Back to reality, after an idyllic holiday spent soaking up the sun in glorious Surrey. I must say it was good to be home. We didn’t hear a tyre squeal once, nor the Sunday morning cacophony of all the dogs in our street barking along to the sound of the church bells. Sunday mornings in Surrey are quite peaceful – just the distant hum of lawnmowers and a barely-audible groan as Harold returns from the newsagent with the Sunday Times (total weight 3 kilos). We had a couple of day trips out in the jalopy, stopping at picturesque village hostelries to sample some typical British pub grub. Harold was happy to pop down to the local to sample the latest guest ale on offer. He did find it a bit weak, though, and found walking home in a straight line a novel experience.
We were still in holiday mood on our return, so went to the beach on Bank Holiday Monday. Warsaw Beach. For the uninitiated, this is at a place called Nieporęt on the banks of the Wisła, about 40 minutes drive from downtown Warsaw. Cross the Wisła on the Grota-Roweckiego Bridge (the northernmost one) and turn left onto Modlinska (dual carriageway). At the first major junction turn right towards Nieporęt on route 633, which you will reach after about 15 minutes. Go through the village and turn left at the T-junction, and a few hundred yards further on the right is a car park. At this place the river bends in a deep V, making a sort of lake. There is a real beach, with sand and beach volleyball, and a moored barge serving excellent freshwater fish and chips. You can bathe, sail, windsurf and even hire a jetski (a Polish invention, surely?). It’s very simple and unspoilt – no funfair, no loud music, and no litter. It’s a great place for a picnic if you don’t fancy fish and chips, you’ll need to take a blanket and/or deckchairs, and don’t forget your Fortnums wicker picnic hamper! The young blades might find it a bit dull (although I could tell Harold was enjoying the scenery when he broke into a chorus of “With a thong in my heart”) but it’s a perfect spot to enjoy the last of the summer wine.
Harold read a book during the holidays Yes! The good news is, it kept him so quiet he didn’t hum the theme from Match of the Day once in a fortnight. The bad news is, it was the new 800-page biography of the South American revolutionary Che Guevara, who has become fashionable again, I believe. Needless to say, he’s now marching round the house sporting a beret and a Kalashnikov, shouting “Venceremos!” and other things in very bad Spanish. I have to keep my bourgeois activities (leg-waxing, toenail-cutting) very secret now, and preparing dinner is a nightmare. I don’t know the difference between a burrito, a tortilla, a fajita or an enchilada – they seem to be the same thing, only folded differently. I did suggest that smoking cigars was a bit on the bourgeois side, but he just said I was a running dog (or was it a paper tiger?) and cigars were fine as long as you stubbed them out on the petty-bourgeois furniture. That was enough to get him banished to the back garden. He dug out his old combat uniform from the attic – in fact they were regular old green overalls he wore when he was painting the fence, but he got so much creosote on them they look like jungle fatigues now – and won’t sleep in the same bed two nights in a row. This means that he is in the spare room every other night, after spending the evening in the back garden by the campfire stubbing his cigars out on my lovingly manicured lawn and listening to “Buena Vista Social Club” on his walkman. I have refused to have anything to do with this belated discovery of the joys of marxist-leninism and have announced that henceforth I will be known as Evita, and hoist him with his own petard when I asked who was he going to be supporting at the next World Cup? He’s gone off into the jungle, or maybe it’s the shed, to ponder this metaphysical problem. If he doesn’t hurry up his burritos will be cold. Or are they fajitas?
Of course, Harold hasn’t a clue that I used to be something of a Pasionaria myself. Vi Hornblower and I went on a demo in Paris once. (Actually it was last year.) Not on purpose, you understand. We had been shopping at Galeries Lafayette and wandered into it by accident. As we arrived at the station, we walked into a great hullabaloo, people waving flags and shouting through megaphones. With the benefit of hindsight, this was possibly not the best moment to get out the Instamatic, and before I knew it I was surrounded by burly chaps with berets and moustaches and T-shirts proclaiming “CGT” (Che Guevara’s T-shirt, perhaps?), breathing garlic in my face and asking me if I was an “agent provocateur”. Obviously an hommage to my penchant for French lingerie. In a show of solidarity with the workers, I handed the camera to a large policeman who took a snap of me arm-in-arm with the sans-culottes; he then pointed to a nearby building,, where a video camera was pointing down in my direction. I waved enthusiastically for my French fans, so intent on my appearance on the nine-o-clock news that I didn’t notice how my new friends had dispersed rather quickly, and when I looked round, Vi was being hauled into a police van by some large gendarmes shouting “Non, je ne regrette rien!” “Allez les bleus!” I responded gamely, which did not best please Vi, being manhandled as she was by the boys in blue. Vi used to be quite a star on the hockey field for Cheltenham Ladies, and her tackling skills have not diminished, as anyone who has been in front of her in the queue on the first day of the Harrods sale will attest to. I threw my carrier bags wide and challenged the moustachio’d policeman to arrest me – “Arretez-moi!” I cried - by now I was ready to throw myself under a racehorse to defend a girl’s right to shop, had there been a racehorse handy. There was a large dog, but I was not prepared to throw myself under that, especially while it was using the lamppost. The gendarmes - or salauds, as I was now referring to them - pulled my shopping bags from me and threw them into the van before hurling me in too. Vi and I linked arms and sang the rude version of the Cheltenham Ladies hockey song all the way to the Bastille - or, as it turned out, the departure gate for Eurostar, where we were unceremoniously decanted onto the platform. I asked if we were being deported. “Non, Madame,” said the Capitaine, who was rather dashing in an Inspector Clouseau sort of way. “Eet eez for your own safety. Zis is a manifestation of ze revolting worqueurs. Zis eez no place for two charmeeng Eengleesh miladies.” With that, he clicked his heels, kissed our hands and marched off through the fog to do battle once more with the red hordes on the boulevards. Vi and I stood gazing after him with gratitude as the steam swirled around us. (“I thought this was Eurostar?” - Ed.)
“You know, Vi,” I said dreamily, “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
(Fade out to “As Time Goes By”, rear view of two matrons laden with carrier bags walking arm in arm into the distance along a platform …)
Aux armes, citoyens!
