by Tommy Barnes
‘The atmosphere in Richelieu was tense, Rose,’ I said on returning from the bakery one day in August, having bought two croissants for us and two secret croissants just for me to eat in the car on the way home.
‘Why?’ said Rose, absent-mindedly holding a dribbling Albert.
‘There’s a new 1999 Renault Mégane estate in town.’
‘What?’
‘Previously there were just two of us, both white 1999 Renault Mégane estates. He stayed on his side of town and I stayed on mine. It wasn’t ideal, but we coped. But now, a green 1999 Renault Mégane estate has turned up. Green, of all things! Parked outside my bakery in broad daylight. I eyeballed the driver as I rolled past it as if to say, “Let’s meet at noon and try and shoot each other.” The woman behind the wheel seemed a little frightened.’
‘Yes … I’m not sure that’s really a big deal?’
‘OK, Rose, fine. Not a big deal. Nothing to worry about. Well, all I can say is don’t come running to me when Richelieu is chock-full of 1999 Renault Mégane estates. 1999 Renault Mégane estates as far as the eye can see, taking our parking spots. Wall-to-wall 1999 Renault Mégane estates causing traffic jams, blocking fire hydrants. Bloody Renault Mégane estates running over elderly ladies and stealing our women, Rose. Those shitting 1999 estates, eating our croissants, Rose. EATING OUR CROISSANTS, ROSE! EATING OUR FUCKING CROISSANTS, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, ROSE. Eating our fucking croissants. Don’t come running to me because I am telling you now – it’s fucking happening. THEY ARE COMING, ROSE. They are coming.’
‘Maybe you should cut down on the caffeine.’
‘Yeah, you’re probably right.’
After a crappy first half of the year, it got really hot from July to September. Mid-to high thirties most days. A proper heatwave like the ones you remember from your childhood – dry, endless, so hot you couldn’t leave the house in the middle of the day or you’d be baked onto the landscape like a burnt cookie. Our once vibrant lawn was reduced to desperate little islands of brown grass surrounded by large patches of barren sandy soil. There are only a few things I remember from that time. Firstly, a goat arrived. I don’t know why we got a goat. Rose wanted him for some reason. I presumed it was part of Rose’s pregnancy cravings, which was odd because she’d already given birth. The goat was called Bevington. Sadly, and this is a very serious issue that I think it’s important to discuss, Bevington turned out to be a misogynist, so after a week or so we had to get rid of him. He bullied Barbara and Winifred and he headbutted Rose’s sister. My point is, there’s no place for domestic violence in the modern world, even if you’re a goat.
The only other event I really remember from that period with any clarity was finally going to my compulsory stage de gestion four-day management course in August. This was the course I had been booked on in April that I needed to complete in order to get my tax status as a brewer and gardener. Anyway, I thought it was a four-day management course, but it turned out I was booked onto a four-day argument.
On the first day, I walked into the meeting room in the Chambre de Métiers office in Tours, where the course took place, to find everyone sitting in horseshoe formation, screaming furiously at each other. In the centre a formidable little woman called Julia, who seemed to be in charge, took on all comers from around the horseshoe like a travelling-circus prize fighter, and there we remained all morning, shouting at each other. On Monday afternoon we all went into a conference room where another man stood in front of us and argued even more furiously with my classmates. We spent Tuesday morning back in the horseshoe, this time with Julia more confident than ever. She’d got the measure of us the day before. We started the day arguing about the previous afternoon’s conference-room argument. This continued until Wednesday, when the arguing finally stopped. It stopped because Julia dedicated the entire day to explaining what would happen to your business if you got divorced. Suddenly my classmates were all ears. They sat in silence, anxiously taking notes. In a 2014 survey, 57 per cent of French men admitted to having affairs. Once she had finished this particular segment, the arguing began again.
