by Tommy Barnes
I could see immediately that Rose, who’d been listening in to the converstation, was delighted at the thought of me actually doing some work. I imagined myself coming back from a day of lawnmowing – tanned, athletic and a foot taller, to a proud girlfriend, a bottle of wine on the garden table and a delicious meal that veered in my mind between a ham and cheese sandwich and stew, and ended up a stew sandwich.
‘OK. I’ll do it. I will become a gardener. Stew sandwiches,’ I said.
‘Stew sandwiches?’ said Rose.
‘Just the bit about becoming a gardener,’ I said. ‘Ignore the other bit.’
Bonjour Monsieur Barnes,
We invite you for a meeting to discuss your plans to start a brewery and set up a gardening business on 1 April.
Cordialement
Chambre de Commerce, Tours
I emailed the Chambre de Commerce in mid-March, the organisation that I was told I needed to register with to get a tax status, outlining my plans for a brewery and gardening. I wanted to become a micro entrepreneur – the most simple tax status. They replied a week later inviting me in for a meeting. Brilliant! I thought. They will talk me through the registration process and any other regulations I might need to comply with … I’d better wear my Goodfellas jacket. My Goodfellas jacket is a Prince of Wales checked jacket that is very similar to a jacket one of the gangsters in Goodfellas is wearing when he’s found hanging on a meat hook in an industrial freezer. It’s a nice jacket. I only use it for special occasions, and when I do, I avoid industrial freezers.
The meeting was scheduled for a few weeks later, but I wasn’t too worried. I had been warned that France was incredibly bureaucratic, but if that meant waiting a few weeks then it wasn’t so bad.
April Fools’ day, 1 April. The day of the meeting. For the previous two weeks I had been preparing myself for this. I expected to walk out of there a bona fide beer maker, ratified by every law in the land. It was the start of something big. I would be able to look back on this day as the moment I became a success. I dressed up as smartly as I could (Goodfellas jacket), gathered all my documents into my folder, as well as my crib sheet of important questions, which I had translated into French. I drove an hour to Tours, the nearest city to us, where all the local administration seems to be done, through vineyards and across the rivers of the Indre and the Vienne to the banks of the Loire where Tours sits, and by 9 a.m. I was being ushered into an office in the Chambre de Commerce by a tall, serious young man.
‘Bonjour Monsieur Barnes. Thank you for coming to see us today. I understand you want to start a brewery.’ He spoke French very slowly, aware that I was a moron. I immediately warmed to his perceptiveness.
‘Yes, that is correct.’
‘OK. You have come to the wrong place. You need to go to the Chambre de Métiers.’
‘Oh, right. It’s just I emailed you with the details …’
‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’
‘Right. Well, I was thinking of doing some part-time gardening while I establish the brewery. I think that was on the email as well?’
‘Ah yes, gardening. Good idea.’ He consulted his computer. ‘I’m afraid you have come to the wrong place. You need to go to the Chambre d’Agriculture.’ He showed me to the door. ‘Thank you for coming. I am glad to be of help.’
‘OK. Is this some kind of April Fools …?’
‘No. Goodbye.’
As I walked back to my car in a state of bewilderment, I wondered how many other offices in Tours were entirely dedicated to telling people they had come to the wrong place. I guessed about 40 per cent.
I got home and immediately phoned the Chambre de Métiers.
‘In order to register with us, you must first come to an introductory workshop. The next one is on 3 June.’
‘But that’s two months away! And after that I can start?’
‘No, after that you must do a week-long management course.’
‘In June?’
‘Hold on, I will check. No, the next management course is August.’
My nan’s alarm clock sprung into view. The numbers had turned red and were flashing. The baby was due at the end of June. There was no way I could wait until August before I started selling beer. There was only one thing for it: I was going to have to start selling beer on the black market. Not only that, and perhaps even more daringly, I was going to have to do some illegal gardening. Holy shit, I thought to myself, the thrill of danger causing my knees to knock together, I’m Errol bloody Flynn.
