5 - Upsetting the Apple Cart

The autumn and winter are the busiest time for jobbing club comedians, and whereas I had only planned to be away Thursday to Sunday for work, the nature of the comedy circuit had changed. Not long ago every big weekend club (and there were at least two in every major city and town) would have a Thursday night gig, but a contraction of the circuit had meant that not only had some clubs disappeared altogether, but those that remained no longer had a Thursday show. Fortunately, I had by now started on the corporate circuit and was working as an after-dinner speaker or as a host at corporate awards ceremonies, which were not only more lucrative but which I actually enjoyed far more than a heaving club night, acting as crowd control for stag and hen parties.

The only snag in this was that my working pattern became far more unpredictable; I could be away at any part of the week or away for weeks at a time. I had worked pretty much the same schedule for over five years now, but things had necessarily had to change. I was earning more money but was spending more and more time away. And whereas before I would only ever be away for work, now I might be away for five days but only have two or three gigs. It wasn't practical to come home to France for a day, either financially or logistically, so I was spending time away from home and having nothing to do. It's hard enough being away from your family so much, without also having the nagging feeling that the family may actually be growing in your absence. Brief conversations were grabbed by telephone or Skype and the paranoia increased if I heard hitherto unrecognised animal noises in the background.

'What was that noise?' I would snap.

'What noise?' they would all chorus, alarmingly harmonised.

'I heard bleating…' I'd take a deep breath. 'Have you gone out and got a sheep?'

'It's just the telly, Daddy,' one of them would say.

'No sheep here, Daddy,' another one would offer as confirmation.

I'd spent most of the previous week doing shows to English expats and assorted other Anglophones along the French Riviera: Monte Carlo, Cannes, Antibes and Nice. It is one of my favourite places in the world, combining stunning coastline, classic architecture, fantastic food and some of the silliest-looking rich people you're likely to find anywhere. I first went to Nice nearly thirty years ago and it hasn't changed all that much in that time; yet despite all the magnificent things the city has to offer, its walkways are still paved with dog poop. This is by no means a Niçois phenomenon but most other places seem to have cleaned up their act. I find it astonishing that France, a country that cares not only a great deal about what it looks like but how it's perceived, would allow one of its more spectacular spots to be covered in dog crap. It's like they're in denial about it.

There are so many dogs in Nice, none of which seem to get about under their own steam – they are carried under the arm like a living handbag; they are, in effect, an accessory, but an accessory that poos. There are very few dog poo bins to be seen, and although there are a few dispensaries for 'poo bags', they are all empty. In the end you spend most of the time wandering around Nice not admiring the buildings, the light, the beach or the people but looking at the floor and making sure you don't get merde all over your loafers. Some cities, like Toulouse for example, have tried TV campaigns to force a change of culture amongst dog owners, but it's a slow process.

Personally I think the problem will get worse, and not just in Nice. In France, as in many other countries with a 'sensible' Green policy, supermarkets no longer have boxes of free carrier bags at the checkouts; it's all about 'Bags for Life' these days and while that's all very worthy, it's bad news for your dog owner because we've all run out of poo bags. It used to be that when I came home from working in the UK my case would be full of the kind of things that French cuisine simply isn't capable of reproducing, things like Wotsits, Marmite, brown sauce and sausages made of sawdust, water and fish testicles; you know, staples of the English diet. Now it's full of carrier bags. On any given weekend, if I stay in a hotel and shop individually for each meal I can get about a dozen bags. And we need them too, or at least Natalie does as this is very much her department. Honestly, her day revolves so much around the collection of animal excrement she could take a PhD in Scatology. She patrols the garden picking up any dog mess, so that the boys don't play in it, then she mucks out the horses and rounds up all the manure in the paddock to sell or use for bartering, and in between times she's emptying the cat litter trays and changing Thérence's nappy. (All of that changes when I'm at home of course; I occasionally change the nappy.) However, our shortage of poo bags had become so dire that I had started hanging around the fruit-and-veg section of the supermarket and, when no-one was looking, grabbing handfuls of the clear plastic bags and hiding them under crates of beer. It is very undignified and just one of the many unreported consequences of being 'eco-friendly'.

In my absence the cats had grown at an alarming rate, to the extent that I was almost convinced they weren't semi-feral, semi-domesticated cats at all, but actually a family of abandoned black panthers. Walking into the living room was now like being in a scene from a Born Free spoof, as three quite large cats prowl round the place or lie in a postprandial daze on the rug next to the remains of a zebra carcass. I'm convinced that they will inevitably rip me to death one day, while Thérence will go on to make a fortune in the circuses of Las Vegas sticking his head in their mouths.

