Take one tired, brow beaten world-weary business executive with a beautiful wife and three gorgeous kids (more of them later) and pick the whole lot up from a remote desolate island somewhere in the wild waters of the English Channel…well the Isle of Wight actually…. and deposit them lock stock and two steaming baguettes in a small town in south west France.
The result, I truly hope, is a fascinating and often funny insight into the clash of British and French culture, language and attitude.
So let me start at the beginning, the tired brow beaten bloke was me (Ex Director General of Cable TV and MD of Isle of Wight Cable Telephone Company) and my long suffering wife..(known to many as the Cable widow) is Elaine.
With our brood of three wonderful kids Sebastian (thirteen years of puberty), Alexandra (also known as Gertie, eleven years of precociousness) and Libby (AKA BamBam, nine years of breaking things) we sat down around the almost real gas fire in our house just outside Cowes and had a family pow-wow. We also very generously included Henry our mad black Labrador puppy in the get together, he didn’t add much to the debate but did manage to eat one of the cushions.
For years, Elaine and I had talked about moving to France when we had made our millions, somewhere like the Cote D’Azur or Pete Mayal’s Provence, and so, that wind swept evening, we discussed the issue at hand. And no we had not made millions, but had heroically and with great panache lost thousands to the voracious financiers, lawyers and advisors who exist within subterranean caverns in the City of London, only emerging during banking and lunch hours.
The discussion with the widow and the brood was about our standard of life, not politics not the state of the nation, nor Tony Blair’s new conservatives, but us; our life, our existence, their schools, their friends and ….well us.
It was a very selfish discussion, we all admit that, but after years of single parenting Elaine wanted to meet the chap she had married over fourteen years ago for more than ten minutes. Sebastian wanted a playground bigger than the Isle of Slight, Alexandra needed more in her life than a very expensive private school and “boring boys” and Libby needed something bigger to break…Martin Johnson or maybe the entire English rugby team. Me, well I just wanted a different life..no more bankers, no more bored…sorry board meetings, no more indigestion and five o clock in the morning alarm calls..not much to ask, was it?
What emerged from this little gathering was the farting of the almost real gas fire, yet another destroyed cushion and the unanimous decision to shift the entire family operation to somewhere in France.
Nowhere particularly particular or specifically specific, just France.