BEER NO. 4:
The Worst Fence in Braslou Black IPA
RECIPE
Malts
5.1 kg Maris Otter
300 g Belgian pale malt
300 g Chocolate malt
300 g Carafa
Hops
10 g Nugget
100 g Citra
Yeast
Mangrove Jack West Coast
MISTAKES
Bottles not cleaned properly
Gardening
Drinking and gardening
Looking back, there’s not a finer sight in the world than a cast-iron table, lit fleetingly by a whimsical, early summer sun, spitting petals into the air like great plumes of champagne fizz as it is dragged at great pace through a flower bed by a chronically overweight hound. At the time, however, I lost my shit.
‘BURT! FOR GOD’S SAKE, DESIST!’ I shouted over the top of the roaring ride-on lawnmower engine as he plundered his way through the Johnsons’ garden, wreaking mayhem and destruction at every turn. The Johnsons were particularly particular about their garden.
There are several great philosophical questions that have troubled humanity from the outset and I fear may never be truly answered. However, I am pleased to announce that as I watched Burt over my shoulder, hurtling towards the horizon with cast-iron table in tow, ploughing a ragged furrow through immaculately kept lawns and only coming to a stop when the table became anchored in a hedge, I accidentally answered one of them. The question of whether a ride-on lawnmower can knock over a tree. Yes, people. If the driver is sufficiently distracted by a fat, satanic dog, yes it can. While staring in amazement at Burt over my shoulder, I hadn’t realised that the direction of my ride-on lawnmower had altered and when I looked back I found I was on a collision course with a little fruit tree. Before I could work out where the damned brake pedal was, there was a terrible creaking and I had pushed over the young apple tree and mowed it to death.
This was the culmination of a disastrous micro-career in gardening. I had hacked, slashed and burnt my way through a variety of previously well-maintained lawns. I accidentally strimmed Roger’s orchids. I chopped Neil and Sally’s hedge into some kind of surrealist vision of Hades. Sarah and Andrew had warned me their ride-on lawnmower didn’t turn left. They were wrong. It did turn left, just not when you wanted it to. Consequently, I crashed it into their barn. I used too much weedkiller on Julie and Ronald’s garden and turned it into the surface of Mars. I accidentally threw a rancid rabbit corpse at one of Barry’s neighbours. You see, there are two types of gardener: those who giveth life and those who taketh it away, and it turns out I was a taker. A destroyer of all things. I had more in common with Burt than I realised.
I had started taking Burt gardening with me in another attempt to form some kind of a bond. Burt was in no mood to form a bond. He soon developed a ploy in which he would lay a carefully placed poo in the path of my lawnmower and watch with glee as I ran it over, scattering said poo all over my lower legs. I would have to spend the rest of the morning pushing the mower with one hand and holding my nose with the other.
The incident of the cast-iron table wasn’t really his fault, however. When I arrived to mow the Johnsons’ lawn, I had tied his lead to the table so he wouldn’t be able to poo in my path and then I had filled his water bowl with the only water I could find, Perrier. Burt had never tried fizzy water before. He wasn’t aware of its existence. The bubbles in the water were such a
shock to his world view that they caused him to embark on a rampage, table in tow. No normal dog would have been able to drag that table, but Burt had weight on his side.
Interestingly, it wasn’t until after I knocked over the tree that I started drinking at work. I wasn’t downing bottles of whisky on the job or anything like that. I just mean I started taking the odd bottle of beer for the ride-on lawnmowers. They have beer holders, for God’s sake! It was clear they were designed to be driven with beer, so what was I supposed to do? Leave the beer holders un-beered?
I was brought up in a drinking culture. From the age of about fourteen onwards the whole point of anything was to get as drunk as you possibly could. When we were old enough to start going out and hiding at the back of pubs, we would meet up at the station, buying four-packs of Stella Artois, drinking them on the train to the next town, then pub-crawling our way through four or five pubs until we got to the pub in the town centre where we were meeting our friends, and only then would the night and the proper drinking begin. This is what teenagers in shitty provincial towns did when I was young.
