French Letter: Whatever you do, do nothing
A friend of mine turned up in the pub last night after an absence of several weeks. He and his wife had been on holiday in Porto – a city I have never visited – and I was intrigued to learn how their trip had gone. “How much time do you have?” he asked me – never a good sign. I pointed to the full glass in front of me on the table.
Anyway, it turned out that Porto is extending its metro system so that the area around their hotel was a building site. “It was hard to walk anywhere without detours. The air was full of cement dust. And then I developed acute gout combined with arthritis, which was really painful. Finally, I fell down the stairs. It was a complete disaster.”
He could have gone on. And he did. They tried to take a train up the Douro valley, which he remembered from a previous visit was really beautiful. But the trains weren’t running that day and the only way to get there was by boat up the river, which would have been nice except that there was no return boat available.
Travel these days is a nightmare. The Covid pandemic might be over, but somehow, and for reasons that are not entirely clear, everything seems to have gotten worse.
Louisa and I are off to London in two weeks’ time, by way of Paris. We haven’t seen our grandson for the best part of three years, and a selection of my wife’s American family will be in London for a clan reunion. We were supposed to go last Christmas and New Year, but had to cancel because of the Omicron virus, which we were informed was about to hit Britain “like a tidal wave”.
This time, we’re booked on Easyjet from Charles de Gaulle to Gatwick. We would have gone by Eurostar, only its computers were on the blink and the cheapest tickets we could find were twice the price of the air fare.
The trouble is that from everything I’ve read since completing our reservation – a task that Einstein would have found challenging – Easyjet these days is about as reliable as British Railways in the 1970s. Passengers have been left stranded across Europe, sleeping in departure lounges for days on end or forced to hole up in cheap hotels.
Not that Ryanair is much better. It remains, essentially, a money-making machine. A friend of mine who lives near the Swiss border says he had to fork out an additional 110 euros the other day so that his daughter and her friend could board a Ryanair plane from Toulouse to London. There was a mix-up of some sort over the small print of their booking and the airline charged 55 euros each to put it right.
So much for the era of cheap flights.
And that’s only the half of it. When we arrive in London, the national rail strike will be in full swing. No Gatwick Express for us. My son, who lives in Muswell Hill, will have to fight his way through central London in rush-hour traffic to pick us up from Gatwick, which on the day in question is likely to be about as relaxed as Waterloo station at 5.30 on a Friday evening, or even Waterloo itself in the midst of the battle.
Still … mustn’t grumble. Worse things happen at sea, especially if you’re booked on a P&O ferry.
In France itself, meanwhile, it is becoming almost impossible to find a dentist who will take you on as a new patient. Louisa’s and my previous dentist, a rather charming Romanian, upped and left without so much as a by-your-leave, and none of her colleagues within a 20-kilometre radius had any gaps in their patient lists. “Désolé, monsieur” – click! The result is that we have to travel to Rennes, two hours away, just to have a couple of broken teeth repaired.
On the eye front, the outlook so far is more promising. Pascal, our local optician, who started wearing colourful shoes after his 50th birthday to show that he remains young at heart, informed us on Tuesday afternoon that we needed to have our eyes checked by a specialist for possible cataracts. But when? I anticipated a date somehow corresponding to the departure from office of Boris Johnson. But I was wrong. “If you leave now, she has an opening available at four o’clock.”
Thus it was that two hours later, having whisked along the newly completed N164 dual-carriageway in the direction of Quimper, I found myself in a darkened room staring at an image of my eyeballs on a hi-res computer screen. The doctor – a Hungarian, I believe – drew my attention to two cloudy areas on the edges of my retina. Apparently, these were not a welcome feature. She looked up at me as if half-asleep. “Mais pas grave.”
It was the same for my wife. The result is that we have to go back in January, and if our shared problem has worsened, we will be booked in for laser surgery in February.
Voila! And all for €178.12, seventy per cent reimbursable on our cartes vitales.
Closer to home (than Quimper, that is), our friend Catherine, born in Paris but a naturalised Bretonne, was dismayed on Wednesday to find a hornet’s nest in her garden. Worse, the hornets in question turned out to be of the Asian variety, which resemble small armoured fighting vehicles and are best known for cutting the heads off honey bees and feeding what’s left to their larvae.
Catherine reported her find to our village mairie, a civic requirement now that illegal migration is the norm. They referred her to the larger cantonal office in Callac, which pointed her in the direction of the overarching Guingamp-Paimpol agglomeration. But the upshot, eventually, was that the exterminator was summoned and is reportedly on his way.
My pal Ian has a simpler solution. When he and his wife were sitting in their garden last summer, a hornet made his wife, Florence, its target, hovering just inches from her face. She was petrified. Not so Genghis, the couple’s predatory cat, aka “the menace”.
His paw flew up, the hornet was grasped in his extended claw and deposited, lifeless, on the grass. Mr Miyagi, late of The Karate Kid, who could pluck a mosquito out of the air with his chopsticks: your spirit lives on in Genghis Cat.