I’d spent 10 years trying to be more like my goat-farming neighbours. What if I stressed my ‘Britishness’ instead?
I was standing in the long queue of a rural French boulangerie when it happened. The sun was just coming up and the glorious smell of freshly baked baguette filled the dawn air. I drank it in and shuffled forward, awaiting my turn, aware I was getting “looks” – and it wasn’t difficult to see why. I had driven all night from performing at a comedy gig in London to get to my home in the Loire valley, and I was still in my work clothes. My stage wear included a check tweed Edwardian frock coat with matching weskit, navy blue dress trousers, brogue monk shoes, a smart Oxford-collared shirt and a knitted blue tie, slightly loosened. Under normal circumstances, I would not invade my local boulangerie dressed as a cross between a late 60s dandy and a roaring 20s duellist, but it had been a long drive, and I was too tired to tone it down.
Plus, I had never really fit in locally anyway. We had moved there about 10 years earlier, in 2005 – a catastrophic decision, according to my agent, but a happy one for me, my wife and our then four-year-old son; the pace of life was less frenetic and we felt less hemmed in. And, as I often said only half-jokingly, it was the closest place to London we could afford to buy a house. Things had gone pretty well: my wife, being half-French and fluent, was working locally as a teacher, and my son had picked up the language more quickly than I can change a car tyre. We had two more children and I was … well, I was doing OK.
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