Bonjour monsieur

Posted by Darrel Bristow-Bovey on 16 March 2020

If you have to have a birthday, you should have it far away – that way you aren’t surrounded by people reminding you that you’re a year older, slapping you on the back and saying congratulations and secretly thinking, ‘I’m glad it’s him who’s nearly ancient, and not me.’

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I’ve been known to sink into gloom and misanthropy on my birthdays, refusing to acknowledge them, then abusing everyone for respecting my wishes. Distance is the only remedy, so this year I found myself on a road trip around the south-west of France, stopping off wherever the fancy took me, like some ageing Jack Kerouac, if Kerouac drove a 2004 Toyota Corolla instead of jumping freight trains.

My birthday dawned in Carcassonne, which was a good start. Carcassonne, with its crenellated walls and 53 pointed towers and dungeons once used by the Inquisition, is one of those impossibly beautiful hill- towns where Juliette Binoche is always throwing open wooden shutters while young Johnny Depp rides a hay wagon and uncorks a bottle of wine with his teeth.

There was light rain, but the clouds kept opening and closing to let golden sun fall between the raindrops. I felt weirdly good – maybe because my moustache had finally come into its own.

I’d started growing my hairy lip-warmer at the beginning of the trip, and although some people think the only thing worse than a half-grown stache is a full- grown stache, they are wrong. My full-grown face-fungus was a thing of wonder. It was thick and luxuriant and curled up at the tips.

I didn’t look like some hipster creep, I looked like an old-school Frenchman of the World, a roguish, Gauloise-smoking connoisseur of wine, women and other women on the side. Those Frenchies have it right – they know that men and women just grow more alluring as the years add some oak-ageing and mellowness. For once in my life on my birthday, I felt like I belonged.

As I strolled through the old town, the rain stopped and the pearl skies brightened to blue, and that was even better because I could furl my umbrella and use it as an umbrella should be used – like a jaunty cane that you can swing to and fro and raise in greeting and strike the metal tip against the cobbles with a satisfying click. I felt wonderful, all a-strut and a-swagger, like a marquis, like a vicomte, like John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons.

I am in exactly the right place on my birthday, I thought happily. All of life has led me to this moment. I am not growing old and frail, no! Look! I’m dashing and firm and virile!

As I strode towards a trio of skulking teenagers on a park bench, I felt pity for them. Poor young garçons, so callow and gauche. I bet they wish they were me.

I brandished my brolly to scatter the pigeons in my path, and greeted the boys with a kindly nod. They stared at me with what seemed admiration and appreciation, but then one nudged his buddy with
a bony elbow and bobbed his head in my direction.

‘Monsieur Parapluie!’ he sniggered.

I don’t know exactly how I knew that calling me ‘Mister Umbrella’ was a jeer, or whether it was because he was a teenager or because he was French that he managed to make two simple words so devastatingly wounding. I was not dashing D’Artagnan, or the Vicomte de Valmont. I was Mister Umbrella.

I tried to keep chin up and shoulders square amid the laughter of the lads, but I can’t swear I managed it. It’s only natural, I suppose – kids are mean and Frenchies suck – but next year for my birthday, I think maybe I’ll just lock myself in the boot of my car until it’s all over.

Bonjour monsieur

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