Yorkshire – the holiday season starts

I do like a good one liner. I am very keen on monorails. Ok, so that has set the bar quite low for today’s next to penultimate missive, before the early start on Sunday morning down to the flesh pots of the south of France. I need some more flesh on me, to flesh out a bit after the final UK diet day before the autumn.

In support of that quest for the ultimate Sylph like body, I took another long walk, this time in the area between Findon and Patching. It is very rural and it seems I caught some of the Yorkshire cognoscenti ( by that I mean the extreme upper strata of Yorkshire society that is sufficiently well-educated to understand that there is a better world outside their hallowed county – perhaps you could call them scum?) taking a well-earned holiday in the sultry south, and in a frankly, rather gaudy display of the latest in northern transport. I managed to capture this picture which I know will be gazed upon in wonder by most of those chaps that were born north of Coventry.

Yorkshire folk on their holidays

So there I was Packing after Patching. I was considering whether to bring both pairs of my Karma gear (was that not the name of an old Volkswagen model?) fair trade hippy trousers that I had bought at the Wychwood Festival, so I decided to wear a pair as I went on the increasing numbers of errands upon which I am sent in the final days up to departure. These trousers are universally acknowledged wherever I go, even when walking through the car park of The White Hart (terribly hard to do on a diet day when no drink can pass my lips), so I have decided to pack both.

There are some items that are not readily available or very expensive in France, some of which are vital to ones well-being. These need to be pre purchased and packed as well. Pimms No 1, for instance, is hard to find, Heinz Salad Cream, otherwise known as Creme de Salad, is also a necessity that cannot easily be sourced down there and then there are English sausages and bacon. That’s it, they have everything else a man would and should eat and drink and I shall be reminding myself in a crash reintegration course of the range and extent of French produce, cooking and wine that can be enjoyed over the next 6 weeks.

Packing also involves taking some more copies of The Valbonne Monologues ready to help at least partially settle the huge pent-up demand that I believe is waiting. The book, written primarily to help me spread the good word about the fine services of Currencies Direct took on a new persona once the first embarrassing picture was published and the readership shot up. That, or people really do want to hear more about currency exchange, not a concept I can understand.

Actually, there is a blonde follower of this column, whom I cannot name because she is blonde from a bottle which sounds fair to me (oh yes, that was deliberate) who asked me recently if I could change 15 euros into sterling. I said I could and she is now the proud owner of one of my books which she thinks she will be able to exchange for £ when she gets back to the UK. I did not have the heart to tell her how few £ she might receive.

More errands are no doubt on my agenda today. Buying a microwave, cutting back wisteria, taking the rubbish to the tip, plus the small matter of leaving my music empire set up to sing sweetly through the next two months, will no doubt be part of the last mad rush to ready our Arundel house for the rental season, and for the zero number of bookings we have taken.

Chris France
@Valbonne_News