How I Won the Yellow Jumper (24 page)

When the moment arrived to order and, even though I didn't want it particularly, I had no other choice than to apologise for my lack of French and in a clear, crisp and slightly over-enunciated voice articulate my wishes.

‘I would like the Spotted Ham Pot “House” Radishes Crunching With The Mustard Emulsion, please,' I declared pompously. I wish I'd been able to order the Marbled Ocean In Its Frost, and the Leeks, Plugs and Mushrooms, too. But
embellishment would have been unnecessary.

Already, we were all shamefully overwhelmed with schoolboy giggling, as the poor waiter looked on, clearly disappointed with our attitude and inwardly damning Britain and the British. Later on that evening, Matt tilted his chair too far back, and fell over, making the decanters nearly explode. We paid the bill and left.

It's the aberrations that I remember best.

And one evening in particular. Like the mini-Stonehenge scene in
Spinal Tap
, it's still funny. Often at three o'clock in the morning, when I am beset with the usual anxieties, I will take time out from fretting about my life to analyse once again what exactly it was that went on which left Liam clutching a head of fennel and pouting at the camera.

It was Bastille Day. It often seems to be. And for once, rather than sitting out the French national holiday on the concrete terrace of a Kyriad hotel overlooking the back of a Carrefour car park, it seemed we had lucked out. We were in Aix-en-Provence. The beautiful town has its slightly ugly parts, of course, and before you get the impression that we were staying in some beautifully restored townhouse on the
Cours Mirabeau, rest assured that we had located the only one-star hotel in town. Dark, fetid and awful, we dumped our stuff in its gloomy rooms and disappeared into town to eat and watch the French get all dangerous with fireworks.

So there we were, fortunate enough to have found a table outside, despite the crush of people gearing up to party. It was nearly ten o'clock, and the town was only just beginning to fill up. We studied the menu, and ordered starters according to our well-rehearsed customs. Liam requested something challenging, possibly with added cruelty. Woody would have asked for something light. I almost certainly had a gazpacho in mind (the evening was hot). Matt knitted his brow, and then rubbed his temples.

‘Do you know what? I think I'm not getting enough vitamins. Too much dairy. I need something good to eat.'

‘Have the old
assiette de crudités
,' prompted Liam, not unreasonably. Why anyone would ever want to order a plate of sliced carrots and a raw spring onion I had no idea. Yet, Matt went for it.

‘
Et pour moi, je prends l'assiette de crudités. Voilà
.' He finished decisively, flapping the menu shut in the waiter's face for extra flamboyance.

What, then, went on between the request and the execution is anyone's guess. But what was placed in front Matt was either a peculiar joke, a hallucination or the only answer to an over-stacked and overflowing vegetable rack. But it was the biggest bowl of unprepared, huge and raw vegetables I am ever likely to see offered up as a light starter.

Staggeringly, it contained two complete heads of fennel, a clutch of spring onions, a cos lettuce, a red lettuce, a head of cauliflower, at least five large tomatoes, three endives, a green pepper and a red pepper.

Our jaws hit the deck. But we solemnly took to the task, the table pulling together to come to Matt's aid. We're good like that in times of need. After a solid half an hour of unfettered vitamin intake, we gave up. We'd barely scratched the surface of this extraordinary starter.

More often than not, though, it is not the meals served in restaurants with the pretension of being ‘gastronomique' that stick in the memory, rather it's the chance encounters, the welcome, simple meals in welcoming, simple places that spread the love, the feeling of well-being. A wide, smile-cracking pleasure it is, to sit in the warmth and be fed.

There are a number of hotel chains that populate the fringes of French towns and their associated industrial zones like barnacles. They differentiate one from the other in one critical way: while Campaniles, Kyriads and Ibis all boast restaurants, Formule 1, Etaps and Balladins leave you high and dry.

The food these budget hotels serve is surprisingly good, and very cheap. Although, since they generally only exist to service France's army of travelling salesmen who trawl the country on a tight budget hawking their various wares, they can often appear quite overwhelmed by the arrival of the Tour's multinational menagerie.

Once about a hundred of us all descended on a Kyriad hotel in some anonymous part of the country, which was seemingly
staffed by only one local teenager. Within minutes of the first wave of Tour workers sitting down and glaring impatiently at her, she was floundering utterly in her attempts to keep up with the tempo of orders coming her way. Her coping mechanism in this instance was to dissolve into giggles at every word uttered in her direction.

It was one of those encounters that leaves the English-speaking world mystified and irritated in equal measure. She appeared on the face of things to be quite incapable of understanding anything said in French to her, if it was nuanced with anything approaching the accent of a non-native speaker.

