Champagne

Bonjour peoples

Here I am in France after finding an internet cafe at last. I arrived on Tuesday and for the first time in my life I walked into the arrivals area of an airport to find someone holding up a card with my name on it. Well almost- the name-card holding man was late. So I hung about wondering what to do. And failed to decide on a course of action because I had been up since 4am and my phone was refusing to work. ‘Oh well, I’ll just be stranded then’, I thought. When suddenly, fifteen minutes later, a small and very well dressed man, who turned out to be called Patrique, appeared from nowhere holding a card saying ‘Gregor Wright’. C’est moi.

Unfortunately Patrique’s english was poorer than my french (ie non existent), so the long car journey went past mostly in silence. A comfortable silence none the less because we both just smoked and occasionally spoke to each other in the wrong language.

When we arrived at Pommery I met the girl who was helping to organise the show:

‘Hello Gregor! Do you speak French?’

‘Weeell… sort of a little bit…’

‘*Okay*’

‘Em… *The cat is on the newspaper?*’

‘Oh okay, in English’.

‘It’s probably best’.

It turned out that the Zobop had to be laid in the cellar which is thirty metres underground. With eighteen kilometres of tunnels and twenty million bottles of champagne apparently. ’20 million bottles = good amount of booze. 18 km of tunnels = hard to run away’, I thought.

It was very dusty and very damp and very dark. None of these are good conditions for installing a Zobop. But there aren’t many options either, you just have to get on with it. So I did. And now I’m finished.

Lots of things happened in between but they are mostly not worth going into. Apart from a new phrase I have learned… The only person who spoke English was a guy called Julian and he kept me right most of the time. Then at one point, during a technical glitch, one of the other guys made some kind of exclamation. Julian said ‘Do you want me to translate?’

‘Sure’.

‘It’s a French saying for when something goes wrong. It translates as…hmm, let’s see…”There’s a bollock in the soup”‘.

And sure enough, at that exact moment there was a metaphorical bollock in the proverbial soup.

Anyway, it’s all done and dusted now. I finished the floor yesterday and everything was fine in the end. So I’ve had the day off today and it has pissed with rain all day. And it took ages to find this internet cafe. It’s the only one in Raimes and the directions I got from the man in the hotel were poor- At the end of the street apparently. The street is very long, can you show me on my map. No it’s not in the phonebook. Oh, what’s the name of the street then. It’s a small street. Okay thanks, em merci’.

But I found it in the end. So at least I’ve managed to post once. The day before I leave. Oh well. Another thing that went a bit wrong was my camera. I thought there would be a chance that I wouldn’t be able to post so I thought I would take some pictures instead and post them when I got home. Not exactly a revolutionary idea, but a first for Burning Salad all the same. So I had a few great photos in mind…I turned on my camera…it said NO CARD (‘Shite’ I thought, ‘I’ve left it at home’)…and just when I realised that it should probably store pictures without a card anyway, it went…BZZZZZZZZZZZ…CCCHT. And it hasn’t done a single thing since. Including turning on.

Anyway, I had better sign off now. I have been typing this on what is presumably a French-layout keyboard and everything is in the wrong place. This is an internet cafe after all and I reckon that every vowel and piece of punctuation has already cost me about ten pence each.