My grave holiday error!

I really put my foot in it...

Hello from Arles in Provence where the living is easy!

So easy, in fact, that my brain has turned completely soft.

We drive around the Camargue, where there are flamingos galore and also wild white horses - d’you remember that 60s kids’ TV programme, The White Horses? They are here, roaming freely! They’re quite small horses but very hardy, apparently. ‘They’re semi-feral,’ I read aloud as we drive.

The Camargue is a gloriously green landscape, pancake flat. It’s rice growing, salt raking country (is that what they do with salt?) deep in rural southern France. It’s also losing-your-brain country as I am SO relaxed. My brain is being gently raked in the hot sun.

We potter about happily, around the local villages and coast, shouting, ‘LOOK HORSES!’ We amble lazily around a bird sanctuary.

It’s only when we return to our little apartment near Arles that we realise something is amiss.

Or rather AFOOT.

‘Where are my Birkenstocks?’ Jimmy asks repeatedly, roaming around the apartment.

Now I hope I’m not going to be libelled for this but Jimmy does lose things - i.e., his glasses, often to be found perched on his head.

Also wallet, keys, phone - those kind of essential items. I should mention that I lose my purse/keys/phone frequently too. And Jimmy is very good at taking charge of the really important things, like our passports, which he stores in a special armoured wallet that I not allowed to touch or even look at. My passport - my identity!!! - is only handed to me seconds before I have to face the passport person as if, otherwise, I might flush it down the toilet or smother it in jam. I’m becoming de-skilled at passport management!

‘Where are my Birkenstocks?’ Now Jimmy is looking under sofa cushions and behind the chest of drawers. He stomps through to shine his phone torch under the bed.

I just phase out when this kind of thing happens. When we were away on an art course Jimmy misplaced his wallet, and was frantically looking for it, and I just sort of sat there, glazed over, smiling at a cloud. ‘That’s so funny,’ said our friend Lisa. ‘You didn’t even react!’

What was I meant to do? Alert the Government? Call the police?

Here in our little holiday apartment I potter around, nibbling cheese, while Jimmy tears through the bathroom, the wardrobe - the garden even. He marches up to the pool and searches frantically in the dark.

I should point out that while I love France - it’s my favourite country - there are things about it that are dangerous.

1. The rose wine is so nice and far too easy to tip down one’s throat.

2. If I lived here I would be 99.9% cheese.

3. The dastardly Birkenstock thieving gang! Jimmy’s missing sandals are probably being hawked on eBay right now.

However, since all my oestrogen drained out of me I couldn’t give a crap about other people’s lost things. Isn’t Mother Nature brilliant? You reach this wizened life stage precisely at a point at which no one is going to shout, ‘Where’s that crucial form I need for the school trip which has to be handed in today otherwise I can’t GO?’

(Actually if you’re early meno or had children late-ish then I guess that might happen, at which point I’m sending wine).

Jimmy lopes back to the apartment and stands over me, staring. I realise he is waving my sandals at me. ‘These are yours,’ he announces. ‘Where are MINE?’

What am I? Birkenstock monitor?

‘I don’t want to talk about this any more,’ I say airily, from my pleasantly breezy pasture on the moral high ground. Thinking, isn’t it wonderful when in no way can a minor problem be categorised as yours? Heck, I’m almost enjoying this - the frantic searching, the cries of THEY’VE GOT TO BE SOMEWHERE. I’m looking on from a distance and thinking, ‘I’m so glad that’s not me.’

It’s like that stormy night thing, I decide. When you’re sitting all cosy indoors, with a nice roaring fire while rain lashes the window and trees thrash in the gale—

‘You’re wearing my Birkenstocks,’ Jimmy announces.

I look down at my feet. ‘WHAT?’

Well I can’t see anything wrong at all!

‘Those are my Birkenstocks! Have you been wearing them all day?’

Um, it would appear so, yes. While we admired the horses and flamingos it seems that I was happily plodding about in size 11 Birkenstocks (I am a 6).

I peel them off my hot, disgustingly sweaty feet and hand them to him. ‘Look on the bright side,’ I tell him. ‘Isn’t it great that they’ve been found?’

Love,

Fiona (current state: semi-feral) xx

PS My new novel, The Woman Who Got Her Spark Back, is out now! You can order here - and if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription, you can read for free!