Having discovered that in fact we had the gender wrong for at least two of the beasts, we decided that it was, by now, time to name them properly and naturally the French have a system for the naming of animals. The reasoning behind this has been traced to the Gallic requirement that everything, without exception, must carry some form of bureaucratic burden. The system is this: animals born in a given year must all have names that begin with the same letter – so, for instance, the letter for the year 2011 is 'G'. What is the point?! Nobody stops you in the street and says, 'Oh what a lovely dog, what's he called? Aristotle? Oh, he must be five years old!' I don't understand the need for this unnecessary uniformity. It stifles creativity; unless of course it's the year of the letter 'F' – and then there's endless fun!

'Fart!' Maurice giggled repeatedly.

'Which one, though?' Samuel would say.

'We're not having a cat called Fart!' I'd say, attempting some form of parental control.

'All of them!' they'd both shout. And round and round it went in an endless cycle of giggling and the word 'fart', until eventually, after a few choice 'F' words of my own, we settled on Fox, Flame and er, Vespa. Vespa, of course doesn't actually begin with an 'F', but because Natalie has a fear of scooters and motorbikes (and because I'm a technical dunce) it was pointed out that having a cat called Vespa is as close as I'm actually going to get to owning the real thing, so the name stayed.

It was a small victory, but a precious one and it feels good now and then to be able to put two fingers up to bureaucratic restriction. France is seen from the outside as both heavily regulated and almost constantly on the verge of anarchy, but I think that they're very much two sides of the same coin. Like a teenager who feels hemmed in by parental control, just occasionally French society needs to let it's hair down and rebel; sometimes it's a grandiose gesture like a general strike, but mostly it's the small victories that keep the community together in a kind of 'them and us' way. Naming one of the cats 'Vespa' as opposed to 'Fespa' may seem like a pitifully minute gesture in the grand scheme of things, but to me it represented that we were in fact becoming 'French'. We'd taken your laws, Madame La République, and blown a very Gallic raspberry at them.

Of course, that's as lawless as I get. I suffer from a certain level of OCD; I need the cutlery in the correct part of the cutlery drawer, tins on the shelf should be facing forward, as should creases on trousers. DVDs should be in alphabetical order, pens need lids and pasta varieties shouldn't be mixed. I don't like chaos or surprise or anarchy. I'm obviously in the wrong family.

Before travelling to the South I'd been in London, where there were reports of fuel shortages in France, but I was sceptical. This is just another example of anti-French bias from the UK media, I thought, another opportunity for a bit of Frog-bashing what with their quaint, antiquated values like workers' rights and community; bloody cheese-eating communists. I was wrong though, there really was no fuel. Panic-buying, a peculiar human condition that leads otherwise sane people to buy ten pints of milk on Easter Sunday because the supermarket may be closed on Easter Monday, had emptied the petrol stations, meaning that all non-essential usage of fuel had to be curbed. Activities like mowing the lawn, for instance, were a definite no-no, and yet as winter approached it needed doing, otherwise the garden would look like it had an ugly stubble all winter. I could live with that – my OCD doesn't stretch to anything that involves physical endeavour – but Natalie couldn't.

'We'll let the horses out,' she said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

'What? You mean including the horse we're trying to cure of an escaping habit?' I said, not liking the idea one jot. 'You're going to let both horses wander around the garden with the cats and the dogs and the kids? Isn't that a bit dangerous?'

'If you need me, I'll be inside,' I said.

It all seemed like a good idea on paper, a family communing with its animals on the lawn, bathed in late autumn sunshine; like a scene from an impressionist painting. Unfortunately, it failed to take into account the rather highly strung nature of Ultime, who clearly likes the safety of her paddock and once out of it becomes a little skittish, the slightest noise setting her off. And once she's off, Junior gets all 'protective boyfriend' about the whole thing and chases after her, which sets Toby off too and the whole place goes mad. It's like the Pamplona run, as people dive for cover, only with horses and not in Spain. Anyway, it's dangerous.

I watched the whole thing from the safety of the kitchen and it was bedlam. First you'd see Samuel run past the window, laughing his head off and shouting 'Stampede!', only to be followed by Ultime and Junior and Toby in a crazy conga, Benny-Hill-theme-tuned-style chase that probably looked more dangerous than it actually was. And it just kept happening, like they were on a relentless merry-go-round: child followed by horse followed by dog. I ventured outside at one point and got caught up in the whole thing, but then a car went past and it triggered Ultime off, and while she went haring towards the patio this time Junior, instead of following her, made straight for me. The bloody animal was trying to settle scores!

'He's just being friendly!' Natalie shouted as I went running past her.

I dived into the hedge and almost landed on Maurice, who apparently had been hiding there for most of the afternoon.

'What are you doing here?' I asked, trying to sound brave.

'I don't want to get run over,' he said.

