Phobias - Fat Dogs and French Estates - page 124

Thoroughly irritated at having to curtail his deep discussion about nuts and bolts, Jack
turned in disgust.
“What's wrong, Gordon?” he barked.
“Charles,” came the rasped response.
“What?”
He was never going to get the hang of this Christian name conundrum; it was obvious
I needed to help out.
“Charles, it's Charles darling, that's his first name.”
“Right then, Charles. I'll get signore to stop and you'll have to get out.”
“But I can't,” came the pitiful reply.
“What d'you mean you can't?”
“Desperately sorry, but I just can't get out on the ledge. I'm afraid I might faint.”
Jack, who has no comprehension of human frailties and even less interest in being dip-
lomatic about them, was exasperated by this response.
“What? Right, bloody strange if you ask me. Well, Charles, try to breathe deeply and
pull yourself together and I'll get signore to stop at the next football pitch-sized piece of
level ground. Please do not vomit all over us. Just point in the other direction.”
I tried to minimise the trauma for the wretched Charles by suggesting that we swap
places so he could be on the hillside, but he declared that the manoeuvre was far too risky
because we were still moving. As evidence of the dangers involved he pointed at a couple
of pebbles that fell off the track, sure indicators of a treacherous surface and obviously sus-
ceptible to imminent subsidence.
Nodding sagely I gave up on that idea and opted for the safer talking-him-to-death
ruse to keep his mind off the horror of the drop. As luck would have it, I spotted an empty
oil drip-tray rolling around the floor, so stuffed that into his hand in the event that he was
overcome by a gastric emergency.
We finally made it to the top and poured Charles out of the car so he could regain his
land-legs for the return journey. From this point we could see everything we needed to see.
As I feared, it was indeed mainly steep, bare slopes of rocky scree. The photographs of
woodland shown in the blurb had been of a copse (presumably taken from various angles)
and outcrops of trees on the higher areas.
What a crying shame . Fortunately and only because Jack was still very much 'onside'
with signore , he took this relatively well. He turned to his new buddy.
“So tell us about the hunting you do here,” he said. “We're very keen on shooting
pheasant and rabbit and we'd also like to start shooting boar and deer.”
Signore looked a bit confused.
“Ah yez, buta mya hunting paradise is inside my house,” he said with a chuckle. “I do
alla mya shooting in Africa. I can show you mya tropheze again if you want.”
“ No , thank you,” was the collective reply.