Unpacking.

I’m crap at unpacking after a holiday. The cases sit around in the spare room for days. I nip in there now and again, remove something, try to decide what to do with it: find somewhere to put it away, or put it in the wash. And this return from holiday is worse than usual because I’m exhausted - we all are - by the 16 hour trip home, which went like this... 

We pitch up at Toulouse airport after our lovely little break, on Thursday evening, and a woman in the check-in queue in front of us says, “The flight's cancelled. We just took the last two seats back to the UK on Monday, the next ones are… Tuesday.”

Tuesday? Give us a break, we can't hang around until Tuesday, and we arrived at the airport in such high spirits as well, agreeing about what a great time we’d all had with our friends. It's a horrible blow.

Turns out it’s because of an air traffic control strike, a French one (oh, the irony) which is due to end next day, at 5 pm. All Easyjet can offer us is a flight back from Nice on Friday night… to Luton, everything else is taken.

“How far is it to Nice?” I ask.

“About 600 km," says the Easyjet woman.”

Not so far, I think.

My husband puts his head in his hands, Youngest starts to cry because he wants to go home, Eldest swears and kicks his luggage, Middle One slumps down against the wall, everywhere people stare at us because we're making a spectacle of ourselves.

“Let’s get the Eurostar,” says Middle One.

Actually I’m happy to wait until Tuesday, I think, mentally driving back to our friends’ house on the hill by myself, holing up there, sitting around eating cheese, drinking wine, headphones jammed in my ears, reading material propped in my lap, staring out toward the stunning Pyrenees… possibly forever. But I don’t say this. 

I do say, “Look, let’s not fall to pieces here. We need to work it out, hold it together. It’s not the adversity that matters; it’s how we deal with that adversity. We’re not war-traumatised Syrians walking across all of Europe with only the things we can carry.”

They all look at me - my boys - and miraculously they calm down, for the moment…

Anyway, I'm thinking about all of this as I unpack the luggage in the spare room, dumping dirty washing in a pile at my feet, putting skirts back on hangers, looking about for my other Converse trainer, because I’m sure I packed two…

At the airport I check the train prices on my phone, which Easyjet won’t cover, about £950 for all of us at such late notice, out of the question then, obviously. So Eldest and I sort out hiring another car, a bigger one, because we've already handed back the tiny Renault and we drive back to our friends’ house in the dark for one more night with them (they were always going home separately, and their flight is mercifully unaffected). At ten a.m. next morning we set off to Nice.

Look at the map. It’s a fuck of a long way from Toulouse to Nice, if you’ll pardon my French. But most of it's autoroute, so we make speedy progress. We zoom past Carcassonne, Narbonne, Montpellier, Nimes, Arles then on past Aix-En-Provence and the turning to the seaside resort of Frejus, where a lifetime ago my parents had a mobile home (which it wasn’t, mobile that is) where we spent many long hot summers when I was a teenager, and where I fell in love with a Norwegian boy called Eric when I was about fifteen, not that he ever knew anything about it because I was much too shy to tell him.

Near Frejus.

We make it to Nice airport in plenty of time. We eat burgers. We go through departures. We stand for hours like cattle, waiting to board the plane. I chat to a glowing honeymoon couple, arms wrapped round one another, who when they hear we’ve driven from Toulouse say we look remarkably chilled.

“This isn’t chilled,” I say, “this is catatonic.”

We arrive in Luton at one in the morning local time, not much of a welcome, freezing cold, the taxi I've booked to collect us nowhere to be seen; but I don’t mind, I’m just so glad we made it home.

The taxi eventually turns up. We get back to south London. We sleepwalk through most of the next day - Saturday - especially me. We don’t have much energy on Sunday either. So you'll understand why it’s taking so long to get round to unpacking. 

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. My other Converse trainer is nowhere to be found, by the way. I guess it’s lost in France somewhere, footloose and free.

Bof.

The thing about France is that it's often fermé. Either it's lunch time, or a bank holiday, or a festival, or a strike, or a festival at lunch time on a bank holiday and everyone is striking. 

Example: we went to a French Center Parcs thing some years back when the boys were little, Pierre's Having A Vacance, I think it was called, and it had everything a proper Center Parcs has, except it was way cheaper… and most of it was fermé. 

We tried to dump a few of our spare kids in the creche… Fermé they said, for a refurb. Okay, we said. So we traipsed off to the pool with our towels, the male members of our party wearing those ridiculous regulation Speedos the French insist upon, showing up their male members… Also fermé they said, for lunch, of course, (parce que the French love a bit of lunch). Okay, we said. So then we tried to hire kayaks for a go on the river, but the kayak hire guy had gone for lunch… all day. Bof we said, because we were getting the hang of it by now.