‘
Pour moi, les pâtes, s'il vous plâit
,' I offered, concentrating hard on my diction.

She shrugged her shoulders and giggled.

‘
Les pâtes? C'est bon?
'

‘
J'en sais rien
.' Shrug. Giggle.

She looked over her shoulder away from us, appealing for help from a solitary Frenchman eating at a table next to us. Could he help her interpret the desires of this collection of idiots from abroad who speak only in disjointed glottal stops and random fricatives?

With a nod of the head in my direction, he translated for her. ‘
Il veut les pâtes
.'

‘
Ah. Alors, pour vous les pâtes
.' She noted down my order with a little giggle.

Later on that evening, the chef, already working with smoke coming out of his ears as well as his little kitchen, was called upon to assist with the taking of orders, his young co-worker having dissolved into a heap of teenaged uselessness.

Then the ice-cream freezer blew its fuse and burst into flames. Which was a good job, because we were struggling to translate ‘Magnum White' into perfect enough French to make our order understood.

The food was good, though: my pasta was perfectly prepared
and the others had some sort of stuffed quail with complex textures and worrying little bony bits. For no good reason at all, they gave us a free bottle of rosé. We left the table covered in mess and full of good humour.

There are also meals which won't be forgotten because they are homespun or spontaneous affairs, where the owners of auberges, chalets and gites have provided for us from their own fridges. There was the couple in the Carmague who left a plate of cold meats, cheese and bread out for us on the terrace of their beautiful farmhouse. And a bottle of thick, deeply red wine. When we arrived it was nearly midnight and we ate overlooking the little vineyard that had produced the stuff. In the morning we bought a case of their wine for next to nothing, as we sat at their breakfast table overwhelmed by a choice of twenty different home-made jams.

A week after that, we stayed in a chalet in the Pyrenees run by an English couple from the Home Counties. Our midnight arrival was marked by the shattering sound of one of those wine bottles, which fell onto their drive as we opened the car door. But they too had laid on a feast for us. By one o'clock in the morning, we were each clutching a glass and trying not to feel too self-conscious in their hot tub.

The next year, our sat nav let us down badly. We were trying
to find an auberge in the countryside near Gap. It was getting late and we were lost. Eventually I realised that I no longer had any choice other than to phone the owners and plead for directions.

This is not an easy proposition if your French is as restricted as mine, mainly because it almost always starts with the unanswerable question from which all solutions and/or misdirections must follow: ‘Where are you at the moment?'

I gazed through the windscreen. We had reached a T-junction. Ahead of me was a clear choice between turning right into a bit of France to the right, and turning left where a further, more left-sided bit of France would open up in front of us. I had no idea where we were. Hence the need for the phone call.

More by luck than linguistics, however, we soon found the place. It stood on its own in a tiny hamlet, next to the post office. We unloaded our gear, and, on approaching the lady sitting outside at a table just about to eat her dinner, we posed the next critical question.

‘
Est-ce qu'on peut toujours manger ici quelque part?
' She shook her head. The restaurant hadn't even opened that day and, besides, there were no other guests. We must have looked as abject as we felt.

Just then, her husband returned in the car from a fruitless search-and-rescue expedition (he'd driven off to find us). But of course, he declared on hearing of our predicament, his family was just about to sit down for a late dinner. If we didn't mind the simplicity of the food, we'd be welcome to join them. We didn't mind, and so we joined them. Within minutes of carrying our stuff to our comfortable little rooms in an annex above the post office, we were sitting down with Norah, Remy and little Enzo to a fresh tomato salad, bread, oven chips and steak. It tasted great. Remy opened a bottle of rosé. We saw that off in a matter of minutes, and raised the game. Running to the
back of the car, Liam returned swiftly bearing a bottle of Bordeaux and Côtes de Bourg. The Renault always clinks suspiciously.

As the wine flowed, so did the chat. Remy wanted to talk about the disintegration of respect for sportsmen, particularly with regard to the French football team who had let themselves down so badly a few weeks prior to that during the World Cup in South Africa. It was, thought Norah, a mirror image of the disrespect eating away at French society. Enzo, a hyperactive seven-year-old who, his parents confided, rarely went to bed before midnight and would often sleep in till midday, was more interested in the free Tour de France stage calendar which Woody magicked from somewhere. It kept him quiet for minutes at a time. In the morning I gave him a vuvuzela, which I had brought with me from South Africa, and we took our leave before our sudden friendship with this splendid family ended, as they faced up to the reality of life with a highly motivated plastic horn blower.