Who the f*ck am I?

CONTENT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to my grandmother for having brought me up as one of her children.

Thank you to my father for being the man he was.

Thank you to Connie and Gordon for having given me my love of England.

And finally, thank you to my amazing wife Jenny who somehow puts up with my moods and helps me stay grounded.

I would also like to dedicate this book to our Weimaraner dog Misty who died a few days before I finished the editing process. She was our beloved companion for nearly fourteen years and will be missed so much.

FOREWORD

Why am I writing this book? What do I have to say that is worth putting down on paper? And is it going to be of interest to people, to you, the reader?

Who am I to pretend to be writing his 'memoirs' at the age of forty three?!

Well, I am a nobody. I am not a politician (thank God!). I am not a successful business man. I am not a life coach. I am merely a fellow human being who is meandering through life, trying to negotiate the 'good time' and 'bad time' cycles that life throws at him as best he can. Like all of us I guess. Like you. We are the same. We are all the same. We all go through some 'good times' and then we are also dealt some 'bad times', and all we can hope for is that we are able to do everything we can to minimise the impact of the 'bad times' on our lives while trying to make the positive cycles, the 'good times', last as long as possible.

'Ah, so this is a self help book' I hear you say. Nope. I would not pretend to have answers for you. I would not be writing a book to tell you how you should manage your life. Remember, I am going through the same cr*p as you are going through right now.

There are several reasons why I have been thinking for a few years now about writing a book.

Firstly I thought this may be a great way to help reduce the constant noise in my head. You know, all the thoughts that go through one's mind during the day? Putting some of the interesting ones down on paper, giving them life, just to see if some of those thoughts are any good, just to see if some of those thoughts are worth my neurons getting busy about.

We apparently get between thirty five thousand and sixty thousand thoughts every day. I don't actually think writing will reduce the noise or activity level in my head, it will stop it while I do it, of course, so this will be like meditation.

Yes, I think this is the meditation work that I am supposed to do every day to keep me calm and centered, to stop me from having any bursts of anger or from losing my patience so easily. I know meditation is good for me, but I am bad for meditation. I do not give it the respect it needs, I do not give it the time it needs. I prefer other forms of meditation, like running or having a workout; the high impact ones. I really struggle to do the 'quiet time and space' thing. But the word 'meditation' is well overused these days. The new way to convey the benefits that meditation can bring to you is to use the word 'awareness' (yes, you may well remember that infamous interview with Jean Claude Van Damme years ago when he was going on unintelligibly about the fact that 'he was aware'). Well, he was rubbish in his explanation of the concept, but the concept is not rubbish. And he was actually ahead of the times talking about it using the word 'aware'! He must have had a top life coach at the time! Well, he could have afforded a top life coach, couldn't he?! You will have read about it too, it's everywhere these days: being 'aware'. It's about being present in the present moment. All it means is that we have to try to think about what we are doing when we are doing it, and therefore not do several things at once (oops, yes, you're thinking, driving while texting your mates is just the opposite of 'awareness', and it's illegal too by the way!).

You can be aware in so many ways: walking your dog, painting, doing DIY, reading a book, writing a book...

Another reason for me to try writing a book is that I was always good at school and University at writing essays. I was always good with the written word; I was totally rubbish at Maths though! Are the two mutually exclusive? No, I don't think so. So it may be that I find writing a book not too difficult. Well, we'll see about that; I'll let you know after I have written the few chapters I have in store for you!

It may also be that this is the right time in my life. I am forty three years old, I have just stopped working for the moment (hold on, don't just close the book now thinking it is some privileged, born with a silver spoon in his mouth guy that is going to tell you what life is about), and I have moved with my wife Jenny and our dog Misty to the Costa Blanca in Spain. I will tell you more about that later on, but the point of this is that I am time rich in a paradise like environment. Is that not a good enough reason to try your hand at writing? Is that not the final push that I needed to sit down and try to make sense of a few things. A lot of people say that writing about a specific life event, or even a novel or fiction, was 'cathartic' for them. I understand this word as meaning a therapeutic process to help you to come to terms with a trauma or a difficult situation.

Now, I have just googled 'cathartic' and the Oxford English Dictionary gives us the following definition:

Providing psychological relief through the open expression of strong emotions; causing catharsis: crying is a cathartic release.

