.

Supermarché Sweep

The drive to Roquebrun is familiar and beautiful, the supermarket in Cessenon-sur-Orb is an old friend and we arrive at our poncy ‘second home’ in the idyllic village on the river Orb and ask the same questions as we do every visit: What will not be provided in this fucking expensive villa?

Here’s a handy rough guide to what owners usually omit.
ITEMS NEVER PROVIDED IN EUROPEAN PROPERTY RENTALS
Italy: Toilet paper, bin bags, light bulbs and a key that works.
Spain: Anything required for electrical equipment plus gas bottles for a cooker that needs gas bottles.
France: Olive oil, salt, pepper or any substances that might be needed to make edible food.
Wales: Everything, including the address of the place.
Germany: Need you ask….
Belgium: All good; local prostitute’s phone number usually pinned to notice board

Roquebrun is of course as picture-perfect as it always is. It always takes a few days to get in the groove of having virtually no work – with your own business it never really stops – Ashly bangs out some emails and chases some money while I do this blog stuff.

We’re still moving at Thrusting-Go-Gettam-Business-Moguls pace until the night after we get fabulously drunk: then we are cool and can shuffle around like smelly old French ladies picking up the morning baguette.

The house has not been given much of an upgrade since our last stay four years ago, in fact I’m convinced I recognise the towels, and the pillow cases are an odd colour.

Who cares! It’s Languedoc and it’s heavenly. I spend a few hours wandering around the house staring at stuff; French plumbing always amazes me as it makes the Large Hadron Collider seem as basic as a 70’s festival toilet trench, and the decor in each room consists of seven or eight different wallpapers hung in the dark by a Crystal Meth addict. Who cares! It’s Languedoc.

Bingo… there is no salt and pepper and there is no olive oil. The garden’s citrus and fig trees are bulging and the splendid cave (local wine co-op) is a short stagger down a postcard lane, the bar is open and there’s a new restaurant that’s pleasingly not child-friendly. I resolutely refuse to blow-up the lilo as I stopped blowing-up lilos in 1973.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
This is not a request, it’s a decree.
“Just around the hill.”
It’s not a hill, it’s a mountain.
“Ready?”
Water, Navajo trackers shoes, spirit, gumption. Check!

The walk is an 8k boiling scramble up a scree-covered mountainside that would have SAS training instructors reaching nervously for the Health & Safety manual, the panorama over Languedoc that hits you in the face at the top is worth the admission alone and slightly humbling, you had to work to get it.

My still intact Cub Scout instinct stops us from veering off towards Norway instead of the route that will take us back to the village and the sanctuary of the bar – the final ascent is so severe I rip my underwear quite dramatically and a considerable amount of genital zip-chafing follows.

The wonderous terrain successfully takes your mind off the problem; as does the rather shameful smug self-satisfaction at being able to breeze this kind of thing as a 61 year-old who is very keen on wine and fags. The descent is a solid test of the shoes and the Rectus Femoris as a lot of it is spent sliding sideways waving your arms around.

All is now vanilla as Ashly has been exercised like a young gun-dog and deux demis have been destroyed in the bar; all that’s left now is to wonder which of Gods Creatures left the many small piles of excrement we saw along the trail. Baby pigs? Huge squirrels? Dwarf goats? Like so many of the big questions, we may never know...

The Straight Life

We’ve been coming to this village in Languedoc every September for around 15 years – y’know, like good Guardian readers do.

As a young man the thought of going to the same place year on year (Wales doesn’t count) for a ‘holiday’ was as attractive as chronic hives or the inevitable herpes; but don’t fight the clock. We work hard running a small business in Brighton and London, we can do this, so we do.

