Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
it home for Christmas. The English on board clinked plastic glasses and congratulated each
other, while the French on board behaved like it was Liberation Day.
I blame the late French photographer Robert Doisneau for this; he has an awful lot to answer
for if you ask me. He's the one who took the famous photo of two lovers kissing on the streets
of Paris, and while it would be unfair to lay all embarrassingly public displays of affection at
his doorstep, he certainly gave it a veneer of acceptability, especially in France.
I once had a girlfriend who strictly forbade me from kissing her in public - she also strictly
forbade me from kissing her in private as well, so it wasn't much of a relationship to be fair.
She would never have got on in France. The French are a hot-blooded, emotional race (and
they do see themselves as a distinct race) who have no qualms about displaying their feelings
in public; on the whole I don't mind it, but the amount of prolonged kissing (older people
might remember the word 'snogging') on French railway platforms is frankly beyond a joke.
As I almost always travel alone, it is quite awkward to have to stand amongst a group of gen-
erally young, good-looking lovers constantly chewing each other's faces off. Other people on
these platforms seem to regard this behaviour as entirely reasonable, some taking up posi-
tions to get a better view, others just bathing in the warmth of it all like it's one big osmotic
love-in, but nobody seemingly prepared to shout,
'Cherchez une chambre!'
for the good of
all.
Well, I'd had enough frankly. After thirteen hours of travelling I had made it as far as Saint-
Pierre-des-Corps in Tours, just in time to catch the last connecting train home. And then it
just seemed that everyone else on the platform began some sort of slow motion dance where
they paired up and just started getting off with each other! It was too much for me and that's
when I told them in my grammatically unsound French to 'get a room'. Thankfully nobody
took any notice of me and my strung out, Anglo-Saxon limitations, except for one old woman
who just came and stood in front of me, not in admonishment for my outburst, but clearly
expecting to get some 'action' along the lines of what everyone else was up to.
I had effectively been travelling with this woman for the last three hours. We had shared a
waiting room at the station in Poitiers, queued alongside each other to get a ticket and, by
chance, had seats next to one another on the journey from Poitiers to Saint-Pierre-des-Corps.
She had, as the French say, a little too much sugar on her strawberries, which is their way of
saying 'mad as a bottle of chips'. For instance, she had complained bitterly about how uncom-
fortable the seating was on the train until a fellow passenger pointed out that she was in fact
sitting in the luggage rack.
She was also carrying a mangy dog in a carrier bag, which she kept calling her
bébé
and
which, to its great credit, didn't seem to have much time for her either. At one point she
opened a bag of biscuits and instead of offering the animal just one biscuit she shoved the
whole thing in its face like it was a nose bag and the dog, clearly not a fan of vanilla wafers,
just sneezed into the bag and emerged with its face a wafery mess. The old woman looked at
