Life tends to be full of little disappointments, until we get to the unavoidable big one at the end, of course. It's what separates us from the animals. Dogs might look at you if their bowl is underfilled, but they get over it (until next feeding time). Wildebeest might look annoyed on their long, boring, dusty migrations - but they have a brain the size of a pickled onion and don't know any better. If they did, they wouldn't keep getting caught out by crocodiles at muddy waterholes. But seeing as we're at the top of the global foodchain (with the occasional grisly exception), we have to put up with traffic jams, defrosting freezers, and paying £21 for a ticket to travel hundreds of miles to watch your football team play appallingly against a side bottom of the league before conceding a stupid goal with literally seconds left before the end of injury time. And soforth. Here, to sum up one of these disappointments, is a story.
In 1994 myself and six of my closest friends had just graduated from our local college, with varying degrees of success, and decided the only way to celebrate was to get on a coach at Preston Bus Station bound for sunnier climes. For a shade over a hundred quid we somehow managed to wangle two weeks in a static caravan on the Costa Brava. Possibly the 31hr bus trip had something to do with the incredible cheapness. I can't remember the tour company (pronounced two-er, of course) we used, but it was a Cosmos-esque alternative with a similarly tacky name 'Astro' or 'Spectral', or something. We all piled onboard and wondered what to expect, as the driver swung out of Europe's Longest Bus Station and into the rain.
The aim of this jolly trip was of course to indulge in the teenage pastimes of drinking, girls, and alfresco vomiting - but first we had the journey to negotiate. This was where the disappointment came in (there is some relevance to this story). It wasn't the incredibly long journey - we were 17 so quite happy to sit there and look at Penny, the perky Australian rep ("nice to look at, not nice to listen to" was the opinion of one of my friends). The crushing blow came as we rolled into France. Now don't get me wrong, I love France - I've probably been at least half a dozen times - but remember crucially we were onboard a budget express coach of cheapo English tourists. No charming Breton villages, or cosy Parisian cafes awaited us. We were bussed into Bully-les-Mines, and the fun started.
Bully-les-Mines is a small town in the Pas-de-Calais département of Northern France, about 20 miles west of the mining city of Lens (I didn't just copy that from Wikipedia, honest). It was apparently the routine lunch stop used by this company, as obviously they could just arrive at a pre-booked restaurant and stay there for an allotted time before continuing the long trip south. The local restauranter would pay the company for this service to ensure they kept the rosbifs fed, and everybody would be happy. Or not, as it turned out. We had no inkling, as we were just pleased to be in a foreign country and on holiday. The bus stopped in the quiet town square, and Penny announced over the microphone that the owner of a nearby restaurant would be coming on board to tell us the dining options.
Tap...tap...tap went the mic. "'allo? You got me? Allo! This is Johnny. How are you?". Nobody answered. "Good! A we'come to Bully les Mines. Today we have the lunch for you. You have cheeken with the chips, or beef with the vegetables, including the green bean." Those were his exact words. We shuffled off the bus, keen to kick-start our break with some proper French food and enjoy a bit of Gallic hospitality. Sadly, we got nothing of the sort. Chez Johnny was a poky little place with rickety wooden tables and paper tablecloths. The heavily facial-haired chefs regarded us with suspicion through the kitchen serving hatch as the waitress wandered over to find out which of the two options we wanted, before haughtily scribbling it directly on the tablecloth.
French food is widely regarded as a wonderful institution, and I've had some stunning meals there since. But what we had on that day was a culinary atrocity. I went for the beef, and when the chicken came out I thought I'd dodged a bullet. But then my choice appeared, and chewing bullets was a good description of what it was like. It was some of the worst food I've ever eaten. We choked it down as quickly as possible, paid our Francs, and scarpered. Still having half an hour before the coach left, we wandered around the town centre looking for a boulangerie or something where we could buy something edible. But the entire town was closed. This was a weekday lunchtime, and nothing was open. The local hypermarché was fermé, and there was not a soul we could try our broken school French on to ask. The only thing we found that would take our money was a 'preservatif' machine in the street.
So that was the crushing disappointment of the start of our holiday. We got over it, though. The coach stopped at a service station near St Etienne and we loaded up with chocolate and Ruffles chips, which you can't buy in the UK, for some reason. Once we staggered off after the 31hrs had elapsed we had a typically boorish holiday (the details of which I can't divulge, of course). On the way back the coach - again with Penny on board - stopped at Bully-les-Mines, but we had the knowledge of what was to come. A different group of co-busees listened to Johnny before traipsing off to his horrible diner, but we nipped off when his back was turned and went straight for the hypermarché, which thankfully was still open. This is why humans have become the most successful species - we can adjust to disappointment and alter our behaviour accordingly. Mostly, that is. I'll probably go back to another Blackburn game, for one thing. But I'm not going back to Chez Johnny. And I never did get my green bean.
