Picking up my boots, it's all about my roots, yeah..

We've recently returned from our first trip back in a year to the countries from whence we came, France and England.  For me in particular, who had never lived outside of the UK before, it was an event that I couldn't mentally prepare myself for, it being the first time and all.

When we first came to the Middle East I had quite a strong idea of where I was moving from, a small village in West Sussex, and how I felt about the project of living abroad.  It was a sojourn, a temporary move all be it for some years perhaps, but there was not much doubt that before I knew it we would be back.  When you are doing something completely new and unknown you can only guess as to how it's going to make you feel or act.  Time spent playing out your new life can quickly change your point of view.

East Preston, a jolly nice place.

The first thought provoking moments about my roots came when we met new people out here, who invariably were from different parts of the world and all four corners of the UK, or if you're reading this after the Scottish referendum, perhaps all three corners.  I found myself explaining where our previous home was as no-one has ever heard of the village, then describing life there in a nutshell.  However it soon dawned on me that I wasn't satisfied with that answer.  It was where I was from most recently but I wasn't born there.  I didn't consider myself an adopted son of the county nor an outsider, it just happened to be where I had ended up living and a very pleasant place it is too.

It dawned on me that when you consider where you're from the only thing you have absolutely no choice in is where you are born, although there are probably not many five year olds who get to choose either.  So my answer changed to the city where it all started for me, 'I'm from London', if pushed I could list the places where I've lived since leaving there, but that's the essential truth.  It's also an answer that needs less explanation as to its' geographical location.  If further detail was required, I could reveal that I'd lived in the cheapest place on a Monopoly board, thanks Parker Bros., still traumatised by that.

Luv a duck, it's Laaandon, cor blimey guv'nor.  As Dick Van Dyke may have said..

The next epiphany (are you allowed more than one?) was when we were back in England and people would ask 'how does it feel to be back home'?  My first thought was 'I'll need to let you know when I'm back there'.  Sub-consciously our life and existence here has become more than just a base for a couple of years, it's actually where we call 'home'.  Strange to think when you consider that people of my age are often beginning to plan for their retirement and create an environment that they hope to settle in to ad infinitum. But this affinity to what will always be a non-permanent place to live doesn't make me feel insecure.  I'm happy that I still feel comfortable in East Preston as well as a small village in France where my in-law family live.  Instead of feeling isolated my thoughts are more of how lucky we are to have the opportunity of spending our time in several places, although obviously not at the same time.

Ultimately what this has re-enforced in me is a belief that life is not so much about the place where you reside at a given time but more about the people you're spending your time with, at work or on holiday.  If you're fortunate to have support from people who care about you and who you care about, location is just a formality.  I would never have really appreciated that without experiencing the adventure we've enjoyed for the last year.

Vive la difference..

Boules to that..

 Let me tell you about the time I played in my first (and probably last) boules tournament.

We were on holiday in France, staying in a small village in the Haute Loire département.   It is the annual 'vogue', a four day fête where you can enjoy such delights as a fun fair, travelling circus, car boot sale and several music events.  But the highlight for the more competitive residents are the two tournoi de boules.

Hats were compulsory until 1959, then the Beatles came along and changed all of that..

Now you may think that boules is just a jolly pastime that you've dabbled at while on holiday and that you've seen locals play over a pastis and Gauloise, but that simplification would be like saying all football is about a bunch of blokes kicking a ball around with jumpers for goalposts (which is in effect what it is..), what you are really seeing is France's national obsession, their beautiful game.  Have a look at French TV, they regularly have televised games and many towns will have a Bouleodrome, a boules centre which often includes indoor facilities to allow year round enjoyment.  Suffice to say some people take this very seriously and travel around their region in the summer months making a few tax free euros, if they're good enough.

Hence there are two boules events at the vogue, one strictly for people from the village and another more serious event for all comers.  So my beau père and I enter the village event after clarifying that I qualify due to my close association with the place and more importantly that as an Englishman I offered little threat of appearing in the latter rounds and therefore stealing the prize money.

We duly turn up at the registration time, casually eyeing up our competitions, wishing them a friendly 'bonjour' with an undertone of 'I hope you lose'.  Most seemed to be family pairings, father and son, mother and daughter, nothing to dent our belief that we would at least give a good account of ourselves if nothing else.  The organisers took our entry fee then noted our names on a flattened out crisp carton, adding to the ad-hoc 'it's just for a laugh' ambience.  Then as time moved on, the more serious players began to arrive, noticeable by their natty little 'Obut' ball carriers and their sporty trainer/white socks sports combo, as opposed to my flip flops.  Please note I didn't use the word 'bag' in describing the ball carriers.  I'm trying to avoid any double entendres so you don't descend in to Sid James style sniggers at every turn, so get it over with now and we can move on, matron..  This was beginning to look like a serious competition, for a start these guys had their own kit, always an ominous sign, and it looked as if they had used it fairly recently. We hadn't played for a couple of years and the boules we had in the garage were turning a nice shade of rust.  I've had this feeling of impending doom before when I was the holder of the annual tennis club 10 pin bowling championship.  The following year a guy from the club turned up with his own ball, shoes and hammock like ball polisher.  Suffice to say he won.  After a delay of about an hour, waiting for the bandits to turn up, we started our first round match and I began to learn what this game is really all about.

