Part One
I’ve got gout. And not for the first time, either. Eighth day, now.
I first became conscious of it during a trip to Bremen, with Sarah The First, about eight years ago. A holiday made memorable because of the way it was supposed to be a surprise for her 30th, which I then blew in innocuous fashion whilst doing the Sunday evening ironing, with the famous words “when we get back from Germany…”
It comes on gradually (gout, not being a thicko husband), but then hits you with everything it’s got. And the pain? Extraordinary, frankly. Hope I never get to know worse. Hobbling across the cobbles of that lovely city was just bloody agony, after the symptoms had finally kicked in to the full extent. I slept not a wink on the night before the flight back. That line about how even a light sheet cannot be laid upon the affected part of the body? All true. If an angel had farted on my big toe that night, I’d have hit the ceiling.
Eventually I was told of a pill you can take to treat it. Except I turned out to be allergic to it. Pain stopped, but I nearly flayed myself alive through itching.
So, I get it now and again. Fat, thin, drinking, sober, fit or unfit; makes no difference, it seems. Try and catch it early (failed this time; I went to a job interview last week with the gait of a man invalided back to Blighty in 1916), gobble the ibuprofen down, hydrate and elevate. It’d be a pain in the arse, were it not a pain in the foot.
As a consequence, I find myself taking it easy when I kind of wanted to be out walking and running, as part of the health kick I am now on, for the foreseeable. Annoying to be laid up, but at least I can use my remaining digits with full function to witter on further about events from days gone by. As I am typing this (at work, shhhh.. I’m kind of up to date with things) my foot is sat on the top of a box of A4 printer paper, throbbing quietly.
On the subject of health more generally, it’s fair to say that my 20 plus year career as a smoker did me little good. I was diagnosed with asthma as a boy of about six, so taking it up some years later was a terrific idea. Still, with that said, I loved it, and I reckon I got my money’s worth across those decades of puffing. And I think I have managed to emerge as one who, whilst he no longer indulges himself, can avoid doing the puritanical thing with those who still do. None so annoying as the reformed and the ‘reborn’; often possessed of only a single note to sing, and a flat one at that.
Happily, whilst still polluting the world, I had the opportunity to travel a good deal of it. As such, I was rarely far from the opportunity to pick up 20 for little more than a quid. Less than that, I remember, from the kiosks in Belarus. And an airport always presented one with an opportunity to load up with a brick or two of my beloved Gauloises Blondes. Travelling overseas so frequently meant I never felt the need to try and squirrel away too many (although a small fag wall built up over time, back home; my Dad was the beneficiary when the end came) but it was always fun watching one’s countrymen and women attempting to flout the law so brazenly.
Probably the best example I have seen was on one of the handful of morning flights I have taken back from Budapest, either after working there or visiting chums. I had a poke around, found the EU section and grabbed my standard boxes and made for the queue. It was all a bit hurried, as my friend Benj (he of the Macedonian wedding, you’ll recall) and I had made it rather a late evening the night before, drinking Armenian brandy and listening to the Smiths on his balcony. Aesthetes that we imagined ourselves to be. Mrs Benj declared herself really rather unimpressed, as one day segued into the next. However, I made my dawn cab and got to the airport in some sort of order, in need of coffee and, well, a fag.
The lady in front of me at the till pushed-in, which isn’t a habit that goes down well with me; being British, I am genetically 1.5% queuing etiquette). I started to mutter, but sort of dribbled to an astounded stop, as she proceeded to pull at least 15 bricks of fags from her baskets (yes, note the plural) and lob them one by one onto the cashier’s conveyor. The scene started to look like one of those Fordist factory machines that they showed ‘through the round window’ on Playschool, when I was a child.
With the numbers motoring into the low thousands of cigs, a chap with epaulettes and several lanyards arrived from the fringes, asked to see the lady’s Boarding Pass, and asked him to come with her. Not a scene I had witnessed before, but you do wonder from time to time how anyone would be able to claim anything like ‘personal consumption’ rights if truly grilled on the subject. She made a few noises of Estuarian English protest, said something about being “alaahed as maneey as I wont”, but ultimately crumbled in the face of authority, as we do. Off they went, she presumably to have her card marked forever in Hungary as the Silk Cut Smuggler, only to return to Tilbury Docks shamefaced and empty-handed.
It took the cashier and I some considerable time to bring down the higgledy-piggledy construction that had gathered at her end of the conveyor. A purple and white depiction of the after-events of a Fred Dibnah Special. Anyway, we eventually laid eyes on one another, once the pile had dropped down sufficiently, sufficient for us to exchange our best “dearie me, some people eh?” faces before she swiped my more modest haul and my credit card.
Those last couple of years as a smoker came with a diminution of opportunities to travel for work, so periodically my Dad and I would saddle up the motor car, with me at the wheel, and make for the Port of Dover for a day trip and a spot of shopping in Calais. A crude exercise in gathering together wine, cheese and tobacco, with a few other sundries (like candles – Johnny France makes a good candle). In our defence, it was done in my neat little Citroen, rather than a rusting Transit, so I can look back on it with a certain amount of superiority. This was, in fact, something by way of a miniature European Tour, as on the occasion of our second or third paté foray my Uncle pointed us in the direction of a tented village of Tabacs, just barely inches across the border into Western Belgium. The place is actually a suburb-cum-village called Adinkerke, which Wikipedia tells me is actually a location of some history, and the site of a significant WW2 Military Cemetery.
