I had a birthday..
Yes, indeed, I had one of those landmark birthdays recently and it made me stop and think, as these birthdays have a habit of doing.
I decided that, instead of dropping you a line every Monday, as I had started to do, I would only do it every second Monday. Why? Well, I assume you already have a pretty busy life and that if I write too often, you may not have the leisure to open the email.
But if it’s a little less frequent, you might be more inclined to read my limpid prose..
You may wonder what prompted this, so I’ll tell you what I’ve noticed. Some of you don’t open my message right away and that’s fine, but the result is the filling up of a busy Inbox with stuff that you’re yet to read. Then, seemingly only a few days later, you see my name in the Inbox again and I start to become just a little bit of a nuisance. And after just a few more days, it all looks a little time-consuming to read a stack of emails the greater part of which are really not of crucial importance. So you may end up never opening them and just deleting the lot.
So I’m sparing you, you see? Out of self-interest, as much as anything else!
But if I’ve got this wrong and enough of you are perfectly happy to revert back to the ‘once a week’ format, then I shall follow your wishes.
So please drop me a message and let me know what you’d prefer. In fact, drop me a message anyway and just say ‘hello’, if you like!
Here’s the latest from Merrie England, with, as usual, the last being the latest..
‘Twas my birthday..
And so it was that, on the morning of my most recent and significant birthday, Leona and I picked up our very good friend Alan to start a two-day visit to the pretty city of Périgueux, a two-hour drive south of Chef-Boutonne, our home town. We were going to celebrate my birthday with our friends Pamela and Chris, along with Alan, so we were, as the London slang would have it, ‘mob-handed’ and ready for a bit of fun.
Leona and I like to go to Périgieux from time to time as it reminds us of the early days of our connection with France. Back in 2003 we bought a cute and picturesque house in The Dordogne, in a hamlet called La Boissière D’Ans, deep in the heart of the Périgord region. Then, as now, you could buy French houses almost with your beer money, it seemed, so inexpensive were they in comparison to our own in England.
It was a holiday home, or maison secondaire, as they are known in France. In the link above, you’ll see our house on the left; the one with the external staircase.
This birthday trip promised an exceptional meal in one of the vanishingly few Indian restaurants in France. We had been there a couple of times before so we knew that it shouldn’t disappoint. For all of you who live in mainland Britain, and have curry houses at your very elbow at any time, day or night, I should tell you that if you go to live in rural France, you will soon start pining. Out in the sticks, there’s no food delivery and indeed, no taxi service. In towns it’s different but we Brits who emigrate to France (I have no truck with this ‘ex-pat’ idea; we are immigrants here) seem always to want to live the bucolic life, so variation of cuisine is hard to achieve without becoming an expert in your own kitchen.
Our little house was very much a rural retreat and the nearest decent-sized town was the city of Périgueux, with its cobbled streets and cute little independent shops and cafés. Since the middle ages, of course, the city has sprawled a bit, as have I since my own middle age. We didn’t always visit Périgueux on our trips to our holiday home but we knew that it was always there, within reach, just twenty-five minutes away by car.
The hotel chain Ibis is our ‘go-to’ staple when travelling. The reason? Without fail, you will have an excellent and clean bed and a good, hot shower. They keep each hotel up to the same high standards, in our experience, so when we think about travelling, we check their availability first.
When you think about it, that’s what most travellers need, isn’t it? I have stayed in some dreadful places over the years but since discovering Ibis around twenty years ago, I have never found discarded underwear or socks in the beds or alarming wet patches on the carpet, just where you blindly put your foot down to get out of bed.
We chose the Ibis Périgueax Centre for our stay, having been there the previous year. On that occasion, we had risen for breakfast and had found ourselves surrounded in the restaurant by gigantic, willowy young black fellows with earphones in, langorously pushing breakfast victuals into their faces, staring into the abyss of their smartphones the while. I remarked to Leona that, by the size of these fellows and the fact that they all seemed to be wearing some kind of sports clothing, that they might be the modern iteration of The Harlem Globetrotters. An hour or so later, a huge and sumptuous bus arrived to pick them all up on the hotel forecourt. Emblazoned on the side of the coach? “The Harlem Globetrotters”. I checked online and found that they had been playing an exhibition match in the suburb of Boulazac the night before.
