The Wrong Side of the Road (Part 2)

Despite the sun playing peek-a-boo most of our first full day in France, I managed to get sunburn. Not sunburn in any normal, conventional sense. No. In my finite wisdom, I decided to put factor thirty on my tattoo and my mole and then, being distracted by the Girl shouting at wasps, forgot to put any other sunscreen on. When I get sunburnt I find it's very binary in nature. I either don't have it, or my skin turns the colour of red wine and then sloughs off in great quantities for weeks on end. Plus, it creeps up on me. So I didn't notice how burnt I was until I got home, had a shower and started screaming. When I got out of the shower a gibbering, scarlet wreck I glanced in the mirror to discover I was glowing red save for a neat circle around my tattoo and another around my mole. I looked, in short, like the flag of Japan in reverse. 

The next day it was cloudy and grey, so someone (an idiot) came up with the grand plan of going to the local caves. As you may recall, I deal with tunnels in the same way small children deal with a cold, clammy hand grabbing their ankle as they climb into bed. The same is said for caves. So it was a surprise even to myself that I was the idiot that suggested going to the caves. I suggested it for two reasons;

1. it would be cool in there
2. they are called La Grotte Clamouse - which makes me laugh (it sounds like someone crapped on your dessert)

The Kids loved the Grotte, and to anyone not concentrating on the billions of tonnes of rock just waiting to collapse on their head, it is very beautiful. Unfortunately, for me it was like being suspended by a single cotton thread over a ravine filled with crocodiles armed with chainsaws. Whilst on fire. For two hours.

"Daddy's saying 'ship' a lot."

On and on and on it went, with our guide taking pains to explain how the caves were first discovered, and when this seventy tonne stalactite came crashing down, oh, and how the caves fill up with water in seconds during a rain storm. Lovely. Next time we're on holiday I'm going to suggest train surfing.

"And 'ere we aff a tank wiz ze fish zat aff no eyes..."

I turned to the Boy and said (in a noticeably quavering voice)

"Boy! What do you call a fish with no eyes?"

"No eye deer!"

He replied, and cracked up at his own joke. Tosser.

Eventually we got out, only avoiding being crushed to death by the piffling fact the cave didn't collapse whilst we were in it.

"That... was... AWESOME!"

The Boy yelled, and we took him and Girl to the shop where they eschewed buying anything cave related and instead bought the worlds most disgusting sweets. They consisted of little plastic fire extinguishers that sprayed cola flavoured hydrochloric acid in your mouth. Naturally, the pair of them redecorated the interior of the car with them, smearing the windows and creating a large, mobile wasp magnet.

The next day we went to the local market. Now I have failed to mention up until now that we were with family. Brother-In-Law, Sister-In-Law, Father-In-Law, Step-Mother-In-Law, Step-Brothers-In-Law and their respective girlfriends. The group of us went to the local market, wandered around acquiring all manner of tat and then took a seat at a bar in the town square to enjoy the particularly awful service. After forty minutes of waiting we moved to another bar where we waited forty minutes to be told it would be forty minutes before they would serve us. This made the Girl grumpy. To compound matters, the Wife had volunteered to take one of the Brother-In-Law's girlfriends to the local tattoo parlour to help her book an appointment. The Girl wanted to go. We disagreed, 

Thus was lit the fuse on the worst tantrum she's thrown in recent years. We waited for the Girl to look the other way and I hissed "Run!" at the Wife. This gave me about thirty seconds of peace before the Girl looked back round, saw what had happened and went a funny colour.

Interestingly the French have a different way of dealing with the sudden appearance of a satanic, screaming infant in their midst than the English. In England, everyone pretends not to have noticed. In France they treat it like a form of street theatre, and pull up chairs next to you to watch.  So, with approximately two-hundred people looking at me, I tried to deal with the Girl. Since she was blocking the door of the bar and I was getting "that look" from the staff, I braced myself and  picked her up. My plan was to take her to the other side of the road, where she couldn't get in anyone's way. I imagine it was a similar experience to cuddling a wolverine. She screamed blue murder, kicked and fought and then ran her fingernails across my sunburnt shoulders.

Ouch.

This made me let go, at which point she tried to run out into the road. In a moment of panicked reflex I managed to grab the back of her dress and yank her out of the path of a car before we both ended up in a pile by the side of the road. What felt like a month passed and, just as she was calming down a little old lady with a zimmer frame came over, smiled at me and before I could say; "Non!" started talking to the Girl - who reacted with such volume and bile the old dear literally ran away. And queue another god-knows-how-long of; "No! No! No!" Eventually I managed to distract her by showing her a statue of a lion and in a blink of an eye the whole storm passed like it had never happened. The assembled throng of French market goers looked disappointed, turned back to their drinks and went back to ignoring us.

The next day we went straight to the lake, as this didn't appear to cause the Girl to melt down. I like the lake, it's very peaceful save for the Girl yelling;

"SHUT UP! WE'VE GOT TO BE QUIET!!"

We swam a lot. The Boy insisted, at one point yelling at one of the Step-Brothers-In-Law;

"GET IN THE WATER, YOU JESSIE!"

Before more kindly pointing out;

"It's okay once it's over your nuts."

We inflated the Kids dinghy, tied it to my foot and swam out across the lake, looking for fish and dragonflies. When it was time to come back in I turned around and made for the bank again.

"Did you tie that on properly?"

The Wife asked. I sagely nodded, and explained my expertise with knots.

"Are you still attached Kids?"

"Yes!"

I gave the Wife a "told-you-so" look and swam on laughing about how funny it would be if we turned around and found they were a dot on the horizon.

"Dad."

A small voice said.

"We're not attached any more."

And we turned to discover they were, in fact, a dot on the horizon. Took me a quarter of an hour to catch up with them. By the time I got back I was shattered, and the Girl was geographically disadvantaged;

"Are we in England?"

The rest of the holiday passed relatively uneventfully. The Boy found a level of humour I couldn't have imagined when I explained what happened to the French monarchy;

"Ha ha! Heads cut off! Brilliant!"

And before we knew it, we were having a meal out to celebrate our last night on holiday - where I had the single best pizza of my life. The Girl, clearly enjoying the bonhomie of our last night, pole danced gratuitously for us, around a tree growing up through the middle of the restaurant.

Dear god, no.

Once she finished she sat on the floor in the middle of the restaurant, legs akimbo, skirt hoicked up, and graphically scratched her bits and pieces - thereby putting everyone off their food.

And then, at the end of it all, something weird happened. On the journey home we stopped at some services in the middle of the night so the Kids could go to the loo. The Wife took the Girl to the lady's, whilst I took the Boy to the men's. As the Boy and I walked back out into the warm night I realised I'd had the first real family holiday abroad that we would all remember - and I came over a bit wobbly. I picked the Boy, gave him a cuddle and told him how much I loved him. He smiled, looked at me and said;

"You're the best dad in the world."

And then;

"Heads cut off! I love it!"

P.S. I mentioned the murder thing, didn't I? Funny thing - we were in the South of France, four people got murdered in the Alps and I got bombarded by people asking "Was it near you?" I've come to the conclusion people were rather hoping I'd been shot. Which is just plain mean, you rotters.