A Friend Indeed
I've just invented a proverb: "A friend indeed is a friend you can have a holiday with and still remain friends." It's hardly pithy, I accept, but, as a proverb should be, it's a nugget of wisdom and truth. Ask anybody whether they have survived a family holiday taken together with another family, and their faces will cloud over. Oh dear, they will say ...
But my friend Paul is indeed, a friend in need, and together with our families (Paul, admittedly, with the odd change of wife here and there), we have survived not one, but two joint holidays. Here's how.
Paul's son Sam was at crawling age and Annabel was a toddler when the idea of going away together cropped up. It was very late to do anything about it, but I got the number of an agency which hired out gîtes in France. The concept is glorious: You rent a beautiful, rustic cottage, adorned with geraniums, cool on the inside, fully equipped and in idyllic country surroundings ... Yes, please, we'll have some of that, merci beaucoup.
The agency sent me something suspiciously unglossy. Already, on the phone, they had sounded doom-laden about our chances of getting anything at all at this late stage, but through the post came a dingy-looking photocopy of a photocopy, with some semi-legible text and illustrations which took the form of black blobs. All but one of them had been crossed out in felt-tip.
The one remaining gîte sounded really nice. I worked out that it had open fireplaces, several bedrooms and was on a farm near to a small town called Châteleaudren, in Brittany. It seemed absolutely ideal, so we booked it.
To get us there, Paul borrowed his father-in-law's car. Well, actually, it was a car belonging to his father-in-law's company, and therefore to be treated with the most goat-like of kid gloves. That the car wasn't entirely suitable soon became clear. It was a tiny little Vauxhall Nova, to which Paul attached a roof rack for our various cases, buggies, travel cots and other accoutrements. That was fine (as long as we didn't travel under any low bridges), but the conditions inside weren't.
Birgit gets car sick if she sits in the back of a vehicle, so she joined Paul in the front. It needs to be noted at this stage that she was also several months pregnant with Lucy, so would have been vomiting all the time anyway, without the assistance of the various sick-making elements which the holiday was to throw up (sorry). Anyway, in the back were Paul's wife, Ali, plus me, Annabel (in a child seat) and Sam (on Ali's lap). The conditions were agonisingly cramped and of course the children both dribbled, puked and dropped food and drink all over themselves and us. Well, that's what you expect. Serve us right for having unprotected sex in the first place.
Sam (who nowadays is a pretty normal sort of chap) was "going through a phase". This particular phase entailed him being relatively quiet for reasonable periods, but every now and then, he would, for no apparent reason, let out a blood-curdling yell at a volume which, considering his small frame, was physically impossible. Except that he did it:
"Wuuuuaaaaaaaarrrgh!"
And then one more for luck:
"Wuuuuaaaaaaaarrrgh!"
So startling was this (planned each time, seemingly, to coincide with my finally descending into some kind of minor nap) that it was was sufficient to seriously threaten to perforate my eardrum, as well as making me jump high enough to bash my head on the car's ceiling. It was excruciating, and it went on for hours and hours and hours.
Châteleaudren, it turned out, was a heck of a long way from Le Havre. But we had to go via Le Havre because Paul worked for P & O and could thus get cheap tickets. Dusk was falling as we finally reached the gîte, but even in the gathering shadows, we could perceive that it wasn't precisely the rural idyll that we had anticipated. The building itself was across the yard from the farmhouse and had no garden (so bang went the idea of sunbathing luxuriantly on the lawn). Our arrival was greeted with a cacophonous barking from several slavering, rabid-looking Alsatians which roamed, lead-less, around the yard. The children were traumatised before they'd even got out of the car, as these creatures reared up against the windows, scratching them with their paws and frothing against the glass.
Having been trapped in the car for several minutes (there being no sign of any humans), we were eventually released when the surly farmer appeared and rather reluctantly called off the Hounds From Hell. He showed no willingness to react to my gushingly fluent and well-prepared French words of greeting. In one way, this was a relief, because I'm always getting into trouble by plunging headlong into foreign language conversations that I turn out to be incapable of sustaining; on the other hand, it would have been quite nice if he had made some slight attempt at being vaguely welcoming.
As we entered the musty-smelling house, we all became aware that we had picked up something on our shoes as we had walked across the yard.
"What's that?" asked Ali. "Oh God, it's cow shit!"
