Planes, Trains and Automobiles

If there's anything worse than travelling away from your loved ones to be ignored or abused by Christmas office parties, it's travelling away from your loved ones, getting snowed in and not being able to get to work to be ignored or abused, and therefore not even earn any money. I'd been in Crawley staying with Natalie's parents for ten days, but in the last five I had made it to one gig and had to 'pull' five others. Snow had hit England, it was – 4°C and dropping fast, taking my spirits with it.

  To be fair, I don't go along with this 'why can't we cope with a bit of snow, they manage in Russia' mantra that gets trotted out every time along with 'Dunkirk spirit', 'mustn't grumble' and nudge-nudge, wink-wink references to 'having six inches in your back garden'. Normally I would; I've travelled all over the world and if there's anything certain about the British transport system it's this: it's bollocks. We have a road system that cannot carry the weight it's put under, the privatised rail network is owned by a different company to those who operate the trains, and the trains themselves are so phenomenally expensive that it's cheaper to hire a car to do most short-notice journeys anyway. It's a scandal that goes pretty much unreported because the politicians who created this mess don't actually have to pay for any tickets themselves. All of their travel is paid for, all of it. Why would they kick up a fuss about a freebie?

  The timetables that most rail companies operate are fragile at best, more often than not a triumph of optimism over reality, where the slightest thing will bring the whole system to its knees: leaves on the line, tracks melting in the heat, the wrong kind of snow – farcical examples of a system that's constantly teetering on the brink of chaos. Having said all that, Crawley had been hit by the kind of weather that would have Eskimos re-arranging their plans. A foot of snow fell almost overnight, temperatures continued to drop and obviously public and private transport was taking a hammering. To give an indication of just how bad it was in Southern England, some of the shops were shut.

  I'm well aware that there is something romantic about being snowed in, making do with what food you have, playing old-fashioned games by candlelight, a warming whisky by the fire and sundry other sepia-tinted winter myths – but I wasn't snowed in, I was snowed out. Natalie was snowed in at home and I was stuck in Crawley unable to travel anywhere. Not only could I not get to any gigs, I couldn't get home either. OK, the upside was that I wasn't being injured by flying marbles, tripped up by Toby, used as a scratching post by the cats, rubbed suggestively by Pierrot or plotted against by the horses. According to Natalie, it was chaos there; everyone shut up indoors with nerves being shredded. 'I don't know,' she mused, 'at times like this I think maybe we have too many animals.'

  If I had a lawyer's sharp mind I would have leapt all over that statement and got some kind of promise out of her; but really I knew that that would be a forlorn hope, so why waste my breath? And in any case, chaos or no chaos, I was missing every single one of them. I'd get daily reports from home which only really made things worse. There's no way in the modern age that you can't be in touch. Fixed telephones, mobile telephones, email, Facebook, Twitter – you can communicate almost constantly, but does it always help? I'm not so sure. Sometimes it's just a constant reminder that you're not actually where you want to be. Natalie would post regularly on Facebook and upload photos from home, and I would look at them late at night after work, if I'd made it there and back, and just end up feeling even more cut off. Even Samuel was emailing on a daily basis, usually just to ask for something or to see if I would contradict whatever edict Natalie had laid down at home.

  Maybe it's because of what I do for a living, the fact that I'm usually the centre of attention, that I find it difficult to conceive that life not only does actually go on without me but can actually thrive. Like I say, other people have it worse I know; other people are separated indefinitely, some permanently, I know all that. It doesn't make it easier. Thérence's vocabulary seemed to be improving rapidly which I would only find out second-hand during phone conversations with Natalie, conversations which I actually found harder than not talking to her. My mind usually wandered during these calls, I would feel suddenly even more sorry for myself than usual and angry too: angry at the weather, angry at the distance between me and my family, angry at not being home more often than I was. And Natalie, unaware that my attention would usually have drifted, would still be talking.

  '... and so really we're lucky to be alive,' she concluded.