But, yeah, it also flogs fags. Lots and lots and lots of them. Multiple stores, and row after row after row of cigarettes. Sold, mostly, to English and French people, taking advantage of the price set against the cost of smokes back home. And it was a rare old saving; costing probably about 45% of that in the UK. One pulled off the motorway, and performed that most exciting of manoeuvres that is crossing a road to the left, in a right-hand-drive car, on the right hand side of the road. One needed a fag after that, as well.
Round a sort of mini-golf roundabout, down the hill and into a car park. All you can see for the first 600 yards are tarted-up warehouses, with, oddly, adverts (lets called them fagverts, just for fun) written onto the sloping sides of the roofs. I must look the place up on Google Earth, sometime. It must look like the side of a 1980’s F1 Car, parked outside a snooker tournament.
You pull up, and head in. Everyone is English, grey-faced, and stinks of fags. One gets suckered-in to begin with by the fact that the coffee machine is free. So, you grab a coffee, and wander out for a contemplative gasper, and start to do the maths on your purchase. Some folk have the bearing of punters who’re there pretty much every day, and have an unsettling over-familiarity about them. These are the Transit owners, frankly, and one tends to try to avoid their gaze.
One suspects that it isn’t everyone that makes it further into the settlement, as this first place is so large. However, partly because it flogged my favoured brand, back then, I preferred the place down the road, on the corner. Plus they have a crazy fibreglass statue outside of some sort of Flemish Laurel and Hardy pairing, and next door is a shop that sells, if I recall correctly, exclusively, garden gnomes. Another reason to go in there is all the free stuff you get; lighters, chocolates and the like? They just chuck in a fistful when handing over your bag of boxed-up 200s. Wonderful. Somewhere within the maelstrom of the ground floor of our house we’ve still got some of those lighters, even though neither of us has been a smoker for more than three and a half years. And the chocs were always dead handy when one forgot someone’s birthday. I imagine we’ll still be going, all the while the old man keeps puff-puffing away.
SWK has the distinction of being the only person I have ever known to buy an e-cigarette from this ‘Tobacco Alley’, as I now know it to be called. Tuesday 30th December 2014, it was. The day we went with Dad on a jaunt of this sort to buy, amongst other things, the 96 bottles of sparkling Cremant wine that we served at our wedding, the following Summer. I was piloting us down to Dover, first thing, and SWK had the responsibility of guarding the traditional bounty of egg sandwiches, prepared the night before (we always sit in the queue, reeking of boiled egg sandwiches, on arrival at Dover as we wait to board – I have no idea where this tradition comes from – nice though, with lots of pepper).
Generally my wife is a quiet co-traveller. She pecks away at her phone, sometimes dozes off, that sort of thing. On this occasion she was perched in the back, holding the foil pile of white and yellow bounty. When suddenly she piped up:
“Bollocks!”
“What’s up?” we chorused in question.
“Forgotten my fucking e-cig” she sang back. Sounding a bit like me, poor thing.
We’d come just that bit too far to go back and collect it and make the ferry in time, so I proffered my own. During the crossing it went back and forth between us, and I remember getting that same ‘charge fear’ I described in my last piece, but, happily, good old Fagtown provided.
We were on our way back to France for the liquid element of the day’s shopping when I offered her the opportunity to drive overseas for the first time. As she’s normally one undaunted by any of life’s challenges, I was very surprised when she turned down the invitation, and didn’t really say why. Northern French A-roads have very little traffic on them, and, the odd moron bombing up the wrong lane excepted, are trouble-free, in my experience. However, one took the good lady at her word, and on we went. Her time was to come, as you’ll see in the next instalment, which features honeymoon driving quite prominently.
This trip was not quite done for drama, though, as both my fellow travellers decided to get a little excited about the prospect of ‘popping in to Dunkerque on the way’. They wanted to have a look at the locality of Operation Dynamo, etc. Of course they did, when you’ve got fairly minimal time and a load of stuff to buy 20 miles down the road. However, being a decent chap, I acquiesced to their wishes and headed off at the next turning. And regretted it pretty much instantly.
I’m alright driving the wrong way ‘round when I know where I am going. Or when there is an obvious objective in sight. Tasked with driving across a foreign town, dicing with the traffic, and trying to recall the Highway Code in crude reverse, whilst looking for signs to ‘la plage’? No, then my confidence fails me and I start driving rather like Mr Magoo, I’m afraid. We did quite a bit of circuiting around, and sort of eventually came out at a long car park, in front of some modern flats. In the distance there were some salt flats and the edge of what might have been a beach. A bit disappointing, but a return journey was promised, and we made good speed back to the main business of the day, and even managed to fit in a spot of lunch at the marvellous ‘Le Bleriot’ café, which is attached to the Auchan hypermarket. They do the most smashing omelettes, which I favour with Merguez spicy sausage.
Dunkerque deviations aside, this was a comparatively untroubled trip. But as we shall see, it’s not always been plain sailing. Far from it.
Back in a short while to conclude with some rather more hair-raising tales of driving over there. Look out for:
- The Search for Vallombrosa Abbey
- How To Turn Left
- Florence The Wrong Way
- And the quite unforgettable Gifting Wing Mirrors to Greeks
suggzy 