It is a curious thing, but if you were to ask the average Englishman or Englishwoman which country was England’s oldest ally, he or she – if well educated – would probably say, correctly, “Portugal” (I refer the honourable reader to the Treaty of Windsor of 1386). Ask the same English person which country is England’s oldest or natural enemy, however, and even the less-than-well-read would probably say “France”, for we have had a love/hate relationship with that country since 1066. True, a lot of it has been because the English raided France for hundreds of years in attempts by Anglo-French kings to reclaim the land that they once owned, but the French have not been entirely blameless either, by never missing the opportunity to mess up England’s interests globally. Yet the English love France. They go there for their holidays, they drink French wine, they adore French cuisine; in fact they admire the entire joie de vivre that underpins the French way of life; but the odd thing is, few of the English bother to learn French. Even ex-pats who have lived in France for years often have only a smattering of the French language and live an isolated life with fellow English. The French see this reluctance to learn their language as arrogance; the English see the reluctance of the French to speak the de facto international language of English as arrogant and stubborn; and so the relationship goes on.
I mention all this because, for many years, I refused to go on holiday to France for the simple reason that I could not speak French. I take the view that one should at least try to speak the language of a host country, but I had never been taught French at school. Eventually, I solved the problem by teaching myself French, and Jane and I embarked on our first French holiday back in the 1990s. We have never looked back: beautiful country, friendly people, good food and wine, quaint customs – though, politically, France seems as hostile to England as ever (especially after Brexit).
Given the Shacklepins’ relatively new love affair with the French, it will come as no surprise then that, when our local Arts Society advertised a four-day trip to arty sights in and around Paris, Jane and I jumped at the chance. I had never been to Paris.
Our (luxury) coach left Melbury Market Place at 0700 on a Thursday, so we had an 0530 start to the day, with a taxi at 0630. It took us 13½ hours to get to our hotel, the Novotel in Saclay, a rather nice village 17 miles south west of Paris – though we never managed to actually explore Saclay as there was no spare time. Despite the location of the hotel, the optimum route to it from Calais was apparently to take a clockwise orbit around Paris from the north, like a space craft engaging in a sling-shot orbit. In the process we took in some terrible traffic congestion and some awful parts of the Paris suburbs that looked like some sort of dystopian nightmare – strange architecture, graffiti everywhere, a shanty town of refugees (presumably), and very heavy rain. The hotel, when we arrived, was a weird contrast: it was clean, quiet and comfortable for sleeping, but fairly spartan elsewhere and with a strange taste in decor: a dark brown bathroom; dim lighting in the bedroom; paper cups; no tea; no spoons; a pinball machine in the lobby; no apparent sign of anyone senior in charge; a very nice building; a quite good breakfast, but appalling evening food (part of the package – the dinner, that is, not the appalling bit). We got on well with our fellow travellers of the Arts Society, but there were a few of the inevitable dodderers and half-wits, some of whom missed the announcement at the Folkestone tunnel terminal to return to the coach and BOARD NOW, with the result that we lost our slot on the Le Shuttle that would take us through the tunnel, adding to the delay on the journey and throwing us into the rush hour on the Paris périférique. We staggered into the hotel, 2½ hours late, at 2130 (local time) for a dried-up meal of beef bourguignon with pasta. A bottle of wine cost 30 Euros, which we thought was a bit steep for a country which almost invented the stuff.
Day 1 (Friday) was a visit to Giverny: Monet’s Garden and the Impressionist Museum. The weather was good, but the garden was packed, so the excellent guided tour was a bit like a trip to IKEA as we shuffled our way around. Afterwards, we strolled through the village and enjoyed a good lunch al fresco in the French style. I cannot remember much about the museum – very arty I think. We had boiled chicken for dinner.