  'Sorry?! What?'

  Natalie had been woken at five that morning, as one of the big barn shutters that cover the lounge windows had got loose in the wind. The shutters are 12 feet high and very heavy, but she went out to secure the one that had come loose and, thinking that was the extent of the damage, had gone back to bed. What she hadn't seen was that the boys' trampoline had blown away! This isn't a small thing – it is 5 metres in diameter, a heavy metal colossus and the wind (or more likely a whirlwind) had lifted it up and thrown it 30 metres where it had hit the corner of the house and landed on the car, smashing the windscreen and denting the roof.

  A couple of years ago there had been massive storms that hit Western France and carried on into the centre where we are. Thirty people had died in those storms as bungalows built precariously on a flood plain were torn apart, flash floods devastated villages and trees had fallen on cars; there were many other casualties too and Natalie and the boys, though unharmed, had been without electricity for three days, frightened and in the dark; I hadn't been there then but had vainly promised that next time I would be. A similar storm had now hit and I hadn't kept my promise.

  Natalie had been out in that storm having to muck about with shutters and whatever else had come loose, and if, like me, you'd been on the road for ten days working every night to drunken Christmas audiences and were feeling a bit strung out anyway, your mind runs away with you. What if she'd been hit? What if she'd been picked up by the tornado? At this point I was a gibbering wreck. According to the news the storms in France would blow themselves out by that night but, and this happens at this time every year when fatigue and the weather conspire to make me paranoid, I couldn't think of anything else but getting home.

  'Are you OK?' she asked. 'You'll be home soon.'

  I didn't need reminding. My remaining gig in Oxford was unlikely to go ahead and even if it did I wasn't prepared to battle my way there and end up not being able to get out again. I told the organisers in Oxford that I wouldn't be able to make it and that I didn't think the other three acts on the bill would make it either. The gig was cancelled and I began to make plans. It wasn't just a case of getting back to France; there was the logistical problem of just getting out of Crawley. As things stood, even trains from Sussex to London were problematic – going further than that looked nigh on impossible. This tends to happen every year. I try and make it back home for 21 December so that I can spend my birthday with Natalie and the boys, but it doesn't always work out like that. I had spent the previous year, my thirty-ninth birthday, sitting in a room at the Radisson Hotel in Stansted Airport and from my vantage point morosely watching heavy snow fall onto the runway, listening to radio reports of 'unprecedented' weather and travel 'chaos'. I was watching this unpleasant wintry scene while sipping from a warm bottle of champagne kindly donated by a comedy club for my birthday and chewing angrily on cheap, shop-bought sandwiches from Spar. I eventually got home on the evening of the twenty-third, but it was a low ebb.

  This year I had made contingency plans. I had a flight booked from Stansted to Poitiers, a seat on a Eurostar to Paris and, just in case, a foot passenger ticket from Dover to Calais. The only thing I hadn't done was provisionally hire my own boat. It was the kind of journey that Ranulph Fiennes would write a book about. I got the last train out of Crawley going to London Bridge, then walked across London to King's Cross which was in chaos. The Eurostar trains had been frozen by the 'wrong kind of ice' and no-one could see them moving for a couple of days. I made a decision and managed to get a train from Liverpool Street to Stansted and camped down in the airport hoping that the airline's desire to avoid cancellations and recompense would mean that safety concerns would be loosened and my flight to Poitiers would leave early the following morning. It did, powered not so much by the aircraft's engines but by the sighs of relief from everyone on board. The aircrew, whose main job it seems is to sell stuff on the flight, had a field day on that flight as, despite the early hour, the bar was emptied and weary travellers dared to dream that they might actually make it home for Christmas. The English on board clinked plastic glasses and congratulated each other, while the French on board behaved like it was Liberation Day.

  I blame the late French photographer Robert Doisneau for this; he has an awful lot to answer for if you ask me. He's the one who took the famous photo of two lovers kissing on the streets of Paris, and while it would be unfair to lay all embarrassingly public displays of affection at his doorstep, he certainly gave it a veneer of acceptability, especially in France.

