The Latest from Merrie England. And a sorry tale of loss..
..of how Jools Holland cost me more than €1000..
Firstly, thanks for reading this. I’m so delighted that you are taking precious time out of your day to read my scribblings from rural France and it’s just a pleasure to be able to communicate with you. I’m doubly delighted to see that you are not alone and that there are others, all potential friends!
To business, then. You’re here to see the latest Merrie England strip and see it you shall. As always, only the last strip you see below is the latest and the preceding ones remind you of the story line.
Now, about this Jools Holland fellow. And by the way, this very much has to do with living here in France, so I’m not digressing at all, as you’ll see.
I’m quite a fan of his and in truth, nothing makes me smile more than when he plays boogie-woogie. I’m not sure if it’s a dying art or not but very few music styles are so thoroughly joyful, so we need to support anyone who’s doing it well.
Earlier this year, March, I think, I was talking to my son on the phone. He lives in England - Leeds, in fact - and he was gleefully telling me that he had just booked tickets for him and his wife to see Jools Holland at one of the big venues in Leeds. Then, as I made some approving noise about this, he seemed to hit upon an idea.
“Do you want to come, too, Dad?”
“Certainly and with great pleasure. In fact, I’m sure we’d both like to come, if that’s OK.”
”Give me a few minutes…”
He called back to tell me that we would now all be meeting up in Leeds this coming December. This would be his Christmas present to us. Two tickets to see Jools Holland. Lovely!
I was delighted, as was Leona, my wife.
So, that was that. A family gathering and my boy picking up the bill.
It wasn’t until this last week or so that we started thinking about it again. How to get there, where to stay and all that.
It’s a convention in our family, for reasons long lost but firmly understood, that we don’t stay in each other’s houses when visiting. Thankfully, we have all had decent careers and have avoided the most wasteful vices like gambling, drug-taking and golf, so there has always been a bit of cash down the back of the sofa cushion to pay for a hotel stay here and there when we want to visit each other.
It was around this last week, as I said, that it started to dawn on us, with growing bitterness, what this well-intentioned and generous gift was going to cost us. I mean to say, I don’t mind paying for a theatre ticket but this was starting to look like a true financial haemorrhage.
From our corner here in the south-west of France, there is no flight in December to Leeds/Bradford Airport, so we started to look further afield. We checked departures from Bordeaux, Limoges, Poitiers and La Rochelle but drew a blank with the lot. Some of these routes are only open for six months, so are nothing but fairweather friends.
To cut a long and oath-strewn story short, the itinerary now looks like this:
Drive to Poitiers, a trip of forty-five minutes. At least this will be on French roads, so we’ll have more than three inches between us and the cars in front, behind and either side.
Take a plane to London Stansted Airport. Well, the flight is an hour and a half but there’s all the business of being “processed” by the authoirties, so this will expand to around three hours.
Stay overnight at one of the hotels at Stansted. A three-hour drive to Leeds after all that mucking about is out of the question.
Buy dinner at the Hotel.
Buy drinks, too, probably.
Pick up hire car the next day. At least we will have fortified ourselves with a plentiful and tasty breakfast, for which we will have paid handsomely.
Drive to Leeds in a three-inch road envelope, cars and lorries bustling around us, risking life, vehicle and sanity. Arrive at Leeds and pay for three nights’ parking at our hotel near the Headingley cricket ground.
After this, we will visit my son, daughter-in-law and grandson. Hopefully, this will be a great opportunity to mess about to regress by about 60 years playing childish games. And we might even play with our grandson, too. Actually, that’s not fair on my son and daughter-in-law but I couldn’t resist the small but rather pathetic joke. After all, this story is stressful enough without avoiding even the smallest joke opportunity.
There will be meals to eat and most of these will be in restaurants. It’s OK, we can afford it (he wept), and then we’ll enjoy the gig, have some quality time with the family and then do the whole list above again in reverse, dropping the hire car at Stansted.
I refuse even to get a calculator out to find out what the true damage is for this trip but it will be substantial. On the plus side, though, I haven’t seen my son since late May, when I stupidly bought he and I tickets to go and see a game at Tottenham Hotpsur’s sumptuous new stadium in London. No hire car was needed for this trip but everything else was.
You’d think I’d learned my lesson, wouldn’t you? But in my defence, I agreed to the Jools Holland gig a full two months before I had to think about flying into Stansted to watch Spurs stumbling to defeat aginst the mighty Brentford F.C.
I suppose that, if I had never left England, it would still have been something of a trip. We used to live just a few minutes from Stansted airport but would have had no need to use it. Just a car trip, hotel and dinners
Living here in France is, I think, easiest for those with no family in other countries but when I come to think of it, that little bit of a barrier to travel makes the trips to visit the offspring just a touch rarer, so in theory at least, more gratifying.
Weighing it all up, though, I would still prefer to spend my time here in France, in a lovely bucolic setting where life is at a much more relaxed pace.
It’s just that all this quiet relaxed living comes at a pretty high price..
P.S. Before I go, here’s a link to something on my YouTube channel. You can subscribe to that as well, if it grabs you by the interests!