4 - Feeling a Little Chaton

If I have garnered a well-earned reputation for being a little gauche socially, then it's fair to say that Natalie has earned an equally justified renown of her own. Where animals and their welfare are concerned, she is a soft touch.

As usual for a Sunday I had got home at about three in the afternoon, following the customary harrowing journey home. Though I was no longer driving nearly as much, I usually had to skip sleep on a Saturday night to try and meet all my travel connections. I had been working in Leeds the night before and in order to make my earlyish flight from Stansted Airport to Tours I had had to take an all-night coach from Leeds to Stansted. If ever you feel like you may be a winner in life and that maybe you just need bringing down a peg or two, I can heartily recommend an overnight National Express coach. As is often the case, I was the only one on the bus (going via London) whose belongings weren't in a black bin liner, and as usual the only one wearing a cravat. The overnight coach is undoubtedly convenient, as trains don't run through the night, but they are uncomfortable, generally crowded and sometimes quite menacing; they are not for the faint-hearted, though it has to be said, arguably preferable to the brutality of the budget airline flight that follows.

The drive home from Tours Airport through the vineyards and rolling fields via Amboise and Montrichard acts as my decompression chamber, before the boys quite rightly demand attention; though it's fair to say that I'm quite often in a fragile state having not slept for twenty-four hours. The boys, however, were playing their own games this time when I got back, so I was allowed to grab a cold beer, lie on my under-used hammock in the orchard and enjoy the late autumn sunshine.

Natalie was out at the front of the house walking Ultime (who appeared to be dealing stoically with her STD) up and down the verges on the roadside so that she could eat and cut the grass. I began to doze off, the soporific rural idyll washing the bestiality of my flight and all-night coach journeys out of my system. Five minutes I had. Five minutes, then reality came stomping through the grass and poked me in the eye with the pooey end of a stick.

Natalie was deep in conversation with a couple I didn't recognise, who had stopped by with some news. Now wide awake I wandered over, sensing trouble.

An old woman who lived a kilometre or so down the road had had a stroke and died. All very sad, obviously, and this particular woman was something of a character. She'd lived on about an acre of land on which stood various old caravans, a couple of ancient Citroëns and various other shacks; it looked like a shanty town. She also lived with lots and lots and lots of animals, all of which were now homeless, all of whom now needed care. All of them. Dozens of geese and chickens, some mangy old dogs, a horse, goats, cats.

'Had we known her?' the occupants of the car asked.

'Not really,' we answered.

'She was our aunt,' they said. 'It's a shame.'

'Especially for the animals…'

No! Come on! What the hell is going on here? I thought. What are you people, salesmen? Don't you know that I'm married to Noah's female reincarnation? Of course they did, they'd have heard. They'd have been at the old lady's place, wondering aloud what to do with the animals, and someone would have pointed out that there is an equally mad woman down the road who'll take all your animals off your hands for you. Ignore her husband, they'd have been told, she does. That's it, I thought, we've become a mecca for anyone wanting to offload livestock. It's going to get like an animal Oxfam shop around here – we'll come down of a morning and find 'donations' on our doorstep.

'Would you be interested in…?'

'We have these three lovely chatons…' said the lady, completely ignoring me and pointing to a box of kittens on the back seat.

This is how drug dealers work, isn't it? You start off with a few kittens and next thing you know you've got a couple of goats, three pigs, a shire horse and your life is no longer your own.

'We've just taken on three kittens, I'm afraid,' Natalie told them. Phew!

'Well, we've also got two goats and a pony.'

Seriously, what's going on in a world where any Tom, Dick and Harry can pitch up and start handing out animals to the vulnerable and the weak? That's how they sell cigarettes in Burma and it's bloody unethical. Not to mention the fact that we simply might not be able to take care of the animals properly; we were using a horse with genital herpes as a lawnmower for God's sake! We should have been on a blacklist.

Natalie managed to resist, I think partly because I was smacking my head repeatedly on the bonnet of the 'dealer's' car while wailing about injustice and fate, but they'll be back at the end of the month, they said; give us a chance to talk things over, see if 'we' change 'our' minds. It all sounded much like a threat to me and I went storming off muttering expletives and generally behaving like a man who hadn't slept for a day or so and then been abused in transit. I flopped back onto the hammock and almost squashed a kitten which then spat at me, waved its backside in my direction and put me firmly in my place with typical cat haughtiness. They'd been here five minutes these cats and they were already bullying me.

Of all the animals I thought we'd ever own, I'd certainly not banked on cats. I'd never even liked cats, and it became increasingly obvious over their first few weeks that Natalie and the boys didn't feel I could be left alone with the kittens. In order to keep me and the kittens apart therefore, I was assigned tasks that kept taking me outside, though I am not, by any stretch of the imagination (and hammocks apart), an outdoor person. I don't do outdoor stuff; I am not capable. I don't even own a pair of wellington boots, my logic being that if I owned a pair I'd be asked to do things which involved having to wear them, and that's surely to be avoided. Some men may still see themselves as hunter-gatherers; but some of us sadly are best left with the admin.

