Froggy's World - Alms for Oblivion (Weblog)

Misadventures of a cultural exchange
28th October, 2006

We'd dined at the restaurant once before and had noticed that the female proprietor had been playing with a kitten. The food had been good and, travelling in France, strangers in a foreign land, we decided to revisit it. My wife, whose grasp of French is more confident than mine, decided to strengthen French-Dutch-Australian relations with some light banter.
   "How is your pussy?" she asked with a broad smile. Rather than produce the expected recollection of our previous visit, this innocent query produced quite the opposite result.
   "My pussy?" said the woman, arching her eyebrows and taking a step back. It dawned on me that the conversation was proceeding down a path we had never intended to tread.
   "No, no," I said. "Not your pussy. Le petite chat," I said, wracking my brain for the French word for kitten and making small animal motions with my hand. "Your cat. We came here last week and you had a cat."
   "Ah, le chat," said the woman, visibly relieved that she had not fallen in with two antipodean pornographers intent on roaming the countryside insulting the honour of French womanhood.
   "That went well," I said to my wife.
   "At least I didn't miss the basket," she said, a reference to an incident the previous day when we had taken our rented car onto the autoroute and come to a tollgate.
"Here," she had said, handing me the correct money in euros, which I duly tossed into the coin collection basket.
In my defence, it had been getting dark at the time, although I am prepared to admit that it was quite a large basket. Regardless, as I tossed the coins I heard one miss and ricochet off the roadway. By now, cars were queueing behind me but the boomgate remained in place.
   "How could you miss?" demanded my missus. "You'll have to get out and pick up the coin," she yelled.
   "I can't get out! I'm too close to the bloody basket. I can't open the door. Give me more money!" I cried.
She gave me a handful of coins and I threw them in the basket. Still the boomgate remained in place while the impatient horn-blasts of fist-waving Frenchmen increased.
"It's insatiable," I screeched. "How much money does it want? Give me more coins," I said, hurling a fistful of euros into the basket. That was the last of our coins. All that I had left to throw was an apple, a banana and half a baguette. Mercifully, the third handful did it, the gate flipped upwards and we rocketed onto the autoroute.
The next day we went to the beach. The beach, I have always thought, is a great social leveller where the good and the great and the poor and the desperate are largely indefinable. Private beaches, in my opinion, are elitist and to be resisted at all costs. So we stood and looked at the sun lounges and umbrellas and restaurant tables nearby and the sign advising the rates charged for the privilege of entering this private sanctum.
   "How dreadful," I sniffed. "Thank God it's not permitted in Australia."
   "They have waiter service," said my wife, nodding towards a gentleman carrying an ice bucket and a bottle of wine.
   "Really," I said.
   "Not that your egalitarian, socialist principles would permit you to support the concept of private beaches on which only those with sufficient funds can lie," she added.
   "Quite right," I said, "but then perhaps we should see just how disgusting it is to lie on a plush, padded mattress in the shade of an umbrella while a white-jacketed lackey runs back and forth fetching booze in chilled containers, and then walk ten paces to a strategically placed restaurant table and eat before collapsing back onto the sun lounge for a post-prandial nap."
It's true what they say; travel broadens your knowledge and I now know that private beaches are elitist, exclusive, dreadful places - unless of course you're lying on one, watching the waters of the Mediterranean sparkle through a glass of ice-cold beer.

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