We’ve embraced the straight life with a willing smile and open arms – never fancied the gutter anyway. Give me Orlebar Brown terry towelling ‘resort shirts’ and Camper moccasins over piss-stained tracksuit trousers any hour of any day. It’s a huge ‘no’ to being poor and homeless patronisingly bought a sandwich by a kindly hippy divorcee whose husband ran off with a 25 year old from the office and she got the house. Choices eh? I made them.
N.B. The husband and the 25 year old usually last eleven days. He’s now living in a bedsit at the end of the Northern Line and has only recently desisted from standing outside ‘his old house’ at night, weeping uncontrollably and screaming ‘I love you!’ at the windows. He is not aware that his ex has moved in with her nutritionist and rented the house to Chinese students who video him and post the results on YouTube. He’s gone viral. Embrace the straight life.

Self isolation looms. Fourteen days.

Otherwise we’ll be sent to Rhyl in a cattle truck and forced to pick turnips. The first person we call about this dilemma is of course our yoga teacher – we reschedule our next class. Responsibilities fulfilled. We have also developed a finely-tuned ability to spew-out incredibly poncy statements. Here are small selection from this trip:
“Was the pool a nice temperature?”
“This is actually fine without any gin!”
“I thought you were a little anti-parsley.”
“No monkfish? That’s unusual.”
“There has to be a better rosemary bush at the rear of the estate.”

There ya go, no shame, don’t care. Straight life embraced.

The Miracle of Lamalou-les-Bains

All the many sick people gathered here wander around town – no, scrub that – most are being pushed around town in wheelchair limousines.

Everywhere there are poor souls and their drivers who have come to ‘take the waters’, they stare at our supple and able bodies with raw envy; it’s a great little town to boost ones self-esteem.

The chairs are all noticeably high-end, shiny chrome and deep leather that surrounds Stephen Hawking style control panels. The assumption is that ‘taking the waters’ is not a cheap fix for everyone with infirmities, as the endless bandages and plaster casts we pass are immaculate and seem to have been washed on a 60 degree cycle with a vat of vanish oxy-action.

We seek out a restaurant we’ve heard about but it’s very covid-closed – and peering through the windows we see ironed table linen and small vases that are obviously intended for a carnation or similar. Woah! Walk away… a pleasant old lady with a wrist and shoulder cast, bandaged ears and a finger splint tells us it’s permanently shut.

We are politely nodding and smiling before we are suddenly and violently diverted by the small matter of a 15 meter high church spire sitting on the pavement behind us. The spire is being finished before they lift it up and pop it on top of the church, this is genuinely impressive and we obviously rudely dismiss the old lady to see this spire-action.

Ashly offers a ‘Bonne chance’ to the able-bodied guy leaning on the spire and he gives back a rather limp shrug – hope he’s got some help for the gig. We are deeply disappointed to hear that the great erection is still some time away and skulk towards the main drag rather miserably – some folk less fortunate than us who are swathed in bandages, full-body casts and a sci-fi looking back-brace help us to count our blessings.

The town is seen and done.

The old lady we harshly dismissed in favour of ogling the new spire was on the table next to us as we had the traditional ‘Coca Zero’ – and I’m sure she put a hex on us. Time to move on. Now we have a mission, our French diet is not like our yogic Hove intake, we urgently need dental floss, as there are very few creatures on Gods Wonderous Earth that we have not put on a barbecue over the last few days.

“Oh Give Me A Home….”

We take our annual pilgrimage to a minuscule mountain top village called Le Pin, our huge list of Favourite Places On Earth includes Le Pin – it’s at the top of page two, and that puts it above both San Francisco and The Dead Sea.

Why I insist we go there is a mystery, if we don’t I become tetchy and irascible.

The village amounts to three houses permanently patrolled by angry looking old French chaps who are as brown as old timber and are always, yes always, fiddling with old bits of machinery. We’ve passed through annually for over ten years and that tractor clutch is still not fixed. They look at us like we are baby-killers arriving at the Old Bailey.

We reach the summit of the mountain just above Le Pin driving slowly over a carpet of fallen chestnuts, there are usually cyclists at the top wondering how the fuck they made it there – some very nice German guys asked us to do the photo of them with the huge panorama spread behind them.

