New life
Mal de mere
Zenga Longmore
The French food is great, like. You get this amazing lamb chop thing with sauce. Wish I could recall the name something French, if I remember right.'
A heavily built man from Newcastle had been unwittingly torturing me for the last three hours on the St Malo-bound ferry. The fact that I had not responded to his ceaseless culinary chattering had done little
to deter his zeal.
Not that I meant to be rude, don't get me wrong. In normal circs I would have simpered, nodded and even thrown in the occasional 'Oh really' for politeness' sake, but, as I lay slouched on the deck, sucking a seasickness pill, good manners went the way of all flesh.
Opening my left eye with a great deal of effort, I noticed that Omalara was waddling perilously close to the edge of the deck, but I could do naught but re-lower the weary eyelid. If Omalara, I reasoned, wished to embark upon a cross-Channel swim, it was fine by me, as long as I was not expected to exert myself in any way.
`The sauce,' the man continued, rolling the words around his tongue, as if savour- ing a phantom taste. `Ah, the sauce! Lash- ings of garlic and butter. And there's another dish they eat in Brittany, you must try it, it's called. . . . '
Heaving myself up from my chair, I took Omalara by the hand and staggered to my cabin, silently vowing never to allow anoth- er morsel of food, sauce or otherwise, to pass my lips again — a vow which I broke within minutes of reaching St Malo.
Omalara danced off the boat in ecstati- cally high spirits. She had been greatly amused by my bouts of seasickness, suppos- ing I had been sick as a party piece to amuse her during the crossing.
St Malo, where we were staying for a four-day break, is a fairytale town of cob- bles and turrets. Cafés abound, chairs and tables spilling out into the narrow streets unhampered by traffic fumes due to the fact that the town centre is a glorious car- free zone. Omalara became quite over- whelmed by the waiters who clustered around her, vying to see who could offer her the most toys and free titbits. Even when she roamed from table to table, per- forming comic turns, she still managed to receive genuine smiles and cries of delight. By the end of the first evening, I was a con- firmed francophile.
St Malo, which lies in the north of France, is an impressive town. The monu- ments and grandiose buildings appeared so like the genuine mediaeval articles that I was surprised to learn that much of the town had been rebuilt after the second world war. The Americans, in order to lib- erate St Malo from the Germans, had bombed most of the place to rubble. The townsfolk rebuilt the city almost exactly in its former style; the only difference being, I presume, the amount of lichen which had settled on the stone.
If only the English had taken a leaf out of France's architectural book, instead of trying to be avant-garde, then maybe Lon- don would not be one of the ugliest cities outside America. Perhaps the French themselves are to blame for pretending that everything in La France is modern and `ahead of time' when really, behind our backs, they stay truly ahead of time by remaining behind it.
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