Well, I can tell you that writing my 'memoirs' (I really do not like this word, it sounds far too pompous!) will definitely be a cathartic process for me.

I actually think that if my life experiences can give me the ability and the desire to take some time to try and analyse and understand what happened at certain times and why it happened, then your life can provide you with the same opportunities, the chance to do a bit of structured thinking, turning off the 'daily noise' by switching on moments of reflection. Wow, that sounds really deep! When my wife reads this she will definitely think I have lost the plot! She is a very practical, down to earth person who does not do 'new age' cr*p as she calls it! But let me reiterate, this is not a book flogging you another distilled down version of some new age thinking, this is not a self help book as I said above. This is a description, I guess, of what my life has taught me so far. And my objective is to hopefully make you think about your life too, the different episodes you lived through, the ones you remember, the good ones and the bad ones I talked about earlier... and give you the desire to try and understand some of it, let's not go for all of it just yet, and writing about it in very simple terms as I am not a therapist (remember, I am just a nobody).

As well as being this catharsis, I am curious to see if writing might be my 'Life number 5'. As you will read later, I am a bit of a chameleon when it comes to work.

The last two reasons are the ones that are the strongest and they are actually linked. I have come to realise over the past two years that the three big traumatic experiences of my life have turned out to be platforms to springboard to an amazingly positive life experience to follow.

People who get to know the tragic events of my early life always say something like: 'Wow, so Eric had it tough as a kid' or 'Oh my God, what a start in life'. Yes, it is certainly an unusually difficult start that was dealt to me. But the striking thing that is pushing me to write this is that on each three occasions, I embarked on a life changing path which firstly gave me the opportunity to learn some ethics and strong values from my grandmother, to then discover and embrace a new culture and language, and to now become a bit more spiritual and tolerant (the tolerance thing is still very much work in progress I have to admit, my wife will attest to that!). Yes, the three events that I went through that could have broken me, that could have made me spend my teenage years in care, or take my own life as an adult like so many people tragically do when struggling to cope with a hugely traumatic time in their lives, these events turned out to be the most positive things that happened in my life.

Mental health is getting a lot of coverage in the media these days. Celebrities are sharing their own experiences of issues they may have experienced. Many soldiers who return from tours of duty or reach retirement suffer from PTSD and go through hell. We are also made aware of the shockingly high percentage of men from all walks of life who take their own lives, and of teenagers who again commit suicide or self harm because of some form of physical or mental abuse, or bullying at school or through social media. It seems it is everywhere these days.

Many people also suffer from body image issues: human beings are very good at always feeling inadequate physically, typically women think they are too fat and men think they are too thin and not muscular enough. Depression, bipolar disorder, body image issues, suicide... When you are in the bubble of a particular mental health issue, being wrapped up by this dark cloud of negativity, it is so hard to even imagine a way out or a positive outcome.

So I would love to imagine that this book might help just one person to find their way out of their darkness to allow them to start seeing things differently, in a more positive light. There is always an option, things are never as bad as our conscious mind makes us believe they are through the narrative it constantly runs in our thoughts. I have experienced suicide of loved ones, low self confidence and body image issues, some degree of physical abuse as a child, depression, short term addiction to alcohol, and anger issues. But I'm not giving up hope to improve who I am, both physically and mentally. I keep exploring different avenues to find out a bit more every time about who I am as a human being.

I am therefore interested in seeing if you can identify and analyse some traumatic times in your life. Can you also look back and say: 'Jeez, I actually changed when I went through this and that', or 'Come to think of it, this is what made me discover such and such'. And are there any clues for us to identify these potentially life changing events? Because that would really be helpful, being able to recognise the signals that would tell us: 'Ok, you are approaching a crossroad my friend, so you have to make a decision here... do you want to turn left, or do you want to venture on the right path?'

So I really want to share this with you to see if you can draw some parallels from the patterns in my life to the 'good time' and 'bad time' cycles in YOUR life. Can you shed some positive light on the dramas in your life? Can you identify those key moments and events that made you turn right instead of left? I would love to think that I could be of some help to some people, to brighten some dark chapters in their lives. But let's not fool each other here. This is probably one of the most difficult things to do: to think positively when something awful happens to you, to see the brighter side of a really tough situation. If you can do that, well, you are already there, you are already 'aware'!

