Holidays have fallen on us, hard and heavy, like a glacier revenging itself on an SUV. No sooner back from northern France than we are bound for southern England, for the Sussex coast. If the weather holds we are in for sub-tropical temperatures garnished with English mud.
Wimereux was very nice, in a stolid French middle class sort of way. There is a style of French seaside architecture which I find comforting and nostalgic, having made multiple visits to Deauville, Trouville and points thereabouts over the years. I am always reminded of French A levels, in a sort of Maupassant/Flaubert way. This prompted Mel to reminisce about her enjoyment of a book called 'The Grand Meaulnes'. I have never read this book but I had a French teacher who said it was her very favourite novel and referred to it constantly, despite the fact that we were reading 'La Pharisienne' by Mauriac. I took agin the Meaulnes heavily and have never forgiven it/them. I took petty schoolboy revenge by thinking of it as The Grand Moan, a joke I revived a few years back when Mel and I went for a pre-honeymoon trip to the area of fenny woodland described in the work (the Solignac?) and she too went on about what a wonderful book it was.
Anyway...
Our three days in Wimereux were very hot and sufficiently sandy for anyone. I tried not one, but two kites, one large, one very small. The large one called itself a stunt kite. This might have been a reference to its effect on child development. I reckon it should have been called a psycho kite, so keen was it to dive out of the sky without provocation, at Stuka speed and with intent to maim by vertical impalement. The small one got taken out after supper on the second night and I'm not sure whether an absence of consistent wind was to blame for its stubborn imitation of a stone or whether it was a presence of consistent wine in the bloodstream of its nominated operator.
Three pleasant days, but overall we did spend rather a long time waiting for food to arrive. Our first lunch took so long to appear we had almost exhausted our discussion of 'Le Grand Meaulnes' and my theory that you should never trust literature that features a hero who seemed to want to be both singular and plural. I heard the waitress apologising to the next door table for their wait. "Il y avait du monde," she explained abashed. Well ya don't say... You build a restaurant by the sea, you have a national holiday weekend, you organise intensely sunny weather, you get to one o'clock in the afternoon and... poof... a load of people turn up at your eatery, expecting to...er...eat. It has to be said that I had taken against her a bit by then. I ordered the meal in fluent French, which impressed me but did take some time, because she made me repeat everything. "Huh. Her French wasn't very good," I quipped to the children, hinting darkly that she was probably from Eastern Europe and only waiting at weekends to eke out her earnings from plumbing. That was my excuse and it held good until her apology to our chain smoking, mussel-slurping neighbours.
In a truly eccentric French way we also had the pleasure of staying in a hotel suite which entirely neglected conventional proportions based on the human body. The doors were about a foot higher than normal and about six inches narrower while one wall featured windows both too high off the ground and too small in relation to the wall area. It made me feel quite queasy on our return after my attempt at flying the smaller kite, though admittedly my vulnerability to queasiness was at an advanced level at the time. It seemed that my family had turned into sunburned munchkins clattering about on the set of a Tom Petty video.
But a healthy childish glow has lit upon all our cheeks. All that sun has grilled off our London pastiness and I am taking a ghost watch to bed with me at night for the first time in about two years. The children fared a bit better and are now as brown as provincial French hotel decor.
Well, that's probably enough nonsense from me. You've all got beer gardens and parks to sit in, and I suggest that you do. We are off again for about eight days and there will be silence here.
We're off to France for a couple of days, to sit on a beach, make sandcastles. fly a kite and drink lemonade. The kite has been purchased, the finest Woolworth's could sell, and I am hoping that it will be an improvement on the underground kite of a year or so back. And I'm probably lying about the lemonade. Eurotunnel owes six billion somethings and I owe Barclaycard a bit less and I hope we'll get to our hotel safely by early afternoon. They call it the Opal Coast but I prefer to move with the times and I think of it as the Starburst Coast.
So some quality time with the family awaits. Now that's a phrase I don't often use because the pedant in me always asks: what kind of quality? Specify good, bad or indifferent, for these are all qualities. It's signing a blank cheque, like looking forward to a quantity meal. Quality now seems to mean 'good' implicitly. Why? Is this a long term side effect of eating Quality Street at Christmas? The quality of something can be bad too, or even strained and droppething on the place beneath. So, more specifically, I am hoping to spend some good quality time with the family, including something more than struggling with a kite that wants to be a neutron star.
I am also hoping to drink something other than lemonade.
Bath times are almost back to normal round here. What with the world cup, school plays, choir concerts, hot weather and some early wine drinking the natural enemies of regular bath time, namely The Simpsons, have been greatly augmented. The evenings have broadly speaking gone to pot in a Daily Mail style departure from all decency and civilisation. Unwashed children at ten o' clock - "Scramble!"
But a calm orderliness has descended over the last few days, another welcome side-effect of England's World Cup exit, and the old hilarious bath time banter has returned. Last night Mel was holding forth, yet again, on how much of a cherub Cristiano Ronaldo looks. I find this highly amusing and have no worries that she will run off with him. In fact I rather relish the idea that Botticelli and Michelangelo's greatest works might be full of little winged creatures rolling around holding their knees or launching themselves spectacularly through the air with no one within a mile of them. If I ever get to the Sistine Chapel I will seek out the Cain and Abel panel and look to see if there is a crowd of little fresh faced midgets surrounding God and pointing at Cain mouthing "Come onnn! That's a straight red, y'know, murder is."
Jake doesn't like to hear this kind of soft talk from his mother and considers it disloyal to me. "Bigamy!" he shouted. Zoe came to my rescue and put the question directly to her mother, whether she considered me to be at least as 'buffalicious' as said C Ronaldo, the Flying Portuguese. Mel took some time to answer, which I took as a bad sign. Quite correctly as it turned out. "Well, your father is probably more buffalo than buffalicious," she announced, incredibly pleased with herself.
In a further assault on the familiar English I learned to speak Zoe then related that a classmate of hers had been heard to remark that someone at school had 'proper big-up legs'. So I retreated downstairs and consoled my buffaloid self with a proper big-up glass of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.
I haven't mentioned the World Thing till now, but at last my silence can be lifted. Now it can be told. I'm sure the Sundays are full of this sort of stuff but here is the definitive list.
TEN THINGS SVEN DID WRONG.
1. Not being English.
2. Pulling birds FAR too fit for his looks.
3. Pulling birds in line with his salary.
4. Having too big a salary.
5. Taking only four strikers, two of whom weren't match fit and one of whom he was not prepared to play.
6. Being Swedish. (see 1.)
7. Playing players in positions they don't play for their clubs.
8. Taking Frank Lampard.
9. Defending 0-0 scorelines.
10. Playing Frank Lampard.