"Ah," - here, as someone who had spent several youthful summers working on farms, I came into my own - "ah no, that's certainly not cow shit, it hasn't got the right consistency. No, it's definitely chicken shit, and, do you know ..." (sniff) "... I could swear there's a hint of pigshit in there as well."
Damned impressive, I thought, but the others were too busy scraping their shoes and retching (remember the morning sickness) to appreciate the skill involved in my diagnosis.
In the morning, the composition of the unlikely cocktail was confirmed. In the yard roamed both pigs and chickens, all crapping away to their hearts' content.
"Why didn't you tell us it was a bloody pig farm?" demanded Paul.
"I didn't know!" I replied, truthfully.
"Here, let's have a look at that brochure. If it doesn't say anything about it being a pig farm, I'm going to ask for a refund."
Oh dear. A reappraisal of the photocopy did, indeed, reveal, in tiny print, the legend "Entreprise porcine". Not that I would necessarily have recognised this slightly estate agents' blurb rose-tinted bespectacled mode of description, but clearly, all the other potential clients had, which was no doubt the reason why it was the only gîte left without a felt-tip cross. We had literally been crapped on.
"Things will look better in the morning" is a really silly expression which is hardly ever accurate. In my experience, things invariably look considerably worse in the morning. As they did on the starship "Entreprise porcine". As shit goes, it's the piggy version which receives the worse press, but the chicken variety is actually far more pungent. It attracted eager flies and other creepy-crawlies which didn't at all mind entering our house. There being no lawn, the children couldn't be let out, for fear of either being covered in crap or eaten alive either by mosquitoes or rabid Alsatians. Oh, happy hols.
Inside, the house was as filthy as the interior of an unswept chimney. Sam crawled around for a few moments and was instantly transformed into a Black and White Minstrel (without the White bit). Of course, he tried to put his hands in his mouth and didn't comprehend why he wasn't allowed to (his "Wuuuuaaaaaaaarrrghs!" being in this case quite understandable). His clothes couldn't be washed as the hot water had broken down. The children had to be washed in the sink because there was no bath.
But we were British, mainly, and upper lips were stiffened. We would just have to make the best of it, wouldn't we? So off we set (it rained every day, by the way, but that goes without saying) to visit a selection of extremely boring small towns, seedy, run-down zoos and rip-off amusement parks. Both couples went out to dinner twice (leaving the others to babysit), but the local restaurant had a very limited menu consisting of various types of tough, fatty meat and bony fish so obscure that their names weren't even listed in the dictionary. You can't go wrong with French food. Yeah, that's what we had thought as well.
Paul and I half-heartedly drove into Châteleaudren for a beer in its sole café, but the local "lads" looked at us so threateningly when we put a coin on the edge of the pool table to indicate that we'd like a game, that we abandoned both the coin and our beer, escaping while the going was good.
There was another doubtful sporting activity to be enjoyed at the farm. The farmer's wife, occasionally to be seen in a smock, hanging out washing, never actually made contact with us, but her daughter did. Cross-eyed and capable only of grunting (a bit like what they keep in the attic in Hammer films), she appeared at the door of our gîte every morning, cradling a "boule" in each hand, leered at us and indicated that we should follow her to the weedy gravel patch which masqueraded as a boules terrain. We didn't know the rules and she was incapable of explaining them, so the only way we could know how the game had gone was to watch her reactions. If she giggled inanely, she had won, but if she burst into tears and ran back to the farmhouse shouting curses, she had lost. In the latter case, both mum and dad would glower psychotically at us from behind the curtains.
As if in sympathy for our predicament, my one remaining wisdom tooth decided to make its hitherto unnoticed presence felt. But this time, it did so with a genuine sense of vengeance for some unspecified but evil crime I must have perpetrated against it (possibly neglecting it for a lifetime, for a start). This was no normal toothache, such as that encountered in Luxembourg. Oh, no, this was cancer of the jaw. Yes, it was. Only that could explain the horrendous agony with which I was overwhelmed.
For two days, I lay in a darkened room. The bed was rock hard, the rain hammered on the shutters, the smell from the yard was appalling, but I cared only for my jaw. I consumed massive overdoses of paracetemol, listened to Birgit assuring me that cancer of the jaw didn't exist and that, even if it did, I didn't have it, and begged her to plunge a knife into my heart and put me out of this misery. Surely, death would be infinitely preferable to this torture.
