Every cloud has a Sylvie lining

“We’ve got either a car or a hotel for you 60 km away in Creil – we’re just checking availability of both. We suggest you go there, we will update you on the way. We are sending a taxi for you”

I sat on the kerb outside the car rental office. Monsieur G was chain smoking and talking rapidly on the phone, he was trying to get me a car whichever way he could, but having no luck. At this point, 13 hours after getting out of bed it might have been sensible to give up on the trip. To admit defeat and go home or stay here in Beauvais just outside Paris until the Landy was fixed. I couldn’t though. I looked at my displaced strimmer, clothes and wellies all sitting next to me like horticultural refugees on the kerb. I really had this yearning to get to Le Monteil. I needed to be there and felt like I was being tested somehow; not in a religious sense but a philosophical sense. How strong was my mettle? How resourceful are you? This is nothing compared to trying to grow your own fuel.

As Le Monteil wasn’t/isn’t yet habitable, I was going to stay in the bed and breakfast three hamlets down the hill from the house and as the owners were going to be new neighbours and likely helpful people to know in the future I didn’t want to let them down. I looked into the car lot behind me. Just to make matters worse John Non Jovial was sunning himself on the bonnet of a red Citroen C3. Comb over was manically pacing up and down and muttering to himself. I think my American friends would say he was on the edge of going postal.

Monsieur G and I decided he could go and have the rest of his Saturday afternoon. I would be collected in a taxi and await my fate. Since quitting corporate world I had learned to embrace not being in charge and today was the exam after months of training. Monsieur G said he would call me during the week to update me on the Landy. He was such a lovely man, he had really wanted to show this visitor to his shores that his country would look after people like me. We embraced and he went off to see his family.

I looked at the map. Creil would take me to the east of Paris, I had planned my entire route along the west of Paris. Even if I got a car, I would now need to circumnavigate Paris and it was late afternoon and I had the equivalent of driving from Glasgow to London yet to do. Olivia would need three come back tours and be on the road until she was 90 to cover that.

I didn’t have time to consider the implications of this. A badly driven Renault saloon scraped along the kerb in front of me. Heavily tinted windows prevented me from seeing who was in it.. The driver’s door opened but whomever was driving was clearly so short I wouldn’t be able to see them until they rounded the back of the car and came into view…it seemed to take an eternity. And then she appeared. Sylvie. Half woman, half taxi driver and not someone you’d readily arm wrestle with. Mirrored aviator sunglasses, a fixed facial expression, shotputter stance which said “all that shit is going in my car? No problem. I can handle it. Let’s get your sorry ass wherever it needs to be” but with a French accent of course.

Fate had thrust me into the hands of strangers today all of whom I’d never expected to meet. I was just going to go with the flow of this one. Sylvie pushed her aviators higher up on her nose, thrust a powerful hand towards me, half shaking my hand half yanking me to my feet.

“Creil?”

Took me a while to understand what she was on about then it clicked,

“Yes please”

There was something decidedly secret service about Sylvie. I was starting to sense she could do martial arts to a fatal level; just from the way she swept my petrol strimmer into the boot of her car. I climbed in. The diesel must have been wearing off because I was starting to get a new smell, something vaguely familiar, reminded me of the roses at home but didn’t smell like roses, more like,

“Horse shit”

“Excuse me?!”

“Horse shit. My car is full of it. I have just been cleaning out my stables. Open your window otherwise you will be dead in three minutes”

Then beneath the aviators a broad smile erupted and she slapped my thigh, laughed and with a squeal of tires we were off.

Even if I’d found the energy, and suppressed my bubbling emotions to be able to talk, I wouldn’t have been able to get a word in,

“So do you speak Spanish?”

“No… “

“I do. I learned it on a two week trip to Columbia”

I knew I was going to regret the question but I just couldn’t help myself. After all Columbia wasn’t a typical holiday destination and the random nature of the conversation compelled me,

“Soooo….what were you doing there?”

There was a dramatic pause, the aviators were pushed further up on the nose,

“All I can say is it involved a man I met in Chile and related to the work I was doing at the time”

I wasn’t sure how to follow that, I was too tired to come up with something logical let alone intelligent,

“Was the weather good?”

How bloody British a question was that? It was all I could muster however. The answer just increased Sylvie’s mystique,

“Yeah not bad. Not bad actually. Of course we were fishing most of the time so it didn’t matter the weather was like”

This was all so random and surreal I felt really emotional. Besides, the unprecedented combination of diesel fumes and horse manure was making me feel sick.  I looked around for clues in the car to initiate a more sensible conversation. I spied a dog lead.

“Oh you have a dog!”

“Yes two. One is a Labrador” (now we’re cooking) “One is a German shepherd, I’ve trained her to kill on sight” (and it was all going so well)

Once again I geared myself up to ask a question I was worried I was going to regret hearing the answer to,

“Kill on sight?? Er that’s…er….(quick more Haribo)…unusual!”

“She’d never actually kill anyone she’d just hurt them badly. I live alone on a farm with my horses and my dogs. They’re my children. Someone once tried to break in and do harm to me and my animals. I cannot have that again”

Another random stranger thrown my way with whom I could instantly connect and feel a warmth for. The rest of the journey was full of chat about dogs, our mutual desire to have a small holding and be self sufficient whilst sharing an overall love for animals.

The conversation became so engrossing I hardly noticed that we’d arrived at our destination. So imagine my surprise when it turned out  to be a Shell petrol station in a concrete infested suburb of Creil……..