At breakfast today, the French man in front of me at the coffee machine was having problems. The coffee machine is a very simple affair. On the far left is a button and a nozzle for hot water with a nice picture of a water tap and the words hot water in Spanish, French, Italian, German and English. On the far right is a button and a nozzle for hot chocolate complete with nice picture and description. In the centre, and this is where it starts to get complicated for the French, is one nozzle but three, yes three buttons above it. One for black coffee, one for white coffee and one for milk on its own.
Three buttons perfectly positioned, beautifully described and in full working order.
Not rocket science is it?
The French man picked up his cup from the large pile alongside the machine, put it on a saucer and placed it under the left hot water nozzle. Then he pressed the button for black coffee. As the coffee poured out of the centre nozzle he stood there gazing into the middle distance humming ‘Je ne regrette rien’ under his breath. He finally looked in his cup – no coffee. “Je t’alors,” he said to me as I smiled at him and he pressed the hot water button again.
He was on the final chorus, warbling away in his very own impersonation of Edith Piaf when he noticed the coffee cascading down the drain channel. “Oh, mon dieu,” he said to me as I grinned like an imbecile at him. He quickly fumbled for the cup and pushed it across, misjudged the position and was just in time to get the last burst of coffee into his saucer but with another quick shove managed to capture the final dribblings of coffee in his cup. “Ah, la plume de ma tante,” he said and do you know what he did next?
He picked up the cup and saucer which were covered in coffee dregs and dripping everywhere, put it back on the nice clean serving surface with all the nice clean cups and saucers and walked off, presumably to find a coffee machine that worked in the old fashioned way (Bit of Charles Aznavour for you there).
I turned to the man behind me and said, “French eh? What can you do? Filthy pigs, all of them.”
But luckily he didn’t hear me. He had his eyes shut, lost in the third verse of La Marseilles.
The sun beds are nothing unusual, made of shiny plastic with adjustable head/back rests but my bed never seems to be the same as everybody else’s. I’m OK if I’m lying horizontal with the head rest flat but as soon as I raise the back of the bed and lie down I start to slide down the bed and off the end. The higher the back rest the quicker I go. The only way I can stay on is by holding on to the sides of the bed. When I let go I’m off again. Pauline’s lying there, absolutely still and serene in the same position as me but, look out here I go, I’m off again.
No other damn person around this damn pool seems to be having the same trouble. In fact it’s got to the stage now where I no longer slide off and land in a crumpled heap at the end of the bed. I’ve put on a false black handlebar moustache and an old fashioned bathing suit, parted my hair down the middle and perfected the art of leaping up on my feet very quickly, hands above my head, feet together, legs straight and shouting, “Ho!” or “Oop la!” trying to give the impression that even acrobats have to go on holiday and wind down sometimes.
It’s bloody wearing me out though.
Just hope they think I’m French.
Went to a bar for lunch.
We sat outside at a pavement table, ordered and waited until the waiter brought out my plate of soup. Although I thought I’d ordered a plate of green vegetables and potatoes, the soup was very nice. However one thing bothered me as soon as the bowl was put on the table. The pavement and consequently our table and chairs were sloping from right to left at an alarming angle which didn’t really become that noticeable until something was laid on the table. If you’re sitting at the same angle as the table everything looks level doesn’t it? You just have a strange feeling that you’ll fall off your chair any minute. Anyway, as soon as the soup bowl was put on the table in front of me the soup began to list to the left and in a sudden rush, started to pour out over the edge of the bowl and into a deep bottomed plate underneath, obviously there for this very reason.
I quickly started to slurp the soup in the bowl to stop the soup in the plate from flooding the table and was congratulating myself when it reached that fine balance of just hovering on the rim of the plate and the rim of the bowl. In fact if we’d had more plates and bowls I could have constructed a rather lovely two foot high table cascade as an impressive table decoration. An idea I might suggest to the manager when I leave.
However, now that I’d eaten some of the soup the bowl was lighter and the movement of the liquid as I ate started the whole thing sliding across the table, slowly and imperceptibly at first but then suddenly in a quick swish towards the other end of the table. I tried to stop it by pressing on the bottom of the bowl with my spoon, missed the bottom but hit the rim instead and added a sort of bouncy action to the bowl as it still slid away from me. By this time the waiter had come back and, oblivious to what was going on, started to put more plates, glasses and cutlery on the table, all of which stayed exactly where he’d put them until he went away again. Then the whole damn contents of the table started to twitch and then join the soup bowl in a race for the end of the table.
The waiter had very kindly filled our glasses to the brim and water was now overflowing onto the table along with the soup and we all, by now, had our hands and feet on the table trying to keep everything in place. When we’d finished our meal the table was an absolute disaster area and I could sympathise with those Titanic passengers trying to eat their dinner as the ship went down.
As we left, Pauline said, “We’ll never be able to go back there, look at the table.”
The table had shifted and was now standing in the middle of the road, the tablecloth and its contents now in a big heap beside it.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “They’ll think we’re French.”
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