Day 2 (Saturday) was far too busy. Our first destination was Fontainebleau, arriving at 1130, but there was only time to look at the outside of the chateau and enjoy another excellent (though brief) French lunch in La Petite Ardoise, a little backstreet restaurant that I had found on the internet. The very friendly patron and I enjoyed a good French conversation, though I think I might have sold him the Channel Islands. At 1330 we were off to Barbizon, a little village noted for the emergence of the Colourists. The guided tour of the museum was interesting, but very tiring (seen one painting you’ve seen them all), and I nearly fell asleep in the video introduction that told us about Colourism. Heavy rain limited our stroll through the village and we left at 1600 for Chateaux Vaux le Vicomte – a huge privately-owned chateaux that seemed to be as big as Versailles. The welcoming introduction was given by the Comte himself (nice chap). The chateau was very impressive but – again – there was only enough time to gallop around its interior and snatch a bite to eat in the cafeteria before heading back to the coach in heavy rain. The original plan had been to stay until 2300 to watch fireworks (in a downpour), but the crew mutinied and wanted bed. We were back at the hotel by 2100 or thereabouts. No dinner (thank God).
Day 3 (Sunday). Paris. We left the hotel at 0900. Our driver kindly took an inner northern route so that we could see the Arc de Triomphe, Place de la République etc, but the plan came unstuck when it became clear that all roads south to the Seine and Notre Dame (our destination) had been, or were being, closed off by the police. Place de la République was daubed in graffiti and a painted Palestinian flag, which we thought was appalling. There was a heavy CRS and police presence. In summary, we spent three hours in inner Paris in a coach, backing and filing, driving through back streets. Our coach driver was brilliant and he never lost his cool or his determination to get us to our destination. We saw most big sights in Paris twice or even three times, sometimes from different directions. In the end, our driver took a last desperate sling shot approach and managed to get us across the Seine to Notre Dame; but we were three hours adrift in our programme and it was about 1300. The queue to get into Notre Dame stretched for four or five hundred metres so Jane and I decided to cut our losses and headed for Le Flore En L’ile, a nearby café that had been recommended by a Parisian friend. We indulged ourselves with a delicious three-course lunch with wine but, afterwards, there was only time to stroll up the Right Bank as far as the Louvre before having to return to Notre Dame for a three-hour guided walking tour of Le Marais (the old quarter). This was very well delivered and fascinating, but I suppose we must have walked at least six miles and we were exhausted by the time it was over. We returned to the hotel for our final dinner and the worst meal I have ever come across. The starter was inedible and most people left it: it was a salad with some sort of sliced pressed meat containing gristle or cartilage; I asked what it was (in my best French) and the waiter said conchon (pig) and indicated his nose. Jane has since looked it up: it was Pig’s Snout Salad. The main course was breaded turkey escalopes, that well-known French speciality.
Day 4 (Monday). Day 4 saw our return home, which took another 13 ½ hours, partly because there was a long delay on Le Shuttle owing to a technical fault. En route, we called in at Lens (near Calais) where there is a branch of the Louvre. The latter was not really my cup of tea, I’m afraid and, in any case, by that time, I had come down with a stinking cold or the ‘flu as a result of the woman in the seat ahead of us coughing and sneezing throughout the entire trip. She was an interesting character worthy of singling out for a few special words in this journal: she was on her own and one of those people who listened to, and joined in with, all of our private conversation. She had been one of the people who had caused us to miss our slot on Le Shuttle on the way out, and she spent the entire visit sighing, fidgeting and complaining about all and sundry. The pinnacle of her contribution came when, on the way back to Calais, she suddenly said,
“Oh God, I’m going to be sick”,
and promptly threw up into a paper cup on her lap. The smell of vomit stayed with us for the remainder of the trip home.
We finally arrived back in Melbury at 2100 and grabbed a taxi home. Jane and I slept like logs, both feeling a bit rough, but me worse (naturally). I stayed in bed and cannot remember Tuesday or Wednesday. I emerged on Thursday and did nothing; we finally managed to unpack on Friday. We have almost recovered now – heaven knows what the bug was – but we now need a holiday to recover from the holiday.
