Bittersweet Symphony

One of the first "real-life" French sentences that sticks in my mind is "Au fond avec les valises!"
It was 1995 or thereabouts, and I had travelled with a girlfriend to the south of France: we were going to squat with her uncle and aunt, who had retired out there.
Now imagine that sentence being yelled at you by a fistfull of irate French people on an overcrowded bus.
My friend and I were struggling to travel through Nice on public transport, having just emerged from the airport feeling slightly dazzled by the heat, the language and the foreign-ness.
We were 17, we didn't have a clue why all the other passengers were yelling and gesticulating in that frantic Latin manner: we were scared.


Turns out, "au fond avec les valises!" is a rather unpolite (and decidedly un-British) way of saying "would you two girls mind terribly moving to the back of the bus with your large cases, please? That is the convention for bus travel in France, though of course we understand that you couldn't possibly know that."

Anyway, the point is: I rather feared that the six-train, four-day round trip from Toulouse to Manchester that we have just finished might well be the parental equivalent of this dubious first clash with the French language. In short, I fully expected to be subjected to countless incitations (some real, some imagined) of "au fond avec les enfants!"
I imagined that anyone unlucky enough to share breathing space with our two offspring for the duration of a long train journey might feel slightly peeved.
But in the event, and as so often, my pessimism was proved unnecessary.
Call it good fortune, call it heart-warming human nature: we only shared carriage space with highly tolerant, child-friendly individuals.
Some of them even managed a stint as temporary babysitters.
And the boys behaved beautifully. Even on the 8 hour trudge to Paris as the TGV bowed to the will of angry strikers who had elected to make their point right in front of it.

Trains aside, the in-between days were spent idling with family, and especially the two 80 year old great grannies, whose sunny nature and penchant for a good gossip and a shopping spree make them not so very different from those two wide-eyed 17 year old girls who boarded a bus in Nice.

Of course, there was the tiredness, and the language barrier, and the socialising and the panic of a certain FH who lost his wallet and ID card an hour before we were due to head home.

But there were also those exquisite three minutes, somewhere just south of Bordeaux, less than two hours from our final destination, when I escaped to the empty train bar, sipped a paper cup full of hot tea, gazed out at the vines just starting to blossom in the dusk, and listened to Bittersweet Symphony.

I thought about a very good friend of mine, and the terrible time she's going through.

I thought about how proud of us I was for making this trip. How proud of myself for sticking to my guns, not putting myself through the ordeal of a plane trip, even though it was, by most people's standards, the "sensible" thing to do.

I thought about how these few short minutes of absolute quietness, bar the music, seemed so graceful that I had to hold my breath, as though gazing at a perfect piece of art, or a spectacular view.

I think you have to cover many thousands of kilometres to appreciate a moment like that. To flirt with perfection... and no longer be afraid when a bunch of French people yell words you don't understand.