So finally, what I would love to achieve with this book is to take you on a roller coaster of emotions: I would love to make you giggle, I would love to make you laugh. I do have a sense of humour and I do give people a laugh in our everyday life, but I have no idea if this will translate onto paper. I would also love to shock you, I love to shock people, shock them by saying 'unconventional' things, things that people never dare to say. And then when you say those things, people tell you: 'Yes, you are right'. Do not be afraid of saying things. And I would also love to make you cry. Crying is taboo. Crying is not cool. Especially if you are a guy. Well, I wear my heart on my sleeve, which is not always an advantage, so I do cry quite easily, and I have become worse over the past two years. But this is linked to what my wife and I went through during the past few years, as you'll discover later. My whole family is quite emotional too, it's the Latin thing, right? My grandmother used to get emotional quite regularly, so does my Uncle Gerard, her youngest son; he is terrible nowadays. He is seventy one years old and he cries as soon as he tells you something nice about somebody he knows. And you would not think he would be someone who cries easily as he is a bit of a bear to look at; six foot tall, 120 kilograms in weight (that's about eighteen stone in real money), with a big bushy beard.

So hell to all of you who think that only girls cry! Try it sometimes, let go, and try it. Remember, 'crying is a cathartic release'...

I should also say that I started writing this book in the summer of 2016, and then my new life on the Costa Blanca took over for a couple of years, and I picked up the writing again three years later in July 2019.

It is with sadness that I write that my friend Gordon who you will read about in later chapters, died in February 2018 at the hospice in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, UK. He was in his eighties and was surrounded by his family who had been caring for him for the last six months of his life. This is why I speak in the present tense when I speak of him in the earlier chapters of the book as he was alive when I wrote those in 2016.

Finally, despite the editing and proof reading that my wife Jenny undertook to help me get to the publishing phase of the book, I hope there are not too many grammatical and spelling mistakes as English is obviously not my mother tongue.

CHAPTER 1

It's not how you start...

There are two types of people in life: people who are lucky and people who are unlucky...

'She's dead... yes, I'm telling you, she's dead...!' This was accompanied by a characteristically French shoulder shrug as my father's arms looked like they were helplessly waving about.

My dad was standing in the street at the front door, my grandmother and I were on the landing at the top of the stairs looking down towards him. He must have had a set of keys, or maybe my grandmother just left the door unlocked as it was fairly safe to do so in those days. He had just opened the door and was shouting up to my gran. That's all I can remember of my mum's death; I had turned four a bit less than a month before that; It was the 21st of December 1976.

She had fallen down the stairs. They told me she had fallen down the stairs. I told my mates who asked at play time at primary school: 'How did your mum die? She fell down the stairs' I remember myself saying. That's all I knew. That's what I knew. It must have been dark in the stairs, or maybe they were really steep like the ones at my grandmothers'. When you are four years old all stairs are steep, right? So it was easy enough to understand: she'd fallen down the stairs.

How do you deal with this situation as a parent? The thing that people normally say is: how do you protect the child in these tragic situations? Well, this is how my dad and my grandmother decided to protect me. This first barrier of protection is erected with words. Chosen by ordinary parents, not prepared for finding themselves whirled around by this hurricane of emotions and grief. How could you better protect your four year old kid and try to make him understand that he'll never see his mummy again on the one hand but that things are totally fine and dandy on the other hand?

The second barrier is the one you erect with love I guess. And that's the one that is of course the important one in the long run. That's the one that creates the difference between families that are built around a strong leader and therefore have a robust family unit, and the families that do not have many common values, being thrown together while meandering through life's events, being unable to take control while dealing with a family trauma. My grandmother was a matriarchal figure, everybody in the family respected her, her children of course, her grandchildren, her two remaining daughters in law and her son in law who was married to her only daughter, Suzy. She was the glue holding together all the pieces of the family jigsaw; every piece knew where they fitted, and when one piece tried to get above their station they would be sure to receive a bit of the proverbial 'boot up the backside', in the figurative sense you understand. So they did not try that very often. That's called respect. You respect your elders. You respect your mum, you respect your dad.

