Two announcements before I start ranting:
(1) Londoners: I’m getting into London this Saturday afternoon. I’m leaving again on Thursday and probably won’t be back until after New Year’s. I’m keen to see as many of you as possible, particularly those I didn’t manage to catch last time, so give me an email or wait until my phone is in the UK and contact me there, 078 17772635. Suggestions for Saturday night gratefully received.
(2) Wellingtonians: heritage couch free to a good home! My sister’s shifting, and the couch she inherited from me is surplus to requirements. This is the marvellous gold/green creature that so happily participated in every party at Todman St. It’s a bit threadbare but it’s dead comfy and my mum has a photo of me sitting on it as a baby, so it’s been in the family for a long time and I’d like to see it placed where someone will give it the same loving attention I always did. Anyone interested, call Miriam on 021
137 8640. (You’ll have to pick it up, mind.)
After my expedition to Montpellier, Avignon and Carcassonne, I returned to Julian’s place in Auch. I was backtracking for a very specific purpose: I had been invited on what promised to be a very worthwhile expedition to Andorra.
So, Friday morning and the bags were packed, the car loaded, and we set off bright and early. Very bright and very early. This was a problem. you see, the previous night we had experienced… Tip Top. And Julian had experienced it more than anybody.
Let’s see if I can run this down.
Julian lives in a roomy apartment next to a high school. The education system that he’s entangled in, working as a language assistant, also provided this accommodation which he has, essentially to himself. He does have a nominal room-mate, Jan, who only very occasionally appears to make use of his sparsely furnished room, thus giving Julian all the freedom he requires to kick balls through doorways. Mostly, Jan lives with wife and children in a different place entirely.
When I got back to Auch, I was surprised to find that Jan had chosen to materialise. He’s tall, very agreeable, quite young for someone with wife and multiple children, and when he practised his English with me it was really quite good. Certainly vastly better than my French. Anyway, that Thursday November 22 was the night of the release of the new Beaujolais, and Jan proposed we go out for a little drink to mark the occasion. We readily agreed. We would, it transpired, be meeting up with another person, a
female colleague of Jan’s. All well and good. Evening came, out we went, and the wine was ordered and tried – as Julian put it delicately, ‘it’s very young’. Jan agreed that it’s always terrible. (Why the entire country makes a song and dance each year over what seems to be universally agreed as a crap wine, I have no idea. Genuine French culture for you, anyway.)
Jan’s friend showed up, a fierce-talking chain-smoking deputy principal just barely in her thirties, one of those women with career in her blood. As we consumed more wine I was less and less able to understand her rapidfire French, and before long she and Jan were having an intense and unintelligible conversation across the table, the barrage of French diagonally separating me from Julian. We just smiled and nodded to each other and the wine kept coming.
Finally we got up to leave, and I was quite ready for bed. But the night was just beginning. We jumped from bar to bar, getting drunker and drunker, the time getting later and later. As Jan and his colleague sink deeper into each other’s company, Julian and I welcomed fellow language assistant Andrew, who had been led a merry mobile-phone chase around Auch before tracking us down. Andrew is an sturdy Irish lad of 21 years, with a ready smile and a penchant for rugby. It was at his rugby training that he met Go, who was also with him that night. Go is Japanese, represented Japan in the Sevens at one time, and played rugby in Canterbury, befriending along the way such Kiwi rugby legends as Todd Blackadder, former All Black captain. And here he was in southern France, with not a whit of French to his name, to play rugby for Auch.
So we chatted, and marvelled at how Go really is called Go, and I was able once again to wheel out the story of how I used to play basketball with How and Why. (Although, okay, not at the same time, and their names are spelt Hao and Wai. Hey Hao! You’re an anecdote!)
And then we made it to the infamous Auch nightspot… Tip Top.
They checked us in the camera before opening the door to let us in. It was by now circa 2am on a school night but the place was just starting to fill up. I was ready to go home but I hung on – I couldn’t leave Julian behind! The group’s reasoning process was by this time well impaired, and with a bottle and a half of Beaujolais under my belt alone I was in no state to lead the group out of the Valley of Death/Tip Top. I called it a night when the bottle of whisky appeared, leaving Julian to battle on while Jan and his colleague were, ah, becoming steadily more collegial.
Julian sprinted in sometime in the region of 5am, a third of a bottle of whisky later. We were due at the car about 9.30. It was, needless to say, to be a long ride to Andorra.
Oh, Jan appeared at 9ish, as Julian and I were getting ready to leave. There, my friends, is another piece of French culture for you.
next: Andorra!
[waybackmachine link to original]