Tennis take off

Tennis as expected was a triumph for one mustachioed old git. Despite playing against man mountain Peachy Butterfield AND Roly “gay skipper” Bufton, not a single game was lost and so some of us, and by that I mean me, adjourned to lunch at the Auberge St Donat with a happy smirk playing about their facial features. Some were forced to accept that their hopes had crashed and burned as my picture today in no way suggests.

I think the tennis aspirations of my opponents will fly

Lunch however was no picnic. It was there that I secured yet another customer for Currencies Direct (this transforming it into a business lunch – this for my accountant, an avid reader of this column) and two more customers for my book “Summer In The Cote d’Azur although one sale was secured by dint of Masterful subterfuge by my self-appointed French sales manager Master Mariner Mundell and the other has yet to be paid for.

Why anyone would trust the Master with a 10 euro loan and then accept repayment in the form of a copy of my book is on one level very gratifying but on another level mystifying. I suspect the questionable sales tactics of my sales manager may still cause me problems at some stage but at the moment I am prepared to accept a sale is a sale. One area I need to address is the question of sales commission . I had thought that the Master had been prepared to undertake this onerous task on a voluntary basis. Indeed he had volunteered to undertake this hitherto non-existant position and has subsequently dined out on his sales success at the Premier Mardi event in April where he sold 9 copies and secured another 10 euro (the sales price) from one of the delegates on the understanding they she did have to take a book and that the Master went away for ever.

It seems however that certain traits of the Jewish faith to which he is beholdent are hard to suppress. One comment today suggested to me that philanthropy was not as well embedded in his Jewish soul as I had hoped. He does not collect stamps after all and would prefer to collect commission. Sadly from his point of view the business model upon which sales are based precludes such a ridiculous notion as commission.

I had escaped to play tennis only after mixing up a cement mixer full of, well, cement for that nice lady garden designer, her epithet when she is not decorating. When house builder Peachy arrived he had the temerity to suggest that she was a full on civil engineer, but I have a problem with the civil part of that description.

Then to the tennis at the Vignale. It seems that during the planning for this titanic tennis outing, Peachy had expressed the opinion that he had great hand to ball control, not hand to eye control as I suspect he intended to say. I am a big follower of Freud and I know what he really meant.

After the sport clash was concluded we went to the inevitable post tennis debriefing at the Auberge St Donat for yet another astonishingly good simple meal of fantastic value. However a vast over consumption of wine led to some rather distressing revelations so much-loved and happily seized upon by the author of this column.

For instance, who was it amongst the assembled multitude who released their innermost fantasies when faced with a morning erection, and why on earth should the phrase ” hand of god” have entered onto this discussion? My own feeling is that this is food for thought but Peachy did not concur, he expressed the opinion that food was for eating and proceeded to give us all a wholesome demonstration.

So much more material was generated today that this missive will be simple to write in the coming days, but until then dear reader you will have to wait.

Chris France