and on the seventh day he returned

...back from France
.
Le Sud to be exact.

Perpignan, close to the Spanish border in that unbordered, undefined area known as Catalan which, whether the inhabitants speak French, Spanish or more likely Catalan French or Catalan Spanish, leaves you in no doubt that you are in a province with its own very unique identity.

And how nice it was to spend five days in the company of some good friends and lots of good beer, wine, cognac and food, especially the food.

Oh yes, there was a rugby match of some sorts in there as well, saturday night, but thats not important.

Heres the Reader Digest Condensed Diary format...

Thursday - Picked up by Rob and an uneventful drive down to Stansted and check into the Hilton at the airport, take taxi into Bishop Storford that evening and visit a Thai restaurant for a very good meal.

Friday - mid morning flight to Perpignan, used Ryanair who regularly get slagged off for their no frills budget airline approach, we paid £19.95 for our flight and it was fekkin superb. A new Boeing 737-800, very clean, very punctual, very efficient use of staff. Its a low cost, no fekkin-about airline, it doesn't do food, it doesn't do films or audio, it doesn't even have a pocket on the back of the seats for you to stuff your magazines, or more likely, rubbish into, but it picks you up where it says it will and it drops you off where it says it will and it does it all cheaply, what more do you want for £20 ?

Check into the Hotel de la Loge in the centre of Perpignan, its basic, its got beds and toilets and its cheap - is there a theme developing here ?

Drop bags and straight downstairs to a bar around the corner which tends to be a meeting point for all of the various people we socialise with, spend a nice hour or two sat out in the afternoon sun with beer and sandwiches until the sun drops behind the Loge (city hall in medievil times) and it gets cold enough to sit inside the bar.

Friday evening we are collected by bus and taken to a small coastal town called St Esteve where the local rugby club have put on a barbeque and a live showing of the Bradford v Hull game from back home. Evening is spoiled somewhat by the presence on the bus of what is becoming annoyingly prevelant at Leeds games - the knucklehead supporter.

A bunch of neanderthall drunks had boarded the bus in Leeds colours and had sung some rather distastefully racist songs about our rival club Bradford on the way to St Esteve, one of our party had objected and was threatened with violence by a single brain celled, beer saturated yob - we decided that keeping some distance from these cretins would be the best sort of action to take but all through the night they made a bloody nuisance of themselves causing everyone else on the bus to apologise to the French hosts all night long - they took it in good heart by assuring us that beer fuelled fuckwittedness was not only confined to the UK, a nice thing to say to us but we all know that is not strictly true.

Fortunately the bar staff had sufficient skill to handle fuckwitted racist drunks and indeed worked a wonderful scam on their meagre brains - when the knobheads complained that they were paying 5 euros for a half litre (plastic) glass of beer the bar staff "negotiated" a deal with them to supply a half litre glass for 7 euros with a quarter litre glass thrown in for free, the fuckwits thought this was a wonderful piece of negotiation on their part and boasted of it all night - what they didn't realise was that everyone else in the room was drinking litres of beer at just 6 euros. Its the best way to handle drunken doylums, take advantage of them but convince them that they are the clever ones.

Rather than take the bus home we were offered a lift by one of the French web site co-ordinators and taken to the bar that he uses for the after-match receptions, it was fine as concrete rooms go but we were tired and only had the one beer with him before walking the short distance home where we were accosted (not for the first time) by a group of friendly youths who wanted to talk about the game the next day - its something that we noticed for the whole weekend, the town of Perpignan is certainly getting behind rugby league in a big way, maybe its the commercial advantage of having between one and two thousand beer and food hungry overseas supporters in your town every second weekend or maybe they are enjoying the game of rugby league itself.

Saturday - Met up with a crowd of ten good friends, hale and hearty chaps (and chapesses), and ajourned to the Cafe Vienna, a very nice and slightly upmarket restaurant in the centre of Perp, very classy sort of place in a very French Parissienne sort of way although they wouldn't thank you for calling them Parissienne. Had two gorgeous courses washed down with some nice red wineand spent a couple of very pleasant hours exchanging all sorts of chat and stories in that way that only a group of old friends can do, the sort of thing where most of you are talking all at once and there are four or five conversations going on at the table and you just jump from one to the other, very convivial and its what I enjoy most about the French weekends away.

The game was held at 6pm and it was fekkin freezing, not much else to say about that part except that Leeds won by a large margin. Later on that evening we found ourselves back in the centre with Ricky and his girlfriend and spent the rest of the evening in a small Spanish tapas bar eating an unusual meal. Started with your own choice of anything or everything from the tapas counter which mainly consisted of seafood and roast vegetables, had a nice plateful from there washed down with red wine and then came the main course - a sword onto which had been stabbed meat from every mammal known to man and then roasted on a barbeque, brought to your table and dumped on the plate with a potato to provide alternative experience to the tastebuds. I ate the mountain of meat but confess to not knowing which mammal each piece had come from and caring even less, more red wine and then coffee and I believe a cognac, not bad value for 20 euros each.

Sunday - Caught the train to a small coastal village called Collieure, very cute, very picturesque, very artistic with lots of galleries, it will be gorgeous in the summer but on sunday it was cold so we retired to a Spanish restaurant in a side street where I had a huge plateful of prawns for starters, so many prawns that I got tired of shelling them and my arms were aching from the effort, more red wine and then a beef main course, I had already eaten more than a weeks worth of food on this short vacation but if you visit catalonia and don't enjoy the food then you must be mentally deficient of any sort of pleasure genes at all.

Spent late afternoon and early evening back in Perp in our "local" bar with eight friends, beer, wine, coffee and cognac and hot chocolate, yes I drank all of those. The conversation again was eclectic and so relaxed that we were all slipping into the mood that made us stay in the same place last year until we had run up a 240 euro bar tab, but sunday evening was early closing and at 9pm the bar staff were ready for us to leave but took Rob around the corner to show him a small restaurant up an alleyway that was open and so we all decamped there. It turned out to be a bar run by USAP supporters who are the wrong code of rugby for us and after a bit of gentle jibbing from the bar staff we were shepherded into a seperate room where wine was produced and food ordered. I'd had enough of fancy food by then and just ordered a pizza but we had a lot of fun in that room and made a lot of noise, probably why they didn't want us in the main part of the restaurant. Finished in an Irish bar with a big glass of Bushmills where Rob was dragge dinto drinking large shots of rum with two other lads that we knew while I tried to chat above the noise with Carolyn, who's husband had wimped out and gone back to their room, ended up walking back to the hotel with Carolyn while Rob stayed and tried to out-rum the other two, he failed and regreted his decision the following day.

Monday - Flew back on a brand new Ryanair 737-800 on one of their 5p flights, yes thats just five pence for the 1000 mile two hour flight, on time, clean etc etc etc, why Ryanair get such a bad press I'll never know.

Back at Stansted Robs car wouldn't start so he called for the AA and we retired to the Hilton for coffee while we waited for them, five minutes later the AA turned up and we never got to finish the coffee and danish that I'd paid eight fekkin quid for. Stopped at the Ram Jam Inn on the A1 for a meal, met up there with John and Carolyn and had an hour in the restaurant eating proper food that was out of place in what was supposedly a motorway service area - the Ram Jam is a proper restaurant which just happens to be on the side of the A1 and is good value in nice surroundings serving good freshly cooked food, an anethma on a British motorway I know, but there you are.

So, thats the weekend then, reading all of that again it appears to give the impression that we spent all of the time eating and drinking, and to be honest we did, and bloody enjoyed every minute of it.