The first year we were here I had to build a big bonfire for garden rubbish, which in itself is easy enough, but I just couldn't get the thing lit. Every time I got a spark going it went out, I tried rags soaked in petrol, barbecue firelighters, magnifying glasses using the sun's rays – I even rubbed two sticks together for about half an hour because I'd seen it in a film, but nothing worked. In the end I ran out of patience and just emptied the petrol canister on it in a manic arsonist-style frenzy, stood back (I'm not an idiot) and threw a lit box of matches at it. The resulting fireball threw me to the ground and as I lay there thinking that that was a bit too close for comfort I saw the fire snaking along the grass towards me and the petrol canister that was next to me. I got up and ran away shouting 'She's gonna blow!' and jumped into a hedge.

Yet despite this dubious track record with the great outdoors, rather than be trusted indoors with the kittens, I was, one sweltering autumn day, to be found waist deep in odious, rotted bio-matter, while wearing someone else's waders, all on the pretext of pond clearance. It is not a situation I thought I would ever find myself in and I don't want it repeated, but apparently ponds don't clean themselves and I had been earmarked to remove all the reeds.

'Didn't we plant these reeds?' I asked.

'The fish need to breathe,' Natalie said.

'Yes, but didn't we plant these reeds?' I persisted petulantly.

'Take those things off before you go back in the house, won't you?' And with that she was off.

Firstly, wearing someone else's waders just feels wrong, like using someone else's toothbrush. Oddly enough I don't own a pair of my own waders, largely for the same reason that I don't own a pair of wellies but also because, and I'm ready to be corrected on this, Fred Perry haven't yet moved in to the 'Swamp Husbandry' market. If being a mod is about anything, it's about looking your best at all times and about dignity, both of which are sorely tested when you're wearing an agricultural gimp suit, covered in a tar-like substance that appears to have oozed up from the Earth's core and that smells like a landfill site on a hot day. It's difficult to describe the stench and texture of the stuff; it's fetid, ebony black and gloopy; like Dublin's sewers the morning after St Patrick's Day. And it doesn't give up its reeds without a fight either. I emerged from the pond an hour later looking like I'd struck oil, but smelling like oil that may have been formed in a Portaloo at the Glastonbury Festival.

In the end, though, it couldn't be avoided. I had to be left alone with the kittens. Natalie had to take Samuel and Maurice to the dentist and it was my turn to babysit while Thérence had his afternoon nap. Seriously, I thought, what's the fuss? How difficult could this possibly be? Yes they're frisky and in and out of cupboards and plant pots and they tend to crawl over you when you sit down and they bring chaos where previously there was order – but I can put my inherent OCD neatly in a drawer for an hour or so and just relax, can't I? You know, go with the flow. Chill. No? Apparently not.

Natalie and the children left reluctantly and I decided to lay down some ground rules. We were in the large open-plan kitchen-diner-lounge, with me in my customary position behind the breakfast bar, standing like a surly barman. The kittens were at the opposite end lying on the rug and enjoying the afternoon sunshine as it came in through the window. 'Right,' I said to them from a distance at the other end of the room, 'you stay in your half of the room, and I'll stay here and just keep an eye on you. Don't go jumping on the work surfaces, don't go scratching and pulling at the rugs and sofas and most importantly stay away from my shoes and my coats. You may look cute on a black and white Athena poster, but I'm no pushover, OK kids?'

Who was I fooling? I turned my back briefly and almost immediately there was a gut-wrenching, ear-piercing feline scream that chilled me to the core. I spun round to see one of the cats dangling from Maurice's wicker toy box! The cat had got one of its paws stuck in the handle and it was struggling violently. The paw looked like it was facing the wrong way, like one of those horrible football injuries that they don't show on television anymore; it sounded bad and it looked worse. I disentangled the cat and put it on the floor where it whimpered pitifully and tried to limp back to its bed, dragging its leg behind it.

I'm afraid that this is when I lost it.

'Well that's just bloody typical, isn't it? I turn my back on you for one bloody minute while Natalie and the others turn their backs on me for one bloody minute and you go and do this! What were you thinking?' All three of them sat there in front of me, just looking at me as I towered over them and went into a full-blown Basil Fawlty style meltdown. 'What were you thinking?' I shouted, waving my fist in their little faces. 'You know who'll get the blame for this, don't you? Eh? Me! Me! That's who.'

All of a sudden they rushed at me simultaneously apparently 'limpless' all of a sudden. They're going to attack me, I thought – but they ran past and I turned to see Natalie, Samuel and Maurice standing there, mouths open, their faces a mixture of horror and, worst of all, disappointment.

'What are you doing, Daddy?' Maurice asked, not unreasonably under the circumstances.

'Playing,' I said, 'just… just playing.' There was an uncomfortable silence while they all looked at me and the kittens, none of which it seemed were even slightly injured, curled around their legs and purred. 'I'll go and see if there's anything that needs doing outside,' I muttered and scurried off.

