What I Did On My Holidays

We’re back in circulation after a highly successful (in the sense that we came back with the same number of children with which we left) visit to Blighty. We spent a week in Norfolk with My Dear Wife’s extended family in a (very large) rented house and three days in Canterbury on the basis that we’d never been there.

Many, many random thoughts floated through the inside my head as I gazed out through the drizzle at the grey fields surrounding our little holiday love nest in the benighted Norfolk village of More-Incest-In-The-Marsh, a faintly squalid hamlet of semi-derelict former pig-pokers’ cottages and ramshackle intensive turkey-rearing sheds sinking slowly into the fens just outside of Kings Lynn and populated almost entirely by seven-foot tall, monocular, mad people. With webbed feet.

Actually, that makes it rather sound as though I didn’t have fun, but I can assure you that I did. I was born at bred in a Norfolk village not dissimilar to More-Incest-In-The-Marsh, though it must be admitted that these days that is a rather different place, with running water, a take-away, a Budgen superette and a metalled road to civilisation. More-Incest-In-The-Marsh made me feel rather warm and nostalgic.

Also I have spent a thoroughly agreeable time making merry with My Dear Wife’s extended family, and have subsequently gained about 3 kilos on the week. Back on the wood-chopping regime next week.

These are some of the thinks that I have thunked.

MacDonald’s

I know I go on about them a bit, but the subject of fast food is one that interests me, particularly given the environmental, social and health impacts of junk food production and consumption.  Though I have previously regarded them as an Enemy of Mankind, I’ve recently been softening my line on McDos: at the ground level, at least, the employees appear to be human.

In fact, for the first time in well over a decade I found myself at the counter of a MacDonald’s in the shape of the Alençon outlet actually attempting to order something for the kiddies to eat. Normally I’m just helped to a table and told not to play with anything sharp while someone else does the shopping, but this time I’d run ahead specially.

I was confused when the young lady kept asking me if I would like a menu – of course I wouldn’t: I could see what was on offer on the wall behind her. And besides, how many variations on the cheeseburger theme could there be. Gradually a pile of burgers, chips and chicken nuggets appeared on the tray.

Then someone explained to me, patiently and in words mostly of one syllable, about the existence and excellent value represented by the Happy Meal and the Big Mac Meal. So the young lady sighed, smiled sweetly and completely redid the order without complaining and we all got something to eat for the grand total of about €23.

And do you know what? I really don’t think the food is very nice. I’d go so far to say that I think it is complete crap. The buns taste undercooked and flabby; the meat is overcooked and lifeless and the chips seem to enjoy only the vaguest relationship with potatoes. In culinary terms, the best bit was the sliced gherkin. Even the girls (who were bloody ravenous by this time) pushed the stuff around in a rather listless fashion before announcing that they really weren’t that hungry after all.

MacDonald’s in France is successful, without doubt, but that success is relative. The much-quoted (though seemingly not by the company themselves in anything that I can find) “fact” that France is McDo’s second (or first – depends who’s saying it) most profitable market. But that is in a marketplace with relatively little competition, so it is hardly surprising that margins are pretty good here.

In fact, the MacDonald’s UK (and probably Germany, but my German is ropey to say the least, so I may be mistaken) has more outlets and sells more “meals” than France, but the competition from other fast-food emporia is far hotter there, so margins are consequently rather more slender.

This is not rocket science.

France has a long way to go before the nation can really hold its head up high amongst the ranks of coutntries who really know about how to eat junk food.

Oh, and the WiFi at Micky’s may be free, but they do seem to want to put some funny stuff on your computer (or, at least, someone in the vicinity does) that my anti-virus thingy thinks is spyware, which is worrying, the amount of packaging is breathtaking and the coffee absolutely stinks.

We took picnics after that.

Halloween

Since when was Halloween supposed to be happy? I always thought is was meant to be a time of sorrow and fear. And yet, there it is, everywhere you go “Happy Halloween.” There are even greeting cards for the festival.

It has certainly become a money spinner. For example, a farm near to More-Incest-In-The-Marsh was selling “pick your own” pumpkins for £1.50 a pop. On the basis of one pumpkin per square meter, which is pretty conservative I’d say, that comes out at a revenue of £15,000 per hectare, making a fear stab at the earnings generated by those cultivating illicit cocaine crops, and certainly way ahead of the £1,000 or so one would get from growing wheat.

These pumpkins have little food value – they are grown for form not flavour – so end up either rotting in landfill or littering the streets where they present a significant slippage hazard to groups of drunken youths and students in fancy dress “celebrating” something that until a few years ago was a minor date in the calendar.

Shops and restaurants are cashing in by decorating and “themeing” their premises in a suitably spooky manner, and since they can leave the fairy lights up after taking down the fake spiders and so-forth they can ease seamlessly slide into Christmas mode.

Heaven help us.

Nintendogs

Sometime ago, the elder girls started agitating for Ninteno DSs, hand held games consoles that are instead of books, interacting with one’s parents in any meaningful way or participating in imaginative play. Marx would possibly recognise them as being a new opium of the masses.

Miserable sod that I am, I quite naturally resisted this and refused to buy them anything of the sort.

So they hit upon the idea of doing extra chores during the summer that would help us with the gîtes in return for payment. The intention being, of course, that they could save up enough to buy the things themselves without needing my approval.

I agreed to this on the basis that I thought it unlikely that they would have the sticking power but would be delighted to be proven wrong. And so it came to pass, and I have to confess have shown themselves to be something of a boon when it comes to reducing in-car violence on long trips.

One of their favourite games is something called Nintendogs. These feature fluffy little puppies that their virtual owners need to feed, train, walk and wash. The pets can be entered into competitions to win virtual money to but…more dogs.

The games are based around some of the more adorable breeds (a subjective term, I admit) and are called things like “Labrador & Friends” and “Dalmatian & Friends,” and are utterly divorced from reality.

Where, for example, is “Witless Setter & Friends?” In this, the pitifully low IQ-ed dog consistently refuses to obey simple instructions, rolls around in any kind of foulness it can find, steals food or consumes the most revolting of scavenged scraps (I’m just pleased we haven’t got a kebab shop in this village) even though it is perfectly well fed, and then lays around the house posing a considerable trip hazard while reeking strongly of rotting pilchards.

On the basis that art holds a mirror to nature I think we can safely conclude that Nintendogs may be many things, but art it is not.