23 August 2018
Les continentals expulsées
A mercy errand.
By Nihc, Nihc
Shh, c’est moi. Et pourquoi est-ce que j’écrise en Français? Aha, je suis déguisé.
Sorry about that, but I had to fool the moronic editors of the Shaw Sheet (who said that they would never again publish anything I had written) that they had a brilliant new French writer. That’s why my name appears as “Nihc, nihc” rather than “Chin, Chin”. Clever, eh? Fortunately they are too stupid to get beyond the first line of anything which they think is in French so we are quite safe now. Wow, what MI6 missed by not making me an offer.
Actually the deception is fairer than it looks, because I am, in fact, in France. I hadn’t been here for some time, to be honest, not since I flushed my passport down the loo in fury after the Australians beat us at rugby. Since then it’s been down to Canvey Island for the hols. Quite nice in a way – somehow the smart set do not seem to have discovered it so you could call it exclusive – and it does have its own fashions. I have rather a nice medallion, which would pass for gold, unless you actually tested it.
Anyway, everything changed when the loo got blocked and the plumber found the passport wedged across the drain. It had changed colour a bit over the years – obtaining a Canvey Island tan more or less, but it is surprising how you can restore things with a toothbrush and a bit of soap. No, not my toothbrush, obviously. I’m not stupid. There are advantages to flat sharing. Anyway, once my passport was restored I thought I ought to use it. You see those continentals are probably having a wretched time since we decided to throw them all out of the EU and I thought they must need something to cheer them up. Being generous by nature, I went myself.
It is one thing to decide to go to France and quite another to make up your mind how to do it. Approaches have varied over the years. I think it must have been Edward III or the Black Prince who, summoned by the French king to do homage for Gascony, offered to come with a helmet on his head and an army of 50,000 men. Stylish of course, but that sort of thing has rather gone out of fashion. No doubt I could get a good helmet on eBay, but my friends from the Dog and Duck (even if they would all come along which is doubtful) would hardly be equivalent to 50,000 armed retainers. No, something more modest was called for; taking the car through the Channel Tunnel, for example.
There isn’t much excitement in taking a car to France these days. When I was young, you had to put it on a ferry, but that was the second sailing of the day. In order to get to Dover from North Essex where we lived, you had to find your way across the Thames and, unless you wanted to go into the middle of London, that meant taking the ferry from Tilbury to Gravesend. It wasn’t a very long ride, to be sure, but for all that you had to wait for the next ferry to come in and then drive aboard, fitting your car in between lorries. We used to take a caravan which added to the excitement, and by the time we reached the shores of Kent, it was time to stop for a large breakfast before travelling on to the coast. Alas, I am too young to remember the days before roll-on/roll-off ferries were introduced across the Channel, but I remember them on the Irish crossing from Fishguard where roll-on/roll-off was introduced later.
What a performance with drivers standing around on the dock side as the cars were unloaded by crane waiting for theirs to appear! That wasn’t necessarily the end of it, either, because your car might come down with a jolt, leaving you to spend the next part of your holiday wondering why it no longer went in a straight line.
The Eurotunnel shuttle is tame compared with all that, and it gives you long enough to fit the headlight deflectors which have replaced a visit to the garage to adjust the whole system. Yes, it is more convenient, of course, but arguably it is less fun.
There were other things too; getting your bankers to arrange for a foreign bank to give you credit, sitting in the garden of your French hotel waiting for the operators to put through your call to the UK, and, of course, eating your first croissant, in those days a pastry which you could not obtain in England.
It is easy to get nostalgic on arriving in France and I have to say that sitting in the square, trying to avoid being drawn into English by the waitress who had somehow worked out that I was not a local, I rather regretted those early days when the food was all different and they did not speak English. Still, this is not really a holiday, more an errand of mercy. How am I to cheer the poor blighters up in the face of their pending expulsion?
