A brief trip to France
On Sunday evening I had flown down to Toulouse in France for an overnight stay and then – business done – flew back to Blighty last night.
It was my first visit to the city and, although I could not claim that tourism or sightseeing is my bag, I found it just my sort of place.
Seriously, if this Brexit catastrophe comes off (and/or the revolution comes), I could now see myself purchasing an apartment down by the River Garbonne as a bolt-hole to which I could disappear from this cruel world and see out my declining years fitting in perfectly with the alleged 104,000 students who make up about a fifth of the local population.
I remember about twenty years ago when my father, who could not speak a word of French despite having regularly holidayed in the south of the country all his adult life, calling an impromptu family summit after lunch one day to ask how we would react if he decamped from Britain and bought a villa or town house somewhere around Nice as his main residence. It sounded if he was semi-serious because one of his concerns was whether or not we would all be bothered to go and visit him regularly.
Never mind filial or dynastic loyalty, the general discussion that followed centred on the participants’ different attitudes towards ‘owning’ a property, however salubrious, abroad in the context of holidaying generally.
Amongst my own generation, I was in a minority of one. Everyone else was broadly against the idea on the basis that it would tend to militate against holidaying variety and foreign travel in general – one would feel obligated to make the monotonous trek to the family pile instead.
In this context I appeared to be coming from the opposite direction.
Sightseeing has never particularly floated my boat – I remember one of my regular golfing partners once being taken off for a holiday in Venice by his fine-art-loving spouse and, when I asked him how it went the next time we hit a ball together, he paused and then said with not a little feeling “The trouble with grand palaces and churches, Bill, is that the moment you walk into your second one of the week you immediately succumb to the thought that once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all …”.
At that point a wave of empathy flooded through me.
In days of yore my family had a weekend cottage in the country. My financial circumstances being what they are the prospect of buying a home abroad has never really been on my radar anyway but – should I have ever had the odd £10 million to spare – I would have had no aversion at all to buying say a £5 million villa in Portugal or similar and – via the means of cheap flights – treated it as a modern day version of a 1960s British family’s weekend family cottage.
No, as I told my hosts in Toulouse, all my life my physical surroundings have been of but minimal interest.
Whether spending 15 weeks on a remote building site in the north of Western Australia with a pal immediately after we left school, or being sympathised with (to some puzzlement on my part) for having spent my student days in Leicester, I’ve always just ‘got on with it’.
I suspect my approach may be as much a product of having attending boarding schools from the age of 7 to 18 as any inherent lack of ambition and curiosity about the world on my part. I duly held my hand up and said that – if I had been my father – I would go ahead and buy a place in the South of France. What an area to have a ‘weekend cottage’ in. And on top of that, possessing it wouldn’t prevent me going anywhere else in the world if I should ever feel like it [which I probably wouldn’t].
But to return to my theme – there is something about Toulouse which immediately made me feel relaxed and at home.
The range of buildings was vast, the general friendliness of the locals very welcome and – just sitting in a café/restaurant on the central La Capitole square enjoying an early Sunday evening dinner after my arrival and then again yesterday, nursing a coffee or a cocktail whilst watching the world and his wife wander by, a warm sense of ‘belonging’ grew by the hour.
It was unfortunate but perhaps inevitable that the process of returning to the UK was less enjoyable.
Firstly, on our Easyjet flight (my companion a self-confessed and serious ‘nervous flyer’) as night follows day it was inevitable that we were going to be located across the aisle from the obligatory one gormless Brit on every such aircraft who was possessed of a semi-Mohican haircut, all-over tattoos, a terminally restless three-year-old child and a complete absence of parental control skills.
Apart from bouncing around in his rows of seats, disturbing those in the rows in front and behind, the kid spent the duration either fighting and struggling with his father, screaming, crying or running up and down the aircraft to the annoyance of everyone on board.
Upon arriving at Gatwick – against, it must be admitted, my own misgivings [on account of my uneven relationships with both all things technical/mechanical and Murphy’s Law which says that if it is theoretically possible for something to go wrong it will] – I suggested we head for the ‘e-passport self-exiting control cattle-barriers’ rather than join the ever-growing queue of riff-raff aiming for the ‘human being operated’ section.
You can guess what happened next.
Whilst my companion – who had never used the electronic cattle-barriers before – went straight through in a flash, I was ‘refused’ three times by my barrier and ended up being sent off to the ‘human operated ‘ queue.
At this point the wick on my fuse, though nowhere near explosion-point, was definitely fizzing.
The Border Force lady at the desk politely pointed out that the reason the machine refused me might have been because I had been wearing glasses when I attempted to go through: apparently, when it comes to spectacle-wearing, the scanner can get confused if passport-holders are not as they as they appear in their passport photo [and in mine I was not wearing them].
This sort of thing is where I begin lose my rag with ‘the authorities’.
Why the hell – if that is the case – don’t they have a large prominent notice on display telling the public that – if they aren’t wearing glasses in their passport photo but are now (or indeed vice versa), they should make sure, as they approach the barrier, that they are in the same state as they appear in their passport photograph?!?
[And indeed, with any other similar items of ‘warning information’ that may apply also on the notice].
It’s just common sense, isn’t it? It’s the kind of thing that, if I had ever been appointed CEO of Border Force, I’d have instigated straight after my very first walkabout at Gatwick’s North Terminal.
Anyway.
By then our ‘homeward journey travails’ were almost over.
But not quite.
I would prefer to forget the fact that, when we finally reached ‘Area U’ of the Gatwick North Terminal Long Stay Car Park, it took me about fifteen minutes to find my car because I had lost my bearings and then – when we had – it took me nearly another five minutes to locate my car keys in the depths of my luggage!