Like most casual players, I had assumed the idea of the game is to get your ball nearer to the jack, or cochonnet as it's known in France, than your oppenents',  and indeed that is the concept but it's not quite the same as green bowling in the UK.  In that game, if you want to remove one of the opposition's balls (really, come on..) you have to fire it out along the ground, whereas in boules you have the third dimension of aerial attack. Although while watching some green bowling in England lately I noticed that some of the more mature players were using a sky-borne Barnes-Wallace approach, forced on them by arthritis or general maladies in the back/leg department.  I can imagine the banter over tea later about the validity of Earthquake Ethel's 617 squadron approach on the last end of the game..

We won the toss, which was about all we did win on the day, so the honour of throwing the cochonnete and taking the first shot was mine.  Thankfully I managed to get my boule to within about 4 inches of the target and stepped back, comfortable in the thought that this end was as good as won, rule Brittania.  Now please take the time to visualise a news clip released by the RAF of a target, a warehouse perhaps, being used for some nefarious purpose by an unseen enemy.  Next thing you know it's obliterated by a smart bomb, launched from thirty thousand feet, the warehouse is gone but the surrounding play school, hospital, pet sanctuary and old aged person home are untouched, not a tea cup displaced. Hooray for lasers.  

Now picture a grainy black and white picture of my boule, resting smugly in it's place next to a little white ball..  Boom, now it's gone but the white ball remains.  'That's a lucky shot' I'm thinking as I step up to try again.  Once more I am close to the target and once again Dead Eye Dick, as I am calling my opponent, launches another 'smart ball' to violently move mine away and so a pattern is established.  It transpires that this forcible removal of other people's shots is what the game is about, rather than the accurate placement in the first place, which is beginning to look like the easier bit.  We were therefore being given a boules lesson and resigned ourselves to a quick defeat.

It's fair to say our opponents were not overly chatty, but did reveal that they were not from the village but a large town some 30 miles away.  Ha!  But this event is for local people, maybe we can get them with a technical knock-out.  However the conversation with a rules official then played out in my head - 'Excuse me Monsieur, I do believe these players are not from round 'ere, I expect you'll want to disqualify them under rule 5 subsection 'C' regarding the lack of proximity of their abode?'.  'Bien sur Monsieur Rôti de Beouf, just remind moi of your address?  The Middle East you say, ah, tant pis...´.

So we retire to the bar area for a drink and to await the draw for the next round, and it became apparent that this was also part of the event, the drinking that is.  In fact, if golf is a good walk spoilt, boules must be a good boozing session interrupted by flinging a ball or two.  The break went on for the best part of an hour and seemed to be of an interminable time.  Some players who we're sitting next to us seemed to suggest we could go and have a practise while we were waiting which after our first match seemed like a good idea.  They were also from out of the area, I'm beginning to see a pattern here..

They won the toss and in time put their first ball close to the cochonnet. I thought this would be a good opportunity to get some training in so I attempted to fire it out, with great success.  In hindsight, this was the only time during the whole afternoon I managed this feat but from small acorns..  The rest of the game went their way, with me trying out a variety of shots in the hope that I found a technique that worked and generally not paying too much attention.  Game over, we strolled back to the bar in order to find our second round opponents, only for me to be told they had been those players and we had just been defeated again, lost in translation.

I should say that I do speak reasonably good French, but family and friends make allowances for my short comings by speaking more slowly and clearly.  I have often found than when engaged by random people the nature of a casual conversation without knowing the context and often including slang is often unfathomable.  Hence when asked a two word question by our second opponents I was completely flummoxed.  All I could hear was 'more balls?'.  Did this mean he wanted to carry on playing or was it an observation on the poor standard or our play?  It transpires he meant 'do you have any more balls to play in this end?', but the complete lack of any grammar and virtual lack of vocabulary just didn't give me enough to work on.  It's not unfair for me to add that the chap asking me this question was probably not France's answer to Stephen Fry, but a man who seemed to think that he'd only been given a limited amount of words to use during his lifetime and didn't want to waste too many on me.  Add to that the fact he didn't move his lips while speaking and you can understand why I was confused.