So at the age of sixty two, my grandmother, she was called Germaine, had to start being a mum all over again, mum to her four year old grandson. That cannot have been easy. Ok, she knew what the job entailed, she had had plenty of practice! She had been a mum to her four kids who were born during the war. Her first son Robert was born in 1939, then my dad was born a year later, then my aunt a year after that in 1941. Then Gerard turned up in 1945... he must have been the unplanned 'mistake'... thanks to very little or nonexistent contraception in those days. I find it hard to imagine how difficult life must have been for all these families who were having children during WW2. I am not sure if there was rationing in France as there was in the UK, there must have been, but even if there wasn't, it must have been so tough to have toddlers around at a time of conflict. Making sure they were fed. Making sure they had clothing. Making sure they were safe from the German invader.

My family lives in the South East of France (between Lyon and Grenoble) just a stone's throw from the Vercors, the hotbed of the French Resistance. So it was a dangerous place at times with the Germans moving into any area they could, and of course finding themselves engaged in combat and ambushes with resistant groups.

I always remember my Uncle Robert telling me of the incident where the Gestapo were roaming the streets of the village (called Izeaux) looking for a group of resistants. My granddad had let them hide in the cellar of the house where he thought they'd be safe. Then... bangs on the door... and the next minute my gran and granddad had their little family surrounded by German officers. I don't know which year this was but I reckon it must have been late 1943 or 1944, as the story that my Uncle Robert has always been so proud of telling us is that at the age of around four years old he was kicking the long leather boots of these revenge thirsty killers (this obviously is the height a four year old can reach when kicking) and shouting at them: 'Leave us alone! Leave our house!' He always told us the story while laughing hysterically as if it was a great big joke. But can you imagine the fear that the two parents must have felt, while for their four year old future Gendarme it was just a fearless game. Or was it his first attempt at law and order? The hideaway was not discovered and the Champon family was safe. The officers left the house and continued their search through the village while creating havoc firing their weapons around the streets of the village, leaving bullet holes in the outside walls of some of the houses, some of which you could still see until just two or three years ago when the house in question was repainted and they filled in the holes. I couldn't believe it! Had this been in Britain, this house would not have been allowed to just wipe away the signature of that traumatic chapter in the village's history.

Anyway, those were tough times. So you had to be tough to make it through. My grandmother was tough. A few years later they emigrated a whole three kilometers away to the next village (two of my uncles still live in the village today and they are still considered as strangers as they came from the 'rival' village!), and she lost her husband to cancer. He was fifty four years old. She was a single mother having to bring up four kids; her youngest, Gerard, was eight, it was 1953.

So when she took up the role of being 'my mum', I think she was pretty well drilled in dealing with life's traumas. But as well as becoming a 'foster mum' she had also taken up the role, unbeknown to her, of becoming a 'foster wife' (don't know if there is such a term but there ought to be!) to her thirty six year old son. Looking back I am not sure which job was the toughest! I will tell you more about myself later on, but my dad was not an easy man by any means. She was obviously looking after the house expertly, and this involved of course doing the cooking as men of that era in the working classes were not involved in such activities.

Over the years, my dad's job had evolved, by no choice of his own, into being a company director and this meant he was out for lunch every day with clients (you have all heard of the French business lunch, right?!), so he was lucky to enjoy some great food and even some posh and fancy food. I remember him in the last few years of the three of us living together having rows with my grandmother as he had the cheek to tell her that his steaks were always overdone! And so in the latter years we had the Saturday 'ceremony' (yes, Saturday had turned out to be steak day in our household) of my dad cooking his own steak as only HE knew how to properly cook a steak! The only reason his steak was overdone is that lunch would be served at the later time of 13.00 on Saturdays to accommodate my dad's constant meetings with local people to help them on a variety of matters (more on this later) but he would never be home on time and so my grandmother, in the rational way that she did things, would cook our three steaks together as it would be too frivolous to only cook our two, and then re-heat my dad's when he decided to turn up, so of course his steak might have been a bit dry as you can appreciate, but that was his own bloody fault! But my god, what a palaver we had with these steaks! Thank god, he did not dare to challenge his mum's cooking in any other areas; frying a steak was as