Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ill, but because she has a way of making me feel guilty when I am. 'You've not got the flu,
though,' he continued and I looked away from Natalie quickly. 'You're exhausted, completely
run down.' It was a partial victory.
As it happens I'd planned to take the following weekend off work anyway because I felt I
needed a break; I don't for a moment pretend that I have a tough, tiring job or that a few days
hammering away at the coalface of show business is really that physically wearing, but every
so often the travel takes its toll. I tend to lose at least one night's sleep a week because of
travelling and the build-up of that over a few weeks inevitably has its consequences. Even
Natalie recognises this, showing much more sympathy for exhaustion than she does for what
she dismissively calls 'a bit of a sniffle'.
Despite telling me that I needed to rest, the doctor, being French, couldn't resist writing
a prescription anyway. France loves antibiotics; in fact, it loves medicine of any kind and
dishes the stuff out with wild abandon, this despite warning posters in every doctor's waiting
room to use medicine, antibiotics especially, sparingly. There are two adults and three chil-
dren in our house, so there might be about ten visits to the doctor every year between us, and
each time we bring home at least five new boxes of medicine; we have so many prescription
drugs in our house we could set up a black-market chemist. We have four medicine cabinets
and they're all full. Doliprane, Bronchokod, Amoxicillin, Smecta, Spasfon, Adiaril, Advil…
the list is endless, and all are expected to be taken at meal times, which practically means
an extra course. While I felt somewhat vindicated for spending most of the day in bed, the
doctor's diagnosis did present problems of another kind. We live in a very rural, very agri-
cultural area and the locals have enough trouble trying to understand exactly what I do for
living as it is, there being no culture of stand-up over here. They can just about accept that
I'm in 'showbiz' and therefore are very tolerant when I dress the way I do. But to do a clearly
non-physical job and dress eccentrically is one thing; to then describe yourself as 'suffering
from exhaustion' is frankly beyond the pale. One of the local farmers nearly chopped his own
arm off in a freak combine-harvester related incident a couple of years ago and he still got his
harvest in.
Feeling genuinely exhausted is all very well, there can be quite serious health repercussions,
but you try telling that to rough-hewn, agricultural men of the soil. It just doesn't wash. The
parents of one of Samuel's school friends popped by one day to find me coughing, spluttering
and lying down in front of the television and at first, they seemed quite concerned.
'He's tired,' Natalie told them and they both looked at me like maybe Samuel would suffer if
a real man wasn't around to guide him; the dad especially, who is a huge man, a former lorry
driver who now suffers from multiple sclerosis, seemed particularly and quite correctly short
of sympathy.
The sudden death of one of Natalie's French uncles put my own physical weaknesses into
their proper context. Thierry had been a very good friend to me ever since I first met him
