DIARY
VICKI WOODS Two weeks buried in la France profonde among fields full of sunflowers has left me fat and sleepy and almost cured of my addiction. I can take or leave most of the things that are habit-forming and bad for your heart-rate, but I've been on three newspapers a day since I was 12: it's a hard habit to kick. For the first five days after we left England, either I or my similarly addicted husband drove 15-, 20-, 30-mile round-trips to bar-tabacs looking for com- forting and familiar newsprint. We were both desperate for a bit of Christchurch or Maastricht or the tumbling franc and we seized whatever we could find: truffling up three-day-old Daily Mails or Suns or yester- day's Telegraph. But sanity and the sunflow- ers gradually prevailed and the English newspapers' traditional August silly season helped to make the search seem more and more foolish. Newspapers are a habit that needs to be fed daily. Forty-eight hours without taking the tabloids leaves too many gaps to fill even for a print-junkie like me. Cartoons, leader-pages and columnists become incomprehensible. What are wider and wider bands? Who are these bastards? Is it the Pope who's dead or the King of the Belgians? Where were all these people who were anti-ERM when I needed them most, i.e. at dinner? What in heaven's name is a Power Mum? My office has kept a pile of newsprint for me 18 inches high. Shall I just sign the pledge and recycle the lot ?
Iam not addicted to The Archers, but the Sunday repeats are an insidious little habit while I wallow in the bath. `Ambridge' in BBCshire is twinned with `Merouel', if that's how you spell it, in France, and the twin-town storyline irri- tates me every time it burbles out, not because of Lynda Snell's French accent or Clarrie Grundy's adventurous cooking but because the whole Poulsonesque concept of twinning is dead and it should be left to lie, along with slagheaps and Gannex rain- coats. My own home town of Lancaster flattened a 14th-century hostelry in the Sev- enties to raise up a jerrybuilt shopping mall called Perpignan Way. What possessed the councillors? I'm used to gritting my teeth every time I swing past the Alencon Link in Basingstoke (it links a roundabout with another roundabout), but we all howled aloud at the rue de Basingstoke in the pret- ty Normandy town of Alencon. Who seduced whom in the twinning blind date? Did Wellingborough approach Niort or Niort Wellingborough? Can les Niortais pronounce Wellingborough? Did Nantes find Tredegar or the other way round? I'd be hard put to find Tredegar myself on a route-map of Britain. We were heading for the Charente-Maritime coastline one bril- liant morning and rolled into a dullish sea- side town south of La Rochelle called Chataillelon-Plages. Two streets and a strip of red sand. It is not jumelee avec Dawlish or Paignton or Budleigh Salterton or some- where even vaguely buckets and spades. It's twinned with Knebworth.
We should, of course, have had a lot of money to chuck about ourselves. I am mortified to think that I spend hours of my life poring over newsprint only to retain recondite information about the Duchess of York's blessed flak-jacket, when the rest of the world and George Soros are conning the financial pages. We must be the only people who changed our sterling into French francs travellers' cheques to travel out with, and brought 1200FF back across the Channel to change into sterling. My MD, Terry Mansfield, occasionally sug- gests, during annual budget meetings, that I `run Harpers & Queen as though it was your own money'. Heaven forfend.
We began our fortnight in France not in Charente-Poitou but in a small village house in north Brittany. I am notoriously bad and last-minute at choosing holidays, hating the hours of organised and careful preparation that has to underpin seemingly `effortless' serendipity. I say, 'Enough! This one! Let's book it!' So travel editors can always rely on me for the 'Hell' angle in those Holidays in Heaven and Hell round- ups. From the brochure, I could see that the gite was small and rough-and-ready but thought it would be good for my pampered adolescent children. They could bicycle out each morning to practise their French at the depot du pain. Wiser virgins murmured counsel, which I ignored. My colleague Caroline Clifton-Mogg described how her best friend would always fly out alone beforehand to give an untried house the once-over before committing her family to it for a fortnight. Well, really. On the ferry out, I prepared everybody with lectures about roughing it and everyone mucking in to fetch logs. 'This isn't one of your poncy luxury holidays,' I said. 'OK, OK,' they said, being good-hearted children. When we unlocked the front door of 'Nous Sommes Ici' despair crept up and locked around my heart. The owners have decorated their Breton cottage to `UK Standard', boxing in the beams and laying carpet-tiles on all floors. They left typewritten sheets of paper cheerfully explaining why. 'Most French holiday gites,' it said, 'are furnished by their French owners, who have a different lifestyle and different priorities to a British family.' Oh, yes? Artlessly, the copy rolled on: 'Often there are no easy chairs, only dining furniture, frequently no separate kitchen, cold tiles on the floor . . . Heating is often by open log-fire only, and although the idea is romantic it's often inconvenient whilst holiday-making. We have endeav- oured to provide as many 'home comforts' as possible with carpets throughout, electric convector heaters in all rooms, proper sani- tary and laundry facilities.' The proper san- itary facilities included mauve, scented loo- rolls. The big stone fireplace had been boxed in. The kitchen had nothing French in it. No sharp knives, no crab's-claw crack- ers, no amusing long wicker basket to stick your bread in, nor little twisty jug to put oil in one side and vinegar in the other. Even Clarrie Grundy would have been disap- pointed. Wildly, I opened all the cupboards and discovered a tin of Sainsbury's rata- touille Provencale and a St Michael's Liver and Bacon Complete Meal in Onion Gravy with Potatoes for One. A note said, 'We hope you brought your teabags with you because French tea is weak and awful!' There was no coffee-pot in the house. We ate every meal out, including breakfast, for three days, ignoring another helpful note that said, 'Eating out, particularly in tourist spots, is quite expensive — unless you have a taste for mussels and muscadet!' Give me strength. If you didn't have such tastes, what the hell were you doing in Brittany in the first place? I went to plug in the (French) portable phone we'd hired, to call for help. The (French) plug wouldn't fit. Every single socket in the Breton cottage had been rewired to take a square English three-pin plug. We moved south, swiftly.
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