Homeward…

We are on the way home, and I am posting this early due to issues with  wifi which is more expensive at sea and we are flat broke now.

We made the necessary en route stop at Carrefour to replenish milk and bread, and also to load a trolley with wine and pastis and Pineau and cognac and champagne, which should tide us nicely over Christmas, and which made the checkout girl laugh and ask if we were going to have a party.

We loaded it all in through the camper van window, and the children made disapproving remarks, but we didn’t care. I love French wine, and they just don’t export any that is worth drinking, on account of preferring to keep that for themselves, which I suppose is perfectly reasonable really. Also I love the French attitude to wine, which is that it is a thoughtful pleasure to be savoured and considered, rather than the English approach, which see-saws between guilt and splurge, depending on the individual, usually leaning towards splurge in my case.

We had eaten so much this week that nobody felt like breakfast until lunchtime, for which we had French bread and doughnuts. Even then Oliver thought for a minute that he might save his, but decided against it because of the family practice of eating together, which is that when we finish our own we pretend to be seagulls around anybody who has got anything interesting left, making seagull noises of ‘share, share’, and the person thus assaulted has got to attempt to protect it with equally seagull noises of ‘mine! mine!’

We ought not to do this, really, because it is almost always Oliver, which is probably why he is so thin. Also although it is great fun and makes everybody laugh it leads to some truly awful table manners.

We made the slow haul up the autoroutes back to Zeebrugge, even slower than the journey down, because we are weighted down with wine and souvenirs and memories. One of my favourite souvenirs was bought from a street vendor, and is a gold-painted tin model of the Eiffel Tower which has batteries and lights up with little coloured lights in the dark, it is absolutely perfect and will fit in nicely with my collection of interesting memorabilia from other adventures.

The children were so tired they curled up together in the back to watch a film and we navigated our way past Compiegne, and Amiens, past Arras where we once blew our very last Euros on a visit to the circus, and Lille, then out of France to Bruxelles, feeling regretful about leaving the endless possibilities of the enormous continent behind us, for the confines of the tiny UK.

We passed wind farms and straw barns and etangs and neat little houses with red tiled roofs, and looked out at the autumn-gold-and-scarlet trees under huge grey skies. We have had the most incredible, beautiful weather all week, we have worn flip-flops and T-shirts around the parks, except Mark, obviously, who wears a shirt and his sensible Clarks shoes at all times, and the sun has decorated Oliver liberally with freckles, it has been wonderful.

We had a bit of an anxious moment on the way up, when the Belgians decided to think about digging up the road to the port, although they didn’t actually do anything other than plant dozens of cones along it, and instead of an autoroute it became an autostand, with long lines of trucks and Belgians and the only camper van older than ours that I have ever seen, Mark thought that it might have been a minibus in the 1960s, it would have looked elderly even in Delhi.

Fortunately in the end they got bored with the road improvements, and chugged along in a truck and collected the cones again, and we made it to the port with half an hour to spare and no worries.

I say no worries, of course what I mean is no worries apart from the stack of Carrefour alcohol in the bathroom, since I am not sure exactly how much allows you to qualify for ‘personal use’ but the policeman at the port who made me take all the bedding off the bed in order to check for rogue Syrians didn’t seem to notice, although he did comment on the stack of carrier bags from Disney, so maybe he just thought we were travelling fun-loving alcoholics.

We are on the boat now, and Mark is worried about this journey because he says that the boat is listing and some things are not properly maintained, so if it sinks then you can all sue P & O on my behalf for being rubbish and depriving the world of my daily diary entries, also you can all demand recompense for the presents I would have brought back from Disneyland if only I hadn’t sunk. Also you can sue them for being rubbish because when we tried to upgrade we couldn’t so we are in a cupboard again. I can tell you we won’t be doing that again. I much prefer my own lounge and complimentary champagne, and even Mark is sorry now that he has tried it.

He is worried enough to have carefully checked where the lifeboats go from and has shown us which one will be best to use if we are going to escape from a twenty first century Titanic.

I have dealt with the problem by having a glass of wine as a warm up to the one I intend to have with dinner, which has made me feel much happier.  Mark will look after us if anything goes wrong, so don’t worry.

We will be fine.