We carefully timed our return to the UK so as to escape the Royal Wedding, and with it the mayhem in which London was plunged at the beginning of May. We left our house in Maremma on a sunny Monday morning - the first one really since we had arrived - and made our way north towards Genoa. The long journey from Tuscany to Calais, where we would slip our middle-aged looking Volvo into the belly of a train travelling under the Channel, had to be split over two days, so we chose Provence, with its lavender fields and maritime pines, as the site of our mid-journey stop. T - who had accompanied us on the way down - had to catch a flight back to the UK, as he was due to go to the Americas the following day. So it was down to me and to Lady V to get ourselves and the Boy Child back to Blighty. The first time together, travelling like a ‘real’ family. The bare thought of it made us both shiver with horror.
To make things worse, I had chosen an irritatingly quaint, French-looking and absurdly remote B&B near Avignon for our overnight stay. The reason was that it had a highly-recommended restaurant serving local delicacies. As a matter of fact, we never got to taste the restaurant’s delicacies, because, by the time our Volvo had rolled its carcass into Provence, it was dinnertime, and we were still 2 hours drive from our hotel. We were a few miles from Aix-en-Provence, so we decided to stop there for some food, before proceeding into La France Profonde.
Boy Child strapped to my chest, we set forth into the old cobbled streets of Aix. Lady V was in a nostalgic mood (she always is in France, it’s her Pavlovian reaction to years spent in dimly-lit cafes drinking cheap red wine, smoking red Gauloises and listening to croaky records of Edith Piaf). I stopped listening to her when she started muttering about how the last time she was in Aix she had the most exquisite waxing experience of her lower regions, one that had had a marvellous effect on her burgeoning relationship with DJ S. I switched off the sound of her voice (I am getting pretty good at this) and turned my attention towards the bars that littered the grim squares we crossed on our way. Everything was either closed or empty, which, on a Monday night, is unsurprising in a city like London, let alone a shithole like Aix.
Suddenly, a heaving, brightly-lit restaurant appeared at the horizon, and - ignoring Lady V’s protests about French bistros and her need to have the air filled with old chansons - I grinned and parked myself and the Boy Child onto an outdoor table, under one of those environmentally-disastrous heaters. Only then did I turn my attention to the clientele, and I realised we had hit Aix’s equivalent of London’s Chinawhite. The place was covered in gym-buffed men in Versace suits and women who could have easily been either footballers’ wives or whores. They mingled, eating sushi, eyeing each other up like animals do in the savannah, trying to figure out in one sweeping glance how much muscle/money/silicone the person in front of them hid underneath their clothes.
The waitress welcomed us with a shocked look in her face. At first I thought she was merely displaying French coqueterie, or some other French cultural whim that generally leads them to contract their facial muscles in an attempt to look more interesting than they actually are (look at Sarkosy, for example, and how he always looks like he’s sucking on a lemon). Then I glanced around us and realised people were throwing terrified glances in our direction, the way you would look at a man waving a hand bomb while your plane is 12,000 ft up in the air. And then I realised what they were so afraid of: the Boy Child.
Indeed, just as this realisation sunk into my brain, the Boy Child stiffened his back and let out the loudest, most horrific shriek I have ever heard in a human, and proceeded to scream and shout until Lady V hastily uncovered her large bosom and stuffed his mouth with it. If you think the French are indifferent to female breasts, you’ve never been to Aix-en-Provence. Women’s eyeballs popped out of their sockets, men’s tongues rolled onto the tables, and just about everyone in the restaurant stopped breathing for a few seconds in pure shock at the sight of Lady V’s mammary glands. We had become the restaurant’s freaks. Clearly, couples with babies were not the customary clients of Aix’s wannabe Chinawhite.
We pretended not to notice, chatting amiably while the Boy Child screamed, puked, poo-ed, giggled, yelled and passed out in quick succession. But we knew, for the first time, that the line had been crossed. A few weeks ago, we might have been sitting amongst those hideous looking men and women without any of them ever taking notice of our presence. We could have been one of them, as far as they were concerned. But that little parcel we were carrying with us made all the difference. We were a couple. We were parents. We represented everything that is boring and conventional about life. We were the enemy. We quickly finished our dinner, pretending that nothing had happened, and swiftly asked for l’addition.
And as we rapidly walked away from the restaurant, feeling the still-bulging eyes of the waitresses and customers fixed to the back of our necks, we passed a young couple walking towards it. I eyed him up - a handsome, slender, dark-haired Frenchman with a Jean-Paul Belmondo air about him. Lady V glanced sideways at the girl (I don’t really know what she looked like, but I assume she was pretty and French-looking given the loud swooning sounds Lady V emitted when she was at a safe distance). We turned to each other, Boy Child finally quiet in his Baby Bjorn, and gave each other a grin of sexual complicity. Just your average, boring couple? Mon cul, my dear footballers and footballers’ wives, mon cul...!
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