The dictum that what goes on tour stays on tour should, as a general rule, hold good. But if I tell you that my husband is now renamed Péage, you will understand that some stories are too good to sit on. Picture us as a foursome – Dave and me and two great friends – in an elderly Mercedes Sprinter van, basically freeloading our way up France, from the Basque country to Normandy.
Our modus operandi was simple, really: hop from free meal to free meal. After the first repose, with my relatives in the foothills of the Pyrenees, we headed for a few days with friends in Lot-et-Garonne, then north to the Charente region to impose on another lot.
To get to these places as fast as possible, in order to maximise the time for eating, we took the toll motorways. Which brought challenges none of us had considered, the most pressing being my inability, as the front seat passenger in a right-hand drive vehicle, to either collect the tickets or pay the money at the unmanned péages. I couldn’t lean out far enough; besides, the fingers on my left hand don’t work.
It fell to Dave, sitting in the back of the van, to open the big sliding side door and lean out and down, like the winchman in a helicopter. Except the door, being old, sticks in the open position, so he had to disembark to free it. It’s quite a high step. Doors to manual with difficulty, you might say.
You may think I am hard on my husband. I’m not. Decades ago, long before I met him, he worked out that being charmingly ditzy, impractical and amusing meant other people would do absolutely everything for him. This time, because K and I in the front were flying the aircraft, and dear F, in the back with him, is far less of a sap than me, he was on his own.
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But he’s not as nimble as he once was, and he also refuses to wear varifocals because it would spoil his looks. Every stop – and there were many, because the péages came thick and fast – was therefore comedy gold. He fumbled and grumbled, he climbed in and out like a nonagenarian, and couldn’t see which slot gave tickets or took tickets, or which took cards or cash, so kept pressing the wrong buttons and putting things in the wrong place. The fact that the tolls were expensive, and he’s a tightwad, made him even grumpier. “Forty-four bloody euros,” he cried. “All this hard labour and it’s bloody extortionate.”
At one péage he faffed around to such an extent that K, an impatient man at the wheel, started to drive off a few seconds early, meaning the door slid back, nipping Dave’s fingers. His language grew more and more profane. Finally, we christened him Péage.
Our hosts, much beloved, rarely seen, met us with feast after feast, usually cooked on a plancha and eaten in the sun. We stayed in hotels and gîtes near our friends’ houses, where I confess I struggled with the logistics of successive strange beds and bathrooms. Designers love, as I once loved, hand basins mounted on tasteful countertops, but when you are in a chair these things are torment. You cannot reach over far enough even to spit out toothpaste. But these are first-world problems – I survived. I camped. Besides, we laughed about 80 per cent of the time and the other 20 per cent was spent eating.
The coup de grace for Péage came on the ferry home, in the impossibly small wheelchair cabin with only two berths. He was far too stiff to climb into the top bunk. F, as befits a former Queen’s Guide, rigged him up a makeshift bed with the chair and stool; he promptly got cramp. He couldn’t even stay in the bar because the ship was carrying a thousand excited French teenagers, rampaging through a man’s peace.
It was no good. In the small hours, the ferry’s purser was faced with an angry, tired, child-phobic Scotsman, hungry for mince, lorne sausage and a quiet pint, demanding another cabin. He told them he wasn’t an effing teenager and couldn’t get in the top bunk. It worked. They gave him one.
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We’re home. We feel so well loved. And thanks to everyone, we achieved a minor miracle.
Melanie Reid is tetraplegic after breaking her neck and back in a riding accident in April 2010