So when we arrive at Toulouse airport with our friends, over the Easter weekend just gone, with only an hour to go before the hypermarket closes, after which time our party of eleven will starve to death for the next two days because everything will be fermé, for Pâques, we're rather anxious to get to it, and load up the car with supplies, loads of supplies.

Our friends get hold of their hire car before we do. “We’ll go on ahead,” they say. Okay, we say. My husband drives (he can actually drive) and I try and navigate to the hypermarket using Google maps on my phone and the address my friend just gave me, because this is the way we operate in France: he drives, I navigate, but it's the wrong way round because I'm the better driver and he's the better navigator. So it's not long before we're screaming at each other because I've directed us down a one way street and now we're sitting, all squashed together in our tiny Renault, face to face with a furious French man, also sitting in a tiny Renault.

"You've directed us down a one way street!" shouts my husband.

"It's not my job to look at the road signs!" I shout back, "I'm looking at my fucking iPhone! I can't do both!"

To be honest I'm quite proud that I've managed to direct us to a Carrefour at all. It's hardly my fault that it's the wrong one because Google maps automatically populated the nearest. I ring my friend.

"Where are you now?" says my friend.

"Good question," I say. "Definitely in France, probably on the outskirts of Toulouse."

"I think you need to retrace your steps," says my friend.

I get Eldest to swap places, so now he's in the front of the Renault with the iPhone and the Google maps app, and the irate husband, and I'm in the back taking a breather. Eldest immediately directs us out of town, towards a river and open countryside and the peage. Within minutes I'm back on the phone to my friend.

"We're heading out of town, there's a bridge!"

"You shouldn't be doing that!" says my friend, laughing down the phone.

"I know!" I say, and I hang up, because I have a very strong desire to scream at all of my family at the top of my voice and I don’t want my friend to hear this and know how horrible I am in real life. (We make it to the hypermarket in the end and load up the car with food, but then it gets boring so I’m skipping on).

Tuesday. The loads of food has run out, so all eleven of us set off for some lunch in the local town. It's a perfect day: sunny, powder blue sky, snow-capped mountains in the distance, all that.

Upon arrival at the local town at lunchtime, which is barely past breakfast for us (particularly for me, because I always sleep in) most of the restaurants are… you guessed it, either fermé or about to fermer. This is really not okay, we say.

We all live in London, south London, some of our party originally come from Sydney. Things don't fermer for lunch in south London, or any part of London, or Sydney. Tooting is alive with activity at all hours. Only the other day there was a drive-by shooting at the end of our road, on a Sunday lunchtime. We're used to round the clock action.

Fortunately a member of our party (a male member) speaks French, and manages to persuade a waitress, who incidentally looks exactly like that skinny moody love-interest in the film Ratatouille, to serve us some lunch. Fantastique! Except, they explain, there will be no choice whatsoever, it's Confit de Canard, or bust. Ça va? Okay, we say.

"Can we have pizza?" say the kids. 

"No, you can't," I say, "it's a fait au confit." 

That night we sit outside round a bonfire at the bottom of our friends' garden, under the stars, and the boys take it in turns to play acoustic guitar and some of us sing, or try to sing, and the frogs croak in the nearby pond, because they're a-courtin' presumably. I say, "I'm already living the memory of this," to my friend, and I hug her, because she's wonderful, and j'adore her, and because we're outside under the stars in front of a bonfire, listening to the guitar, and the courtin' froggies in the pond, and we've had two bottles of red wine between us, and because this is something that can’t ever be fermé.

This is so much more than okay, I think.

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. Update (01.59 am, 02.04.16) - I wrote this in France, before I knew about the air traffic control strike, which meant that our flight home was cancelled. It just took us 16 hours to get back, via driving to Nice. No kidding. Funny.

The Long and Winding Road.

My first ever luxury spa break coincides with the terror attacks in Brussels. As I zoom up the MI to Leicestershire to rendez-vous with my mother (it's her treat) the music I’m listening to at full blast in the car is interspersed with distressing radio reports about the carnage in Belgium. We were in the city last summer so it’s still fresh in my mind, but anyone with even half an imagination is able to conjure an image of an airport departures lounge after a suicide bomb has gone off. 