Natalie realised that we weren't going to come out of the hedge until the horses were safely locked away, which she eventually did while muttering to herself something about my cowardice, completely ignoring, not for the first time, the fact that Junior clearly has a vendetta against me. My theory is that he sees himself as the alpha male in our family and will aim to protect Natalie in the same way that he protects Ultime. I have to make sure that we're not left alone together because he's obviously harbouring some deep-seated jealousy towards me. Is it jealousy? Or does he just dislike mods?

Despite the potential for serious animal-related injury and my natural dislike for physical labour, I actually had things that I needed to do outside. I had to harvest the quince.

It is not a role I had ever envisaged having in life, quince harvesting. I'm not even – and I'm aware how ridiculous a statement this is – much of a fruit fan. It's a messy business eating fruit and you're liable to get a squirt in the eye or, worse still, stains on your shirt and as such I shy away from it. I do love my orchard, though.

The previous owners, Monsieur and Madame Lebrun, had planted twenty-one fruit trees to mark their daughter's twenty-first birthday – various varieties of apple, plum, cherry, pear, medlar, quince, walnut. It was a beautiful gesture if you're going to stick around to enjoy the results and watch them grow, but has a whiff of sadness about it if you then decide to sell up a couple of years later, which they had done. Much of what they did to the house when they renovated was with their daughter (and especially future grandchildren) in mind. They put a secure fence around the pond, the swimming pool is raised, and the upstairs ceiling-to-floor gabled windows have child safety 'balustrades'; they obviously had planned to grow old there and watch their grandchildren run around the place. But then their daughter had declared to them one day that she had no intention whatsoever of having any children and immediately, seemingly in a fit of pique, they had put the house up for sale. We turned up less than a week later putting paid to any 'second thoughts' and so they'd moved on before the trees, as if mirroring the person they'd been planted in honour of, had borne fruit. We were the lucky beneficiaries and had taken full advantage.

This was the first time, though, that we had had a crop of quince in successive years since we moved here, which either says something positive about my orchard management skills or that I'd been doing something terribly wrong previously. Anyway, not only did we have a crop, we had a bumper crop. At a rough guess I'd say at least 40 kilos of the stuff. Normally I'd make a few jars of chutney, some quince 'Turkish Delight' or even a quince cordial and that would be that but I was still working my way through last year's crop.

Quince is a brute of a fruit, like a slightly hairy cross between an apple and a pear. They can't be eaten raw and their cores are so tough they wouldn't break down in a nuclear holocaust, so to actually do anything with the things takes something of a run up. I'm aware that this all sounds like a bit of a hissy fit at the Women's Institute, but (aside from charging people to throw them at Junior) I was running out of ideas of what to do with it all. You can't rush a good chutney either, and making the 'Turkish Delight' is not only a slow, highly involved process it's bloody painful as the boiling hot quince spits at you from its cauldron. So I'd taken to wearing protective goggles and Marigolds – all mod-approved naturally! Not, it has to be said, an incredibly manly way of doing it, but I was once taken to task by a heckler in the front row who wanted to know why I had a burn mark on my forehead. I tried to convince him that I'd been kidnapped and tortured with lighted cigarettes, reasoning that 'I got burned making fruit sweets' might not find favour with a hostile, late-night audience.

By carefully wrapping each quince in newspaper they will keep from autumn until about Easter, so you have a bit of time – but even so, quince with everything can drag a bit and even if I do make 3 tonnes of chutney with them I've then got to try and get rid of it. The French, apparently, aren't big on the stuff and when offered a jar at the dinner table most tend to sniff it, make positive gestures as to its bouquet and then ask about the background of chutney in general before replacing it on the table untouched. Also, current restrictions on how much 'liquid' you are allowed on board a plane makes bringing jars of chutney into the UK a risky business; I've been stopped once already at the airport and had a hard time convincing security that it wasn't some kind of aromatic explosive, just a preserve and very nice with cold meats. They confiscated the jar, probably because it was lunchtime, but clearly have me marked down now as The Chutney Bomber.

What I may do at some point is hire a van and import hundreds of jars that way. Instead of being one of those comedians who spends the last five minutes of their act trying to sell you the CD or DVD of the set you've just seen, I'll set up a little stall covered in a gingham tablecloth at the back of the club and flog chutney as people leave. I've become hooked on the process of making chutney; it's become my escape. Obviously moving to France in the first place was meant to be my escape and it still is, but what with Natalie and the boys and the animal equivalent of 'Open Day at the Borstal' I've found an inner bubble. When the stresses and strains of family life here increase and my world feels once again like it's teetering precariously on its axis, you can find me in the kitchen furiously peeling, cutting up and boiling all the goodness out of fruit like a crazy person.