AUX ARMES CITOYENS

 

 

Vi Hornblower and I went on a demo in Paris once. Not on purpose, you understand. We had been shopping at Galeries Lafayette and wandered into it by accident. As we arrived at the station, we walked into a great hullabaloo, people waving flags and shouting through megaphones. With the benefit of hindsight, this was possibly not the best moment to get out the Instamatic, and before I knew it I was surrounded by burly chaps with berets and moustaches and T-shirts proclaiming “CGT” (Che Guevara’s T-shirt, perhaps?), breathing garlic in my face and asking me if I was an “agent provocateur”. Obviously an hommage to my penchant for French lingerie. In a show of solidarity with the workers, I handed the camera to a large policeman who took a snap of me arm-in-arm with the sans-culottes; he then pointed to a nearby building,, where a video camera was pointing down in my direction. I waved enthusiastically for my French fans, so intent on my appearance on the nine-o-clock news that I didn’t notice how my new friends had dispersed rather quickly, and when I looked round, Vi was being hauled into a police van by some large gendarmes shouting “Non, je ne regrette rien!” “Allez les bleus!” I responded gamely, which did not best please Vi, being manhandled as she was by the boys in blue.


Vi used to be quite a star on the hockey field for Cheltenham Ladies, and her tackling skills have not diminished, as anyone who has been in front of her in the queue on the first day of the Harrods sale will attest to. I threw my carrier bags wide and challenged the moustachio’d policeman to arrest me – “Arretez-moi!” I cried - by now I was ready to throw myself under a racehorse to defend a girl’s right to shop, had there been a racehorse handy. There was a large dog, but I was not prepared to throw myself under that, especially while it was using the lamppost.




The gendarmes - or salauds, as I was now referring to them - pulled my shopping bags from me and threw them into the van before hurling me in too. Vi and I linked arms and sang the rude version of the Cheltenham Ladies hockey song all the way to the Bastille - or, as it turned out, the departure gate for Eurostar, where we were unceremoniously decanted onto the platform. I asked if we were being deported. “Non, Madame,” said the Capitaine, who was rather dashing in an Inspector Clouseau sort of way. “Eet eez for your own safety. Zis is a manifestation of ze revolting worqueurs. Zis eez no place for two charmeeng Eengleesh miladies.” With that, he clicked his heels, kissed our hands and marched off through the fog to do battle once more with the red hordes on the boulevards. Vi and I stood gazing after him with gratitude as the steam swirled around us. (“I thought this was Eurostar?” - Ed.)


“You know, Vi,” I said dreamily, “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”


(Fade out to “As Time Goes By”, rear view of two matrons laden with carrier bags walking arm in arm into the distance along a platform …)

Aux armes, citoyens!