I was informed a few weeks ago that I'd accrued ten days' annual leave. I found a return flight to Bordeaux for thirty-eight quid and asked Trina if she fancied a week with me there. Apart from a couple of hours when I had to work a bit trying to extinguish her jealousy of Wendy, and latterly, Hayley, we got on with only the small, expected amount of effort.
The petite studio was a skilfully photographed single room. Once you'd put the canapé-lit down there was a space a yard square to stand up in. After a couple of nights on it, one was glad to do so. In the shower room, the damp, and a pumping, testosteroned air freshener, vied for olfactory dominance. I had to take the batteries out of the latter to suffocate it.
On our first day there we got caught up in the grève générale, walking in parallel with a march which stretched as far as the eye could see along the esplanade, until we found ourselves behind a row of riot cops who started firing tear gas onto their fellow citizens. The smarting eyes and the feeling of having sandpaper being rubbed inside one's throat wears off, which is perhaps why the police kept renewing the volleys. So much for the fraternité bit.
We took meandering routes through the old town. Some of the smaller roads have a soft beauty which is all the greater for being neglected. We found a bar with people dancing to folk music and a cat asleep on a table. Getting round without walking was cheap. For forty-five Euros you can buy an annual bus and tram pass (whereas a month in Bristol sets you back nineteen pounds), although you need something cheap to offset the almost Scandinavian beer prices: in the cat bar, a pint was eight Euros, but it reached eleven for a Basque beer in the outdoor Christmas market.
In the centre d'art contemporain we drifted quickly through an installation by Lubaina Himid. In the catalogue she says that her aim is "to be banal", an objective certainly attained in her installation comprising of painted wooden cutouts of images of slaves, drawn from paintings in which they appear.
More interesting was an exhibition about contemporary architecture, which included a 1967 Danish documentary film about the first adventure playgrounds there. A lorry dumped a lot of waste wood on some wasteland, the children were given saws, hammers, nails and other now-censored threats, and encouraged to build themselves little houses. They also kept animals, and we saw the chldren gleefully watching the project's pet rabbits copulating. "Don't stick your nose up its bum," said a girl, turning one of the rabbits round, sucessfully inducing another frenetic coupling.
My reading was Rosamond Lehmann, The Weather in the Streets. Virago's feminist glue doesn't hold much together, but once I'd reunited the cracked sections and lone pages escaping to the floor, I found it an intense, enveloping story of a doomed affair. In a pub's gloomy bedroom, our heroine looks at a "staring hard bed." I can feel a complete works coming on.
That all makes it sound more arty than it was. Mainly, we drank.