Anorexia beaten?

It was a long day. Leaving Pau at just after 8 am tells a story, yes, we has to get up early which is never something to which I look forward, on the other hand the destination was Valbonne and the chance at last to catch up with some old pals.

The 7 hour drive was mostly uneventful, except for that curious habit of the authorities in charge of motorways to use traffic comes to restrict the use of lanes from time to time for no apparent purpose. It caused That Nice Lady Decorator to comment that she thought the reason for their placement was that they had nowhere else to store them. Perhaps they were just saving wear and tear on the surfaces.

In the late afternoon, we finally arrived in my beloved Valbonne, and after unpacking the car and a quick shower, we prepared ourselves for the first of many social occasions; drinks and then dinner with man mountain Peach Butterfield, his gorgeous wife Suzanne and the splendid Roly and Poly Bufton. I have a picture today of Peachy who, as you can see, was celebrating the fact that he has beaten anorexia.

Living proof that anorexia can be beaten

It was Poly who provided the next entertainment, making an obscure reference to wine glasses. “Tall wine glasses are dangerous” she said and she was not even pissed at the time. No, me neither. I think it had something to do with their enormous height making them very easy to knock over when testiculating (waving your arms around and talking bollocks). Or it may have had something to do with the danger of breaking them when near the swimming pool, but although it was warm enough to dine outside we were still some distance from it. Very curious, but then I discovered that her and Peachy had lunched together and it had involved several bottles of rose, so I gained some perspective. Apparently they can be even more dangerous if the have wine in them.

We discussed Peachy and my contributions to the Onboard Online invitation that we had both received to add personal thoughts to a section, soon to be published, about which boat we would like to be and why. It is an obscure idea, much like the north versus south banter blogs which we had been asked to write for their website, and for which we had been paid, but with more professional writing work no doubt just around the corner, we felt we had to submit something. Peachy went for SS Fatboy (a small dingy weighed down by a fat bloke, eating a burger, a picture of which I have featured before)  for fairy obvious reasons. However his claim that it has beautiful lines (like himself) is hard to substantiate. I went for Black Pig, the mythical boat driven by the redoubtable Captain Horatio Pugwash, in the children BBC TV series made in the late 1950’s and made the usual crass references to the other characters it features, namely Seaman Staines, Roger The Cabin Boy and Master Bates. I don’t know how they got away with it on TV in those days.

We eventually collapsed into bed before midnight and face the task of retrieving all our stuff from the garage to put back into the house after the departure of the beautiful and willowy Currencies Direct customer Debs Frost, otherwise known as the Naked Forker, for reasons that some of my regular readers will know. She has been looking after our house during the winter and has been frantically packing for weeks to move out. She tells me that she thinks she has been overdoing it as recently she as she put her phone in her pocket one day and her jeans fell down. If only it was always that easy to… (edited on the grounds of good taste).

Chris France
@Valbonne_News