Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
It took me nearly ten minutes just to get his boots off, but the process of actually getting
him into the waders, which clearly weren't his as they were at least five sizes too big for him,
was one of the most undignified halfhours of my life. This short, stocky Frenchman barking
orders at me to pull harder and do it this way, not like that, like this, hold that, not there! I felt
like a serf getting his knight ready for battle and in the end he looked utterly ridiculous; the
massive pair of waders made him look like the cruel victim of a shrinking experiment or a
small boy in his dad's clothes. I pointed out to him that the waders wouldn't be very effective
in water because they weren't the right size, something I immediately regretted saying as I
suspected he'd agree and ask me to get him out of them. He looked at me like I was an idiot.
'I'm not going anywhere near water!' he said, rolling his eyes at my obvious stupidity. 'I'm
going to kill a rat!'
'Oh,' I said, 'there was a mouse in my car the other day.' Again, he just stared at me. I wasn't
making it up, I know it sounds like one of those sentences you say in a foreign language be-
cause they are the only words you know like 'the castle is open on Sundays' or 'I have a blue
bicycle', but it was true, I had had a mouse in the car the other day. It lives under the bonnet
and has eaten through the heat lining and some cables, but I hadn't told Natalie for obvious
reasons and Jean-Paul wasn't that interested either.
He leaned closer to me and narrowed his eyes, 'a rat!' he seethed and spread his hands out
to show how big it was. He cackled, said a cheery
'Merci'
and waddled off to face what I can
only imagine was a quite ferocious rodent and leaving me utterly baffled by the whole epis-
ode.
By now, I was ready for a lie down, but there was a lot to do preparing for the next day, what
with birthdays and the first day back at school after the Christmas holidays.
'Ian, come and look at this.' My heart sank. It was the way Natalie said it. I knew it wasn't
good, it wasn't an 'I've found a four-leafed clover' come and look at this, it was more of a
'there's something amiss here' come and look at this. Had I known then that it was a 'take a
look at Junior's dangle' come and look at this, I wouldn't have gone and looked at that at all.
'I think there's something wrong with his willy,' she said.
Firstly, 'willy' seems highly inappropriate to describe a muscle that when fully extended,
and it often is, the randy old sod, is actually thicker and longer than my arm. 'Willy' suggests
something cute and manageable, not this brute of an appendage. And secondly, Junior tries
to attack me when I approach him with food for heaven's sake; the chances of him lying back
and thinking of England, or France or Norway for that matter, as I try to get a closer look at
his love baguette were pretty slim, so I kept my distance.
'Looks alright,' I said, watching Junior watching me.
'Hmm,' said Natalie, 'looks like it needs cleaning to me. Anyway, look at this as well.' She
pointed to Junior's rump where there were a series of cuts on each side, 'Ultime has them
too.' My first thought was that we had some kind of horse-arse equivalent of crop circles,