This year, though, there were no evident celebrities, although I was treated (almost) like a celebrity when I checked in. Leona and I are on their central computer system and the eagle-eyed girl at reception spotted my birth date and smiled a jolly “joyeux anniversaire” at me. How very pleasant.
At this point, and I promise you that I am not sponsored by Ibis, I should mention with pleasure the marvellous attitude of all the staff working there. Somebody somewhere - quite possibly the very genial manager - had instilled in the team the simple idea that smiling makes everybody’s day better. Quite literally, everybody from the manager to the room cleaners were bright with smiles and that added significantly to the pleasure of our stay.
We all met during late afternoon in the town centre, needless to say, settling ourselves outside a welcoming bar facing onto the Place Saint Louis. In fact, the bar was called The Saint Louis. Click on the link above and you’ll see it.
We ordered refreshments and took our time, enjoying the warmth of the day. Being now officially ancient, I was pacing myself with the beers. Didn’t want to be roistering before the appropriate hour, you see. And mindful, as I must be these days, so stricken in years that I am, of keeping at least some of tomorrow’s pleasure until the morning. As an old colleague once said, after an evening during which he had allowed himself to be monstrously over-served, that he had had all of today’s happiness the night before. A telling remark, in my experience.
Our table was booked for seven-thirty, so we arrived with the idea of eating al fresco in the bosky courtyard of the restaurant. But my friends sniffed the air with wrinkled noses and grimaces of distaste and so we asked to be seated inside.
There had been a lot of drain cleaning going on in the city that day…
My meal was excellent but all my friends, and Leona too, had less than approving things to say. A portion was too small, a dish wasn’t as expected and most heinous of all, the rice wasn’t good. I had ordered a mutton biryani and it was excellent, so I was quite happy. I couldn’t help thinking that I should have avoided telling them how excellent the place was in the days leading up to our visit. Better to under sell and over deliver, after all, isn’t it?
There was wine on the table, too, and I had that feeling that we were starting to eat into the next day’s joy. But by now, it was around nine o’clock, which means that I was quite near to my normal bedtime. All would be well…
We trotted back to the hotel and, it being a fairly balmy night, we ordered more wine. Need I go on?
The next morning was something of a struggle but, as the notorious toper W. C. Fields was heard to say, on being asked how he could cope with a hangover every morning, you “know that from now on, it’s only going to get better.”
Chris and Pamela went home that morning, having arrived a day before we did. Despite their disappointment with the Indian meal, they were quite enchanted by the hotel and the city, even going so far as to suggest a second visit later in the year. Apparently, there’s a lavender exhibition. Or something.
I spent much of the morning in a big armchair facing out onto the river Isle, just on the other side of the road from the forecourt. I’d had the idea to do some drawing but my hands didn’t seem all that interested. It would have taken too much effort to persuade them, as well, so my art satchel remained redundant at my side.
Leona wasn’t feeling too wonderful, although that will not have been to do with the drinking, as she hadn’t overindulged the night before. She wanted to stay at the hotel so I drove myself and Alan to see our old homestead, as shown above, and generally gave him a bit of a tour of the area.
That night, the three remaining voyagers dined across the river at a very homely restaurant called “Restaurant La Cantina”, where it was universally agreed that the food was excellent. The owner, Jérome, found the time to chat with us for a while, too. He seemed particularly keen to know why it was that Britain had voted to leave the EU.
I don’t like to use these pages for anything political, so I won’t go through that conversation and will close the narrative here.
The next morning we left for Chef-Boutonne with the certain idea that before too long, we would be back.
Have you had a chance to look at Merrie England on the WebToon pages, yet? The strips are done now in the phone- and tablet-friendly format, which has allowed me to revisit each cartoon and draw it again, using the skills that I’ve learned over the last couple of years. I’ve only completed the first sixteen but I’m fairly racing along.
There’s a lot more work in this new format but I hope that, in time, the strips will be far more engaging and attractive than in the old style.
See you again soon!