So that was Paris: very educational, very arty; some good people-watching. It was not as bad as anecdotal evidence would have one believe, for the streets seemed to be free of dog mess and all the waiting staff we met were very pleasant and efficient. I enjoyed speaking and eating French; we don’t think we will use a Novotel again and we don’t want to see the inside of a coach again for quite some time. We really needed to stay in Paris much longer to fully appreciate the city: another time perhaps (but not yet).
The procedure for passing through the Channel Tunnel was bizarre, by the way. After the coach driver had checked in, we drove up to a long building and all of us had to get off to walk through British passport control. We duly queued for a nice man to look at our passports, walked the length of the building, then climbed back onboard the coach. The coach then drove about 400 metres before stopping at another long building. Off we got again, into the building, for two nice French chaps to stamp our passports, whereupon we walked the length of the building and climbed back on the coach again. The requirement for the passport stamp was because of Brexit, of course, but wouldn’t you have thought that the two lots of immigration staff could have been accommodated in one building with one desk? We had the same procedure at Calais when we returned to the UK. Utterly weird.
There are so many eccentric things coming out of the establishment in the UK at the moment that I am spoilt for choice in choosing a good one to record and ridicule. It has been a hard decision, but I think the madness that I will mention this time is the decision by the Royal Yachting Association (RYA) to change its guidance on emergencies at sea and insist that when someone falls overboard, the cry is not “Man Overboard” but “Person Overboard”. The cry of “Man Overboard” might upset someone who considers themselves not to be a man, you see, there supposedly being God-knows how many categories on the gender spectrum. Yes, woke is still with us. So you have fallen into the oggin without a lifejacket, you are swallowing salt water and your past life is flashing in front of you, but suddenly the mental video of your life pauses and you think,
“Hang on a minute…how dare they shout, ‘Man Overboard!’. I am a Grade 57 non-binary”.
I don’t think so, somehow. Black mark RYA – you are clearly all at sea on this one
Now this is interesting (stop rolling your eyes at the back and keep your fingers off that keyboard). I am not, as you would say, ‘Green’ ie a person obsessed with the planet and the environment. Even my best friends would not use that adjective. Nor would they describe me as a socialist, despite my humble background like the Prime Minister’s (whose father was a toolmaker, you know). I suppose most would say I was a cynic, but then a cynic is what an idealist calls a realist. Cynic or realist will do for me, but such definitions do not deter me from wanting to get the most out of the energy available to us or to strive for the most efficient systems. In striving for these goals I am well-qualified as an engineer: our house is fully insulated with a Grade A certificate in energy efficiency; we have solar photovoltaic panels on our roof which not only offset our electricity consumption but also generate an income; and we have had a fully electric car since 2020 whose energy costs us only 2 pence a mile to run. Yet there there is more that could be done, and my research into these areas might be of interest to those seeking the transition to the colour of a frog. No, don’t switch off, dear heart, this is an interesting lesson in why the UK government’s drive for zero carbon footprint is doomed to failure, but if you really are in a hurry, just jump to the last two sentences in this paragraph.
The UK government offers a grant to households to adopt heat pumps for heating their houses. A heat pump is driven by electricity and draws heat energy from the outside (the air, the ground, or a nearby stream or river) and emits it inside the house either via conventional radiators, underfloor heating or hot air vents. And before you ask, yes you can still extract energy from freezing cold air. It uses the same principle as a refrigerator, which draws heat out of the inside of the ‘fridge and dissipates it into the kitchen via those cooling fins on the back. I won’t burden you with the thermodynamics, but basically, for every unit of electrical energy used to drive the heat pump, roughly three times that amount of energy can be transferred to heat your home. Or to put it another way, if you currently heat your home with electric heaters, a heat pump would do the job for a third of the electricity consumption and cost. It all sounds very good. However, if you currently heat your home with gas, like we and most of the homes in the UK do, then the advantage starts to look a bit more shaky, because electricity in the UK costs considerably more per unit of energy (the Joule) than gas. I did the calculation for a heat pump conversion of our 13-year old, modern, house and the cost came out as marginally more expensive than heating it with gas, as at present. Nevertheless, I thought I would get a couple of quotations from heat pump installers to look at the feasibility of changing over, and this is where it gets interesting because it really surprised me. Despite my house being what I would describe as modern and conventional, to convert it from gas central heating to heating by a heat pump, I would need: a fan evaporator unit about 1 metre x 1 metre x 0.5 metre outside our back door; all our internal walls ripped out to fit larger bore pipes for our radiators; existing radiators replaced with larger ones; and our airing cupboard enlarged into an adjacent bedroom to accommodate a hot-water storage cylinder about 1 metre in diameter and presumably weighing over a tonne. Hmm. I gave this a moment’s thought and then shelved any thought of having a heat pump. If you build a house from scratch and there is no gas laid on then, yes, a heat pump is worth having; but converting an existing house – even a modern one like mine – would be very disruptive and grossly expensive.