Eventually, Birgit found a chemist, who gave her some suppositories. For me, not for her. Having a wife who is willing to shove things up your arse can sometimes be an advantage, but she trained as a nurse and so is experienced in doing unspeakable things to people. It wasn't as awful as I feared it would be, but it did no good. When we managed to translate what it said in the small print on the box, we realised that it contained merely a minor dose of aspirin. I begged to be taken to a dentist, but I was the only one who spoke French, and therefore eventually had to arrange it myself.
There was no phone in the gîte (laughable notion), so enquiries had to be made from a rural phone box without the help of any Yellow Pages, not an easy thing to do when you can open your mouth no more than a millimetre wide. No doubt our hosts would have helped, but the farmer was permanently out and his wife pretended to be.
I won't go into detail about what the village dentist did. Oh, all right then, I will. Diagnosing that there was a reservoir of puss underneath the tooth causing all the trouble, he declared that it would have to be released in order to relieve the pressure. To this end, he added an extra long "bit" to his drill and simply bored down through the tooth, the root and the nerve and out the bottom (that's the bottom of the tooth, not my bottom, although it felt like it). Thus, the gunge beneath the tooth was granted its freedom.
I'm not upsetting anyone in any way, am I? It bloody upset me, I can tell you.
Back at the cottage, there was one feature which we hadn't yet tried out. The fireplace in the main room (you could have called it a sitting room, were it not for the fact that that the only thing to sit on was a straight-backed wooden chair) was tempting. True, it did have a bird's nest in it, but it looked combustible. Besides, there being nothing else to do, we spent the evenings playing board games in the kitchen. There was a TV, but it was a black and white one with no signal. What more attractive thought than to play our board games in front of a crackling log fire?
I gathered a few twigs from the hedge, added them to the bird's nest and struck a match. Within seconds, the entire house was filled with acrid fumes and all its inhabitants were forced to flee, squelching into the yard while the - shall we say furious? - farmer poured buckets of water onto the conflagration. Well, how was I to know that the chimney had been boarded up years before?
"That's it," said Paul, "we're leaving." And, surprisingly, no one tried to talk him out of his decision.
At the height of the summer, it's not normally easy to change ferry crossings, but Paul pulled rank at P & O and arranged for us to take the next day's boat from Le Havre. But by the time we had squeezed everything back into the car, time was tight. Paul had the bit between his teeth and entered suicidal driving mode, determined on no account to miss the ferry. The rest of us just covered our eyes and prayed, while Sam expressed himself by bellowing
"Wuuuuaaaaaaaarrrgh!"
into my ear with even more urgency and frequency than before.
None of it helped. We drove onto the harbour front to witness the Pride of Le Havre (or whatever it was called) steaming purposefully out of the harbour, and not even the Queen Mother could have had it turned round.We had to book ourselves into a seedy seafront hotel for the night.
And while we're on about it, what does Le Havre have to be proud about? It's a horrible place with few redeeming features. But I may be prejudiced on account of what happened that evening when we tried to go out for a meal in what looked like quite a nice restaurant. The infant Annabel had a little plastic horse which she trotted round the table. Yes, it made a bit of noise, but the people at the only other table which was occupied showed no sign of even noticing, far less complaining. Nevertheless, the owner decided that he was going to ask us to leave, because we were "disturbing other customers". I've never been so angry. Opposite, there was a building site. I picked up a brick and had to be restrained from hurling it through the restaurant's window. I'd have done it, I honestly would.
"Let's look on the bright side," I said in the morning (another unhelpful saying, aren't they all?) "Now we've got time to do some duty-free shopping."
"Very good, Oliver. Where exactly are we going to put it?"
"Er ... on my lap?"
And so it was that I ended up with several large boxes of wine and beer on my knees in the back seat, obscuring Paul's view as he reversed out of Auchan's car park and straight into a concrete bollard which inflicted severe damage on his father-in-law's precious car.
But still we remained friends. Indeed, I'm sure that, if it hadn't been for growing children and changing relationships, we'd have shared lots more holidays. As it was, it was many years before we teamed up once more, again following one of my bright ideas.