I don’t wake up in the morning desperate to get drunk. I don’t hide my drinking from people and I can go without if I have to. I’m not dependent on booze. Interestingly, I do wake up in the morning desperate for croissants. And I do hide my croissant-eating from others. Sometimes I have two or three a day. My croissant habit has affected my social life. I turn up to dinner parties covered in crumbs and people won’t look me in the eye. I hide croissants round the house. It may be that I have a croissant problem. The day Damien told me you could get them delivered directly to your door still ranks as one of the greatest days of my life. Rose is on to me, though. She has banned me from having croissants delivered more than twice a week.
Gardening is difficult. That’s what I was talking about. Don’t let anyone tell you gardening isn’t difficult. I mean, it wasn’t all bad. If it was a nice day and you just had to sit on a ride-on lawnmower and drink beer, it could be wonderful. I loved doing Julie and Ronald’s garden on a sunny day. Their neighbours were called Gaston and Françoise and they were French farmers in their late eighties. I don’t know what the average life expectancy round here is, but it must be higher than normal. Nearly every farmer seems to be in their eighties and nineties, and they are all out driving tractors and tending their crops and womanising (I should think).
Gaston loved to chat. Whenever I cut Julie and Ronald’s grass in the morning, he would putter over from his farm on his little old tractor and invite me in for a glass of rosé, which he poured from big unmarked plastic bottles. ‘For the strength,’ he would say. His wife, Françoise, would hobble in. She wouldn’t normally have a drink unless I had brought some beer.
‘You want a drink, Françoise?’
‘Of course not. It’s eleven in the morning!’ Françoise would exclaim.
‘It’s his homemade beer.’
‘Oh, beer! Why didn’t you say?’ Then we’d sit around the table shooting the shit, none of us really understanding each other particularly well, but getting along. After an hour or so I’d roll out of their kitchen and onto a ride-on lawnmower and merrily zigzag my way through Julie and Ronald’s orchard, crashing into trees in a state of utter bliss.
A lot of the time it wasn’t like that, though. The first half of the year had been unusually wet and cold, which meant I would spend half the day on my hands and knees pulling clogs of grass out of the bottom of jammed lawnmowers.
The second half of the year became excruciatingly hot, so hot that you’d have to try and get the work done before 3 p.m. because from then on the temperatures were in the high thirties. The damp in the first few months had created an ideal environment for a mosquito/horsefly orgy, and so when the sun finally came out a great swarm of mosquitoes and horseflies came with it. Hedge trimming was agony on the shoulders. Weedkiller smelt of perfumed death. People, unsurprisingly, employed me to do the jobs they didn’t want to do. The shit jobs. The jobs where you had to balance on top of a wobbly ladder fifteen foot in the air and wave a bladed power tool around. Gardening was killing me, but I had no alternative. My respect for Nick and Claire had quadrupled by the end of the summer – and bear in mind I had quite a lot of respect for them in the first place. You would have too, if you’d witnessed the vigour with which Nick jammed beer cans up chickens’ bums.
I met Xavier at a fête de la bière (beer festival) in a village just to the east of the city of Tours towards the end of April. My mum had found an advert for the beer festival in our local paper when she came over to stay. I don’t know why she was looking for adverts for beer festivals. It’s her prerogative. One needs to keep oneself occupied when one is retired.
On the whole, French fêtes were much better than English ones. In my experience, any festival you go to in Britain is now solely concerned with generating maximum profit, but the French, in a move that will strike British events organisers as utterly baffling, still put the emphasis on actually having a good time. For instance, last year, while we were staying in a village called Chantelle in the Auvergne, a region in central France, we went to the village’s annual Fête de la Musique. It was unlike any music festival I’d been to in England. It was free, the beer was cheap, you could see the stage and – this was the best bit – whereas events in Britain tend to be segregated by age (a British teenager would sooner throttle themselves to death than attend a social gathering with their family), at this fête everyone was there: teenagers, young children, parents and really, really old people in wheelchairs. Everyone was mixing together, chatting, drinking a sort of grapefruit and white wine punch (which is much nicer than it sounds), having fun and dancing to what was one of the dirtiest, loudest heavy metal bands I have ever encountered. I shit you not. They were heavy. Don’t get me wrong: this band were good. Not enough spandex and giant hair and 1980s rock for my particular tastes, but they were still good. But man, were they heavy.
