Away From the Numbers

It wasn't just the bad language of course; being at home and enjoying a full family Christmas had underlined just how little time I actually spent there and that had to change. The original plan was that within five years of moving to France I wouldn't be travelling back to the UK nearly as often as I had been. Though the actual 'How are we going to do that?' part of the plan had always been a little vague, and in fact the opposite had occurred. I was away more than ever and sometimes for long stretches.

  Over the years we had tried various ways to earn money in France. Natalie had worked as an estate agent, but when her three years' maternity leave was over, which at this point was about five months away, neither of us wanted her to go back to work for Norbert. Also, in the meantime my working week had become more unpredictable, meaning that sometimes Natalie wouldn't be able to work even part-time hours – plus, since Thérence's birth, we had collected more animals, meaning Natalie would find it difficult to do any kind of job that wasn't working from home.

  My attempts at earning money in France had thus far been fruitless and physically detrimental. As an English comedian I have worked all over the world – Melbourne, Dubai, Mumbai, Boston, Montreal, Helsinki, Munich, Nice, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Shanghai, Manila, Brussels, Amsterdam, Singapore, Cyprus – basically, wherever there's an expat or at least an English-speaking audience there's a gig. Why not set up my own? In Paris?

  People have tried and failed to organise comedy in Paris, but surely I stood a better chance? I had all the contacts, the proximity to Paris itself and the desire to succeed where others had failed. It didn't last long. Finding a venue in Paris was nigh-on impossible; I wanted a nice, small theatre set-up but none of them have bars, meaning that the project would be unviable. I then turned to nightclubs (of which there are many) and had a meeting with a well-known club owner in the Bastille district. She was kind enough to see us but she wasn't convinced – the idea of a stand-up comedy night in France is very new and she just couldn't really grasp the concept. Eventually what we wanted to do sunk in, but, she asked, how would we make money? Well, I said, aside from ticket sales, the bar returns will be massive. There will be 300 Anglophones in your club, all drinking.

  'No,' she said, a deadpan look on her face.

  'But it works…' and I listed all the places I'd played in where clubs had been going for years.

  'This is Paris,' she said, unimpressed. 'People don't drink here.'

  I must have looked a little dubious at this statement. I know big-city expats and in my experience they're very rarely ever sober!

  'I have an idea, though,' she continued and leaned in conspiratorially. 'We'll secretly film all the comedians and sell the footage to mobile phone companies.'

  Illegally filming and selling my colleagues' intellectual property to communications giants was one of the most insane ideas I had ever heard and I gave my thanks for her time and left her to her mad, swivel-eyed view of the world. What about an English 'pub' in Paris, I thought? There are lots of those. One in the Pigalle district gave me the go ahead, but then said if any other client wanted the function room for that night, they could have it and it didn't matter how much notice she gave!

  'Let me get this straight,' I said, not quite believing my ears, 'I will have booked three top comedians, brought them to Paris and found them a hotel. Sold potentially 300 tickets and even on the afternoon of the show itself you can cancel me?'

  'Yes,' she said. 'Deal?'

  Another even less keen on the idea said I could rent his place for €20,000 a night.

  'Great!' I said, 'I'll be along with the money just as soon as I find somewhere to land my GOLDEN BLOODY HELICOPTER!'

  The Anglo-French Chamber of Commerce gave me a list of people who might be able to help – events managers, PR firms and the like; no psychiatrists, though, which would have been distinctly more useful.

  Julia and Pete ran a PR company that had fallen on hard times and they were struggling but thought that standup comedy might be their salvation.

'Forget about Paris,' they said, 'there's too many rules there, it's too difficult. Come and try down here.'

  'Down here' was the Deux-Sevres region, but close enough to Cognac and the Dordogne to programme a three-night run there. 'Is there enough of an audience to make it work, do you think?'

  'Oh yes,' they said, 'easily.' It was what I wanted to hear frankly and I let that get the better of my, let's be honest, pretty weak business sense.

  Maybe expats in France are a different breed. There's always the possibility that they don't crave 'English entertainment' the way expats further afield do and that's to be admired really; they certainly weren't that fussed about stand-up! My role was to help with advertising, book the comedians, their travel and hotels, MC every show, drive everyone around and stump up most of the money. Julia and Pete's job was to make sure the venues were ready and obviously do most of the PR.

  'I take it you've spoken to the expat business associations in Dordogne, have you?' I suggested on the phone one day when Julia hinted that ticket sales were a bit 'sluggish'.

  'Oh, I hadn't thought of that!' she said enthusiastically. 'I did put a poster up on the side of a fish and chip van today, though.'