  I once had a girlfriend who strictly forbade me from kissing her in public – she also strictly forbade me from kissing her in private as well, so it wasn't much of a relationship to be fair. She would never have got on in France. The French are a hot-blooded, emotional race (and they do see themselves as a distinct race) who have no qualms about displaying their feelings in public; on the whole I don't mind it, but the amount of prolonged kissing (older people might remember the word 'snogging') on French railway platforms is frankly beyond a joke. As I almost always travel alone, it is quite awkward to have to stand amongst a group of generally young, good-looking lovers constantly chewing each other's faces off. Other people on these platforms seem to regard this behaviour as entirely reasonable, some taking up positions to get a better view, others just bathing in the warmth of it all like it's one big osmotic love-in, but nobody seemingly prepared to shout, 'Cherchez une chambre!' for the good of all.

  Well, I'd had enough frankly. After thirteen hours of travelling I had made it as far as Saint-Pierre-des-Corps in Tours, just in time to catch the last connecting train home. And then it just seemed that everyone else on the platform began some sort of slow motion dance where they paired up and just started getting off with each other! It was too much for me and that's when I told them in my grammatically unsound French to 'get a room'. Thankfully nobody took any notice of me and my strung out, Anglo-Saxon limitations, except for one old woman who just came and stood in front of me, not in admonishment for my outburst, but clearly expecting to get some 'action' along the lines of what everyone else was up to.

  I had effectively been travelling with this woman for the last three hours. We had shared a waiting room at the station in Poitiers, queued alongside each other to get a ticket and, by chance, had seats next to one another on the journey from Poitiers to Saint-Pierre-des-Corps. She had, as the French say, a little too much sugar on her strawberries, which is their way of saying 'mad as a bottle of chips'. For instance, she had complained bitterly about how uncomfortable the seating was on the train until a fellow passenger pointed out that she was in fact sitting in the luggage rack.

  She was also carrying a mangy dog in a carrier bag, which she kept calling her bébé and which, to its great credit, didn't seem to have much time for her either. At one point she opened a bag of biscuits and instead of offering the animal just one biscuit she shoved the whole thing in its face like it was a nose bag and the dog, clearly not a fan of vanilla wafers, just sneezed into the bag and emerged with its face a wafery mess. The old woman looked at the hapless creature but didn't bother to clean it and offered me the bag of biscuits instead! I declined politely – I'm not a huge fan of vanilla wafers either especially the ones covered in dog snot – and looked at the dog who I swear just rolled his eyes as if to say, 'I know, but what can you do?'

  And now here she was in front of me, on a dark, icy railway platform in Central France. We were surrounded by lovers either meeting or parting, and the wind was blowing in along the station, chilling to the bone. She was a batty old dear and her eyes were clearly seeing mistletoe where there was none and her lips seemed puckered up while bits of biscuit clung to the hairs on her chin. I seriously thought of legging it onto the tracks and trying to run home. I looked at the dog, its face so covered in wafer he looked like he had canine psoriasis, its eyes seemed to say, 'Take me with you, please' which instantly shook me from my reverie as for one absurd moment I thought of arriving home and adding another bloody animal to the collection. I plucked up the courage to speak to the woman, but she beat me to it.

  'Can I stroke your coat?' she enquired. 'It looks so soft.'

  And so I spent the next five minutes waiting for a train while having my coat stroked by an old woman. I had been on the road for ten days, travelling since late the previous evening and was so tired I was actually shaking through fatigue. Tomorrow would be my fortieth birthday – I realised I was just an hour from home; an hour from Natalie and the boys and the dogs, cats and horses; an hour from snowed-in pandemonium, short tempers, noise and marbles. I began to weep silently, exhaustion playing a part obviously but also happiness. I was finally going home and I couldn't have been happier.