At the climax of the event, as elderly women chatted to each other over dessert, the singer sang a song that was specifically about her backside while the guitarist wailed on his guitar and a group of primary-school children gleefully spun each other round at the front of the stage. Every now and then the singer would hold her microphone out towards the crowd and the children would, as one, shout back, ‘ARSE!’ It was brilliant. If I had any criticism of the gig at all, it’s that I was the only one throwing glasses of urine at the stage (I didn’t).
That was the Auvergne, though. While the intention is always good, French fêtes can be hit and miss. I remember going to one Fête de la Musique in a village in Burgundy a few years ago, where we, along with some bemused local farmers, endured an outrageously pretentious band from Paris playing a three-hour rock opera that was somewhere between a Meatloaf video and a primary-school nativity play. Consequently, I had no idea what this fête de la bière would be like. Ideally it would be an opportunity to meet other brewers in the area and to drink lots of delicious beer, but it was over an hour each way and for all I knew it could potentially be a complete waste of time. My friend David Kimber Bates, who lives in Richelieu, agreed to come with me. He was a good companion because, in his own words, ‘I’ve been to loads of French fêtes. You never know what the mad fuckers are going to do.’ At least he was prepared.
When we arrived, the signs were not good. As we parked up in the village just east of Tours and got out of the car, we could hear early ’90s ragga blasting at an outrageous volume from the direction of the beer festival. We approached cautiously. The fête was on some recreational ground at the edge of the village. A DJ booth stood alone in the field, manned by an enthusiastic young woman who screamed jubilantly over the music words to the effect of ‘Are you having a good time?’ She wasn’t at all interested in the answer. As well as this, dreadlocked men, bare- chested except for leather waistcoats, roamed the field carrying ancient musical instruments. There was a large food tent about thirty yards from the DJ booth in which families desp
erately huddled, fathers peering through the plastic windows, trying to decide when it would be safe to herd their family to the car park. Opposite was a long, open- sided beer tent patronised by a few hardy drinking pros. We headed straight past the shouty woman playing ragga music and the bare- chested musicians to the beer tent and leant against the bar, bewildered.
‘BAT SHIT!’ shouted David over the chorus of ‘Boombastic’.
‘YES. SORRY. I THOUGHT THERE MIGHT ACTUALLY BE SOME LOCAL BEER MAKERS HERE. THIS WASN’T WHAT I HAD ENVISAGED. I’M NOT REALLY SURE WHO THIS IS AIMED AT.’
A middle- aged man in tight denim shorts began gyrating next to the DJ booth.
‘HIM,’ shouted David. ‘JUST HIM.’
Conversation was near on impossible. The beer was local, at least. We had a drink and turned to go.
‘WHAT’S THAT OVER THERE?’ shouted David, pointing behind the beer tent. About fifty yards away, through trees and over rubble-strewn waste ground we could see what looked like some kind of stall. We began to make our way through the rubble. There were more stalls. Four in total, in a line. There was no one visiting them because they were almost impossible to spot from the main fête, but, sure enough, they were beer stalls. The beer festival organisers had hidden the beer festival.
And there was Xavier standing behind his stall. Tall, heavy stubble, a weariness that comes with having seen it all and not being particularly bothered about any of it, a face that was perfectly suited to chewing tobacco, Xavier looked like a character from a western. Not the hero, or even the main baddy, but one of the other dudes. Secondary baddy, perhaps. One without a speaking role. We introduced ourselves. I told Xavier that I was an aspiring brewer. It soon became apparent that he was a lovely man. He made mostly Belgian-influenced beers, Tripels, which are very strong abbey beers and blondes in the style of Leffe.