Twins: Ten Thousand Letters To My Children

The air of disappointment was palpable. Having cycled a less than respectable post croissant distance to La Couarde Sur Mare, we discovered that Ile De Re’s premier ice cream purveyor, La Martiniere had shamelessly neglected to open an outlet there. Perhaps then, it was no surprise when a huddle of well heeled retirees began to form an orderly queue beside the children’s three wheeler, in every expectation, one presumes, that Alex and Sophie were the new enfants terrible of the island's mobile artisanal ice-cream community. Sadly not; naughty...but not quite terrible. After further coffee and croissant at the critically acclaimed/cryptically named 'Hotel' next to the Hotel De Ville , the air of disappointment became slightly less palpable and rather more menacing as Alex and Sophie deliberately threw their weight to the low side inducing me to balloon around the corner, and skittle a group of hapless tourists like osteoporotic tenpins. Butter would...

September last year gave us a succession of warm, sunny days, tickled by a light breeze. After yesterday’s Odyssey, sleep lasted until 4.30am, before somebody announced loudly to the sleeping denizens of Rue de la Place, that the toilet was the wrong shape and that consequently the pee-pee train had not so much arrived at the wrong destination as been horrifically derailed on a brutal mountain switchback. Knowing that the prospects of further sleep were receding more rapidly than the Larsen ice shelf, we made coffee and admired the rising sun before it had had the opportunity to push the needle above 22°C. The forecast anticipated temperatures that would blister paintwork so we busied ourselves industriously before the heat of the day with Friday’s newspaper and everything vaguely sweet that the previous visitors had left. Eventually, decency prevailed and the boulangerie finally capitulated to our sulky patisserie hungry loitering. In the absence of Jenny...

Imagine a dream. Perhaps you’re riding a horse through rolling countryside and beside you is a beautiful consort, comely of face and flaxen of hair. You stop by a babbling brook and feed each other peeled grapes and a spatch-cocked swan or two. Your minstrel compliments your garters before launching into a lusty rendition of something melodic on his lute. The strains of his music drift through the glade and as the roosting songbirds chatter about you the forest tannoy crackles into life to advise that you have precisely 11 minutes to vacate the cabin and make your way to the car deck. Brittany Ferries, I salute you. If the cross channel business dries up, Guantánamo Bay will always be hiring (cable ties, crocodile clips and car battery included). If proof is required that much can be achieved in a very short period of time, with the right motivation, the children were roused, dressed, fed and strapped into their car seats by the time car de...

In front of me sits a small black box. It is a hard drive onto which I have finally saved all the photos and videos of my twin children that have been accumulating over the last 3 years 10 months and 11 days since they were born. This represents a personal triumph of great magnitude for several reasons: 1. I have significantly reduced the risk of losing all those cherished memories to an unforeseen but entirely predictable hardware failure, spilt drink or stray projectile (or perhaps all of the above). 2. I have ticked a 3 year 10 month 11 day old job off the 'to do list' and so really have no excuse not to do the tax return as well. 3. I have dismissed the future need to berate myself in any "don't you take a lot of photos - you do back them up, don't you?" conversation, of which there are rather a lot. 4. I have overcome the last self-imposed obstacle to writing something down about the children before I start to forget what it real...

The last thing I wrote in my diary was months ago, on Friday, 2 September 2016. “8.30 a.m. sailing from Poole to Cherbourg arriving at 12.30 p.m. - saw six dolphins and three sets of waves in the channel going in the opposite direction - very odd. Aston Martin DB5 parked next to us on the car deck - very jealous (not) but much discussion of single male driver”. The thing that immediately strikes me about reading old diaries is that I shouldn’t. You might ask whether the same applies to writing new ones. Last year the beautiful wife, the delightful children, the stalwart friends and a range of inflatable hangers on, made the lengthy and perilous journey from Bristol, England to Ile De Re, France by a combination of car, ferry, grit and determination. The result was a week of sybaritic bliss on an island retreat one kilometre offshore from La Rochelle in the Charente Maritime. Had I taken the trouble to write more than three lines in dubious italics about the last year’s ide...