I want to say a few years ago, but it really isn’t. It was eleven years ago that we went as a family to France, one of our visits to the Dordoigne area. It’s beautiful, for any pondering a visit. Lush green scenery, a beautiful river that meandered between towering cliffs. It’s a place that I would happily visit again, unfortunately the year that we went, I was an 18 year old lout with little appreciation for the subtleties that the region had to offer me…
Namely, I was a lout, a teenager of sixteen / seventeen and the last place I really wanted to be was on a family holiday in the middle of a caravan site in France. It was run by the Keycamp people, and the ones who helped the customers and looked after the houses were close to my age so I began talking to them. They were cordial at first, however after the first few days of me hanging around the site being bored off my tits as I refused to go anywhere with my family, they dropped the supplier / consumer proprieties and invited me along to their nights out and campsite gigs.
The one I can really remember was one evening a short while before we left for home. They asked if I wanted to join them offsite and a short car ride later found ourselves in a local pub. It was a low beamed hut which had a bar and a stage facing each other across three rows of tables and booths. The tables themselves were bare, save for the coasters to set beer glasses on. A tribute band had been setting up when we arrived and we were well into our beers by the time they came to play their set.
This was my first experience of pub culture with my peers, OK, I’d been with family and also with work colleagues, but this was the first time that I’d allowed myself to go out with people my own age. (My track record with that age group had not been to great to date.)
However, they didn’t disappoint. It was a lovely evening and the memory that sticks with me most was when they finally played something that I liked, Maybe Tomorrow and I was so pissed by that point that I went jumping up and down the aisles of tables demanding that people clap along whilst shouting out the words to the song and one scared looking blonde woman meekly complying…
The next morning, we left for home.
400 Words A Day 