The course was a perfect example of French bureaucracy. Julia spoke much too quickly for me to understand. I don’t blame her: it wouldn’t have been fair on all the other people in the class if she spoke at half speed. But the course was compulsory, regardless of whether I understood it or not. There was no exam, so I didn’t have to understand it, but I did have to sit in a room full of arguments for four days without really knowing what was going on, just to get my certificate. And it wasn’t only me. I got the impression that a lot of the French people on the course thought it was a waste of time. Here was a room full of young, motivated people (and me), desperate to get out there and start their new businesses, but before they could, they had to sit through four days of compulsory bullshit. This goes on all over the country every month. When you think about all that time wasted when people could be out there running their businesses and paying taxes, the French state must lose millions in potential revenue.
On a similar course in the UK everyone would sit in silence, meekly scribbling notes on their pads, never to be used again. Then, when they were a safe distance away, they’d complain bitterly to each other about what a waste of time it was. In fact, this is exactly what I am doing now. Not the French, though. They love to argue. They long to feel the garlic-tinged spittle of a furiously shrugging adversary flecking against their cheeks. They scream at each other, but then a few moments later they are all friends again.
It’s probably a good thing. They don’t bottle things up like the English do, and by arguing you hopefully arrive at some kind of truth. The only thing is, I assume in France – as in the UK – there is a substantial number of people who are morons. In the UK, although a lot of people who might have something interesting to say end up keeping their mouths shut, thanks to our nation’s loving embrace of repression, it also means a high proportion of morons keep their mouths shut for the same reason. In France it’s the opposite. Everyone is discussing things all the time. Clever people and morons. I’m not sure which is best. You might think it’s better to have the morons blathering on if it means sensible people are voicing their opinion as well, but then there’s nothing more frustrating than an argument between morons, is there? It’s like watching people trying to play tennis with rolling pins.
I noticed something funny on my course. My classmates would sometimes say English phrases in what they thought was an English accent. ‘Bye bye!’ or, ‘Let’s go!’ Things like that. They couldn’t quite master an English accent, though, so they ended up sounding like a cartoon character. Bugs Bunny, normally. I found this hilarious until I realised that it was probably the same the other way round, so when I speak in what I think is a French accent it must sound equally ridiculous, and whereas they are just saying the odd English phrase, I am talking in French the whole time. For Damien and Celia, an evening with Rose and me speaking French must be like being stuck in a Warner Brothers cartoon omnibus.
From July to September I gardened as much as I could, baby permitting, getting out early, wacked up on coffee, and coming home a few hours later before the temperature reached 40°C, perforated by horseflies and mosquitoes, to find Rose and Albert in a darkened room with all the shutters shut and between eight and ten fans strategically placed around the sofas, rumbling away. There we would sit each afternoon, not daring to go out until sundown.
The days were hard, but the evenings were joyous. Still hot from the midday inferno, we spent early evenings in hammocks, rocking the baby under the shade of the trees in the dell, drinking Fred’s fizz with cassis and eating mustard-flavoured crisps and then, as the sun set, we’d move onto the terrace and barbecue the absolute vitamins out of anything that seemed edible while Exile on Main St by the Rolling Stones played on repeat. If the baby slept, we’d play thousands of games of rummy on the wooden table outside the kitchen till late, surrounded by candles jammed into old wine bottles as bats swooped a
bove us. At night Albert slept in the bed with us, all the windows open, trying to coax in any sort of a breeze. When I say he slept, I mean he slept in one-or two-hour stints, his waking up expertly timed to coincide with the exact moment when we were just falling asleep. It was a confusing, magical, exhausting time.
We began to emerge from the chaos of having a newborn baby around the start of October. It was amazing that when I looked back at the gardening over the summer, I realised I had actually done rather well. I hadn’t really made any money on my black-market beers, but despite my ineptitude at gardening, I had gathered more and more clients, largely, I believe, out of sympathy and/or the twisted fascination that comes with watching a simpleton struggle with the most facile tasks – watching me work was like watching prehistoric man banging rocks together to see what would happen. But I found myself turning a profit. I had managed to save up around €1,000. I had also managed to get my tax status approved, I had registered with the Douane, the French Revenue & Customs, and I had been granted a licence to sell beer at the markets. All I needed now was the beer. There is a lot you need when you have a child, and I’m not just talking about hard liquour: there’s all the cots and clothes and general apparatus that you have to have with a baby, which could add up to be expensive – but both Rose’s sisters and my brother had children, so in fact we had a surplus of baby things. We had everything at least twice over – cots, car seats, a million items of clothing.