***
In my youth, I'd avidly read the novels of Arthur Ransome. Although the most famous of them were set in the Lake District, two of my favourites, "Coot Club" and "The Big Six" had been about nineteen-twenties youngsters living out idyllic sailing holidays on the Norfolk Broads. The names resonated with me so vividly: Wroxham, Horning, Potter Heigham. What about hiring a boat on the Broads and having a few adventures ourselves? After all, both Paul and I now had two teenage children and Paul's new wife Adèle got on well with Birgit. What could go wrong?
Well, the M25, for a start. It was Friday night, and, as usual, the traffic was at a standstill in the torrential rain, but we comforted ourselves with the reassuring thought that we were heading for an area of tranquil beauty where we would be able to relax and forget the hurly-burly of daily life.
Yes, well ... Arthur Ransome was writing a long time ago. It turned out that the M25 and the Broads had more in common than one could possibly have imagined. As we took over our cruiser and pulled out onto the river, we noticed a strange similarity between what we were doing now and what we had been doing a couple of hours previously, namely making slow progress through a traffic jam. The only difference was that we were now in a boat. So there we have it: the M25 and the Norfolk Broads: Both are long, straight, featureless and permanently jammed.
Surely not? Why do so many people go on the Broads for their holidays? Ah, there's a paradox. If it wasn't for the tourists, it would be quite quiet, wouldn't it? And so would the beach at Torremilonos. Although, to be perfectly accurate, a better Broads analogy would be Tesco's car park on a Friday evening: a procession of vehicles searching fruitlessly for a parking space. This we realised when the time came for us to think about tying up for the night. Easy, we thought, remembering our canal successes. We simply tie up outside a rustic pub and dive into it for dinner.
Ah, but on the Broads, it doesn't work like that. As dusk encroached, we began to panic. Where could we tie up? Okay, theoretically, we could drop anchor in the middle of a broad, but then we wouldn't be able to go to the pub.
That was the problem, the pubs. They really have it sewn up, you know. Provided their particular piece of river bank isn't already chock-a-block (which it probably is), they are delighted for you to moor up outside them but only if you a) pay a fiver for the privilege or b) eat an over-priced meal in them. On the first night, we opted for the latter course, which provided us with quite an adventure.
We stumbled through the monsoon (yes, of course there was a bloody monsoon) to a large pub with a big family room. The place was packed with holidaymakers, all tucking into something or other with chips. We all commented on the fact that the chips were real (i.e. made out of actual potatoes, not frozen). How refreshing! How unusual and innovative for pub food to be genuinely home made! But not for one family in the corner, who complained to the barmaid about the quality of their chips. Far from being pleased, they would actually have preferred their chips to be of the frozen variety.
The chef was at the end of his tether after allegedly serving 300 meals that weekend. The first that we or any of the other guests knew of this was when he came charging out of the kitchen, pouring sweat and snorting and grunting like a newly-released bull. In his hand he held aloft a large raw potato, which he slammed onto the table of the complaining family with such force that he nearly broke it in two, like in one of those karate demonstrations. A hush descended on the bar as all eyes and ears turned to him.
"You wanna see a fucking potato?" he demanded. "That's a fucking potato! I don't expect you've ever seen one. In this pub you get real food. If you want frozen food, you can fuck off back to your council house where you belong!"
Obviously, political correctness is an alien concept to the good folk of Norfolk - at least to this particular representative. The balance of support seemed to be in favour of the chef, and there was even a hint of a ripple of applause, but unfortunately, he had chosen the wrong family (or the wrong family had chosen him). The father was large, tattooed and musclebound, while his wife would have given a fishwife a bad name. As the man got to his feet and drew himself up to his full and not inconsiderable height, far from restraining him and saying, "No, Gary, don't get involved", she was actually pushing him forward and encouraging him to "make something of it". It was obvious that a major brawl was about to break out, and the first thing that seemed likely to happen would be that the chef, who was overweight and not young, would collapse from a heart attack. He was as white as a sheet and hyperventilating alarmingly.
But he wasn't to be insulted in this way. As his customer squared up to him, he suddenly had an idea for a choice of weapon, charged back into the kitchen and re-emerged with a large catering container full of chips, which he proceeded to pour over the customer's head.
As the customer wiped the grease from his eyes, this was the point at which, along with the rest of the cowering clientele, we slunk out into the car park, adults shivering and children wide-eyed. Wow, that had been some supper. It had come complete with cabaret and we hadn't even had a chance to pay, although I did go back and settle up the next morning. The bar was surprisingly un-trashed, but of the chef there was no sign.