That incident was used as the final reason why the cats couldn't possibly be re-homed. Some flim-flam about trauma was offered, but only half-heartedly and no-one was buying it. So, the decision having finally been made, rather dubiously to my mind, I came into my own with a 'to-do' list: bowls, proper beds and collars were needed, I said, let's get these cats organised.

The pet shop is actually in a garden centre and is somewhere I usually try and avoid, because if Natalie has an obsession with collecting animals it is matched only by her addiction to gardening. There have been times when I have spent so long in garden centres I have seen plants grow, flower and die before we have made it to the checkout. I once, and I'm not making this up, collapsed in a garden centre in England, due to some longstanding inner ear balance problem, and Natalie carried on shopping while we waited for the ambulance. The combination of garden centre and pet shop is therefore potentially quite a dangerous one.

We got off relatively lightly in the plant section, with just a few lavenders finding their way into the trolley while I was off choosing collars and practising the word 'no' in preparation for the pet department.

'Daddy, can we get a mouse?'

'Daddy, can we have a parakeet?'

The chinchilla was the one that did it for me. A sad little South American fur ball cruelly out of place in a cage in Central France, with its big doe eyes and depressed manner. I have to admit it was very tempting to rescue it, to give it some kind of life.

'Daddy, can we have a chinchilla?'

'Yay! Mummy! Daddy said we could have a chinchilla!'

I was shaken from my temporary reverie. 'What? No I didn't! We don't know anything about chinchillas. No way! Have you seen Gremlins? Those things will ruin the sofa!'

Then it started – the wailing and moaning and gnashing of child teeth; even the chinchilla had a look on his face which suggested he'd probably be better off staying put. I'm proud of the fact that my children love animals so much – it is a civilising influence – but keeping a lid on it, especially when they are encouraged so much by their mother, was proving quite difficult.

Their love of animals is a by-product of the outdoor life that we were leading, but even they have their 'outdoor' limits. Nothing could persuade them to join Natalie and me in foraging for and eating wild mushrooms, and you can't really blame them for that. I wasn't all that enthusiastic either. There are mushrooms everywhere in the autumn, and while we were out on a bike ride one day we found a whole pathway of them in a little copse. Natalie wanted to pick them there and then, but Samuel and I, both naturally suspicious people, weren't convinced, as we know less about wild champignons than we do about chinchillas. We decided to be cautious and consult our book of French mushrooms when we got home.

Our particular book of French mushrooms, however, is one of the world's most useless guides, up there with Fell Walking for the Agoraphobic or A Politician's Guide to Probity. It's a thick book and 'details' hundreds of mushrooms and fungi, carefully separating the poisonous from the edible with each entry supported by a picture. The problem is that the pictures are all drawings and they are all exactly the same! Whether they couldn't afford a photographer and the illustrator only knew how to do one kind of mushroom I don't know, but it only serves to muddy the waters of the business frankly. This singular drawing, which (don't get me wrong) is very good, was seemingly of the exact mushroom we had found, so now we couldn't tell if it was poisonous, edible or just one of the charmingly entitled 'Mild Irritants' (making it sound like some mushrooms may try to sell you double glazing over the phone during dinner).

It's always best to consult experts in these situations, however, Natalie became convinced that the mushrooms were edible because Sandrine, the hairdresser, told her they would be. Firstly, I remonstrated, she's a hairdresser – she will say anything! And secondly, she's a French hairdresser – she'll say anything and wave scissors in your face if you disagree. At the time it was me having my haircut, and I'd rather she'd have concentrated on my latesixties Steve Marriot haircut than convince Natalie to risk poisoning her family.

We picked the mushrooms on the way back from town (that's how convincing French hairdressers are), but I was still uneasy about the whole thing.

'Are you sure we should do this?' I asked, as if it was illegal or something.

'Well, Sandrine said it would be fine,' Natalie answered, though I could tell she was wavering.

'But she's French!' I tried one final time. 'They eat anything.'

'Oh, stop it!' The fifty per cent French blood in Natalie started bubbling to the surface like lava as she picked a couple of hub-cap-sized mushrooms. 'What's the worst that can happen?'

'Oh, I dunno, death?'

I cleaned the mushrooms with a damp cloth, having read somewhere that you should never wash mushrooms because you lose the flavour (or in this case maybe poison), covered them in chopped garlic, parsley and butter and put them under the grill. They looked magnificent placed on top of thickly sliced pain de campagne, the glistening melted butter and the aroma of garlic adding to their lustre. We sat there with our plates in front of us feeling like proper country folk, but we didn't eat them straight away.

'You first,' I said bravely.

Natalie hesitated and then dived in. 'Mmmm,' she said, overacting I thought.

We ate the mushrooms and I'm happy to report that there were no side effects, no sickness, stomach upsets or death. Or, most disappointingly, taste. They were incredibly dull. I'd expected a hearty, almost steak-like texture and a strong, woody flavour, but this was like eating soggy foam. The thing about France, you see, is that food is a kind of death or glory experience: food can be great or terrible, but should always be interesting. These mushrooms were neither of those things, in fact they were worse than death; they were bland mediocrities, sullen and insipid. They were the French countryside equivalent of a midnight hot dog in Leicester Square.