Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
rough points and its drunks, though even they seem more benign than in other places. It has
atmosphere and culture, restaurants, brasseries,
crêperies
,
maisons de thé
, antique shops and
chocolatiers galore; it also has a C&A which is 'just great for children's clothes'.
For two days we went seemingly up and down the same road as Natalie shopped the way
she always has, the complete antithesis of the 'impulse buyer'. A beige cardigan in Galeries
Lafayette would have to be weighed up with a similar cardigan from another shop at the oth-
er end of the Rue Nationale, with a multitude of journeys in between and me trailing behind
with a dozen shopping bags containing clothes, a very heavy set of antique coat hooks and
my ever-failing spirit and good humour. She literally shopped until I dropped.
What we hadn't done much of, however, was talk about what our next step could be, how
we would reduce my travelling and still earn money. It's not that we hadn't talked, we'd talked
a lot, but like all parents with small children, all we'd talked about when we had the chance
to be away from them was the children. So, on the last night we planned to go back to a little
restaurant in the beautiful Place Plumereau and chat over a nice glass of wine and some local
specialities. My feet, though, simply wouldn't go the extra half mile and could barely scrape
their way to the Chinese restaurant across the road from our hotel. We were in one of France's
finest old cities, in the gastronomic
Centre
, and we were having a Chinese! In our defence, it
was Tours' first ever Chinese restaurant and was established way back in 1977 so, you know,
it had history.
What it didn't have were any other customers, so we had ample opportunity to thrash out
our 'problem' in public. I got out a pen and paper like a secretary ready to take shorthand - if
this discussion needed anything, I thought, it is a list. I wrote a bold number '1' in the top left
hand corner and then looked at Natalie who was sipping stiffly on her aperitif. I circled the
number and looked at Natalie again. I put a colon just to the right of the circled number and
started to underline the whole thing. Natalie grabbed the pen and took it off me.
'Look,' she said, slightly irritated, 'we both agree that we spend too much time apart. It's not
good for us and it's not good for the boys. Agreed?'
'Agreed,' I said. 'Can I write that down?'
Possibly for the long-term good of our marriage we were interrupted at that point by the
world's oldest waitress, a delightfully smiley Chinese woman who seemed happy to have a
bit of company.
'Are you ready to order?' she asked brightly.
Not for the first time on our little break my order was questioned, not because of my bad
French accent (which would have been perfectly acceptable), but because I was plainly just
ordering the wrong thing.
'Are you sure?' she said, 'You'll never eat all that!'
'Honestly, I've been shopping all day and I am ravenous,' I said and she turned away with a
smirk on her face. 'Anyway, agreed. I want to be at home more, that's a given.'
