A day

I should probably have realised it would be ‘one of those days’ when I woke up at 4.15am with a pain in my hip and cramp in my legs. I had, of course, seriously overdone it yesterday. I knew it as I was doing it – but I was suffering with the first flush of love for Nîmes, and I had no idea when or if I would be back. I got up, walked (crab-like) to the bathroom, and took a couple of painkillers. They helped immensely – and while I didn’t get back to sleep until around 5 minutes before the alarm went off, I am sure they were a valuable five minutes.

Breakfast, again, at the excellent Royal Hôtel, simple but good. Then a taxi to the SNCF station, listening while the driver complained about “incivilité” and a “manque de respect”. Cyclists were the target of his ire, and he almost ran into the back of a bus as he warmed to his task. “There’s all these scooters too,” he said, “and you’ll never guess what I saw last week, some young connard on a skateboard… in the middle of the street. The Romans would never have stood for it, they’d have had him in the ‘Arène’ being attacked by a lion. I’d like to see him get away from a lion on his ‘putain de skate’.” Pausing only to shout at a bus driver who was puling into the taxi rank “putain… manque de respect”, he dropped me off and I almost ran (still crab-like) into the station.

The beauty of the TER – which I believe stands for “train exceptionnellement ralenti” – is that you can use your ticket in any of them (provided they are going to the same place, of course). So rather than hang about Nîmes station for an extra 15 minutes, I hopped on the 8:50 rather than wait for the 9:04. Thank God I did, because the 9:04 was subsequently cancelled. I had to change at Avignon and get the Valence train as far as Montélimar, where I was picking up the rental vehicle. The first I knew of the cancellation was via the noticeboard: “incident de personne” – train making alternative journey. This meant, apparently, not going to Montélimar. As with railway workers the world over, nobody really knew what was going on, and the best I could do was go all the way to Valence, get off there, and get a bus to my destination. Fair enough – I assumed the “incident de personne” meant some poor bugger had either committed suicide or been hit accidentally by a train, so a minor inconvenience to me wasn’t going to upset me that much.

The minutes passed by. There was a train for Valence, definitely, but nobody knew where it was. I assumed they meant the train, not Valence. I’m not sure the “cheminot” found my comment that helpful. More waiting, the board was updated: still no details but the train would now be leaving at 10:35, not 10:15. Then 10:40, then 10:50 “c’est sûr”. At 11:05 we left. From no information, we suddenly got an excess of it. The morgue unit had finished: they’d collected all the body parts and washed down the rail. The train could leave. As I was sitting there, a young woman looked at me and said “Did he just say what he just said?”

“Yes,” I said.
“Quel con,” she answered, and went back to her book.

The one thing the announcement hadn’t said was the thing that affected us the most. And instead of going to Valence directly, we started stopping off at all the stations we should have stopped off at in the first place. We pulled into Montélimar at 11:51, and I ran as quickly as I could to the offices of Rentacar on the other side of the square, getting there at 11:54. The employee in the small and rather insalubrious did not give me the warm welcome I had been anticipating. In fact, he started having a go at me for being late. At first, I thought he was taking the piss and it was just his sense of humour. But there was no smile – he was deadly serious.

“You’re going to have to come back at 2pm,” he said. “You were supposed to be here at 11:30 – that’s what you said when you filled out the form on line – and I can’t take you now because I have to go off for my lunch. We are closed from 12pm to 2pm.”
“You’re having a laugh?” I said, somewhat irritably.
“No,” he said. “Come back at 2pm.”
“I can’t do that,” I said. “I got here as soon as I could. The train was delayed for an hour and it has only just come in.”
“When you booked, our website says we are ‘closed from 12-2’,” he said.
“No, it didn’t,” I said, having been glancing at my form while he was hyperventilating in the corner. “I didn’t use your website. I used booking.com and it says nowhere you are closed from 12-2.”
“You should have called,” he said.
“I haven’t got a cell phone,” I lied.

He looked at me, as if he hadn’t expected somebody insane enough to not have a cell phone to turn up at his office, weighed up how mad I possibly was, and said “if I take you now, I’ll miss my lunch.”

“Listen,” I said, “it’s hardly my fault someone killed themselves on the railway line is it? It takes a long time to clean up all the mess, you know. Besides, we’d have finished by now if you’d started when I came in.”

And then, miraculously, his mood shifted, and he started signing me in for the car. Deposit, driving licence, passport – “ah, you’re Canadian? – date of birth, where were you born, blah blah blah.”

In the end, it only took 15 minutes, and he took me to the parking lot, going carefully over the car to check for dents. Well, I say ‘car’, it is a Renault Twingo, so I could have put it in my pocket (I had a Twix in there, so decided not to). And with that he was gone.

I found the road towards Dieulefit, and felt unaccountably happy. I even managed to not get lost and turned up at my friend S’s house just in time to hear her tell me she would be staying on for another week, instead of going home tomorrow.

“Well, that’s great news,” I said.
“Not really,” she answered. “I just got hit by a Jeep in the supermarket car park. The guy was 70-plus and wouldn’t give me his phone number. So, I had to take a photo of his driving licence and make sure the supermarket had everything on surveillance video. I’ve only just got back.”

“Wait till you hear about my morning,” I said.