“You go … wiff Toulouse”
I have never been to Toulouse, but my friend Sparrow has. Last week he sent me several scanned pages of the diary he kept during our trip to France. This was back in the mid-1980s, when we were still young and adventurous and blonde. At this point, I think I should warn younger readers to look away, because what follows are the nostalgic ramblings of a middle-aged man reliving his youth.
We bought an ex-army VW combi, which we called The Hen because she looked like an olive-green chicken squatting on a nest of eggs. We had no time or money to customise her, so we slept on the passenger seats, which were hard and angled and too short: we had to curl up with our heads jammed under the ashtrays. She wanted regular or super, but we filled her up with unleaded because it was cheaper. A bad idea. The Hen kept running, but wanted a pint of oil every time we refuelled.
And so we drove to France, via Germany and Switzerland, to pursue our romantic dream of spending hours crouched in the mud, cutting grapes from vines with tiny nail scissors.
Because I had never been to France, I was quite surprised to discover that the country wasn’t one large vineyard, with Paris in the middle and Lyon somewhere to the south. In fact, we drove for three or four days without seeing a single grape. We were running low on cash and even Jimmy Hendrix was starting to sound nervous as he belted out “Foxy Lady” for the umpteenth time on our cassette deck.
To save money, we bought the cheapest tinned food we could find. I will never, ever eat ravioli again, even if it is prepared by the very best chef in Italy. At dusk, we would look for a suitable field to park The Hen and then spend hours trying to balance our tiny gas burners on uneven terrain. Over dinner, we would make appalling jokes at our own expense, before settling down to play guitar, write letters or draw surreal pictures in the failing light, trying to ignore our rumbling stomachs.
You can imagine how loudly we cheered when we saw the first vineyards, stretching out in neat lines as far as the eye could see. But our joy was short-lived, because we soon discovered that all the grapes had already been picked. Cursing our bad luck, we headed south, torturing hundreds of farmers with our poor French, watching their faces shift from friendly to bewildered to dismayed as we struggled through the sales pitch we had so carefully prepared: “Bon-sure mon-sher! Avay voo travaille poor mwa et mon amee, silver plate?”
We were fast approaching the Spanish border when we struck gold at an apple orchard, where we found a farmer who was looking for workers. The only problem was that Sparrow wasn’t allowed to work because he was travelling on a South African passport. This was explained to us by our interpreter, a friendly, Egyptian student called Halim, whose English was only slightly better than my French. Halim took great pains to suggest how this problem might be resolved. His words remain etched in my memory: “You … no … Me! … no-no … I … no-wait-wait … You come … no! … You go! … à Toulouse!”
The following morning, Sparrow set off to Toulouse to draw money and run a few other errands. Here’s an excerpt from his diary:
Sparrow’s nightmare trip has made me steer clear of Toulouse for almost 25 years, but I think I’m now ready to retrace his footsteps and see the city for myself. Hopefully, some kind reader will convince me that there is more to Toulouse than zero parking, well hidden banks and cinema-lined traffic circles.
(PS: Just so you know, Sparrow is still the kind of guy who types out his diary when he gets back from a trip. He currently runs his own video production company.)
Richard de Nooy
