Travels with my parents

I have been meaning for many years now to write a book called “Travels with my parents” but due to all manner of circumstances, such as laziness and an innate fear of my father coming back from the dead to check my spelling and punctuation, I have not yet managed to put pen to paper.

In thinking back to the many trips I have made with my parents, there was always the constant need to protect them from any form of embarrassment. Actually, it was more like the constant need for me to protect myself from embarrassment.

It’s a bit like watching television with your ageing mother and father. As we all know, in spite of assurances that the programme or movie you are watching is rated for “all ages” there will be a love scene that will inevitably be somewhat on the steamy side during which those parents and children watching will not make eye contact but rather feign complete and utter boredom until the plot moves away from the bedroom and back to the streets where people are killing each other. Somehow heinous murders on TV are so much easier to handle in the company of parents than love scenes.

My father, however, was not someone who could sit and feign boredom. His reaction was always to suddenly get up as though he had been miles away and not paying any attention to the movie, stand in front of the TV so no one else could see what was going on and say: “Right, who’d like a cup of tea?” And then go into a longish diatribe of how to make the perfect cup of tea until he was sure that the love scene had ended and people were once more happily murdering each other again.

But, back to travels with my parents.

The most fascinating of these trips was when my older brother Donald and I were driving my parents through France from Paris down to Lourdes.

We were just short of halfway when my brother pulled over and asked me to get out of the car with him to study the map and chart the most attractive route.

As we spread the map over the bonnet of the car, Donald angrily stabbed his right forefinger at the map, which I found quite funny because the top of his right forefinger had been bitten off by a pet rabbit when he was four years old and watching him trying to stab a map in anger was rather like watching someone trying to play tennis with a ping pong paddle.

Anyway, the cause of his irritation was the fact that in his estimation we would be required to make a 400 kilometre detour off our intended path. The reason being that were we to continue on the shortest route to Lourdes we would have to pass through the French town of Condom.

This being the early 1980s, we entered into an argument about whether or not my parents actually knew what a condom was. Given that my father still used to refer to a woman’s bra and as a “bust bodice,” I was pretty sure that we had nothing to worry about driving through a town called Condom but that we should be careful of coming across any place called “prophylactic”.

My brother won the day and we took the 400 km detour trying all the way to explain to my parents why our one day trip was extended to two.

Further embarrassment was to occur a week later when, on our way from Lourdes to Italy, the only accommodation we could find on the very crowded Cote d’Azur was a seedy hotel that was, in fact, nothing more than a brothel.

We pretty much got away with it until at breakfast the next morning my father asked Donald why everyone in the hotel that morning seemed to be a woman.

My sibling choked on his croissant and excused himself from the table. My father kept musing out loud about the strange hotel that did not seem to have any male guests until my mother mercifully told him to shut up and finish his boiled egg.

A few weeks earlier, in Paris, we found it was almost impossible for my parents to walk from my brother’s apartment to the bus or metro without passing through a red light district populated by prostitutes. We told them that these were in fact nuns dressed in civilian clothes to enable them to communicate better with the local community.

It was with a sense of excruciating foreboding combined with great amusement to see my mother greeting every hooker she came across with: “Good morning sister, a beautiful day is it not…?