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Gone Francais: The Full Monty

20th November 2018
(Blog Posting)

I normally spend my Monday afternoons sitting in a glass box being abused by sub-ameobic lowlife, so a long train ride through the flamingo-flooded plains of the Van Gogh country Camargue in the last of the Spring sunshine made a welcome change. Montpellier was two and a half glorious hours away, via Perpignan, Sete and Narbonne. It’s as pleasurable a journey as you could hope for, but as a Yorkshireman accustomed to UK rail travel, so is being dragged naked through a carpet of drawing pins stretching the exact distance of the Transpennine route. It’s also around half the price. From the Amelie-esque surroundings of Saint Roch Station, and the appropriately named Place Comedie, I made my way towards the absolute-*******-to-find Hotel Cafard, where I was booked into the ‘Ice Box’ suite.

Reinvigorated by a bottle of Chateau de Cazeneuve, and amazed to find that there was no appetite whatsoever in Aix-en-Provence for Middlesbrough’s borefest rollover against Rotherham, I went to the Musee Fabre. I actually did those things the other way round, but this blog is pretentious enough as it is.

Nunchuks, pitchforks, upended tables and beer lobbed everywhere. A card game had descended into a riot. When doesn’t it? For once though, I wasn’t involved. I was looking at Pieter Breuhgel’s Rixe de Paysans (1620). All of the painting’s subjects looked like the grotesque progeny of Andrew Lloyd Webber, if you can conceive of a world so horrifying as to contain multiple Andrew Lloyd Webber’s.

The Monoprix supermarket across the street was doing a roaring trade in booze amongst the street chess players, but it’s keenest customer was a giant white rat that lived exclusively on the shoulder of it’s equally inebriated owner.

‘Quelle nom?’ I asked.

‘Reggie’ announced the owner, triumphantly, rolling out the letter ‘e’ at the end. It wasn't wholly clear which of them was the pet, and which the handler.

Reggie’s white coat was a deep shag pile, and, like my own carpet, stained with beer. His eyes flared red as he bared his nicotine yellow teeth.

‘Il boue?’ Is he drunk?

‘Mais oui’ came the reply.

If you've enjoyed this you really need to check out my travel book, Billy No Maps. Alternatively, click the @ sign to be notified of the next instalment of the travelog.