The following story is the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  It is all lies.  Who was it that said; never let the truth get in the way of a good story?  As with most good stories, this one is about a group of friends that met in a pub.  One was an English Irishman, or Irish Englishman, I haven’t quite made up my mind yet, a Welshman, who we shall call Dafydd, a Frenchman we shall call Thibaut, and a half Spannish, half Colombian girl, who lookd like a super model and who tried to convince me to take up Keto.  Later we were joined by two Albanian girls, their brother, and the dog, who was a boy and not a girl, as my Welsh friend Dafydd thought.  Throw into this melting pot, a French Artist, that we shall call Lucy, anything to protect the innocent, and we have all the characters!

My mate Dafydd, had been trying to get me down to the pub for a week, and for some reason, and against all my wishes, I couldn’t.  However, the evening before Father’s Day was the perfect opportunity.  Son was off with friends having a party and somebody’s house, and I don’t even want to know any of the gory details.  But, as the big softie that I am, and because it was raining like a cow having a pee, as they say in French, who had obviously been having a great time drinking beer, hadn’t found the toilets, and just as he was arriving in the barn needed to pee and couldn’t hold on, and just let go, I took them in the car and dropped them off.  No cats and dogs here matey!    My daughter had been very persistent in asking her mother to go to the cinema to see a Japanese manga cartoon, and my wife had obviously been softer than I had, and had agreed to take her.  Offer it up to the Holy Souls Darling.  Kate loved it which is a good thing I suppose. 

I was on my own and decided to take up my friend’s offer of meeting down the infamous pub in Nantes, where my nose just seems to lead me every time.   I was suitably smart casual, and the beard looked better than Papa Smurf’s!  I reached the pub, said hi to everyone, bought my over priced, but never the less, wonderful pint of Guinness and sat down at my friend’s table.  Introductions were made, and the evening had started.  Dafydd was on great form, and jokes started flying, not all of which I could repeat here, in order to protect your chaste ears Dear Reader.  We discussed the origins of sheep jokes, which we all seemed to find ball breakingly funny.  Apparently, the Welsh would steal sheep along the English border to annoy the English.  The punishment for which was having your arm cut off.  The punishement for shagging them was only to be severly whipped, so the Welsh would slyly say that they only wanted to have sex with them.  Laughs, were being laughed, and being as infectious as the dreaded lurgey.  Laughing turned into Dafydd flirting outrageously with the Albanian girls and us teasing him, but gently.  He “is” our friend after all.  Apparently three minutes of heaven is better than two minutes of heaven!  All of a sudden, this young thirty something pretty girl walks up and sits with us.  To me, anyone in their thirties is young.  She was a friend of Dafydd’s.  I will call her Lucy, so as to protect the innocent. I learnt she was an artist and we started talking about her art.  She had an expo on at the Nantes natural history Museum, allying art and science.  I said I would have to go a long the next day and see it.  I don’t think she believed me.  It was one of the last days of the French curfew, so at 23h Dave came along and said we needed to finish our drinks and go home.  So, we did!  You don’t disagree with Dave!

Fast forward to the next morning.  The morning of Father’s Day.  That one day of the year, where my kids feel guilty and are nice to me for the day.  Kate came up asking which tea I wanted.  This was turning into a very agreeable morning.  Themnall of a suuden, my daughter turned into a she-devil, and started yelling that she didn’t like caramel, and stormed off into her room slamming the door.  Well that was unexpected.  It transpired that my son had been to the bakery, and had got her a little something. That something was based on caramel, and she threw the something into the bin in disgust.  My wife and son might quite have liked to have tasted this caramel thing and were equally as disgusted with Kate.  Welcome to my perfectly dysfunctional family!  However, he came up stairs with  a pain au chocolat aux amandes, which as I may have explained before, is the crack cocaine of French Patisserie, and also a favourite of mine.  You can diabetes just by looking at it!

Eventually Kate calmed down and became human again, and by the time I was ready to go out, she was fine.  I took my camera, my daughter, and the car, ventured into Nantes and even found a parking space.  Now my daughter is 11 and has been known to be a little “difficult” with the kind of places we visit, but everything seemed good for the moment.  She enjoyed the fossils and the different kinds of rock and stones, and we both agreed that one actually looked like a willy.  Hey, it made us laugh. We saw skeletons, and the massive collection of taxidermy.  Towards the end of the visit, we arrived at the exhibit I had wanted to see the most. The young thirtysomething’s exhibition.  To say I was blown away would be putting it mildly.  Her art was amazing and can be seen in the gallery below, or you can visit it like we did at the Natural History Museum in Nantes.  I can’t sing her praises loudly enough!

We finished our day by going to my favourite place in Nantes, the John Mc Byrne Irish pub.  We came out of the car park, looked up at the sky and thought, hmmmm, it won’t be long before it rains.  I saw a flash and three seconds later heard the deafening thunder.  Strangely enough, our pace quickened slightly.  We got to the corner of the street where the pub is and the heavens opened up on us.  The umbrella, which was there to give us a false sense of security, and maybe even keep us dry, was a complete fallacy, and proved to be bloody useless, I mean unfit for purpose.  We arrived at the pub, and were soaked through.  As we looked out of the window, there was a small stream forming in the middle of the street.  You had to be there to really grasp the severity of that poor cow that needed to pee…

We eventually made our way home and finished by getting for Monday morning.  Yes those Sunday evening blues.  The photos from that eventful day, were taken on the Canon 6D Mark 2, with the Helios 44-2 analogue lens, and then I switched to the Canon 16-35 F4 lens for those super wide shots.