  It didn't bode well. I booked comedian friends of mine, Paul Thorne and Paul Sinha, who I knew could handle most situations and who would be prepared to give me a little leeway if things were a bit 'amateurish' to start with, but those relationships became definitely strained by the second show when we found ourselves in a massive, 500-seat salle des fêtes with no sound system. An emergency system was rented, which we then had to rig up even though none of us had a clue what to do.

  'Do you not carry your own microphones around with you usually?' Julia asked, pulling on a cigarette, as we lugged the heavy sound equipment around the venue.

  'No, Julia. No we don't.' I looked at Paul Thorne, who was a close friend, and rolled my eyes in a 'what can you do?' way. He looked back at me and mouthed some particularly nasty insult in my direction.

  'Don't ever ask me to work for you again,' he added.

In all we did six shows over two months, two runs of three, and a couple of them were very good, enjoyable comedy gigs, but we played to ever-decreasing numbers as Julia and Pete insisted, against my advice, on changing the venues every time.

  In the penultimate show somewhere in a tiny village outside of Cognac we had seventeen people in. Of course the show went ahead and I introduced the first act and went outside to lick my wounds. As usual Julia was there, puffing away on yet another fag.

  'Why are we in the middle of bloody nowhere, Julia? We've got seventeen people in! Seventeen!'

  She looked at me, shocked that I was angry. 'Do you normally get more than that then?'

  I had already decided that I was working with idiots, that they were costing me a fortune and putting long-term friendships under considerable strain. The sixth show would be the last, I thought, but decided against telling Julia until the thing was over. Also, it was the effort involved that didn't seem worth it, the organising, the funding, the travelling and the performing was a lot harder than I'd anticipated. It's much easier, I thought, to just walk on stage and tell jokes for half an hour and let somebody else take the strain.

  We arrived at the last gig, again at some tiny town in the middle of rural Deux-Sevres, the venue having been changed from the most successful show we had had on the first run. Again I was with two very good friends, Andy Robinson and Gavin Webster, and I'd already told them that I thought this would be my last; the strain, emotionally, physically and financially was just too much. Andy later described my pre-gig condition as something resembling a stroke. I got out of the car and the entire left side of my body seemed to droop, he said, I then pulled myself up and staggered into the venue and like a man possessed started fiddling about with the sound system. Apparently happy with my work, I then marched out of the back of the hall and promptly collapsed.

  'The show must go on!' I kept mumbling like some drunk pantomime dame, as Gavin and Andy tried to persuade me that actually I wasn't in much of a fit state to do anything. The pompiers were called and I was rushed to hospital in Ruffeq, travelling in the ambulance with Julia; and that was the last I saw of her as she disappeared when we entered the hospital. Andy and Gavin, to their great credit and despite being obviously quite shaken, went ahead with the show. I still lost money on it, though.

  I had been having stomach problems for a couple of years and nobody had diagnosed it properly enough to actually treat it – was it an ulcer, hernia, irritable bowel syndrome, reflux? I had been opened up, had tubes shoved in every orifice and taken more drugs than an East German shot-putter, and still the problem persisted.

  'So, Doctor?' Natalie asked nervously on one occasion. 'What do you think?'

  The doctor, actually a stomach specialist, looked at me again and shook his head. This doesn't look good, I thought. He took his glasses off, rubbed his eyes, looked at Natalie and sighed. 'You've told me what your husband does for a living, the lifestyle that goes with it and the endless travelling. Of course he's ill.' He looked at me, 'Monsieur, go home.'

  In my weakened state I took this to be the rallying cry of a Le Pen follower and told Natalie that I was going to throw him through the window. 'Monsieur Moore!' he said, a bit rattled. 'Please don't misunderstand me.' He went on to explain, very eloquently and very reasonably, exactly what he meant. You cannot keep putting your body under this pressure, he said, nearly a hundred flights a year, the trains, the driving, at least one night's sleep lost a week, eating at odd hours, the drinking etc. etc. It is physically unsustainable, he said, so move back to England. Or get another job.

  I thought about this as I lay in that hospital in Ruffeq for three days. I was totally alone. Natalie couldn't leave the boys and drive three hours to come and see me, Andy and Gavin had flown home as planned and Julia had disappeared. Andy had rung Natalie to tell her what had happened and she was in regular contact with the hospital, but I had no working phone, no computer, nothing.

  As a child I had read a biography of Peter Sellers and in it there was an incident where he suffered a heart attack on an aeroplane. And while he lay there thinking that this was the end, Sellers says that he had a 'visitation', somebody came to him and said that if he survived he should 'go back to Clouseau'. Sellers had sworn never to play the role again after the first two films, but he survived the heart attack and did indeed 'go back to Clouseau', resurrecting his career.

