WEEK 34 & 35 -- A New Vice; Driving on the Right.

 Well, I assume you all recognise this famous landmark.  Le Mont St Michel, France.  If you are planning on visiting during the tourist season, get there nice and early to avoid the queues.  This year we were in France when the holiday season was almost over, and the narrow streets winding their way up the mount were not quite as packed with tourists.  The coffee was as expensive as ever, mind you.

We've been holidaying in Brittany for the past six years.  I dare say we'll look back on this period as the Brittany Years.  There was an elegiac feel in the air this time; partly because it was starting to feel autumnal, but also because this was probably our last family holiday, just the four of us together.   I'm amazed we've sustained it this long, really.  Many teenagers opt out of holidays with mum and dad after the age of 14, preferring instead to stay at home and trash the house with illicit parties that spiral out of control.

Now then, the new things.  Obviously going to France is not a new thing.  But as promised in an earlier posting, I did smoke my first cigar.  My first tin of cigars, in fact.  A new vice.  Comparable, I think, to drinking a tiny intense espresso in an Italian piazza whilst wearing Ferragamo pumps.  I have a pair of Ferragamo pumps, as it happens.  Got them in a Charity Shop in Shirley.  I'm glad I only spent £12 on them, to be honest, not £250, as they aren't very comfortable.  I'm determined not to be beaten, but so far it's 3-2 to the pumps.  The picture of a cow field shows you the view I contemplated while smoking my cafe creme each evening.

My other new thing was driving in France.  Driving on the right.  Shriek.  The experience would have been even more alarming had the car been a left-hand drive.  I can imagine myself fumbling in panic in the glove compartment for the gear stick each time I approached a junction.  In fact, it wasn't too dismaying an experience as it turned out.  French roads are generally pretty empty.  On the whole, I prefer to be driven, so that I can stare blankly out of the window.  Staring blankly out of windows is part of the writer's job description, and is not easily compatible with driving.  Still, the challenge of driving on the right was there, and I rose to it.  Nervously and timidly, but there we are.  I hope I'm a better person for it.

WEEK 30--Buying Cigars

Another genuine first: I have never bought cigars before in my life.  And here's where I bought them.  The Chocolate Box in Walsall.  When we lived in Walsall my sons were always amused by the idea of a sweet shop with a dental practice upstairs.  Were they in cahoots?

I have vivid memories of trips to the dentist in Walsall, before I learnt not to take my small sons with me when I was having a check-up.  I was powerless to repress them with my mouth crammed with surgical steel and latex-clad fingers, and was forced to lie there as the older one ran through his 007 impersonations.  'Do you expect me to talk?  No, Mr Bond, I expect you to DIE! Mwa-ha-ha!' The younger one kept up a stream of observations and artless questions: 'Cool! blood!  Are you going to drill her heart?'  The dentist squeaked rather huffily*, 'No, I am not going to drill her heart!'

But back to cigar buying.  I felt incredibly furtive as I approached the shop.  Was I going to bail out and buy a quarter of aniseed balls, like blushing young men in a bygone era exiting chemists with tubes of toothpaste instead of condoms?  To understand my furtiveness, you need to remember you can take the girl out of the manse, but you can't take the manse out of the girl.  I don't think I've felt this furtive since I was six, and cadged half a tube of coral lipstick from a friend, then hid it under the box tree in the garden.  I still remember the smell of it.

Oddly enough, I have bought cigarettes before, from this very tobacconist's in fact.  But they were a prop for a murder mystery party.  I was a Russian countess, and obviously I needed some pastel-coloured Sobranie cocktail cigarettes to pose with.  I never smoked them.  The cigars I fully intend to smoke (though not inhale).  Hence the furtiveness.  Coupled with that English affliction: the fear of making a fool of myself in a shop by not knowing what I was doing.  Do you buy them by the tin, or by the dozen?  Or do they come in twenties?  Was the correct term actually cigarillos?

Oh Catherine, why oh why, when SMOKING SERIOUSLY HARMS YOU AND OTHERS AROUND YOU?  Basically, because I always feel left out on holiday when the menfolk of my immediate family sit on the balcony puffing their fat cigars.  I shall sit there and puff my thin cigars.  Or quite possibly, let them burn languidly between my fingers.  This is, after all, 'the world's favourite everyday pleasure'.  It says so on the tin. (As far as possible from the picture of a man's throat horribly devoured by cancer.)

Yes, I know I could have bought them in a French tobacconist, but I was consumed by the following possible scenario: me requesting 'Cafe creme' and ending up with a cup of coffee, which I'd then have to drink, because I don't know the gender for cigar, and Grammar School girls don't like to make linguistic blunders; would rather not communicate at all.  I'd then emerge from the shop and have to lie to my family and say I'd changed my mind, because I'd be incapable of admitting my ridiculous tongue-tied English anguish.

I confess, I love the smell of tobacco.  I'm sitting here sniffing the tin.  My current favourite perfume is 'Cuba' by Czech & Speake.  It is not the easiest fragrance to love, perhaps.  You can read the thumbs-down reviews on the perfume website Basenotes (http://www.basenotes.net)  But here's the blurb from the Czech&Speake website:
Inspired by the old town of Havana, its Latin rhythms, smooth cigars, fine rums and exotic beauties, this fragrance bursts into life with the initial top notes of bergamot, lime, peppermint and a hint of rum. Layered with a melange of spicy and floral middle notes, mainly rose, clove and bay, Tonka beans add a subtle softness. The lasting base notes of tobacco mixed with the richness of frankincense, cedar wood and vetiver round off this striking fragrance.
Gosh, I need a little lie down after that.  And maybe a cigar.

*A JKR tribute sentence, there.  (Observed Hermione cattily.)