I came across a website of stories. Not the fantastic, but rather normal stories of real life people. Anecdotes, snapshots and heart felt moments, but all real. Not urban myths or virals, but interesting all the same.
So I got to thinking, I'm must have anecdotes of my own, stories to tell. Well I do. And this is one. I'm posting it here because I don't want it to get lost in that website.
In 1988 my entire family moved from the UK and emigrated to Spain. We moved as a family and drove the entire route with my dad and friend in three separate vehicles. My dad drove a Ford Transit minibus, I drove a Mercedes saloon, and my friend drove a VW Golf. We kept in contact with CB Radios (Citizen Band) to stop ourselves getting lonely. My brother, mum and another friend went a week early by ferry.
1,500 miles was a long journey through France and Spain. We made it safely in one piece, but this little story is about the French journey.
Just off the ferry, Ramsgate to Calais, we hit the motorway to Lille. The radio chat was good and high-spirited, the roads clear and good to us, and we ate the miles up fast.
France has no more immunity to graffiti and terrorism than the rest of Europe, and every bridge we drove under, or every sign we drove past, and even written on the road itself, was the words AF. It was French for something, and was usually written with some Gaelic slogan that none of us understood. The chat one night on the radio turned to what this AF meant, and what political or revolutionary organisation it was.
Towards the end of the first day we got hungry. Knowing that we were travelling on a budget, we would sleep in the cars, but buy food on the road. We were veterans of the motorway café in the UK and knew the food was good and inexpensive. So it was armed with that knowledge that we finally agreed to pull into the next lay-by and buy some sausage and chips.
Well the lay-by didn't take long and there was a "food van" parked up so we got out our French francs (pre-euro days) and ordered three loads of sausages and chips. It came to nearly £5.00 for just the chips, which in UK should have only cost £0.20 at most. So we bought the chips and gave the sausages the miss. Now being French they didn't call chips, chips, but rather Frites or fries. We noticed that there was a menu board outside which clearly detailed the prices of these fritz and we were shocked. These prices were for the bloody tourists not the French. Curious to know if we had been ripped off we drove on making sure we would check the prices of all the other Frites wagons.
Sure enough each one of these vans were adding so much on top of their prices that the profit they were making was criminal. Deep fried chipped potatoes had massive markup.
And on we drove, until we began giving each of the Frites wagons an English "V" sign in defiance of their rip-off pricing, and still seeing AF written on every white concrete pillar and post.
This one particular afternoon was quiet and as my dad drove past another one of these symbols the radio crackled into life.
"I know what AF stands for. 'Arsesoles to Frites'."
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