I don’t need even half an imagination, however, because the scene is graphically described for me - for all of us - on the radio, in newspapers, and later on the television news, as ever, and ad infinitum. I suppose we don't have to listen to it, or watch it, or read it, if we don't want to, it's our choice. The news-maker and news-consumer can't exist one without the other, it cuts both ways. 

Why is our reaction to tragedy to pore over it? We all do it. Flicking through a newspaper my eye is invariably pulled to the death and disaster stories: the man who murdered his beautiful musician wife; the family of five who drowned together when their car slid backwards down a jetty (maybe that one really is an unimaginable horror, I struggled to read more than a line or two of that). Often I don’t get very far into the story before having to move on and turn the page because it’s too distressing, but still, these are the ones I’m drawn to. Why?

Because it’s about counting our blessings, our near-misses, and our might-have-beens. It’s about thinking: well at least that wasn’t me and mine, not this time, and feeling that flood of relief. And this, in part, is because modern life doesn’t prepare us for death and disaster in the way it used to for generations gone by. Death is no longer laid out in front of us in front parlours, scrubbed clean to be scrutinised. I've only seen one dead body up close: my grandfather's, and that's because I asked to see him (I wanted to put a flower in the coffin with him). Most of us just don’t see it. Most of the time we’re able to push it to the back of our minds, always trying to be normal, to carry on, to pretend it's not there. We go to work, we buy a Starbucks on the way in, we have a laugh with a colleague by the water-cooler, we invite family round for Easter and we're grateful it wasn’t us in that airport departures lounge, or on that tube train, and that we're fortunate enough to have a pay cheque to cash at the end of the month.

But disaster shadows us all, all the time. On the motorway speeding in the fast lane, one crazy jerk of the wheel could mark the endgame. Some actively seek out those risky moments, young men in particular, for the rare thrill, the near-death high: climbing a high cliff, base-jumping from a tall building, wing-suit soaring down the sheer side of a mountain. Perhaps they risk everything because they think they’re invincible, that disaster can’t touch them, that they have a guardian angel watching over them? Or perhaps they need to be near danger to feel alive? Middle One was obsessed with Philippe Petit for a while, the man on wire guy, he even learnt to slack line on the common in homage to him, and Petit is a perfect example of someone who needs (needed?) to live on the edge, literally, in order to feel something. 

Most people don’t need that. We live safe comfortable lives, we have family and friends and work and music and books and television to entertain us, and we have the vicarious grief and pain of others to gaze upon in the news. Terrible tragedy does serve a terrible purpose: it reminds us how lucky we are, and that our remaining time is precious.

Songs of Praise.

On the way north in the car I was listening to a CD my younger brother made for me: my life so far, in music. Touchingly he remembered all sorts of things I'd forgotten about in the correct chronological order, going back to music I liked as a child, some of which apparently had quite an effect on him. Embarrassing things, like Telephone Man by Meri Wilson (My brother: "I listened to it again and do you realise what that's about? Me: "Er, yes, I do, now,") then Abba, Carpenters, Elton John (dancing to Crocodile Rock in that basemen in Vancouver with my best friend, Stacey Gates), on to The Beatles, of course, and then all the 80s stuff I'd erased from my mind (Quiet Life by Japan) plus the usual: Stones, Kinks, Bowie, Roxy Music, John Lennon, Fleetwood Mac, and some one-offs I never tire of, like Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me) by Cockney Rebel, which would be one of my desert island discs for sure, even some of my soppy guilty pleasures (Roberta Flack, Killing Me Softly). It was a sweet gift because music has such power to transport us back to a time and place like nothing else, except perhaps for smell. 

The moment we hear the opening bars of that something we’re there in the moment again, with that boyfriend, (Lay Lady Lay, Bob Dylan) or that mate, in her bedroom, getting ready for the school disco (Kids in America, Kim Wilde). We all have that, and we will always have that, until our particular endgame comes to claim us.

As I pulled off the motorway at the exit for the spa hotel, my brother’s CD was just finishing. The journey had taken longer than I thought it would, but at last the sat nav said there were only a few more miles to go. Suddenly there was a sign up ahead: is this it? I thought. Weirdly the very last track on my brother's compilation was beginning as that journey was ending: George Harrison's My Sweet Lord. 

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. Easter. I might not believe in God but I do have faith in people, and always will have, even in a world in which we blow each other up in the name of religion. And Eldest is home. So bring on the celebrations, slaughter the fatted calf for the return of a dearly beloved boy, and have a heavenly one yourself. We're going to France for a few days with friends who have a house there, but I'll be back again soon, right here. Happy Easter.