Day 40: I Couldn't Possibly Comment

A CAVALCADE of excitements, no less - none of which I can tell you about if I want to avoid being disinherited. There was a long-distance truck driver in the shower this morning, mind you, and Dad's still in with a chance of winning a Mazda with his Scritch* card.

In the meantime, I have assembled this list of very short famous French men.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: 4ft 11
Jean-Paul Sartre: 5ft (existential angst? All seems terribly clear now)
Honoré de Balzac: 5ft 2
Marquis de Sade: 5ft 2
Voltaire: 5ft 3

And no, Napoleon wasn't that short. He was a shade off 5ft 7.

* Like a Scratch card, but French.

Day 39: I Am Disappointed In My Readers

For God's sake. I don't make this stuff up, you know. Granted, in the past I've stolen photographs randomly from the interweb (squirrels with light sabres, for example) to prove a point, but I do NOT expect to get emails asking for actual photographic evidence of things I say I've seen. My integrity is and always has been very important to me, but since I am being FORCED to defend myself in this instance, I DON'T expect to have to do it again.

If I SAY I've seen a shite re-enactment of the last 600 years of naval history using model ships, dry ice and water, I MEAN it - but since you insist, here's the photographic evidence.



Same with the tableau of the handless Caveman baby waving from the arms of his Caveman mother. It's not like I could MAKE IT UP, is it?



Honestly. You people. Next you'll be asking if there were any mechanical monkeys there yesterday. The answer's yes, and no you're not seeing the pictures. They're for my own private enjoyment, if you must know.

Day 39: I Don't Find Much To Write About

Haven't really been anywhere today. Well, I went on a nearly-two-hour bike ride up and down the old railway track and on some Rough Tracks through vineyards, waved at a few vineyardy type people on tiny tractors and saw a lot of sunflowers and flowers and that, and then found myself on a 2km-long very long incline in an oncoming wind. Got home, fell off the red bicycle and lay on the lawn panting while the dogs licked the sweat from my face, but otherwise I've just watched 'A Place In The Country' on telly and read emails and that. Oh, and had bean soup and raspberry yoghurt with a few seeds and nuts in for lunch, and an oatcake with cheese on.

It's raining now. Still, the words that I find funnier in French than in English are still good. In a way. If you want to feel the full benefit, imagine you're Charles de Gaulle making a speech from the top of something big:

Poney Club (Pone-eh klooob) Pony club.

Prix Choc (Preee shok) Surprisingly low prices.

Hard Discount (ahrd dees-koont) Surprisingly low prices, in a pikey kind of a way

Le Weekend (luh week-ende) The weekend.

Come to think of it my mother's shopping list was good:

Pork
Grillons
Melons
Red onions
Broccoli
Apples
Water
Goats' cheese
Membership of Alzheimer's Society for your father
New daughter

I added 'cock ring' and she sighed, because I always write 'cock ring' or 'gimp mask' on her shopping list, and I always laugh hysterically at my own sensationally sophisticated sense of humour, like I'm the lovechild of Lenny Bruce and Victoria Wood making the best joke in the word EVER for the first time.

Sigh.

Day 38: I Visit A Museum Or Two In La Rochelle

I promise I don't do it on purpose. Nothing much happened yesterday, apart from a bike ride and a story about Nair, the Cambridge Military Hospital and a Red Cross nurse, and nothing really happened today either. I wrote a boring post about things that sound funnier in French than in English (e.g. Poney Club), but deleted it because I'm the only person who finds that sort of thing funny.

Just as well I went to the Museum of Automata (hem hem), in La Rochelle this afternoon. We didn't know, we really didn't. We thought it would be full of quite serious bits of mechanical stuff, and old advertising and nicely made windy-uppy stuff. But it wasn't. "300 Animated People" it said on the sign outside. Not just people though. Oh no. Milkmaids milking cows (his tail moves as his eyes roll and she bleats a bit); glassy-eyed clowns with spinning heads; endless mechanical hedgehogs; ladypuppets drinking tea; monkeys pushing rats in carts; crosseyed flying fairies dressed in Christmas wrapping paper and a pig on a ladder.







And Judge Judy.












And, um, Roy Hudd. (Not the Emu bloke, the other one. You know the one. Looks like this.)








The thing that's beginning to trouble me, though, is the apparent inability the French have to make sure that their 'models' (moving or not) have adequate facial hair. You may remember Genghis Khan from Day 35. One eyebrow. You know. That one. Look. Here's his bloody brother. Where's his beard gone? What's the matter with his eyebrows? Why does no-one care except me?


I'm not even going to start on what happened when we went next door to the Museum of Tiny Models and saw a) the biggest model railway I have ever seen; b) the last 600 years of naval history re-enacted with the help of dry ice and models moving apparently independently through glassy water; c) a strange panel depicting Early Man, complete with a baby that waved even though it didn't have any hands. And that's without the bloody mechanical piano playing Simon and Garfunkel over and over again in the background. "Are you (plinky plink) going to (plinky plink) Scarborough Fair? (plinky plink?)" I am beginning to think that all of the French are on crack all of the time.

Day 37: I Attend The 'Festival Hippie' in Matha (Pop. 2,167)

I've only ever been to one festival, and that was a wanky middle-class one full of people called Henrietta off their tits on badly-rolled low-grade skunk, meeting all their advertising pals in the vodka tent and shouting 'wicked!!' in loud home-counties accents across the rolling hills of Shropshire. (I hasten to add that I am a middle class wanker, but at least I know it.) One day I hope to be thin and unselfconscious enough to go to more festivals, and not ones full of people I might have worked with once in the Dark Days.

Last night, however, I was enticed to the 'Festival Hippie' in Matha by this super lifesize model stationed on the roundabout on the road to Angouleme. Matha (as you definitely won't already know) is a teeny tiny town with not much in it apart from 4 pharmacies, a supermarket and a bloke in a 2CV van, so we weren't expecting much.

I was, to be honest, both surprised and delighted. It was like I hear a real festival is like, but in miniature. 2 stalls of hippy tat, including bongs of various shades, patchwork pantaloons and Peruvian scarves; 1 tiny beer tent and some excellent banners which you can see above. (What relevance Marilyn Manson, Bob Marley (x4) and Johnny Halliday have to a hippy festival I couldn't tell you, but then the French have never been famous for their contribution to popular music.) We ate nice sausages in bread, drank local beer, and waved at our friends. It was nice. Small, but nice. And not really like a festival. But nice.

The musical highlight of the last night of this 3-day extravaganza was Ronnie Carryl (short, bearded, long hair) who is distinguished by having played guitar with Phil Collins, and known to the French as 'Ronnie-Carryl-Guitariste-Phil-Collins'. He got his childhood mate Charlie up on stage (Charlie is, we guessed, a quantity surveyor from Godalming), and Charlie sang badly.

The people working on the door let in someone with a goat on a string, but wouldn't let in a braying middle-class English woman who was trying to smuggle in a half bottle of wine with a screw-top. ("But I live here!" "And?"). We couldn't find the car, of course, even though there were only about 30 cars in the car park, but then from what I hear, it wouldn't be a festival if you could find your car easily. I know the only time I ever went to a festival it took us 3 hours to find the Micra.

Can't blame them for trying, although somehow Johnny Halliday banners, Blur on the PA and the following sign, spied at the entrance to the 'site' (i.e. field next to barn owned by the local community) tells me they might (just) have missed the point: