Jack and Sam - Fat Dogs and French Estates - page 2

This was a bad idea. After a couple of kilometres a second police car, pulsating with
blue lights, drew alongside. The gendarme thrust a neon wand out of the window and ges-
ticulated frantically towards the hard shoulder. Obviously he was trying to attract my at-
tention, so something terrible must have happened. In response, exercising great caution, I
pulled over and the police car screamed up behind. This was when the very agitated gen-
darme burst out of his vehicle and started banging on the passenger window. Jack, still
bleary-eyed, opened the window a slit to be greeted by a barrage of noisy demands. They
roughly translated as, “When I say stop, you stop! ”
Typically, instead of accepting blame, Jack pointed out that he wasn't driving, but la
chauffeuse on the other side of the car, holding the steering wheel, was. Therefore would
they please direct their complaints to her?
Moments like this can be tricky when one's command of French isn't up to the stand-
ard expected by the Police Nationale. They can be even trickier if one's husband is suscept-
ible to periods of diplomatic 'black-outs'. Amongst those who fall prey to his acerbic com-
ments (in addition to confused gendarmes) are call-centre personnel, journalists, business
consultants and politicians. He regards most people as incompetent until they have reached
at least fifty years of age and delivered at least ten years of consistently impeccable work.
Other than that he's often perfectly fine.
Jack continued to be disagreeable and grumpy. He maintained that anyone contem-
plating the arrest of a front-seat passenger for an undefined motoring offence obviously
needed a good night's sleep and should let him do the same. Fortunately this outburst was
in English and largely lost on the officers. Eventually everyone, including the dogs, calmed
down and the truth was revealed. There were no disasters on the road. There was nothing
too wrong with my speed. The real problem was our headlights. They were focused slightly
to the left and therefore presented a grave danger to all other motorists ('all', I reckoned,
amounted to the police car and one lorry I had spotted earlier).
“ Zut alors! ” A catastrophe indeed!
With many sincere apologies, we pledged to leave the autoroute at the next exit, find
a semi-reflective wall and adjust our headlights to ensure they no longer presented a lethal
threat to other road-users.
This regrettable incident had occurred in the midst of our life-changing decision to buy
a second home in France. It had started one day many months previously after a serious
discussion about how we intended to spend our dotage. Jack had just retired and I was keen
to do the same. This meant we needed a plan, a team plan. The team included our dogs,
Sam and Biff, because whatever non-work activity I undertook, it usually involved them.
Jack is a mechanical engineer who had spent his entire career working in the manu-
facturing industry. His straight-talking, dominant nature had stood him in excellent stead
for this. However, when coupled with his zero-tolerance threshold, awkward situations had
often arisen. Quite frankly, he has the patience level of a wolverine on crack and frequently