Keir Royale

So where’s the silver lining?

Above you see our “back garden” at home, where to play swingball you have to position the water-filled base carefully so as not to bash a wall, another wall, a shed door, or your opponent.

I must add this is an old photo. There is now a good deal of greenery clinging to the walls, but the grass is considerably less green and healthy-looking.

As soon as we walk through the door, fresh from six hours on the ferry, Hannah declares,
“I hate this house, it’s so boring with no garden.”

I can’t help feeling some sympathy with her, but have to come over all “make the best of it” and “this is home” and “you’ll see your friends tomorrow.”

“Only at school,” she moans.

Once we’ve harangued them through hands, face, teeth, wee and bed, we start the Herculean unpacking task and I ponder on what I have to look forward to now we’re back in Blighty.

I manage to come up with a few flecks of silver shimmering beneath the fog of shattered  homecoming…

- I am at last back in synch with Radio Four, and no longer have to feel slightly at odds with the world through listening to everything an hour late.

- I can listen on FM and kiss goodbye to all the dross that the Suits at the Beeb don’t really want on their airwaves but have to keep on broadcasting for the sake of the licence fee, so they shove it onto LW.

I hate bloody Long Wave. Morning Service, Shipping Forecast, Yesterday in Parliament, and hour upon hour of men whittering on endlessly about other men batting cricket balls.
There always seems to be a Test Match Special or the Cricket World Cup or a Let’s Piss Off Everyone who can’t get Radio Four on FM Cricket Bonanza when we go to France.

It got so bad this time that I even started developing an interest in the night life of the cricketers in the West Indies.
Apparently they had one really nice evening on the beach, drinking beer and singing songs, relaxing after a hard day on the pitch.
And I learned that one of the players had only just gone back to cricket after a few years trying to do a proper job. He found it hard to support his new wife and baby on what he could earn in the real world, so he worked himself back into shape and is now totally focussed on the game (which suggests he was merely dabbling the first time round) and is playing really rather well.

- I can turn on a tap without worrying about receiving a bill the size of the National Debt. Here we pay enough to service the National Debt every year, but we pay it regardless of how much water we use.

- I don’t have to be continually lighting things with matches - cookers, wood fires, paraffin stoves. This also means Mike can’t light the oven and leave the matches in the lit oven, prompting me to run to the kitchen to see what’s burning, only to find he’s cooking a box of matches for supper.

- I can simultaneously use the kettle, toaster and microwave. If I’m feeling really reckless, I can even do a bit or ironing and vacuuming at the same time WITHOUT a fuse blowing.

The electricity in France seems especially designed to tease…
“You think you’ve got electricity, but it’s only pretend, it’ll stop working if you actually use it, and then you have to fiddle with a little screw thing underneath the place where you plug in the appliance. You’ll find it’s melted and you can’t get it out, hee hee hee.”

- I’m back on broadband, and don’t have to grapple with a French keyboard in an internet cafe, where the letter “a” is where the “q” should be, and everything I write looks like I’ve suddenly started typing in tongues.

- And joy, oh joy, I can re-acquaint myself with the goings-on chez Grissom, Horatio and Mac.
I find the New York posse almost impossible to understand, but there are always subtitles, something we discovered could help no end when trying to keep up with French TV.

I even managed to watch CSI in French. They got Grissom’s voice completely wrong, but an addict has to take what she can get.

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