Another immense wait for the third round and then then draw, where we get a father and son combo and a closer, more enjoyable game.  Still lost, but the manner of losing was more agreeable.

So what did I learn about boules?  Well you need a laser guided smart ball and eye to go with it, we were the equivalent of a Roman siege machine, the only guaranteed thing our balls were going to hit was the floor. 

OK, it's not accurate, but whatever we hit will have a big hole in it..

Secondly, mark your balls (hang on in there with the sniggers, we're nearly at the end..). Ours came in a value set from Carrefour some had markings and others were plain.  I played with the latter on the assumption that everyone else would have lines on theirs. Not so fast Mr Bond.  I would estimate that 75% we're plain like the ones I had so at any given time I had not the foggiest idea of what was going on.  The only way I could pick them up with any certainty was to wait until everyone else had taken theirs and assume the remaining three were mine.  Even now I'm not sure I bought the same set back that I'd taken out.

As a footnote to this episode, the following day the 'open' event took place.  It started at 2pm and finished at 11.30pm, and my wife thinks golf is a time consuming game.  We also learnt from some neighbours that there was a bit of controversy about the number of players in our event who were not village people, that is people from our village rather than members of the disco group.  In our experience two out of our three opponents came in to this category, so if they were disqualified we would move from relegation zone ignominy to top third respectability, result.

Nice work if you can get it..

Let me preface this entry by saying that these are just my own opinions and musings, please do not rely on anything mentioned here as you would a verified fact.  I'm not making this stuff up but it is purely based on my own perspective and experiences, which as far as I'm concerned are factual..  You can trust me, I'm a teacher..

I'd also like to add that whilst the events that follow have taken place in la belle France, I'm pretty sure it would be the same in the UK or pretty much anywhere in the 'developed' world, I'll let you decide whether it should be called 'developed' or not?

So to begin at the beginning.  We are on holiday in France and to make the most of our visit we hired a car.  If you've ever hired a vehicle you'll know that this is not as simple as you might think, partly due to the desire of the hire company to make a profit and also because unscrupulous customers try to rip them off.  In between these two opposing forces are the ordinary folk that just want to drive around a bit and end up paying the cost associated with these two self interested camps.

I guess the best story I have to illustrate what clients can get up to is the one about a guy in the Middle East who hired a Bentley then took it dune bashing.  You may not know exactly what a Bentley is but let's just say it's not an off roader.

Like I said, not suitable for off road use.  Please be aware this is just a stock photo picked at random from the internet so if you are the proud owner of  DK57 CXV fret not, you won't be finding sand in the glove box.  Also I'd like add this was not our hire car..

Then there are my personal experiences of rental cars which include one occasion where the previous user had obviously used the back seat as a mobile dog grooming parlour, or another time where they had left enough vapour in the petrol tank to get me 200 yards away from the hire office.  From his perspective an excellent piece of planning, from mine enough to go and see a witch to get a spell put on him.  I hope he enjoys his time as the cuddly toy on the front of a dust cart..  Mind you the phone call to the office was priceless - 'I've run out of petrol in the car you've just loaned me!', 'where are you?', 'look out the window..'..

So I can appreciate why car hire companies like to dot the i's and cross the t's, but it does make a simple transaction in to something akin to writing the Magna Carta.  Much of this paperwork is based around insurance.  Insurance to cover you should you not being the car back with a full tank of petrol (this is a western thing..), 'extra' insurance should you have an accident - 'what do you mean 'extra' insurance?!  What do I need 'extra' for?  Collisions that include royal personages?  A no fault bump with a dragon?'.  Then at the end of these discussions you're asked to sign a four page contract in triplicate that would take a team of lawyers no less than a week to interpret.  I mean really, has anyone ever read the terms and conditions before ticking the box?

I'm a cynic about insurance, I've always believed it is a way for insurers to make money rather than a safety net for the insured.  This outlook is supported by my experience that if you ever need to claim on it by the time you've taken in to account the caveats and excess payment, you normally end up with about a tenth of what you thought you'd have.

Where was I?  So we hired a car and had a marvellous time in Provence, which was going to be the subject of my blog until we were cruising back down the motorway and bang, something had clearly made an impact on the underside of the car, and it didn't sound helpful.  I don't know if you've ever been on the autoroute doing 130 kph and wondered what would happen if your tyre had a sudden and calamitous deflation? No?  Just me then..  In my mind there was going to be an explosion and then Jason Statham like I was going to steer the car around the school bus, past the minivan full of nuns and park it safely on the hard shoulder. Later, when collecting my OBE I was going to modestly wonder what all the fuss was about, I'm just an ordinary guy with an inbuilt ability to be at one with motorised transport. But every bloke has probably had that daydream. No? Still just me then.. 

