Leaving Cherbourg was not going to be something I particularly mourned. Paris, with all its mixed memories, is still one of my favourite cities in the world and I couldn't wait to see my friends and enjoy it all.
The train there proved a surprising highlight. The other occupants of my carriage were four women, almost comically like Sex and the City had it been set in Normandy, on their way to Italy. We were joined by a mother with two children, a boy of 7 or 8 and a girl of around 11 or 12, who were to provide my chief entertainment for the next two and a half hours.
The boy's main occupation - perhaps his sole goal in life - was to behave in ways as embarrassing as possible to his sister, who seemed to be on the cusp of severe teenage self-consciousness. To my delight this included talking loudly, eating noisily, picking his nose, fiddling around in his ear and then thoughtfully chewing on the results and, once, scratching himself extremely rigourously. She kept giving me these helpless looks as if to distant herself from him, as if she weren't really travelling with this troupe of monkeys at all.
He was charmed and excited by everything he saw and her best strategy lay in pointing out the numerous cows, sheeps, cars, tractors, trains, signals and other miscellany associated with a long train journey. Anything, it seemed, to stop him from scratching himself or picking his nose and eating it. His mother, of course, sat opposite them and let them get on with it, wisely burying herself in a book. She had clearly witnessed this all before and resigned herself its inevitability, occasionally offering some conciliatory looks for the girl, or chocolate for the boy, to keep the peace.
Most intriguing of all though, was the girl's T-shirt, which occupied me for fully half the journey. It was a simple black affair, with white writing that proclaimed H. Morgan International. Now I don't know who these people employ as their translators or T-shirt designers, but it was a stroke of genius, for under this was a poem that read
Once on a high and windy bin in the morning
Mist two lovers kissed
And the world stood still Then your fingers
Touched my silent heart and taught it how to sign
[sic]
Now I can see where they were going with the last one (though one can never discount the possibility that the designers had a particularly enlightened attitude and the lovers were in fact deaf), but "a high and windy bin"? I swear that is what it said. It's a fantastic image, but I suspect it wasn't exactly what they - or the girl - had in mind. Any thoughts or ideas on what they meant or how it got translated thus, let me know.
