Tonight felt like the start of a ‘proper’ bank holiday. Seems a long time since its been warm enough to spend the evening drinking outside on the pub‘s patio (albeit the short while before the temperature dropped to a level forcing us back indoors again). But for an hour or so, this was the sort of night you’d expect to have to fly abroad to find nowadays. It is little wonder the Brits have drink so heavily when they go over to the continent. The novelty of consuming alcohol outside is simply too much to squander and the consistent warmth over the full duration of the continental evening gives the illusion that it is never gets late; like a perpetual post-dusk state. This is certainly how I remember feeling when my friends and I took a brief sojourn to a youth hostel in Nimes a couple of years ago. I also remember both the weather temperature and the previous night’s pre-flight lack of sleep had made me feel very lethargic by the time I arrived. No sooner had we checked into the hostel, I actually had to take a mid-afternoon nap for an hour or two in one of the shared dorms, just to get somewhere feeling vaguely near human again.
After a snooze and a shower, we spent the rest of the evening sitting on the patio and before we knew it the whole of the first day there had already disappeared. In fact most of the first night had disappeared too. We had lost the time eating copious amounts of cheese, smoking copious amounts of tobacco and drinking copious amounts of red wine. To be honest I am not sure whether this makes us typical lazy uncouth Brits, or tourists who were fully willing to embrace and consume the French culture. I like to believe it is the latter, but out of all the other international travellers at the hostel we were the last to retire to the shared dorms, and we were undoubtedly the most inebriated.
Despite my dizzy head, I managed to stumble in the darkness through the sleeping masses towards the bunk I’d napped in earlier. Unbuckling my belt, my trousers dropped round my ankles and drunkenly leaned back to sit myself on the bed. But as I did so, I was startled by a noise from beneath me. It sounded like someone crying “Non-non-non!” I also became conscious of two hands clasping my arse cheeks trying to push me back up to a standing position. I jumped up quickly, as the horror of the situation hit me; I had nearly sat on a Frenchman. But if I was filled with horror, it was surely nothing in comparison to the poor French lad himself. My arse is particularly hairy and he had effectively just been awoken to the sight of two giant granary baps slowly descending towards his face – a breakfast in bed that not even the continentals would want to suffer. I pulled up my trousers and scrambled away to another bunk.
It was a bit embarrassing at the time. I always feared the French lad thought my behaviour as a shameful example of s ‘Brit on the piss’ oafishness. I hope not. I don’t like thinking in terms of national stereotypes. I’d prefer it if he sees the incident as a befitting tribute to the classic French bedroom farce that they all find so incredible humorous. Like I say, I am the type of tourist who makes effort to embrace local culture.
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