We drove north and parked in the designated car park with a quarter of an hour to spare before the minibus was due to pick us up and take us to our holiday destination. On it would be up to six strangers with whom we were to spend a week in the confined space of a boat. Marvellous. Happy days.
There was only one slight snag. Catriona and I would be enjoying the holiday for free in exchange for my writing an article about it. And the company sponsoring us had asked me not to tell the others, who were paying a great deal of money, about this arrangement. We had chosen a spot next to a tricolour-decked modernist monument to General de Gaulle and sat with our luggage on the monument’s plinth in the sunshine and waited. And while we waited I considered what would be my strategy when the inevitable question arose, probably over the dinner table, of what it was I did for a living.
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