Thursday 28 July 2016

I write this in sunny France.  I kid you not, my wife and I are doing a house swap in Aix-en-Provence for 4.5 weeks.  It is lovely.  The people whose house we are living in are going to drive to England and stay in our place in London.  They haven't left yet which could be odd but it is isn't.  Catherine is visiting family in Corsica and Alain is working deep in the bowls of the house.  We are living in an annex which is quite separate to their main living quarters.  Essentially my life consists of eating bread, cheese, meat and drinking coffee & beer whilst reading.  It's a hard life in the sunshine.

So why am I writing this you may ask?  Well my wife met me in Nice on the south coast of France, a long story which I will skip for now.  I drove the TT down from London at the weekend.  It should have been a very chilled drive, roof down, sunshine, empty roads (they really are empty in France) and nothing to worry about apart from 6 weeks off work.  However, the French customs officers had a strop on following Brexit and terror attacks so kept me (and everyone else) waiting 4 hours extra to get through the port at Dover.  This meant that I had 600km to do to get to the booked hotel and I wasn't starting out from Calais until gone 16:00.  Now the French have a rather generous speed limit of 130km/h but in the interests of a Saturday night I sat at 150 all the way.

After about 300km I noticed the familiar sight of a Healey 100.  I also realised that I wasn't catching it very rapidly.  When I did catch it I realised that it was going about 110km/h with two people in it which seemed very fast.  I couldn't help myself and leant out of my car and waved like mad at them.  The lady driving had a very cool scarf on and the two of them had an intercom of some description.  They looked very cool and very happy.

I did later see two French Healeys in a service station but no more on the road.

It was fun.