I brewed once or twice after Albert was born, and the results weren’t spectacular. I have already mentioned the herbicide black IPA, but my normal IPA beers, the ones I was hoping would be my main selling beer, were still coming out with an astringency that wasn’t particularly pleasant.
Nevertheless, after a summer of gardening, once I had put a croissant quota into place and substituted Fred’s red for expensive supermarket wines, I now had some cash in my pocket. I started to look around for breweries. You can pick up a pico brewery (a very small microbrewery) for around €1000. That would make 100 litres of beer a time. This wasn’t enough for a commercial venture really, but it was all I could afford. I told myself if I brewed twice a day, every day, I might be able to make some money. Twice I found breweries for sale on the internet, but both times when I phoned up to enquire, they had already been sold. I began trawling the internet obsessively.
At the end of September Celia gave birth to Zoe, an beautiful baby with eyes that gleamed and twinkled. For Braslou, alongside Albert this amounted to a population explosion.
We travelled back to England in late October for my mum’s seventieth birthday. She hired a house in Southwold on the east coast of England. My mum is the eldest of thirteen brothers and sisters, all of them lovely people and all of them, to a person, quite, quite mad. My uncle Mark eats five kilograms of cheese a week. Aunty Maggs is an ex-lawyer, ex-property developer, ex-around-the-world sailor who used to live on a boat and now lives on a house on the edge of a cliff that is eroding daily. Aunty Myra makes a living buying things at car boot sales and selling them on eBay, and she drinks nothing but coffee and red wine. Mostly red wine. I think she drinks coffee to rehydrate. There are loads of others, all insane. I bored them all with my plans to by a brewery. I hinted that I might need some investment, but none of them seemed interested.
When we got back to France at the end of October, we were caught out. The seasons had changed. It was cold. Seasons feel more defined here. They change overnight. Suddenly summer was over. As the evenings got colder we started having log fires, but they weren’t enough to keep the house warm. I remembered how cold it got the winter before – Rose and I huddling as close to the fire as we could without losing our eyebrows. We wrapped Albert up in more and more layers. It wasn’t right. It was only going to get colder and I knew we had to do something. I was continuing to search for microbreweries, but I was starting to realise that the money I had saved might be about to be repurposed. I received an email on 16 November, the day before my birthday:
Tommy, I am upgrading to a larger a brewery and I therefore have a 100-litre brewery for sale. €1000 to you. To be honest, it’s a pain in the arse brewing with something that small, I would suggest getting something bigger, but if you want it, it’s yours.
Cordialement
Xavier
If I’d received the email a month before, I would have bought it, but now the pressure was on. Rose had been dropping hints like:
‘We should get a log burner.’
And:
‘Why haven’t we got a log burner yet?’
And:
‘Your son is freezing to death. We need to spend the money on a log burner.’
Some I picked up on, some were probably too subtle, but I knew things were about to come to a head.
We visited Beauval ZooParc for my birthday, about an hour east of Braslou. It was raining. I always think I want to go to zoos, but when I get there I find them depressing. The animals look bored and I find it hard not to take this personally. Beauval was a sort of unreconstructed zoo. No great expanses for the lions and tigers to roam in; instead they repeatedly patrolled small patches of grass surrounded by flimsy-looking fencing so that their footprints were worn into the dirt, just desperate for something to happen, surrounded by an endless line of wide-eyed, slack-jawed morons with nothing better to do with their lives than sneer at some poor creature less fortunate than themselves. It reminded me of my teenage years in north Hertfordshire.