I can reassure you that thanks to the marvellous engineers in companies like Hankook (for instance) nothing much happens right away.  However over the next two seconds or so you get the idea that it would be better if you pulled over.  Thank you unsung heroes that are tyre scientists.

It became immediately obvious that this was a dead tyre, it had shuffled off it's mortal coil, it was now an ex-pneu.  But dreadnought, this is a hire car from a national company, surely they will have contingency plans for this sort of common occurrence? And they did, just not the sort I had in mind.

This is when I learned a lot about spare tyres in a very short space of time.  Mainly that modern cars don't have one.  This is one of the genius side effects of the global warming con.  It's given companies the opportunity to offer you less and claim the moral high ground at the same time.  You can imagine their reasoning - 'you see if we don't give you a spare the car is lighter and uses less fuel, manufacturing costs are lower, you pay less road fund licence and the environment is saved, hooray for us!'. Brilliant, unless you get a puncture, in which case the whole scheme falls apart.  You need to have a less fuel efficient truck drive twenty miles to pick you up and take you the twenty miles back to their base, which means you are  now further away from your destination than you were when you started, take that environment..  They do supply a puncture repair product designed to get you to the nearest garage, but it doesn't work in the event of a tyre  being deformed in a high speed blow out on a motorway, they've not really thought that through have they?

However their recovery insurance got us off the motorway curtesy of a breakdown truck - tip #1 definitely get insurance to cover this, I think their minimum charge was 122 euros.

Now we could relax, the hire companies emergency strategy would swing in to action.  We called them, 'l have a puncture in one of your cars', 'that's down to you mate..', 'surely you have an agreement with a supplier?', 'nope', 'what do recommend we do?', 'sort it out yourself.'. Wow, those hours spent on the customer service course weren't wasted..  

This is where we had our crash course in how the system works. The following information was given to us with the headshake, shrug and intake of breath through teeth that only true professionals can manage.  'You see you can't change one tyre as the pair have to match and guess what we, don't have one that matches', so we're now looking at two new tyres. 'Oh and we may struggle to get one that size and type'.. Hang on, we're driving a Citroën in France and you don't think you can find a tyre for it?  Would you rather we bought something more common place next time? Maybe a £1.5m Bugatti Veyron or a 1923 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost?!  Either way it was now 12pm and the garage was closing for two hours so nothing was going to happen soon.  They dropped the Jolly Roger and sauntered off for a leisurely lunch.

After the break, it transpires they could get hold of two tyres, what luck.  Bad news was the whole business was going to cost roughly twice the normal price, why, because it just does if you want to be on your way.  Stand and deliver.. 'What if we shop around?' we thought. 'Good luck with that, feel free to ring my mates in local garages who will tell you the same thing..'.  How did he read my mind?!

Maybe it's worth involving the enormous weight a national car hire company could bring to the negotiations?  So we ring our man in their office - 'nothing I can do to help, it's your problem, oh and don't forget if you're late back tonight we'll charge you for another day'.  We were feeling the love..

So we got two tyres when we needed one, at twice the usual price, on a car that we didn't own and were giving back that evening, still we'd had a nice lunch in local restaurant, silver lining anybody?

Tip # 2; next time you buy or rent a car see what sort of spare it has.  Especially if you're buying, as the only thing that will make manufacturers think twice is if they lose sales as a result of heir actions. Like me not buying a car is going to make any difference.

Tip # 3; check with rental companies before you travel and make sure you know what you are liable for.

Tip # 4; you can't help where you break down but if it's on a motorway you may have to brace yourself for a big bill.  

Tip # 5; if you're in garage trade get a contract to pick up motorists from the motorway, it's a licence to print money.  We weren't alone in the two hours that we were waiting in the yard, at least another 5 cars were bought in and we saw another 3 broken down on the hard shoulder later on.

It may sound like I'm being overly critical with the two businesses concerned, so in the interest of fair-play let me summarise by saying the following.

When I drove leased cars you were responsible for paying for punctures, fair enough, however they had national agreements with tyre companies which ensured you got new rubber fast and at a discounted rate.  Would that not seem logical for hire companies too?

I appreciate the breakdown company have a lot of costs in running their super-expensive trucks.  I just didn't realise that when they pick you up you have to buy the wagon..  I remember reading a newspaper article once about why all of the products, including petrol, at motorway service stations are more expensive than in other locations.  The answer given was that it was dearer to get delivery lorries out to the them.  But don't lorries use the motorways every day?  Aren't they passing the outlets that are more expensive? Their argument would be more understandable if you were talking about Land's End or the Mull of Kintyre.

The truth was, of course, that they were more expensive because you have no choice, if you're up a creek, the first paddle that comes along is going to be welcome at any price.