I don't really feel like today I have anything particularly important to say; instead I'm just going to tell you a story that I remembered whilst I was talking to a colleague of mine on the way home today, about a holiday I had in France when I was 15.

In my current job I always get annoyed when 15/16 year olds fail to understand how worried parents can get when they disappear for ages without telling them where they are.

I was reminded tonight of this holiday...

I in my GCSE year and my cousin and very good friend Jeff was in the lower 6th. Our grandparents decided it would be good to take us both on holiday so that I could improve my french and Jeff could keep me company. We were going for about a week in total.

On the way there my grandpa drove. Jeff and I were sat in the back seat of his Volve 440, trying not to laugh as we drove through tiny villages and country roads at 18 miles an hour (as this was the 30km/h speed limit...) whilst my granny would grip the seat, turning her knuckles white as she worriedly pointed out the only tree in what appeared to be a 20 mile radius: "Carfeul dear," she would say "watch out for the tree, it's very close to the road!"

"I've already seen it" came the patient reply "I'll be careful."

Anyhow, we managed to complete the journey in two days, staying overnight at a nice little hotel in a little french town. We were told off in the morning though, as after my grandparents had gone to bed at about 9 pm, Jeff and I decided to go for a walk to stretch our legs. We were only out for about an hour, we didn't see a single soul and nothing was open anyway... Somehow Grandpa knew we'd been out...

We got to our resort, 2 days after setting off, (although I'm sure that if we had taken the motorway route we could have done the journey in about 6-7 hours, we were only staying just south of Paris! "But you can't see anything from the motorway, the country roads are so much prettier..."), and settled in.

The resort was a walled compound, made up of several gites and a recreation area, catering exclusively for English people. Quite how this would help my french I'm not sure, but the thought was there.

Anyhow, having been embarassed on the 2nd or 3rd night we were there, by my grandpa who came over to the recreation area, where Jeff and I were playing pool, and said "Right boys, bedtime, you've got 10 minutes to finish your game!" This in itself would not have been too bad had there not been loads of other people our age there and the had the time been a little later than 9 o'clock...

The next day we got up, relaxed in the morning and then helped get lunch ready. "What's for lunch?" one of us asked. "Brain Pate, fried Spam and salad" came the reply. It was the third time we had had spam that holiday and we didn't like the thought of brain pate. And anyway, who still eats spam these days?

Jeff and I decided to go out by ourselves after lunch that day. We looked on a map that was hanging on the all of the living room. It probably didnt help that the map looked like it was at least 80 years old but hey, we used our thumbs to measure the distance to the nearest town, which according to the map was only about 6 or 7 miles away. We figured we could walk there in a little over an hour, grab some proper food (in this case our plan was McDonalds...) and come back well in time for tea.

We announced that we would be going out and were told that tea would be at 5.30.

It turns out that not only was our measuring of the distance not particularly accurate, but that it is quite hard to walk at 6 miles an hour for a long time. It took us nearly 2 1/2 hours to get to the town, the name of which completely escapes me.

As we arrived we were greeted by a giant billboard: "McDonald's 6 mins -->"

"Brilliant!" we thought. We walked for ten minutes in the direction the sign pointed in. No Maccy D's in sight. After a further 10 minutes of walking I plucked up the courage to ask someone in my GCSE level french "Ou se trouve le McDonalds?" The man laughed and said something about "Ou se trouve ta voiture?" (Where's your car?) he then went on to explain that McDs was about 8 kms away.

We were a little disappointed.

We went to the supermarked and bought some chocolate instead.

The walk home took a similar amount of time, although we did run some of the way as we realised it was getting late.

We missed tea. In fact it was almost 8.30 when we got in and my grandparents were not best pleased.

At the time I couldn't understand it as we had told them we were going for a walk.

I now realise that perhaps I should have told them where we were going and why and they may have not been so worried...

In the end we actually had a really good time, we visited the champagne cellars for Moet et Chandon and went to some other interesting places, but, needless to say, we weren't allowed out by ourselves anymore!