  I'm not comparing myself to the great Peter Sellers, but I had a similar incident. I woke groggily from the anaesthetic, at first not knowing where I was, but there was a voice I recognised and it was my good friend and comedian Mick Ferry, basically telling me that I couldn't change my course, I am who I am, and that I should make a decision early and stick to it. I took this as a reference to my brief, inglorious time as a comedy impresario. The thing is, Mick was talking from the television in the corner of the room – French breakfast television was showing a clip from the film Looking For Eric and it just happened to be the bit that Mick was in. It was one of those absurd coincidences that life sometimes throws up and added to the whole surreal nature of the previous twenty-four hours. Though at the time, being alone and not knowing where I was, I found it quite scary!

  The diagnosis was actually quite prosaic. The internal scar tissue of my old external appendix wound had wrapped itself around my intestines and finally my body had shut down, unable to cope.

  'It's very common,' said the doctor in Ruffeq. A sentiment echoed by our family doctor and the sundry 'medicos' in Natalie's extended family too, 'very common'. For the last two years I'd been poked, prodded, invaded and pumped full of drugs and apparently they'd missed the obvious. Very common indeed! Bloody cheek!

  Eventually I got home, a wounded, poorer individual and almost immediately the phone rang. It was Julia.

  'I've been thinking,' she mused before I could say anything. 'I think we should do a run of shows over Christmas.' I gave her my reply, going completely against the advice of the doctor who had warned me not to get agitated and to remain calm. I never heard from Julia again.

  So we'd tried estate agency and running our own comedy shows; we'd also tried to make a living from brocantes, eBay, selling cushions and chutney. Now we needed a radical rethink. 'Why don't you both go away for a couple of days and think about things?' asked Natalie's mum, immediately after Christmas. 'We can take care of the place, can't we, Brian?' Brian looked a little sceptical to be fair, even for a couple of days three young boys and the frantic hubbub of the menagerie wasn't something to be taken on lightly. We didn't give him chance to object.

  The city of Tours was once the medieval capital of France and it's one of my favourite places. Less than an hour from where we live, its airport is a very useful Ryanair hub. Every Christmas we go there with the boys to see the Christmas lights and they stuff themselves silly on toffee apples and barbe à papa (candyfloss). This time was different though, Natalie and I were on our own for two whole days. Taking advantage of Natalie's parents' generosity, we gave brief instructions of how to feed, clean and care for the horses, dogs, cats and children – and got out of there quick before they changed their minds.

  A couple of days to ourselves in Tours was just what we needed. Natalie's life had become a merry-go-round of various kinds of animal droppings and outdoor maintenance, so a chance to go shopping in some of the more up-market French boutiques had her salivating before we'd even got there – and I was eagerly anticipating spending two nights in a hotel and not actually being on my own!

  Tours is a cross between the bohemia of Brighton and the academia of Oxford or Cambridge, with the ancient buildings of the medieval capital thrown in. Like any city it has its rough points and its drunks, though even they seem more benign than in other places. It has atmosphere and culture, restaurants, brasseries, crêperies, maisons de thé, antique shops and chocolatiers galore; it also has a C&A which is 'just great for children's clothes'.

  For two days we went seemingly up and down the same road as Natalie shopped the way she always has, the complete antithesis of the 'impulse buyer'. A beige cardigan in Galeries Lafayette would have to be weighed up with a similar cardigan from another shop at the other end of the Rue Nationale, with a multitude of journeys in between and me trailing behind with a dozen shopping bags containing clothes, a very heavy set of antique coat hooks and my ever-failing spirit and good humour. She literally shopped until I dropped.

  What we hadn't done much of, however, was talk about what our next step could be, how we would reduce my travelling and still earn money. It's not that we hadn't talked, we'd talked a lot, but like all parents with small children, all we'd talked about when we had the chance to be away from them was the children. So, on the last night we planned to go back to a little restaurant in the beautiful Place Plumereau and chat over a nice glass of wine and some local specialities. My feet, though, simply wouldn't go the extra half mile and could barely scrape their way to the Chinese restaurant across the road from our hotel. We were in one of France's finest old cities, in the gastronomic Centre, and we were having a Chinese! In our defence, it was Tours' first ever Chinese restaurant and was established way back in 1977 so, you know, it had history.

  What it didn't have were any other customers, so we had ample opportunity to thrash out our 'problem' in public. I got out a pen and paper like a secretary ready to take shorthand – if this discussion needed anything, I thought, it is a list. I wrote a bold number '1' in the top left hand corner and then looked at Natalie who was sipping stiffly on her aperitif. I circled the number and looked at Natalie again. I put a colon just to the right of the circled number and started to underline the whole thing. Natalie grabbed the pen and took it off me.

  'Look,' she said, slightly irritated, 'we both agree that we spend too much time apart. It's not good for us and it's not good for the boys. Agreed?'

  'Agreed,' I said. 'Can I write that down?'