I never give up, of course, and there was one more thing in practical terms that could be done to improve our house energy efficiency, and that is to fit an integrated battery system with our photovoltaic solar panels. That is what we have just done. Currently, when the energy generated by our solar panels exceeds our domestic needs it is exported into the National Grid and we get paid for it. A battery system, which we have just fitted, will store that excess and then use it to offset our domestic usage at night or in winter. It will also top itself up from the Grid at off-peak times when the National Grid is making more electricity than the nation needs and, consequently is sold very cheaply. The key thing is, we are already paid a certain amount of money for every unit of energy our solar panels generate (whether we use the energy or not); we are then paid a further amount of money for the proportion of that energy deemed to be exported to the Grid (an arbitrary 50%); we can offset our domestic usage during the day by running machines whenever the sun is shining; and finally (now) we can offset our usage on dark days by supplementing our usage from the battery. It is all a bit complicated and involves some complex software and a flexible tariff from our electricity supplier that also charges our electric car when the electricity price is cheapest. It is a “win, win, win, win” situation as far as I can tell. The only snag is, the battery system has yet to be set to work by our installer as it has a fault.
Now, I wonder how Jane would feel about having a wind generator in the back garden?
Things are becoming a little worrying. I am starting to do some eccentric things and I am concerned that I may be slipping into some sort of dementia, something that might require me to take The Blue Pill and thus save the NHS from having to look after me until life’s end. I’m sure the present government will help me on my way. I bought a pair of bright yellow socks the other day and I have already taken to wearing cherry-red corduroy trousers in public (though, thankfully, not yet with the yellow socks). That is worrying enough, but matters came to a head yesterday. Jane and I went to the cinema to watch Downton Abbey – The Grand Finale and Jane went off piste by insisting on buying a bucket of popcorn. This odd behaviour threw me out and clearly had some influence on what followed, because – brace yourself dear reader, for this will really shock you – I bought myself a Large Hot Dog with Onions and Tomato Ketchup for consumption in the cinema. I have never bought a Hot Dog, or – indeed – any other form of comestible, in a cinema before. No, not ever. Of course, no-one of any consequence saw me as the cinema was in darkness. My secret is safe (until I told you lot). But it really is quite worrying, especially as I enjoyed the food. Pray for me to return to sanity. It was a good film, by the way, and a fitting end to the saga.
With a whirr the garage door rose and daylight flooded in. Cautiously and silently, I drove out the memsahib’s electric carriage for transport to our bridge club. I stopped, and waited patiently for her to board the vehicle – the clang of the garage door behind me told me that she was on her way. The car door opened and, just as she was about to climb in, she suddenly said,
“Oh my God. Why didn’t you tell me that I was wearing blue tights?”.
I was totally nonplussed.
“I didn’t notice that you were. Besides, what difference does it make?”
She looked at me as if I were being wilfully stupid.
“I can’t wear blue tights. They don’t match the pattern in my skirt. They should be black”.
And with that, she harrumphed and stalked off up the drive to the front door, tip-tap tip-tap in her high heels, there to re-enter the house and change her hosiery. We only just made it to bridge club in time.
I remain baffled to this day. I tell you, boys – women: I’ve been studying the species for nearly sixty years and I still don’t understand them. Still, without them what would little boys do?
25 September 2025
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 