by Ric Erickson

Number 1.27 - Metropole Paris - Monday, 26. August 1996:- Since the beginning of July, Le Parisien has been running a long series of features about where one can go for holidays in France, rather than to the seaside or the mountains.

Part of the series is about little-known places in Paris or the Ile-de-France and these are useful for short excursions - such as the one to the guinguettes out by the Marne, that I mentioned in Metropole 25.

In crowded little Europe, France is a big country, and even if you add 60 million visitors a year to the 60 million inhabitants, there is still a fair bit of elbow-room left over. First off, not everybody comes at once, and a few residents actually leave the country for their holidays - like I have done this year; hidden right this very minute in my 'Ratlands' bolt-hole south or the border, down Spain way.

Spain spoiled me a long time ago and has given me the disadvantage of always comparing any new place I try holidays in, to good places I have been there. Since I have been in a lot of really... but I have been tempted by catalogues with colorful postage-stamp pictures, and ended up in places that were not so... Interesting as 'Ratlands.'

I am sort of beating about the bush to say that I have passed holidays in France that were quite agreeable and even a lot of fun, and in this issue I write about one of them - Josselin, out in the Bretagne.

Another thing to consider when you are reading this stuff I am writing - in the midnight hour! - is that I and Mrs. E. Have had two kids under eight - that we never had in all those Ratlands places - and we no longer sneer at the poor schmucks who are lombarded with these screaming, irritating, annoying, horrible and nasty little people, because we now have our own.

One thing we never knew before - kids! - was how the logistics of going on and being on holidays changes things radically. We can't go to Pepe's at ten in the evening and stay there until four and then go have some cognacs up at the truck-stop on the highway until six and watch the sun come up in the parking lot. Those wonderful days - and nights - are over. Dead. Gone. Just as gone as the 25 peseta Cuba Libre.

A lot of holidays - we have neither maid nor footmen - are spent dealing with the food-chain, for example. Two-year-olds don't eat cheese toastadas: they want hot mush and few bars or restaurants have it. If you have no kids you don't want to read this, and if you have them you know all this already. Kids are a nuisance - full stop.

After a hectic year in this city a really large number of people go and have a hectic holiday and I have never been able to understand this. Maybe it is because when I was growing up my parents got exactly two weeks off during the summer and that was the holiday and the rest of the time - about six weeks - was simply summertime. One year I went to 'camp' and it rained for ten days and I had no desire to try that again.

So, except for two weeks, it was summertime and kids had to make do on their own somehow, because everything wasn't organized to death like it is now. I can remember having some bad summertimes before I learned to swim, because all my good chums learned to do it a year before I did, and that left me outside the fence looking in at everybody having fun.

When the new pool was built, I went to the old one and learned enough on my own, in private, to be able to join the others the following year, and we all got more daring together again.

Now I am watching my own kids for a month in this place that is not 'Ratlands' and I truly like it here better than at Josselin, but I think Josselin was the best place I ever had a holiday in France. If it was near this sea and under this sun I would go there again, because it was pretty agreeable. But. If.

But, if, it were here it would not be Josselin, in the Bretagne and if it were here, the farmers would not get out their 19th century steam tractors and sharpen up their old scythes and mow down a field of wheat by hand, just for fun, on a hot summer's day. That was worth seeing.