  Possibly for the long-term good of our marriage we were interrupted at that point by the world's oldest waitress, a delightfully smiley Chinese woman who seemed happy to have a bit of company.

  'Are you ready to order?' she asked brightly.

  Not for the first time on our little break my order was questioned, not because of my bad French accent (which would have been perfectly acceptable), but because I was plainly just ordering the wrong thing.

  'Are you sure?' she said, 'You'll never eat all that!'

  'Honestly, I've been shopping all day and I am ravenous,' I said and she turned away with a smirk on her face. 'Anyway, agreed. I want to be at home more, that's a given.'

  'And I can't easily get a job because when you are working, you could be away at any time and I won't find something that flexible where we are.'

  We sat pondering this for a few minutes before the waitress brought us our starters; all freshly cooked, piping hot, wonderfully tasty spring rolls, wontons, soups, toasts, seaweed, the works. Hmm, I thought, I may have a problem here.

  'So ideally,' I said, taking a break from the food to get my breath back, 'we need something we can do from home.'

  'Like a gîte?' ventured Natalie tentatively, knowing what my reaction would be.

  'No way!' I spluttered, 'Come on, we moved here to get away from people! I'm not doing a gîte!'

  'It's just an option that's all. If our aim is to work from home and for you to be at home, it ticks all the boxes.'

  I sat sulkily back in my chair as the waitress approached to clear our half-empty plates, she tutted at mine. Wherever I go it seems restaurant staff feel they have a right to judge me. One of the first times I went out for a meal in France with Natalie's family I ordered a steak to be 'well done' and the chef came running out of the kitchen, tears in his eyes and told me off. He practically begged me to change my order claiming that he couldn't serve 'leather as food.'

  'OK, so not a gîte. Fine. What do you have in mind then?'

  We threw ideas around for a while – buy a shop in town, open a dog kennels (not my idea), a crêperie, goat farming – each one slightly more bizarre than the one preceding it.

  The waitress returned with our main courses which didn't all fit on the table, forcing her to move another table next to us, and as she did so she looked at me as if to say 'I told you so!'

  'Bon appétit!' she said sceptically.

  'Why don't we both do a TEFL course and teach from home?' I suggested. I had actually mooted this idea with my friend Paul one night in London, proposing it as a way forward for Natalie and me. He had laughed himself silly. 'You? A teacher?' And then he was off again.

  'You?' said Natalie, barely able to control herself. 'A teacher? You nearly disowned Samuel when you taught him how to ride a bike. No. You haven't got the patience…'

  'Oh, that's absolute boll—'

  The waitress glided over to us. 'Everything OK?' she said, meaning our food presumably and not our relationship.

  'Lovely. Really lovely.' We said together, still piles of the stuff in front of us.

  Pleased with the answer she sat on a table behind us and opened a huge box of Ferrero Rocher, which she proceeded to munch through as we continued to eat our meal. It was quite intimidating actually and as we got half way through our main course we simply couldn't eat any more. I got up to go to the toilet and heard her say to Natalie, 'So he doesn't like the wine either, eh?' and pointing at my full glass.

  'We could get teachers in!' I said, returning to the table having been inspired in the tiny toilet and still doing up my flies.

  'You mean like a writing holiday or a painting holiday, like that?'

  'Exactly!' I replied. Natalie looked at me, a glint in her eye.

  We thrashed it out over the cooling food for another twenty minutes or so. Convert one of the barns into a classroom, use local hotels and chambres d'hôtes to house the students, have the 'teacher' stay with us and we'd provide the meals for everyone. It was using the property to its full potential, we'd be at home together, I would do the cooking and therefore be largely kept away from the 'students' and the local community would gain in tourism. It seemed like the perfect answer, even if it would take time to set up, build and then establish it seemed an ideal solution for us. And I would be at home more.

  'Have you finished?' interrupted the waitress from her trough of chocolates.

  'Yes, erm… could you box it up for us please? We'll take it with us.'

  I hate it when Natalie does this, I find it embarrassing but it seemed to please the old waitress no end, especially when she managed to sell Natalie a bag of Chinese tea as well. And in the spirit of goodwill, and after she'd carefully boxed up the remains of our meal, I even ate a bowl of lychees which I can't stand and she wished us a Bonne Année as we walked the 5 yards across the road to our hotel with an almost complete Chinese meal and half a bottle of rosé in our hands.

  The lychees had their usual effect on me and I barely slept that night – and just as I was about to, at six in the morning, the fire alarm went off. It was, as always, a false alarm, but it rendered any further sleep utterly impossible and so I spent the early hours sitting in a chair, staring at my laptop and eating cold Chinese food. It was horribly reminiscent of being away at work only this was very different. Natalie was in the bed in the corner of the room, gently breathing and, more importantly, we had a plan. This could be a big year indeed.