Back on the boat, we naturally discussed the events, and it turned out that it was a good thing the chef hadn't done a Basil Fawlty and demanded to know whether the other customers were satisfied. Comparing notes about our various meals, we discovered that the salmon and prawn pie had contained neither salmon nor prawns, while the chicken curry had thrown up remarkably little chicken.
"Well go on then, who else is dissatisfied with their meal, eh?"
You could imagine hands being timidly raised:
"Er, well, actually ...."
The pubs got better, but not much. On the second night, we were enticed to moor outside a hostelry in Horning. Here there was a man on duty especially to reel you in, like a fish. By this time, it was so wet that you could hardly tell where the river ended and the garden began, and he was appropriately attired from head to foot in bright yellow waterproofs and waders. We didn't mind that, but he then woke us up at 6 am by noisily re-arranging us in order to squeeze in yet more captive customers.
The next night we were at a pub at Reedham Ferry. By this time, we had got things better sussed and had tied up some distance away and walked into the village, at least giving us a choice of where to eat (which was a system which only worked if you could actually find a free mooring space anywhere, which was seldom). In this pub, things looked more promising until the local folk musician came on and played every cliche finger-in-the-ear folk song known to man. That bastard "Wild Rover" and "Seven Bloody Drunken Nights", you know the stuff. His set was enlivened by a girl in the audience who looked like an ex-punk rocker along the lines of Hazel O'Connor and begged to be allowed to do a song. She had a sweet voice and did a pin-dropping rendition of Ewan McColl's "The First Time Ever I Saw Her Face". Of course, she was a million times better that Mr Arran Sweater (the Singing Postman would have been preferable) and we all bellowed for more. He was having none of it. Unwilling to have his show stolen, he tried to win us back by involving us in a lusty singalong entitled "Norfolk and Good" (try singing it out loud). The children were even wider-eyed than before, and the adults just raised their eyes to heaven.
Before finally giving in and opting for the "anchor in the middle of a broad and play board games" option, we did have one last despairing attempt at a pub supper. In Stalham, there seemed to be only one pub with food, so in we went. The ensuing scenario will be one which readers will recognise. In case any readers are foreign, you may need an introduction to the culture of pub food in the UK
Each table has a little brass plate on it with a number. Near the bar will be a poster with easy-to-follow instructions for how to get something in your stomach. On no account sit down at a table and expect to be served, because you'll be there until closing time, at which point they'll chuck you out. The instructions will say:
1. Select a table from those available and note its number.
2. Choose a dish from our delicious and wide-ranging menu and order it at the bar.
3. Order your drinks at the same time.
4. The meal will them be brought to your table (Ed: Big deal, huh?).
In other words, you do all the work. Plus, by the time your food arrives, you have finished your drink. You can try asking the waitress for another one, but she will look at you as if you are from the Planet Zog and say she isn't allowed to do that. So you re-join the queue for the bar and, by the time you have obtained your drink, your food is cold.
There are, of course, some variations to this pattern, and it was one of these that we experienced in Stalham. You scan the menu and find some things which sound really nice. You order them and sit down, only to be informed some time later that they are, in fact, "off". So you have to have a re-think and return to the bar and order something you don't actually particularly want. In the meantime, those who ordered things that were "on" receive and consume theirs, leaving you all on your own with yours. Except that, in Stalham, fifty percent of the menu was "off", so at least we got to eat in two shifts.
I went for a fantastic starter. "Succulent, fresh whole-tail North Atlantic King Prawns, lightly coated in crisp golden breadcrumbs and grilled to perfection, served with a deliciously light Marie-Rose sauce and a salad garnish."
Wow! It sounded magnificent! Why do people bother going to France when they can get catering like this on their own doorstep? The reality was two reconstituted lumps of frozen fishy stuff with prawn tails attached, done up in batter and deep fried in lard until nearly black, served with a leaf of lettuce and some pink gunge from Happy Shopper.
Still, the surroundings were interesting. The very loud jukebox specialised in speed metal. We ate our second and third choices surrounded by the black leather-clad and heavily-pierced locals (whose engine oil aroma was actually preferable to that emitting from the kitchen), to the strains of Metallica, Megadeth and Slipknot. Yum!
