Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
market meal for two and the serving suggestion imploring that one of you stock up on bread
first as the meal is a bit on the frugal side.
I spent all week in my new attic office, painting and repainting the same walls like a partic-
ularly dull
Groundhog Day
. The paint steadfastly refused to either cover evenly or, in some
places, at all. I can see now how people come up with these modern decorating paint 'effects',
after four coats they just give up and say, 'Sod it, that'll do. I'll call it dappled.' Mine looked
more like a dirty protest. All week I was in there, the fumes and the exertion made me naus-
eous and aged me considerably so that every evening I emerged from the place looking like
Dorian Gray's portrait, only a bit rougher.
I collapsed onto the sofa after one full day and though it was still early in the evening I didn't
wake up again until about five in the morning. Natalie obviously felt it was better to leave my
battered body where it was, which would have been OK if it wasn't for the fact that she'd also
asked me to put the hens to bed in their coop before I came in. It occurred to me now that I
had forgotten to do so and I flew up off the sofa terrified that the weasels or foxes may have
taken advantage of my neglect, but the hens were waiting at the back door for me, clucking
away. Usually I find their clucking very relaxing, almost peaceful, but not on this occasion as
they were clearly admonishing my absent-mindedness and had been waiting by the door for
just such an opportunity.
Eventually, and after the mockery of
monocouche
, the painting was finally done and so, per-
haps nearly four months behind schedule, my new office was open. There had been times
over the course of the year I had thought it would never happen. Times when we hadn't seen
the builders for weeks made the whole thing feel like some pie-in-the-sky notion, a fanciful
half-baked ambition that, like wanting to represent your country at football, would be looked
back on in later years with a kind of nostalgia and a shake of the head at the naivety of it all.
Builders, French or otherwise, can do that to you, they make you doubt yourself.
I did point out to the builders at some point in July that the whole thing was supposed to
have been finished at the end of June. 'Ah,' Monsieur Butard in one of his rare visits had
replied, 'I didn't say which year.' He was only half-joking; it had taken him two months to
decide that he couldn't install the stairs.
But finally I was in!
The walls were done, the skirting boards on, the floor painted and furniture erected. It is,
even if I say so myself, a thing of beauty. I doubt it's to everyone's tastes, though; it is a
'boy's room' definitely. A boy with an excess of late 1960s furniture, a mountain of mod
paraphernalia and, most importantly, a wife who refused to allow any of that stuff to be on
display in the house. Actually, to be fair, she did at first and then gradually things would be
sidelined, ceramic scooter models once prominently displayed would disappear and then turn
up at the back of a cupboard somewhere; books whose spines didn't fit in with that season's
new colour scheme wouldn't be completely removed but suddenly the shelving unit would