Albert, now four months old, wasn’t the least bit interested in the suicidal big cats. He saw every outing as an opportunity to sleep. He was sleeping when we rolled him (in a pram) into the one canteen that was open on a wet November Thursday in Beauval ZooParc.
‘Look, Tommy, we’ve got to do something about the house. I know you’ve been saving the money for the brewery, but we’re not going to get Albert through the winter if we don’t get some sort of heating.’
‘You know what creates a lot of heat, Rose?’
‘A log burner?’
‘Well, yes. But also, and this is interesting, did you know that microbreweries often have two or even three heated tanks? Now, there must be some relatively straightforward way to harness …’
‘We’re getting a fucking log burner,’ said Rose.
‘Good idea.’
Reluctantly I replied to Xavier that I wasn’t in a position to buy his little brewery system. Although this was almost certainly the end of my scheme to start a brewery, at least for this year, when I gave it some thought it felt like a relief. I didn’t know anything about running a brewery. I liked telling people that I was going to start a brewery; it was something to say and so often I had nothing to say, but I’m not sure I ever thought I would really start one. Despite this, it was the only plan I had left, and now it was gone I felt empty. I’d given up on the murder-mystery book. I’d sent it to every agent in the UK without success, so I had changed the title of the book and sent it to all the agents again, hoping they wouldn’t remember, but that hadn’t seemed to work either. It was almost as if I had written a really, really bad murder-mystery book.
It was a comedy/murder mystery that I assumed would be the next Harry Potter, but even though I sent it out to all the publishers I could find, I received zero responses. Finally, after badgering a particular publisher with emails and eventually calling them, I had this conversation.
‘But you publish lots of murder mysteries – what’s wrong with mine?’ I said.
‘Well, the problem with it really is that it’s quite obvious who committed the murder within the first three pages. So it’s not much of a mystery.’
‘Oh. It’s a comedy as well, though. You publish lots of comedies.’
‘Yes. No. The other problem is it’s not really very funny, which makes it not much of a comedy.’
‘Oh. Well, what is it, then?’
Long pause.
‘It’s words. It’s just lots of words.’
As much as I hated it, I could start gardening ag
ain in the new year, and with Rose bringing in some money from selling sculptures and her marketing job, we could get by for a bit, but I couldn’t garden for ever. We would limp on, but it was starting to feel like our life in France wasn’t going to be sustainable.
Great January downpours dragged through Richelieu Forest by a bitter wind left the landscape translucent and anaemic, before finally arriving onto my sad little head. It wasn’t only the weather that was desperate in Braslou.
I brewed a lot over winter. There was little else to do. With the glorious summer over, we were forced indoors. I focused on IPAs, but I also made porters, stouts and Belgian ales. Think of this as the Rocky training montage bit. I experimented with different malts and hops and I discovered that, instead of having to buy most of my hops from America, I could buy Cascade and Nugget hops, both excellent for IPAs, grown in the Alsace region of France. Not only that, I also discovered new and interesting varieties of German hops that worked well in IPAs and other beers. This all made sense. I wanted to make a beer that was modern – and by that I mean a craft beer IPA, not an easy-drinking blonde lager – but there didn’t seem much point in copying an American-style IPA completely, because that would mean I would be entering into direct competition with all the other millions of IPAs out there, and there are so many exceptional IPAs.
So I wanted a European take on it, using European hops. The more French, the better, but German hops would do as well. The problem was, no matter what hops I used, I was still getting a strange aftertaste with the IPA. I started brewing Belgian Abbaye beers too. Abbaye beers are strong beers, like Leffe, traditionally brewed by Belgian monks with a particular yeast that gives them a flavour of cloves and bananas. I’d spent several happy mornings down at Bruno’s bar in Braslou with Damien drinking Leffe, so I thought I’d start by creating something like that. They also came out reasonably well, those Belgian beers, but they had the same aftertaste. Indeed, the only beers I made that didn’t have the astringent aftertaste were the dark beers. The porters and stouts.