The bare splendour of Le Caroux is across the valley and our new cycling friends seem unnaturally elated and bursting with energy, we think it must be some kind of cycling-induced endorphin hit. We pity their frauen this evening… Nail-biting hairpins bring us down the mountain to a valley heavy with apple trees – being Guardian readers we only take as many as we need from the windfallen; we don’t bag ‘em and start a stall in St Chinian with a Union Jack draped over a trestle table as some might…

The rest of the stay is spent staring at the river and the over-photographed Roquebrun bridge, the morning wander to the bakers and noses against the estate agents window, the wine buying trips and all the usual middle class liberal crap I love.

I have a rock-solid excuse though: being from the Cardiff/Newport area I didn’t drink a glass of wine until into my twenties as only The Queen and posh women drunk the stuff. We thought middle class was having a holiday outside Wales. I still have a lot of catching-up to do.

When we’ve got to go home I always want to get there as swiftly as possible, we’re usually going away again fairly soon anyway so I really don’t want to ‘say goodbye’ to some bloke in a bar who probably hates us or have a ‘last look’ at a rubbish-strewn beach.

We have however changed the way we travel around recently and have stopped getting the unbearable Stupid O’Clock flights to and from UK airports. This means having to vacate one’s luxury villa, freezing Airbnb hovel or overpriced hotel with hours to kill before flights back to our sad isolated island. This means ‘doing something’ for hours instead of being at an airport at 5am looking like a sickly Goth teenager. We opt for a circular route to get to Montpellier at the designated time, maybe they’ll not let us travel back to the UK… you never know!

The landscape north of Roquebrun flattens and loses its drama, it rolls more like Wisconsin or Sussex, and a much anticipated visit to the supposedly majestic Pont du Diable will kill an hour or so; after all it’s bound to be quiet there as we’re mid-pandemic. Wrong. It’s closer to Edinburgh on New Years Eve, I perform a toe-curling u-turn in the queue to the designated car parking area and we head for St Jean de Fos as we have heard a rumour that every roof in the village is made of green ceramic tile. The village is still, the narrow streets are familiar and, yes, they have a disproportionate number of green ceramic roofs – the church has a particularly well-shod example. It is a local artisan skill which they promote successfully alongside their other local skill which is honed to perfection – The French Art of Utterly Ignoring You.  We wait sullenly for two diet cokes, the waitress would obviously rather clean tramp excrement from the pavement than serve us, she’d prefer to walk the M23 and scrape up the dead badgers than work our table. This is not a problem; the folk in West Wales are far ruder, the Southern English pub landlord is Premier League snottiness – they just know you’re ‘not from round here.’ You just get used to it, if you can’t – stay at home. St Jean de Fos is also a small town where people discard pairs of trousers on benches, in Brighton we see single discarded shoes everywhere, here they leave unpleasant looking old trousers. Is it an ancient ritual? A charming folk festival? The French are, after all, notoriously badly dressed. 
Finding Montpellier airport is, of course, hell.

Despite having been there at least twenty times and with Sat Nav it is still like being Arnie Saccnuson on a bad day. Do they keep moving the airport?

After finding the stupid airport stress levels are high so we cure this by dumping the hire car and purchasing two dog-wee cans of generic lager and a packet of Phillip Morris fags – the lady in the shop tells me ‘Ils sont mentholés?’ I tell her they’d be just fine and dandy if coated in strychnine.

We smoke outside on a bench surrounded by thousands of fag ends and empty cans – all of them Phillip Morris menthol and generic lager. The oversized-baggage-drop is manned by a shockingly pleasant dude who takes my guitar and gently slings it on the oversize-baggage thing, all the staff are pleasant and slightly glowing – they’re sitting on their arses with very little to do. The airport is still; as if the last fifty years had never happened… maybe they didn’t.