From then on, we settled for take-away ready meals from Somerfields in Beccles.
Probably, a Broads holiday is wonderful if the sun shines, but as it was, we just had to keep on the move, which was especially problematic because the hire boat didn't have any windscreen wipers and for much of the time we couldn't see where we were going. Apart from reducing the scenic merit of the holiday, it meant we were in a permanent state of terror of crashing into the bank, a bridge or another boat.
A further problem was caused by the fact that you had to lower the entire roof before going under bridges. In the ongoing tropical storm, this was inadvisable, so various routes were inaccessible to us. At Potter Heigham, for instance, even the little dinghies favoured by Coot Club members had trouble negotiating the famously low bridge, so we had no chance at all After all the rain, there was only about a foot of clearance, so even a model boat such as you might use in your bath would have found it difficult to get through. All we could do was shrug our shoulders and turn round.
On one occasion, we rounded a corner to see a railway bridge in front of us. I don't know why no one thought to make any preparations. We just kind of assumed that it would lift itself or swing open or something. It even looked high enough for us to swish gently underneath it. As it happened, a nice little train was just passing over it, so maybe we were distracted by that. Possibly we were just pissed.
At any event, Paul suddenly yelled, "Shit, I've got to lower the roof". As I threw the engine into reverse, Paul rushed below decks to adjust the roof, but never got there. In his haste, he smashed his head against the wooden canopy, making a gaping hole in it (that's his head, not the canopy, which remained intact). The passengers in the passing train had front row seats for a splatter movie, as we drifted around in the middle of the river, lavishing the entire first aid kit upon Paul's shattered bonce.
Within two days, we had explored every available inch of the Northern Broads and were forced to take the plunge of negotiating Great Yarmouth, about which the guide book was completely doom-laden, and rightly so. It was terrifying. What we had to do was consult the handbook, calculate when low tide would be at Yarmouth and set out from a place called Stracey Arms two hours beforehand, in the knowledge that the river we were travelling along was now tidal and that we would absolutely not be able to stop or moor up anywhere between there and the coast. Instructions for dealing with the various bridges, narrow channels, vicious currents, traffic lights and other hazards of Great Yarmouth were detailed and complicated. You couldn't have done it without someone reading them out loud to the steerer.
Except that some people obviously did. Here another hazard came into the equation. Not only were we incompetent landlubbers, but so was practically everyone else on the Broads. In the Arthur Ransome books, there were just one or two "Hullabaloos", or townies playing loud music, travelling too fast and generally being useless and dangerous. But here, everybody (including us) was a Hullabaloo. We had all had a laughable minimum of instruction. We, however, were at least trying to follow the rules about speed, position, etiquette, etc, while many of the others cheerfully ignored everything except their own progress, instead acting as if they were in bumper boats in a theme park. Yup, it was the old M25 syndrome again.
On the way to Great Yarmouth, therefore, we saw one terrified family stranded at 45 degrees on a mudflat, having strayed too far from the centre of the channel. It was the Broads equivalent of the hard shoulder, except with no access to any emergency telephones and a longer than usual wait for the AA.
Negotiating one of the bridges, we narrowly avoided a head-on collision with one boat while nearly being rammed from behind by another. Once, on Breydon Broad, a speedboat full of "Hullabaloos" streaked past, leaving the flotilla of pleasure boats bobbing and plunging and in genuine danger of sinking.
In the evenings, pubs having proved a bit of a culinary cul de sac, we took to playing games. This is the best way for families to bond, unless, of course, any of the members are particularly competitive. Luckily, no one in either family cared less whether we won or lost, so normally the evenings degenerated into stomach-ache inducing hysterics on the subject of each other's bodily functions, all of which were clearly audible through the paper-thin cabin walls. Don't go on holiday with friends if you have any intimate personal secrets you'd rather they didn't know about. And do not entertain any hopes of sex. Luckily, we all knew about each other's farting, snoring and pre-menstrual outrageousness before we set off, and we knew a hell of a lot more about them by the time we got back.
But still we remained friends. In fact, we all became even better friends, bolstered by the reassurance that each family suffered in equal measure from the wrath of female hormones and that there are certain things in life that are best let out into the open.
Paul and his family recently emigrated to America, probably in order to avoid the possibility that we might invite them on a fortnight's mountain bike tour of Milton Keynes.

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