Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I was in the middle of this call and worried about losing the signal, despite it being pretty ob-
vious to the person on the other end that something was amiss as I was trying to shoo Junior
away under my breath and gagging from the stench rising from the puddle.
'Is everything OK?' the caller asked. 'Is it raining there?'
'No, no,' I replied as I flicked Junior the V-sign, 'Everything's fine. I'm standing next to a
waterfall.'
All of us, at some time or another, have been victims of crime. The violation one feels after-
wards can linger and promote a kind of debilitating paranoia until the transgression, no matter
how trivial, gets blown out of all proportion. Serious crime is worse; it feels like a personal
attack and recovery, if it happens at all, can take years without ever being fully completed.
The doubts always remain. The thing is I didn't expect this particularly drowsy corner of the
Loire to throw up this kind of problem but it did, and my bucolic paradise had become, albeit
temporarily, somewhat tarnished. In short, we had been 'scrumped'.
Now some of you may be thinking that apart from the victims of queue jumping this is pretty
much as trivial as crime gets and that it would take an incredibly petty and small-minded in-
dividual to make much of an issue out of it. You'd be right of course, but in my role as pin-up
boy for the 'Petty, Small Mindedness' minority, I did make an issue out of it. I was bloody
annoyed.
Someone was stealing my cherries.
Natalie, of course with her sunny disposition and belief in the basic goodness of humanity
was convinced that it was the birds that were doing it, but the evidence definitely suggested
otherwise.
'If it's the birds,' I said, scratching my chin and giving it the full Poirot, 'why are there no
cherry stones at the base of the tree, eh? Answer me that!'
'They take them away?' she replied, a touch patronisingly.
'OK, but point two: why are they only taking cherries that are at arm's reach? Hmm? The
top of the tree still has loads of cherries on it.'
Incontrovertible evidence, in my book, that it was a human behind this travesty and, unable
to argue against it, she stomped off muttering something about mental illness.
The problem I now had was to try and stop the remaining cherries from falling into enemy
hands. I couldn't climb the tree because the fruit was right at the top and the branches wouldn't
take my weight; Natalie forbade me to send one of the boys up there as it was pretty high and
possibly a bit dangerous and the third option had disaster written all over it: me, on a very
rickety old wooden ladder standing precariously on uneven ground while I stretched myself
up to pick the fruit. Natalie did offer up a fourth option which was to leave the fruit where it
was, stop arsing about and stop obsessing about things.
'Hmm,' I said, 'have we not met?'
