Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'Er, I don't know, Samuel's tricycle!'
'I'm not leaving his tricycle in the road! Hurry up!'
It was a fair point and I went haring off. Five minutes later I returned and of course the space
had gone. I got out of my car and just stared at the 'foreign' object, a gleaming BMW. I closed
my eyes, threw my head back and just howled, the frustration and fatigue combining to make
it a primeval cry from the depths of middle-class, small-town-frustration hell. Neighbours
came to their windows to see what could possibly have happened to tear apart their peaceful
Sunday morning so violently, and what they saw was me standing in the middle of the road,
my car blocking the traffic, my eyes closed and my head thrown back roaring at the sky. The
fact that I was impeccably dressed must only have added to the 'man at the end of his tether'
feel of the scene, and as someone in a blocked car started beeping his horn at me I just stayed
frozen in that position, unwilling to move.
Natalie came out, waving nervously at the neighbours and apologising to whoever it was
beeping their horn. She put her hand on my arm and said quietly in my ear, 'Go inside, my
love, go inside. I'll put the car away.' I began to trudge off, 'And Ian,' she said firmly, 'we need
a holiday.'
I remember, as a ten-year-old child, watching Ian Botham hitting six after mighty six over
the heads of the Australian fielders; his mixture of swagger and belligerence was utterly cap-
tivating. It was the summer of 1981 and 'Botham's Ashes', and I was stood outside a Radio
Rentals in Truro unable to move. I was spellbound and despite my dad, not a fan of cricket
in the slightest, imploring me to move so that we could get on with what had hitherto been a
pretty dull Cornish holiday, I couldn't. My love of cricket started there; a lifelong passion that
would lead to days glued to the television or radio and nights poring over statistics. I knew
even then that this was life-changing, not just for Ian Botham, but for me.
Over twenty years later and I was standing outside an estate agent's in a small town in the
Loire Valley, going through a similar shop-on-the-high-street life-changing epiphany.
'Have you seen how much places cost around here?' I asked rhetorically, Natalie having
wandered off down the road with Samuel. She knew the score. Natalie's parents, despite be-
ing the main reason that we had moved to Crawley, for which I will never truly forgive them,
also had a small holiday cottage nearby. We had been visiting every year for the last ten years.
We loved the place. Danielle, Natalie's mum, is French and some of her younger siblings
grew up in the town and her father was Post Master there; Natalie's grandparents, who were
coming for lunch, still lived locally.
The town is everything you imagine a small, rural French community to be. It has a large,
dominating church, a small chateau on the riverbank, a couple of nice restaurants, two or
three bars, a number of
boulangeries
,
charcuteries
and
alimentations
, a grand-looking Hôtel
de Ville, a weekly farmers' market and, as with every small French town, about half a dozen
